“What makes a Baptist Church…Baptist?” These beliefs have historically identified baptists and distinguished them from other denominations:
- Bible as the only rule for faith and practice
- Regenerate and immersed church membership
- Autonomy of the local church
- Priesthood of the believer
- Soul liberty
- Immersion and the Lord’s supper are the only two ordinances
- Separation, both ecclesiastical and ethical
We have maintained from Scripture that the local NT church is under no human authority outside of Christ including synods, councils, presbyteries, or any hierarchy of bishops or cardinals as taught by the Roman Catholic, Anglican, or Orthodox traditions. That being the case, we look to the words of Jesus himself to establish ordinances or rules for worship. Some may wish to call them sacraments, but Baptists have shied away from this term as it implies that these actions can impart grace in and of themselves.
These religious ceremonies have a powerful effect when we understand and have experienced the spiritual realities they represent.
As is the case with the other points we have discussed in this series, the ordinances are viewed differently by the various church traditions. With Scripture alone as our guide, we find two practices commanded by our Lord for his church to observe as we await his return from heaven: baptism and the Lord’s supper. Rather than conferring grace to the participants as external acts, we understand them to be physical signs or symbols of spiritual truths. E. Y. Mullins helpfully explains the Baptist view, that “They are outward symbols that signify very profound truths, and these truths have vital power in the Christian life when duly apprehended or spiritually discerned by the recipient when the ordinances are administered.” In other words, these religious ceremonies have a powerful effect when we understand and have experienced the spiritual realities they represent.
Baptism is the immersion in water of a professing believer in the name of the Father, Son, and Spirit. It was commanded by Christ when he commissioned his apostles after his resurrection: “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 28:19). It is closely linked here with the command to make disciples, so baptism naturally follows the preaching of the gospel and leads to systematic instruction in all of Jesus’ teaching. This work is to be repeated by every generation of disciples until the very “end of the age” (v.20).
As a symbol, baptism identifies the believer with Jesus Christ. Not only is he baptized in the name of the triune God, which implies divine ownership and authority over the individual, but he is to call on the name of the Lord, himself (Acts 22:16). This implies submission to the lordship of Jesus on the part of the baptized person, which necessarily limits baptism to only those who are already believers. As Robert Saucy notes, “Baptism is therefore the sign of the working of the gospel in which God unites the believer to himself through Christ, and the believer testifies to the subjective reality of that union in his life.”
The believer’s identification with Christ in baptism is a powerful picture of his death to sin and resurrection as a new creature. Paul makes much of this symbolism in Romans 6 when he says that, as believers, we are so closely identified with Christ’s bodily death, burial, and resurrection, that we should consider ourselves dead to sin and alive to God. He uses baptism in a very similar way in Colossians 2:12, maintaining that the believer was “buried with Him in baptism, in which you also were raised with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead.” When Peter refers to baptism in his first epistle, he sees in it an analogy to the great flood – God’s judgment on human wickedness – and the ark which delivered Noah and his family to safety. In the same way, Peter says, Jesus delivered us from God’s righteous wrath by our identification with his death and resurrection – He, the just One, and we, the unjust.
Baptism also serves to identify the believer with the church. When we are identified with Christ, who is the head, we also become identified with the church, which is his body. In Ephesians 5, Paul speaks about how husbands and wives ought to relate to each other as an illustration of the relationship between Christ and the church. He states in v.23 that “Christ is the head of the church; and He is the Savior of the body.” Then in v.30 he notes that “we are members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones.” It is inconceivable that one might identify with the head but not the body, yet that is exactly what happens when someone is baptized apart from membership in a local church.
From the beginning we can see that new believers were baptized and subsequently added to the church: “Then those who gladly received his word were baptized; and that day about three thousand souls were added to them” (Acts 2:41). It was not unusual for new believers to be baptized almost immediately upon their conversion to Christ, as the rest of the NT examples of baptism generally agree. When baptized these new disciples became full participants in the life of the church, receiving thorough instruction in the Christian life and being subject to the spiritual oversight and discipline of the congregation and its leaders.
While our identification with Christ and with his church does indeed involve cleansing from sin, it is too much to say that the Scriptures use baptism as a picture of this cleansing. At its heart, our salvation is death to the old life and resurrection to eternal life in Jesus Christ. This understanding as it relates to the symbol of baptism is important and helpful, because an emphasis on cleansing of sins will naturally tend to picture only cleansing from past sins, and the baptized individual will then be responsible to keep himself clean. But when we understand that salvation is about new life, and our baptism pictures this, then we can experience the life-giving power of the Spirit into which we have been born again, rather than bear the burden of maintaining a spiritual gift granted at our baptism.
There is more that could be said, but this should be enough to demonstrate what distinguishes Baptists from other traditions on the subject of baptism. Next, we will look at the Lord’s supper before going on to consider ordinances proposed by other church traditions.