In “The Eucharist, Part 9: Tertullian” (2024-04-06), we discussed how Tertullian was the first early church writer to refer—in the first decade of the third century—to baptism and thanksgiving as sacraments. He did so a century before anyone else did, so his writings constitute the most important evidence.

Consider the new Christian. After a confession of faith, one became a catechumen—a unbaptized Christian. Unbaptized Christians were not permitted to take part in the thanksgiving offering (the eucharist) or the Lord’s Supper. They were dismissed during that part of the gathering of believers. Thus, a person’s baptism and their first thanksgiving offering were their initiation rites, that is, their first acts as Christians following their confession of faith.

Consider the new Roman soldier. After a Roman had decided to become a soldier, he had to give a sacramentum, an oath to give his life completely to the service of the Roman state. Tertullian’s father was a Roman centurion who spoke the sacramentum, so Tertullian was speaking from his own experience. As we will see, for Tertullian, the Roman sacramentum of the Roman soldier formed a fitting analogy to initiation of a new Christian.

Tertullian explains:

Tertullian was writing against certain Christians who did not practice the requirement for baptism. Faced with Christ’s command to baptize, he concluded that baptism is required.

Notice the specific language that Tertullian uses. Tertullian here compares a sacrament of bare faith alone with a sacrament of both faith and water. He claims that the sacrament of faith has now been amplified by the addition of the sealing act of baptism.

Got that? Faith itself is the sacrament and baptism is a sealing act.

The seal on the letter is not the letter itself, but the authentication of the letter by the author. The author is asserting that the content of the letter really comes from—and is represented by—the author. It is the outward stamp on what is contained within: an indicator of authenticity. By analogy, if faith is a sacrament—an oath of initiation—then baptism is its seal.

Similarly, Tertullian describes baptism as clothing. Clothing covers the naked body so that it can be displayed properly without shame. By analogy, if faith is a sacrament, then baptism dresses it up (i.e. makes it presentable).

In case you think I’ve made all this up arbitrarily to suit my bias, consider that after I wrote the above interpretation of Tertullian, only then was I made aware of what Tertullian had written in another work:

Yes, indeed:

Faith itself is the sacrament and baptism is a sealing act.

Tertullian makes clear that, by our oath of faith in our heart when we first repented, we are already bathed in the blood of Christ. The regeneration of the heart by the blood precedes the baptism by water. Water is the outward seal—a figure or sign—of what has already taken place inwardly within the heart of the man of faith.

There are two baptisms. The one is the baptism by blood through one’s profession of faith, while the other is the baptism by water. The baptism of the blood “stands in lieu of the fontal bathing when that has not been received.”

Notice how different this is from the teaching of Roman Catholicism:

Notice two things. First, completely missing is Tertullian’s view that we are bathed already at the time of our confession of faith. Nowhere is found Tertullian’s claim that we are freed from sin before we are baptized, nor that baptism by blood stands in lieu of water baptism when it is missing. Second, the Catechism attests that the very mission of Roman Catholicism rests on the premise that we are not bathed already. This is mutually exclusive with Tertullian’s view.

The point in both of sealing and clothing is to make the specific identification between Christ and the believer. This is precisely what the Roman sacramentum did: it sealed the obligations. It did so by intellectual assent. See, oaths are things with content. They are words spoken to affirm something else. Baptism is the same way. How can water be an oath? It is an act of intellectual assent: one chooses to be baptized, affirming by their deeds what their faith is.

This is why Tertullian in his writings is so insistent that only those who have had sufficient training in the faith could be baptized. It is why he wrote against children (and thus infants) from being baptized. The very young could not make an informed profession of faith nor were they able to be properly trained.

This should surprise no one. Just as with the Roman oaths, only those of sufficient age and authority had legal standing to make binding legal decisions. We still hold to this today, where minors require parental consent until their age of majority.

Tertullian notes that if a child cannot be trusted with matters of (mere) earthly importance, how can they be trusted to weigh matters of heavily weight? Only those with sufficient maturity have ability and freedom to choose. It is preferable to delay baptism until each person can demonstrate that their confession of faith is valid, rather than just taking it for granted.

It is notable that this also excludes infant baptism. An infant cannot even make a confession of faith, let alone prove that their faith is valid. We can’t even baptize them on the assumption that their faith is valid, let alone requiring proof by one who cannot even speak or reason.

Now let’s continue with Tertullian’s work on Baptism:

As we discussed above, sacramental water baptism is the sealing around the letter of sacramental faith, or the clothing on the body of sacramental faith. It is the act that authenticates or binds (as in the Roman sacramentum) one’s faith in Christ.

Tertullian continues distinguishing between the sacrament of bare faith alone and the sacrament of faith with baptism. See how on his specific discussion on baptism he clarifies and refines this view: he calls baptism the sacrament of water and says that the water attains sacramental power. The sacrament of baptism is the promise of the power of the Holy Spirit, of sanctification, and of eternal life, not the water or baptismal rite itself! The water itself is just the symbol, figure, or signifier.

The water has no power of its own. The sacramental power must be assigned to it. The sacrament of faith is what makes the water sacramental. The water does not make the sacrament of faith sacramental.

A sacramentum was required to prove a Roman soldier’s allegiance to the state. A seal is required to prove that a letter is authentic. A baptism is required to prove that the one actually has the sacrament of faith. Baptism is the same kind of outward positive intellectual assent that a seal or oath are. They all say this:

An oath requires an attestation. Baptism is an attestation, but whose sacrament is it? Pay close attention:

According to Tertullian, baptism is God’s sacrament. It is God’s oath to us, not our oath to God. It’s only our sacrament to the extent that we receive God’s oath.

See, the person being baptized has already confessed and attested to their faith in Christ. But no one has yet sealed the agreement. This is why the person doing the baptizing speaks the invocation of God. The covenant is being sealed by the Holy Spirit. A covenant requires a sealing agreement by both parties, and during baptism God’s words seal the agreement.

When and where does the person being baptized give their oath to God? It is not when they are baptized in the water. It is when they give their confession of faith and are baptized in the blood. Only then do they make an attestation (of faith). But when one is baptized by water, it is the baptizer who is making the attestation on behalf of God in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The purpose of baptism is to outwardly, visually, and actively seal by agreement the terms of the covenant between the Christian and God. The person being baptized isn’t actually doing anything, other than obeying the call to be baptized. He has already made his confession of faith.

But here is the thing: God doesn’t need you to be baptized in order for his promises to take place. His side of the covenant is not actually dependent on your physical act of baptism by water. That’s why Tertullian understood that while baptism was a requirement by which God sealed the covenant, the blood baptism is that which “stands in lieu of the fontal bathing when that has not been received.”

Did you catch what Tertullian said above?

If water baptism brings salvation, then how can delaying being baptized allow a person to first secure salvation by their sound faith? Recall that Tertullian taught two baptisms: one of blood and one of water.

The baptism of blood is when the believer receives salvation through the power of the cross. Christ shed his blood for us.

The baptism of water is when the believer receives the Holy Spirit, and this may be through water baptism or the laying on of hands. Water itself is merely the symbol of the process and isn’t even strictly required.

For example, in Acts 2, those at Pentecost received the Holy Spirit without being baptized by water.

For example, in Acts 9, Paul apparently received the Holy Spirit by the laying on of hands and only afterwards received water baptism.

For example, in Acts 19, those who were baptized in the name of Christ did not receive the spirit when they were baptized, but only after the laying on of hands.

One must receive the baptism of blood in order to be regenerated. One does not have the baptism of water for the same to occur, nor does the water itself cause regeneration in the normative case.

Roman Catholics view Tertullian as saying that baptism is a sacrament, a ritual with inherently efficacious results. They use it to justify baptizing infants. But Tertullian understood the sacrament in the sense of an oath of initiation. Notably, an infant cannot make an oath before God because it lacks the capacity for language and higher level thought. In particular, no infant can be baptized for the plain reason that God cannot seal the covenant with someone who has not made a confession of faith.

Here is one such attempt by a Roman Catholic apologist, who finds—in Tertullian’s implicit prohibition on infant baptism—a call to baptize infants:

This argument simply fails.

The reason why baptism “regenerates” us is because it is God sealing the covenant that began with our confession of faith (through the baptism of blood). But this is utterly incompatible with the Roman Catholic conception of baptismal regeneration and its rejection of “credobaptism.”

Tertullian can affirm each and every claim that this apologist makes about how baptism washes away sins. All of that remains true if, and only if, one has made a confession of faith and possesses a “sound faith is secure of salvation” prior to water baptism.

Tertullian speaks of water baptism in the sense of sealing or executing an existing covenant. It is, very clearly, something that is not ongoing. As we will see in Part 3, one Roman Catholic apologist wrote:

Now we obviously quibble with the apologist on the “effects produced by the sacrament of [water] baptism,” but what we don’t disagree with is that a believer needs to only be baptized once. It is not periodic.

This is important because by the late fourth century, when Jerome translated the Greek New Testament into Latin, the word sacramentum in Latin no longer had the same meaning it had when Tertullian wrote. As I noted in “Changing Language,” Roman practices had changed. The sacramentum of the Roman soldier was now a vow spoken yearly. Correspondingly, writers throughout the fourth century now often referred to the sacraments of the church as repeated rituals.

It was the same word, but it didn’t mean the same thing that it meant when Tertullian had used it.

Another church father, “Hilary of Poitiers,” wrote—in the latter half of the 4th century—that thanksgiving—eucharist—was a sacrament in the sense of a rite to be performed in and of itself: “eucharist is a sacrament.” But Tertullian viewed the thanksgiving (‘eucharist‘) and water baptism as an initiation rite that one performed because one had taken an oath of initiation to God—a sacrament—and given him one’s allegiance (i.e. entered into a permanent sacred binding covenant by one’s confession of faith).

In other words, Tertullian’s use of sacramentum did not mean the same thing as the late fourth century church’s—and the Latin Vulgate’s—use of sacramentum. When Tertullian wrote of water baptism as a sacrament, this didn’t mean the same thing as when Hilary—and a number of his contemporaries—wrote of the sacraments as rituals to be repeated.

Tertullian mentioned children being baptized because even the very young are sometimes able to consider faith and accept it. Tertullian was skeptical about whether or not such a faith could be real, and so said that it was preferred that water baptism be delayed until proof of regeneration had taken place. Most importantly, Tertullian would never have suggested that infants be baptized because, for an infant, a sacramentum was a logical impossibility.

But, for the newly arisen Roman Catholicism in the late fourth century, a sacramentum as a ritual act—rather than an oath—was logically compatible with baptizing infants, for it didn’t require assent. The ritual had been separated from the personal act of faith.

By the late fourth century, the common meaning of the term had changed so much that it no longer carried the sense of an “initiation oath.” By reading Tertullian as if he understood the sacramentum in the same sense that later writers did, it is possible to imagine that Tertullian supported infant baptism. It’s just another ritual where the ritual itself has inherent meaning in-and-of-itself. There would no longer be a need for the infant to speak an oath, because the oath taking aspect of the person was replaced by the efficacy of the ritual itself. The sacraments had been bureaucratized.

The Roman Catholic understanding of sacraments as rituals—typified in “The Sacrifice of the Mass”—is fundamentally incompatible with Tertullian’s view of the sacrament as an oath of initiation. As we recently pointed out in “The Eucharist, Redux #1,” there was a corresponding late fourth century change to the eucharist, from a unconsecrated sacrificial (tithe) offering of thanksgiving into a consecrated sacrificial offering of bread and wine. In the sacramentum of Tertullian and the eucharist of Justin Martyr, Ignatius, Clement, Irenaeus, and Cyprian, we see the early writers being pressed into service to support late fourth century novelties.

As noted above, Tertullian’s father was a Roman centurion. His words can only be understood in the context in which he wrote them given the practices at the time. For Tertullian (and his father), the sacramentum was an oath before the gods in which the gods themselves would hold the soldier accountable to his oath. The oath itself was not efficacious, it was the gods who would hold the soldier to his oath. So too does the regeneration of the baptismal sacrament come from God. In Part 3, we will discuss Baptismal Regeneration in more detail.