“[It] has been remarked that there is a difference between apostolic example and apostolic precepts”, says William MacDonald in his commentary on 1 Corinthians 11. “We are not obligated to do all that the apostles did, but we are most certainly obligated to obey all that they taught.” He was writing about Paul’s teaching on the Lord’s Supper, not about baptism, but the point is well made and applies to either. In the context of baptism, this means that we don’t treat the stories of baptisms in (for example, and primarily) the book of Acts the same as we do the command of the Lord Jesus and the teaching of the apostles.
Bearing that in mind. I nonetheless consider that the New Testament historical accounts, of baptism in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, might function as a sort of check on our views of what that baptism is and to whom it is applied. (Naturally those views are likely to color how we read the historical accounts, so it’s worth being aware of that.) The particular aspect I’ve been pondering lately is the baptism of a household, mentioned twice in Acts (Lydia the Thyatiran seller of purple, and the unnamed Philippian jailer, in chapter 16) and once in 1 Corinthians (Stephanas, in chapter 1). Christians who baptize infants typically consider that these examples support their view.
The problems
On X (formerly Twitter) I came across a link to Peter Goeman’s blog post Are the Household Baptisms an Argument for Infant Baptism? I recommend reading that through before continuing (if you do) with my own meager thoughts.
Dr. Goeman is a Baptist and of course disagrees that the households said to have been baptized in the New Testament constitute support for an infant-including view of baptism. He presents two problems with the argument from the historical household baptisms:
- It is likely that slaves—adults—would have been included in the definition of a household. “This is important”, says Dr. Goeman, “because adult conversion and baptism require a profession of faith and confession of one’s sins. Even paedobaptists agree with this. However, it is difficult to see every slave professing faith in Christ at the same time their master does. Many of these households had a significant number of slaves.… Are we to suppose that in each case, every slave professed Christ immediately along with the master of the house?”
- There is Scriptural precedent for references to an entire (all, or whole) household specifically excluding one or more members of that household. Dr. Goeman says, “The classic example of this is 1 Samuel 1:21–22.… The story reveals, ‘The man Elkanah and all his house went up to offer to the LORD the yearly sacrifice and to pay his vow’ (v. 21, emphasis added).” Continuing, he points out: “Although the Greek of Samuel uses the same household formula as Acts in verse 21, verse 22 quickly reveals that Hannah stayed behind. The reason Hannah didn’t go up with Elkanah was that she was caring for an infant child. Although the text does not say the child stayed with Hannah, we obviously should not include the child as part of ‘all his house’ that went up to offer the yearly sacrifice.”
In the comments on the post, Scott Cooper brings up additional problems. Roman law “appears to have” barred married soldiers, he writes. “This would have likely applied to Cornelius and the jailer.” In the case of Lydia, he considers that “[as] a ‘seller of purple’ goods, she was likely a wealthy, industrious, businesswoman.” This apparently makes her an unlikely candidate for the occupations of wife or mother. And: “…if she were married, in a patriarchal society, it would be very unlikely for her to have invited a group of men she had just met to her home.”
How problematic are the problems?
What follows is my own meager (meagre?) take on the matter, which you should feel free to discount or to ignore altogether.
First, to respond to the point about slaves. When the question is partly about whether baptism is appropriate for anyone who hasn’t made a personal confession of faith, this seems to me to be near begging the question. Can we assume that each slave was required to make his own free and personal confession of faith prior to baptism, in order to support the view that every person (regardless of relationships) is required to make a free and personal confession of faith prior to baptism? Today, this matter of slaves arises when we discuss whether to baptize the infant or very young children of Christian believers, but today even a man’s own children likely are not viewed as so bound to his household as a slave might have been in the time of Acts. In our modern societies with our heavy emphasis on the life and rights of the individual, perhaps we Christian parents would go so far as to say to our own children, “[Choose] this day whom you will serve”. It may be hard for us to grasp what Joshua meant when he continued, “But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15).
I think that it is just possible that we attribute too great a proportion of individualistic self-determination to the slaves of the New Testament era. Do I think for a moment that Paul or Silas went racing through the Philippian jailer’s house, water in hand, desperately attempting to capture and baptize a shrieking slave as he passionately denied the Gospel that his master had just embraced? No, I do not think that. But neither do I think it likely that any slaves did protest. To the extent that they were included among those baptized, they surely acquiesced to their master’s decision to follow Christ. (That “bondservants” formed a part of the early Church, we know from the command given to them by Paul after he addresses wives, husbands, and children in Ephesians chapters 5 and 6.)
Second, the example of Hannah and Samuel being left behind when otherwise Elkanah’s whole household goes up to offer his sacrifice and vow. If we continue to verse 23 of 1 Samuel 1, we read: “Elkanah her husband said to her, ‘Do what seems best to you; wait until you have weaned him; only, may the Lord establish his word.’ So the woman remained and nursed her son until she weaned him” (emphasis added). Clearly her son stayed behind with her—that was the entire reason she gave her husband for her own staying behind (“As soon as the child is weaned, I will bring him”, verse 22). We know that not every member of Elkanah’s household went up with him because the text tells us that not every member of his household went up with him. These exceptions are told us directly, and are an important part of the story, as the next thing that Hannah does after weaning the child is to bring him up to “[lend] him to the Lord… [as] long as he lives” (verse 28).
I accept that the case of Elkanah’s travel is an example of a term such as “all his house” referring generally, not strictly, to a man’s entire house, because the text calls our attention to the (critical) exceptions to the entirety. If any household members were excepted from the baptisms recorded in Acts, I think that this would similarly have been notable: why were they left out? Did they protest, or not profess? Were they not old enough? Were they not considered so far under the head of the household’s authority that they could be baptized following his or her own belief? But unlike in this instance from 1 Samuel, the New Testament text does not say either that there were exceptions made, or why.
My problem with the problems
The theme running throughout all of these problems—if they are problems—is that they seem to focus on finding exceptions to the concept of “household” (or possibly “house” or “family”) as a thing. Or, more pertinently, they find exceptions to the concept of “household” as a way to refer to individuals in relation to the head of a household.
The Baptist view must deal with the occasions when the authors of the New Testament so used a term such as “household” in order to refer to individuals who were baptized, rather than listing or mentioning the individuals by name. For an infant-including view of baptism, we might say, for example, that the word spoken to the jailer in Philippi—“Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household” (Acts 16:31)—provides a clue as to why the text then refers to the baptism of “all his family” (verse 33). Darby went so far as to write, “This was an absolute statement of God, and, if words have meaning, warrants me to claim the salvation of my house in answer to my faith in God.” If we include the infants and children of believers among the proper subjects of baptism, we don’t even need to speculate on the makeup of any individual family mentioned in the text.
In contrast, the Baptist view requires exclusions or exceptions. If the Baptist view is correct, then there must of necessity not have been any infants baptized on any of these occasions, or any children too young to have made each their own profession, or any slaves unless each made clear his or her own decision individually. There can’t have been any of these, despite that none of the Scriptural accounts rule out any. I don’t know if there is a compelling case made that the household of Stephanas included no one under the “age of accountability”, but say that there is one: would it not be a fascinating coincidence if every single household or family said to have been baptized in the New Testament happened to have included no children too young to make a verbal profession of faith?
But the Biblical text describing these baptisms makes no exceptions. And the significance that I see in the Biblical references to the baptisms of households is that the designation “household” describes those over whom the head of the household is in authority—those whom he represents; those for whom he is responsible. This continues in our modern world as well: my toddler children do not have any sacred right of agency over their own selves or bodies such that they get to run out into the street to play while cars fly around the corner, or eat a strict diet of caramels and toaster pastries, or refuse diaper changes. Far more gravely, they do not have a say in the matter of whether I bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord, or teach them to observe all things that the Lord Jesus commanded (Ephesians 6; Matthew 28).
Do the accounts of baptized households constitute a proof that infants were baptized by the apostles? No, they do not. But I consider that infant-including views of baptism allow a simple reading of the text, without needing to prove either that there likely were or likely weren’t infants included in the mention of any given family or household. Without, as Dr. Goeman says, “[arguing]… that the mention of the entire household always means every member of the household without exception”, I consider an infant-including view of baptism a natural way to understand these accounts.
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