Dimensions of Baptism Biblical and Theological Studies

'SHE AND HER HOUSEHOLD WERE BAPTIZED' (ACTS 16.15):

HOUSEHOLD BAPTISM IN THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES

Joel B. Green

Apparently, the time has passed when the central question addressed to

episodes of 'household baptism' in the Acts of the Apostles is whether one

might find here a biblical-theological foundation for infant baptism. The

cul-de-sac into which this discussion led is well-represented in the debate

between Kurt Aland and Joachim Jeremias a half-century ago, and sum-

marized in George R. Beasley-Murray's discussion, from the same period,

of the question, 'Infant Baptism a New Testament Institution?'.^1 Although

Beasley-Murray, himself a Baptist, regarded the practice of infant baptism

as one of those areas in which the cleavage between biblical scholarship

and ecclesiastical belief was most on display,^2 it might be truer to say that

the whole enterprise of attempting to tie the baptism of little children to

explicit biblical precedent and/or warrant itself belies an overly simplistic

approach to theological-hermeneutical method.^3 In any case, recent discus-

sion of baptism in Acts has scarcely raised the question of the baptism of

infants.^4

1. G.R. Beasley-Murray, Baptism in the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerd-
   mans, 1962), pp. 306-52. Kurt Aland, Did the Early Church Baptize Infants? (London:
   SCM Press, 1963); idem, Die Stellung der Kinder in denfriihen christlichen Gemeinden
   —und ihre Taufe (TEH, 138; Munich: Kaiser, 1967); Joachim Jeremias, Infant Baptism
   in the First Four Centuries (London: SPCK, 1960); idem, The Origins of Infant Bap-
   tism: A Further Study in Reply to Kurt Aland (SHT, 1; London: SCM Press, 1963).


2. Beasley-Murray, Baptism, p. 306.


3. For an alternative account to a biblicist approach of this kind, see William J.
   Abraham, Canon and Criterion in Christian Theology: From the Fathers to Feminism
   (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). For more nuanced reflection on the interface of
   biblical exegesis and constructive theology, see Joel B. Green and Max Turner (eds.),
   Between Two Horizons: Spanning New Testament Studies and Systematic Theology
   (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000).


4. Cf, e.g., Lars Hartman, 'Into the Name of the LordJesus': Baptism in the Early