'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
- 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). - Beasley-Murray, Baptism, p. 306.
- 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). - Cf, e.g., Lars Hartman, 'Into the Name of the LordJesus': Baptism in the Early