The Swiss Delegation at the Synod of Dordt on the Baptism of Slave Children
Translated from Early Sessions of the Synod of Dordt (V&R, 2018), pgs. 137-38.
[Authors: Johann Jakob Breitinger; Markus Rütimeyer; Sebastian Beck; Wolfgang Mayer; Johann Konrad Koch]
The question is asked, whether children born of pagan parents, and now adopted into Christian families, should be baptized, if those who offer them pledge in good faith that they themselves will educate them in the Christian religion or ensure that they are so educated?
THE RESPONSE OF THE HELVETIANS
This question seems to arise from an ingrained error, which attributes more to the external sacrament than is appropriate, and less to the order instituted by Christ. Therefore, to avoid either fostering error or exposing holy baptism to mockery, children of pagans should not be baptized before they are catechized, for the following reasons:
Abraham, the father of all believers, previously a Gentile before he was called, had heard of the true God, had come to know him, had believed in him, and God had made a covenant with him, yet he did not receive circumcision as the sign of the covenant and seal of the righteousness of faith. But when God became his God and the God of his seed, only then was he and his seed circumcised. Therefore, children of Gentiles, as long as they are not in the covenant and do not know the true God, nor believe or profess to believe, cannot become partakers of the sign of the covenant. For where there is no covenant, there is no place for the sign of the covenant.
Christ instructed the apostles who were sent to the Gentiles to teach and baptize. Therefore, Gentiles must be taught before they are baptized.
The Apostle Paul calls children holy if born from at least one holy parent, but he refused to call those born from neither holy parent holy, but defiled.
Christianity does not consist in the will of the one who wants to convert another, but in the mind of the converted. Therefore, Gentiles should be converted before they are marked with the sign of Christianity. Nor did the apostles baptize those whom they wanted to bring into the Christian church, but those already brought in.
Those [families] offering and pledging have no power to raise these children or to guarantee their own lives long enough for them to be educated, instructed, and to confess the faith. It can also happen that these adopted Gentile children, before they are instructed in the Christian religion, might either run away again, or by some other circumstance be separated from that faithful family, or even die. Consequently, such children would be initiated through baptism whom we cannot deny are Gentiles, defiled, alien to the covenant of grace, to the knowledge of God and his Christ.
Our churches are not accustomed to baptize Gentile infants abandoned by Gypsies before they have made sufficient progress in the Christian religion and have confessed it. The same reasoning applies to Jews.
If these Gentile children are, by God’s appointment, sheep of Christ and in the covenant of grace, the delay of baptism will not harm them. Since it is not the privation of baptism, but its contempt that condemns.