Reflections on the Necessity of Baptism —

“As you do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything.”

Ecclesiastes 11:5

You can see the difficulty of this, can’t you? Like so many Christian dilemmas, it is like trying to reconcile predestination and freewill, to explain how two different worlds can become one, to articulate a marvellous reality beyond our grasp (cf. Psalm 131:1-3). To reiterate what I said before: For physical temporal beings—humans—baptism is necessary to do, but it may not always be necessary to receive in order to be saved because the One who saves is a nonphysical timeless Being. Salvation is an eternal person. All this chatter about the necessity of the logical order of salvation is also of little value when it is precisely a Being outside of space and time who is doing the saving, and we the receiving. It is no longer a matter of logical whenness or systematic precision per se. I think the NT, especially the book of Acts, paints that picture very vividly. Sometimes salvation through the Holy Spirit comes by faith before baptism, such as the exception with Cornelius (Acts 10:44-48) and most times salvation comes by the laying of hands after baptism (not the baptism itself), such as with Apollos and Timothy (Acts 19:6; 2 Timothy 1:6). Regardless of the procedural order or the arrow of time, all disciples were baptized (albeit typically before receiving the Holy Spirit), and none of them rejected baptism as necessary, as if the verbal profession was more important than the bodily profession.

Consider the consequences

By contesting its necessity, we contest that the body need not participate in what the words commit the body to! How can that be so? We die with Christ in baptism, do we not? (Romans 6:3-6) How, then, do we say, it is not necessary? Do we not speak with our hands? To teach baptism is not necessary is to cut the body from the soul, the physical from the spiritual, the confession from confessor. It is to reinstitute that gnostic dualism—flesh bad, spirit good—as if it is only the inside that counts, and that our works are disconnected from our faith, actions detached from belief, as if faith does not give birth to works, as if faith in itself completes itself (cf. James 2:22-26). To contend otherwise is to treat our present bodies with contempt, as if we are all ghosts in machines wearing meat suits destined for oblivion, as if we will possess strange new flesh upon resurrection, as if the incarnation and bodily ascension of Christ are not essential. This is not so (Job 19:25-27).

Moreover, there is something troubling still. The combination of beliefs that ordinances are just signs or reflections or a dramatic portrayal of faith, not realities themselves, paired with this new low-church standard and bare necessity mindset, have inevitably led to the belief that ordinances are things we do just cause, insofar that we don’t even need oil when we anoint!—Honestly!—I’m not kidding. The attitude is ‘if the elements are not necessary, why bother using them?’ I’ve witnessed this firsthand. Do we not need wine when we drink? Bread when we eat? Water when we baptize? Or is it all proverbial, memorial symbols of no avail? Let me ask it another way: Are we truly made by and through water? Are we truly created out of the earth? To be born into God’s visible kingdom here on earth, one must be baptized by the same element that created the earth (2 Peter 3:5). To say we don’t need water is to say we don’t need a body—but we do need a body. We are creatures. God does not need a body. He is Creator. He is not bound to our physical limitations. He rightfully supersedes it. But we are physical creatures formed from the soil designed to take dominion of the earth. Just as God restored the earth in the Flood, he wants to restore mankind (ground) through the waters of baptism. Just as Jesus healed the blind man’s eyes with mud, He also wants to heal us in the same way he created us. Jesus did not put the ‘proverbially’ mud on the blind man’s eyes, he wanted the blind man to physically wash off the mud to be restored. We are creatures of contingency; we need water and food to survive. Why does this all the sudden not apply to baptism? To anointing? Heck, to communion, too.

The symbolism of baptism is historical, narratival, typological, and ontological. God created the visible world with prophetic symbols, imagery, and meaning—we are truly made in the image of God, are we not? It’s not just wordplay. Water is that first primordial substance we and the world were created by and through. Water baptism, therefore, is not a fictional reflection of reality, it is the visible reality of our restoration. To teach we don’t need the water is to treat our soul as if it is frictionless with the physical world.

If we willfully protest the doctrine that ‘baptism saves’ or teach that ‘water is not necessary for salvation’, who are we actually fighting against? God, Satan, or man? We should consider what we are implicitly teaching the congregation when we affirm such ideas.