Ironies Not Noted

Usually atheists are a pretty grim lot, but at times they develop a sense of humor.  At least I think they were being playful when they recently held a ceremony in which prominent atheist Edwin Kagin “de-baptized” a bunch of his colleagues with a hair dryer.  The implement was labeled “Reason and Truth.”  I mean, labeling the emission of a lot of hot air “Reason and Truth” is pretty ironic.

Kagin was dressed in a monk’s robe as he performed the ceremony, which makes me wonder whether he will eventually get into black masses.  The symbolism of the hair dryer involved drying up the water placed on those atheists’ foreheads when they were infants.  Kagin invited people to “come forward now and receive the spirit of hot air that taketh away the stigma and taketh away the remnants of the stain of baptismal water.”

That, of course, was an allusion to the notion held by Roman Catholics and some other groups that infant baptism removes the stain of original sin.  Even Martin Luther claimed that “the infant is locked in the jaws of the devil” until baptized.  In fact, when it was pointed out that this was blatantly inconsistent with his powerful proclamation that salvation is by faith alone, and that an infant cannot have faith, he retorted with “How do you know the infant can’t have faith?”

These atheists’ complaint involves their having had no choice about whether they were baptized or not, and Kagin remarked that his mother told him he had “screamed like a banshee” when the water was applied to his forehead.  He takes that as a sign that he was already an atheist.  On that first issue they have a point, and it’s one that the Anabaptists and their spiritual descendants, the Mennonites and the Baptists, have been screaming about since the sixteenth century, along with quite a number of other denominations.  Karl Barth brought a breath of fresh air into European theology, and even while claiming to be a Reformed theologian he wrote a little book on baptism in which he strongly claimed that only the baptism of believers is scriptural.

The defenders of pedobaptism haven’t always had the purest of motives, either.  If I remember my Reformation history correctly, Ulrich Zwingli had a good relationship with the Anabaptists of Zürich for a while, even joining them in their prayer meetings, until he suddenly realized it would be impossible to maintain a state church without infant baptism.  Then he immediately began executing Anabaptists.  That is hypocrisy of the first order.

So maybe we Christians owe Kagin and the other atheists who participated in his little ceremony a debt of gratitude for pointing out from the outside that things may have drifted a bit far from apostolic Christianity.

Nevertheless, beyond blowing hot air on the spot where people were baptized, there is the irony of their taking their infant baptism so seriously that they think it necessary to erase it.  It is almost inevitable, too, that Kagin admits his son is a Christian fundamentalist minister since having “a personal revelation of Jesus Christ.”