A Christian's Pocket Guide to Baptism

The Water that Unites

Robert Letham

• Publisher: Christian Focus Publication
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781781910924

PART ONE

FOUNDATIONAL PRINCIPLES

Baptism is a matter often fraught with discord and strife. One popular book described it as ‘the water that divides.’¹ This is a tragedy, since it is the sign of our union with Christ and his church. It should be a focus for union rather than division. Yet I have known many people who have been excluded from church membership and ministry because their baptism was not held to conform to what was regarded as biblical. How can this division be overcome? Is this a simple matter, to be resolved if only everyone were to submit to the plain and obvious teaching of the Bible? Or are deeper questions involved?

When we disagree on biblical teaching it is important that we consider factors affecting the way we interpret the Bible, and so shape our understanding of doctrine. Our reading of Scripture is often governed by unconscious principles that influence what we can see in the text. Elsewhere I have argued that we can study the Bible until we are blue in the face but we will never come to an agreement on disputed questions such as whether infants are to be baptized until we have uncovered these factors.² Only then will we appreciate what drove the biblical authors and the church down the ages in its interpretation of the Bible. A key to reading a book of the Bible—or any document, for that matter—is for us to determine, as far as we can, what was the intention of the person who wrote it. Often our own cultural and philosophical assumptions can hamper this process. In this first section, we will ask how far our reading of Scripture is to be taken into account in understanding what baptism means and who should receive it.

We will also argue that not only the surface text of Scripture but its implications and entailments are part of its overall teaching. The church fathers constantly appealed to ‘the rule of faith’ in their preaching and teaching. By this they were maintaining that the way we read the Bible must always be checked against the central truths of the Christian faith. Moreover, since the Bible consists of two sections, integrally connected, we need to read it as a whole, canonically. This means that we need to grasp what baptism is and signifies against the background of the history of salvation as it unfolds in Old Testament and New Testament.

Again, since God created the entire universe, our salvation embraces matter as well as spirit. Consequently, the sacraments God has appointed—baptism and the Lord’s Supper in the New Testament—must not be dismissed as of only incidental significance in the Christian life but should be seen as integral to the way God ministers his grace to his church.

Finally in this first section we will examine the relationship between the individual and the corporate as it appears in both Testaments. In the Western world, we are accustomed to viewing ourselves as individuals. In the world of the Bible, people thought rather differently than we do. This issue affects the question of how we view the family, the household, and consequently children. The conclusions we draw will affect who we baptize. So these foundational principles are vital to grasp, since they often govern the way we read the Bible, understand its teaching and implement it in practice.

	Warning
	Don't Forget
	Stop and Think
	Point of Interest

1

INTERPRETING THE BIBLE:
THE TEXT AND ITS IMPLICATIONS

Many Christians are convinced that all we need to do is to open our Bibles and the answers will spring ready-made from the text. The truth is not entirely like that. The teaching of Scripture is rich and multi-layered and is found in two distinct, but inseparable, ways. There are explicit statements on particular matters. These are fairly clear, if taken in context. The gospel itself is presented like this in many places. John tells us that ‘God loved the world in this way, that he gave his only-begotten Son, so that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life’ (John 3:16). There are many similar statements in the Bible on a range of matters that are clear and decisive in themselves.

However, as one great Protestant confession put it, the whole counsel of God for his glory, man’s salvation, faith and life is not only expressly set down in Scripture but also ‘by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture.’ (Westminster Confession of Faith [WCF] 1:6).³ This is due to there being many things in the Bible that are hard to understand. Even the apostle Peter found the letters of Paul at times beyond his mental capacities (2 Pet. 3:16). Hence, prolonged thought and reflection is needed.⁴ For instance, the overall teaching of the Bible is held by the church down the centuries to give overwhelming voice to the fact that the one God exists indivisibly as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. However, no one sentence states it in so many words.

It may be a surprise that until the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, many heresies arose from the demand for exact support from explicit biblical statements. The trinitarian crisis of the fourth century is a leading example. Followers of Eunomius, a bishop who championed ideas similar to those of the earlier heretic Arius, demanded that the defenders of the doctrine of the trinity produce chapter and verse from the Bible to prove it. Arius and Eunomius both claimed that the Son, while creator, was himself created. He was a different being than God. Nowhere in Scripture was it said in so many words that he was one with the Father from eternity, they claimed. Arians, Eunomians, and Macedonians all appealed to Scripture, contending that the orthodox used unscriptural terms.⁵ Gregory of Nazianzus, in defending the doctrine of the trinity, replied ‘Over and over again you turn upon us the silence of Scripture.’ He pointed out that the Fathers, on the other hand, in their handling of the Bible, ‘have gone beneath the letter and looked into the inner meaning.’⁶ Instead, the heretics’ ‘love for the letter is but a cloak for their impiety.’⁷ Scripture uses metaphors and figures of speech. Slavery to a literal interpretation, Gregory said, is an erroneous exegetical and theological method.⁸ Ironically, the heretics favourite terms for God, ‘unbegotten’ and ‘unoriginate’ were not in the Bible at all.⁹

Closer to our day, B.B. Warfield remarked: ‘The re-emergence in recent controversies of the plea that the authority of Scripture is to be confined to its express declarations, and that human logic is not to be trusted in divine things, is, therefore, a direct denial of a fundamental position of Reformed theology, explicitly affirmed in the Confession, as well as an abnegation of fundamental reason, which would not only render thinking in a system impossible, but would discredit at a stroke many of the fundamentals of the faith, such e.g. as the doctrine of the Trinity, and would logically involve the denial of the authority of all doctrine whatsoever, since no single doctrine of whatever simplicity can be ascertained from Scripture except by the use of the process of the understanding.’¹⁰ Warfield’s point is vital. The church has the responsibility of thinking hard about the connections and entailments of the statements in the Bible.

A classic example of where biblical fundamentalism proved deadly is the case of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. They despised the pronouncements of the great ecumenical councils of the church, particularly the first councils of Nicaea (325 AD) and Constantinople (381 AD) which resolved the trinitarian crisis and expounded the church’s teaching on the trinity. Instead, the group preferred their own understanding of the Bible to the distillation of the biblical exegesis of the church expressed at both councils and confessed down the centuries. They started a journal, Studies in the Scriptures. What a fine sounding title! In reality it was designed to oppose the biblical profession of the Christian church over nearly two thousand years. In contrast to sects such as this, we must submit our biblical exegesis to that of others in the church (Eph. 5:21).

In short, in considering baptism—its nature and subjects—we need to think together the implications, entailments, and connections of a wide swathe of biblical truth. To what does this passage refer? How can we understand it in the historical and theological context of the book in which it occurs? How does it relate to other aspects of biblical revelation? This is to discern ‘the sense of Scripture’ as Gregory called it. Moreover, as with any topic we ought to ask what is the sense of the whole of Scripture, not merely an isolated text or a few passages here or there.

When thinking about baptism we should deal not only with the express statements of the Bible but also with the wider sense of Scripture that is entailed in these pronouncements.

2

INTERPRETING THE BIBLE:
THE OLD AND THE NEW

It is something of a truism that we have two Testaments but one Bible. This was an issue fought out in the second century when the church condemned Marcion’s rejection of the Old Testament as heretical. He held that the Old Testament portrayed a different ‘god’ than the god of the New Testament. The Old Testament deity—or demiurge—was the creator, a god of justice, law and wrath, fickle and cruel. The god revealed in the New Testament by Jesus was loving and gracious. Law was absolutely excluded. The most faithful exponent of this god was Paul together with his friend and colleague, Luke. So, for Marcion, the Old Testament was to be rejected, most of the New Testament was also suspect, while only the letters of Paul and, to a lesser extent, the compositions of Luke accurately reflected the truth.

The popularity of Marcion and his teachings forced the church to respond. His denigration of the Old Testament, and with it, the severance of creation and redemption seen in his proposition that there were two ‘gods,’ enabled the church to define the canon it had already received. The church recognized that the one God had a plan for our salvation that encompassed the whole of human history, from Adam to Abraham, Moses, and David, finding its fulfilment in the coming of the Son of God in Jesus Christ. Irenaeus, Tertullian and others were responsible for defending the faith against Marcion. It was clear to them, and to the church, that the Old Testament and New Testament stood together.¹¹ While there are elements of discontinuity between the two Testaments—and, above all, the New Testament is the fulfilment of what was pre-figured in the Old Testament—these must be seen in the context of their continuity.

GRACE—CONCEALED AND REVEALED

‘Grace, concealed in the Old Testament, is revealed in the New,’ wrote Augustine (On the Spirit and the Letter, 27). Entailed in this conclusion is the vital point that we cannot understand either Old Testament or New Testament aright in isolation from the other. Jesus’ own method of biblical interpretation was to see all parts of Scripture—the Old Testament as we now have it—as referring ultimately to himself. In Luke 24, following his resurrection, he explained to the disciples on the road to Emmaus that the law, the prophets and the psalms all spoke of him (Luke 24:25–7). Later that same day, to a larger gathering, he declared that all sections of the Old Testament referred to his sufferings and glory, and to the task of the church in preaching the gospel (Luke 24:44–7).

To appreciate the meaning of the New Testament, it is indispensable to have a grasp of the Old Testament. Matthew wrote his gospel to establish that Jesus is ‘the son of David, the son of Abraham’ (Matt. 1:1) and so the inheritor of the promises of the Abrahamic and Davidic covenants. He reinforces his history by indicating that Jesus fulfilled what was written in the Old Testament (Matt. 1:23, 2:5–6, 15, 23, 3:15, 5:17–20). The entire scope of his gospel is that the kingdom of God has now come and has extended to all nations, fulfilling the eschatological expectation of the Abrahamic covenant and so of the entirety of Israel’s covenant history (Matt. 28:18–20).

The Letter to the Hebrews is virtually incomprehensible apart from an understanding of the history of Israel, particularly the priestly system of Leviticus. The author argues that Christ is superior to the prophets, the angels, Moses, Aaron and the Levitical priests; he is our great high priest who has decisively completed the saving plan of God foreshadowed in the Old Testament.

The Book of Revelation is saturated in Old Testament imagery. Virtually every comment, every detail in the many visions, relates to some place in the Old Testament. Christ, who now in his ascended glory is the ruler of kings on earth (Rev. 1:5), completes the whole tapestry of Old Testament prophecy and apocalyptic imagery.

THE NEW COVENANT FULFILS
THE ABRAHAMIC COVENANT

Central to this whole sweep of redemptive history is God’s covenant. Made with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Yahweh renewed his covenantal commitment to their descendants at Sinai. Later, Jeremiah foretold that he was to make a new covenant (Jer. 31:31–33), bringing to fulfilment the Abrahamic covenant and his promise to Adam, writing his law on human hearts, and making effective and definitive atonement for sins.

This new covenant fulfils the covenants of the Old Testament, and is not a replacement. The protevangelium (the first announcement of the gospel) in Genesis 3:15 was fulfilled by Christ’s conquest of the devil. There God promised Eve that one of her offspring would deal a deathly blow to the serpent and his offspring. Jesus announced that this had taken place (John 12:31–2).

The new covenant fulfils the central promise of the Abrahamic covenant, in which God promised that the offspring of Abraham would be the means of worldwide blessing. Paul argues that justification by faith applied to Abraham and David as well as to us (Rom. 4:1–8). Abraham looked forward to the time when the covenantal promise God had made would be realized; this has happened now that Christ has come (Rom. 4:9–25, Gal. 3:6–18), for he is the offspring in whom all the nations are blessed (Gen. 12:1–3, Matt. 28:18–20).

The Westminster Confession of Faith affirms that the Mosaic covenant was an administration of the one covenant of grace.¹² Paul states that the law, given at Sinai, was not contrary to the gracious purposes of God in the Abrahamic covenant. It supplemented that covenant but did not replace it. ‘It was added because of transgressions until the seed should come to whom the promise had been made’ (Gal. 3:19). Since it was added, the original covenant remained in force; an addition is supplementary. The Mosaic covenant did not undermine the promise to Abraham in any way. It never propounded a different way of salvation, for that was utterly impossible after the fall; from that point on the whole world was guilty before God. Indeed, the Mosaic covenant pre-eminently displayed the grace exhibited in the Abrahamic covenant. Its provision for the forgiveness of sins was strikingly evident in the sacrificial system. At the moment the covenant was enacted, the people of Israel stampeded into idolatry (Exod. 32:1–35); if the covenant were a strictly legal one Israel would have been cast off right away. No, on virtually every page grace is evident in the midst of the legal cast of the Sinai administration. Yahweh’s forbearance with the repeated sins and apostasy of Israel and Judah is unmistakeable. The goal of that covenant was to lead the covenant people of God to their maturity with the coming of the promised mediator, foreshadowed in the sacrifices and ceremonies of the Mosaic cult. That mediator was the seed, the offspring, promised earlier to Abraham.

This continuity is nowhere more evident than in the new covenant, which entailed the writing of God’s laws on the heart instead of merely externally on stone tablets. Under Moses the law stood outside the covenant members; in the new covenant the law is written on the heart by the Holy Spirit (Jer. 31:31–3). The substance of the covenant is the same; its administration differs. Throughout grace is dominant, constituting God’s covenants after the fall, while the law regulates them. While there are obvious differences between the Mosaic covenant, established by Yahweh with Israel at Mount Sinai, and the new covenant instituted by Christ in the New Testament, there is also a prevailing continuity. As The Westminster Confession of Faith and the 1689 Baptist Confession describe it, the covenant of grace has a unity in both Testaments, while its administration differs.¹³

In 2 Corinthians 3:6-11 Paul compares his ministry with that of Moses, asserting that he is a second Moses. Paul’s ministry is superior to Moses’ since it achieves what Moses could not do. The latter was a purely external ministry, whereas Paul’s effects change. However, ...

Table of contents

• Testimonials
• Title
• Indicia
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part One: Foundational Principle
• Part Two: What Baptism Signifies
• Part Three: Conclusion
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Christian Focus