Weird Question on Baptism

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u/frog_ladee 🌱 Born again 🌱 15d ago edited 15d ago

My understanding, as a person who was Episcopalian before becoming a Baptist in my 50’s (over a decade ago), is that Baptists believe that baptism signifies having made a personal decision to accept and follow Jesus Christ as Lord and savior. Infants and young children don’t have the cognitive ability to understand what that means. So, infant baptism is a ceremony that doesn’t really do anything.

I’ve been both sprinkled and dunked. I was christened as an infant. Later, as an adult, I was baptized again by immersion after my personal decision to accept salvation. Even though I affirmed my faith in Christ during an Episcopalian confirmation ceremony at age 12, as an adult after I received salvation, it was important to me to have a baptism by immersion, to publically acknowledge my rebirth and faith commitment. I studied what scripture said about baptism, and saw that it requires a personal profession of faith in Jesus—not just a ceremony of sprinkling water on one’s head, in my case, as an infant who couldn’t even understand the words being said.

I would add that the danger of infant baptism is that it fools many people into thinking that it’s all they need to do. They checked the box of having the ceremony, without recognizing that salvation entails actually embracing the fact that Christ died for them as being what salvation means.

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u/whicky1978 🌱 Born again 🌱 15d ago

Baptists like to have baby dedications where they commit to raising the child in a way that honors the Lord.

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u/Southern_Dig_9460 15d ago

That’s not the same thing.

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u/whicky1978 🌱 Born again 🌱 14d ago

Correct

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u/SavioursSamurai 15d ago

Basically Baptists believe that baptism should be a sign of profession. We believe that it is a sign and seal of the saving faith received. In Catholic terms I think it would be akin to confirmation.

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u/Traugar 14d ago

Speaking as someone who was Baptist, they view it as symbolic. They don’t view it as doing anything, other than serving as a profession of faith. The terminology used is that is an outward sign of an inward change. In that view, where it is a profession of faith, an infant would be incapable of being baptized because they would first have to have faith before they could profess it. Obviously, an infant couldn’t do that. While I no longer hold to that view, it makes sense within its own framework.

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u/HerdsmanofTekoa 15d ago

Baptists are not superstitious at all. Baptism is the easiest submission to the LORD. We believe that it's an outward reflection of our inward man. Babies are completely innocent. Baby baptism is silly because the baby is totally innocent. God is a good guy, He's not some ogre that is looking for any excuse or technically to send us to hell. He loves everyone (which is why He sent His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, to die for our sins).

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u/Jesus_died_for_u 15d ago

An infant baptism is just a bath. An infant is not old enough to understand sin nor that they are a sinner.

The examples we have such as the Ethiopian are of believers. You might argue Cornulus must have had infants in his household, but that is assuming from no information.

We do dedications. This are the aspects of that. The parents make a public commitment to live like Christians should live and to raise the child like Christians should raise a child and to tell the child about the dedication when the child is old enough to understand.

A baby has no part in physical birth other than along for the ride. Likewise, a person believes the gospel and has no other part in the spiritual birth. The Spirit does the work, enters, and seals the new believer. Afterwards the Spirit guides the new believer in growth.

Acts is a book of transition. Jews became believers. Gentiles became believers. Baptism is no longer to ‘get the Spirit’ as in chapter 10. That happens at birth. The Jews in 10 were ignorant of the Spirit and baptism. They just needed to be taught.

Now baptism is a public sign of what took place spiritually in the secret of the heart.

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u/Ok_Compote_423 14d ago

As a Baptist ive always seen baptism as a public profession of dedicating your life to Christ. So after you receive salvation, you want to profess to the world Christ is King and that you dedicate yourself and your life to him, so you get Baptized in the pool behind the podium/pulpit, or if you were in the deep south in a Southern Baptist church, you'd likely do it infront of a crowd of other believers in the river or creek lol. But yeah infants aren't capable of that type of profession yet. Also some Baptists, not myself but I've heard just from people talking, that some believe you can't get to Heaven without baptism. I don't know what all that is about though. But it really just ties back into giving an individual more freedom to choose to partake in Christianity and its practices, and also to make a public profession and have it be as honest from the heart as it can be.

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u/MeBollasDellero 14d ago

Anabaptists generally taught that the church should consist of people who had personally professed faith in Christ, rather than everyone born within a Christian territory.

That produced several distinctive ideas:

Believer's baptism rather than infant baptism.
Conversion before church membership.
The Bible—especially the New Testament—as the authority for Christian faith and practice.
Separation of church and state.
Religious liberty and freedom of conscience.
Church discipline among professing believers.
Strong emphasis on actually living according to Christ's teachings, especially the Sermon on the Mount.
Many Anabaptist groups embraced nonviolence, refusing military service and sometimes refusing governmental offices or oaths.

This was extraordinarily radical in the 1500s.

Catholics, Lutherans and Reformed Protestants generally still assumed that the government and church were interconnected. If you were born in a Catholic territory, you were normally Catholic; if your ruler adopted Lutheranism, the territory became Lutheran.

The Anabaptists effectively said:

Government cannot make someone a Christian. Christianity requires individual faith and conversion.

That idea had enormous implications for later concepts of religious liberty.

Both Catholic and Protestant governments regarded Anabaptists as dangerous.

Their rejection of infant baptism wasn't merely viewed as an unusual theological position. Infant baptism was tied to citizenship and the social order. Rejecting it seemed to challenge the entire relationship between church and government.

Consequently, Anabaptists were imprisoned, tortured, exiled and executed.

One famous example was Felix Manz.

In 1527, Zürich authorities executed him by drowning in the Limmat River. There was a grim irony to the punishment: because he taught baptism by immersion or believer's baptism, his persecutors effectively gave him a deadly "third baptism."

Thousands of Anabaptists were eventually killed during the Reformation era.

Much of their martyr history was later collected in the Martyrs Mirror, published in 1660, which became particularly important among Mennonites and Amish.

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u/OLDPARSON 🌱 Born again 🌱 13d ago

Baptism is an outer symbol of what has happened spiritually in the heart. Some say infant baptism replaced circumcision. If that is true, why are you baptizing girl babies since only boys were circumcised? That it does not save is evident by Acts 11

Act 11:14 Who shall tell thee words, whereby thou and all thy house shall be saved.

15 And as I began to speak, the Holy Ghost fell on them, as on us at the beginning.

16 Then remembered I the word of the Lord, how that he said, John indeed baptized with water; but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost. KJV

Act 11:14 Who shall speak to thee words whereby thou shalt be saved, and all thy house.

15 And when I had begun to speak, the Holy Ghost fell upon them, as upon us also in the beginning.

16 And I remembered the word of the Lord, how that he said: John indeed baptized with water but you shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost. DRB

They received the Holy Spirit before they were baptized. How did they receive the Spirit. by believing the Gospel. Can an infant believe the Gospel? Obviously not. Baptism is an act of obedience. identification and symbolic, not sacramental.

Baptism is not unique to Christianity. When a Jew followed a mentor he was baptized, by immersion, to symbolize that he has left the old life behind and is now a clean slate to be written upon by the teacher. Paul studied under Gamaliel. He would have been baptized. If salvation had any sacramental value Paul would not have said that God sent him to preach the gospel, not to baptize. Indeed, we see the identification factor when Paul chastises the Corinthians for saying I am of Paul, I am of Apollos, I am of Cephas and I am of Christ. He said he did not want to baptize lest people would think he is drawing people to himself instead of Christ.

Many people die thinking they are believers because they were baptized as infants. I was a Methodist and my wife was a Lutheran and we both lost thinking our name tag and baptism was what got us to Heaven. I even struggled with getting baptized after I was saved because of my infant baptism. God asked me if I was saved in that group. When I said no, He asked then what do you owe them? I said nothing and was baptized, but I was already saved three months prior.

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u/Renegade8669 12d ago

New/returning Southern Baptist here. My local church just finished up a study on Baptist Distinctives and we discussed this issue in detail.

As a Baptist, I believe: Baptism is an expression of faith (Ordinance) and not a means of grace. As such, true Baptism can only be performed on somebody who has made a conscious, informed decision to follow Jesus Christ. Also, true Baptism is by full immersion, as it pictures the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus and the new life we have in Him when we repent of our sin and place our faith in Him.

Could another Baptist hold a differing view than me? I think it's possible, but highly unlikely. We believe in the Priesthood and Competency of every Believer. This Baptist Distinctive basically affirms that every Believer is competent to interpret the Bible, so another Baptist could potentially come to the conclusion that infant Baptism is acceptable. The only way I could see that happening is with a very new Baptist or one who is questioning the Baptist Distinctives.

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u/Hoon0967 15d ago

Q: Hey, here’s some water right here. What’s keeping me from being baptized? A: Do you believe with all your heart? That’s in the book of Acts somewhere.

Baptist typically only baptize people who make a profession of faith of which infants are incapable of. They do this because it is the pattern found in the New Testament. It’s one of the reasons they have been called the People of the Book.

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u/Scared_Cheesecake715 🌱 Born again 🌱 14d ago

As a Bapitist, this I've seen this verse quoted many times by other Baptists to support the doctrine of symbolic baptism after salvation. You are quoting Acts 8:31, which is in most older Bible translations like KJV. Problem with this one is that this verse is not found in the earliest manuscripts of the Bible. What actually happened was that this text was written in by the early church leaders as a sort of footnote or commentary, then misattributed by translators during the English translation of the Bible, which is why you often see it ommitted or included at the bottom as a footnote, which is what its intended to be. Of course I still believe in the Baptist doctrine of baptism then salvation, with baptism being similar to a wedding ring, symbolizing our new walk with Christ.

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u/swcollings 15d ago

The general Baptist understanding of sin is largely "list of bad things I've done" and salvation is often understood as passing a true-false test on certain factual propositions. This results in a very different understanding of baptism from more classical Christian understandings.

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u/relrobber 15d ago

I don't dispute that there are probably many members of Baptist churches who see things the way you described, but it is not even close to the doctrinal stances of Baptist churches. Any church of any faith could have many of its members described in such flippantly wrong terms.

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u/Cheepshooter 15d ago

This is doctrinally NOT what Baptists believe.

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