Becoming un-Baptist Part 3: Baptism Continued

Becoming un-Baptist Part 3: Baptism Continued

In my previous posts on becoming un-Baptist, I wrote about how my ecclesiology shifted, and then how my theology of baptism shifted.  In this post I provide a sketch of how my understanding of the practice of baptism shifted.

Valid Baptism

On my journey out of a baptistic understanding of baptism, I reflected on the practice of baptism as well as the theology of baptism.  I was asking questions about what made a valid baptism, who ought to be baptized, and when they ought to be baptized.  What I found in Scripture ended up having more correspondence to the practices of the Early Church than I had expected.

The question of what made a valid baptism came up for me when I was considering doing missionary work (theological education overseas) through the International Missions Board (the Southern Baptist missionary agency).  Technically, I would have had to have my baptism regularized, which means that I would have to be (re)baptized because I was not baptized in a church that was Southern Baptist and also did not affirm the “perseverance of the saints.”  I was adamant that my baptism was valid; I was baptized by immersion in water, by a believing Christian, after a confession of personal faith, and in the name of the Trinity.[1]

As I dug into this, I found that often times Baptists would leave out any statement about the person doing the baptism.  Even when Grudem wrote about baptism in his Systematic Theology, he did not state that a baptism needed to be administered by a believer for it to be valid.  Instead he states, “Scripture simply does not specify any restriction on who can perform the baptism ceremony.”[2]  The problem I found here is that this does not comport with the way I had been taught to reason from the Bible.

I had been taught that since there was no (overt) example of an infant ever being baptized in Scripture, then the practice is unbiblical.  Using that same logic, I found that every example of Christian baptism in the Bible had an already baptized person performing the baptism.  This means that, logically, it takes a baptized person to baptize biblically (i.e. validly) another person.  If I had left it at this point, I may very well have remained a Baptist.  However, I connected the dots:

1.      Biblical baptism requires a baptized person to baptize.

2.      Only someone who is baptized after coming to faith has a valid baptism (from a Baptist perspective).

3.      For at least 1,400 years of Church History (likely longer), only converts would be baptized after a profession of faith (the practice was to baptize infants and at times delaying baptism until the deathbed).

These points led to a problem.  Unless one can trace a line of baptized converts baptizing other converts (which cannot be done),[3] then there is no one, at the present, who can validly baptize another person.[4]  This lack of a succession of "biblically" baptized people means that Baptist churches are unchurched (along with every other denomination of Christians).  However, if infant baptism is valid, then there are valid baptisms at the present, but this would also mean that I (and all other Baptists) was wrong about who can be properly baptized.  This left me with either affirming infant baptism is true and right, or affirming that no one at the present is validly baptized.

Mode of Baptism

Growing up, I remember my dad (a Baptist pastor) had baptized people on a couple of occasions by means other than full immersion because of the particular needs of that moment.  This is in contrast with many Baptists who would hold such baptisms to be invalid because the baptized were not fully immersed in the water.  My position was cemented when I took a trip to Greece with The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.  We stopped at the place in ancient Philippi where Paul (probably) baptized Lydia.  There as I listened to a lecture on baptism and how it always meant full immersion I was looking at the creek where Paul did his baptizing.  It was nearly full to its banks and maybe would come up to my knees in the deepest location.  And what should there be but an icon showing Lydia kneeling in the water as Paul scooped water and poured it on her head.  One of these views comported with reality.  The other did not comport with reality.[5]

I still agree with my dad.  The meaning and symbolism of baptism is best captured through immersion.  However, immersion is not necessary for a baptism (done in the name of Trinity with water) to be valid.

Household Baptisms

The Apostles did things which no clear thinking Baptist would do.  They baptized entire households.  And following the text of Scripture, these households were not entirely composed of believers!  This practice of household baptisms did not appear to be an outlier but is a fairly common theme in the New Testament (at least when speaking about who was baptized).

With household baptisms recorded in the Bible, it is not possible to prove that infants or toddlers were present in the households who were baptized.  It is probable, but not demonstrable.  At the same time, it appears that not everyone in the household necessarily believed prior to their baptism. 

In Acts 18:8 there is an example of an entire household believing and being baptized:

“Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue, believed in the Lord, together with his entire household. And many of the Corinthians hearing Paul believed and were baptized.”

This demonstrates that Luke can speak of an entire household believing and being baptized.  So, when he does not mention it, we can either read into the silence that the household believed and Luke just failed to mention it, or we can read the silence as intentional (but authorial intent is so passé these days). 

There are two instances in which the text states the household was baptized, but does not state that the entire household believed.  There is the example of Lydia in Acts 16:14–15.[6]  The text does not say anything about her household believing, only that they were baptized with her.  A more explicit example is found in Acts 16 with the baptism of the Philippian jailer.  Paul and Silas used a singular imperative “believe” when they said “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household” (Acts 16:31).  There is no apostolic command for his household to believe only for the jailer.  We read that the jailer “was baptized at once, he and all his family” (Acts 16:33).  Then the singular faith of the jailer is again revealed in 16:34, where we are told that the jailer “rejoiced along with his entire household that he had believed in God.”  Luke was quite capable of saying “that they had believed in God.”  However, Luke did not record that they believed, only that the jailer believed, yet he and his household were baptized.  It does not appear that personal faith is necessary for each person baptized in a household.[7] 

I cannot prove that there were infants/toddlers in these households that were baptized.  However, slaves were baptized as part of the household (for Lydia to have a household, she would have had to have slaves).  This leads to the question of how would a slave (who had not made a profession of faith) would receive baptism as part of the household and an infant would not?  Slaves were considered part of the household in both Roman and Hebrew society (In fact, according to Torah, the slaves of a priest could eat the food that the laity were forbidden to eat because it was reserved for the priests[8]).  Slaves were culturally considered part of the household, but the children were considered a significantly more important part of the household.  It does not make sense that a slave (as part of the household) would receive baptism and an infant would not receive baptism (as part of the household).

Evangelism Separated from Baptism

Baptism was not always immediate.  Paul appears to have made this very clear in 1^st Corinthians 1:14–18:

I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, so that no one may say that you were baptized in my name. (I did baptize also the household of Stephanas. Beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized anyone else.)  For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.  For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

If baptism was something that was consistently practiced upon belief, then we would expect Paul to have baptized a lot of people.  Paul was in Corinth for a year and a half,[9] but he only baptized 3 (households).  Yet he has the audacity to refer to himself as the father of the Corinthian Christians,[10] when he (if we were to follow the expectation of immediate baptism upon belief) left Corinth with only three baptized households constituting the church in Corinth.  Further, Paul understands his call to proclaim the Gospel (even for one and a half years in the same place) to be a separate thing from the call to baptize.  This runs into a significant problem in that if baptism was supposed to immediately follow a profession of faith, then Paul should have been a baptizing machine because it would have been a necessary fruit of preaching the Gospel.

That Paul did not view Gospel proclamation as requiring him to be involved in baptisms is an important point.  I am certain that someone could explain it away (with varying degrees of success).  I think that it is best understood as the basis for the practice of the catechumenate (the period of learning about the faith before one was baptized and became and Christian) in the early Church.  The only individual who was immediately baptized that we do not know for certain had been spiritually formed by Judaism is the Philippian jailer.  Every other convert immediately baptized upon their belief, for lack of a better term, had a biblical worldview.[11]  There is no clear example of a rank polytheist converting and being immediately baptized in the entirety of the Biblical text (the Philippian jailer being a possibility, but not clearly stated as such).

These conclusions about the practice of baptism along with my theological conclusions (see my previous post here) led me to the point where I uncomfortably accepted the premise and validity of infant baptism.  This moved me from the periphery of baptistic circles to a camp outside in a land unknown to me.  In many ways, I had left my father’s house and set out for a land that I had not seen in a direction that I did not know.

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[1] This experience was part of the catalyst for me to think carefully through the topic of baptism.

[2] Pages 983-984.  This was the standard Systematic text used at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.  The Baptist Faith and Message (as revised in 2000) likewise is silent on who can be the baptizer:

[3] A movement known as the Landmarkist movement who argued that Baptists were the true Church and were always a distinct entity from the Roman Catholic Church.  Here is a chart of their interpretation of Church History.

[4] Some Baptists, such as John Smyth (the first Baptist), argued that the local congregation has the full authority and autonomy to carry out the biblical commands as they saw fit.  In my estimation, such a practice removes that body of people from anything that could be considered a historical or ontological connection to the Church which Christ founded.

[5] The Greek word baptizo often means full immersion.  This does not necessitate that the Christian practice of baptism slavishly followed the technical meaning of a word they utilized for a distinctly religious action.  Thus is should not surprise anyone when the early Christian manual on Church practices, the Didache, provides both immersion and affusion as valid means of baptism (Didache 7).

[6] One who heard us was a woman named Lydia, from the city of Thyatira, a seller of purple goods, who was a worshiper of God. The Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul.  And after she was baptized, and her household as well, she urged us, saying, "If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come to my house and stay." And she prevailed upon us (Acts 16:14-15).

[7] The baptism of households ought to be examined in light of Cicero’s De Domu 109 and De Officiis 1.54-55 to see how Roman culture understood how religion and the family unit worked.  Likewise, one could consult the Old Testament.  There is little doubt that a biblically faithful Jew would have the entire household following the prescriptions of Torah because that is what they were commanded to do (Regarding children there is Deuteronomy 4:10 and 11:19; regarding slaves there is Exodus 12:44 and importantly Leviticus 22:10–11).

[8] Leviticus 22:10-13: “A lay person shall not eat of a holy thing; no foreign guest of the priest or hired servant shall eat of a holy thing, but if a priest buys a slave as his property for money, the slave may eat of it, and anyone born in his house may eat of his food. If a priest's daughter marries a layman, she shall not eat of the contribution of the holy things. But if a priest's daughter is widowed or divorced and has no child and returns to her father's house, as in her youth, she may eat of her father's food; yet no lay person shall eat of it.”

[9] Acts 18:11, “And he stayed a year and six months, teaching the word of God among them.”

[10] 1^st Corinthians 4:15, “For though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers. For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel.”

[11] Lists of those baptized in Acts:

Acts 2, practicing Jews; Acts 8, Samaritans; Acts 8 Ethiopian Eunuch; Acts 9, Saul; Acts 10, Cornelius the Centurion; Acts 19, the disciples who had not heard of the Holy Spirit;