“Your church’s practice is anti-catholic!”
A friend or two has made this charge against Baptist churches like mine for requiring people to be baptized as believers before joining. Like most churches of every denomination, we require baptism before admission to membership. The challenge is, paedobaptists of every kind define their sprinkling as infants as a “baptism,” whereas we do not. Therefore, we say to anyone sprinkled as an infant, “You must be baptized to join.” And that feels anti-catholic to some.
What does it mean to charge a church with anti-catholicity? It means that, while a church may confess in the words of the Nicaean creed that it believes in the catholic or universal church, the church’s actual practice of barring some Christians from membership undermines that profession. That’s what these friends say my church is doing. Insofar as the doctrines of catholicity and unity stand in obverse relation to one another—catholicity says the one are many; unity that the many are one—to charge a church with anti-catholicity is to charge it in the same breath with being divisive or anti-oneness.
To put the shoe on the other
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