Sunday School - Teaching On Baptism - Part 3

Silicon Valley Reformed Baptist Church

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Sunday School - Teaching On Baptism (Cessationism) - Part 4

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give some context for this lesson. My own experience with thinking about immersion specifically, was growing up in a crew of 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.

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Let me show you what the confession says about this. So if you open up in the back of your hymnal to page 685, excuse me, 686.

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In the back of the hymnal? Yeah, 686 on the bottom page, not the hymn number.

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Okay. Oh, okay. Thank you. All right.

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So if you look at number 4, the last point there, it says immersion or dipping of the person in water is necessary to the due administration of this ordinance.

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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?

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What is due administration? Is due administration how it should be done, or is it how it must be done?

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This wasn't clear to me, and I went and I looked at Waldron's commentary on this confession.

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If you've ever seen it, 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.

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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.

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So there really aren't many commentaries on the Baptist confession. There are many on the Westminster confession, most people go to those.

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But then when you have sections like this, where baptism is going to be something just in this confession, not in the

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Westminster confession, well, then you don't have anybody's thoughts on what these words are intended to mean.

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So what Sam Waldron says in that, is that due administration is just what should be done, not necessarily what must be done.

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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.

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So I did a poll, and about 60 % Reformed Baptist pastors agreed with Waldron.

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And so, but it was 60, that's close to 50%, but that was enough to give me, kind of confidence in the situation to not worry about it too much.

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But then, and on top of that, I had looked at what people had said in church history, specifically what

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Baptists said, and 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?

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That just doesn't happen very often. You know, typically someone who's sprinkled is sprinkled as an infant.

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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.

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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.

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And I couldn't find anything. And so I decided to just move on and accept what seemed to be the majority opinion, because it seemed right enough.

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Anyway, having thought about it more, having talked to Brian about it more, since he came in with a different thought than I had, and realizing that, you know,

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The first is that the sign and the thing that it signifies, there's a marriage between the two.

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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.

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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

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Trayvon Martin, or whoever it was who had eaten Skittles and iced tea before he had been shot.

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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.

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It's no longer the Lord's Supper at that point. And what is it that baptism represents?

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Is it primarily washing that it represents? If so, a sprinkling might as well represent that.

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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.

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Now, to what degree does sprinkling represent that? It just doesn't. But 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

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New Testament. So the second one is also just thinking about the fact that the word baptism means immersion.

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There are cognates of the word baptism in scripture. So to baptize is the word baptizo.

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There's a word baptizmos that is occasionally used to mean baptism. And those words are cognates.

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And a lot of times Presbyterians will really capitalize on the fact that baptizmos is used to mean things other than immersion.

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However, baptizo, the verb to baptize, is only used to speak of immersion.

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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.

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For example, you know the word church means gathering, but we're still a church in a sense, even when we're not gathered.

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So that word has kind of taken on more of a life than just its singular dictionary definition.

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However, if you look at the way scripture uses this word in contexts all different than just that ordinance, even describing what the people experienced as they went through the

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Red Sea, that word is not used to describe an ordinance that is practiced by immersion.

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Rather, it just does mean immersion, and it's really that simple. So that was some of my biblical thinking about the matter.

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But one of my biggest hangups is that, you know, I really cared what the early

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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.

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You know, it's a common thing in analyzing theology just to look at the

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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.

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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, et cetera, and then on top of that, the

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Holy Spirit guiding them in specific controversies, how important is it to listen to what they had to say about this particular issue?

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And one of my biggest holdups was I just couldn't find anything from early Baptists on this.

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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

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I should be searching. And I'd like to take you through that today, but I'm gonna take you through a lot of things on the history of what people have thought about immersion.

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We're not gonna go through every single text in this list here, but if you wanna pass those back there,

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I'll 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.

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Not each of these things is necessarily an accurate statement of what baptism is.

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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.

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So first, let's talk about the Didache. Who here knows what the Didache is? Is that something people are familiar with?

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All right, Miriam knows. What do you know about the Didache? It's like what? Right, yeah, so the

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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

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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.

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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

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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?

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Why should we count the Didache as having more historical weight than just one random person's testimony in the first century?

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Proximity to the early church, right? There are a lot of people that have proximity to the early church who have bonkers views, right?

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So yeah, why should we give this one a little more weight? Yes? I think maybe, but I'm not sure.

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We don't have any evidence. Yeah, so I would say that what you see is that the best theologians in the following centuries cite the

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Didache favorably, right? And so what you have is this evidence that people had favorably treated the

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Didache for several centuries, right? And then onward. This is something that people thought highly of.

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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

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Christian thought that cites it favorably. Whoever has extra handouts can make sure they get passed around appropriately.

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Thanks. All right, so what does the Didache say about baptism? And honestly, when

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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.

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But having read this again, and in light of thinking through this more,

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I have different thoughts on it now. So first, in concerning baptism, baptize this way.

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Having first said all these things, you know some formula of how to baptize.

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Baptize into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and living water. Know what living water is?

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Moving water, that's right, yeah, moving water. But if you have not living water, baptize into other water.

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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.

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If water stays still, it gets warm, right? So rather than baptizing in stagnant water, it's preferable to baptize in not stagnant water.

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Because if non -moving water is stagnant, then it's not as clean.

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But then secondly, I think it was also designed to represent the fact that from him will flow over his living water.

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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

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Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. But before baptism, let the baptizer fast and the baptized and whatever others can.

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But you shall order the baptized to fast one or two days before. Okay, so here, the person who wrote the

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Didache offers pouring as an alternative to being immersed.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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, et cetera.

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It's not something we should necessarily adopt, but it reflects Christian thinking. And I think the takeaway from this is if the word baptize 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.

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Does that make sense? Well, I don't know what they would have said back then.

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Well, I mean, I have thoughts on what they would say, but I can't read them too much into this particular author.

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But yes, that you have not been baptized until you have been immersed, if the word baptism means immersion.

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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, right?

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It's not saying if you can't baptizo by baptizoing, right? It's not if you can't immerse by immersing, then immerse by some other mode.

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They're just saying, here's an alternative to baptizing, which

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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.

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Another thing to consider is just how limited the source book of the

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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

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Matthew. No other book of the New Testament, not the other gospels, not Acts, not the epistles of Paul, only the book of Matthew.

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Given that whenever you see an allusion to scripture or ever you see a quotation, he's only quoting, he's only alluding to Matthew and nothing else.

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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.

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I've heard, sir, say I, from certain teachers that there's no other repentance save that which took place from when we went down into the water and obtained remission of our former sins.

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So you have this dialogue in the Shepherd of Hermas where someone talks about going down into the water, you have here practiced immersion.

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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 sprinkling or pouring.

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All right. Moving on to later church fathers,

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Tertullian. Who knows anything about Tertullian? What do you know about Tertullian, Brian?

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He's supposedly a Christian, and he kind of broke himself up.

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Yeah, he got involved with the Montanists, which were, you can imagine them, like we've got

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New Apostolic Reformation, like the really wild Charismatics. They had a sort of similar movement back then, and he kind of got involved in that a little bit.

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Eventually, he ended up rejecting it, but yeah, that was one mark on him, unfortunately.

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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 before this, and even during this time and after, a lot of people were writing in Greek.

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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, had, yeah, it's not here.

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Yeah, Tertullian himself, if I understand correctly, had been baptized emergent, and his parents had chosen not to baptize him as an infant.

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So let me go through some of his quotes. A man is dipped in water, and amid the utterance of some few words, is wetted, and then rises again, not much or not at all cleaner.

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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 cleaner that makes any difference.

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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.

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In 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.

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So he's describing, once again, being plunged in water. This is another statement about immersion.

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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.

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So something he was dealing with back then, and this is from against Praxis. Praxis was essentially the equivalent of the oneness movement that we have now.

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So it's interesting. A lot of people imagine that the notion that Jesus is

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God came later in the 300s, but the first heresies you see people dealing with are the idea that Jesus and the

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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

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God until much later. The first thing that people are dealing with is oneness theology, where Jesus and the

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Father are the same person. Okay, yeah, three times immersed, and this is something you're gonna see a lot in this, that a very common practice was immersion, was triple immersion.

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That's still practiced in some churches, like the Brethren churches, and the Eastern Orthodox churches.

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What's interesting about the Eastern Orthodox churches, though, is they are also paedobaptists, so they triple immerse infants.

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If you ever see a video of that, an infant going underwater three times while it's flailing around, you know.

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Aw. It's pretty wild to watch. Anyway, good sign that paedobaptism was wrong.

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Is that really what God required? To deal with this matter briefly, I'll show you, excuse me,

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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,

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I don't know who the president would be, but maybe the one presiding, basically the one presiding.

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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

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Lord has appointed in the gospel. Okay, so once again, you have a statement regarding immersion, and then you have this one from Cyprian.

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Let me see how many of these next quotes I'd like to actually go through.

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Let's do Ambrose Jerome and Gregory. So Ambrose, another fairly important name in church history.

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Baptism is a likeness of death when you go down into the water, and when you rise again, it becomes a likeness of resurrection.

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Thus, according to the interpretation of the apostle, just as Christ's resurrection was a regeneration, so the resurrection, meaning new life, so the resurrection from the font is also a regeneration.

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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.

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Who knows what Jerome is famous for? The Latin Vulgate, right?

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So he wrote the first major translation of the

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New Testament. Who knows what the word Vulgate means, the

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Latin Vulgate? It means common, so it's for the common man, which is very ironic given that later on,

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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.

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And there they are reading something called the Latin Vulgate, which is supposed to be for common people.

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It's interesting how that works. Anyway, yes, Jerome is most known for his work on Bible translation.

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The Savior himself does not preach the kingdom of heaven until by his baptismal immersion, he has cleansed the

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Jordan. Okay, so once again, statement about immersion. Gregory the Great, who knows who

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Gregory the Great is? First Pope?

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So you could argue a lot about who the first Pope is, right? If Pope is just an elder in Rome, Peter could be called the first Pope, because it does look like by all accounts he was in Rome.

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But he's the first guy to start really claiming Roman supremacy.

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At the same time, a lot of his theology was relatively good otherwise. And he fought against Simoni.

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He's also one who Calvin referred to him as the last of the good

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Popes. So you have all these bishops in Rome who are claiming more and more power for himself.

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And unfortunately, Gregory is part of that, part of elevating that. At the same time, a lot of his theology was otherwise pretty good.

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I think he's also the guy who popularized the notion of the seven deadly sins, if I remember correctly.

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Anyway, but with respect to trine 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.

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Now we, in immersing thrice, signify sacraments in the three days sepulchre, I don't think that's right, sepulchre 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.

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So we're talking much later at this point, right? It's 600, so obviously you've got the development of paedo -baptism, et cetera, but you have immersion still, right?

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The transition from credo -baptism to paedo -baptism happens fairly early in church history.

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The transition from immersion to sprinkling happens later.

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So in other words, there's less excuse for this one. 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?

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Now let's look at some of the reformers, because what is interesting here is the fact that these various paedo -baptists throughout the

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Reformation even acknowledged that immersion, excuse me, sprinkling and pouring are later developments in church history.

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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.

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So that's quite a concession from them. So let's go through these Luther quotes.

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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.

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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.

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He's saying he wants to go back to dunking babies. However, because it agrees with the meaning of the word,

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I'm not sure what that is or where that comes from, toffee, the infant or whoever is baptized should be submerged in water and drawn out again.

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In the German language, the word toffee, probably the German word for baptism,

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I didn't look into this, comes undoubtedly from the word teuf. Therefore, those who are baptized should be dunked.

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Immersion is also suggested by the significance of baptism, for baptism, as we shall hear, signifies that the old person or her sinful birth from flesh and blood are to be altogether drowned by the grace of God.

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We should therefore do justice to its meaning and make the act of baptism an accurate and perfect symbol.

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So I don't think he ever changed his practice, but he's arguing that they should go back to immersion. And then here in another

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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.

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For this reason, I would have those who are to be baptized completely immersed in water, as the word says, and as the mystery indicates, not because I deem this necessary.

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So he's saying it's not necessary, but that it would be the right way of doing it.

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But because it would be well to give to a thing so perfect and complete a sign that is also complete and perfect.

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So he's acknowledging that sprinkling is a partial sign, and you're removing the main thing signified.

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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.

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

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

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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.

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It is himself who makes us the partakers of his death, destroys the kingdom of Satan, subdues the power of compusence, excuse me, concupiscence.

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Can never pronounce that word. Nay, makes us one with himself, that being clothed with him, we may be accounted the children of God.

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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.

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So he's describing what's being symbolized as an immersion. And so he continues on later in that section, in that chapter of his institutes.

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Churches should be at liberty to adopt either, to adopt either pouring or immersion, according to the diversity of climates.

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So he's saying, you know, if you're in a drier area, maybe you don't wanna baptize, maybe you don't want to immerse.

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Although it is evident that the term baptize means to immerse and that this was the form used by the primitive church.

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Once again, really strong concession that all the early Christians were immersing, that sprinkling and pouring were later developments.

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So I think that's all pretty significant. And then you have

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Zwingli also, who was another one of these guys that interacted with Luther, for example.

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I should have actually probably put him before Luther, timeline wise. Immersion in the water signifies death, that as Christ was dead and buried, so we too die to the world.

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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.

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For when you were plunged into the external water, it signified that you were plunged into the death of Christ.

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That is, as Christ died for you, you too died to the old man. And when you reemerge, it signified the resurrection of Christ, that in him you were raised up again and now walk in newness of life.

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All right, who knows who Francis Turretin is? Okay, so after Calvin in Geneva, there's

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Beza. After Beza, Theodore Beza. After Theodore Beza, there's Francis Turretin. Francis Turretin's a really great theologian, if you ever get his work on systematic theology.

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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,

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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.

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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

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Panabaptists in the Reformation, even one's practicing pouring, that the right way of doing it is actually immersion or the righter way of doing it.

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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.

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None of these things so far have been hard and fast statements about whether or not immersion is necessary.

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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.

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And so, as we look at the Baptists, we wanna look at particularly at statements that say whether or not it's necessary.

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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?

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And I couldn't find any evidence of this for a long time, but anyway, as I studied this several months ago,

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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.

33:50

The quotes that I'm pulling together here, a lot of these came from my own research and Google Books.

33:58

So Google Books, a lot of the things available on Google Books have only been available for the past five years or so.

34:04

So a lot of this is really interesting stuff that's hard to collect and collate. All the other stuff

34:10

I was just grabbing from elsewhere, but these are like, these you couldn't find necessarily a good scripture list for, or not scripture list, excuse me, these you couldn't necessarily find a good quote list for.

34:22

All right, so this first one is just from the catechism. So just thinking on the catechism and what is intended by it,

34:29

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.

34:40

William Collins is the main author. Anyway, how is baptism rightly administered? It says by immersion, et cetera.

34:47

And then notice the connection to the next question. What is the duty of such who are rightly baptized? Is the duty of such who are rightly baptized to give up themselves to some particular and ordinary church of Jesus Christ.

35:00

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?

35:07

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 immersion to be essential to baptism, that it was necessary in order for church membership.

35:25

And later on in the catechism, you also see the question addressed of whether or not, and I think this is, is this the one we did last week, of whether or not someone who has not been baptized may come to the

35:38

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?

35:48

If they restricted communion only to those who are baptized, they also required immersion. Please stop me if you have any questions.

36:00

William Kiffin. So let me pull up my notes.

36:05

I think I was gonna say some things about who some of these people are. Yeah, all right.

36:19

Yeah, Kiffin is interesting. 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.

36:29

Or not unbaptized, but specifically those who had not been immersed to preach, right? And so he decided, on good terms, to leave a church because they didn't hold immersion highly enough.

36:45

Let's see. For to what purpose is it to be baptized, may one reason with himself, if he may enjoy all church privileges without it?

36:54

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.

37:09

And the challenge to, excuse me, and challenge their church communion by virtue of their faith only.

37:16

So he's equating, excuse me, yeah, that is a being dipped, right?

37:23

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,

37:33

Baptist 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.

37:44

You say these have the doctrine of baptism, if they have it. And this is Kiffin arguing with Bunyan, right?

37:51

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.

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

38:14

And they'll often cite John Bunyan as being on their side of the ring for this one.

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But John Bunyan taught you didn't have to be baptized at all, not that you could redefine your baptism by your own conscience or something like that.

38:28

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.

38:41

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.

38:56

One, a right administration. Two, a right subject. Three, the right manner of dipping.

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Four, the right end. Three, so he's saying that if they really have baptism, then they'd have all these things.

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And one of those things being they're immersed. All right, so Benjamin Keech, well known.

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Like I said, his name is typically attached to the catechism. He's one of the primary authors of the 1689

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Confession. And so if you were asking the question, what did this mean when we read it? Well, knowing what the primary authors thought about it is pretty important.

39:38

So he has a lot of quotes on this topic. He has whole sections where he talks about this.

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He says, sprinkling is sprinkling, let it be done how you please, but it never was nor never will be baptizing.

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Very clear statement, a lot of clear statements from Keech. As the cutting off of a little bit of the foreskin of the flesh and not the 20th part around is not circumcision.

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So sprinkling a little water on the face is not baptism. And it would be ridiculous and very absurd to call that circumcision.

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So it is as false and ridiculous to call sprinkling baptizing. The practice of baptism in the primitive times doth, as you have heard, evidently show that the baptized were always dipped all over in water.

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Certainly it is no baptism at all, if not so administered. Really, really clear statements from Keech.

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If those typical baptisms spoken of in the scripture signified immersion or an overwhelming or burial, then it is sprinkling no true baptism.

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But those typical baptisms, et cetera, did signify immersion or an overwhelming or a burial.

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Therefore, sprinkling is no true baptism. Dipping is washing, but every washing is not dipping.

40:56

Theirs is, as Mr. Fisher observes, an improper, remote, or indirect baptism that they infer from the improper signification of the

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Greek word baptizo, and so no true baptism at all. Once again, a little hard to understand that, but basically that not every time you wash something are you baptizing, and baptism, just washing by sprinkling or pouring is no baptism at all.

41:19

All right, Hercules Collins. So who knows what anything

41:26

Hercules Collins is known for? He wrote another catechism called an

41:34

Orthodox Catechism, which the Baptist Catechism is a Baptist version of the Westminster Shorter Catechism.

41:41

An Orthodox Catechism is the Baptist version of the Heidelberg Catechism. So anyway,

41:48

Hercules Collins is the author of that. But the administration of baptism by sprinkling, pouring, or dropping does no way answer the commission nor intention of Christ, the lawmaker.

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Ergo, the administration of baptism by sprinkling, pouring, or dropping is not authentic. And then he says, sprinkling is known to be rantizing, not baptizing or baptism.

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Now, I've mentioned this before when teaching through the catechism, and you see this come up a lot of times, not just in Collins, but also in Keech and others, that early

42:19

Baptists referred to sprinkling as rantizing because they didn't think it deserved to be called baptizing. The word baptize comes from baptizo, which means to immerse.

42:28

And so can you call sprinkling a form of immersion? No, it's a whole different thing. So you should use a different Greek word to describe it.

42:35

The Greek word for sprinkling is rantizo, so they called it rantizing. All right, if any should ask why sprinkling will not do as well as dipping,

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I answer, because that is another thing than Christ hath commanded, and tis high presumption to change

42:54

God's ordinances. Though there was no more virtue in the waters of Jordan than of Damascus, yet Naaman must keep to God's appointment.

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In so doing, we lose the end of the ordinance, which as aforesaid, is to show forth the death and resurrection of Christ.

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We must keep the ordinances as they were delivered unto us, as Moses was to make all things according to the pattern showed him in the mouth.

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God is a jealous God and stands upon small things in matters of worship. Had Moses and Aaron but lifted up a tool upon the altar of rough stone to beautify it, they would have polluted it, because contrary to the command, if you're missing that,

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God had commanded the altar be made with unhewn stone, right, you weren't allowed to cut it. This has no likeness to the holy examples of Christ and his apostles.

43:45

All right, and then Philip Carey, who is not particularly well known, but what's interesting about him is this book on baptism, which

43:53

I'm quoting here, is it was endorsed by William Kiffin, Benjamin Keech, John Harris, Richard Adams, and Robert Steed, who are all signatories of the

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Second London Baptist Confession. So if we're wondering, what did all these different people who wrote the

44:12

London Baptist Confession and signed it believe? Well, they all endorsed, or a large number of the most important ones endorsed this one book on baptism.

44:20

What does it say? Their names are all printed in the front of this book. And it says, therefore, to alter this right from dipping to sprinkling spoils quite the symbols and makes it another thing.

44:32

So it's entirely different thing. It necessarily follows that it is evil when he bids baptized not to do it, but to rantize.

44:41

Okay, so in answering the question, what did the confession mean? What did the authors of the confession think?

44:48

I've come to the conclusion with all these quotes, especially this Philip Carey one, which combines the endorsements of a lot of these guys who wrote the confession, that they all thought immersion was essential to baptism.

44:59

It's not something that was optional. You weren't baptizing if you weren't immersing. Now it's common in presentations of this topic about whether or not immersion is necessary to quote a whole bunch of later

45:13

Baptists. Honestly, I don't find that as valuable, quoting Spurgeon, et cetera. Of course, more later

45:21

Baptists think that immersion is essential. However, what's interesting is to quote the ones who were especially well -known for their ecclesiology.

45:31

To my knowledge, Spurgeon never wrote a book on church government, but John Gill and John Dagg are two experts in Baptist life on church government and Baptist church government.

45:42

So it's far more interesting to know what did they think rather than what did the best preachers think, for example.

45:52

And who knows who John Gill is? So he's a pastor.

45:58

So he wrote a commentary on the whole Bible. If you're ever looking for a good commentary for any passage of scripture, you can check out

46:04

John Gill because he's written something on every single verse. But he was pastor in Benjamin Keech's church some hundred years after Keech.

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I'm not sure how many. And then after him was Spurgeon. So anyway, he came after and before two pretty important preachers.

46:24

All right, so let's go ahead and read this quote. Custom and the common use of writing in this controversy have so far prevailed that for the most part, immersion is usually called the mode of baptism, whereas it is properly baptism itself.

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To say that immersion or dipping is the mode of baptism is the same thing as to say that dipping is the mode of dipping.

46:46

And as for sprinkling, that cannot with any propriety be called a mode of baptism, for it would be just such good sense as to say sprinkling is the mode of dipping, since baptism and dipping are the same.

46:57

Hence, to learn Selden, who in the former part of his life might have seen infants dipped in fonts, but lived to see immersion much disused, had reason to say, in England of late years,

47:10

I ever thought the person baptized his own fingers rather than the child because he dipped the one and sprinkled the other.

47:18

All right, so John Gill, important Baptist ecclesiologist, ecclesiology being the study of the church, held this opinion.

47:28

John Dagg has written a lot on this. If you wanna see everything he wrote, look up this manual of church order, and you can find a lot that he wrote on this topic.

47:38

But he said, a believer who has, at some time, received sprinkling for baptism is not freed from the obligation to be immersed in obedience to Christ's command.

47:47

In this case, the immersion cannot, with propriety, be called rebaptism. On the cases which have been mentioned, no doubt or diversity of practice exists among those who adhere strictly to the precepts of Christ.

48:01

And so he, in addition to claiming that it's necessary, he also claims universal Baptist support in his time.

48:08

Of course, that's the 1800s, but still interesting. All right, so a lot of stuff.

48:16

I know this, hopefully this wasn't too dry. I know it was just reading a bunch of quotes, but hopefully it convinces you that, wow, even later people acknowledged, even later

48:27

Pato Baptists who were sprinkling acknowledged that the early church was immersing, that that wasn't under dispute.

48:32

And then secondly, the early Baptists that wrote this confession all thought that, or at least the vast majority of them thought that immersion was essential to baptism, that someone who had been sprinkled, even if it was sprinkled as a believer, had not yet been baptized.

48:57

Yeah, well, that's practice now, right? And so even though, well, yeah, if you go to a

49:03

Presbyterian church and you're a convert, they'll just sprinkle you, they won't immerse you. Yeah, and so back then that might happen too, but you just have less conversions because you live in a society where everyone is just kind of as a citizen of that land, part of the church and so on.

49:21

That's why it's called the Magisterial Reformation, right? Because the Magisterial Reformers were the ones who said that the

49:29

Reformation should be promoted through the civil magistrate, that basically church life and citizenship were kind of bound up with one another.

49:41

Any questions or thoughts? Yes. Yeah, I would say that a believer who has at some time received sprinkling for baptism is not freed from the obligation to be immersed.

50:11

Yeah, not freed from the obligation to be immersed. If immersion is baptism and baptism is immersion, you gotta still be baptized.

50:53

Yeah, there's all kinds of texts people would use. I mean, a different question might be, why did this start developing?

51:00

Which isn't necessarily because of scriptural reasons, right? It's because you develop this doctrine of original sin that says it's washed away in baptism and boy, it'd be good to wash infants of their original sins so that they don't go to hell when they die.

51:12

And yeah, so if you ever read Dante's Inferno, there's one section where the outer ring of hell, like the softest, easiest ring of hell is where the unbaptized infants are because they didn't get washed of their original sin.

51:26

So a lot of it had to do with some weird theology around original sin. But text -wise, people would point to the fact that in Acts you have whole households being baptized.

51:39

It says that, yeah, it talks about whole households being baptized and say, well, certainly there've gotta be infants in some of these households.

51:47

However, it also says the whole household believed and they're happy to say, well, they believed as much as they could.

51:53

But Brian, sorry, were you saying something? We asked them about what the nature of the baptism was, whether it was at a church, if they understood what was happening, if they understood the gospel.

52:43

Are you, I mean, we are baptized for the cleansing of sins, you know, not as a washing of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for good conscience.

52:52

Baptism now saves you, like it says in 1 Peter. So I wouldn't have an objection to that particular phrase.

52:57

I think you're asking, you know, if someone thinks that, like that weird view of original sin that I was talking about, that baptism does something other than what it did, would we redo it?

53:08

Feel like that would have to be evaluated on a case -by -case basis. But in general,

53:14

I would say, you know, no one's coming in with like a perfect understanding of what baptism has accomplished. But if they have a false gospel, right?

53:21

If what you mean by that is they're trusting in something else other than Jesus Christ, yeah, that's a problem.

53:27

That wouldn't be a true testimony. Under the authority of the church, what prevents me from being baptized?

53:44

Here's water. No, that's for Phillip to do, not me.

54:06

There's two ways of answering the question. Like one, would we in this particular church be willing to practice that?

54:12

And two, would we think that it invalidates it if another church did it, right? I wouldn't think it invalidates if another church did it.

54:18

Do I think it would be possibly tampering with the symbolism or some of church order? Yeah, I wouldn't totally be comfortable with that.

54:28

However, I don't think it invalidates it if somebody else dunks them under. However, it is required, including by the confession, that one who is capable of preaching administer it, right?

54:40

So if you have someone just like go up and dunk someone under, no word taught, no explanation of the significance of what is being done, you don't have that marriage between word and sacrament, then you don't really have, nothing's really being accomplished there.

55:38

Yeah, yeah, so once again, one's not freed from the obligation to be immersed.

55:45

So yeah, if someone wants to come be a member of this church, we would require immersion. And then while we're not, we haven't been saying it in the fencing statement.

55:54

Yes, if our definition of baptism is immersion, then you would need to be baptized in such a manner in order to participate in the

56:01

Lord's Supper. Yes, Brian. Yeah, right.

56:25

I mean, the purpose of this is to navigate this particular situation, right? I, do you have, why don't you go ahead and start to answer that question and I'll follow up with my own comments.

57:50

Right, yeah. Thank you. Yeah, and there's a lot of things in our church's life.

58:03

The constitution doesn't exactly outline. And so as we've even tried to just maintain what the previous generations of our church understood and did, there have been needs to recover this.

58:14

And this is one of the examples, you know, I called up one of the older, old pastors of this church and asked, or I emailed him anyway and asked what the practice was, given the constitution wasn't very clear.

58:23

He said that we required immersion. And same thing for what Dale was asking about whether or not the pastor has the authority to baptize apart from a vote of the church.

58:33

That was another thing where, you know, it wasn't clear for a while. And then we found out, oh yeah, this is what the church used to practice is requiring the church's consent before performing a baptism.

58:48

So we've had a need to recover some of these things. Yes, Dale.

59:14

Yeah, so the Westminster Confession requires an ordained minister and you don't have, you can't do baptism or anything without an ordained minister.

59:23

London Baptist Confession only requires someone capable of preaching. So for example, I administered the

59:29

Lord's Supper a couple of times before I became a pastor here. Kevin. Yeah, if you wanna have like a desert island situation, yes, and that's essentially what happened with the original

01:00:04

Baptists because they didn't consider, because no one was willing to immerse them. And the only ones that were, were heretical churches.

01:00:13

So what they did is they said, all right, we two ministers are going to go baptize each other and we're not gonna, we're gonna draw lots to see who does the first one.

01:00:21

And we're not gonna tell anybody which one because it shouldn't matter. And you had that situation where they decided that, you know, ultimately it doesn't, what's more important is that this is practiced correctly than that, you know, someone who had been rightly baptized is performing it.

01:00:37

So, so yes, if you ever had that desert island situation, do you really, could you really ever have that in today's time?

01:00:44

I don't think so. But this has been experienced before, right? Yeah, well, they're covenanting together as a church, right?

01:01:08

So they're, that's, that's how you create a church, not by, not by being formed out of another church or anything like that, it's by covenant together.

01:01:15

All right, let me go ahead and close some prayer. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for your clear word on baptism and the ordinances.

01:01:26

We pray that we would uphold those rightly, that you would assist us as we worship you today and that you would fill us with the joy of your spirit as we come before your presence, in Jesus' name, amen.