Faith and Baptism
W. Carl Ketcherside
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I have made a promise which I must keep before this year expires. It was made a good many months ago to a sister in Christ whom I dearly love and revere. It has to do with an explanation of my position on baptism. The good sister honestly feels that I make too much of immersion in water when I insist that it is essential to entrance into the family circle created by the blood of Jesus Christ our Lord. She thinks that I weaken the scriptural concept of justification by faith and that I insist upon faith plus something else as a ground of justification before God. I agreed that I would set forth my views on the matter during this year and the time has come to redeem my pledge.
Before I address myself more directly to the theme at hand, I must define what I mean by baptism. Many of my present readers are drawn from segments of the religious realm which seriously disagree with me as to the action and subjects of baptism, and this requires an explanation of what I mean by the term. My definition is provided simply for clarification and not to arouse antagonism. I do not care to promote either hostility or debate, nor to impose my thinking upon any other person. But, as used in this article, baptism is the immersion in water of a believing penitent, as a response to the Good News proclaimed concerning Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah, Lord, and Son of God.
My personal position, based upon my understanding of the new covenant scriptures, is that such immersion is essential as a validation of one's faith and to entrance into the kingdom, that is, the rule of heaven, under the dominion of God's Son. One becomes identified with the elect or called-out company of saints when he trusts in Jesus, by reformation of life and immersion in water as an initiatory act. By baptism he is transferred from a state of alienation into a state of citizenship.
I shall endeavor to avoid some of the cheap dodges and warped theological approaches of debaters to whom baptism has become a mere factional rite, and face up to the matter as sincerely and openly as I can with my limitations and weaknesses. It is my fervent hope that all of us may thus be drawn closer to Him who is in us "the hope of glory."
In view of the clear and repeated teaching of the new covenant scriptures on the subject of baptism, I find it difficult to account for several things in our present age. Why should there be a question as to the importance of a subject upon which the Spirit has spoken so often through Jesus and his envoys? Must we assume that what the apostles wrote about it is so trivial that it can be calmly ignored or disregarded at will? Why should men now give a different answer to those who enquire of them what to do, than was given when the glad tidings
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Again, it is generally agreed that, since the revelation of God as relates to the salvation of mankind, was not limited to the intellectually elite, but was for all, those interpretations which would naturally occur to the interested and unsophisticated reader may be assumed to have the greatest weight. How does it happen, then, that those passages which deal with baptism are subjected to such philosophic treatment and manhandling that they no longer find a way of explaining baptism, but actually explain baptism away? Is the spirit of the modern "expositors" the same as the Spirit which inspired the writers? If so, why does it undermine and water down the apostolic teaching?
Was there ever an unimmersed person in the company of the primitive saints? Can one go to the book of Acts, which was a continuation of the narrative of "the things most surely believed" by the disciples of our Lord, and establish that any person was ever admitted to the community of the reconciled ones who was not baptized? How can a company of believers in our day identify with that established by the apostles when composed not only of those who have never been baptized, but who run the whole gamut of attitude from mildly discounting its value to openly scoffing at its importance?
I am committed to the task of trying to follow as closely as I can in the footsteps of Jesus. That is what it means to me to pledge allegiance to him, which is referred to in the apostolic scriptures as "believing in his name." Since he emptied himself and took upon him the form of a slave, I consider it to be a part of my commitment to empty myself and take on the form of a servant. And that emptying process involves getting rid of false pride and of divesting my heart of any thought of equality with God.
In submitting to the will of the Father Jesus did everything the Father asks me to do with one exception. He believed in the Father and personally testified of that faith. He did not repent of sin because he was guilty of no sin. No guilt was ever found in him. It is true that he was made sin who knew no sin, but he could not repent of it for it was the sin of others. He atoned for that for which he could not plead guilty.
But he could be baptized and he was. Certainly he was not baptized to secure forgiveness of sins. That is not really the highest motive for being baptized, and can never be. It is probably not "the design of baptism" in the sense that a great many legalistic partisans employ the term to score a point on Baptist seminarians. Actually, when Jesus made the long trek to be immersed, the preacher sought to dissuade him on the grounds of relative merit or worthiness. He suggested that Jesus ought to baptize him, rather than vice versa. But Jesus quickly lifted the whole thing out of the realm of comparison or contrast of administrator and subject, and put it in proper perspective.
His reply to the astounded John was, "Permit it to be so in this instance, we do well to conform in this way with all that God requires." Thus Jesus chose to launch himself on his personal ministry of proclamation by visible demonstration of subjection to God's will. "From that day Jesus began to proclaim the message, 'Repent for the rule of heaven is approaching.'" And God honored his conformity with the divine requirement by sending his Spirit to abide upon him and by acknowledging his Sonship. If the Father took occasion at the baptism of Jesus to declare his good pleasure with him, it seems to me a little absurd to expect him to declare he is well pleased with me while resisting his requirement!
Or, to put it another way. If John was reluctant to immerse Jesus because of the superiority of Jesus, should I not be reluctant to oppose being immersed when I know that Jesus cheerfully insisted upon being personally baptized? The highest motive for doing anything is that God requires it. This is the basis upon which Jesus was immersed. He said, "I came down from heaven, not to do mine own
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It is my conviction that when God raised Jesus from the dead he put everything in subjection under his feet (Eph. 1:20-22). All authority is vested in him. He is absolute in power although the universe has not yet come to recognize this. Respect for authority is not demonstrated by mere verbal acquiescence that one is lord. It can only be manifested by doing what the authority demands or requires. Jesus clearly endorsed this principle when he asked, "Why call ye me Lord, Lord; and do not the things which I tell you?"
One of his earliest acts of authority which involved both earth and heaven, was to commission his envoys to go into all the world and announce the Good News to every person. That Good News was the account of the divine breakthrough of God in the form of a Son and the hope of reconciliation by this startling act. It was the news of what God had done for man in dealing with the sin situation. And since sin is a universal malady, the remedy had to be made known universally. All of the world is accounted guilty before God and all need the Good News.
When man is confronted with such a Message he must respond to it in some fashion. One who is in prison and is offered pardon and freedom must respond to the offer. He cannot shrug it off or ignore it in the hope of avoiding a response, because shrugging it off or ignoring it is his response. An offer of amnesty from heaven has to be met by the captive of Satan when he becomes aware of it, and whatever action he takes deliberately, will guarantee that he will never be the same again. The prisoner who chooses to remain in confinement by spurning an offer of pardon, can never be the same. Regardless of how he rationalizes his original deed which brought about his incarceration, he can never forget that he continues to be imprisoned as a result of his own stubborn will.
I hold that any universal offer of freedom from sin with its guilt and effects, by its very nature must be simple and understandable, and any conditions of response must also be clearly stated and within the power of every man to perform. It is obvious to the most casual thinker that if the offer is couched in philosophical terms or requires a certain state of educational attainment to apprehend it, it will not be adapted to a universal need at all. Such an offer would be merely a tantalizing hoax to the masses.
By the same token, if the response to be made transcends the power of man to perform, the offer is not good news at all. It only sinks one further into a state of hopelessness and helplessness. But such is not the offer of a beneficient Creator and Father. The Good News does not consist of what we must do for God, but of what God has done for us. And what he has done is within the context of time and place, and is, therefore, verifiable by the criteria to which man subjects all historical events. The laws of evidence must be applied to any historical situation to authenticate and render the testimony credible, that is, believable to rational minds.
I am a little hesitant about pursuing another angle of this because we have so many careless, slipshod and traditional reasoners posing as theologians, and functioning as interpreters in our day. But the response of man is not a part of the Good News at all. That man can make a response to the offer of heaven is good but it is not news. Heaven has never made an offer to man to which man cannot respond. The requirements of heaven in every age have been commensurate with man's ability to perform. The domain of mythology may have its Zeus and Tantalus, but not the realm of revelation.
When the Good News was first proclaimed, and the remarkable conclusion reached, the terms of human response were not announced until the conscience smitten auditors cried out asking what
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It would have been incongruous for Jesus to have commissioned the envoys to take the Message to all men without informing them of the conditions of human response. Accordingly he said, "Go into all the world and proclaim the Good News to every person. He who believes and is baptized shall be saved, he who believes not shall be condemned." That which was to be believed was that which was to be proclaimed, and this consisted of the life, death, burial, resurrection, ascension, coronation and glorification of Jesus. All of these are caught up in the one profound and magnificent proposition that "Jesus is the Messiah and the Son of God." Accordingly, a belief or trust in this one divine declaration was all that was required, so far as faith is concerned, to enlist one under the banner of God's Son.
But Jesus has been raised up and made "both Lord and Christ." And while one can acknowledge belief in the proposition that he is the Son of God by verbal testimony, he cannot acknowledge lordship by this method. That Jesus is the Son of God is a matter of personal affirmation based upon acceptance of credible testimony, that he is Lord of one's life is a matter of personal demonstration based upon the obedience of the will. Lordship creates a master-servant relationship, and it is not the servant who orally expresses his love for the master who is necessarily faithful, but the one who obeys what his lord commands.
"Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven" (Matthew 7:21). This does not condemn a verbal acknowledgment of lordship. "Ye call me Master and Lord: and ye say well; for so I am" (John 13:13). But it is not enough, for confession of lordship with the mouth proves nothing without the accompanying deeds which validate the acknowledgment. Thus Jesus asks, "Why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?" (Luke 7:46). He immediately proceeds to show that one who hears his sayings and does not do them will not be able to stand against the elemental forces of life. "And the ruin of that house was great." It is for this reason our Lord declared, "Blessed is that servant whom, when his lord cometh, he shall find so doing."
There is absolutely no way in which one can show that he is serious about the master-servant relationship than by doing what the master requires. Lip-service can never be a substitute for obedience. Untested faith is like an unstamped letter. What it says may be good but it is not going anywhere. Obedience is the validation of belief, and our acceptance of the Lordship of Jesus is tested at the very outset. "He that believeth and is baptized." These are the words of Jesus and no amount of equivocation will alter or abrogate them. So long as the gospel is valid, this will constitute the heaven-ordained response to it. The message to be announced and the response required to it are both given by the same authority. To accept one and deliberately reject the other is a defiance at worst, and a denial at best, of that authority in heaven and on earth!
I could spend time writing about the philosophy of baptism and upon occasion I have done so, but that would serve no
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Again, it will be noticed that I have had no recourse to what the apostolic epistles have to say about baptism. My reasons for not referring to them are quite simple. These epistles are not a part of the gospel at all. Everyone of them was written to those who had already responded to the gospel and had been delivered from the power of darkness and translated into the kingdom of God's dear Son. The gospel was proclaimed as fully and completely on the first Pentecost after the resurrection of Jesus as it has ever been, and nothing written later was ever added to it. Those who obeyed it upon that day did so fully and were as much a part of the community of the reconciled ones as any person after the canon of new covenant scriptures was compiled.
Not one statement about baptism in the epistles was ever made to encourage the recipients and readers to be baptized. Indeed, it is apparent that the apostles assumed without question that every person who was the subject of a letter addressed to a congregation of saints had been baptized. It never entered their minds that anyone would be in the community of the reconciled ones who had not been baptized. They stood in doubt about the lives and behavior of many in the congregations, but not about how they came into fellowship. "For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ" (Gal. 3:26,27).
References to baptism in the epistles were not made to furnish arguments for the saints to use upon the heathen to convince them of the necessity of baptism. Instead they were given to urge the disciples to continue to live up to the commitment which they made in their initiation into Christ Jesus. "But now, after that you have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn you again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto you desire again to be in bondage?" Quotations from the epistles may bolster the arguments made for baptism, but the submission to baptism is upon the ground of the authority of our Lord.
It will be remembered that I defined baptism as immersion, and this always brings up the question related to those who have had water sprinkled or poured upon them as "a mode of baptism." I have a very deep and abiding compassion for all of these, having been born into and reared in a traditional background which resulted in my being "christened" by the Reverend Mr. Peterson, of the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, before I was a month old. I have no wish to be critical or judgmental, but it seems to me that if I am to be a disciple of Jesus I must mean the same things by the terms Jesus used as he meant when he used them.
Whatever Jesus meant by baptism I must mean. If I substitute another meaning then I am talking about something else. Fortunately the catholic position is that baptism, in the context of Jesus and the apostles, was immersion. Upon this matter there has never been any major scholarly difference of opinion, and the occasional divergent view has been expressed by someone who had a theological axe to grind, and such axes are proverbially dull. One flies in the face of all scriptural intimation and implication and of most scholarly dissertation when he seeks to justify anything except immersion. I am grateful that when I became old enough to obey my Lord I did not
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I regret the further need of replying to the shallow thinking of some of my brethren who have not yet learned that we are not under law, but under grace. It is apparent from a study of the apostolic epistles that unity was based upon community and not conformity, and is possible only in diversity. Since maturity in thought and learning is a gradual process, unity can never be predicated upon simultaneous arrival at a given level of knowledge since all human knowledge is relative. When I assert this obvious fact I am asked why I insist upon baptism as the point at which one enters the fellowship of the body, and why there is not room for divergency of opinion on this matter also.
The whole problem centers around the lack of ability to "distinguish between the things that differ," a quality for which Paul prayed in behalf of the Philippians (1:10). Baptism is a response to the gospel, understanding of doctrine is a process of learning. Just as all of us entered our earthly families by the same door of birth, so all of us enter the divine family through the door of the new birth. But while all of us must come into the world by the same way, there is room for growth and development after birth.
No two people on earth have identical degrees of knowledge at the same time. By one Spirit we are all baptized into the one body, but in the body there is room for varying degrees of knowledge, even about that one Spirit. So long as our brethren are unable to distinguish between gospel and doctrine, between the birth process and growth, between the new covenant and the new covenant scriptures, they are doomed to create division and perpetuate spiritual ignorance upon the earth.
The time has come for summarization of my personal views. I regard belief of the Good News and baptism into Jesus Christ as essential to entrance into the fellowship of reconciliation. I would not attempt to claim relationship to my Lord in the one body except upon this basis and in compliance with these conditions. As I view it this in no sense weakens the concept of justification by faith. Much of what I know about baptism I learned from the same source from which I learned about justification by faith.
In Romans 5:1 Paul asserts we are justified by faith, and have peace with God. In Romans 6:2, he affirms that all were baptized into Jesus Christ, and thus into his death. Does he mean by the latter statement to weaken or nullify the first? Is it not more in keeping with the integrity of the Spirit to conclude that the faith which justifies is activated and animated? Unless baptism is a demonstration of faith it is useless; unless faith is operative in obedience it is dead. I hold no brief for either a useless baptism or a dead faith. Trust in Jesus must be vital, not vitiated; apostolic and not apathetic. A living faith in a living Savior is manifested by living within his will.
Faith at work is not faith plus something else in justifying us. Rather, it is faith manifesting, demonstrating and validating itself in the only manner that is possible. There can be no example of faith until faith becomes exemplary. I can never forget when men quote Romans 5:1 to show that we are justified by faith, that Paul closed that epistle with these words: "Now to him that is of power to stablish according to my gospel, and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery, which was left secret since the world began, but now is made manifest, and by the scriptures of the prophets, according to the commandment of the everlasting God, made known to all nations for the obedience of faith."
Let the final words of my feeble epistle be those of the majestic letter of the apostle, "To God only wise be glory through Jesus Christ for ever. Amen."