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Ignorance concerning the biblical truth about Holy Baptism needs to be dispelled from the pulpit as well as the catechetical schoolhouse.
Coming under the tutelage of learned Archbishop Ecgbert of York, the Northumbrian-born Alcuin (735-804) became the foremost scholar of his day. His ability with language (he developed lower case letters for Latin), music, poetry, theology, Bible commentary, and liturgy afforded him a seat in Charlemagne’s Court as a veritable secretary of education and culture. Thanks to the vision and labors of Alcuin (of course, at the behest of Charles the Great), the Western Church for the first time had a unified liturgical rite: The Roman Rite. Our Lutheran Mass today is a direct descendant of Alcuin’s conservative approach to liturgy, and our Altar Book mirrors the missal which he compiled. In both the Roman Rite and the missal, Scripture was the guiding light.
Holy Baptism was one such rite that Alcuin closely scrutinized by the Word of God and, so, curated the rite inherited from the Apostles. These liturgical gifts standardized the Church’s worship and greatly advanced European culture by inspiring art, architecture, iconography, and centers of learning from Reichenau to Corvey. All these cultural adornments witnessed to the theology proclaimed from the ambo concerning the application of the saving benefits of Christ’s unblemished sacrificial life and death, but also His glorious resurrection in Baptism. Alcuin not only influenced the codification of sacred baptismal theology in early Medieval sacramentaries but the preaching of baptismal theology as well, continuing the ancient tradition of catechetical preaching traceable to the earliest Christians.
Charlemagne did not inherit a unified Europe, much less a Christian one. Still, he was in a unique position: How was he to secure his empire while promoting the Christian faith among, particularly, the pagan Saxons with whom he warred for over thirty years (772-804)? Positively, he sought to bring universality to the continent by the dynamism of the Gospel. Negatively, he engaged in highly successful conquests of warfare, followed by the imposition of Carolingian law. This itself created a problem. Once conquered, Charlemagne required by law submission to Holy Baptism by Saxon leaders and their people. While results were mixed, the policy itself was completely contrary to Scripture and, so, Charlemagne’s capital punishments associated therewith. Baptism should not be imposed on a conquered people. The Church must contribute to the humanization of the State, not be a weapon of it.
Evangelism was done peacefully, sometimes coming at the expense of martyrdom. It certainly did not come by way of “the conditions of surrender.”The Northumberland Deacon, Alcuin, appealed to Emperor Charlemagne’s Christian complexion when it came to forcing conquered lands to have their peoples baptized and forcibly convert. He maintained this was not the way of Christ and the Apostles, neither was it the way of the Christian Church that preceded Charlemagne. Evangelism was done peacefully, sometimes coming at the expense of martyrdom. It certainly did not come by way of “the conditions of surrender.” Alcuin pointed to Scripture. While the children of a believing parent received baptism according to the promise Saint Peter declared on Pentecost (Acts 2:39), and upon which Saint Paul elaborated in greater detail in 1 Corinthians 7:14, volitional affirmation was required for adults who were granted Holy Baptism: “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 7:9).
There was no ambiguity. Christ Jesus, to whom Charlemagne bowed the knee, stated it plainly: “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned” (Mark 16:16). Put differently, what warranted baptism for the adult convert was the post facto expression of faith given in the preaching of the Word. The preached Word was so important to Alcuin that he wrote and compiled a homiliary (a book of sermons for use by priests) and the lectionary texts for those homilies, that is, he also standardized the lectionary cycle! Luther had no less an emphasis on the preached and performed Word of God, arguing that the sacrament of Holy Baptism was not an ex opere operato affair for adults, the way it was for infants born within a household of faith.
The link between Alcuin and Luther was, predictably, Saint Augustine. Alcuin appealed to Augustine and his monumental work, The City of God, saying: “Faith, as Saint Augustine says, is a matter of the will, not necessity. A man can be attracted to the faith, not forced. He can be forced to be baptized, but that is useless for faith except infancy. A grown man should answer for himself about his beliefs and desires. If he professes faith falsely, he will not have true salvation.” This quote assumes a working knowledge of salvation by divine grace alone on account of Christ alone. Note how Alcuin credits divine monergism for the movement of the will in the first instance, drawing it to the gospel. Christ is “the faith” to which the will is moved. Man cannot “force” it, even if he is a Christian Emperor. Imposing baptism upon an unwilling adult is a sure sign that the preached and liturgized Word had no effect, yet (if, indeed, such a person was exposed to gospel preaching). Consequently, a coerced baptism devoid of faith will not yield “true salvation.” It might only offer a reprieve from punitive policies. Infants of believers, however, receive Holy Baptism as a faith-imparting inheritance, according to the extraordinary love and grace of the Triune God. “The promise is for you and for your children.”
Alcuin, no less than Augustine or Luther (himself an Augustinian friar), expresses a pastoral concern for those being Christianized by Christendom but not evangelized by the evangel. Christ, not Charlemagne, lords over the Kingdom of His one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church; even in a so-called “Christian State.” All this reflected Augustine who distinguished worldly kingdoms (be they never so “Christian”) from the Kingdom of God, such that regenerates and transforms the hearts of men. Preachers today should keep the same in mind. There can be no presumption that the average American understands anything about Holy Baptism. Not only have we lost the vocabulary of the baptized but also the very categories to which they referred; sin and salvation, justification and regeneration, sanctification and transformation, revivification and christification. None of these terms or categories are common parlance anymore. Hence, the need to preach, from the ground up, the meaning and purpose of Baptism, who does it, what it accomplishes, and on what trajectory it launches the baptized.Infants of believers, however, receive Holy Baptism as a faith-imparting inheritance, according to the extraordinary love and grace of the Triune God.
Sometimes the question is posed to Lutheran pastors, quasi dictum: “If baptism saves and God regenerates the spirit of those who undergo baptism, then why not just firehose crowds of people ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’?” The answer is that faith is necessary and, for adults, “Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of Christ” (Romans 10:17). The Scriptures, testified to by the Christian Church from Paul to Augustine to Alcuin to Luther, articulate two domains of salvation: Covenant inheritance for the children of the already baptized and, secondly, the evangelization of adults in the hearing of the Word and the public objectifying by God of their reception of faith through the Rite of Holy Baptism that such persons are clean, forgiven, renewed, united to Christ and His Church, and set on the trajectory of transformation into the glorious likeness of Christ. That trajectory takes them into a lifetime of immersion in the Word of God, Confession and Absolution, and Eucharistic fellowship. Saint Alcuin did not say it first. He may not even have said it better than Luther. But every preacher should be mindful that our times are very similar to those of Alcuin addressing a pagan culture and Luther addressing an indifferent or presumptuous one. Either way, ignorance concerning the biblical truth about Holy Baptism needs to be dispelled from the pulpit as well as the catechetical schoolhouse.
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