ARE WE HUNG UP ON BAPTISM?

Let me emphasize at the outset that while I do not believe in baptism, I most certainly believe that it is the act that God has ordained whereby the believer in the Messiah responds in obedience to the gospel. It is not regeneration, but it is the bath of regeneration according to Tit. 3:5. It does not actually wash filth from the body or sin from the soul, but it is “the answer of a good conscience toward God” according to 1 Pet. 3:21. According to Acts 2:38 it is in some sense “for the remission of sins.” All this I believe unequivocally. When I say that I do not believe in baptism, I mean that my faith is only in Christ and in no act or ordinance. No act or ordinance saves, not even an act of righteousness (Tit. 3:5), for only Christ saves. If the Scriptures say that baptism saves, which they do in I Pet. 3:21, it can only mean that baptism is the act in which we respond in faith to what God has done for us through Christ. With all the great creeds of Christendom I believe implicitly that baptism is the door into the church of Jesus Christ.

But is it not possible to distort a truth by giving it undue eminence? If baptism is the door into the church, is it not possible to become so preoccupied with the door as to neglect the house as a whole? If in our early history we found the church at large neglecting this important ordinance of God, is it not possible that we overreacted in our efforts to correct their remission and have thus made baptism mean more than God ever intended.?

I will share with you a few examples of what I mean.

One of our better known Texas preachers was telling me how much more the grace of God is being preached than it used to be, which gladdens his heart. But he went on to explain how they manage to place more emphasis upon the grace of God and still preach baptism, for, as he put it, “They have to preach baptism.” It struck me as an odd description of a people presumedly motivated by Scripture above all else. Peter’s concern on Pentecost was to proclaim the crucified Christ as the risen Lord. When he at last provoked his audience into making inquiry, he told them to repent and be baptized. His intent was clearly to preach Christ, not baptism.

But when our brother says the preachers, even those that are turned on to grace, have to preach baptism, he may well have meant that they have to preach baptism if they expect to hold their jobs with their churches. Not unlike Pavlov’s dog, our people have been so conditioned to hearing sermons on baptism that they cannot spiritually salivate unless some reference is made to baptism. Some preachers manage to sustain their loyal image by making reference to baptism, however slight it may be, in every sermon. It keeps the saliva flowing!

Another example is the pictures the missionaries send home to their churches and in their mailouts for the solicitation of funds. Almost invariably there will be a picture of someone being baptized. That is, of course, all right within itself, but when they nearly all do it so much of the time it may well indicate something that is not so good. Have they learned that they have a much better chance getting money if they present concrete evidence that they are baptizing folk? Does not this overabundance of photos of baptisms say that we are a baptism-oriented people and that this ordinance has become to us a virtual sine qua non of the Christian faith?

If John Mark had had a Brownie in his travels with the apostles (and it would be he who would be a shutterbug if any of them would have been, right?), we could only guess as to the kind of pictures he would send back home. Maybe one of Paul talking to soldiers at a guard station alongside a highway. Or a candid shot of old Elymas the sorcerer. Maybe a few closeups of some of their new Gentile sisters and brothers, especially the sisters. Or maybe one of him and Barnabas as they disembarked on the island of Cyprus. Yes, and maybe Mark would have taken a shot or two of someone being baptized (which would of course prove once for all that it was by immersion!), but the brethren back home would surely have thought it strange if they received picture after picture after picture of someone being baptized. Some elder would surely have said, “The young man has a one-track mind, hasn’t he?” Or maybe they would have supposed that the Brownie he had was one that only took pictures of people being baptized!

The third example comes out of Abilene itself, and where else should one look for bona fide Church of Christ behavior? A letter mailed out to multitudes by the Herald of Truth Radio and Television Programs reads in part: “Those who responded will receive the material which they requested, then a series of monthly teaching letters — a Bible correspondence course by letter, in effect. When the time is right, they will be contacted by nearby brethren and hopefully led to baptism.” (Letter dated Nov. 29, 1978 and signed by Batsell Barrett Baxter).

One would suppose that in this context the last words would read led to Christ. Brother Baxter and the Herald of Truth folk do believe, of course, in leading people to Christ, and they would insist that this is what Herald of Truth is all about. I am not questioning that, but I am saying that our language exposes our inordinate emphasis on baptism. Why do we have to talk about leading people to baptism? Why not lead them to Christ? After all, the two concepts may be quite different, far more than we have thus far recognized. Usually if one is truly led to Christ, baptism finds its rightful place, but one may be “led to baptism” without really coming to know Jesus as Lord. Led to baptism. Should we not be suspicious of that kind of language?

But let’s face it, such lingo lends itself to the Church of Christ mind. We are much more likely to say, “I was baptized when I was 13” than to say “I accepted Christ when I was 13.” One of our preachers is more likely to describe the results of a gospel meeting with “We had five baptisms” than with “We had five to accept the Lord.” We may not want to admit it, but we are more baptism-oriented than Jesus-oriented, and we are less than satisfied if efforts like Herald of Truth merely bring people to Jesus. The Baptists do that. We want them baptized, as we understand baptism — which is of course the same as the New Testament teaches! They are to be our converts, our way!

What a rude awakening it would be to learn after all we’ve said and done that we are wrong on baptism. We certainly are not right because we can whip “the sects” in debates on the subject or out-argue everybody. Nor are we right because we can quote a lot of proof texts or because we baptize a lot of people. Nor simply because we immerse and do it “for remission of sins.” We may err, not so much because we know not the Scriptures, but because we know not the spirit of the Scriptures.

It was true of the Jews with their most revered ordinances, the Sabbath and circumcision. They erred, not because they had the facts down wrong, but through a false emphasis. They stressed the legalities of these ordinances until they had them out of focus and no longer properly proportioned to the whole of religion and especially the purpose of religion. When the Maccabees first rebelled against their Syrian oppressors, they were at the mercy of their enemies since they would not fight on the Sabbath. The tide turned when Judas Maccabaeus decided that human life was more precious than a meticulous observance of the Sabbath. At a later date Jesus had difficulty teaching the same people that if an ox is to be shown mercy on the Sabbath then surely a man is. That the Sabbath was given for man’s good (and not to oppress him!) and not the other way around may sound like a simple truth, but the Jews, hung up as they were about the Sabbath, had more than a little trouble accepting it.

Even before Jesus came the prophets tried to get God’s people to place the outward in proper proportion to the inward. Many Jews believed that if one were only circumcised nothing else mattered much. But the prophets urged that the real circumcision is not so much what man does to the flesh, but what God does to the heart. Circumcision must symbolize inward renewal. The Law sometimes addressed the circumcised Hebrews as if their circumcision meant nothing, such as referring to their “uncircumcised hearts” (Lev. 26:41). Moses referred to himself as having “uncircumcised lips” because the Israelites were circumcised in the flesh but not in spirit (Ex. 6:12). If Jeremiah could say his people’s ear is uncircumcised (6:10), then it could be that our people’s ear is unbaptized.

Even more remarkable is Ezek. 44:9 where God rejects the uncircumcised in heart (who had been properly circumcised in the flesh) as well as those who were complete strangers to His covenant, uncircumcised in the flesh. So in Col. 2:11 where Paul says “In union with him you were circumcised, not with the circumcision that is made by men, but with Christ’s own circumcision, which consists of being freed from the power of this sinful body,” it was in the spirit of what the prophets had already emphasized. God has always wanted man’s heart. If the external ordinances do not represent a heart yielded to God, they mean nothing.

The ultimate circumcision ‘that the prophets envisioned could come only in Christ, for only in him does one find the power to be set free of sin. The apostle is telling us that we are all to be circumcised with this circumcision of the heart, which comes through yielding our hearts to Christ through faith and repentance.

Then in the next verse he says: “For when you were baptized, you were buried with Christ, and in baptism you were also raised with Christ through faith in the active power of God, who raised him from death.”

Baptism does not take the place of circumcision. The apostle is rather showing that circumcision is God’s continuing purpose for His people—a circumcision of the heart, which is really what He wanted under Moses, of which fleshly circumcision was only a symbol. So we have to conclude that baptism is not the circumcision that the apostle calls for, but the yielded, contrite heart—a circumcised heart. He calls it “the circumcision of Christ.” It is what Christ works in our inmost self through his indwelling Spirit. Literally it was done with a knife upon the flesh; in Christ it is done upon the human spirit by the visitation of the Holy Guest of heaven.

This “circumcision of Christ” is formalized in baptism. If something very significant has not happened in one’s inmost self, if he has not been “circumcised” by Christ, then baptism has little or no meaning. It may happen that a real transformation, a heart circumcision, does not come until years later. In such cases baptism would have a retrospective symbolic value, as if one would say, “I was baptized into Christ, but only now am I coming to realize its significance.” It is to overdo the symbol to be baptized again and again and again, even though it might well be true that we keep on experiencing now and again “the circumcision of Christ.”

We should see here the stark reality of circumcision as a symbol of what Christ does in us and for us. The mercy and severity of his truth, which may cut and hurt in its healing, removes that which separates us from God and sets us apart from a world that would otherwise hold us captive to sin. Baptism is our assurance that such surgery has been performed by the Spirit of Christ in our hearts.

If the Jews were hung up on circumcision by overstressing its outward form to the extent that the God of heaven considered them uncircumcised, then cannot the baptized Church of Christ, many of whom are baptized even a second time, be so preoccupied with the “rightness” of baptism to the neglect of weightier matters as to be viewed by heaven as unbaptized? If the apostle could say “In Christ neither circumcision avails anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation” (Gal. 6:15), then there might be instances in which he would say the same about baptism.

No one championed the cause of primitive baptism anymore than Alexander Campbell, and yet he realized that even that ordinance could be distorted by being made a fetish. He wrote: “The preachers of ‘essentials’ as well as the preacher of ‘non-essentials’ frequently err. The Essentialist may disparage the heart, while the Non-essentialist despises the institution. The latter makes void the institutions of Heaven, while the former appreciates not the mental bias on which God looketh most.” (Mill. Harb., 1837, p. 413)

God looketh most into man’s heart, Campbell recognized, and it is this insight that we are likely to miss in our emphasis upon any outward form. It should cause us to think when Alexander Campbell, who published volumes on baptism and defended its proper place in the scheme of redemption on the polemic platform, should write the following: “It is the image of Christ the Christian looks for and loves, and this does not consist in being exact in a few items, but in general devotion to the whole truth as far as known.” (Ibid, p. 412)

General devotion to the whole truth as far as known. This does not represent the thinking of most of our folk in Churches of Christ today, and this is my complaint. We have overdone it on baptism to the neglect of “the image of Christ” and “general devotion to the whole truth as far as known.” We must restore our sense of proper proportion, and this comes only be making Christ the center of all we do and think, and the whole of the Scriptures rather than a select path of prooftexts.

We should never lead anybody to baptism, but to the crucified Christ who is the Lord of Life. Once his Spirit circumcises their hearts, as those on Pentecost were “cut to the heart,” then we, like the apostle Peter, can instruct them to repent and be baptized for the remission of their sins. And if God’s love story has really touched their inmost souls, we’ll not have to argue with them about being baptized, for they will respond in loving obedience as “the answer of a good conscience toward God.”—the Editor