Now and then Skeptics will ask, "Why so many ways to do baptism if the church is such a unity?" The point of this essay will be to give some answers in this category. .
A study like this should begin with the word at hand, "baptize". In Greek it is baptizo, and it appears in some form 80 times in the NT. Lexicons indicate that the word was used of such things as a sunken ship, where it is a matter of an object in physical relationship with water or some other substance. Baptizo is derived from bapto, meaning to cover wholly with a fluid. Let's see how this word is used in the NT (only three times):
Luke 16:24 And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.
John 13:26 Jesus answered, He it is, to whom I shall give a sop, when I have dipped it.
Rev. 19:13 And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and his name is called The Word of God.
Bapto is certainly a cousin of baptizo but clearly carries a connotation of temporary action.
A typical argument for immersion states that only immersion perfectly symbolizes the resurrection of Christ. One may also note that immersion baptism was frequently performed in Judaism (the Qumran baths).
Let's now consider some arguments we have found in various places.
Baptism does not always involve immersion. Luke 11:38 says "[t]he Pharisee was astonished to see that he did not first wash [baptizo] before dinner." Mark 7:3-4 says the Pharisees "do not eat unless they wash their hands, observing the tradition of the elders; and when they come from the market place, they do not eat unless they wash themselves [baptizo]." No one in Israel took a full immersion bath before eating.
"Themselves" is not found in Mark 7 in the original. The verse only says "unless they baptizo." That said, what of it not meaning immersion?
The argument seems to beg the question that the meaning of baptizo here is that there is not something that is thoroughly immersed (in this case, most likely the hands). In fact no object of baptizo is given directly in either case. The same may be said of Murray's attempt (Christian Baptism) to disclaim immersion from the example of birds in Leviticus who are "baptized" (yet not obviusly wholly immersed) in the blood of another bird. By parallel we might consider that a child told to "wash before dinner" isn't told to wash their whole body thereby.
In short, this argument does not work unless one assumes that there is no contextual background indicating, as would be naturally assumed, that the hands alone are what is immersed because of the forthcoming meal in which the hands are specially used; and in any event, would not support any other method of baptism, like sprinkling or pouring. Even advocates admit that immersion best represents the Resurrection, with one exception I have found so far.
Adams in Meaning and Mode of Baptism (28) makes the point that Christ died on a cross and was put in a roomy tomb, wrapped in cloth. He goes on to quote a comment asking how God's resurrection power is approximated by "the raising of a dripping, dishelevled body after immersion". It is extremely doubtful that in the ancient world, where dirt was part of life and no one was walking around using white gloves on the windowsills or using hairspray, any person thought as Adams does of "dripping" or considered being dunked any more "dishevelling" than taking a walk down a dusty road or any other activity. Adams is using modern ideas of inconvenience to make a case. He is also wrongly emphasizing the space in the tomb, and the point of death. Jewish typological thought hardly required such precision.
Baptizo is used metaphorically. Jesus said, "I have a baptism to be baptized [baptizo] with; and how I am constrained until it is accomplished!" (Luke 12:50) Was Jesus immersed in suffering? In Acts 1:4-5 Jesus told his disciples "not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which, he said, 'you heard from me, for John baptized with water, but before many days you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit.'" Did this mean they would be "immersed" in the Spirit?
The two parallels are weak here. The first is weak because "suffering" is not a tangible thing the same way that water is. One could justly say that Jesus was indeed immersed totally in suffering, but it is metaphorical either way and has no relevance.
In the second case, one may add that the Spirit is said to be "poured" on the disciples at Pentecost, and that pouring therefore represents best the gifting of the Spirit. But then at best one might be able to argue that one may imagine a mode of baptism where the water is poured upon the person until they are immersed, otherwise Jesus' "command" cannot be fulfilled, and nor can the full symbolism.
As it happens, though, Acts 1:4-5 is probably of no relevance, since it is a parallelism of comparison (baptized with water vs. baptized with Spirit, often symbolized by water in the Jewish tradition), and thus reference to the Spirit being "poured" offers no actual counterposition.
The jailer and his family were baptized. Do you suppose Paul and Silas, while still bleeding from their flogging, took the family through the streets in the wake of an earthquake, to a river to be immersed?
An objection like this begs a serious number of questions and baldly anachronizes modern feelings upon ancient persons. The ancients were far more accustomed to pain, inconvenience, and disaster than we are.
If the flogging was so severe to Paul and Silas, then how are they managing to sing? Shouldn't their teeth be clenched in pain? (Note as well that the jailor attended to their wounds first.) Did the earthquake do that much damage? (All we know is that the bonds were broken and the doors opened; but the building did not fall, nor apparently did the jailor's house, since soon after they go there for a meal.) Is a river necessary? (Not that that is a problem, but the jailor, who was likely a military veteran, also quite likely had his own bath.) The objection is creative, but without grounding.
How about that Hebrews refers to "baptisms" in terms of sprinkling in the OT?
It doesn't. This is a very creative act of eisegsis by Adams (Meaning and Mode of Baptism, 10) who apparently decides that the "diverse washings" of Heb. 9:10 (using a form of baptizo) must be referring to the "sprinklings" in the next several verses. Adams apparently doesn't consider that it refers to the washings of hands, clothes, and flesh prescribed in Leviticus.
What about the constraints?
Here are some examples offered:
Paul was baptized standing up. "And now why do you wait? Rise and be baptized, and wash away your sins, calling on his name" (Acts 22:16).
This one reads the text a little too woodenly. It assumes that "be baptized" is a command of action that does not involve getting into a different position, which only begs the question.
Three thousand people were baptized in Jerusalem (Acts 2:41). There was not enough water to do immersion baptisms on this order in Jerusalem, and the pollution would have been intolerable.
This objection seems to miss some points:
1) All three thousand did not need fresh water each time.
2) Ancient peoples were not "environmentalist" or microbially oriented in this way. Even today millions wash in the Ganges and drink from it as well, even as cows take their baths in it. Did anyone not drink from the Pool of Siloam? (Between Siloam and Bethesda and other pools, there was ample water for such baptisms.)
3) If Jerusalem could supply drinking water for 200K people during festivals, and managed to have enough water to survive the siege of Jerusalem in 70 for several years, it would not be hard to find enough water to do baptisms for 3000? Especially if fresh water was not used each time -- Herzog and Gichon in Battles of the Bible [99] that even in 1948 the water needs of the Jewish sector of Jerusalem, cut off from outside water, was provided by nothing but rainfall, which in winter is enough to supply water needs for a year.
What about the bedridden? Or those with tracheotomies? Or in iron lungs? What about people in deserts and in the Arctic? What about people living under hostile regimes? Etc.
The model for such situations seems clear from this seemingly unrelated passage:
2 Kings 5:18-19 In this thing the LORD pardon thy servant, that when my master goeth into the house of Rimmon to worship there, and he leaneth on my hand, and I bow myself in the house of Rimmon: when I bow down myself in the house of Rimmon, the LORD pardon thy servant in this thing. And he said unto him, Go in peace. So he departed from him a little way.
It goes too far and erects a straw man to see this as posing a problem. It would be no surprise that churches in desert areas, for example (or the Ethiopian eunuch, if, as Adams claims [42-3], there would be no water nearby), later resorted to methods other than immersion, but this did not make it the normative practice.
On the other hand, one might note that the resort to pouring or sprinkling seems to be an effect of the idea that baptism is required for salvation, which as shown in link below is not true.
The NT uses the metaphor of sprinkling (Heb. 9:13, 1 Pet. 1:2) of the blood of Christ for the removal of guilt. It sure seems odd that this would not be a mode of baptism. (Murray, 21)
Odd to whom? The "sprinkling" metaphor comes of the OT metaphor, and to use baptism as a metaphor here would give the unpleasant picture of being bathed in blood. At the same time, since baptism does NOT remove sin, if anything use of such a metaphor here would be misleading.
And now we can take a closer look at a major linguistic discussion of the words bapto and baptizo. James Dale composed a series of works in the 19th century in which he came to the conclusion that baptizo had nothing to do with a mode of action (as in, immersing a thing in water) but was a word that meant a changing of condition without reference to mode. Thus he supposed that baptism by sprinkling or pouring or any means was not contraindicated by the word.
We read up to Vol. 3 of his work, and while it is quite detailed, at the core points it is fallacious. He acknowledges that baptizo is used of things immersed or sunken in water, but replies:
- That in water baptisms we do not "sink" the person -- this is obviously true, but Dale neglects the common-sense answer that baptizo only refers to the effect of being immersed into something and that getting that thing "out" is another action.
In his second volume Dale reports this very objection being made by a critic of his first volume [50] but makes no effort to answer the point at all, merely re-reporting the argument in a mocking way.
- That baptizo is used of such things as drunkenness (being "baptized" in wine) or the use of drugs.
This is where Dale makes his most significant presumptive mistake, for he merely dismisses any idea that the wine and drug examples are figurative (saying only there is "no sign" of such meaning) and proceeds to find as generalizing a meaning of baptizo as possible on the assumption that all meanings it offers must be literal.
By such semantics one could just as easily argue that the word "wooden" does not refer to a tree or object as something made of wood, but because it is also used of the "wooden" performance of a bad orator, actually has a more generalized meaning of something hard and stiff. This analogy is not perfect, for the word "wood" has a meaning of a substance also (but what of the application as well in a figurative sense to baseball bats, for example?); nevertheless, it illustrates the flaw in Dale's methodology.
He also fails to account for the possibility of improper, poetic, or hyperbolic usage of baptizo by classical writers.
In his second volume [93-4] Dale answers this charge with a vague reply asking if there was ever a word which "presented an equally divided usage of literality and highly-wrought picturing" but does not at all provides the details needed to substantiate such a vague point -- which would require indeed a study to determine whether indeed such words existed. I would say, that "wooden" by itself certainly does. In the third volume [83ff] Dale confronts the same problem and responds with little more than the same non-answer.
- One example Dale uses is that of ashes as a "baptismal" material [106] in a ceremonial purity rite. He admits that ashes can envelope a person, but wants to know whether envelopment is "required."
The oddity is that the passage he quotes from Josephus has someone putting ashes into water and uses this as an application medium. Well, here is a question: If one is enveloped in a cloud of dust, does it need to be packed solid around you to "envelope" you? Obviously not. Dale is once again failing to regard the contextual element of the material "baptizing" which by nature could not envelope in a solid mass.
- This all leads to a significant point in which Dale clearly did not grasp a key element of Semitic thought. In Dale's work Judaic Baptism he writes with no reference at all to the ritual immersion baptisms of the Qumranites or other Jewish sects. This may be because of lack of knowledge, but by the third volume, Johannic Baptism, he became aware of material from a Rabbi Isidor Kalisch [25ff] who noted from Talmudic data that ritual baptisms were performed in Judaism by immersion (as well as in the nude -- with men baptized separate from women).
How Dale handles this information is quite telling. He resorts once again to mockery, asking where the female version of John was doing her baptisms. "Did John baptize only men?" he asks. That's actually quite possible, for it would parallel the idea that only men were circumcised/
Other than that it would be unreasonable to demand a special recounting of any female (or other) helpers John had. Dale them embarks upon a mock examination of the Rabbi (in absentia) in which he assumes he knows what the Rabbi would answer to various questions, and fills the Rabbi's mouth with professions of ignorance/ It would have been quite interesting to see how Dale would explain away more recent data concerning the ritual immersions of the Qumranites.
However, of most relevance is that he is misdirected in comparisons to purifying "baptisms" by sprinkling and so on which he refers to as "changes of condition." Dale makes here the classic error of many persons who believe that the act of baptism itself is the agent of change. It isn't (see link below again), so speaking of NT passages directing baptism in terms of doing something that offers a "change of condition," we ask, "What condition did the baptism change?"
Other than making the person physically wet, the baptism does not change the condition of anything. Baptism, however it was done, reflected an inward change already accomplished. Once this is realized, Dale's "change of condition" definition loses its application.
Of course, even if Dale is right, and baptizo refers mainly to a change in condition, one could still point out that to represent a changing of condition, immersion is still a far better symbol than sprinkling or pouring, unless you want to sprinkle or pour for an extended period of time. What it runs down to is, while sprinkling or pouring isn't reason for condemnation, it's just not the best way to fulfill the symbol, and therefore one should be predisposed to immersion as the mode if it is possible, and if one wishes to capture the full meaning of what is transpiring.
In closing now, I find it rather astonishing how far advocates will go to avoid seeing immersion in any text at all. John the Baptist baptized in the Jordan; that he did so indubitably points to an act of immersion. He did not walk around with a bowl and hyssop sprinkling; he did not carry a pitcher for pouring. If he did that, it is obviously pointless to site one's self at the Jordan.
Adams [42] tries to find his way around this by suggesting that John's converts just STOOD in the shallow water while John sprinkled them. Murray [25] suggests that John worked by the Jordan out of consideration for those who would travel a long way and would be thirsty, or who would bring thirsty animals. I think such reasoning is obviously contrived to reach a specific, desired conclusion.
Adams then [49] cites Acts 9:17-18 where Paul "stood up and was baptized" as meaning Paul stood up in order to be baptized while standing. This merely begs the question of mode, without any consideration that "was baptized" is inclusive of all motions and actions that follow, including "assuming the position"!
-JPH