For centuries, the practice among Lutherans has been to ask the sponsors on behalf of the infant to be baptized to confess the faith and renounce the devil for him. Once ordained in 1983, I used the liturgy as then TLH had it and later Lutheran Worship. The Lutheran Service Book has it likewise, but like all their other tweaks, they made it longer. I used this order a few times in the Bible Belt surrounded by active and maybe even activist, Baptist. I could not answer how my asking infants if they renounced the devil and believed in the Triune God any different from their believer’s Baptism. I couldn’t explain how that practice meshed with the Lutheran acceptance of Baptismal Regeneration. I still can’t. So for 35 or better years I have left those questions to the sponsors out of the rite.
First a little history. The famous Lutheran scholar and catechist, M. Reu, says in his 1918 Catechetics. “A grievous error was committed when the complete ritual of adult baptism was employed in the baptism of infants. Without abridgment the whole series of liturgical ceremonies was performed upon children, the responses, especially the renunciation and the confession, being made by the sponsors. …[A]lthough Augustine already said that these baptismal questions could be understood in their proper sense, but only in a ‘future’ sense inasmuch as the children did not believe as yet, but were merely called to faith through the Sacrament” (Reu, Catechetics, 54).
Luther seems muddy on this score when a German Lutheran scholar quotes him in a 1525 work: “‘Thus we say at this point as well, that the children are not baptized into the faith of the sponsors or the Church, but the sponsors and the Christian Church offer faith and acquire for them their own faith, into which they are baptized and by which they themselves believe’” (Peters, Albrecht. Baptism & Lord’s Supper, 125). Luther himself never changed this rite, but someone in his era did. In yet another catechistical work by Peters, he tells of one 1525 order that “differentiates specifically between the sponsors and the child. They ‘no longer stand in on behalf of the child, but they are merely representatives of the Christian congregation, who step in with the petitions and the promise of caring for the Christian instruction that is to follow. …Luther’s ‘naïve’ viewpoint[i], that the child renounces Satan here ‘through the sponsors,’ and gives witness to the faith, which is given to him through the baptismal act, is no longer treated as part of the act” (Peters, Confes. & Abs, 227).
Let’s wrap this all up with a definitive reference by one of Luther’s biographers, Martin Brecht: “Luther thought that the premise that a person consciously had to experience his own baptism, because no one could trust anyone else, was indefensible….Faith could not be made into a prerequisite for baptism, for one could not be sure of faith, either in oneself or in someone else”(Luther, Brecht, II, 336-7).
In 35 years of my amended practice, no layman has asked me, “Why do I leave those questions out?” Or, “Would you use the questions?” Only one layman has ever expressed doubts about the questions. What I can’t get over is that of the 4 Lutheran hymnals that have come out since TLH only the Wisconsin Synod’s does not have those questions.
You know the adage that those who can’t play coach? Well it’s those who don’t actually do liturgy are the ones that take the lead in updating it or not. Likewise, those who never have had to defend Confessional Lutheranism in the world seldom notice when there is a disparity between practice and doctrine.
[i] In 1521, as opposed to the earlier quote from four years earlier, in his “Defense and Explanation of all the Articles of Dr. Martin Luther”, Luther is clear. “And we can see every day that wherever in the whole world baptism is administered, the question is put to the child, or the sponsors in his stead, whether he believes, and on the basis of this faith and confession, the sacrament of baptism is administered” (LW, 32, 14).
