Believers' Baptism

On January 5, 1527, at 3 o'clock Saturday afternoon, Felix Manz was drowned to death in the icy waters of the Limmat River by order of the Zurich City Council. He had been identified as "one of the real beginners and chief promoters" of the Anabaptist movement. By his own admission he had (re)baptized a woman in Embrach and declared that, if released, he would do the same kind of thing again. (1)

A month after Manz's execution, a group of Anabaptists issued the Schleitheim Confession in which they declared that Baptism should be administered only to those "who have been taught repentance and a change of life and in truth believe their sins to have been blotted out through Christ." (2) In 1529, the imperial diet at Speyer revived the ancient Code of Justinian which specified the death penalty for the practice of rebaptism.

It is important to recognize that the Reformation tradition of believers' Baptism was forged in the context of persecution and martyrdom. Something was decisively at stake for those who were willing to accept the loss of livelihood, the forfeiture of home, land, and family, even torture and death "for the testimony of God and their conscience," as Menno Simons put it. Their courage, of course, does not automatically validate their convictions: that can be done only by direct appeal to the touchstone of Holy Scripture. However, it should certainly cause one to ponder why Baptism was once deemed so important that some Christians were willing to die for it, and others to kill over it.

In contemporary American culture, Baptism seldom involves personal sacrifice or hardship. Karl Barth once characterized Infant Baptism in Europe's state churches as "a part of the landscape…mightier than the wall of Berlin and the cathedral of Cologne or whatever you please." (3) In many of our churches, both paedo- and credobaptist, Baptism is as American as the Statue of Liberty or Sunday afternoon football. By becoming safely routinized as a part of the ecclesiastical landscape, Baptism tends to lose its basic New Testament meaning as the decisive transition from an old way of human life to a new way; as an act of radical obedience in which a specific renunciation is made and a specific promise is given.

One of the most telling arguments against believers' Baptism is that it is the liturgical enactment of modern rugged individualism. James Daane has put the case this way:

We Americans have been brought up on the tradition of individualism. In business, in politics, in morals, even in religion, we have been taught that it is "every man for himself."…The largest part of the American church has been invaded by the spirit of individualism…. This unbiblical individualism has led to a denial of infant Baptism, to the belief that a child cannot be a member of the church by birth, but only by individual choice. (4)

More recently, William H. Willimon, in his superb Peculiar Speech: Preaching to the Baptized, has restated the same objection. "Those who baptize only adults sometimes say that they wait to baptize until a person 'knows what it means.' This rationale owes more to the rationalism of the Enlightenment than to anything biblical." (5)

It must be conceded that these arrows hit their target as a critique of contemporary baptismal practice in many Churches. When the Church degenerates from the communion of saints into an aggregate of like-minded individuals, or worse, into an "amorphous mass of Pelagian good will," then believers' Baptism indeed becomes a pro forma initiation into a holy club, a meritorious act to be performed, rather than a thankful and obedient response to what God has done.

However, over against the attenuated meaning of Baptism in many modern churches stands the doctrine of believers' Baptism advocated in this article. Rooted in both the historic Baptist tradition and the leading principles of Reformation theology, this doctrine affirms both the sovereignty of God in salvation and the corporate character of the Christian community. It also makes full allowance for the genuinely free and responsible role of repentance and faith as constitutive for the act of Baptism.

Early Baptist Developments

Modern historians agree that the modern Baptist movement rose from John Smyth who, in the winter of 1609, took water from a basin and poured it over his head in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. After rebaptizing himself, he then re-baptized his entire congregation of English Separatist refugees at Amsterdam. In 1612, a splinter group from Smyth's congregation returned to London and founded what has rightly been called the first Baptist church on English soil. Out of this small sect emerged the General Baptists, so called because of their belief in the universal scope of Christ's atoning work.

Another stream of English Baptists arose later, and independently, of these early General Baptists. They emerged out of an independent congregation founded at London in 1616 by Henry Jacob, a radical Puritan Congregationalist. In time, this congregation also split in a number of different directions, some members questioning the validity of Infant Baptism, and beginning to form congregations around the principle of believers' Baptism. Richard Blunt, one of the movement's leaders, thought that Baptism "ought to be by dipping the body into the water, resembling burial and rising again." (6) Within a few years, immersion became the universal mode of Baptism among both the General Baptists, with their Arminian theology, and the Particular Baptists, as they came to be called, because of their idea that Christ had died only for the elect.

In 1644, the Particular Baptists published one of the first Baptist confessions of faith in England, the London Confession, in which the following statement on Baptism is given:

The way and manner of the dispensing of this Ordinance the Scripture holds out to be dipping or plunging the whole body under water: it being a signe, must answer the thing signified, which are these: first, the washing the whole soule in the bloud of Christ; secondly, that interest the Saints have in the death, buriall, and resurrection; thirdly, together with a confirmation of our faith, that as certainly as the body is buried under water, and riseth againe, so certainly shall the bodies of the Saints be raised by the power of Christ, in the day of the resurrection, to reigne with Christ. (7)

This was a radical act in England in the 1640s. Thomas Edwards, Presbyterian polemicist, was greatly shocked at this practice of believers' Baptism by immersion. In one of his writings he issued the following: "Whosoever re-baptized any that had been formerly baptized should be immediately cast into the water and drowned." (8) As a matter of fact, few if any English Baptists were drowned in the seventeenth century, unlike the Anabaptists on the continent in an earlier period. However, since their meetings were illegal, many of them spent time in prison and some died there during the years of persecution prior to the Act of Toleration of 1689.

By the early eighteenth century the General Baptists had largely lapsed into Unitarianism. The Baptist apologetic was carried forward by the Particulars who remained staunchly Calvinistic in theology. In 1689, they published the Second London Confession (originally drafted in 1677) which was modeled on the Westminster Confession of 1649. With minor adaptations, the Second London Confession was adopted by the Philadelphia Baptist Association, which secured the services of Benjamin Franklin to republish it in 1743. It quickly became the dominant confessional standard for Baptists in America.

The difference between General and Particular Baptists is seen in the way they handled the question of salvation for babies who die in infancy. Both parties, of course, refused to consign such little ones to perdition for lack of Baptism. The Generals, however, argued from the innocence of infant nature, while the Particulars stressed the effectual calling of God which extends even to "elect infants…and all other elect persons who are uncapable of being outwardly called by the Ministry of the Word." (9) Baptism, though, should be reserved for those who have been quickened and renewed by the Holy Spirit, and are thus "enabled to answer this call and to embrace the grace offered and conveyed in it." However, repentance and faith, which are the content of such an "embrace," are not so much human products as gifts of a gracious God whose overcoming mercy (a better term than "irresistible grace") is announced and celebrated in the act of believers' Baptism.

In the preface to the Second London Confession, the Baptists of 1689 acknowledged the close similarity between their document and other orthodox confessions, even to the point of common wording "in all the fundamental articles of the Christian religion." Claiming that they "have no itch to clog religion with new words," they asserted solidarity with other believers "in that wholesome Protestant doctrine" which had occupied the great reformers of the sixteenth century. (10)

The framers of the Second London Confession followed the Westminster divines in describing God's salvific acts in terms of a covenantal relationship. Through a covenant of grace, God freely offers salvation to sinners, requiring faith in Jesus Christ and promising the Holy Spirit "to make them willing and able to believe." However, where Westminster sees the covenant dispensed through Baptism which may be administered not only to those who personally profess faith in Christ but also to infants, the Baptists restrict Baptism to "those who do actually profess repentance towards God, faith in, and obedience to our Lord Jesus." (11)

The ferocity of the Baptism debate can still be felt in the titles of polemical tracts volleyed from one side to the other: Daniel Featly's The Dipper Dipt (1644); Samuel Fisher's Baby-baptism meer baptism (1653); Richard Carpenter's The Anabaptist washt and washt, and shrunk in the washing (1653); William Russell's Infant baptism is will-worship (1700), and so on.

Out of this controversy emerged a distinctively Calvinistic understanding of believers' Baptism, a tradition which held together the twin Reformation emphases of sola gratia and sola fide. One of the earliest exponents of this perspective was Thomas Patient who argued against paedobaptism on the basis of Calvinistic soteriology in his The Doctrine of Baptism and the Distinction of the Covenants (1654). Others who took up this line of defense included John Bunyan, Benjamin Keach, John Gill, Abraham Booth, Alexander Carson, and Charles H. Spurgeon. In recent years a contemporary statement of this view has been set forth in two important works: David Kingdon, Children of Abraham (1973), and Paul K. Jewett, Infant Baptism and the Covenant of Grace (1978). (12) To these must be added Karl Barth's significant treatment of Baptism in the final part volume of his Church Dogmatics (IV/4). In elaborating the theological significance of believers' Baptism on Reformed presuppositions, these writers were forced to deal with a complex of issues which first surfaced during the Reformation itself and have remained central in all subsequent discussions.

Baptism and Faith

In reviewing the baptismal debates of the Reformation, Karl Barth issued the following challenge: "The one great dogmatic problem with every theory of infant Baptism…is that of the relationship between the event of baptism, on the one hand, and the faith of the one baptized on the other." (13) This problem is inherent in the fact that those New Testament passages which provide some of the clearest insights into the meaning of Baptism (e.g., Gal. 3:26-27, Rom. 6:1-11, I Pet. 3:21, Col. 2:11-12) invariably conjoin Baptism with repentance/faith as integral aspects of the same reality. Significantly, this point was conceded by the Lima Report on Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry in a delicate statement of ecumenical compromise: "While the possibility that infant baptism was practiced in the apostolic age cannot be excluded, baptism upon personal profession of faith is the most clearly attested pattern in the New Testament documents." (14) The most recent investigation of the origins of Infant Baptism, which builds upon the classic exchange between Kurt Aland and Joachim Jeremias a generation ago, indicates that the earliest baptismal rites were designed for those who could personally declare their own faith. Only gradually, and somewhat awkwardly, were such liturgies accommodated to small children and infants. (15)

Reformed Baptists have pointed out that the very definitions of Baptism set forth in the confessions of the Reformation presuppose an inextricable linkage between Baptism and faith. For example, the Anglican Catechism puts the question, "What is required of persons to be baptized?" and answers, "Repentance, whereby they forsake sin, and faith, whereby they steadfastly believe the promises of God made to them in that sacrament." (16) Similarly, the First Helvetic Confession declares, "We therefore by being baptized do confess our faith." (17) Such language merely reflects the New Testament portrayal of Baptism; indeed, that is why the Reformers, good biblical theologians that they were, included it in their doctrinal standards! Invariably, though, when the subject of Infant Baptism is introduced, there is a backing away from such clear affirmations and, one can only say, an abnormal resorting to qualifying adversatives: but, nevertheless, although, yet, not only, etc. (18) The clear impression is that the evangelical understanding of faith is being accommodated, rather unnaturally, to the prevailing practice of paedobaptism.

Of all the mainline Reformers none saw the inviolable nexus between Baptism and faith more clearly than Martin Luther. From his early treatise on The Holy and Blessed Sacrament of Baptism (1519) onwards, Luther challenged the ex opere operatum of medieval sacramentalism with the opposing nullum sacramentum sine fide, "without faith there is no sacrament." (19) The principle is specifically applied to Baptism in the Small Catechism (1529): Water does nothing, but "the Word of God connected with the water, and our faith which relies upon the Word of God connected with the water." (20)

In the face of the Anabaptist challenge, Luther did not shrink from a full-blown doctrine of infant faith. Rather than trying to peep into people's hearts to see whether or not they believe, we should trust that in Baptism the infant is changed, cleansed, and renewed by "inpoured faith" (fides infusa). The fact that the intellective processes of the infant are in abeyance is no hindrance to the impartation of faith; if anything, it is easier for an infant to receive faith since "whorish" reason is not as likely to get in the way! (21)

Against this defense of paedobaptism, the following arguments have been set forth: (1) It compromises Luther's own doctrine of justification by faith alone. What is the difference between fides infusa (infused faith) and the various schemes of gratia infusa (infused grace) against which Luther inveighed so forcefully? Can we speak of faith "clinging to the water" and of God himself "intermingled" with the baptismal water without relapsing into a medieval, magical way of thought? (22) (2) It violates the consistent New Testament sequence of preaching-faith-Baptism. This is true not only for the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20) where the clearly intended order is evangelize-baptize-catechize, but also in the several "household" Baptisms (Acts 16:33, 18:8; 1 Cor. 1:16) where proclamation and response invariably preceded Baptism. (3) It trivializes the decisive role of repentance. In the sphere of the New Testament, Baptism signifies a life-transforming transition from decay and death into the newness of life in Jesus Christ. This requires not only the positive response of faith but also a renunciation, a deliberate turning away from one's former pattern of life. The early baptismal liturgies recognized this as part of Christian initiation by requiring the baptized to spit in the direction of darkness, i.e., in the face of Satan. (23) It was repenters' baptism as well as believers' baptism. But, if infant faith is barely conceivable, does infant repentance make any sense at all? To Luther's retort that we are Christians even when we slumber, it should be recalled that no one in the New Testament was ever baptized while asleep!

What has been called the "uneasy conscience" of this apology for paedobaptism is reflected in the practice of sponsors who confess faith on behalf of the infant during the baptismal rite. According to this tradition, common to Anglican and Lutheran liturgies, the minister asks the infant about to be baptized a series of questions: "Do you believe in the God the Father Almighty, etc."; "Do you wish to be baptized in this faith?"; "Will you obey God's commandments all the days of your life?" In the First Prayer Book of Edward VI, the minister also asks, "Doest thou forsake the devil and all his workes?…Doest thou forsake the carnal degrees of the flesh?" To each query the sponsors reply, "I will." Then the minister baptizes not the sponsors, of course, but the baby for whom they have answered. Concerning this practice Jewett has asked: "If the child can renounce his sin, confess his faith, and promise to obey God vicariously, why can he not be baptized vicariously? If it is unthinkable that the sponsors should kneel and have the water of sacred baptism…applied to their heads in the infant's stead, how may we be sure that it is God's will that they make to him the most solemn promises ever to move mortal lips in the infant's stead?" (24)

Despite strong objections to paedobaptism based on fides infantilis (infant faith) or fides vicaria (vicarious faith), these views at least maintain (however inadequately) the biblical connection between faith and Baptism. With respect to this one crucial point, then, those who practice believers' Baptism stand closer to the Lutheran and Anglican traditions than to their Reformed cousins.

Covenantal Continuity

For the most part, advocates of believers' Baptism have been content to rest their case on the basis of Scriptural evidence alone. While they would hardly have regarded Jacques Bossuet as an ally, Baptist apologists would have agreed with the French Catholic bishop's appraisal of Protestant paedobaptism:

As touching infants, the so-called reformed say that their baptism is grounded on the authority of Scripture, but they bring us no place out of it, expressly affirming it, and what consequences they draw of the same, they are very far-fetched, not to say very doubtful, and too deceitful. (25)

Bossuet, of course, believed in infant Baptism, but he thought that it could only be supported by appealing to church tradition.

However, within the first generation of Reformed theologians, a powerful argument for infant Baptism was set forth on the basis of the covenantal unity of the Old and New Testaments. Huldrych Zwingli, the chief architect of this construct, understood that he was plowing new ground. Whereas Luther could rejoice that Baptism was the one Sacrament which had remained "untouched and untainted" by human corruption, Zwingli concluded that all the teachers of the church since the days of the apostles had been in error on Baptism. "We shall have to tread a different path," he noted. (26)

Early on, Zwingli had agreed with the Anabaptist premise that Baptism should not be administered to children prior to the age of discretion. (27) In June 1523, he wrote to Thomas Wyttenbach: "You can wash an unbeliever a thousand times in the water of baptism, but unless he believes, it is in vain." (28) Nor did Zwingli have any sympathy for the idea of an infant faith. His fear of idolatry prompted him to reject any form of sacramental objectivism which connected spiritual reality too closely to material signs. Water baptism could only be a rite of initiation whereby those who received it were dedicated or pledged to the Lord. Just like the white cross sewn onto the uniform of a Swiss confederate, Baptism publicly marked one off as a member of Christ's army, the militia Christi. It is, he said, our "visible (sichtbarlich) entry and sealing into Christ." (29)

But how could such a sign be applied to infants? Zwingli's answer, elaborated by Bullinger and Calvin, derived from the analogy between Circumcision and Baptism: Just as the children of God's people were circumcised in the Old Testament as a sign of the covenant, so the children of believers in the New Testament should be baptized as a sign of their ingrafting into the Christian Church. Jesus himself, it was said, submitted both to Circumcision and to the Baptism of John, thereby joining the rites of the two dispensations and signifying that they were of equal value. (30)

Some proponents of believers' Baptism have responded to this argument by denying outright the analogy between Circumcision and Baptism. According to this view, Circumcision was a pre-messianic sign given to the covenant people in order to mark them off from other nations until the advent of Christ. Newborn male members of the nation of Israel received the sign of Circumcision as a distinguishing mark of their role in propagating the chosen people. The meaning of Circumcision was exhausted with the birth of Jesus.

Baptists, however, have tended to interpret Circumcision in a broader, more positive light. First of all, even in the Old Testament, Circumcision was a symbol of an inward cleansing and renewal of the heart (Deut. 10:16; Jer. 4:4; Ezek. 44:7). This symbolic significance of Circumcision is carried forward into the New Testament as well. Thus Paul can refer to Gentile Christians as "the true circumcision" who worship God in the Spirit (Phil. 3:3).

The key text for this thesis is Colossians 2:11-12, the one New Testament passage where Circumcision and Baptism are brought into parallel position. Here Paul says that in Christ we have received a "circumcision made without hands." This has happened through a "putting off" (cf. the "putting on" of Christ in Baptism in Gal. 3:27) of the old life in the "circumcision of Christ," a reference either to the cross of Christ or to the forgiveness and inner transformation wrought thereby (cf. Col. 2:13). Having experienced the grace of God in this way, Paul continues, you were buried with Christ in Baptism and also raised with him-through faith. Thus regeneration, the inward Circumcision not made with hands, is the New Testament antitype for which literal Circumcision in the Old Testament was the type. (31)

The effort to identify Circumcision with Infant Baptism breaks down with the discontinuity between heredity and faith. As G. Ernest Wright once put it, "In the Old Testament the prophets pointed to the one Israel within the nation, whereas in the New Testament by a logical extension Israel became the 'seed of Abraham' by faith rather than heredity." (32) Clearly this is Paul's argument in Galatians 3:23-29. Had Circumcision been displaced with Infant Baptism in the economy of the Christian dispensation, Paul would have had a ready-made argument to use against the "foolish Galatians" who were tempted to "make a good showing in the flesh" (Gal. 6:12). He could have simply said to them: "Circumcision is a thing of the past. Have your children baptized rather than circumcized." Instead he proceeds on a different basis by relativizing Circumcision in light of its true New Testament fulfillment: not Baptism, but the new birth, regeneration. "For neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation" (Gal. 6:15).

If the Reformed doctrine of believers' Baptism shares with Luther a firm commitment to the coinherence of Baptism and faith, it resonates equally strongly with Zwingli and Calvin on the unity of God's people through the ages. The theology of grace which undergirds Reformed soteriology presupposes that there is one way of salvation, one Mediator between God and humankind, and one destiny for all the saints, that Heavenly City which hath foundations, the new Jerusalem. However, Baptism in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit points not only to the sovereignty of God in salvation, manifested in the one covenant of grace, but also to the eschatological fulfillment of that covenant in the incarnate Christ and the calling forth of his body, the Church. True, the people of God are one, "but the difference between the two 'administrations' is cataclysmic, for they are separated by a gulf and an unscalable height, the death of the Christ and the glory of his Easter, with the age of the Spirit ensuing." (33) To fail to recognize the diversity as well as the unity of the old and new dispensations is to succumb to a flattened, truncated view of redemptive history.

Historically, the doctrine of believers' Baptism has implied a gathered church, a community of intentional disciples marked off from the world by their commitment to Christ and to one another. Baptism is the liturgical enactment of the priesthood of all believers, not the priesthood of "the believer," a lonely, isolated seeker of truth, but rather of a band of faithful believers united in a common confession as a local, visible congregatio sanctorum (holy congregation). In the waters of Baptism we confess the priority of God's grace in bringing us to repentance and faith. In the midst of the baptized community we stand before God and intercede for one another. We proclaim God's Word and celebrate God's presence among us in worship, praise, and fellowship. As a part of the baptizing community we declare the overflowing mercy of God to all peoples everywhere, "showing forth the wonderful deeds of him who has called [us] out of darkness into his marvelous light" (1 Pet. 2:9).

Pastoral Concerns

The recovery of a robust doctrine of believers' Baptism can serve as an antidote to the theological minimalism and atomistic individualism which prevail in many credobaptist churches in our culture. Baptism is not only the solemn profession of a redeemed sinner, our "appeal to God for a clear conscience," as the New Testament puts it (1 Pet. 3:21); it is also a sacred and serious act of incorporation into the visible community of faith. Such an understanding of Baptism calls for the reform of our baptismal practice at several critical points.

First, Baptism should be restored to its rightful place as a central liturgical act of Christian worship. Too often it is tagged on to the beginning or end of the service as an appendage to the "main event." Many early Baptists, both in England and America, practiced the laying on of hands following Baptism. This consecration or setting apart recalls the baptismal rites of the early church in which confirmation, enacted through anointing with oil or the laying on of hands, was seen as an integral part of Baptism itself and not as a separate Sacrament. The service of Baptism should also be related to the reverent and frequent celebration of the Lord's Supper, understood not as a "mere symbol" performed in remembrance of an absent Savior, but rather as real communion with a risen Lord who invites and meets His redeemed people at this spiritual banquet.

Along with prayer and the reading of Scripture, the baptismal liturgy should include the personal confession of the one being baptized, preferably spoken from the baptismal waters, as well as the renewal of baptismal vows by the participating congregation. The tradition of an outdoor ceremony performed in a creek, river, or lake has much to commend it. The trauma of death and resurrection, which Baptism symbolizes, is hardly conveyed when things are too neat and convenient. Such is the case with a new-fangled baptistry in which the minister does not even enter the water but, standing behind a plastic shield, simply reaches over and submerges the baptismal candidate who is seated on a reclining chair!

Secondly, Baptism should be related directly to the discipline and covenantal commitments of the congregation. The role of catechesis in the process of baptismal preparation is also crucial if we are to avoid trivializing the meaning of Baptism. As James F. White has pointed out, "No system is immune from indiscriminate baptism." (34) As credobaptists have evolved from small sectarian beginnings to what might be called the catholic phase of our history, both the covenantal and disciplinary features of our Church life have become marginal to our identity. We have reacted against the harshness and legalism which has sometimes characterized this dimension of our tradition. Yet the faith we confess in Baptism requires us to deal with these issues. What are the standards of holiness which ought to distinguish a man or woman of God? What are the ethical implications of our corporate decisions? Can we recover a structure of accountability in our congregational life without relapsing into narrow judgmentalism?

Finally, believers' Baptism must be practiced alongside a proper theology of children. While there is no hereditary right to salvation or church membership inherent in the circumstances of one's birth, children of believing parents do stand in a special providential relationship to the people and promises of God. John Tombes, a seventeenth-century Reformed Baptist, spoke of the privileged status of such children who are "born in the bosom of the church, of godly parents, who by prayers, instruction, example, will undoubtedly educate them in the true faith of Christ." (35)

Jesus took a special interest in children, received them into his arms, and blessed them. He did not baptize them. It is right that the children of Christian parents be set aside in a service of infant consecration in which the parents, along with the congregation, pledge to bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. We should always be sensitive to the evidences of God's grace in their tender years and encourage their early interest in prayer, the reading of Holy Scripture, and the life of the Church. However, because biological childhood can never be transformed into spiritual childhood, we do not say to our children, "Be a good Christian child," but rather "Repent and believe the gospel." The spiritual awakening and discernment of children, even within the same family, do not proceed at a uniform pace. Thus Christian parents and ministers of the Church must ever be vigilant in the nurture and counsel they offer.

The salvation of children, like that of adults, is the gift of God. This divine self-giving is celebrated in a baptismal hymn written by Robert T. Daniel:

Lord, in humble, sweet submission,
Here we meet to follow thee:
Trusting in thy great salvation,
Which alone can make us free.



Nought have we to claim as merit;
All the duties we can do
Can no crown of life inherit:
All the praise to thee is due.



Yet we come in Christian duty,
Down beneath the wave to go;
O the bliss! the heavenly beauty!
Christ the Lord was buried so.