Tyche’s parents had probably taken John 3.5 to heart, and wanted her to be “born of water and Spirit” and thus to enter the after-life in safety. And the church authorities, without having any coherent theological rationale for their position, had said yes to the pressure of laymen - parents who loved their children(Ferguson 1979:42-44; Wright 1987).

In the fourth century, the number of adult converts was huge. In Antioch, the annual total of baptizands could reach a thousand (Piédagnel 1990:250); but it was never large enough for the preachers. Chrysostom, the Cappadocians, and Augustine all urged the catechumens in their world to stop temporizing and to submit themselves to baptism: the “exhortation to baptism” is a characteristic fourth-century patristic form . Augustine excelled at it. But it would disappear in the fifth and sixth centuries, in part because the various forms of official suasion left few adults unconverted, and partly because of the spread of infant baptism. In the West this is primarily because of the theological influence of Augustine of Hippo. In theological combat with the Pelagians, and arguing from the practice of baptizing newborn babies, Augustine elaborated the doctrine of original sin which saw the baptism of the infant as essential to the infant’s eternal salvation and thus as pressingly urgent (Pelikan 1971:317-318). Augustine’s theology thus followed where the parental concern of earlier centuries had gone before, and the baptism of every infant could be seen as an emergency. The liturgies of the church took a long time to reflect this new reality, but by the eighth century liturgies had come to be written specifically for the baptisms of those who could not speak for themselves (Whitaker 1970:166; Didier 1965). David Wright, the patristics scholar who has worked most seriously on this issue, has called this development a “baptismal revolution” (Wright 2001).

The consequences of this shift from the primacy of adult baptism to the omnipresence of infant baptism were all embracing. In terms of the process of conversion, things were truncated: the leisurely four-staged conversion journey of the pre-Augustinian church was no longer appropriate. Instead there were two stages: stage A, which was the baptism soon after birth, with promises made by godparents, conferred belonging in the Christian church and civilization; and a lengthy stage B, in which the parents and godparents were to instruct the child in the essentials of Christian belief and behaviour. After 479 in the West, confirmation might punctuate stage B (Fisher and Yarnold 1992:149), but there rarely seems to have been effective catechism associated with confirmation. In many places, churchmen were satisfied if the believers knew the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed (Jegen 1967:209). The early Christians would not have called this conversion! Liturgically, baptism also suffered. It became disconnected from the major feasts of Easter and Pentecost, and was scattered throughout the year. The baptismal ceremonies themselves shrunk: in comparison with the “awe-inspiring” rites of the third- and fourth-century church they were humdrum, routine, at times slapdash. The evolution of the shape of the baptismal fonts is eloquent of this trivialization of baptism. The Catholic liturgical scholar A. Khatchatrian has indicated this in schematic form, as baptism over the centuries became higher and dryer (Khatchatrian 1982; see attached sheet). Lutheran liturgical theologian Anita Stauffer bewails this development:

This structural inversion of baptism had consequences for many aspects of the societies of Christendom Europe. Let us consider only its impact on two of these - the laity and the clergy. Generally speaking, the laity were in the church, not because they had chosen to respond to the Christian good news, but because of societal inevitabilities. Their parents, by having them baptized as newborn infants, had done in their behalf, with the best of intentions, what everybody did and indeed what the law required. So, from the sixth century onwards, the militia Christi of Christendom was made up of conscripts. They were poorly catechized; but they were expected to respect the clergy, to come to church, to pay a tenth of their income to the ecclesiastical establishment, and to stop engaging in pagan practices. Throughout the history of Christendom there are records of people rebelling against these expectations. In Caesarius’s Arles, the congregations misbehaved in church, and were so eager to leave the services that Caesarius had to lock the doors so they would stay to hear his “very moving sermons” (Vita Caesarii 1.19, 27). Preachers such as Martin of Braga repeatedly had to remind the laity to stop engaging in the “worship of the Devil”: burning candles at stones and trees and springs, muttering spells over herbs and the like. They must “think what pact you made with God in that very Baptism.” For they had promised to renounce the Devil, that is “if you were already able to reply, or certainly he who promised for you and received you from the font said” (On the Castigation of Rustics 15). That was the problem. In a church without effective catechism, whose members were there because of the promises that others made on their behalf and whom the authorities compelled to go to church and to pay for its operation, there was bound to be stonewalling. Further, there was bound to be syncretism, not only in religious observances but in ethics. Lay Christians, in a world Christianized by these means, were bound to live ordinary lives, shaped by the values and techniques that were deeply embedded in the customs and psyches of their folk. If they chose like the early Christians to live extraordinarily, loving their enemies, sharing their possessions and the rest, ordinary Christians thought that they were insane. As Augustine overheard lukewarm, long-time, Christians telling recent converts who wanted to take Jesus’ hard sayings seriously, “You’re going to extremes . . . it’s lunacy!” (Sermon 88.12)