In this clip, Cy Kellett welcomes Karlo Broussard to discuss the legitimacy of the Catholic Church in light of apostasy claims from the LDS perspective. Karlo clarifies the role of St. Peter and emphasizes that it is ultimately Jesus Christ who builds and leads His Church.
Transcript:
Cy Kellett: MacKenzie, welcome. Why aren’t you Catholic?
Caller: Well, as you probably know, I am lds, but. Oh, yeah, mackenzie, we’ve spoken before into the papacy.
Caller: Okay.
Caller: What we believe about the apostasy and everything, there is one source within the Catholic Church in the thing of infant baptism. From your Tertullian. You know who he is, right? He said something. There is a quote that he said about the infant baptism thing. Let them therefore come when they are grown up, when they can understand, when they are taught whether they are to come. Let them become Christians when they can know Christ.
Karlo Broussard: Are you saying that Tertullian is right in that statement or wrong in that statement? And what are the implications of whether he’s right or wrong?
Caller: Are you saying that Tertullian actually makes sense in that statement?
Karlo Broussard: Oh, okay, so you’re appealing to him as an authority to justify the belief that we should not engage in infant baptism. Okay, so with regard to Tertullian in that particular text, I would have to go and read the text and look at the surrounding context in order to provide an appropriate interpretation. But let’s just for argument’s sake, say that’s what he’s saying. He’s denying infant baptism, promoting what we might call cradle baptism or believers baptism. I would just simply respond and say, well, he’s wrong in that sense, and it’s okay for even us as Catholics to acknowledge that individual church fathers are wrong on some issues, just as our Protestant friends and other Christians will recognize as well. An individual church father is not protected from error. But we all agree on that. We would make a case for infant baptism. We would appeal to John 3:3 5, where Jesus speaks of being born again of water and spirit. If that is a reference to sacramental baptism, which I argue for again in my book, Baptism Now Saves you, then it’s going to follow that Jesus intends for everyone to be baptized, both young and old. Because when Jesus speaks of the new birth by water and spirit, he doesn’t restrict it to adults or those he can believe. He says, unless one. The implication being unless anyone, anybody within the category of human being is born again of water and spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. So John 3:3:5 would be a text we would appeal to not only for baptism in general, but also for infant baptism. We would also appeal, McKenzie, to the prior theological understanding of original sin. I have an article on this on Romans, chapter 5, verse 12@catholic. Where I argue that Paul is talking about original sin there. And if all human beings have what we understand to be original sin, the deprivation of sanctifying grace upon coming into existence. And we know that baptism gives that sanctifying grace, then it would follow that we would baptize our children to give them the gift that they do not have in their first birth, that is sanctifying grace, the supernatural birth, to make them sons and daughters of God the Father. And then finally, the last line of argumentation we would employ, we would have to go further, but just by way of summary would be Colossians, chapter two, where St. Paul teaches us that the circumcision of Christ is indeed baptism. And if circumcision was administered to the young and to infants in the Old Covenant, how much more in the New?
Caller: It’s Ask Me Anything with Jimmy Akin or on Catholic Answers live. Welcome back, MacKenzie.
Caller: Hello, Mr. Akin. I know that you are a rather intelligent man, but I have a question that regarding the whole infant baptism thing, from an LDS point of view, I believe the church says that it respects the dignity of every human life, both unborn and born. But I believe that there is a point of contradiction with the whole infant baptism thing from. From two points. Specifically, that no one having faith in the word of God can look upon the child as culpably wicked. For such an innocent being needs no initiation into the fold, for he has never strayed straight from the. From the fold. He needs no remission of sins, for he has committed no sin. And should he die before he has become contaminated by the sins of earth, he will be received without baptism into the paradise of God. And both from a historical point of view, that there is no record of infant baptism being practiced during the first two centuries after Christ. I mean.
Caller: Yeah, that’s mysterious.
Caller: In the fifth century A.D. oh, dude.
Caller: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Caller: Well, go ahead, you finish.
Caller: I mean, it didn’t. From going for. Through that theology until after, you know, it didn’t start up again en masse until after the Protestant Reformation. I mean, with the whole Anabaptist and everything.
Jimmy Akin: Hang on, what are you saying? Didn’t start until en masse, until after the Reformation.
Caller: I want to understand your claim in general.
Caller: Okay, go ahead.
Caller: Baptism in general.
Jimmy Akin: Okay. You’ve laid a number of issues on the table. Why don’t you let me respond to them and then we’ll see where we go from there. Okay.
Caller: Okay.
Jimmy Akin: Okay. Because it sounded like you were about to anticipate an argument I might use, but let’s see what arguments I actually do use. So I guess let’s work our way backwards. You said that Infant baptism did not start in Mass until after the Protestant Reformation. That is historically inaccurate. Infant baptism was practiced all the way through the Middle Ages. It was the dominant Christian practice. Even in the Protestant Reformation. It was only, I mean, you know, Lutherans practice it, Anglicans practice it, Methodists practice it, Presbyterians practice it. It’s only in Baptist groups and those that have been influenced by Baptist groups that you don’t get infant baptism. So even after the Reformation, infant baptism was the norm in Protestant circles. Prior to the Reformation, infant baptism was universal in the Middle Ages in Catholicism and in Eastern Orthodoxy and in Oriental Orthodoxy. If there was any variation from the norm of infant baptism, it had to fall in the early church before Christian practice was solidified in these different areas. And, and there were some people in the early church who delayed baptism not just until they were adults, but until they were getting ready to die and they would be baptized, some of them shortly before death. At the same time, there were other people who were baptized as infants. And this is before you mentioned the 5th century. So that’s the AD4 hundreds. It’s clear this happened before then because, for example, we have the records of a council that was held at the North African city of Carthage in AD 252. So this is, you know, a century and a half before the fifth century. And one of the attendees at this was St. Cyprian of Carthage. You know, he’s the local bishop. This is a council of Carthage, so of course the local bishop’s going to be there. And one of the questions they debated at this council was whether or not you should wait to baptize a child until the eighth day after the child was born. And you might say, well, why the 8th day? Why not the 7th day or the 12th or the 40th or something like that? And the obvious reason is because in the Jewish economy, boys were circumcised on the eighth day. So the child is born, you wait eight days, you circumcise the child. And so there were some Christians entertaining the proposition that, okay, that’s what you do with baptism. A child is born, you wait eight days, and then you baptize the child. And so this got put to a group vote at the Council of Carthage in 252. And the majority opinion there, the position that the bishops voted on, was do not wait till the 8th day. Do it as soon as possible. Because infant mortality was so high in the ancient world and so claims that. So that backs us up to the AD2 hundreds. We actually know of earlier Cases. For example, there is a prominent 2nd century church father named Polycarp of Smyrna. And in the mid second century, about 8156, he was martyred. And he said, why should I deny Christ? Because they gave him an opportunity to deny Christ. He said, I’ve been serving him for more than 80 years. So if he’s been serving him for more than 80 years, and the understanding in this period was that that means you’re a baptized Christian, that would mean that infant baptism was actually being said. This is 156. You back up 80 years from that. You’re in the first century. So we have significant evidence there that this practice began in the first century, even if it wasn’t immediately followed everywhere.
Cy Kellett: When we went to the break, we were talking with McKenzie, who was not able to stay on the line. McKenzie and Pasco, Washington. But I was asking about infant baptism and there was more you wanted to get to, so I’m going to just turn it over to you.
Jimmy Akin: So we talked about the historical development of the practice of infant baptism, and then we moved on to what does. To the more theological part of his question, which was what does original sin mean? Because he has the correct understanding that in the Catholic view, baptism will cure original sin if it hasn’t already been cured by God’s grace. And I pointed out that original sin, despite the name, does not in Catholic circles refer to a personal sin. You have not done anything if you’re an infant that would. That, you know, would offend God, and consequently you would not be sent to hell on account of original sin. And in fact, the Catholic Church understands that God can provide grace to people apart from the sacraments. So the Catechism of the Catholic Church, for example, says that we may confidently hope that God can provide salvation to children who die without baptism. And some subsequent documents have even gone a little further than that. So I would say that it seemed like McKenzie’s question was being motivated by a clash between the Catechism or the Catholic Church saying it respects the dignity of all life. And yet there are these kids who die without baptism and would go to hell on that account. And that is not Catholic teaching. So that’s the answer to the theological core of the question. The Catholic Church would also say that besides that, besides just the issue of do you get to heaven or not, God does give his grace through baptism. And there are other benefits besides salvation, like becoming part of his Son’s church, becoming part of the Body of christ. I wish McKenzie had stuck around Because I wanted to see what he would say in response to, at least based on the way the question was initially posed to us in the call screening, I wanted to see what he would say if I posed a counter question. Now, he said, from an LDS perspective, how things look from the Mormon perspective. Let’s look at the same situation in a Mormon context. Would he say that the Mormon Church says it respects the dignity of all life, born and unborn? I suspect he would agree with that and say, yeah, the Mormon Church does. The LDS Church does respect the dignity of all life, born or unborn, in human life. Okay, so if we take salvation off the table because we don’t have a substantive difference here, does the Mormon Church agree that besides merely not going to hell or outer darkness in Mormon terminology, are there other benefits to being baptized that one receives, when one receives Mormon baptism? And I’m pretty sure he would say the answer is yes. Because in addition to getting forgiveness of sins, it’s also believed that you need to be baptized in order to, to receive full spiritual development in the afterlife. You know, like becoming a God and so forth. On the Mormon view, you need to have baptism for that. And they’re so persuaded of this that even for people who have died in a state of grace where they’re not going to go to outer darkness, they try to do posthumous baptisms after death baptisms for these people via a proxy. You have someone else who’s a proxy, that person comes into a Mormon temple, they baptize them on your behalf. If you say died as an infant without baptism, now, it would seem your salvation is not in question from a Mormon perspective. You know, you haven’t gone to outer darkness, but they would seem to acknowledge that you can still need, even if you died as an infant, you would still need to get baptized for reasons other than salvation. And that’s why they do proxy baptism for you after your death. So I would say, is there a contradiction here on the part of the Mormon Church, the LDS Church, between saying that it respects all life, all human life, born and unborn, and the idea that infants who are in danger of death or dying or have died still need baptism for benefits other than salvation? Because we both have our own version of what those benefits are. But I suspect he would say, well, in the case of the LDS Church, I don’t think it does have a contradiction. And if there’s no contradiction for the LDS Church saying it respects all life and there are reasons other than salvation that you would want someone baptized, like if they died as a child without it, then the same thing would be true for the Catholic Church. It can still respect all human life, born and unborn, and say that people need to be baptized, as you know, in order to receive other benefits besides salvation itself. The difference is the Catholic Church does not practice after death, baptism by proxy. So you want to therefore baptize infants on the Catholic view.
Cy Kellett: Mackenzie, again, we will say thank you for that call and the question. I’m gonna. Let’s take a quick break, Darren, and then we’ll come right back. That’ll be perfect. We’ll get set and we’ve got only one line open right now.