Friday Roundup (6/27/25)
infant baptism, article on the fetter lane revival in 1739, Seamus Heaney poem
Happy Friday! The Friday Roundup is just for the various things I found interesting this week, and that you may too. Let’s get into it:
Peiter Leithart on the history of infant baptism (I wish the full article was not behind a paywall!). I think what he is pointing at is that both sides of this Christian debate have gaps in their arguments from Christian history, though I firmly believe that the historical evidence points in a much stronger way to the practice of infant baptism not only being normative, but also biblical. He writes:
That, in very brief compass, is the shape of the story. Identifying the genre of the story, however, depends on one’s assumptions about God’s will for Christian baptism.6 For Baptists, the story is definitely a tragedy. Infant baptism became established because of “alien influences” in the church, which transformed baptism into either a magical ritual or a “mere sign,” and in either case baptism and the gospel were diminished.7 Infant baptism is a “wound” in the body of Christ, a “hole” in baptismal practice, an arbitrary and despotic rite.8
Paedobaptists, by contrast, normally tell the story as one of straightforward continuity: The apostolic practice of infant baptism, reflected in various ways in the New Testament, continued undisturbed throughout two silent centuries, after which the apostolic practice became more openly discussed and more firmly grounded. According to this story-line, opponents of infant baptism such as Tertullian were aberrations, and the story is pure comedy. Samuel Miller expressed this view with remarkable rhetorical force: “I can assure you, my friends, with the utmost candour and confidence, after much inquire on the subject, that, for more than fifteen hundred years after the birth of Christ, there was not a single society on earth, who opposed infant baptism on any thing like the grounds which distinguish our Baptist brethren.”9
Perhaps additional evidence will one day turn up to clarify the practice of the church between the apostles and Tertullian. Given the evidence that we currently have, however, neither the comic nor the tragic version of the story makes sense. The Baptist story of tragedy cannot account for the opening chapters of the story -- namely, the biblical evidence in favor of paedobaptism. A sudden shift from inclusion of infants in Israel to exclusion of infants from the new Israel would have left identifiable skid marks on the historical record. There are none.
Paedobaptists, on the other hand, have not fully acknowledged the weight of the evidence against the universality of infant baptism. If the story is one of pure continuity, how does one explain the (apparently) widespread practice of delaying baptism well into the fourth century? How are the early postapostolic liturgies, which clearly assume believer’s baptism, to be explained? And, if the church practiced infant baptism virtually without contest, what accounts for the prominence of confirmation as the key to initiation in the medieval church?
Look at this BLT I ate this week. Isn’t it glorious:
A graph shared from the great Ted Gioia, no commentary needed:
Fetter Lane Revival in early Methodism:
I enjoyed revisiting this article from Firebrand by Douglas Fox, about the charismatic aspects of early Methodism, especially the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at the Fetter Lane society on New Year’s Day, 1739. Wesley reports his experience,
Mr. Hall, Kinchin, Ingham, [George] Whitefield, Hutchings, and my brother Charles were present at our love feast in Fetter Lane, with about sixty of our brethren. About three in the morning, as we were continuing instant in prayer, the power of God came mightily upon us, insomuch that many cried out for exceeding joy, and many fell to the ground. As soon as we were recovered a little from that awe and amazement at the presence of his majesty, we broke out with one voice, ‘We praise thee, O God; we acknowledge thee to be the Lord.’
I wonder, what would Methodism in America have been like if we celebrated Fetter Lane every year instead of Aldersgate? Not to diminish Wesley’s conversion moment in the least, but a corporate experience of the Holy Spirit seems much more likely to be the true origins of the Wesleyan/Methodist revival.
Read this poem: “Follower” by Seamus Heaney, the great Irish poet. I recently got back into his work after reading the book Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe. The poem is about following his dad on the farm, and how that role has been reversed in his older age. Here’s the last section of it:
I stumbled in his hobnailed wake,
Fell sometimes on the polished sod;
Sometimes he rode me on his back
Dipping and rising to his plod.I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away
Nicene Creed in Old English: If any of you all are Beowulf fans, or even Chaucer fans like myself, it’s somewhat beautiful and stunning to hear the Nicene Creed, translated into Old English first by a monk called Aelfric in 992.
The All-New Big Tech American School: Read Emily Brownlee’s remarks to the Kansas State Department of Education, as posted by Jonathan Haidt’s Substack, After Babel. Part of her speech here:
As a former high school teacher and a mother of four children, it’s alarming why I constantly have to prove with scientific research why this invasive technology is detrimental to our kids, when no one in the field of education can prove why it was introduced in the first place.
Why did we allow schools to become Silicon Valley profit centers?
Why did we replace human interaction with machines?
Why did we replace pencil and paper with keyboards?
Why did we replace physical books with digital ones?
Why did we force our children to stare at screens for seven hours a day when we had zero research on what it would do to their eyes, their brains, and their humanity?
Technology, as it's currently being used, is not the future of education — it’s the demise of education.
You have a golden opportunity, as Dennis recently mentioned, for Kansas to be a lighthouse for the nation. Save the current generation, and all those to follow, by eliminating the one-to-one tech programs in our schools and prohibiting distracting, addictive personal devices for the entire school day.
Then — and only then — will we be well on our way toward educational equity, transformative classrooms, and flourishing human beings.
Thank you
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