BAPTIZED, YET UNBAPTIZED

Should you read such a book as Baptism: Studies in the Original Christian Baptism by Johannes Warns, you would find accounts of “mass” and “forced” baptisms. Back in the eighth century, for example, the emperor Charlemagne appointed the death penalty for any who would not be baptized. In the fifth century when Clovis, king of the Franks was baptized, apparently for political reasons, thousands of his subjects joined him in the river. It must not have meant much since Clovis remained “an intriguing bloodthirsty man of violence, to whom Christianity was just good enough to smooth the way to reach his political ends,” as history records it.

Now and again through history the poor, persecuted Jews were compelled to become Christians by forced baptism. In the fifteenth century the king of Portugal compelled Jews to be baptized, which was carried out by dragging them by the beard or hair to the font, amidst their screams of protest.

And it seems unlikely that the Russians would ever have had a prince who would attempt to force baptism on the entire state. In the tenth century Vladimir, who baptized 2,000 with his own hands, announced that those who did not want to be listed as his enemies should be baptized on an appointed day.

The wildest story of all is how the prince of the Normans was baptized in the name of Christ, after which he slaughtered his prisoners as a sacrifice to his heathen gods!

While such baptisms were usually by sprinkling or pouring, they were sometimes by immersion. Roman Catholics and Protestants alike persecuted the Anabaptists, who believed in adult baptism by immersion, by drowning them.

These stories out of history dramatize a truth that we all accede to: that baptism is something more than the outward, physical act, irrespective of whether one is forced into it or does it voluntarily. There is such a thing as being baptized (outwardly) and yet not baptized (inwardly).

It all raises a troubling question. If a person’s baptism is imperfect because he was forced to do it, what is the standard for a perfect baptism? If no baptism can be said to be perfect, how imperfect can it be and still be a valid baptism?

Suppose someone is baptized because others are being baptized, or to please a wife or a parent, even when the person is a professed believer?

Or for social reasons or business reasons? Or when “too young to know what I was doing”?

Is there a built-in retroactive value to baptism, so that years later when one comes to a living faith the baptism of long ago takes on meaning? Might there first be the external act, then years later the internal reality?

Or is one to be baptized again when he really believes? Then again and again perhaps as his faith grows deeper and deeper?

The prophets weighed a similar problem in reference to circumcision, for they had the situation of people being “circumcised but yet uncircumcised,” as Jer. 9:25 puts it. In fact Jeremiah put Israel in the same category with the uncircumcised nations of Egypt, Edom and Moab, for Israel was “uncircumcised in heart” (Jer. 9:26). It seems unlikely that a Jewish prophet would ever say such a thing: that even though Israel was circumcised in the flesh, they were nonetheless as uncircumcised as the pagan nations, for the circumcision did not reach the heart. What the knife could do was not enough; the Spirit of God had to touch the heart. It reveals a dimension of deep, spiritual religion in the Old Testament that is often neglected.

In Jer. 4:4 the imagery really comes alive: “Circumcise yourselves to the Lord, remove the foreskin of your hearts, O men of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem.” This anticipates Paul’s language in Col. 2:11: “In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of flesh in the circumcision of Christ.” The apostle indicates in the next verse that this occurs in baptism. This means that baptism represents a changed heart and a renewed life, “the circumcision of Christ” meaning that the Spirit of God is to cut away “the body of flesh” of our sinful lives.

If integrity is to be defined as backing up our profession with our deeds, then we may conclude that both circumcision and baptism, the symbols of covenantal relationship, have often lacked in integrity. Circumcised people have not always behaved as circumcised people, and baptized people have not always conducted themselves as baptized people. So in Scripture we have the idea of both “circumcised and yet uncircumcised” and “baptized and yet unbaptized.”

This is so significant in the Old Testament that Dt. 29:6 anticipates the eventual renewal of Israel as: “The Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, until you love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul, and so have life.” To the circumcised he spoke of the circumcision of the heart, which they had not experienced.

Is it not therefore possible that the modern church, including those of us who have made much of baptism, is largely “baptized and yet unbaptized”? And might not our prophets urge upon us the baptism of the heart? There is the “other side” of baptism, the internal meanings, that we have neglected in our rightful concern for external correctness. The apostle, for instance, refers to “you have come to fulness of life in him” in connection with being raised with Christ from the watery grave of baptism (Col. 2:10-12), and in Gal. 3:27 he says we put on the likeness of Christ in baptism. If the baptized were known for their imitation of Christ, his gentleness and meekness, they would not have to argue about modes. While it is appropriate that we vigorously bear witness to baptism by immersion, it is far more important that we show by our faith and conduct what baptism means.

Baptism means a change in our lives that is described in Scripture as “the circumcision of Christ” upon our hearts. It is appropriate that we are “baptists,” but what irony it is for such folk to be “unbaptized baptists.” And this is what happens when religion does everything except touch the inner springs of the heart and mind. --- the Editor