THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
attached to tbe teaching of Thomas especially concerning the " character " which baptism confers. This also goes back to Augustine, who touches this idea briefly in order to establish the validity of the baptism of heretics. Baptism incorporates us with Christ under all circumstances. It confers the " character " of belonging objectively to Christ, to his "body," the Church. This character is indelible, and depends only upon the due administration of the sacrament as to matter and form. Thus baptism brings every one into actual contact with the flow of grace emanating from Christ. Whoever " interposes an obstacle " by not receiving baptism in the subjectively right disposition (for instance, as a heretic) does not experience this immediate contact with grace as justification until he subsequently removes the obstacle (as, in the case supposed, by returning to the faith of the Church). The character conferred in baptism carries with it the right and capacity to receive the other sacraments, and at the same time involves the duty of obedience to the Church. In practise it is the sacrament of penance which subsequently makes the character of the baptized heretic or hypocrite efficacious for salvation. On the basis of its theory of character, the Roman Church acknowledges " in principle " the baptism of Protestants, but practically is often in doubt whether the Protestant Churches perform baptism with due regard to matter and form. Converts are thus, where any uncertainty exists, baptized hypothetically with the form, " If thou art not already baptized, I baptize thee," etc. In one essential point scholasticism differed from Augustine, at least from the Augustine of the later, stricter period, by acknowledging not only the " baptism of blood," but the " baptism of the Holy Spirit " or " of desire " as conveying grace. According to Peter Lombard and especially Thomas Aquinas, an adult may even before baptism anticipate in faith the effects of baptism upon the heart (conversio in the proper sense); he may so efficaciously desire salvation as to be incorporated with Christ mentaliter and possess the res sacramenti without the sacramentum, so that if he should die suddenly, the votum sacramenti would be sufficient to secure him salvation. The Roman Church still denies salvation to unbaptized infants; the whole tradition on that point was so firmly established that scholasticism did not dare to think differently. According to this doctrine unbaptized infants do not go to hell, but they do not get into heaven; they remain in a special place, the limbus infantium (see Limbus).
Not much need be said of Eastern teaching in
medieval and modern times. The later Greek
mind seems to have found other " mysteries," not
indeed more important, but more interesting and
more in need of exposition. Of course, however,
this sacrament could not be omitted
2. The from the considerations of mystagogic
Eastern theology (q.v.). From the time of
Church. Cyril of Jerusalem and the pseudo-
Dionysius the baptismal ceremonies
have had their fixed place in these discussions; but
a much larger place is given, especially in the
Byzantine period, to the Eucharist. The most exhaustive treatment of the subject after the Areopagite is that of Nikolaos Kabasilas, metropolitan of Thessalonica (d. 1371), particularly in his treatise " On Life in Christ." The Greeks emphasize the ideas of regeneration and illumination, and conceive both under such aspects as are attainable by specific philosophical (Aristotelian) methods. The notion of a new birth is carried through by means of the terms " matter " and " form "; and the doctrine of a transference from the kingdom of darkness or sin into that of light or truth is easily illustrated by the relation long supposed to exist between darkness and matter, between light and form or the true " idea " or image of God in man. The conception of original sin was current also among the later Greeks. The theologians of the seventeenth century considered Protestant views a corruption of the truth, which they found in an unconditional realism as to the value of the baptismal ceremony. Baptism to them is not merely the forgiveness, but the abolition, the extinction, of sin — although it is sometimes hard to seize the precise shade of meaning intended to be conveyed by their rhetorical expressions. They require, in opposition alike to Rome and to Protestantism, a threefold immersion, although the Russian Church has formally abandoned the practise of rebaptizing Westerns. They teach that children dying without baptism can not be saved, although Mesoloras, for example, lays stress upon the lightness of the penalty in their case.
3. Teaching1 of the Reformers: In order to understand correctly Luther's attitude toward baptism, it is necessary to grasp his idea of grace, which forms the central distinction between the conception of the sacraments in Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. Luther defined grace no longer in
the sense of divine power (virtus), i. Lutheran, but as a sign or token of the divine
disposition — in the older Latin sense as the divine favor. He also considered baptism necessary for salvation, believing unconditionally in the command of Christ, Matt, xxviii, 19. He did not seek for the reason of this command, for its " necessity " in a rational sense, seeing in it simply an expression of the love of Christ, who desires to convince us through baptism of God's favor and thereby to awaken " faith " (fides in the sense of fiducia). In baptism we experience the actual bestowal of the favor of God, which, without it, does not, or at least does not indubitably, descend on man. Luther does not understand the necessity of baptism for salvation in the sense that the grace of God is included in the sacrament in an objective sense, but that while one can not be entirely certain of grace without the sacrament, in virtue of it one may be " always " assured of the grace of God in faith. The preaching of the gospel addresses itself too much to humanity in general; the sacrament applies itself to the individual as such, and thus gives him the assurance of grace, and in case of doubt it is the only full guaranty that he is in God's favor. Luther does not follow the Roman idea of " character " as conferred by baptism, but applies his new definition of grace to the content