Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!seismo!dimacs.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: mls@sfsup.att.com (Mike Siemon) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: Validity of Baptism (Was Re: In Communion with Rome?) Message-ID: Date: 30 Oct 90 05:28:52 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories Lines: 53 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu Our moderator, commenting on one of my posts, says: > Thus you are requiring an unbroken chain back to a > church that does not itself require one to begin with. I have > verified in my copy of the Draft BCP that the Episcopal Church does > actually require the minister of baptism to be baptized, even in the > case of emergency baptisms. So there is a difference here between > your practice and Catholic practice that I think neither side may have > realized. An interesting question: would you rebaptize a Catholic > whose baptism had been by a non-Christian? I suppose the question *is* interesting theoretically (it is related to the question *I* asked, after all :-)) My own, personal, opinion may be more "liberal" than the official doctrine of my church (which I am trying to trace down; the BCP formulation is likely to cover over that which is doctrinally more complex than the public statement.) In practice, I don't think there is all that much to be concerned about. My suspicion is that 99+% of Roman Catholic baptisms *are* performed by priests, and that of the cases where an _in extremis_ baptism was done by a non-Christian, the majority are in situations of martyrdom, where there is no continuing chain from the "irregularly" baptized. (And I will in *no* way contest the inclusion of such martyrs in the Christian community. Indeed, I suspect that the Catholic doctrine was developed *precisely* to deal with the situation of such martyrdoms.) In any case, my *personal* prejudice is to accept as Christian *anyone* who has taken the name to himself -- and I will tend to *assume* some form of baptism. If there has been none, then of course I will "require" it in the form I find most appropriate. But I am in no position to be picky here -- I was baptized by Methodists, after all :-) In short, no I do *not* "require" a chain of baptisms, though I *expect* it -- the point here is that people *will* have been baptized in almost all real cases by Christians, and that this *is* a link back to the start of our faith, and indeed back to the baptism of our Lord. I don't "base" anything on this link, but it is there nonetheless -- and as Charley said this linkage to Christ goes, for most of us in the non-Orthodox churches, *through* the Roman church. I was interested to observe the posting by one of our Orthodox readers, that baptism in their doctrine, required a Christian (and more particularly, a Christian accepted as being in the communion of the "true" Church) as minister. The Anglican position isn't *quite* so strict :-), but I am inclined to wonder *when* Rome adopted its more lenient rules? The difference in doctrine between Rome and Canterbury here surprises me. I am inclined to suspect that this is one of those aspects of Roman theo- logy that developed *after* the division of our communions. -- Michael L. Siemon Inflict Thy promises with each m.siemon@ATT.COM Occasion of distress, ...!att!sfsup!mls That from our incoherence we standard disclaimer May learn to put our trust in Thee