You are invited to attend our next monthly meeting to be held on Friday, September 12th from 4:00pm to 5:30pm.
We will be discussing “Baptism is First: Infant Baptism and the Sacramental Inversion” by Jonathan Martin Ciraulo from the Spring 2025 issue entitled “Baptism” (Volume 52.1). The article can be downloaded from here.
Here are excerpt from the Introduction to the issue:
In “Baptism is First: Infant Baptism and the Sacramental Inversion,” Jonathan Martin Ciraulo addresses the long disputed question of infant baptism. The question has both practical and theoretical implications for theology. It shapes how we understand the workings of grace and whether personal, conscious consent is necessary for grace to be efficacious. Ciraculo walks the reader through a history of the controversy, and then focuses on the question of infant baptism in the theology of Balthasar. For much of his life, Balthasar had acknowledged the validity of infant baptism, but expressed concerns with viewing it as normative. Towards the end of his life, however, Balthasar seemingly reverses his teaching, writing in Unless You Become Like This Child that it would be unjust to a child raised in the faith to be denied the grace of baptism. Ciraulo understands this later position as more consistent with Balthasar’s theology taken as a whole. He demonstrates this first by exploring the treatment of water in Sacred Scripture, which understands this ubiquitous element as something that is both present within creation, while also mysteriously preceding it and being indiciative of its eschatological perfection. In such a way, Ciraulo develops a theology of creation and of the sacraments (with which Balthasar would be in agreement) in which the sacraments are seen as the very reason for which the cosmos was created. This “sacramental inverson” turns our instinctive perspective on is head: rather than being an addition within time to creation, the sacraments are rather the perfection of creation intended by God from all eternity. Given this perspective, baptism’s justification is not that a person “chooses” to relate to God, but that baptism constitutes the perfection of the order into which a person is necessarily created.
We will meet in the Kateri Room located at St. Michael’s Church, 240 Hemlock Street, Waterloo, Ontario. Use the east side parking lot and enter by the rear doors. Walk up the stairs. The Kateri Room is on your right before you enter the church proper.
This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.