What you would see if you came to a baptism
A baptism at our parish usually happens on a Saturday, with the church half empty and the afternoon light coming in sideways. Near the middle of the nave stands a large font of warm water. On a small table lie oil, scissors, a white garment and a cross on a cord. The priest wears white. If the one being baptised is an infant, an aunt is standing by with a towel and the whole family is quietly anxious about the water temperature.
The service falls into two halves. In the first, the candidate is prayed over, breathed upon, and asked to renounce the devil; then the water and the oil are blessed and the candidate is anointed. In the second half comes the immersion itself, three times, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Immediately afterwards the newly baptised person is chrismated, clothed in white, given a cross, and a few hairs are cut in token of offering. At the next Liturgy, often the same weekend, he receives communion.
Buried with him by baptism
Saint Paul does not describe baptism as a badge. Writing to the Romans he asks: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:3-4, RSV). The grammar is the grammar of a funeral, and then of a resurrection.
Orthodox practice takes that language at face value. The font is deep enough to go under. Three immersions answer the three days in the tomb, and the ancient canons treat the number as serious business: Apostolic Canon 50 directs that a bishop or presbyter who does not perform three immersions be deposed. The words spoken over each immersion are the words of Christ's own commission in Matthew 28:19, naming the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
What is being claimed here is not that the candidate has demonstrated something, but that God has done something. The Nicene Creed, said in every Orthodox church every Sunday, includes the line: I confess one baptism for the remission of sins. Not commemorate. Confess. The Church has never taught that the water merely displays a work completed privately beforehand; she teaches that in the water a person is joined to the death and rising of Christ, and comes up out of it belonging to him.
Facing west, then turning east
Before anyone goes near the water there is a confrontation. The candidate, or the godparent holding the child, is turned to face west, towards the back of the church and the darkness, and is asked three times whether he renounces Satan, and all his works, and all his angels, and all his service, and all his pride. The answer is given three times: I do renounce him. Then the candidate is told to breathe and spit upon him, which visitors always find startling, and which is meant to be.
Only after that does the priest turn the candidate round to the east, where the questions change: Dost thou unite thyself to Christ? I do unite myself to Christ. Asked whether he has united himself, the candidate answers that he has, and worships him as King and God, and then recites the Creed aloud. East is chosen deliberately. Paradise was planted in the east (Genesis 2:8), and the Lord's return is likened to lightning that comes from the east (Matthew 24:27). Orthodox churches are built facing that way, so the whole congregation prays in the direction the new Christian has just turned.
The case for waiting, stated properly
A great many Christians, including people we know and love in Singapore, baptise only those old enough to ask for it. Their conviction deserves to be stated at full strength rather than brushed past. Faith, they say, is personal and cannot be borrowed; nobody is a Christian on his parents' account. The pattern in Acts is that the word is preached, people believe, and then they are baptised (Acts 2:41; Acts 8:12). A promise made by an adult over a sleeping infant is not that infant's promise, and the day may come when he never makes one himself.
Behind this lies a fear with real evidence behind it: whole countries full of people baptised in infancy who were never taught anything, never returned, and now call themselves Christian the way one might name a birthplace. Believer's baptism is a high view of baptism, not a low one. It has cost people their families. An Orthodox writer who treats it as carelessness has not been listening, and Fr. Seraphim Rose, whose own mother was a Protestant, was blunt about where some of the blame for such misunderstandings lies.
perhaps it is our fault for not living and teaching the Orthodox Faith in a way they can understand
Fr. Seraphim Rose, letter of 27 November 1980, quoted in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, ch. 84 (St. Herman Press, 2003)
Why the Orthodox Church baptises infants anyway
The Orthodox answer begins somewhere other than argument. A child belongs to the Church before he is able to argue about it, in the same way that he belongs to his family, his language and his mother's table before he can defend any of them. Nobody waits for a two-year-old to consent to being fed. The Church has never thought that faith is the single good which must be withheld from a child until he can hold his own in a debate about it.
Scripture is then read in that light. Peter tells the crowd at Pentecost that the promise is to you and to your children (Acts 2:39). Luke reports whole households baptised at once, Lydia's and the Philippian jailer's, and Paul recalls baptising the household of Stephanas (Acts 16:15; Acts 16:33; 1 Corinthians 1:16). Colossians 2:11-12 sets baptism alongside circumcision, which was given on the eighth day to infants who could not consent and did not understand. And there is the plain sentence of the Lord: “Let the children come to me, do not hinder them” (Mark 10:14, RSV).
Early evidence points the same way, though its weight is argued over honestly. Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, writing around 180, speaks of Christ saving all who are born again to God through him, “infants, and children, and boys, and youths, and old men” (Against Heresies II.22.4); readers disagree about how much that sentence proves. Firmer is Saint Cyprian's Letter 64, which records an African council of about the year 253 deciding that baptism ought not to be delayed until the eighth day after birth. By then the question was no longer whether infants were baptised, but how soon.
None of this makes baptism a substitute for faith, and Orthodoxy does not pretend otherwise. A baptised child who is taught nothing has been given a beginning and then abandoned in it. What the Church offers instead is a long apprenticeship: communion from infancy, confession from about the age of seven, the Creed learned by heart, and eventually the day when the young Christian says in his own voice what his godparents once said for him. Grace goes ahead of understanding here, as it does everywhere else in a human life.
What the godparents actually undertake
At an infant baptism the godparent is not decoration. It is the godparent who faces west and renounces the devil on the child's behalf, who turns east, and who recites the Creed aloud in the child's place. That is, in the first instance, a profession of the godparent's own faith, made in public, and an undertaking to teach the child the faith just professed. The Church asks, therefore, that at least one godparent be a practising Orthodox Christian who goes to confession and communion.
In practice the undertaking runs to a short and unglamorous list, which we ask godparents to read before they agree to it. None of it is heroic. All of it is the sort of thing that happens only because one adult decided years earlier that it would, and then went on deciding it on ordinary Saturdays when there were easier things to do.
- Pray for the godchild by name, daily, for as long as you both live.
- Bring the child to communion, particularly when the parents cannot.
- Teach the Lord's Prayer and the Creed, and see that the child knows the story of his patron saint.
- Give the first icon and the first prayer book, and keep giving books as the child grows.
- Be a second adult the child can talk to, especially in the years when parents are hard to talk to.
- Stand by the family in trouble, which is the part nobody mentions at the font.
If you were already baptised somewhere else
Converts are received in one of three ways: by baptism, by chrismation after a confession of the Orthodox faith, or, more rarely, by a confession of faith alone. The choice is not made by the convert, and not really by the parish priest either. It belongs to the bishop, who weighs what was done originally, in what words, with what intention, and what the person is coming from.
In most Russian Orthodox practice, including that of our own Exarchate, a person baptised with water in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit is not baptised again. Such a convert is prepared as a catechumen, makes a confession of sins, is anointed with the holy myrrh in chrismation, and comes to the chalice. Where the original baptism was not in water, or not in the name of the Trinity, or cannot be established at all, the person is baptised.
Here honesty matters more than tidiness. Practice varies between the local Orthodox Churches, and sometimes between bishops within one of them. Some parishes and monastic communities baptise every convert as a matter of principle, appealing to the strict standard the canons set out. Others receive by chrismation, appealing to the Church's long freedom to act by economy towards those who are coming to her.
So a convert chrismated in one city may one day meet Orthodox Christians who would have done it differently. That difference is real, it is old, and it is argued about among Orthodox themselves rather than settled by a parish website. It is not a verdict on anyone's past or on anyone's sincerity. The practical counsel is simple: raise the question with the priest at the beginning rather than the end, and let the bishop decide it.
Whatever form the reception takes, the point of it is not paperwork, and not a change of club membership. Fr. Seraphim Rose wrote to a catechumen preparing for baptism in May 1979, and the sentence he put at the centre of that letter is worth carrying from the first enquiry to the day the chrism is wiped away.
You are coming to Orthodoxy to receive Christ, and this you should never forget.
Fr. Seraphim Rose, letter of 3 May 1979, quoted in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, ch. 84 (St. Herman Press, 2003)
A door left open
Nothing in this article asks anyone to despise the water that was poured over him as a child, or to think badly of the parents who arranged it, or of the pastor who prayed. Orthodoxy has its own account of what baptism is and does, and has held it consistently for a very long time; saying so plainly is not an accusation against anyone else. Fr. Seraphim Rose, who grew up among Protestants and stayed on good terms with his family after he became a monk, put the attitude he wanted from Orthodox Christians in one sentence.
If any of this interests you, the simplest next step is not a book. Come to a Liturgy at Kovan, stand at the back for as long as you like, stay for tea afterwards, and ask the questions you actually have rather than the ones you think you are supposed to have. Nobody here will hurry you towards the font, and nobody will think less of you for taking years over it.
We should view the non-Orthodox as people to whom Orthodoxy has not yet been revealed, as people who are potentially Orthodox
Fr. Seraphim Rose, letter of 27 November 1980, quoted in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, ch. 84 (St. Herman Press, 2003)