my fifth blog: thoughts on baptism and tradition

As I promised on my myspace, I am going to articulate some thoughts on both tradition and baptism, which have unfortunatly become intertwined today. I confess that this will not be the most thurough (I know I just made a spelling error) exposition, but rather I just wanted to articulate a little bit of what I believe. The reason this is coming up is because soon my wife and I will have our daughter dedicated at church. This idea of baby dedication is essentially a thing evangelicals do to not feel left out when their more mainline and Catholic bretheren have their infants baptized. It is not found in the Bible, though history says that similar tings have been practiced throughout church history. As such, baby dedication is a tradition that has been handed down for generations. Man makes tradition, god makes doctrine. God makes what is binding, man makes what is sentimental and fun to do. In other words, there is no reason what so ever to have my daughter dedicated other than the fact that we want to honor this tradition. What is unfortnate is tha many traditions have usurped doctrine; man has done this for a long time, ever sinice Jesus told the Pharisees to stop doing it. Today we see people insisting that KJV is the only valid version, that old school hymns must be sung, or that certain gestures, prayers, or liturgies must be done in church in order to make church valid. All of these things are tradition, and can be beautiful and enhance faith when kept in perspective. Another tradition, one which I can not honor for reasons I'll tell you about in a minute, is infant baptism. This was not the practice of the early church, but rather became a practice is a matter of pragmatics. The tradition became widespread, and in many cases it is considered doctrine (some of the more harcore Lutheran churches and the Catholic churches place infant baptism in the place of doctrine). The problem, again, is that this was not the practice of the early church. The early church practiced what we call believer's baptism; ie. the believer himself (or herself) chose to be baptized. The Bible illustrates this principle over and over, after all, who can actually call on a child to repent and be baptized? But this is exactly what the Bible calls on those who believe to do.

That leads me to my next point: in the early church the idea of a believer and the idea of someone who is baptized was one in the same. You simply did not have unbaptized believers, nor did you have baptized persons who did not believe, including if they were too young to believe as is the case for an infant. Again, to be a believer and to be a baptized person was one in the same.

Another tradition of churches today is the mode of baptism. Those who practice infant baptsim by and large do so with sprinkling. There are also some churches who practice "pouring." This does not fulfill the definition of baptism however. Our word baptism comes from the Greek word baptidzo, which means, literaly, to immerse. A sinking boat, for example, could be baptidzoed (that was definitely poor spelling). We should not underestimate the importance of this point; the baptism as we read it in our Bibles is not a translation, it is a transliteration. In other words, no one wrote the English equivelant of the Greek word, but rather they left the Greek word there and simply wrote it with our alphabet. If it were to be translated it would read "immersion." The logical conclusion then is that the scriptures call on us who believe to be immersed; there is really no roon for interpretation there.

Immersion also gets to the heart of what baptism symbolizes, namely the believer dying with Christ and rising again a new creation. UGG. I'LL ADD MORE LATER