Beza and Baptismal Assurance
Sometimes when I read about a debate in the past, I find myself frustrated with both parties. So it was with Jill Raitt’s summary of the debate between Jacob Andreae and Theodore Beza about baptism at the Colloquy of Montbéliard (“Probably They Are God’s Children: Theodore Beza’s Doctrine of Baptism” in Humanism and Reform [Blackwell, 1991]). At times, I find myself appreciating a point Beza makes; at other times, Andreae seems to have the upper hand — and at times, the whole debate becomes frustrating.
But perhaps most troubling is what Raitt puts into the title of her essay: Beza’s use of the word “probably.” Beza “said that infants also probably receive remission of original sin and the fruits of adoption, as long as they do not repudiate these benefits as adults” (159). Raitt notes that Beza “had always taught, as had Calvin, that the children of believers are probably elect” (159). But as it turns out, if they did grow up and “repudiate these benefits as adults,” Beza would say that they had never really received the benefits at all. As Raitt points out,
Were they to repudiate their baptism, they would evidently be reprobate from the beginning. In that case, they did not receive any benefits from baptism, something that could not be known at the time since, in Reformed theology, the action of the Holy Spirit is God’s secret and cannot be commanded by human actions, even sacramental actions” (159-160).
So, for Beza, “Baptism is … a probable, not a certain, sign that baptized children receive the fruit of adoption. To say otherwise would be to make God’s choice dependent upon human actions” (164). In fact, later on Beza went further and “affirmed that many thousands of baptized children are never regenerated, but perish eternally” (167) — prompting Andreae, in shock, to write a marginal note: “Horrenda vox.”
Andreae rightly noted that Beza’s approach undermines any comfort we might receive from baptism and, in fact, in grounding assurance on our experience of faith and on feeling “the motion of the Holy Spirit testifying that one is truly regenerated and adopted as a child of God,” Beza was reducing “assurance to subjective feeling” (166). “Andreae objected that the sacraments would not be sources of comfort if they were merely sources of probability rather than certainty” (164).
In contrast, “There should be no doubt that when a child is baptized, it enters into God’s adoption and love, said Andreae. There should be no ‘probably,’ but rather assurance” (167).
One does not have to agree with all the details of Andreae’s theology of baptism to grant his main point: Baptism ought to be a comfort, and that comfort is undermined if we add the word “probably” to it. If baptism only “probably” means that we belong to God, if we are only “probably” baptized into Christ, if our children are only “probably” included in God’s love but could, if they die in infancy, end up perishing, then baptism can no longer function to give — or even to buttress — our assurance and we will end up looking elsewhere. As history has shown, that “elsewhere” usually turns out to be our own subjective feelings, our own sense that our faith is strong enough, which in the end leads to what Raitt terms a “psychological morass” (168).