My article espousing dual-practice baptism for Anglicans left a number of issues untouched, and this has been rightly pointed out. The basic question I’ll be dealing with here is this, “Even if we assume that your argument is right, what exactly is this ‘dual-practice’ and what does it entail for the actual practice of the Anglican church?”

    To answer this, it’ll be helpful to lay out the way I think of baptismal theology and practice as a rough continuum. On the one side you have intolerant credobaptism, then tolerant credobaptism, then dual-practice baptism, and then a mirror image on the other side for paedobaptism. ‘Intolerant’ here signifies that the church requires it as a point of doctrine and will take action against those who disagree or disobey—the most extreme case (now) would be throwing the offender out of the church. ‘Tolerant’ here signifies that while it is affirmed as good doc, disagreement does not lead to action or church discipline.

    By way of example, an Anglican church takes a tolerant paedobaptist position when it encourages the parents of infant to have their baby baptized, but does not take any adverse action against the couple if they do not. A Baptist church takes an intolerant credobaptist position when a pastor is removed for baptizing an infant. We find a more tolerant credobaptist position when someone is admitted as a member of a Baptist church who was baptized as a baby without being required to be rebaptized.

    Now, obviously, there are many different ways to be tolerant or intolerant and different degrees of tolerance—hence why I talk about this as a rough continuum. One issue is how broad of a section of the continuum could a church or denomination encompass without it collapsing. For instance, even if a church agrees that baptism is a secondary issue, it cannot encompass the entire breadth of the continuum. One can’t consistently punish someone both for baptizing their baby, and for not baptizing their baby.

    The breadth of the continuum that can be included is going to depend in part on the other doctrines of the church in question. The relevant question here is, “How far does Anglicanism extend before it explodes?” I’m going to lay aside the issue of historical majority practice as well as how an actual person or church body might act. Historical Anglican practice is obviously on the tolerant to intolerant paedobaptist spectrum. As for individual people or churches, in my experience this would range all the way from strongly intolerant paedobaptist to including everything from tolerant paedobaptism to tolerant credobaptism. The question here is, institutionally how far can the Anglican continuum extend and does it lean to one side or another?

    The first reply is straightforward, yes Anglicanism obviously leans paedobaptist in its affirmations. Article 27 quite clearly goes out of its way to affirm the baptism of young children, it makes no parallel comment on making space for those who want their children to affirm Christ before baptism.

[Excursus: this might seem inconsistent with dual-practice but it is not. Remember that consistency is a very low bar. To say that two propositions (or sets of propositions) are consistent is merely to affirm that they do not logically contradict] 

So yes, even if I’m right that dual-practice baptism is consistent with the 39 Articles, they clearly lean in the paedobaptist direction—and this is true for the prayer book as well. But this raises the issue of what it would mean to have a dual-practice church that leans paedobaptist. Is this even possible? To put this visually, is it possible to start on the right side of the line and still actually reach the middle?

    I think the answer is yes. Dual-practice baptism simply requires equal rights for both sides. However, equal rights does not entail institutional neutrality. An analogy from the political arena will help clarify this. A country can affirm equal rights and require that there be no religious tests or discrimination but still not be completely neutral. Suppose there’s a country with only two religious sects, the Star-Bellies and the Plain-Bellies. The equal rights government cannot require one be a Star-Belly to vote, or hold office, or even hand down a different prison sentence based on religion.

    However, this does not entail that the country will be institutionally neutral. It might have national holidays based on the Star-belly rather than Plain-belly holy days. Assuming a democratic country and a majority of Star-bellies, the laws that are created will probably have more Star-belly bent than Plain-belly. Perhaps even the idea that there should be no religious test or discrimination is itself something that comes from the Star-belly perspective that is not compatible with Plain-belly doctrine. One might argue that it’s actually impossible for any nation to not lean in a certain direction, pure neutrality is a pipe dream. Every action goes in one direction and away from another.

    Now the point here is not allegorical, don’t try and plug in credobaptism and paedobaptism into Star or Plain-belly. The point is merely illustrative. So how would this work out in Anglicanism? Well, full rights for both would be required. This would mean that no family would face negative repercussions for not baptizing their baby (a common practice) and no office, such as clergy positions, would be withheld based on being credobaptist and refusing to baptize infants (the opposite of common practice). However, there would still be a vast majority of paedobaptist clergy and that clergy could lean and teach in the same way the Articles and Prayer Book lean, towards paedobaptism being better. There just couldn’t be the withholding of a good based on a credobaptist doctrinal commitment. To reframe a previous illustration, credobaptists (i.e. Anglican dual-practice credobaptists—it just gets long typing that all out each time) would no longer be red-headed stepchildren; they’d be a full part of the family—but they’d still be redheaded.

    Note that there are a number of things that are often associated with credobaptism that are ruled out, but not because they are credobaptist per se. Instead, they are ruled out because they are anti-Anglican ideas of sacraments. So, any form of theology that denies that baptism is more than a mere sign will be incompatible with Anglicanism, whether they be credobaptist or paedobaptist. It just so happens that paedobaptists have historically not taken that position—but if they did they’d still be inconsistent.

    There remains one key issue and that is rebaptism. One could, in theory, have a church with such a neutral dual-practice baptism that one could get baptized as a baby and then rebaptized as an adult if one felt so convicted. The issue here is that (almost) everyone agrees that people should only be baptized once. The traditional Baptist view is that infant baptism isn’t a valid baptism and consequently the adult isn’t being ‘rebaptized,’ just baptized properly for the first time. However, given the institutional position of Anglicanism, I don’t think this is a live option. Consequently, even if it were preferrable to wait to baptize, baptizing the same person again as an adult would be out of the question.

    So to answer my question from earlier, “How far does Anglicanism extend before it explodes?”, it explodes at rebaptism. If I were to cash this out visually it would mean that Anglicanism extends from tolerant paedobaptism to just over the dual-practice line but no further.

How would Anglicanism differ if it accepted this version of dual-practice? Not much. Many would see no difference, and for others the only change would be running into the odd priest who’d say, “Sorry, I can’t baptize your baby, but Father Bob over there would love to.” The crucial difference would be for those who wanted to become Anglican clergy but were previously prevented. It would also change the lives of those who’ve come from credobaptist traditions or have credobaptist tendencies and have been treated, as I’ve been told,  like ‘second class clergy’ – a truly mournful state of affairs.

    Now I realize that that we might have created more ‘why’ questions than when we started, but that’s for a different day. Here I’ll stop with an adapted quote from the trilateral discussion of baptism between Catholics, Lutherans, and Mennonites,

Might not [Anglican paedobaptists] acknowledge the decision of parents to foster a mature faith in their children prior to the request for baptism that has determined [credobaptist] practice as an authentic approach to Christian initiation? Might not [Anglican credobaptists] acknowledge that, given an assurance of familial and congregational commitment to provide formation in faith and discipleship, the choice of parents to request baptism for their young children, as practiced by [responsible paedobaptists], is an authentic approach to Christian initiation? Can we acknowledge that the different concerns do not contradict each other, and are grounded in basic aspects of the Gospel? By the term “authentic approach,” we mean that it is based on mutually recognizable biblical concepts of grace, faith and church… (51-52)