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Faith · The Sacraments

Baptism in the Early Church

The doorway of the new birth, not an optional symbol bolted on after

In much of modern evangelicalism baptism is treated as a symbol, an outward sign of a decision already made, often observed some time after the "real" moment of a prayer. The New Testament and the earliest church saw it very differently. Baptism was the God-appointed doorway, faith's first act of obedience, tied so closely to coming to Christ that the apostles never imagined the two apart. It is more than a bare symbol, and it is not mechanical magic. It is the new birth's outward act, real and effective by grace, received through faith.

What the apostles did

Jesus commanded it as the very form of making disciples: "go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost" (Matthew 28:19), and tied entry to the kingdom to it: "except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God" (John 3:5). So on the first day of the church, Peter's answer to "what shall we do?" was not "pray a prayer" but "repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins" (Acts 2:38). And it happened at once, the same day, the same hour, for the Ethiopian on the road, for Cornelius, for the Philippian jailer "and all his, straightway" (Acts 16:33). There is no unbaptized Christian in the book of Acts.

More than a symbol

Paul does not treat the water as a mere picture. He says we are baptized "into" Christ's death and raised with Him: "buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead… even so we also should walk in newness of life" (Romans 6:3-4; Colossians 2:12). Peter goes further still: "baptism doth also now save us," and then immediately guards it from superstition, "not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ" (1 Peter 3:21). The water saves the way the ark saved Noah and the blood saved Israel: not by the substance itself, but by the God who works through it and the faith that receives Him.

What the earliest church did with the water

The oldest church manual we possess, the Didache, gives the actual instructions, plain and practical:

"Concerning baptism, thus baptize ye: having first said all these things, baptize into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, in living water… But if thou have not living water, baptize into other water; and if thou canst not in cold, in warm."

The Didache, c. 110 · The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles

Justin Martyr, describing the church to a Roman emperor around AD 155, calls it the new birth and the washing of regeneration; and Tertullian opens his whole treatise on it with wonder:

"Happy is our sacrament of water, in that, by washing away the sins of our early blindness, we are set free and admitted into eternal life!"

Tertullian, c. 200 · On Baptism
Between two errors

The road runs between two ditches here too. On one side is the modern bare-symbol view, which tends to leave the water holding less than the apostles said of it, a formality that can wait. Those who hold it love Christ no less; the concern is only that it asks less of baptism than the New Testament does. On the other is a mechanical magic, as if the water saved by itself, apart from repentance and faith, which is the very thing Peter rules out. The early church held the middle: baptism truly joins us to Christ's death and resurrection, but as the act of a believing, repentant heart, grace and faith meeting in the water. The same balance the early church kept at the Lord's Table.

Where this lands

Baptism is not how you earn your way in; it is how you come in, the first obedient step of a living faith (see Faith Is a Verb), the moment the Passover blood is struck on your own door. It is the answer of a good conscience, the burial of the old self, the public, bodily, unmistakable "yes" to Christ. The modern habit of separating it from conversion, or quietly shelving it, would have puzzled every Christian for the first thousand years. If you have come to Christ, the next thing the New Testament asks of you is the water.

Study the passages

Read them in context. Links go to BibleHub.

Related: What Does It Mean to Be Born Again?, The Lord's Table, The Sinner's Prayer, and The Witnesses. The Didache and Tertullian quoted verbatim from the Ante-Nicene Fathers (public domain). Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub.