Devotional 148: The Mode of Baptism: Pouring or Sprinkling of Water

The Confession Read

The outward element to be used in this sacrament is water, wherewith the party is to be baptized, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, by a minister of the gospel, lawfully called thereunto.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 28, Section 2

Introduction

There is hardly a more common thing in all the world than water. It falls from the sky without our asking, it fills the rivers and the seas, it runs from every tap in every house, and it costs almost nothing. The poorest child can have all the water she needs, and the richest man can possess no finer water than she has. Water is the great leveller of the earth, abundant, ordinary, and free. And yet this is the element which the Son of God took into His hand when He instituted the sacrament of baptism, and this is the element which the Westminster divines, with the whole church of every age, confess to be the outward sign of our cleansing from sin. What we are to consider now is not whether baptism is a sign and seal of the covenant of grace, for we settled that in the first section of this chapter, but rather how this holy thing is to be done. The Confession answers that question with three careful strokes, and each one matters more than we might at first suppose. Baptism is to be performed with water, and with water alone. It is to be performed in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. And it is to be performed by a minister of the gospel, lawfully called to that work. The element, the name, and the man: these are the three threads that hold this sacred ordinance together, and if any one of them is broken, the whole thing unravels. Beloved, do not imagine that this is a merely technical matter, a question for committees and church courts and professors of liturgy. The way God has appointed to be worshipped is never a small thing, for the second commandment stands as a perpetual witness that the manner of our worship is a matter of life and death. What touches the administration of the sacraments touches the gospel itself, and when we understand why water, why this name, and why this man, we shall find ourselves standing at the very heart of the Christian faith. Consider, then, the shape of what lies before us, for these three clauses are not three scattered rules but a single whole. The element tells us what is applied, the name tells us in whose authority it is applied, and the minister tells us by whose hand it is applied. What, by whose authority, and through whom: these are the three questions that every sacrament must answer, and the Confession answers them all in a single breath. The water is the matter, the triune name is the form, and the lawful minister is the instrument, and none of the three may be altered without altering the ordinance itself. Let us take them in order, and let us not hurry, for the ground is holy.

Scripture Foundation

Let us begin where every right thought about baptism must begin, with the plain teaching of Scripture, and let the word of God be our guide at every point. When John the Baptist came preaching in the wilderness, the religious leaders of Jerusalem sent priests and Levites to ask him who he was. John 1:26 And his answer is striking for its humility: "John answered them, saying, I baptize with water: but there standeth one among you, whom ye know not." A little later he speaks again of the element he employs, and he is careful to distinguish his own ministry from the ministry of the One who was to come. John 1:33 "And I knew him not: but he that sent me to baptize with water, the same said unto me, Upon whom thou shalt see the Spirit descending, and remaining on him, the same is he which baptizeth with the Holy Ghost." Observe the precision of John's words. He baptizes with water, and he will not pretend otherwise. The water is real water, common water, drawn from the Jordan and poured upon the penitent. But John knows that water, in itself, can do nothing for the soul. The contrast he draws is between water and the Holy Ghost, between the sign and the thing signified. John applies the water, but Christ alone gives the Spirit. The Greek word here is hudor, the ordinary word for water, and it is used deliberately, without any hint that the water has been transformed into something mystical or magical. It remains water, and yet by the appointment of God it serves a holy purpose. This is the first lesson of our section: the element of baptism is plain water, and its whole dignity lies not in what it is, but in what God has appointed it to signify. There is a further refinement here that we must not miss. John insists, three times over, that he baptizes "with water," and in each instance the water is set in deliberate contrast with the superior baptism of Christ, who baptizes "with the Holy Ghost." John's water was the shadow; Christ's Spirit is the substance. And yet the shadow was not for that reason worthless, for it pointed forward to the One who stood among them. So it is with our baptism. The water is a shadow, and it will never be anything more than a shadow, but it is a shadow cast by a glorious substance, and it directs every eye that sees it toward the cleansing blood of Christ and the regenerating power of the Spirit. We see the same truth enacted in the desert when Philip met the Ethiopian eunuch. Acts 8:36 "And as they went on their way, they came unto a certain water: and the eunuch said, See, here is water; what doth hinder me to be baptized?" Here was no elaborate font, no consecrated oil, no procession, and no priestly ceremony. There was only a man, a believer, and water by the roadside. And that water was enough. Philip required only one thing of the man before the water could be applied, and the eunuch supplied it with a full heart: Acts 8:37 "I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God." Then, we are told, "they went down both into the water, both Philip and the eunuch; and he baptized him." How simple it all is, and how profoundly the simplicity speaks. The church did not need a river that had been blessed by a bishop, nor water mingled with salt and oil and chrism. The plain water of the desert sufficed, because the power of the sacrament resides in Christ's command and Christ's promise, and never in the physical properties of the element. When the eunuch saw water and cried out, "What doth hinder me?" the answer was nothing but faith, for the water was already waiting, common and free, as the gospel is common and free to every soul that believes. And let it be marked that the eunuch's confession of faith was made before the water touched his body, which is the true order of the gospel: first the heart believes, and then the body is washed, for the washing of the body without the faith of the heart is but a bathing of the flesh. But if the element is water, the form of the administration is more glorious still. Our Lord Himself fixed the words, and they have never been improved upon. Matthew 28:19 "Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." The Greek here deserves our closest attention, for a whole theology is compressed into three short words. The text does not say "in the names," as if the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost were three gods, each with his own separate name. It says "in the name," to onoma, one single name in the singular, and yet that one name belongs to three persons. The Father is not the Son, and the Son is not the Spirit, and yet the one name of the one living God covers them all. Baptism, therefore, is a confession of the Trinity. Every time a soul is brought to the water, the church speaks the great mystery of the faith: one God in three persons, equal in power and glory, and the sinner is baptized into the fellowship of all three. Let the singularity of that name sink into your soul, for it is the answer to every doubt about the God whom we worship. The church has never baptized in the names of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, as though she served three deities. She has always spoken one name, because there is one God, and the three persons are not three gods but the one God in the mystery of His triune being. This is why the formula stands unaltered from the day Christ first spoke it, and why a baptism performed in any other name, whether the name of a mere man or the name of Jesus only, is no Christian baptism at all. The words are not a spell whose syllables work by their own power; they are a confession, and a confession that leaves out the Father, or the Son, or the Holy Ghost has ceased to confess the God of Scripture. This is no small point, beloved, for the triune name is the very foundation of our salvation. We are saved by the Father who chose us, the Son who redeemed us, and the Spirit who applies that redemption to our hearts, and baptism, in placing the one name of the three upon us, declares that we belong to each of them and to all of them together. Paul traces this threefold work in a single verse that reads almost like a baptismal formula of its own: 1 Corinthians 6:11 "but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God." The washing, the sanctifying, the justifying; the name of the Son and the power of the Spirit and the will of the Father behind them all. Here is the katharismos, the cleansing, that water can only picture and the triune God alone can perform. Finally, the Confession tells us who may administer this ordinance: a minister of the gospel, lawfully called thereunto. This too is grounded in Scripture, for our Lord did not commit the administration of the sacraments to every believer indiscriminately. When He gave the great commission, He gave it to the eleven apostles, the first officers of His church, and through them to the ministers who would succeed them in lawful office. Ephesians 4:11 "And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers." The ascended Christ has given officers to His church, and to those officers, not to the congregation at large, belongs the public administration of the word and the sacraments. "For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ." The ministry is a work, and it is a work to which a man must be called, and it is a work by which the body of Christ is built up, and for that reason it is not to be taken up by any hand that pleases. Let us be clear about what this does and does not mean, for both errors lurk on either side of the truth. It does not mean that a minister's baptism possesses some virtue that a private baptism lacks, as though the water itself were charged with the man's holiness. The virtue lies in Christ's institution, never in the administrator's person, and an unworthy minister administers a true sacrament because the sacrament is not his but Christ's. Yet it does mean that the church's public ordinances belong to the church's public order, and that the minister alone, by virtue of his lawful call, stands in the place of Christ to preach and to baptize. A private Christian may teach his children and testify of Christ to his neighbor, but the public setting of the covenant seal upon a soul is the work of the office, and the office is a thing of order, and order is the gift of the ascended King to His church.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster divines wrote this section, they were not composing a new rule but confessing what the church had always received from her Lord. Yet they wrote with the sharp edge of controversy against their own times, and we shall only understand the section fully when we see the errors they meant to cut away. Three errors, in particular, stood in their sight, and each one is answered by one of the three clauses of our section. The first error was the corruption of the element. In the medieval church of the West, the simple washing with water that the Lord had appointed had been overlaid with a host of additions: consecrated oil, chrism, salt, spittle, the breathing of the priest, and a long train of exorcisms and ceremonies. The water, in effect, had been buried beneath the inventions of men. Against this the divines insisted that the outward element is water, and water alone. This was not a quarrel about aesthetics or simplicity for its own sake. It was an assertion of the sufficiency of Christ's appointment. What our Lord had commanded, they argued, needs no improvement from the hands of men, and what He had not commanded has no place in His worship. To add oil and salt to the water was to say, in effect, that Christ had not provided adequately for His own church, and that the water of baptism was not enough until human ceremony had completed it. The second error concerned the name. In the ferment of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there were voices, Socinian and otherwise, that denied the Trinity, and with the denial of the Trinity came a retreat from the triune formula of baptism. If there are not three persons in the Godhead, they reasoned, then why should we baptize in the name of three? And so some baptized in the name of Jesus only, and others dissolved the formula into something vaguer and less precise. Against this the divines held fast to the very words of Christ. The form of baptism is not a matter of indifference, for it is a confession, and a church that will not confess the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost has ceased to be a church at all. The triune name is the badge of orthodoxy written upon the forehead of every baptized soul. The third error concerned the minister. The Anabaptists of that age, and many a sectary besides, held that any believer might baptize, since baptism was, in their view, merely a profession of faith, and one man's hands were as good as another's. The divines answered that baptism is not a private act but a public ordinance of the church, and that the church's public ordinances are committed to the church's public officers. A minister must be lawfully called; he must not thrust himself into the office, nor be thrust into it by the mere favor of men, but must come to it by the orderly call of Christ through His church. This was no spirit of clerical pride, but a reverence for the order that Christ Himself established. The sacrament belongs to the whole church, but it is administered by the minister, just as the food of a household belongs to the whole family, but it is set upon the table by the hand of the steward appointed to that work. The phrase "lawfully called thereunto" carries the full weight of Presbyterian order. It means a man who has been examined, approved, and ordained by the laying on of the hands of the presbytery, set apart to the ministry of the word and sacraments. It is the divines' way of saying that the church is not a democracy of equals in which every voice and every hand has the same office, but a body with members and ministries, each appointed by Christ to its own work.

Theological Depth

Let us now go deeper, and let the doctors of our own tradition open the treasure that lies beneath these three clauses. Calvin, in treating of baptism, insists that the choice of water was not arbitrary. God could have chosen any element, but He chose the one that speaks most clearly of cleansing, for cleansing is the thing that baptism signifies. Water washes away the filth of the body, and thus it becomes a fit picture of the blood of Christ washing away the guilt of the soul. Calvin is careful, however, to preserve the distinction between the sign and the thing. The water does not contain the cleansing; it testifies to it, and the Spirit of God must work the reality of which the water is but the image. This is precisely the doctrine of our section, which confesses an outward element without ever confusing the outward with the inward, or the sign with the grace it signifies. Hodge, commenting upon this very section, unfolds the three clauses as three distinct affirmations, each of which is essential and none of which may be surrendered. The element, the formula, and the administrator: these are not indifferent details but the very form of the ordinance as Christ delivered it. Hodge presses the point that the regulative principle governs the sacraments no less than the preaching of the word. What God has appointed, we may use; what God has not appointed, we may not add. The element must be water because Christ named water. The words must be the triune name because Christ spoke those words. The administrator must be a lawful minister because Christ committed the sacrament to His officers. To alter any of these is to alter the ordinance, and what we then administer is no longer, strictly speaking, Christian baptism. Shaw, in his Exposition, draws out the meaning of the lawful call with particular care, for here the principle of church order touches the consciences of men. He observes that the sacraments are seals of the covenant, and a seal can only be affixed by one who has authority to affix it. A private person may speak of the gospel to his neighbor, and may even lead him to Christ, but he may not set the seal of the covenant upon him, any more than a private citizen may stamp the king's seal upon a public document. The seal belongs to the king's appointed officers, and so the sacrament belongs to Christ's appointed ministers. This is not a slight upon the piety of ordinary believers, who may be holier than many a minister, but a recognition that the ordinances of the church are public acts governed by public order. Turretin directs his fire against the Roman corruption of the element, and his argument is a model of Reformed reasoning. He grants that the ceremonies which Rome added to baptism might have some antiquity behind them, but antiquity is not the rule of worship; the word of God is. Christ commanded washing with water, and He commanded nothing else. The additions of oil and salt and chrism are the commandments of men, and our Lord's own rebuke stands against them: in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. The simplicity of the Reformed rite is not poverty but obedience, and the plain water of baptism is more glorious than all the oils of Rome, because it is the very thing that Christ appointed. Murray, whose Christian Baptism we first opened in the previous section, gives us the deepest insight into the formula. He observes that to be baptized into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost is to be brought into union with the triune God. The name is not a mere label; in Scripture the name of a person is that person himself revealed, his character and his authority and his fellowship. To be baptized into the name is to be placed under the authority, into the fellowship, and within the saving work of the three persons of the Godhead. Murray thus shows that the formula is not an empty recitation but a covenant transaction, a real deliverance of the soul to God and a real taking of the soul by God. Owen, in his writings on the nature of the church, supplies the last link in the chain. He argues that the administration of the sacraments is inseparably joined to the office of the ministry, because the ministry is the standing ordinance by which Christ builds and governs His church. The word and the sacraments go together, as the gospel and its seals, and the man who preaches the one in Christ's name is the man who administers the other in Christ's name. Owen would not permit a woman or an unordained man to administer baptism, not because he doubted their grace, but because the ordinance is not the possession of any private person but of the whole church in her public order. Here the tradition speaks with one voice from Calvin to Owen to Hodge: the element, the name, and the minister are all of Christ's appointment, and all are to be kept exactly as He delivered them. Through all these testimonies there runs a single golden thread, and it is this: the sacraments are Christ's, not ours. He chose the water, and we may not add oil. He spoke the name, and we may not substitute another. He appointed the minister, and we may not seize the office. What would we think of a servant who improved upon his master's written instructions, or a herald who changed the king's proclamation because he thought his own words finer? The Reformed answer to every corruption of baptism, whether Roman or sectarian, is the same: our Lord has spoken, and it is for us to obey, to keep the ordinance as He delivered it, and to find our safety in the exactness of His command rather than in the inventions of our own piety.

Puritan Application

Now let us bring this truth home to our own hearts, for doctrine is never given to us merely to be admired, but to be lived, and the Puritans teach us that every doctrine has its corresponding duty. First, rest in the plainness of your God. There is a deep comfort in the fact that God meets us in water. He might have demanded silver or gold or some costly offering as the sign of His grace, and then the poor would have been shut out of the comfort of the gospel. But He chose the one thing that every creature possesses, so that no one might say the sign was beyond his reach. The same grace that chose a stable for the birth of His Son chose water for His sacrament, and in both we learn that God's glory is not ashamed of low things. Do not despise the water because it is common, for it is the commonness of the water that proclaims the freeness of the gospel. The cleansing it pictures is offered to all without money and without price. Second, rehearse your own baptism as a covenant made with the triune God. The name that was spoken over you was not an empty sound. It was the name of the Father who elected you, the Son who died for you, and the Spirit who quickens you, and that name was placed upon you as a claim and a comfort. Consider, then, whether you are living under that name. Does the Father have your heart, the Son your faith, and the Spirit your obedience? When you are tempted to doubt whether you belong to God, return to the water and to the name that was spoken there, and say with the apostle, I am not my own, for I have been bought with a price, and baptized into the name of the Three. Third, reverence the ministry of the church, and do not lightly esteem the office of the man who preaches and baptizes. It has become the fashion of this age to despise office and order, to imagine that every believer is his own priest and that the church needs no ministers. But the Scriptures teach otherwise, and the Confession after them. The minister is Christ's gift to the church, and the sacraments he administers are administered by Christ's own appointment. Esteem him, then, for his work's sake, and do not think it a small thing that a man has been lawfully called to stand between God and His people and to set the seal of the covenant upon the sons and daughters of the church. Fourth, beware of adding to or taking away from what Christ has appointed in His worship. The temptation is always with us, for the flesh loves ceremony and the devil loves invention. We want to make worship more moving by our own devices, or more contemporary by our own cleverness. But the second commandment forbids it, and the regulative principle warns us that God will be worshipped only as He has commanded. Water is enough, because Christ appointed water. The triune name is enough, because Christ spoke it. Let us be content with the simplicity of the gospel, and let us not deck the bride of Christ with the ornaments of our own devising. Fifth, and last, let the water of baptism send you to the cleansing it signifies. The water that touched your body can do nothing for your soul; it can wash the skin but not the conscience. What you need is the inward washing of regeneration, the cleansing blood of Jesus Christ that alone can make a guilty heart clean. Have you known that cleansing? Has the Spirit taken the reality of which the water was but the picture, and applied it to your soul? If not, do not rest in your baptism as if it were your salvation, for the sign without the thing signified is an empty vessel. Flee to Christ, who alone can baptize with the Holy Ghost, and let the water of your baptism be to you a daily summons to the fountain opened for sin and for uncleanness.

Prayer

O Lord our God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, one God in three persons, we bless Thee for the gift of holy baptism, wherein Thou hast set the sign of Thy covenant upon us with common water and with Thine own great name. We thank Thee that Thou hast not made Thy grace costly to obtain, but hast met us in the lowliest of elements, that none might be shut out from the comfort of the gospel. We confess that we have too lightly esteemed the water and the name and the ministry that Thou hast appointed, and we pray Thee to give us a reverence for Thine ordinances and a holy fear of adding to them or taking from them. O Father, who didst choose us in Thy Son before the foundation of the world, we rejoice that Thy name is upon us. O Son, who didst wash us in Thy blood and redeem us to God, we rest in Thy cleansing. O Holy Spirit, who dost apply that cleansing to our hearts, work in us the reality of which the water was but the sign. Make us to live under the name into which we have been baptized, that our lives may adorn the doctrine of God our Saviour in all things. Give us, we pray, a right esteem for the ministers of Thy gospel, that we may honor the office and receive the word and sacraments as from Thy own hand. And if any who hear these words have received the sign but not the grace, have been washed with water but not with the Spirit, O Lord, have mercy upon them, and bring them to the fountain opened for sin and for uncleanness, that they may be cleansed indeed. We ask all this in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, the one God whom we worship and adore. Amen.