I just completed my latest web site project, a PHP module that reads XML-format Bibles. You can go to the Bible page and look up any verse quickly, or hover a highlighted citation in my blog entries in Internet Explorer or Firefox to see a tooltip quoting that passage in the RSV-CE. Fun, isn't it?

After reading the blog, check out the web site of Franciscan University's campus literary magazine, Lumen Vincens, which I am also working on.

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I recently read some works from the fathers, especially some of Augustine’s writings against Pelagius, and they greatly expanded my understanding of grace. The key point that shocked me was Augustine’s insistence thatgrace not only gives us the capacity to do good, but it also necessarily moves us to will the good, and aids in actually carrying it out. I already had understood this on some pre-conceptual level, and I have taught that a person should pray to God to provide even the most basic desire of a good, but it had never hit me with such stength and precision. Moreover, Augustine asserts that this fact is a necessary truth of the faith.

In other words, we cannot even will to do good apart from grace. Concupiscence has marred us in such a way that this is so. Moreover—this is a point that demands a long discussion but I will present it in brief here—the fathers viewed creation not as something that stands by itself, but as constantly needing to be kept in existence by God. It is heading toward decay in every way. Thus, apart from God we do not stand on a neutral ground in which our decisions would be entirely free, but rather we tend downward. It is the grace of God that sustains us at that middle point in such a way that free will is a possibility. I will have to pursue the topic of free will at length later.

Augustine’s statements are to an astonishing extent in clear agreement with those of Karl Rahner. Just as Catholic theology has for centuries separated grace into two primary categories, so does Augustine: there is the first grace, which Adam had, and the second grace, which comes through Christ and is what we call now “sanctifying grace.” Adam needed the first grace in order to even be able to make a free will decision that begins in a neutral circumstance (the Garden of Eden was a trouble-free circumstance, which at best would provide humanit with a neutral circumstance of decision, since bad circumstance makes us more tend toward evil, but good circumstance does not make us tend more toward the good). Such a decision would have been meritorious because of his guiltless condition. Sinning did not make him lose the grace of God, but set him in a circumstance that a meritorious act could not remedy; neither could the first grace actually move his will to do good. Christ comes to save us from this fall and to give us a grace that actually moves our will toward good. All of this paints an image of the human being as never actually existing without grace. Just as Rahner’s theology describes, there is no such thing as a purely “natural” human, and because of “good” is possible of every human through the grace of God.

All of this is a short summary because I do not want to make it the topic of this thought, but to use it as a background for further thought.

I randomly came recently to think about infant baptism while I was reading Augustine’s Confessions. It is a very ancient practice that some Christians have criticized because it does not evidently date back to the time of Christ himself. I came to a realization, though: Christ baptized adults because those were the ones who were coming to visit. It does not make explicit that children were not baptized. However, as the Church progressed into its early centuries, adult baptism was not the same. It became very often for baptism to be withheld until the death bed, because confession was not commonplace and people were more worried about commiting grave sin after baptism than they were about dying before baptism could be administered. This resulted, actually, in some people being baptized while they were unconscious with sickness, because it was not thought that they were ever awake again.

In other words, even before infant baptism, although perhaps not dating back to the time of Jesus himself, the direct will of the sufferer was not necessarily taken into account. In the Confessions, for example, Augustine has a close friend who subscribed to Manicheanism that was baptized when they thought he would die, even though he was unconscious. The friend later woke up and recanted his Manicheanism immediately and was a Christian again—but he later fell unconscious again and died. In Augustine’s eyes, God’s grace somehow took effect on this man even while he slept, and made him a Christian. How?

The problem with the criticism of infant baptism is that it puts too much emphasis on the human will. Yes, it is nice to have it such that the baptized person understands and wills what it happening, but since when did God need our will to act before his grace? Indeed, according to the theology of grace, if a person ever wills to be baptized, he wills so because of God’s grace already working within him. Catholics speak of course of a “cooperation” with grace, to emphasis that the will is free when grace works in it, but Protestants tend to dislike this word because they want to emphasize that this grace is not merited. Both emphases accounted for, it is clear that we cannot say that the direct positive will of the one being baptized is necessary. I am not sure if there is any doctrine to disagree with me on this, but for the moment this is my theory.

Now, perhaps it can be said that a direct will by the person being baptized against the sacrament can be an obstacle, but it is not clear to me yet what this obstacle might be. In other words, would that person need to be rebaptized later if he comes to believe and will it, or would that baptism still be efficacious? I think perhaps the latter is true. The will constitutes an obstacle to the reception of God’s grace, but not the enactment of the sacrament. The sacraments are sternly efficacious and the grace of God is fiercely faithful, such that once the obstacle has been removed, the grace of God that has been freely given according to the sacramental promise will take effect in that person. A person may at any time refuse God’s grace, but the offer of it is never taken away, and the sacraments are irreversible.

This should not be taken as an exhortation to go baptize people unawares. Clearly it is far better for a person to have knowledge of the sacrament and to will it, and baptism will not guarantee that person’s salvation because the grace of God can be refused.

Thus, in infant baptism, the sanctifying grace of God is requested by the pastor, the people, and the parents, to take action in the life of a child. The child does not will against the sacrament without having knowledge of it, and because of the parents’ promise to raise the child according to the Christian life, this grace will most likely find opportunity in the child, not rejection. Therefore, there is no reason not to baptize the child, although there is an additional benefit when the baptism is directly willed by the baptized. Yet, if we truly trust in God’s sanctifying grace, which leads us to will the good, why would we not want this for a child? If a person can live their entire life with their will freed from concupiscence, and led by the grace of God, why should that be denied them?

Perhaps one more consideration should be made. It might be good to categorize the elements of the sacrament so as to describe that some kind of willing is necessary on the part of those requesting the sacrament (as opposed to the one performing it, usually a priest or deacon). In the case of a child, it is the parents. In the case of a sick person dying, it could be the family or the person, if they requested the baptism. Perhaps also it is possible for the one performing the sacrament (the priest/deacon, etc.) to be the same as the other party. Thus one might ask me why such a consideration is necessary at all, and I would have to respond that it is more practical than theological. As long as it is emphasized that the regular case is one in which there is some person who wills and promises, it will hopefully help prevent situations where a person baptizes others who are unaware. In such an unusual situation, though, a promise should still be made by the one who baptizes to lead that person to a Christian life. A person should never be counted as a statistic—baptize him, then move on, etc. Instead, each life is precious and each baptism is a major commitment to nurture the seed of grace planted in that individual.

~Michael Anthony Abril

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