The reason my blog is called "The Worst Baptist" is because of the reception I have had in many Baptist spaces to some of my views, mostly on matters of application. I disagree broadly with Evangelical trends concerning political matters, I'm still a bit more Charismatic than many Baptists who don't have a background in Pentecostalism (and some that do), and I have an anti-authority streak you could land a plane on. These, and other (often related) matters, put me at odds with my Baptist brethren, and have raised suspicions about my true affiliations more than once. So the name of the blog is kind of a joking acknowledgement of that. I don't actually believe I'm the worst Baptist, I am simply comfortable knowing that there are those who would view me as certainly among the worst of the Baptists.

But the fact remains that, regardless of how good or bad I am at being a Baptist, I am a Baptist. And part of the reason I ended up among the Baptists in the first place is that I affirm the Baptist view of baptism. Which doesn't take very long to say, certainly not long enough for its own blog post. But I was asked a little while back by a Lutheran friend to explain the Baptist view of baptism, so I'm going to take this opportunity to do so.

The English word baptize is just a transliteration of the Greek word βαπτιζω (baptizo), which means to immerse and wash. It is only used in the New Testament to signify a ritual immersion, so it may have taken on a certain connotation in the culture of first century Palestine, but even under these conditions the actual meaning of the word always found its root in immersion. The early church took an existing practice of ceremonial immersion and saw in it a picture of redemption and applied it as such. As far as we are concerned, the Baptist practice of baptism by immersion is little more than a return to this practice.

That is not to say there isn't some degree of wiggle room here. Technically speaking, one of the possible meanings for βαπτιζω is washing, and washing doesn't technically always include immersion. Nor does every form of Jewish ceremonial washing include immersion, at least not of the whole person; it is possible that the practice being described in scripture was more like non-immersive methods of ceremonial washing. However, given that it was not the only word used for washing, and that it is primarily used for immersion and has clear ties to βαπτω (bapto), which means to dip, I maintain the historical Baptist position that the scriptures which use the term are most easily read as involving immersion.

As will be discussed later, the Didache (the earliest known non-Bible writing of Christian teaching) also discusses baptism. In this instance, it demands immersion (in running water), and allows for the pouring of water over the head of the baptized only in the instance where absolutely no better method can be performed (1). It is not only the wording of scripture then, but also the practice of the early church, that baptism done properly relied on immersion or the closest one could come to immersion.

The result of this is that I, as a Baptist, not only insist on practicing baptism by immersion, but cannot accept a baptism delivered by another means. Baptist churches generally have a requirement that a person be baptized in order to be accepted as a member of the church; if someone is joining a Baptist church and points to their being sprinkled as a baby, I and the bulk of Baptists hold that they have not met that requirement and must be baptized. This isn't strictly because of mode, however. It also comes back to whether or not what was administered to them was even theirs to receive.

Baptists believe that baptism should be reserved only for those who have made a confession of faith. As I've discussed before, this is related to our belief that the covenant community only includes those who have been redeemed, that is, those who have saving faith in Christ.

​Ultimately, what this comes down to is the nature of the new covenant in Christ. You see, it is generally agreed upon by the various denominations within Christianity that baptism is a sign of entry into the covenant community of Christ (some hold it as more than a sign, but none hold it as not at least a sign; that is, they may hold it as a sign and as something greater, but it is always a sign, and as a sign it is always a sign of entry into the community). Therefore, the question of who gets baptized and who doesn't, and when baptism should be applied, ultimately comes down to the question of who is in the covenant community and when they enter it. Baptism should be applied to a person who is entering the covenant community at the time when they enter; defining one category will inherently define the other. The Baptist (and Baptist-adjacent) view is that the covenant community is composed only of those who have been redeemed by the blood of Christ; there are other views which hold a different view of who belongs to the covenant community, and therefore who receives baptism.

Now, in my last post I argued for a definition for the church that is incompatible with a view that anyone not yet saved is part of the covenant community, but I want to lean a bit more into how that plays out here. Paul did baptize people into bodies that were not yet churches, see for instance the story of Philippi in Acts 16. Here, Lydia and her household are baptized on their reception of the gospel, and the jailer and his household are baptized on conversion, but the body was still not yet a church when Paul left the city. Which would suggest that the local church and the covenant community are not perfect synonyms, and usually the language used is that baptism is part of entry into the church. But I have used the phrasing 'covenant community' on purpose in the paragraph above; that is, we baptize into the body of Christ, of which the local church is an expression. Essentially, you can have a covenant community where there are believers gathered for the advance of the gospel in service to Christ, but it is not a church until it reaches a certain level of establishment. The definition of 'church' is a refinement of the definition of a 'covenant community,' in which all churches are covenant communities but not all covenant communities are churches. But the fact remains that the covenant community must be composed of those who are actually within the covenant.

Astute readers will note that I cited a passage often used to argue for the baptism of infants. The argument essentially goes that, since whole households were baptized, we can reasonably assume children were included, and therefore Paul baptized children. But assumptions cannot guide us here. The fact is that households are not ever guaranteed to have children in them, even in our modern day, and especially then. At the time of writing the Acts accounts, the concept of a household included everyone who participated in the life of the home, which included extended family and servants. Note also that the description of baptizing whole households happens in the context of people who were in certain stations of society. These are people like a rich woman, a jailer who was tasked with significant responsibility, a centurion (encountered by Peter) with a body of servants actively discussed in the text. Their households absolutely did include more than merely themselves and a possible spouse, but there is no reason to believe that this must have included children. There were, in all cases, enough people in the home to use a broad term such as 'household' without the addition of infants. We cannot, therefore, safely assume there were children being baptized in those instances, and the rest of the New Testament offers no support for the baptism of children. Even the statement that "the promise is for you and your children," as is sometimes cited by pedobaptists, is a statement of scope and perpetuity rather than a statement of infants as members of the body, as evidenced by the rest of the statement, "Repent, and each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off, as many as the Lord our God will call to Himself." (Acts 2:38-39, NASB). That is, the promise being tied to baptism here is for those who are brought to Christ, regardless of generation or location.

Where the Bible offers no direct support for the baptism of infants, it does consistently address churches as places where the members are assumed to be in Christ. In every letter of the New Testament, the recipients are held to the standard that they have already accepted the gospel of Christ, and at no point is there discussion of people being part of the church but not saved by Christ, unless it is an urging to remove them from the church. Further, the teachings of the early church did not align with the idea of infant baptism. Consider the way baptism is described in the Didache, where baptism happens "after first explaining all these points," that is, the preceding body of the Didache, and the command to "require the candidate to fast one or two days previously"(2). Both elements cited here operate only within an environment where the one being baptized has some ability to receive and respond to instruction.

All told, then, the Bible contains no stated baptism of infants and has no knowledge of a definition of the church which includes those not yet saved, and the known practices of the early church required a candidate for baptism to be capable of receiving instruction and following that instruction. "But," one may argue, "what about Jesus' command not to forbid the children from coming to Him?" And to this I would state simply that we don't. We point our children to Christ, we encourage them to rely on Him for salvation and rejoice in Him for His goodness, and we baptize children as soon as they make a confession of faith. The only way to read this behavior as keeping children from Christ is to operate on the understanding that baptism itself carries the power to bring people to Christ.

In every instance of baptism in scripture, it occurs after the person has repented. This should, itself, be sufficient evidence that baptism affirms salvation but does not confer it, except for one statement in the Bible that requires a moment of discussion. This is the statement in 1 Peter 3:21 that "baptism now saves you." Let us begin by looking at the statement in context.

This is part of a lengthier section, which continues both before and after the quoted section, in which Peter is urging his readers to proper conduct in service to Christ, and the quoted verses immediately follow the example of Christ suffering for righteousness rather than for doing evil. This statement, then, exists within the argument for Christian living, and was written to support that call. The point here is the example of Christ and how that relates to our lives. So why does Peter state the saving power of baptism?

In short, he doesn't. Note the 'corresponding to that" bit in verse 21; he is making a direct connection with the thing he has just said, which was the aside about Noah. That is, he is saying that baptism saves you in the same way Noah was saved in the days of the flood. But Noah was not saved by the waters, nor by the passing through the waters, but by that which brought him safely through the water. The baptism itself, as Peter describes it, is an appeal to God, and it is the work of Christ bringing us safely through the waters of judgment that saves us. The claim that this supports baptism as itself saving is tenuous; it is, I would argue, more natural to the context to read this statement as a reminder of our salvation which was bought by Christ and displayed in baptism as we consider the call to Christian conduct.

Taken all together, then, I can find no argument for a baptism that does not align with Baptist teaching. Baptism is by immersion, administered to those who have already been saved, as a declaration of that grace rather than a delivery of said grace.

The first few things I would want to affirm will be fairly straightforward, as I hold pretty orthodox views on the basics of Christianity. These are things that, for the most part, are not really contested within Christianity, and I would go so far as to say that these cannot be laid aside without abandoning Christianity. As such, I'm just going to toss all of these into one post and then focus on more secondary and/or controversial topics for the remainder of the series.

The Christian faith stands or falls on the resurrection of Christ, and this is where I started when I began my deconstruction phase. I did not consider anything short of a literal, physical resurrection from the dead to be acceptable; if Christ was dead, or never existed, then I was prepared to throw the whole religion out as baseless and false. If Christ did not exist, then all of Christianity is built on a lie; if He died and stayed dead, He failed to prove Himself to be God in flesh, and therefore Christianity is built on a lie. A symbolic or metaphysical resurrection is not even worth considering, as it cannot be verified and means essentially nothing. I recently saw a tweet where someone asked, "if it was absolutely, undeniably, 100% demonstrated tomorrow that Christ was still dead in a grave, how would that affect your faith?" and I read through response after response of people saying it wouldn't do anything to their faith.

I don't know what their faith is, but it isn't the one Paul declared would be in vain if Christ had not been raised.

I looked at the gospels as historical documents, because that's fundamentally what they claim to be. I could go into detail in another post, but I was convinced that they were faithful recollections of real events, with Luke and John having the most convincing lines of argument for me. Luke because of his research; the number of details that Luke includes that support his claim to be operating from eyewitness interviews was staggering. Luke stated outright that his goal was to ensure his reader(s) could have confidence in the teachings they've received, and he makes sure to name sources, include stories that other gospels didn't include that show Christ interacting with people beyond the disciples, provide geographic and cultural details that improve clarity, and (as he continues into Acts) distinguish between the things he personally witnessed and the things he didn't. John stood out to me for his honesty and intimate familiarity with the story, how he really turns his focus to who Christ is and lets the person of Jesus stand out on the page even more than the specific things Jesus did or what order exactly He did them. The bit where John and Peter run to the tomb and John is the only writer who records that, well actually, he won that race, but that's an aside; details like that drove home that this was a real person telling real stories about his own real experiences, show a bit of the character of a man who wants to note that he ran faster than his friend, but is willing to admit hesitance to actually enter the tomb.

Incidentally, and this isn't a core doctrine, it's just a side note here, but John is also why I believe in a very early dating of the gospels, which was important to my acceptance of their claims. There is no dispute among scholars, Christian or secular, that John was written after the synoptic gospels, and almost certainly after Acts. Everyone agrees that John wrote last. A great many people, however, put John after 70 ad, and I don't. My reason isn't historical or based on any specific papyrus or anything--so take it how you will--but rather it's literary. As a writer, I am struck by the fact that John has no apparent sense of dramatic tension. He shows throughout his writings that he is a writer who cannot allude to something and then wait to reveal what he's alluded to. Consider this segment of John 2:

I want to note two things about this passage. The first is that John, at the very beginning of his gospel, gives away the ending because this is the type of writer he is. Jesus has alluded to His resurrection and John, writing about it later, simply cannot contain the urge to tell us exactly what this is a reference to and exactly how you, dear reader, should respond to that. The second is that the writer who cannot hold onto spoilers, who cannot help but point to the fulfillment of anything hinted at in his text, does not connect a conversation that predicts the destruction of the temple to the actual destruction of the temple. Even when he points out that Jesus' primary point here was to talk about Himself rather than the temple, he doesn't contrast that with the natural post-70 reading of the passage that would remind people of the temple's destruction. It gets no mention, not even as a thing to be corrected. If John is the kind of writer that I have claimed he is, if he's the kind of writer I see when I read him, the only explanation for this oversight is that John did not yet know about the literal destruction of the temple when he wrote it. This, in my mind, dates his gospel to before 70, which means all the other gospels are even earlier, and this serves to help the case of gospel validity. That Matthew, Mark, and Luke all wrote and distributed their accounts, with names and sources and identifying details, during the lifetime of eyewitnesses and people who knew where Jesus had been buried, and no one trotted out His body or wrote any damning contradiction or managed to show any evidence to the contrary, is a fact that I cannot ignore. If Jesus was a fictional character, or still dead, then the opponents of the church would have held all the cards and could shut these claims down just as quickly as they shut down the claims of other contemporary false messiahs. That they didn't means that the story of Jesus Christ was different in a way that ensured they couldn't. And that way must be that the accounts were true. Jesus Christ really walked the earth, really taught crowds, really performed miracles, really died, and really rose from the dead, and those closest to Him really had their entire lives changed to such a degree that they couldn't help but tell the world what they'd experienced in His presence.

Everything else is built on this.

In the most recent sermon I've delivered, I claimed that everything we know of God the Father we know through Christ. This is because I was specifically talking about knowing God the Father at that time; it would be more accurate, as a general statement, to say that everything we know of the Godhead, the supernatural, and even our own fundamental natures, we know through Christ. When God the Father speaks, it is Jesus' voice we hear. When God the Spirit makes us aware of truth, it is God the Son He is delivering. When human writers sat down to put the scriptures into writing, it was the Eternal Living Word that filled their minds and found translation in the act of recording. This is, I maintain, the fundamental nature of God the Son's function in the Godhead: He reveals and realizes. His death and resurrection are revelatory at their core, displaying the weight of our sin and the love of God for us and the grace that He has available to cover that sin; and in doing that work, He realizes (that is, makes into reality) the salvation of God's people. As the means by which all things are created, He reveals the creative purposes of God and realizes them, and as the One for whom all things are made, He reveals the God-centered order of creation and realizes the God-directed purpose of creation. He is both the light that shows us what God intends us to see and the means by which the revealed is made concrete. The credibility of God the Son, then, is paramount. If there was any deceit or falsehood in Him (and, therefore, in His words), if anything we know of Him is false, then we can know nothing He speaks on with certainty. The resurrection of Christ proves that He is who He says He is and will do what He says He will do. By proving Himself to us, He assures us that He is the credible source of all His other claims. Now, having come to understand that credibility, we can look at what He has revealed.

Third, that a proper relationship with the Father is characterized by allegiance* to Him alone, through Christ, empowered by the Holy Spirit. God will not split our affections, and will be second to nothing. Submission to Him is submission of all that we are, and we become all we were designed to be in the process. I tell people that I'm evangelizing to that I'm not just giving them a chance to escape Hell someday, but rather, I'm asking them to lay absolutely everything at the feet of Christ; our lives, our histories, our skills, our goods, our relationships, our bodies, our identities, our views and habits and desires and goals, everything that defines our sense of self, absolutely everything is given over and nothing is held back. All that we can rightly have when He sends us into the world as a redeemed soul is that which He gives back to us, which always includes a body to stand with and a Father to love and a King to bow before and an eternity to enjoy all of it. I am asking them to consider the person they have been so far utterly dead, and to start a brand new life, whatever that may mean in God's plans for us. Everything else, everything but Him, falls in line behind this overarching drive to be who He has called us to be and live as He has called us to live and do as He has called us to do; and anything that contrasts with that purpose, regardless of how comfortable or important it has been to us so far, must be dropped aside. In salvation, we are not merely recipients of a transaction, we are adopted, and while I will go into this more in the next post, the basic idea here is that we are brought into a new family and held to the expectations and identity of that family.

These, I believe, are the basics of the Christian faith. Everything else stems from them or explains them in more detail. All our models, all our atonement theories, all our theological frameworks and terminology find their soul here. Here we have creation, fall, and redemption; here we have God and man and our need for Him and His love for us. Here we have the Bible, in which God the Son reveals God and ourselves and what God has done and how we respond to that work, which can have no falsehood without sacrificing its essential purpose. In these things we must have unity and unwavering adherence; any deviation from this, any different Christ, any other gospel, any allegiance placed equal or higher than God, any ultimate source of truth other than the Father revealed through the Son through the lens provided by the Holy Spirit, is not Christianity. It may share many things with us, but it is not of us.

The church of Ephesus comes first, and the promise they receive goes all the way to the beginning of scripture. Mankind is created and placed in the Garden of Eden, this paradise where they can live in community with God Himself, but they allow sin to enter into their lives and the world and have to be removed. Now, we tend to talk about how they had to be removed because they couldn't remain in God's presence, and there's truth to that, but the passage actually describes a more specific motive: Adam and Eve needed to lose access to the Tree of Life.

Now, we see later in Revelation that this is not a return to the literal Garden of Eden. The New Jerusalem is a city, not a garden. But it does have the streams of flowing water, it does have the Tree of Life, and most importantly, it has the people of God living in the presence of God without sin. It is in this context that Hebrews, which concerns itself with a significant section on the day of rest coming for the people of God through Christ, presents the fullness of that rest being realized.

This rest, according to Hebrews, is found in Christ for those who will believe on Him. This is placed in contrast to the generation that wandered in the wilderness after the exodus from Egypt, who contended with God and failed to trust in His promises and provision. But it is in the presence of God, in true community with Him like there was in the Garden and will be again in the New Jerusalem, that the rest God promises will be fully realized. This is our first point about salvation: it is a restoration, a return to the perfect design of God and community with Him.

Revelation paints a very vivid picture of those who remain enemies of God being cast into the lake of fire, called the second death, followed immediately by the redeemed going to dwell with God forever. The fundamental promise being made to the church of Smyrna, then, is that the saved have no fear of final separation from God and can trust in the eternal life He offers. The contrast is set forth in the narrative of Revelation, and promised here in chapter 2, but is given in a very clear and concise way by Peter. In his second letter, Peter talks about how unrighteous people and the corrupted natural order will be destroyed by fire, and then promises that those who are in Christ need not fear that because they can look beyond to the new life that awaits them.

At a quick stroke, the promise to the church of Pergamum seems a bit odd. What is this hidden manna, and why a stone with some name on it?

The manna is a theme that gets some development earlier in scripture, though it isn't as strongly recurring topic. In fact, there are really only two places we need to go to get the general thrust of the story so far. The first is during the wandering in the wilderness after the exodus from Egypt, when the people of Israel were in a barren place and hungry. God sustained them with provision in the form of a miraculous bread that appeared with the morning dew that they simply gathered. While there is very little discussion of the manna after that point in scripture, it certainly left a mark on the culture, because it gets cited after Jesus feeds the 5,000. He performs the miracle, He and His disciples ship out at night, and the people find them the next day and ask for more bread as a sign. A relevant part of that conversation includes:

Later, they grumbled among themselves about Jesus proclaiming that He was the bread that came down from Heaven. They got Jesus' point, even if they didn't like it: while the manna was a very real and effective sustenance for the people of God, there is a better sustenance delivered by God in the person of Jesus Christ. The promise of hidden manna, then, is a promise that ties back to the earlier promises of eternal life, with a focus on Christ as the giver and sustainer of that life. In 1 John, the author of both the epistle and the gospel revisits this topic when he tells us, "And the testimony is this, that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He who has the Son has the life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have the life" (1 John 5:11-12, NASB).

Thus, the promise delivered through the church is Pergamum is not simply some bread and a stone, but an imperishable life founded on Christ and a new identity found in Him. The redeemed can trust that our lives are grounded on the solid rock of Christ, because He is both the giver and sustainer of life as well as the author of the promises that life contains.

The message to Thyatira is a bit more straight forward. Jesus promises authority over the nations and, as the morning star frequently represents, a position of some glory. 1 Peter 1:12 notes a similar theme, in recognizing that the saints of old looked forward to the fullness of salvation and that the nature of what we receive is so great that even angels long to see it. But while the idea of us receiving authority and glory will be revisited here, they are not widely common themes in the general epistles. When they arise, in fact, they are generally pointing beyond us. Consider, for instance, John's words just one chapter earlier, during his greeting.

Any glory or authority we may receive is second in importance to that which Christ receives. We can trust that this promise is true, that God will grant us to rule with Him and that He will glorify us in the end, but there seems to be an almost subconscious hesitance by the authors of the general epistles to let us ever think about that without immediately turning our eyes to the One who deserves all authority and all glory. This is a stark reminder that not only is Christ the means by which our salvation comes, but that salvation is ultimately for His glory and not our own. I would do us no favors in presenting it any other way.

The book of life, again, points to eternal life; confession of the name includes both glory and endorsement, and we can ask for no greater endorsement than that of God the Son. Instead of revisiting these concepts, though, look at the first clause in that sentence, that we will be clothed in white garments. This is a promise of purity, that we will be washed clean, that the one who overcomes (that is, the one who believes on Jesus as per our opening verse) will be sanctified and made whole. Hebrews, a book largely about salvation and redemptive history, touches on this a number of times but few as concisely as "by this will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all" (Hebrews 10:10 NASB). The blood of Christ washes us clean, this is the means by which we are sanctified, and we have assurance given to the church of Sardis that this will be perfectly completed.

We have here new information on the new identity we have in Christ, that it involves being marked as one of God's, but this talk about being a pillar in the temple ties back to the promise in the message to Ephesus. Philadelphia's portion includes residing in the presence of God, but the temple language ties back to the apparently false form of Judaism they were dealing with. These people lived in the midst of what appears to be a false temple or synagogue, and are promised a place in the true temple of God.

This, the eternal temple where Christ stands forever, always in the presence of the Father and without need for further sacrifice or washing, is the temple that the redeemed can look forward to calling home. Where Ephesus was given an emphasis on the perfection and the closeness of God to His people, Philadelphia is given a picture of life in perfect and continual communion with God.

The church of Laodicea is a rich body. In the message to them, they have to be reminded that the wealth they have on Earth makes no dent on the poverty they have in spiritual matters, and that they are 'lukewarm' in their devotion to God. There is much that can be said about what it means to be lukewarm, but turning to verse 21 we see that the church is given a vision of something far greater than the riches they are relying on. After all, the throne of Christ is no small seat of power, but as Peter describes it:

Angels, authorities, and powers are subject to the throne of Christ. The things of this world that we seek are too small, they are as nothing compared to the vast riches we have in Christ. To the church of Laodicea, and any of a similar mindset, the desire for earthly wealth is a distraction from the fullness of what awaits those who put their hope in Christ.

The overarching thread of salvation woven throughout the general epistles, though, is that this is all through and for Christ, and as He is better than anything we have on this world, so His salvation is greater than anything we can have through other means, and the weight of our treatment of salvation is greater than how we handle any other subject. This is why false teachers are viewed in such a harsh light: what they do with the gospel is objectively far more important than what they do with anything else. We cannot honor God or do any ultimate good if we will not handle this matter well, and we cannot handle it well if Christ is not the focus of all of it.

In Christ, through the salvation He offers, we have a new and better identity, one that is pure and washed free of all sin and corruption, that includes authority and coming glory, that allows us to reside joyfully in the presence of God forever, without fear of further pain or death. This is founded on the work of Christ and grounds everything we are and everything we do. Let us look forward with joy and expectation, patiently awaiting the fullness of this great salvation, as James reminds us:

If we are truly grounding ourselves on this promise and on patiently waiting for it, our lives will be impacted. This will be the focus of the final post in this series.