Sunday Quote! – Infant Baptism and the Imagination?

Every Sunday, I will share a quote from something I’ve been reading. The hope is for you, dear reader, to share your thoughts on the quote and related issues and perhaps pick up some reading material along the way!

Infant Baptism and the Imagination?

I was reading through Imaginative Apologetics: Theology, Philosophy, and the Catholic Tradition (edited by Andrew Davison) and came upon a quote which I thought exemplified some of the beauty of infant baptism:

A child baptism… is a wonderful argument in itself for the religious dimension. Even apart from the putting on of Christ, dying to sin[,] and regeneration at its heart, the simple fact that a family brings a baby to church is a religious act. They are seeing their child apart from themselves… she is truly real to them. To offer a baby for baptism is to affirm that she is more than a bundle of rosy flesh and a needy mouth. She means more than she seems. In a young infant we encounter reality and it leads us upwards. (42, cited below)

The “imagination” involved in this is not so much a imagination in the sense of “making up” but rather in the sense of experiencing and accessing a different reality. The parents bring their child in to be baptized, thus affirming that this is one who needs God as much as any other; one whom God has called. Infant baptism is an “encounter” with reality which “leads us upwards.” It goes beyond the water and the words and becomes Word and Sacrament. I thought this was a beautiful quote to illustrate the nature of an infant baptism.

Links

Be sure to check out the page for this site on Facebook and Twitter for discussion of posts, links to other pages of interest, random talk about theology/philosophy/apologetics/movies and more!

Source

Alison Milbank, “Apologetics and the Imagination: Making Strange” in Imaginative Apologetics: Theology, Philosophy, and the Catholic Tradition edited by Andrew Davison (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2011).