Baptism in History
by Ed Harrell
via Christianity Magazine, December 1984
My reading of the New Testament makes very clear the meaning and intent of baptism — it was a “burial” that put one “into Christ” and resulted in the “remission of sins” (Romans 6:3–4; Acts 2:38). Of course, we should always be willing to examine our reading to see that it is not prejudiced. Recently, I was rereading Kenneth Scott Latourette’s massive A History of Christianity and found his discussion of New Testament baptism fascinating.
Latourette was a distinguished Yale historian whose multi-volume history is a classic. Near the beginning of his chapter on “Admission, Worship, and Discipline in the Christian Community,” he wrote this passage:
“As we have seen, admission to the Church was through baptism. In the first few decades of the Church, baptism might be administered on a simple profession of faith in Christ. Thus on the famous day of Pentecost, often regarded as the birthday of the Church, when about three thousand are reported to have been to the fellowship of the disciples, the injunction was to repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Whether all were baptized on that day is not explicitly stated, but we hear of the Ethiopian Eunuch being baptized after only brief instruction and of a jailer at Philippi receiving the rite, with all that were in his house, on the very night in which he seems first to have heard of Christ, with the simple requirement of believing ‘in the Lord Jesus Christ.’ … Baptism seems to have been by immersion, at least normally.”
That description of the early church practice reminds me of an experience I had as a Fellow at the Ecumenical Institute at St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. This large Benedictine Monastery has a beautiful modern church on its grounds, and my family and I toured it shortly after we arrived. Immediately upon entering the building, one encountered a set of steps that led down into a depressed area in the foyer with a fountain in it. The monk who guided us pointed out that this was the church’s baptismal fount. He told us that it had been placed in the front of the building because, in the early days of the church, baptism had been the means of entering the church. So it was, I nodded. The steps leading down to the fountain symbolized, he further explained, that baptism in the early church had been a burial. Ah, so.
Both Latourette and my guide confirmed in me the conviction that our difficulty with many questions is not so much deciding what the New Testament says (and consequently what the New Testament Christians did) as grasping the significance of those historical truths.
To say the least, such insights into baptism strongly challenge the fundamental Protestant teaching that man is justified by faith only. One can understand the historical dynamics that led the reformers to protest against the corrupted Catholic belief in justification by works, but the Protestant rebellion, like many revolutions, went much too far. A fair reading of the New Testament leads to the conclusion that first-century Christians understood baptism to be a burial that preceded “the remission of sins” and provided entry “into Christ.”
