Book Reviews
Baptism in the Early Church, Hendrikus Stander and Johannes Louw (ARBCA and Carey Publications, 2004), reviewed by Michael T. Renihan
Professors Hendrikus Stander and Johannes Louw have provided an invaluable resource for students of the Patristic era of Church History. It is also a provocative volume for inquirers bold enough to look beyond their historical presuppositions regarding baptism. A word of warning: objectivity is required or this book will be a frustrating read.
Stander and Louw are both classical scholars in their own right. Each man’s work can be readily examined in the books, monographs, and articles he has published. Each is a world class scholar. Dr. Stander studied at Yale. On those occasions that took him to the libraries at Harvard, he would travel within a quarter mile of where I presently live. He is a kind and gracious man. Dr. Louw, along with Eugene Nida, is an editor of the acclaimed Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains. The careers of Stander and Louw dovetailed at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. They have been associated with that institution for many years.
The denominational allegiance of the authors makes Baptism in the Early Church remarkable. They belong to churches that are paedobaptist and covenantal by confession and heritage. Yet, their desire was (and is) to be objective, honest, and thorough in their quest to understand how the Early Church understood and practiced baptism. In the end, they gently and graciously remove one of the three legs on which the three-legged stool of covenantal paedobaptism sat for many years; the other two being (from this writer’s perspective) theological necessity and eisogetical induction.
In the Twentieth Century, much work was done in the fields of archaeology and history with regard to baptism and the initiatory rites of the Early Church. It is sad that so much has been neglected or dismissed willfully with a few strokes on the keyboard. Everett Ferguson’s volume The Encyclopaedia of the Early Church (which contains articles by Prof. Stander) is a repository for many of these recent discoveries.
Baptism in the Early Church is comprised of twenty-five chapters of varying length. The final chapter contains conclusions that flow naturally from the research and study. There is very little extraneous material. The
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style is compact, to the point, and engagingly thorough. The only drawback to the work is its slight Afrikaans flavor.
The work unearths many surprising early writers in order to present their views to a new generation. Individually and collectively, these works show that the history of infant baptism is not “An Unfinished Tragicomedy” as Peter J. Leithart recently styled the subject.1 In that essay, Leithart dismisses all that came before Tertullian with a sentence fragment. Stander and Louw don’t get to Tertullian until chapter seven. There is much to consider before this unique character ever wrote his treatise on baptism; a work that is highly allegorical and uses all the water passages of the Bible to say something about baptism. Leithart is partly right; Tertullian is the first to draw our attention to the baptism of those who were not adults. It is, however, not necessarily to infants that our attention is drawn, but to children. In the history of this debate, there is a difference. The words are not exactly convertible from one to the other. Infants are those who are nursing. A child is one who has...
