eish wrote: ↑Thu 26 December 2024 2:47 amThis is a HUGE problem in among the World Orthodox. It's also a problem in orthobro culture adjacent to World Orthodoxy.
Old Calendar Zealot has a few good texts up on his YT channel, and then pseudo-orthodoxy like this. It appeals to Modern Man with his soft, conflict averse sensibilities. The niceness which the world exalts as holiness.
First notice there is an implicit assumption that it is an unbaptised infant.* Then it's literally Pelagianism. By Canon 121 of Carthage**, condemned Pelagianism.
http://youtube.com/post/Ugkxvn6YcCeP32c ... JZrNA478YG
Instead of patting ourselves on the back with feel-good stories about babies being automatically saved--baptised or not--we should be praying for their souls. And if they are baptised, we should commemorate them in church.
*Four alternative interpretations:
1) This is only speaking of unbaptised infants. In that case it is Pelagianism.
2) This is only speaking of baptised infants. Papists do not consider baptised infants to be condemned by Original Sin, so is not a sensible interpretation of the meme.
3) This makes no distinction between baptised and unbaptised infants. In that case it is certainly Pelagianism on account of the unbaptised infants.
4) This is alternating between speaking of whichever infants the speaker needs in order to make his based meme fit (straw man argument). I don't think I need to explain why that would be bad.
To top it off, I know of no teaching of the Church which says that all baptised infants are in all cases saints upon death.
**Interpretation:St. Nicodemus wrote:This passage, I say, cannot be taken to mean anything else than what the catholic Church of the Orthodox has understood and believed it to mean, to wit, that even the newborn infants,
notwithstanding the fact that they have not sinned by reason of any exercise of their own free and independent will, have nevertheless entailed upon themselves the original sin from Adam; wherefore they need to be purified through baptism necessarily from that sin: hence they are truly, and not fictitiously. being baptized for the remission of sins.
Canon 110 of the Council of Carthage (A.D. 419)
That infants are baptized for the remission of sins
Likewise it seemed good that whosoever denies that infants newly from their mother's wombs should be baptized, or says that baptism is for remission of sins, but that they derive from Adam no original sin, which needs to be removed by the laver of regeneration, from whence the conclusion follows, that in them the form of baptism for the remission of sins, is to be understood as false and not true, let him be anathema.
For no otherwise can be understood what the Apostle says, By one man sin has come into the world, and death through sin, and so death passed upon all men in that all have sinned, than the Catholic Church everywhere diffused has always understood it. For on account of this rule of faith (regulam fidei) even infants, who could have committed as yet no sin themselves, therefore are truly baptized for the remission of sins, in order that what in them is the result of generation may be cleansed by regeneration.
