Baptism Among The Protestant Reformers

Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin all believed baptism could properly be administered to infants. Yet, whereas Luther emphasized baptism as a sign of God's promise to bring about faith in conjunction with the infant's inchoate faith, Zwingli and Calvin saw it as a Christian equivalent to circumcision in the Hebrew Scriptures, the mark of inclusion in God's covenant people. Adherents of the Radical Reformation rejected the baptism of infants entirely, arguing that infants cannot have faith in Christ, since faith comes by hearing and understanding the Word of God. They repudiated their own baptisms as infants and had themselves rebaptized. Hence they became known as Anabaptists, or rebaptizers. No deeper chasm separated the various Protestant Reformers than their understanding of baptism; nor have their descendants nearly half a millennium later bridged the gap. All of the Reformers reacted strongly to medieval abuses that seemed to make infant baptism an escape hatch from the consequences o…