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To: adiaireton8

You gave me no scriptures where it says babies were baptized. There are many households that could be baptized without including children. Surely if this was such important dogma at least one example of a child obeying the gospel would have been given in the word. I did not ask for a bunch of your "Father's" opinions on the matter just scripture.


836 posted on 04/15/2005 7:05:54 PM PDT by OkieAcres
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To: OkieAcres
You gave me no scriptures where it says babies were baptized. There are many households that could be baptized without including children. Surely if this was such important dogma at least one example of a child obeying the gospel would have been given in the word. I did not ask for a bunch of your "Father's" opinions on the matter just scripture.

First of all, they are not *my* Fathers; they are the Church Fathers. The teaching and practice of the Church Fathers is important, because it tells us what was passed down from the Apostles. The Fathers explicitly say that infant baptism was handed down from the Apostles. Are you calling them liars? Second, your claim that if infant baptism was so important it would have been made explicit in the NT is a non sequitur. I assume you know of the doctrine of the Trinity. Do you think that is important? The word Trinity is not in the Bible, nor is the doctrine spelled out explicitly in the NT. Nor is any explicit teaching on the nature of the hypostatic union, or on the filiation of the Son and the spiration of the Spirit. As history progresses, the Church continues to bring out the implications of that which has always been taught implicitly. That is how theology can still be done today. Just because something is not taught in the Bible explicitly does not mean that it is false, or that it should not be believed or practiced by all Christians. On the contrary, a practice that has been universally practiced since the first century, and for which the Fathers explicitly claim has Apostolic origins, clearly deserves to be recognized as standard, orthodox Christian practice, even if we cannot find it explicitly spelled out in the NT.

-A8

841 posted on 04/15/2005 7:20:52 PM PDT by adiaireton8 ("There is no greater evil one can suffer than to hate reasonable discourse." - Plato, Phaedo 89d)
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