What does baptism signify?
I have found myself thinking lately that debates about baptism among Christians often focus on the wrong question, namely, whether it is acceptable to administer baptism to infants or whether baptism must follow an individual profession of faith. Don’t get me wrong: this is a vitally important question! But I am increasingly convinced that it cannot be answered satisfactorily on its own; rather, our answer to this question needs to flow from some higher-order conclusions about what, in fact, baptism is. After all, the Scriptural evidence is inconclusive; the Bible simply does not tell us whether the households baptized in Acts or 1 Corinthians included infants or not. The historical record does not settle the matter either. While it is true that the evidence we have of the early church suggests that baptisms of adults were the norm - and indeed baptisms delayed long into adulthood not uncommon - much of the delay was due to a belief in the difficulty or impossibility of being forgiven for post-baptismal sins. This is, needless to say, not a position generally held by those who believe baptism is appropriately administered only to those who make an adult profession of faith any more than by their paedobaptist interlocutors! This means that both positions regarding the proper time or circumstance at which to administer baptism mark a development of baptismal doctrine and practice from the views of the early church. And if we want to judge the faithfulness of these developments, given that Scripture itself does not tell us clearly who ought to receive baptism, we need instead to reason from what Scripture tells us baptism is.
So what does the Bible tell us that baptism is? If it is a ritual action that signifies something - which all parties in baptismal disputes can, I think, agree on - what is it that baptism signifies? Or, to ask the question more precisely, given that baptism can signify a rich plurality of things, what should we take to be baptism’s primary meaning? It seems to me that there are basically two answers to this question: baptism signifies the believer’s profession of faith, or baptism signifies God’s action in redeeming and regenerating the believer. Baptism is about the Christian’s action, publicly confirming her faith before God and the congregation, or baptism is about God’s action. Or, as the Articles of Religion describe the options, baptism is “a sign of profession, and mark of difference, whereby Christian men are discerned from others that be not christened,” or baptism is “a sign of Regeneration or New-Birth.”
What I want to argue today is that the Scriptural passages describing baptism suggests that the latter of these options - baptism as signifying God’s action to redeem and renew us - is the principal meaning of the ordinance (I, of course, hold baptism to be a sacrament, but I want to use as neutral a term as I can here). I want to be clear about the scope of my argument. To embrace this view of baptism does not require that one embrace the paedobaptist position. Nor does it necessarily require one hold to baptismal regeneration. But this view of baptism must be correct for the paedobaptist, pro-baptismal regeneration position to have any claim to coherence or fidelity to Scripture. And indeed, to my mind, as a committed paedobaptist and believer in baptismal regeneration, this view - that baptism is about God’s work, not ours - is in fact the most important thing about baptism, more important even than the questions of to whom baptism ought to be administered and whether regeneration is inseparably connected with baptism.
So, where does the Bible give us an account of what baptism is? It must be admitted that much of the Biblical discussion of baptism, while commanding it or describing it happening, does not actually tell us much about what the rite means. Thus, for example, the Great Commission in Matthew 28 includes an explicit command from Jesus to baptize, using the baptismal formula that Christians still use today, but does not in fact tell us what baptism is. To turn to another example, Mark 16:16 makes it clear that baptism is generally necessary for salvation (“The one who believes and is baptized will be saved…”). While this will make the traditional Protestant want to make baptism a matter of God’s agency rather than a human work, this is because of a prior hermeneutical commitment around soteriology rather the text of the verse itself - although for someone committed to a monergistic account of salvation, it certainly is a powerful argument for baptism as associated with God’s work to save us. One might generally say the same about most discussions of baptisms in the Gospels and Acts: there is an association between baptism, repentance, and faith in Jesus, but we don’t get a fleshed-out theory of what baptism is or means, with a few important exceptions.
Let’s turn to a few of those exceptions now: in Peter’s speech to the people in Acts 2, he enjoins them to “repent and be baptized…for the forgiveness of your sins” (Acts 2:38). This language, of course, gets taken up by the church in the Nicene Creed. What is important about it is that, without specifying precisely how, it connects baptism to forgiveness of sins. At the risk of stating the obvious, Peter does not say “repent for the forgiveness of your sins, and then be baptized”; the order is that repentance and baptism together lead to forgiveness of sins. Later in Acts, when Paul defends himself before the mob in the Temple, he recounts Ananias saying to him “Get up, be baptized, and have your sins washed away, calling on his name” (Acts 22:16. Once again, we have baptism connected to the forgiveness of sins. We might add this to evidence of Mark 16:16 to say that there is something salvific about baptism connected to faith and repentance; baptism somehow saves.
And of course, “baptism saves” is precisely the explicit message of one of the key discussions in the epistles of the nature of baptism. 1 Peter 3:21, connecting baptism to the great flood, declares that “baptism, which this [the flood] prefigured, now saves you — not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” The analogy to the flood has some bearing on whether we should see baptism as signifying God’s action or ours; the flood, of course, was God’s action, done wholly independent of the will of Noah or anyone else. But we don’t even need to examine the analogy to come to this conclusion about what 1 Peter teaches about the agent in baptism. If in Mark 16 and Acts 2 we get an association of sorts between baptism and salvation, here we have a causal statement: baptism saves you. Even if you wish to say that what the author of 1 Peter really means is baptism signifies your salvation - a reading I must confess I find somewhat difficult given the text - then the agency that baptism must signify must be God’s, not yours. The only other option is Pelagianism. Further, consider the means by which baptism saves you: the appeal to God for a clean conscience. What does this mean? As any good Protestant knows, the only reason we can appeal to God for a clean conscience is because Christ’s merits are imputed to us in the free gift of justification, that we, as it were, put on Christ because of God’s gracious action And indeed, St. Paul writes in the Letter to the Galatians that this is exactly what baptism means: “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ…” (Gal. 3:27).
This isn’t the only place in the writings of St. Paul where we see the association between baptism and being united with Christ. Thus in Romans 6, Paul writes that “we have been buried with him by baptism into death” (6:4) - an association between baptism and the putting to death of the “old self” (6:6) rather resonant with 1 Peter’s connection of baptism to the flood. Colossians too links baptism with burial: “when you were buried with him in baptism, you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God” (Col. 2:12). Here baptism is connected not just to mortification but vivification, to God’s saving action of putting to death the old man and raising up a new in Christ. This connection between baptism and vivification, the new life in Christ, is found also in Titus; Titus 3:5 declares that God “saved us, not because of any works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy, through the water of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit.” Note well: baptism (the “water of rebirth”) is explicitly contrasted here with “any works of righteousness that we had done,” and described as the means by which God acts to save us!
This language of rebirth and connection with the Spirit brings to mind John 3. In light of the Scriptural witness as a whole, when Jesus tells Nicodemus that “no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit,” it seems most plausible to me that he is talking about baptism (3:5). After all, Jesus own baptism is associated with the Holy Spirit descending upon him, and Paul in 1 Corinthians 12:13 describes our sharing a baptism in or by the Spirit. How is one to be born again so as to be saved? The Biblical answer here does not have much to do with Sinner’s Prayers or the like; one’s being born again is enacted - or at the very least signified - by baptism.
So, given this survey of the Biblical evidence, what can we say about what baptism signifies? I’d sum it up like this: baptism is connected with salvation, not as a response to salvation already bestowed but as a means of salvation. Baptism is thus primarily God’s action, by which we are united with Christ in his death and resurrection. As such, baptism is connected both with our justification (by which we receive a clean conscience before God) and our sanctification (by which we receive the gift of new life). Baptism signifies our mortification and vivification, the new birth or birth from above that is the indispensable condition of our salvation — indeed is our salvation!
Now, this is not to deny that there is a way in which baptism is our public confession of Christ. In Acts, it does indeed show up as a response to having the Gospel preached; Colossians’ analogy between baptism and circumcision is also capable of such a reading. And indeed, from as far back as we have liturgical evidence, baptismal liturgies included the person being baptized publicly confessing belief in Christ. But I do not think that this can be seen as baptism’s primary meaning, Scripturally-speaking. Baptism, at its core, is about God’s action to save us.
Let me try to be clear about what I think I have established and what I have not. First of all, while I think the analysis above makes something of a case for baptismal regeneration, I cannot claim to have proved it. Indeed, there are those who accept baptism as signifying God’s saving action who deny baptismal regeneration. The Westminster Confession of Faith, for example, affirms that baptism is “a sign and seal of the covenant of grace, of his ingrafting into Christ, of regeneration, of remission of sins, and of his giving up unto God, through Jesus Christ, to walk in newness of life”, but declares that “grace and salvation are not so inseparably annexed unto it as that no person can be regenerated or saved without it, or that all that are baptized are undoubtedly regenerated.” Within my own Anglican tradition, there has been dispute about whether or not baptism regenerates; while I am firmly among the pro-regeneration party, I do admit that the Articles of Religion, at least, can be fairly plausibly read either way on the question.
Secondly, this does not prove the appropriateness of infant baptism. It is possible to hold that baptism is a sign of God’s justifying and sanctifying activity and yet is to be reserved for adults. The Restorationist movement typically holds to an understanding of baptism as regenerative or necessary for forgiveness of sins but restricts baptism to those making a confession of faith. And even some earlier Baptist confessions hold this understanding of baptism. Thus the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith, for example, describes the purpose of baptism as “to be unto the party baptized, a sign of his fellowship with him, in his death and resurrection; of his being engrafted into him; of remission of sins; and of giving up into God, through Jesus Christ, to live and walk in newness of life.” And, conversely, it is possible to embrace infant baptism but hold that it is a mark of Christian profession or belonging, strange as it may seem; something like this was Zwingli’s view.
But my argument does, I believe, argue against understandings of baptism like that of Baptist Faith and Message 2000, where baptism is described as “an act of obedience symbolizing the believer’s faith in a crucified, buried, and risen Saviour, the believer’s death to sin, the burial of the old life, and the resurrection to walk in newness of life in Christ Jesus.” It is not the believer’s faith, but God’s salvation, that baptism symbolizes (whether efficaciously or no)! And it is certainly an argument against the understanding of baptism of someone like Karl Barth, for whom baptism is about the human being’s free and active response to God’s saving action. And above all, it is an argument against certain popular lay-level understandings of baptism that make it a mere sign of belief or public ritual necessary for entry into Christian fellowship. Baptism is about God, about God acting to save us!
I’m hoping to write later about what a gift this doctrine is to me, about its pastoral and ascetical payoff - a payoff expressed most powerfully in the Lutheran tradition, but of course present in other traditions as well. And I may try to talk about baptismal regeneration and the infant vs professing-believer-only baptism question as well. But for now, I wanted to (in a manner that I hope reads charitably to those who share different convictions than I!) stake out what I see to be the Biblical understanding of what baptism, at its core, is about. And what baptism is about, what baptism signifies, is God’s action to save us, clothing us in Christ’s death and resurrection both for a clean conscience before him and that we might walk before him in newness of life. Thanks be to God!