Devotional 149: The Meaning of Baptism: Union with Christ and Regeneration

The Confession Read

Dipping of the person into the water is not necessary; but baptism is rightly administered by pouring, or sprinkling water upon the person.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 28, Section 3

Introduction

Three thousand souls were baptized in a single day. So Luke records it in the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles: when Peter's sermon on the day of Pentecost fell upon the crowd, those who received his word were baptized, and the same day there were added unto them about three thousand souls. Now stop and picture that scene. The city was Jerusalem, thronged to bursting with pilgrims from every nation under heaven. The hour was nine in the morning. And within the compass of a single afternoon, three thousand men and women were brought to the waters of baptism. Where in all that crowded city was the water to plunge three thousand bodies beneath its surface? What pool, what font, what river held room for such a multitude? The plain arithmetic of Pentecost presses a question upon us that many a modern Christian has never stopped to ask: must baptism be a plunging of the whole body under the water, or may it be a pouring of water upon the head, a sprinkling of water upon the face? The question has divided churches and, at times, broken fellowship. Whole communions have been gathered and dissolved over it, and sincere believers have refused one another the table of the Lord because they could not agree upon the quantity of water. Against that bitter background the Westminster divines speak a quiet sentence, the briefest section of this entire chapter on baptism and among the shortest in the whole Confession: dipping is not necessary, and baptism is rightly administered by pouring or sprinkling. It reads like a whisper after a storm, and yet within its twenty-three words there is compressed a whole theology of grace. Do not mistake this for carelessness, as though the divines shrugged their shoulders and declared that the manner of washing does not matter. It matters very much, and they say so with the word "rightly." Baptism is rightly administered by pouring or sprinkling; there is a right way and a wrong way, and the right way is not a thing of indifference. What they mean, and what we must now learn, is that the essence of baptism does not lie in the amount of water or in the posture of the body, but in the cleansing that the water signifies. And when we have seen that, we shall discover something more: that the mode of baptism itself is a sermon, preaching to every heart the most glorious truth the gospel knows, that grace comes down from above and does not wait for us to climb up to it.

Scripture Foundation

Let us lay the foundation where alone a foundation can be laid, in the word of God, and let us mark carefully the images with which Scripture speaks of cleansing, for these images are our warrant and our guide. The Old Testament nowhere teaches that spiritual cleansing is accomplished by plunging a person under water. On the contrary, its standing picture of purification is the sprinkling of water and blood upon the unclean. When God promised to restore His people and to wash them from their sins, He did not speak of a pool into which they must descend, but of water that He Himself would cast upon them from above. Ezekiel 36:25 "Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you." The Hebrew verb here is zaraq, to scatter or to sprinkle, and it is the same word used of the blood thrown against the altar in the sacrifices of old. God's own chosen image for the great cleansing of His people is not immersion but sprinkling: water cast abroad upon the soul as the priest cast blood upon the altar. The cleansing is the Lord's work, descending from His hand, and the picture He Himself painted is of a holy water thrown and scattered, not of a sinner sunk beneath a flood. This image runs like a scarlet thread through the whole economy of the old covenant. When Moses sealed the covenant at Sinai, we are told how he purified the people, and the manner of it is recorded with precision. Hebrews 9:19 "For when Moses had spoken every precept to all the people according to the law, he took the blood of calves and of goats, with water, and scarlet wool, and hyssop, and sprinkled both the book, and all the people." Here is the pattern of every purification under the law: not dipping, but sprinkling. Moses cast the blood and the water upon the book of the covenant and upon the congregation, and by that sprinkling they were sanctified. The author of Hebrews presses the point home: Hebrews 9:13 "For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ... purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?" The Greek word beneath "sprinkling" is rhantizō, and it appears again and again in this letter as the language of cleansing. Hebrews 9:21 Moses "sprinkled with blood both the tabernacle, and all the vessels of the ministry." The whole ceremonial law was a ministry of sprinkling, and baptism is the new covenant's heir to that ministry. When, therefore, the church pours or sprinkles water upon a soul, she is not improvising a new mode; she is walking in the exact footsteps of Moses and the prophets, doing with water what the old covenant did with water and blood. Nor is this all, for the New Testament gives us a second image, more glorious still. The cleansing of the new covenant is the work of the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit is everywhere described as being poured out. Acts 2:17 "It shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh." The Greek verb is ekcheō, to pour forth, to shed abroad, and it is the word Peter borrows from Joel to describe what had just happened at Pentecost. Acts 2:33 The risen Christ, "being by the right hand of God exalted, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost, he hath shed forth this, which ye now see and hear." The Spirit did not rise up as a well into which the disciples must descend; He was poured out upon them from heaven, as water is poured from a vessel, and the whole church of the new covenant was born under that descending flood. Long before Pentecost, Isaiah had foretold it in the same terms: Isaiah 44:3 "For I will pour water upon him that is thirsty, and floods upon the dry ground: I will pour my spirit upon thy seed, and my blessing upon thine offspring." Water poured, Spirit poured, blessing poured: the three are one picture, and baptism is the sacrament of that picture. The water poured upon the head at baptism declares in visible form what the Spirit does invisibly, descending upon the soul from above. Now observe what this does to our question. If the Spirit of God is shed abroad and poured out, and if baptism is the sign and seal of the Spirit's cleansing, then what more fitting outward act could there be than the pouring of water? The mode and the thing signified correspond to one another. The minister who pours water upon the head is preaching, in the gesture itself, the great truth that the Holy Ghost is poured upon the heart. And the minister who sprinkles water is preaching, in the same gesture, the truth that the blood of Christ is sprinkled upon the conscience. The mode of baptism is not a neutral detail; it is a doctrine made visible. There remains one further argument from the words of Scripture, and it strikes at the root of the claim that baptism must mean dipping. The Greek word baptizō, from which our word baptism comes, does not in itself mean to immerse; it means to wash, to cleanse by the application of water, and the manner of that washing is not fixed by the word at all. The New Testament itself uses the verb and its noun in ways that no immersion could possibly satisfy. Mark 7:4 Our Lord's critics "when they come from the market, except they wash, they eat not," and they scrupulously observed "the washing of cups, and pots, brasen vessels, and of tables." The word beneath "wash" here is baptizō, and the word beneath "washing" is baptismos. No one imagines the Pharisees plunged their dining tables into a pool; they poured water over them, and Scripture calls that baptism. Luke 11:38 When the Pharisee "marvelled that he had not first washed before dinner," the word again is baptizō, the same word our Lord Himself used when He said "I have a baptism to be baptized with." And in Hebrews 9:10 the apostle speaks of the old covenant's "divers washings," baptismois, describing a system of purification that the law itself prescribed to be done by sprinkling. So the Scripture's own vocabulary settles the matter: to baptize is to wash, and washing may be done by pouring and sprinkling no less than by dipping. The word never carried the narrow sense that some have tried to force upon it. Finally, let the circumstances recorded in the Acts of the Apostles bear their witness, for they show the primitive church herself acting upon this liberty. When the three thousand were baptized at Pentecost, we have already asked where the water lay to dip so many, and the question is not idle, for Jerusalem had no river, and the public pools could never have served such a crowd in an afternoon. The natural reading of that day is that water was carried and poured, and the number of the converts argues against a rite that required deep water and a change of raiment for every soul. Acts 16:33 More striking still is the Philippian jailer, who at midnight, with his household, "was baptized, he and all his, straightway." Here was no river, no pool, no time to prepare; it was the dead of night in the inner prison, and yet the apostle did not delay the sacrament for want of water deep enough to plunge in. What water there was in that prison was enough, because the essence of baptism is washing, not the depth of the water or the posture of the body. Acts 10:47 And when the Spirit was poured out upon Cornelius and his house before a drop of water had touched them, Peter's question was not "where is a river deep enough?" but "Can any man forbid water, that these should not be baptized, which have received the Holy Ghost as well as we?" The water was at hand, and it sufficed, because the Spirit had already done the cleansing that the water would seal.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster divines wrote this brief section, they were not inventing a new opinion but confessing what the church had received, and yet they wrote with the sharp edge of controversy against their own age, and we shall understand them only when we see the error they meant to cut away. The error was the insistence that immersion, the plunging of the whole body beneath the water, is the only valid manner of baptism, so that a soul washed by pouring or sprinkling was said to have received no baptism at all. This was the claim of the Anabaptist parties of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it had spread widely, so that many a simple believer was troubled in his conscience, doubting whether his own infant baptism, or the baptism of his church, was a true washing or only a ceremony of water without any force. Against this the divines set down their quiet confession: dipping is not necessary, and baptism is rightly administered by pouring or sprinkling. Mark the two halves of the sentence, for each has its own work. The first half is negative and liberating: dipping is not necessary. No one is bound to plunge beneath the water as though the validity of his baptism depended upon it, and no church sins that does not practice immersion. The second half is positive and authoritative: baptism is rightly administered by pouring or sprinkling. These modes are not second best, not a tolerated departure from the ideal; they are right, fully conformed to the word of God and to the example of the church from her earliest days. And here the divines stood upon solid historical ground, for the ancient church had always known this liberty. The earliest manual of Christian instruction that has come down to us, the Didache, written within living memory of the apostles, directs that baptism be administered in living water by immersion where that is possible, but then adds plainly: if you have no living water, baptize in other water, and if you cannot in cold, then in warm; but if you have neither, pour water three times upon the head in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. The church of the second century, in other words, already recognized pouring as a true baptism, and it did so not from laxity but from the conviction that the water applied in the triune name is the sacrament, whatever the manner of its application. The divines were no innovators; they were restating a freedom older than the controversies that had lately arisen. Yet they did not mean to suggest that the mode is a thing utterly indifferent, as though any manner of washing would do and the church might baptize with a damp cloth or a drop of dew. The phrase "rightly administered" guards against that looseness. There is a form to the ordinance, and it is washing with water, a real and sufficient application of the element to the person. What the divines rejected was not the notion that baptism has a proper mode, but the notion that only one mode, the mode of dipping, can be proper. Pouring and sprinkling are washing; they are the application of water in a measure sufficient to signify the cleansing of the soul, and in the mouth of Scripture they are the standing images of that cleansing. The divines simply refused to let the amount of water be mistaken for the substance of the sacrament. Pause over one further distinction, for it carries the whole weight of the section. The divines were careful, as they always are, to keep the sign and the thing signified from being confounded. The grace of baptism is not in the water, and therefore it cannot be measured by the water. Whether a man is dipped, poured upon, or sprinkled, the water does no more in one case than in another; it is a sign, and a sign has power not from its quantity but from what it signifies and from the Spirit who works with it. To make immersion essential is, in the end, to put a confidence in the thoroughness of the washing that belongs only to the blood of Christ. The divines would not allow the ordinance to become a work of man's own doing, in which the completeness of the cleansing depended upon the completeness of the wetting. The mode is indifferent precisely because the grace is not in the mode, and to confess this is to confess the freeness of the gospel.

Theological Depth

Let us now descend with the doctors of our own tradition to the foundations of this doctrine, and see how the Reformed church has ever understood the mode of baptism. Warfield gave the question its most careful scholarly treatment, and his patient labor in the archaeology of the early church repays our attention. He set himself to examine what the primitive church actually did, tracing the evidence of the catacombs and the early fathers, and he concluded that the notion of immersion as the universal and exclusive practice of the ancient church is a modern assumption read back into the past. The earliest pictorial representations of baptism that have survived, he observed, show the candidate standing in water while water is poured over him from above, and the earliest literary witnesses speak of washing and pouring as readily as of dipping. Warfield's argument is not that immersion never occurred, but that the church from the first recognized more than one mode, and that the insistence upon immersion alone is a later and narrower thing. He notes, too, that the word baptism, as we have seen, means washing and not plunging, so that the philological foundation of the immersionist case crumbles upon inspection. For Warfield the matter was settled by the twofold witness of word and deed: Scripture's language is washing, and the church's practice was liberty. Calvin, treating of baptism in the Institutes, reaches the same end by a simpler road, and his words deserve to be weighed, for they breathe the moderation that has ever marked the Reformed church. He grants at once that the word baptize properly means to immerse, and that it is probable the primitive church did practice dipping, for the ancient writers speak of it. But he will not have the church bound by it. Whether the person baptized be wholly immersed, and whether thrice or once, or whether water be only poured or sprinkled upon him, he declares, is of no importance; churches should be at liberty to adopt either according to the diversity of climates. What matters is not the depth of the water but the thing signified, the cleansing of the soul by the blood of Christ and the renewing of the Spirit. Calvin's judgment is precisely that of our section: the mode is not of the essence of the sacrament, and he who makes it so has turned from the meaning of baptism to its mere outwardness. Turretin presses the same point with his characteristic rigor, and his argument deserves to be followed, for it exposes the error at its root. The essence of baptism, he argues, lies in ablution, in the washing that signifies the remission of sins, and this ablution is equally signified by dipping, by pouring, and by sprinkling. The Scriptures nowhere command a particular mode, and where the word of God has not spoken, the church is free. What the Scriptures do command is washing with water in the triune name, and this the church performs whether she dips or pours. Turretin reminds us that the Holy Spirit is said in Scripture to be poured out, and that the blood of Christ is said to be sprinkled, so that the two modes the church commonly employs are not arbitrary choices but the very images the word of God has set before us. To demand immersion alone is to bind the church where Christ has left her free, and to confound a circumstance of the ordinance with its substance. Hodge, in his commentary upon the Confession, gathers these threads into a single cord and ties them to the regulative principle that governs all Reformed worship. The question is not which mode pleases us, nor which mode was most ancient, but what God has appointed, and God has appointed baptism to be a washing with water in the name of the Trinity. He has not appointed the quantity of the water or the posture of the body. Therefore the church may administer baptism by dipping where that is found expedient, and by pouring or sprinkling where it is not, and in either case she administers the sacrament truly. Hodge adds a practical note that the divines themselves surely had in mind: baptism is to be administered to infants as well as to adults, and the tenderness of infancy, together with the climate of many lands, makes pouring and sprinkling not merely lawful but fitting. The mode that can be administered to a newborn child without hazard is no accidental convenience; it is a mercy of the God who has not made His covenant signs dependent upon the strength of the flesh. There is a deeper point beneath all these arguments, and it is this. The mode of baptism, rightly understood, is a confession of the heart of the gospel. Dipping pictures a man going down into the water and rising again, and that is a true and precious picture of dying with Christ and rising to newness of life; we do not despise it. But pouring and sprinkling picture something the gospel would not have us forget, that the cleansing of the soul is not our own work but the work of God descending upon us from above. We do not plunge ourselves into grace; grace is poured out upon us. We do not wash ourselves; the Spirit is shed abroad in our hearts. The water that falls upon the head at baptism is the visible promise that the Spirit falls upon the soul, and the gentleness of the sprinkling preaches the tenderness of a God who stoops to cast His mercy upon the least and the weakest, even upon an infant who can do nothing at all to receive it. This is why the divines could write their quiet sentence with such confidence: in pouring and sprinkling they saw, not a diminished baptism, but the gospel itself made visible.

Puritan Application

Let us now bring this truth home, for doctrine is never given to be admired but to be lived, and this doctrine of the mode of baptism has more to say to our hearts than we might at first suppose. First, rest in the tenderness of a God who pours His grace down upon you. Consider the mode itself as a sermon to your soul. You did not descend into the water to be baptized; rather, the water was brought to you and cast upon you, as grace is brought to you and not attained by you. The rain does not wait for the earth to climb up to it; it falls from heaven upon the dry ground, and the ground has nothing to do but receive it. So it is with the gospel. The Holy Spirit is poured out, the blood of Christ is sprinkled, and the sinner's whole part is to receive what God descends to give. If you are tempted to think you must make yourself clean before you may come to Christ, let the sprinkled water correct you. You are not the one who washes; you are the one who is washed, and the washing comes down from above. Second, do not let the sign become your confidence, for the water, whether much or little, can cleanse only the body. The divines were careful to say that dipping is not necessary, and their deeper reason was that no amount of water can cleanse a soul. A man may be plunged beneath an ocean and rise as guilty as he went down, while a drop sprinkled upon an infant's brow may seal a covenant of eternal mercy. The quantity of the water was never the point, and neither is the bare fact of your baptism the point. What you must have is the thing the water signifies, the blood of Christ sprinkled upon your conscience and the Spirit poured into your heart. Ask yourself, then, not how you were baptized, but whether you are cleansed. Have you known the inward washing that the outward washing only pictured? Do not rest in the sign; rest in the Saviour to whom the sign points. Third, be charitable toward those who differ with you on this point, and do not make a test of fellowship of that which Christ has not made a test. There are sincere and godly believers who hold that immersion is the proper mode of baptism, and we have seen that the Reformed church has ever acknowledged the word itself to mean washing, that the primitive church practiced dipping, and that our own divines would bind no man's conscience to a single mode. Where Scripture has not bound, let us not bind, and where charity may be exercised, let it abound. You may hold your own practice with conviction and still embrace as brethren those who differ, for the ground of our unity is not the depth of the font but the blood of the covenant. It is a mark of wisdom to know what is essential and what is not, and the mode of baptism, precious as the ordinance is, belongs to the latter. Fourth, let the sprinkled water teach you to pray for the outpouring of the Spirit upon the church. If baptism is the sacrament of the Spirit poured out, then every time we see the water applied we are summoned to lift our hearts and ask that God would again pour out His Spirit as He did at Pentecost. The church does not advance by the strength of her programs or the cleverness of her methods, but by the effusion of the Spirit from on high. When you witness a baptism, let it become for you a season of intercession, that the same Spirit who was shed forth upon the three thousand might be shed forth upon your family, your congregation, and the nations that yet sit in darkness. Pray that the flood Isaiah foretold, water upon the thirsty and floods upon the dry ground, might come upon this parched generation. Fifth, and last, rejoice that the covenant sign has been made so gentle that even the weakest may receive it. Because baptism is rightly administered by pouring and sprinkling, no soul is shut out by the frailty of age or the harshness of climate or the infirmity of the body. The infant who cannot speak, the aged saint upon a sickbed, the prisoner in the inner chamber at midnight: all may be washed with the water of the covenant, because the covenant does not depend upon their strength. And in this gentleness we see the very character of God, who will not break the bruised reed nor quench the smoking flax. The God who would not require of a frightened jailer a river in the dead of night has made His grace reachable by all, and for this we ought to bless His name every day.

Prayer

O Lord our God, who didst promise through Thy prophet to sprinkle clean water upon us and to cleanse us from all our filthiness and from all our idols, we bless Thee that Thou hast not left us to wash ourselves, but hast poured out Thy Spirit from on high and sprinkled our consciences with the blood of Thy dear Son. We thank Thee for the holy ordinance of baptism, and that Thou hast not made its grace depend upon the depth of the water or the strength of our own flesh, but hast met us in the gentleness of water poured and sprinkled, that even the least and weakest of Thy creatures might receive the sign of Thy covenant. We confess that we have too often rested in the outward washing and have forgotten the inward cleansing, and we pray Thee to give us that cleansing indeed, the washing of regeneration and the renewing of the Holy Ghost, which Thou sheddest on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Saviour. O Father, who hast chosen us, sprinkle us with the blood of Thy Son, that we may draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. O Spirit, who wast poured out at Pentecost, pour Thyself out upon us afresh, and make our souls like the dry ground drinking in the rain, that we may bring forth fruit unto everlasting life. Give us, we pray, a tender charity toward all who love our Lord Jesus Christ, that we may not make the lesser things a wall between brethren, but may keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. And hasten, O Lord, the day when the knowledge of Thy glory shall cover the earth as the waters cover the sea, when many shall be sprinkled among the nations, and the ransomed of the Lord shall return with singing and everlasting joy upon their heads. We ask all this in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.