Exactly -- although they were called anabaptists, that is, rebaptizers, by their critics, they themselves did not regard themselves as doing any such thing. Rather they did not consider infant baptism to be a valid baptism, because they did not consider it possible for one person to make a profession of faith on behalf of another.
To give an example from my own faith background, the Independent Churches of Christ and Christian Churches (a loose brotherhood of freestanding congregations belonging to the tradition of the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement) do not regard infant baptisms as valid baptism on the grounds that they did not involve a personal profession of faith on the part of the believer, and do not regard adult baptisms performed by means of sprinkling or pouring as valid because they are not done by the proper method described in the New Testament (and have several Bible verses ready to cite as proof that only full immersion was practiced in the first century Church). Only the baptism of a person mentally mature enough to make a personal profession of faith, and done by full immersion, is regarded as a valid baptism in that tradition.
Even in the Catholic Church, there are provisions for a conditional baptism in cases where there is genuine reason to doubt whether baptism was performed validly, particularly emergency baptisms. And there was a fairly notorious case recently in Australia where a number of baptisms were done manifestly invalidly (if I remember correctly, because they were using a politically-correct non-standard formula instead of the traditional "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit") and everybody involved was going to have to be contacted to have a proper baptism done. There was some concern about what would happen to someone who wasn't notified and went through life believing they were validly baptized and receiving in good faith the other sacraments -- and given the number of people who apparently were involved, including infants, the chance of someone slipping through the cracks was a very real possibility.
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Re: Re-Baptism
Date: 2009-12-19 10:04 pm (UTC)To give an example from my own faith background, the Independent Churches of Christ and Christian Churches (a loose brotherhood of freestanding congregations belonging to the tradition of the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement) do not regard infant baptisms as valid baptism on the grounds that they did not involve a personal profession of faith on the part of the believer, and do not regard adult baptisms performed by means of sprinkling or pouring as valid because they are not done by the proper method described in the New Testament (and have several Bible verses ready to cite as proof that only full immersion was practiced in the first century Church). Only the baptism of a person mentally mature enough to make a personal profession of faith, and done by full immersion, is regarded as a valid baptism in that tradition.
Even in the Catholic Church, there are provisions for a conditional baptism in cases where there is genuine reason to doubt whether baptism was performed validly, particularly emergency baptisms. And there was a fairly notorious case recently in Australia where a number of baptisms were done manifestly invalidly (if I remember correctly, because they were using a politically-correct non-standard formula instead of the traditional "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit") and everybody involved was going to have to be contacted to have a proper baptism done. There was some concern about what would happen to someone who wasn't notified and went through life believing they were validly baptized and receiving in good faith the other sacraments -- and given the number of people who apparently were involved, including infants, the chance of someone slipping through the cracks was a very real possibility.