Sunday School - Teaching On Baptism - Part 3

Context for the Lesson and the Confession on Baptism

Yeah, let me go ahead and give some context for this lesson and why we're doing these teachings on baptism. So my own experience with thinking about immersion specifically was growing up in Credo Baptist churches that practiced immersion and never really thought much about the nuances of what counts as baptism and what doesn't count as baptism.

And eventually came here, started reading the confession. Let me show you what the confession says about this.

So if you open up the back of your hymnal to page 685, excuse me, 686.

Yeah, 686 on the bottom of the bottom page, not the hymn number. Okay. Oh, okay. Thank you. All right. So if you look at number four, the last point there, it says immersion or dipping of the person in water is necessary to the due administration of this ordinance.

So a question I had when I came to that is what does it mean that it's necessary to the due administration of this ordinance? What is what is due administration? Is due administration how it should be done or is it how it must be done?

And this wasn't this wasn't clear to me. And I went and I looked at Waldron's commentary on this confession. If you've ever seen it, he's got a Sam Waldron has a commentary on the confession at the time that he wrote it.

It was pretty much the only commentary on the confession since then. There have been several others written, not many, just this past. I don't know. In the past three months, two have been published and now they're like a total of four.

So there really aren't many commentaries on on the Baptist confession. There are many on the Westminster confession. Most people go to those. But then when you have sections like this where, you know, baptism is going to be something just in this confession, not in not in the Westminster confession.

Well, then you don't have anybody's thoughts on what these words are intended to mean. So what Sam Waldron says in that is that due administration is just what should be done, not necessarily what must be done.

And I was curious whether or not his opinion was the majority opinion. There are groups on Facebook full of reformed Baptist pastors where you can poll them. So I did a poll and about 60 percent reformed Baptist pastors agreed with Waldron.

And so but it was 60. That's close to 50 percent. But that was that was enough to give me, you know, kind of confidence in the situation to not worry about it too much. But then and on top of that, I had looked at what people had said in church history, specifically what Baptists said.

I couldn't find anything. Baptists just didn't seem to be dealing with this. How often. So when we would encounter this, it would be someone who is sprinkled as a believer. Right. That just doesn't happen very often.

You know, typically someone who's sprinkled is sprinkled as an infant. They're not usually sprinkled as a believer. And back then, how much more was it the case that those who had been. Those who had been sprinkled, it was always as infants.

It was never as believers. And so you just don't have a lot of instances in church history and in that early time of Baptist life where they were addressing this issue directly. And I couldn't find anything.

And so I decided to just move on and accept, you know, what seemed to be the majority opinion, because it seemed it seemed right enough. Anyway, having thought about it more, having talked to Brian about it more since he came in with a with a different thought than I had and realizing that, you know, I really need to study this more.

Having studied it, ended up coming to the conclusion that, yeah, baptism or sorry, immersion is essential to baptism. This is not describing what should be done, but what must be done. So not only is this the biblical position, but I think that the intention of the confession is also to require immersion, not just for baptism to be done properly, but for it to be done at all, if that makes sense.

The Sign and the Thing Signified in Baptism

So a couple of we're going to get into history in a minute, but just a couple of biblical reasons for thinking this way. The first is that the sign and the thing that it signifies, there's a marriage between the two.

You know, in the Lord's Supper, you have wine, you have bread, they represent Christ's body and his blood, and they're designed to represent his body and blood. And if you change those things out, it stops representing the same thing.

I don't know how many of you heard the story three plus years ago where someone had administered communion with Skittles and iced tea to commemorate Trayvon Martin, or whoever it was who had eaten Skittles and iced tea before he had been shot.

But anyway, at that point, you're representing something entirely different. You can't just replace the elements, do them sort of similarly and call it the same thing. It's no longer the Lord's Supper at that point.

And what is it that baptism represents? Is it primarily washing that it represents? If so, a sprinkling might as well represent that. However, if you look at all those passages Brian was walking us through, one of the primary things, if not the primary thing, is fellowship with Christ and his death, burial, and resurrection.

Now, to what degree does sprinkling represent that? It just doesn't. If you want to represent fellowship with Christ and his death, burial, and resurrection, you need immersion the way that it's practiced in the New Testament.

So the second one is also just thinking about the fact that the word baptism means immersion. There are cognates of the word baptism in Scripture. So to baptize is the word baptizo. There's a word baptizmos that is occasionally used to mean baptism.

And those words are cognates, and a lot of times Presbyterians will really capitalize on the fact that baptizmos is used to mean things other than immersion. However, baptizo, the verb to baptize, is only used to speak of immersion.

And my thought for a while was, well, okay, you can label an ordinance with a certain name, but then that doesn't necessarily mean that it has to be that thing. For example, the word church means gathering, but we're still a church in a sense, even when we're not gathered.

So that word has kind of taken on more of a life than just its singular dictionary definition. However, if you look at the way Scripture uses this word in context, all different than just that ordinance, even describing what the people experienced as they went through the Red Sea, that word is not used to describe an ordinance that is practiced by immersion.

Rather, it just does mean immersion, and it's really that simple. So that was some of my biblical thinking about the matter. But one of my biggest hangups is that I really cared what the early Baptists had written about this.

They had worked through these things in detail, and I didn't want to just come to conclusions without seeing what other people had written. You know, it's a common thing in analyzing theology just to look at the Bible and to discount the value of history.

History is not important because we should value—history is not important because we should raise tradition to the level of Scripture or anything like that. But if we're acknowledging that the Holy Spirit has worked through others, especially in times of controversy, how important is it to see what others who are wiser, more gifted, etc., and then on top of that, the Holy Spirit guiding them in specific controversies, how important is it to listen to what they had to say about this particular issue?

And one of my biggest holdups was I just couldn't find anything from early Baptists on this. Well, recently as I was studying it, I did find quite a bit from early Baptists on this once I finally realized what I should be looking for and what I should be searching.

And I'd like to take you through that today, but I'm going to take you through a lot of things on the history of what people have thought about immersion. We're not going to go through every single text in this list here, but—pass those back there— I want to take you through a number of them and then hand this to you so that you have it to look at later on.

Now, each of these quotes has to be understood in context. Not each of these things is necessarily an accurate statement of what baptism is. Not each of these is from someone who I would generally recommend we adopt their view of baptism, but rather it's evidence of the way people have thought through church history about the matter of immersion.

The Didache, the Shepherd of Hermas, and Early Christian Views of Immersion

So first, let's talk about the Didache. Who here knows what the Didache is? Is that something people are familiar with? All right, Miriam knows. What do you know about the Didache? Right, yeah, so the Didache is a first-century text.

So this is the earliest extra-biblical writing. You have the New Testament written in the first century, and then it's not until some number of years later that most other Christian texts are written.

However, you do have the Didache, which was written in the first century. And it's interesting, not because everything it says is accurate, but it lets you know what people were thinking back then. Now, I've gotten the question before, why should we—we don't even know who wrote the Didache.

Why should we count this as something that most Christians are thinking? How do we know it's not a minority view? Anybody have a good response to that? Why it might be worth having a little more weight than just some random person's testimony in the first century?

Why should we count the Didache as having more historical weight than just one random person's testimony in the first century? Proximity to the early church? There are a lot of people who have proximity to the early church who have bonkers views, right?

So, yeah, why should we give this one a little more weight?

Yes? I'm not—I think maybe, but I'm not sure.

We don't have any evidence. So I would say that what you see is that the best theologians in the following centuries cite the Didache favorably. And so what you have is this evidence that people had favorably treated the Didache for several centuries and then onward.

This is something that people thought highly of. So in a sense, it doesn't matter if we know who wrote it or what his views on other things were. What matters is that we have evidence that this is representative of Christian thought because we have much Christian thought that cites it favorably.

Whoever has extra handouts can make sure they get passed around appropriately. Thanks. All right, so what does the Didache say about baptism? And honestly, when I first read this, this is another thing that kept me thinking that immersion was not essential to baptism, that you don't necessarily need immersion.

But having read this again, in light of thinking through this more, I have different thoughts on it now. So first, in concerning baptism, baptize this way. Having first said all these things, you know some formula of how to baptize.

Baptize into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit in living water. Know what living water is? Moving water, that's right, yeah, moving water. But if you have not living water, baptize into other water.

If you cannot in cold and warm, that's why cold or warm water might matter. Once again, it has to do with how much movement there is in the water. If water stays still, it gets warm, right? So rather than baptizing in stagnant water, it's preferable to baptize in not stagnant water.

Because if non-moving water is stagnant, then, you know, it's not as clean. But then, secondly, I think it was also designed to represent the fact that, you know, from him will flow over his living water.

So I think the author had in mind both of those things. But if you have not either, pour out water thrice upon the head into the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. But before baptism, let the baptizer fast, and the baptized, and whatever others can.

But you shall order the baptized to fast one or two days before. Okay, so here, the person who wrote the Didache offers pouring as an alternative to being immersed. Now, reading this again with a different way of thinking about this, I now realize he's not saying exactly that.

He's not offering pouring as an alternative mode of baptism. He's offering pouring as an alternative to baptism, right? If you cannot, if it's impossible to baptize, here's something else you could do other than baptism.

So this isn't necessarily saying that pouring out water is another form of baptism. It's saying here's something you could do if you weren't able to baptize. Now, once again, this is not biblical writing.

This is a practical handbook of what you might do in hypothetical cases where you don't have water, etc. It's not something we should necessarily adopt, but it reflects Christian thinking. And I think the takeaway from this is if the word baptized here means to immerse, what's being offered is an alternative to baptism, not an alternative to a mode of baptism as another mode of baptism.

Does that make sense? Well, I don't know what they would have said back then. Well, I mean I have thoughts on what they would say, but I can't read them too much into this particular author. But yes, that you have not been baptized until you have been immersed, if the word baptism means immersion.

And remember that the person writing Didache is writing in Greek, right? And so they're using the word baptizo just to mean immerse, and they're using another word to mean pour. And they're saying, and if you can't baptizo, then do this other thing.

It's not saying if you can't baptizo by baptizoing. It's not if you can't immerse by immersing, then immerse by some other mode. They're just saying here's an alternative to baptizing, which I would say we should reject that alternative.

That that's something that this author is adding as something you could do in extreme circumstance. Another thing to consider is just how limited the source book of the Didache is. People who have analyzed it, a lot of them have concluded that the only piece of scripture the author is working with is Matthew.

Like no other book of the New Testament, not the other Gospels, not Acts, not the epistles of Paul, but only the book of Matthew. Given that whenever you see an allusion to scripture or whenever you see a quotation, he's only quoting, he's only alluding to Matthew and nothing else.

All right, Shepherd of Hermas, another book which, once again, its value is not in knowing who the author is, but in seeing that Christians through the next century or so thought favorably of this. That it's representative of Christian thought at the time.

I've heard, sir, say I, from certain teachers that there is no other repentance save that which took place from when we went down into the water and obtained remission of our former sins. So you have this dialogue in the Shepherd of Hermas where someone talks about going down into the water.

Right. You have here practiced immersion. And then the epistle of Barnabas. Just other similar documents that people held highly back then and show that when they thought of baptism, they were thinking of immersion going down into the water, not not sprinkling or pouring.

Tertullian, Cyprian, Ambrose, Jerome, and Gregory on Immersion

All right. Moving on to later church fathers, Tertullian. Who knows anything about Tertullian? What do you know about Tertullian, Brian? Yeah. Yeah. He got involved with the Montanists, which were you can imagine them like we've got new apostolic reformation, like the really wild charismatics.

They had they had a sort of similar movement back then, and he kind of got involved in that a little bit. Eventually, he he ended up rejecting it. But, yeah, that was one mark on him, unfortunately. The other thing is he is the first he's the first Latin father.

He's the first guy to write very serious works of theology in Latin ever before this. And even during this time and after a lot of people were writing in Greek. So he's the first guy to start writing in Latin and.

Tertullian himself, and I don't think this is in these quotes, but Tertullian himself. Had. Yes, it's not here yet. Tertullian himself, if I understand correctly, had been baptized emergent and his parents had chosen not to baptize him as as an infant.

So let me go through some of his quotes. Man is dipped in water and amid the utterance of some few words is wedded and then rises again. Not much or not at all cleaner. The consequent attainment of eternity is esteemed far more incredible.

So, in other words, he's describing that when you're washed, it's not the when you go under in baptism. It's not the fact that you're there cleaner that makes any difference. It's the fact that God is accomplishing something in it.

So you have this. Yeah, you have this description of someone being dipped in water. And the same act in the same way as the act of baptism itself, too, is carnal, meaning it's something outward and that we are plunged in water.

But the effect is spiritual and that we are freed from sins. So he's describing once again being plunged in water. This is another statement about immersion. He commands him to be baptized into the father and the son and the Holy Ghost, not into a unipersonal God.

And indeed, it is not once only but three times that we are immersed into the three persons at each several mention of their names. So something he was dealing with back then is from against Praxis. Praxis was essentially the equivalent of the oneness movement that we have now.

So it's interesting. A lot of people imagine that the notion that Jesus is God came later in the 300s. But the first heresies you see people dealing with are the idea that Jesus and the father are the same person.

It's not a denial that Jesus is God. You don't have that until you don't have anyone questioning that Jesus is God until much later. The first thing that people are dealing with is oneness theology where Jesus and the father are the same person.

Okay. Yeah. Three times immersed. And this is something you're going to see a lot in this, that a very common practice was immersion, was triple immersion. That's still practice in some churches like the Brethren churches and the Eastern Orthodox churches.

What's interesting about the Eastern Orthodox churches, though, is they are also paedo-baptists. So they triple immerse infants. If you ever see a video of that infant going underwater three times while it's flailing around, you know.

It's pretty wild to watch. Anyway. Good sign that paedo-baptism was wrong. Is that really what God required? To deal with this matter briefly, I'll show you. Excuse me. I shall begin with baptism. When we are going to enter the water, but a little before in the presence of the congregation under the hand of the president, we solemnly.

I don't know who the president would be, but maybe the one presiding, basically the one presiding. We solemnly profess that we disown the devil and his pomp and his angels. Hereupon we are thrice immersed, making a somewhat ampler pledge than the Lord has appointed in the gospel.

Okay. So once again, you have a statement regarding immersion. And then you have this one from Cyprian. Let me see how many of these next quotes I'd like to actually go through. Let's do Ambrose Jerome and Gregory.

So Ambrose, another fairly important name in church history. Baptism is a likeness of death. When you go down into the water and when you rise again, it becomes a likeness of resurrection. Thus, according to the interpretation of the apostle, just as Christ's resurrection was a regeneration.

So the resurrection, meaning, you know, new life. So the resurrection from the font is also a regeneration. Okay. You go down into the water when you rise again. So Ambrose is also describing baptism as being something where you're going down into and then up out of.

Who knows what Jerome is famous for? The Latin Vulgate, right? So he wrote the first major translation of the New Testament. Who knows what the word Vulgate means? The Latin Vulgate. It means common. So it's for the common man, which is very ironic given that later on Rome only uses the Latin Vulgate for many years.

And refuses to allow the Bible to be translated because it's not supposed to be for the common person. It's only supposed to be for the scholars. And there they are reading something called the Latin Vulgate, which is supposed to be for common people.

It's interesting how that works. Anyway, yes, Jerome is most known for his work on Bible translation. The Savior himself does not preach the kingdom of heaven until by his baptismal immersion he has cleansed the Jordan.

Okay, so once again, statement about immersion. Gregory the Great. Who knows who Gregory the Great is? First Pope? So you could argue a lot about who the first Pope is, right? If Pope is just an elder in Rome, you know, Peter could be called the first Pope.

You know, because it does look like by all accounts he was in Rome. But he is the first guy to start really claiming Roman supremacy. At the same time, a lot of his theology was relatively good otherwise.

And he fought against Simoni. He's also one who Calvin referred to him as the last of the good Popes. So you have all these bishops in Rome who, you know, are claiming more and more power for himself.

And unfortunately, Gregory was part of that, part of elevating that. At the same time, a lot of his theology was otherwise pretty good. I think he's also the guy who popularized the notion of the seven deadly sins, if I remember correctly.

Anyway, but with respect to trying immersion in baptism, no truer answer can be given than what you have yourself felt to be right, namely that where there's one faith, the diversity of usage does no harm to Holy Church.

Now we, in immersing thrice, signify sacraments in the three days supple. I don't think that's the right supple curve, probably. So that when the infant is a third time lifted out of the water, the resurrection after a space of three days may be expressed.

So we're talking much later at this point, right? So obviously you've got the development of paedo-baptism, et cetera, but you have immersion still, right? The transition from credo-baptism to paedo-baptism happens fairly early in church history.

The transition from immersion to sprinkling happens later. So in other words, there's less excuse for this one. You know, if you care a lot about church history and the trajectory of church history and you find those arguments persuasive, if you're persuaded of credo-baptism, how much more should you be persuaded of the necessity of immersion, if that's a much later development even than paedo-baptism?

Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and Turretin on Immersion

Now let's look at some of the reformers because what is interesting here is the fact that these various paedo-baptists throughout the Reformation even acknowledged that immersion, excuse me, sprinkling and pouring are later developments in church history.

Calvin and Luther all acknowledged this. They claimed that it was fine to sprinkle, but at the same time, they acknowledged that sprinkling was a later development and the early church only did immersions.

So that's quite a concession from them. So let's go through these Luther quotes. In Greek, baptism is baptismos, and in Latin, it is mercio. It means to submerge something so deeply that it is covered by the water.

It is no longer a common practice to immerse infants, but to scoop water from the font and pour it over them. We should restore the practice of immersion. He's saying he wants to go back to dunking babies.

However, because it agrees with the meaning of the word, I'm not sure what that is or where that comes from, toffe, the infant or whoever is baptized should be submerged in water and drawn out again. In the German language, the word toffe, probably the German word for baptism.

I didn't look into this. It comes undoubtedly from the word tief. Therefore, those who are baptized should be dunked. Immersion is also suggested by the significance of baptism. For baptism, as we shall hear, signifies that the old person or sinful birth from flesh and blood are to be altogether drowned by the grace of God.

We should therefore do justice to its meaning and make the act of baptism an accurate and perfect symbol. So he's I don't think he ever changed his practice, but he's arguing that they should go back to immersion.

And then here and another Luther quote, it is therefore indeed correct to say that baptism is a washing away of sins, but the expression is too mild and too weak to bring the full significance of baptism, which is rather a symbol of death and resurrection.

For this reason, I would have those who who are to be baptized completely immersed in water as the word says, and as the mystery indicates, not because I deem this necessary. So he's he's saying it's not necessary, but that it would be the right way of doing it.

But because it would be well to give to a thing so perfect and complete a sign that is also complete and perfect. So he's acknowledging that that sprinkling is a partial sign. And you're you're removing the main thing signified.

And this is doubtless the way in which it was instituted by Christ. The sinner does not so much need to be washed as he needs to die in order to be wholly renewed and made another creature and to be conformed to the death and resurrection of Christ, with whom he dies and rises again through baptism.

There are pretty strong statements from Luther that if you were really to have the symbol in full, it would have to be immersion that that sprinkling is is only addressing a minority of what is supposed to be symbolized in baptism.

Even though he says it's that immersion is not necessary, you can still do sprinkling. He's acknowledging that the majority of what signified by it is not you don't have that in sprinkling or pouring.

All right. Calvin. Calvin, likewise, he's not arguing for a restoration of immersion, but he also concedes that the early church only practiced immersion. It is himself who makes us the partakers of his death, destroys the kingdom of Satan, subdues the power of compusence.

Excuse me. Concupiscence can never pronounce that word. Nay, makes us one with himself, that being clothed with him, we may be accounted the children of God. These things I say we ought to feel as truly and certainly in our mind as we see our body washed, immersed and surrounded with water.

So he's describing what's being symbol symbolized as an immersion. And so he continues on later in that section, in that chapter of his institutes. Churches should be at liberty to adopt either, you know, to adopt either pouring or or immersion according to the diversity of climates.

So he's saying, you know, if it's if it's if you're in a drier area, maybe you don't want to baptize, maybe you don't want to immerse. Although it is evident that the term baptized means to immerse that this was the form used by the primitive church.

Once again, really strong concession that all the early Christians were immersing that sprinkling and pouring were later developments. So I think that's all pretty significant. And then you have Zwingli also, who was another one of these guys that interacted with Luther, for example.

I should have actually probably put him before Luther timeline wise. Immersion in the water signifies death. That is, Christ was dead and buried. So we too die to the world. Reemergence from the water signifies the resurrection of Christ.

That as he rose again to die no more, we too have new life in Christ and can never die, but have passed from death unto life. For when you were plunged into the external water, it signified that you were plunged into the death of Christ.

That is, as Christ died for you, you too died to the old man. And when you reemerge, signify the resurrection of Christ, that in him you are raised up again and now walk in newness of life. All right, who knows who Francis Turretin is?

Okay, so after Calvin in Geneva, there's Beza. After Beza, Theodore Beza. After Theodore Beza, there's Francis Turretin. Francis Turretin is a really great theologian, if you ever get his work on systematic theology.

It's called Enlectic Theology. Am I pronouncing that one wrong? For as in baptism, when performed in the primitive manner by immersion and emersion, descending into the water and again going out of it, of which descent and ascent we have example in the eunuch, Acts 8, 38, 39.

Yea, and what is more, as by this rite, when persons are immersed in water, they are overwhelmed and, as it were, buried in a manner buried together with Christ. And again, when they emerge, seem to be raised out of the grave and are said to rise again with Christ.

So just a lot of statements from those who are Panabaptists in the Reformation. Even one's practicing pouring that the right way of doing it is actually immersion or the right her way of doing it. Now, all the quotes we've looked at so far have been things that have either made statements about what is a fuller demonstration of what is signified or what the early church does.

None of these things so far have been hard and fast statements about whether or not immersion is necessary. It's just about whether or not it's right or proper or whether it's better or whether it fully signifies a thing or whether the early church practiced it.

And so, as we look at the Baptists, we want to look particularly at statements that say whether or not it's necessary. We already know the early Baptists promoted immersion, but the question is, was immersion, did they consider it necessary, essential to baptism, so that if you weren't immersing, you weren't actually baptizing?

And I couldn't find any evidence of this for a long time, but anyway, as I studied this several months ago, I was able to find actually quite a bit. And all the rest of the things that you see in here, there are lots of scripture lists on those things.

The quotes that I'm pulling together here, a lot of these came from my own research and Google Books. So, Google Books, a lot of the things available on Google Books have only been available for the past five years or so.

So, a lot of this is really interesting stuff that's hard to collect and collate. All the other stuff I was just grabbing from elsewhere, but these are like, these you couldn't find necessarily a good scripture list for.

Or, not scripture lists, excuse me, these you couldn't necessarily find a good quote list for. All right, so this first one is just from the catechism. So, just thinking on the catechism and what is intended by it, William Collins being the one who likely wrote the catechism.

It's often called Keech's Catechism, but that was just because he was involved in publishing it, not necessarily because he was the main author of it. William Collins is the main author. Anyway, how is baptism rightly administered?

It says by immersion, etc. And then notice the connection to the next question. What is the duty of such who are rightly baptized? It's the duty of such who are rightly baptized to give up themselves to some particular and ordinary church of Jesus Christ.

So, who is to become a church member? Those who have been rightly baptized. He doesn't extend it to those who have been wrongly baptized, right? He only extends it to those who have been rightly baptized.

And so here, even in the catechism, you see a hint that Collins considered baptism to be—or sorry, immersion to be essential to baptism, that it was necessary in order for church membership. And later on in the catechism, you also see the question addressed of whether or not—and I think this is the one we did last week—of whether or not someone who has not been baptized may come to the Lord's table.

And the answer is, no, you have to be baptized to come to the Lord's table. And what you end up seeing in this era is that those who held one of those positions also held the other, right? If they restricted communion only to those who are baptized, they also required immersion.

Please stop me if you have any questions. William Kiffin. So, let me pull up my notes. I think I was going to say some things about who some of these people are. Yeah, all right. Yeah, Kiffin is interesting.

He—one of the things that's notable about Kiffin in this debate is that he left a church because they allowed unbaptized men to preach—or not unbaptized, but specifically those who had not been immersed to preach, right?

And so he decided, you know, on good terms to leave a church because they didn't hold immersion highly enough. For to what purpose is it to be baptized, may one reason with himself, if he may enjoy all church privileges without it?

The Baptist, if once such a belief prevails, would be easily tempted to lay aside that reproached practice, which envious men have unjustly derided in a burst of being dipped—that is, baptized—and challenge their church communion by virtue of their faith only.

So, he's equating—excuse me, yeah, that is a being dipped, right? But he's equating being dipped here with being baptized, and that sort of baptism being necessary for church membership, and talking about the temptation of, in a later time, Baptists deciding not to engage in this dipping, to require this dipping.

So that's not the clearest quote, but this next one is much clearer. You say these have the doctrine of baptism, if they have it. And this is Kiffin arguing with Bunyan, right? Bunyan taught—a lot of people characterize Bunyan as teaching that you didn't have to have a believer's baptism in order to be a church member and be a part of communion.

And a lot of them back up their—a lot of Baptist churches will practice that. They'll allow people who have only been baptized as infants to join as members of the church, even though they say you should be baptized as a believer.

And they'll often cite John Bunyan as being on their side of the ring for this one. But John Bunyan taught you didn't have to be baptized at all, not that you could, you know, redefine your baptism by your own conscience or something like that.

He says—he taught that baptism just wasn't needed for church membership or the Lord's Supper. You say these have the doctrine of baptism, if they have it, they understand it. You say it is the death of Christ, his resurrection, and their interest in it.

But I conceive in the doctrine of baptism there is something else that more properly relates to baptism as a command, which it will be hard for you to prove these unbaptized persons have. One, a right administration.

Two, a right subject. Three, the right manner of dipping. Four, the right end. Three—so he's saying that if they really have baptism, then they'd have all these things, and one of those things being they're immersed.

All right, so Benjamin Keech, well-known. You know, like I said, his name is typically attached to the Catechism. He is one of the primary authors of the 1689 Confession. And so if you were asking the question, you know, what did this mean when we read it?

Well, you know, knowing what the primary authors thought about it is pretty important. So he has a lot of quotes on this topic. He has whole sections where he talks about this. He says, Very clear statement.

A lot of clear statements from Keech. Really, really clear statements from Keech. Dipping is washing, but every washing is not dipping. Once again, a little hard to understand that, but basically that not every time you wash something are you baptizing.

And baptism, you know, just washing by sprinkling or pouring is no baptism at all. All right, Hercules Collins. So who knows what anything Hercules Collins is known for? He wrote another catechism called an Orthodox Catechism, which the Baptist Catechism is a like Baptist version of the Westminster Shorter Catechism.