I'm under the impression that you are an outlier within your denomination. I have a question for you:
According to the Council of Carthage (418), Canon 2: Infants are to be baptized for the remission of sins, while recognizing that they have not committed any sin themselves, yet they are to be truly baptized for the remission of sins.
How do you understand this? What sins are being remitted? Is it the sin of Adam? If so, how can someone have sin and not be guilty? Or is this baptism to be understood as ceremonial and little else?
I am an outlier - though before 1960 I don’t believe I would have been - but there is a growing group of Orthodox students who are looking more deeply into these matters and realizing that a decent amount of what passes for “common knowledge” in Orthodoxy is actually just modernist error. Generally that error can be defined as “trying so hard to be ‘not Western’ that they end up throwing our own dogmas away by mistake.”
Carthage 418, which has Ecumenical authority (the highest level of dogmatic Orthodox authority), explicitly and unambiguously states that infants are Baptized for the remission of sin. As they have no personal sins weighing on their souls, the sin being remitted is the sin of Adam.
Some Orthodox voices take the schizophrenic approach that babies are Baptized for the remission of sin and yet the stain of Adam’s sin could not be passed on to his descendants. Obviously this is incoherent - if the sinfulness of Adam reached the rest of us, then it was transmitted somehow and inherited from him somehow. Those promoting such a view are not thinking clearly or deeply about what they’re saying.
My view - and my priest shares this view - is that the sin of Adam is present in all of us in a way that requires forgiveness / remission but without making us personally guilty of having committed it. I think it’s a mistake to discuss original sin as if it’s a simple equation like 2+2=4, since it is a deep mystery of our faith which seems to transcend simple logic (though St. Augustine gave the most thorough systematic presentation of the topic). St. Symeon the New Theologian describes it as a mystery of our faith as well. What we inherit appears to be not personal guilt, but Adam’s guilty nature; this is how guilt can be “present,” in a sense, though we are not personally culpable for having committed Adam’s sin.
Though people unfamiliar with this topic often say that St. Augustine invented the doctrine, it is explicitly present in St. Cyprian’s Council of Carthage 252, more than 150 years before St. Augustine wrote about it, as described in Paragraph 5 of St. Cyprian’s Epistle 58 to Fidus (feel free to ignore the links in the passage, they came with the copy-paste from the site linked below):
“But again, if even to the greatest sinners, and to those who had
sinned much against
God, when they subsequently
believed, remission of
sins is granted — and nobody is hindered from
baptism and from
grace— how much rather ought we to shrink from hindering an infant, who, being lately born, has not
sinned, except in that, being born after the flesh according to Adam, he has contracted the contagion of the ancient death at its earliest birth, who approaches the more easily on this very account to the reception of the forgiveness of
sins— that to him are remitted, not his own
sins, but the
sins of another.”
St. Cyprian and the 66 Bishops who agreed with him at that Council surely didn’t believe they were innovating the doctrine either, but rather that they simply held the view passed down from the very beginning.
Here is the full Epistle:
https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/050658.htm
