What this is about
Most arguments about baptism and communion are arguments about verses. This page asks something you can weigh without knowing any Greek: how big is the claim?
Three things were believed by Christians everywhere for a very long time:
- Babies are baptized. Written about as an established practice by around the year 200, and settled by a council of sixty-six bishops in 253.
- Baptism is “for the forgiveness of sins” — it gives something, rather than only picturing something. Those words went into the creed the churches still recite, in 381.
- The bread and cup of the Lord’s Supper are Christ’s body and blood — not a picture only. Written down around the year 107, and in every ancient service book in every language.
Many churches today teach the opposite: that baptizing a baby isn’t really baptism, that baptism is an outward sign of a decision already made, and that communion is a memorial in which nothing is given. That may be right. But notice what it means about history. It means that on the two things Jesus actually told his followers to do, every church on earth got it wrong, in the same way, without a single lasting community anywhere doing otherwise, from as early as we have records until the 1520s.
And that runs into some very plain promises:
Upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
Matthew 16:18
Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them … and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.
Matthew 28:19–20. Notice where the promise sits: in the same sentence that commands baptism.
So: did God keep what he promised, or did he leave his church to chance — and chance went badly for fifteen hundred years? There are four possible answers, and it is worth seeing all four before choosing.
Answer one — it was kept
The church Jesus promised to keep is the one you can see in the history books, and it had baptism and the Supper all alongThe church sinned, split and needed reforming more than once. But it never lost the two things Christ gave it. This is the answer the page holds.Answer two — it fell
The church fell away completely soon after the apostles, and was restored in modern timesWhat the history books record is the story of the falling away, so its agreement proves nothing. God restored what was lost through a new work in the 1800s or 1900s.Answer three — it hid
The true church survived in secret, persecuted, outside the official one, in every centuryThere were always believers who baptized only believers. Their enemies called them heretics and burned their books. The promise was kept, but in the wilderness.Answer four — only the gospel
God promised that the gospel and his people would never die out — not that the church would be right about baptismThere were true Christians inside the visible church in every century. That is all the promise guarantees. Baptism and communion are secondary matters. The strongest of the three alternatives.What this page is not doing
It is not arguing the verses about baptism and communion; four earlier dossiers do that (When Were You Born Again?, The Rite That Isn’t There, Unworthy of a Symbol? and One Lord, One Faith, How Many Baptisms?). It does not choose between the Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Anglican and Reformed explanations of how these things work — it uses only what they all agree on, against the view that nothing is given. It names no living person. It says nothing about whether anyone is a Christian, and it is not advice about joining a church, leaving one, or being baptized.
The short answer
- The promise is narrower than people sometimes make it — but it is not nothing. Jesus never promised a church without sin, or that every pastor would teach truly, or that the majority would be right in any given year. He did promise that his church would not be destroyed, that it would be there in every age, and that he would be with it in its baptizing “unto the end of the world”. That is a promise you can compare with the record.
- The evidence for the three teachings starts as early as the evidence for anything. Around 107 a bishop on his way to be executed complains about heretics who “confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Saviour”. Around 155 a Christian describing ordinary Sunday worship to a pagan emperor says the bread and wine are “not common bread and common drink”. In 253 sixty-six bishops answer a question about babies — and the question isn’t whether to baptize them but whether to wait a week.
- The churches that agreed about this had split from each other and were not on speaking terms. This is the heart of the page. The ancient church broke apart three times — in 431, in 451 and in 1054 — over arguments about Christ and about the pope. Those churches cursed each other, listed each other’s errors in detail, and lived in different empires under different rulers. Not one of them ever accused another of getting baptism or communion wrong. A single church can pass on a single mistake. Enemies rarely pass on the same one.
- There was some disagreement, and it never left any descendants. A man in Carthage around 203 wanted baptism delayed — because he thought it was so powerful it shouldn’t be spent early. A Frenchman in the 1000s argued about how Christ is present, took it back, and died in the church. One movement in southern France in the 1100s really did say infant baptism was nothing — and it lasted about thirty years. Meanwhile groups that genuinely disagreed with the church about other things, like the Arians and the Donatists, kept rival churches going for three or four centuries under persecution. Real dissent in those days was loud, written down, and long-lived.
- Both contrary views can be dated to one decade, in one Swiss city. The first believers’ baptism in a community that still exists took place in Zurich on 21 January 1525. The memorial view of the Supper was published there the same year. And the man who published it, Huldrych Zwingli, said plainly what he was doing: “I can only conclude that all the doctors have been in error from the time of the apostles.” He asked to be pardoned for saying it. He did not pretend anyone before him had agreed.
- The Reformers heard both views and said no. Luther and Zwingli argued bitterly about communion at Marburg in 1529 — and both signed an article saying “baptism of infants is right”. The Scottish Reformers wrote that they “utterly damn the vanity of those that affirm sacraments to be nothing else but naked and bare signs”. The Church of England kept infant baptism as “most agreeable with the institution of Christ”.
- The argument of this page is Luther’s, not ours. Nobody was less impressed by tradition than Luther, who told an emperor that popes and councils “have often erred”. And yet in 1528 he wrote: “If the first, or child, baptism were not right, it would follow that for more than a thousand years there was no baptism or any Christendom — which is impossible.” He wasn’t saying the church must be right because it is old. He was saying Christ promised the church wouldn’t perish, so a view that requires it to have perished must be wrong.
- The three alternative answers each cost something. “It fell” is the most honest about the evidence — and it needs a new revelation to fix it, and the modern restorers contradict each other (two of them put back baptism for the forgiveness of sins). “It hid” can be checked group by group, and every group on the list either kept the historic sacraments or wasn’t Christian in any sense — which is why Baptist historians themselves have rejected it since 1896. “Only the gospel” is coherent, and its cost is that it saves the promise by making it fit any history at all.
- This is not an argument that old things are true. The page uses four tests, not one: how early, how widely across the split churches, whether anyone ever disagreed for long, and whether the supposed error would mean the church lacked something Christ gave or merely added something. Run those tests and the pope’s authority and purgatory fail badly — they are exactly what the churches split over. The test that protects infant baptism is the same test that shows those to be local and late.
The first exercise: what did they actually say?
Six people and movements who are often named as early opponents of infant baptism or of the real presence. For each, decide what they actually did. Commit before you read the answer.
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The churches that weren’t speaking to each other
If the argument were only “the medieval Catholic church believed this for a long time”, it would be weak. One institution can carry one mistake for centuries. The actual argument is different, and it is the most important thing on this page.
The ancient church did not stay one institution. It broke three times, and the breaks never healed:
- 431 — the Church of the East. The Christians of the Persian Empire, outside Roman borders, went their own way after a council they did not accept. For a thousand years they were the most widespread church on earth, with bishops from Iraq to India and a mission in the Chinese capital by 635.
- 451 — the Coptic, Syriac, Armenian and Ethiopian churches. They rejected another council’s wording about Christ’s two natures. Christian emperors persecuted them for it; then they spent centuries under Muslim rule.
- 1054 — Greek and Latin. Rome and Constantinople excommunicated each other over the pope’s authority, a phrase in the creed, and a list of smaller grievances that included the kind of bread used at communion.
These churches wrote against each other at length, and enjoyed cataloguing each other’s faults. The Greeks objected to Latin bread, Latin fasting and Latin wording. If any of them had baptized only adults, or treated the Supper as a memorial, the others would have said so loudly. None ever did. Here is the Church of the East, in Persia, around the year 500, in a church out of communion with Rome and Constantinople alike:
He did not style them a type or a similitude, but Body in reality and Blood in verity.
Narsai, head of the school of Nisibis, on the bread and the cup.
And here is the Coptic Church, separated since 451, in words its priests still say before communion at every service:
Amen. Amen. Amen. I believe, I believe, I believe and confess to the last breath that this is the life-giving Flesh that Your only-begotten Son, our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ, took from our Lady …
The Coptic Liturgy of St Basil, the priest’s confession before communion.
Someone will fairly answer: all that proves is that the mistake is older than 431. Quite so — and look where that leads. The Church of the East was beyond the emperor’s reach, and those sixty-six bishops met in 253, sixty years before any emperor was a Christian. Every step backwards takes the supposed mistake closer to the apostles. And it leaves a puzzle. The third-century church quarrelled furiously about the date of Easter and about forgiving Christians who had cracked under torture, and each quarrel left letters, councils and splits. The arrival of infant baptism — on any of the three alternative answers, the biggest change in Christian history — left nothing at all. Nobody protests. The only argument on record is whether to wait until the eighth day.
The second exercise: put a date on it
Eight events. Place each in its period before you are told. The pattern is the point — look at where the first four fall and where the last four do.
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The three other answers, and what each costs
“The church fell away, and was restored”
This is the most honest of the three, because it agrees with everything above. The record really is unanimous, it says — and the record is the record of a church that had already fallen. One body teaches it officially: “After the deaths of the Savior and His Apostles, men corrupted the principles of the gospel and made unauthorized changes in Church organization and priesthood ordinances”, so that God “withdrew the authority of the priesthood from the earth”.
Its cost is threefold. It contradicts “I am with you alway” — which in Greek is “all the days”, not the first and the last. It has almost no time to happen in: the apostle John died around the year 100, his pupil Polycarp was killed around 155, and Polycarp’s pupil Irenaeus is writing about the bread that “is no longer common bread” around 180. And because a genuine loss needs a genuine restoration, it arrives with a restorer — of whom there are several, restoring different things. Two of the modern restorers, in fact, put back baptism for the forgiveness of sins, which is one of the three teachings this page says was never lost.
“The true church was hidden”
This is the most attractive, because it lets a person keep both his view of baptism and the promises of Christ at no apparent cost. It is also checkable, and it does not survive checking. The usual list of hidden ancestors includes the Montanists, Novatians, Donatists, Paulicians, Albigenses and Waldenses. Take them one at a time and ask a simple question: if these people walked into the church that claims them and explained what they believed, would they be allowed to join?
The Novatians were so orthodox that a council in 325 accepted their clergy as clergy. The Donatists baptized babies and had bishops — they split over whether sacraments given by cowardly clergy counted. The Paulicians and Albigenses rejected water baptism because they thought the material world was made by an evil god, and rejected marriage, meat and the Old Testament with it. The Waldensians were condemned for preaching without a licence, not for their sacraments — how far they questioned infant baptism is disputed, no source has them repeating anyone’s baptism, and they joined the Reformation in 1532 and baptize infants today. Not one of them would be admitted. That is not this page’s discovery: Baptist historians have said so since 1896, when the president of a Baptist seminary published the evidence and the outcry cost him his post. His conclusion is now the standard one.
The usual defence is that the winners wrote the history and the losers’ books were burned. But we do have the dissenters’ own writings — a Cathar service book survives, and it describes a baptism by laying on of hands that replaced water — and we have thousands of pages of interrogation records whose whole purpose was to write down exactly what heretics said. Besides, the churches that were hated most of all, the Copts and the Church of the East, kept their books and are still here. An argument that explains the total absence of evidence by the thoroughness of its destruction can prove anything at all.
“Only the gospel was guaranteed”
This is the strongest, and it is what most thoughtful people actually believe. Nobody serious thinks the church vanished, it says. There were true believers in every century, inside the visible church, and they were wrong about baptism as many good Christians are wrong today. What Christ promised is that his people and his gospel would never die out.
Three things can be said back. First, Jesus did not say “I will preserve my believers” — he said “I will build my church”, and a church is a body that meets. Second, and most sharply: the churches that say a baby’s baptism is no baptism usually also say that a true church is a gathered group of baptized believers. Put those together and, for a thousand years, there were no true churches anywhere — only Christians inside bodies that were not churches. That is not “the gates of hell did not prevail”. There is a way out — to say those were true churches with irregular baptism — but then the baptism was a baptism, and the reason for baptizing someone again has gone. Third, ask what this reading of the promise rules out. Not the loss of baptism for thirteen centuries. Not a universal mistake about the Supper. A promise that fits any possible history reassures nobody.
The third exercise: which answer is that?
Six sentences of the kind people actually say. Five are written by this page as illustrations; one is Luther. Decide which of the four answers each assumes. They are used interchangeably in conversation, and they contradict each other.
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The fair objections, and what can be said to them
“This is an argument from consequences. The truth is the truth, however many people got it wrong.”
“Doesn’t this argument prove the pope and purgatory too?”
“But the church tolerated slavery and burned heretics for centuries. Long agreement proves nothing.”
“The Reformers said the church had been wrong for centuries about being saved by faith. Why can’t I say the same about baptism?”
“God’s people have lost things before — the law was lost until Josiah found it.”
Check it yourself
Six things, all short, nearly all free.
- 1. Matthew 16:13–20 and 28:16–20; 1 Corinthians 11:23–26. Ten minutes. Read them for what is promised and to whom — and notice that the promise of Christ’s presence “unto the end of the world” is attached to the command to baptize.
- 2. Cyprian’s letter to Fidus, written in 253 (Letter 64, or 58 in some editions). Do this one. Ten minutes, free online. Sixty-six bishops, under persecution, sixty years before Constantine. Notice what the question is — and what nobody in the letter thinks needs arguing about.
- 3. Luther, Concerning Rebaptism (1528). Forty minutes; long extracts are free online. The argument of this page in its original form, from a man nobody can accuse of deference to tradition.
- 4. Tertullian, On Baptism, chapter 18 (around 203). Five minutes, free. The very first objection to baptizing children. Read it for what he asks for, and notice that the word “again” never appears.
- 5. The Marburg Articles (1529) and the Scots Confession, chapter 21 (1560). Fifteen minutes, free. What the Reformers actually signed about infant baptism and about sacraments being “naked and bare signs”.
- 6. One question, put to whoever taught you. Do this one too. If you were taught that infant baptism isn’t baptism, or that communion is only a symbol, ask — politely, as a real question — where was the church that believed this between the years 200 and 1500? You will get one of the three answers above, and this page has given you enough to check it. If the answer is “I’ve never thought about it”, that is the most useful answer of all, for both of you.
Want the whole thing?
The full dossier gives the evidence for each of the three teachings with its dates and its gaps, quotes the separated churches from their own service books, works through ten medieval dissenters one by one, tests all three alternative answers against their own published sources, applies four tests to eleven doctrines and reports where they cut against Protestants too, weighs the Reformers’ own claim about justification, publishes the prompt that produced it, and ends with a seven-question checklist measuring how large a claim you are making.
Read the full dossier → Simple English →