The story of a "de-baptism"

(Christian Today) - The Anglican Diocese of Southwark has agreed to correct the registered baptism of an atheist who claims he was too young to consent to the ceremony.

John Hunt was just five months old when he was baptised at St Jude with St Aidin church in Thornton Heath, south London, in 1953. He decided in his school years, however, that he did not believe in the existence of God and now wants the record of his baptism removed.

The Church of England has consistently argued that it cannot remove Dr Hunt's baptism from its record books altogether because it is the historical recording of an event.

The register of Dr Hunt's baptism will instead remain but the cutting of an announcement of his "de-baptism" in a London newspaper will be attached to his entry in the register.

The former software engineer is one of more than 100,000 Britons believed by the National Secular Society to have downloaded its “certificate of de-baptism”. The parchment certificate is sold for £3 by the NSS to people wanting to renounce their church baptism.

Southwark Diocese said this week that Dr Hunt’s record would be “corrected”, according to The Telegraph.

Dr Hunt said: “I am delighted that on this occasion the Church are going to do what they said they would do."

He added: "It's about time that some of us stood up to be counted. I am hoping that others will follow my lead.”

To which I respond with the below. Long exegetical responses are not most people's cup of tea so I have shortened this down a bit. It encapsulates the idea rather well I think.

If the Orthodox Church remained alien to the long Western debate on infant versus adult Baptism, it is because she, in the first place, never accepted the reduction of faith to "personal faith" alone which made that debate inevitable. From the Orthodox point of view, the essential question about faith in its relationship to the sacrament is: what faith, and even more precisely, whose faith? And the equally essential answer to the question is: it is Christ's faith, given to us, becoming our faith and desire, the faith by which, in the words of St. Paul, "Christ may dwell in your hearts... that being rooted and grounded in love (we) may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and depth and height" (Eph. 3:17-18)...

We can now return to the objection mentioned above and which, as we have seen, concerns Baptism not only of children but for adults as well. For now we know why Baptism does not and indeed cannot "depend" for its reality (i.e. for truly being our death, our resurrection with Christ) on personal faith, however "adult" or "mature" it may be. This is not because of any deficiencies or limitations of that personal faith, but only because Baptism depends - totally and exclusively - on Christ's faith; it is the very gift of His faith, its true grace.

- Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann
Of Water & The Spirit: A Liturgical Study of Baptism
Chapter 2, Section 8 'Baptism'