Believers’ baptism

Hearing, believing, baptised

Churches that practise believers' baptism see a steady order in the New Testament: people heard the word, believed, and then were baptised. At Pentecost "those who embraced his message were baptized" (Acts 2:41), and so it was at Corinth:

Crispus, the synagogue leader, and his whole household believed in the Lord. And many of the Corinthians who heard the message believed and were baptized.

Acts 18:8

The Ethiopian official, having heard the gospel, asked, "What is there to prevent me from being baptized?" (Acts 8:36), and "both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water" (Acts 8:38). The Great Commission sends the church to "make disciples of all nations, baptizing them" (Matthew 28:19). Jerome, commenting on it, wrote: "They first then teach all nations, and when taught dip them in water" Jerome. Those who hold believers' baptism read this as a witness to the order of faith and baptism; those who baptise infants take it to describe the baptism of adult converts.

They find the same in what baptism means. Believers were "buried with Him through baptism into death" (Romans 6:4) and raised with him "through your faith in the power of God" (Colossians 2:12); Peter calls baptism "the pledge of a clear conscience toward God" (1 Peter 3:21). Baptism, on this view, is the believer's own confession, and the people of the new covenant are those who know the Lord for themselves. Because baptizō (βαπτίζω) first meant to dip or immerse, and immersion pictures burial and resurrection, most of these churches baptise by immersion.

How the church came to practise it

In Zurich in January 1525, Conrad Grebel and others who had studied Scripture with Zwingli concluded that infant baptism had no ground in Scripture and baptised one another on confession of faith. Their opponents called them Anabaptists, ‘rebaptisers’, but they did not count their infant baptism as baptism at all. The Schleitheim Confession (1527) asked that baptism be given to those who have learned repentance and amendment of life and truly believe that Christ has taken away their sins Schleitheim Confession, art. 1. They were persecuted by Catholic and Protestant authorities alike; Felix Manz was drowned in Zurich in 1527. The teaching of Menno Simons gathered the Mennonites Menno Simons, Foundation of Christian Doctrine.

Baptist churches arose among English Separatists early in the seventeenth century, and from the 1640s they confessed immersion as the proper mode. The Second London Confession (1677, adopted 1689), built on the Westminster Confession, holds that those who actually profess repentance toward God and faith in and obedience to the Lord Jesus are "the only proper subjects" of baptism, and that immersion is necessary to its due administration Second London Confession, ch. 29.

Where the traditions differ

Within this family the emphasis varies. Many Baptists call baptism an ‘ordinance’, an act of obedience in which the believer confesses a salvation already received and enters the church's fellowship; others also speak of it as a means by which God confirms his grace to the believer. Many dedicate infants with thanksgiving and prayer.

The Orthodox, Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed and Presbyterian, Anglican and Methodist churches also baptise adults who come to faith, but they baptise believers' children as well (infant baptism), pointing to the promise "to you and your children" (Acts 2:39) and to the link Paul draws between circumcision and baptism. Those who hold believers' baptism answer that the households baptised in Acts heard and believed together, and that the sign of the new covenant belongs to its members, who know the Lord. This is a long-standing disagreement among evangelicals; both sides honour baptism and hold to the same Scriptures in earnest. See the lessons Baptism and the Lord’s Supper and The Anabaptists and the Radical Reformation.