Over the next several posts, we will be embarking on a new series entitled, What Does the Bible Say about Baptism? I believe there are two specific reasons why we should cover this important biblical theme in Scripture.

The first reason is the significance of the doctrine.

Throughout history, there are myriad accounts of believers who have given their lives because of the importance of this doctrine. One of those stories is of Felix Manz from Zurich in the year 1525. He began practicing believer’s baptism, baptizing those who came to know Christ and had not been baptized following their profession of faith. Manz’s views threatened, not only the religious beliefs of the Zurich political establishment, but their political power as well, moving to divide the very centralized secular foundation of church and state. In January 1527, after refusing to recant his anabaptist beliefs, Manz was condemned to death by drowning.

Over forty years later in the Netherlands, Dirk Willem became convinced that the Scriptures taught believer’s baptism, and that the authority of the Dutch Reformed and the Dutch Roman Catholics acted unbiblically in enforcing infant baptism. In 1569, Willem was arrested for his beliefs and practice of believer’s baptism. He was later tried, tortured, and eventually burned at the stake for his refusal to recant his Baptist beliefs. History says Willem died, calling out to the Lord in prayer as the flames consumed him.

Today, we should all be thankful we no longer live in a time when having a particular view of baptism is unlawful, with the punishment being torture and execution. What we should lament, however, is how unimportant such doctrines have become in the church. The church has swung the pendulum to the other side, where it now places almost no importance on the meaning of baptism.

It is clear many people do not understand what baptism is or why it matters. Countless churches baptize people without ever hearing if they have credible professions of faith, assuming that anyone who comes to be baptized should be admitted to the waters and immediately declared a follower of Christ. While Christians should not be executing or persecuting one another over any doctrines, we should see throughout this series that the doctrine of baptism is serious and significant in the life of the church, and why that is the case.

The second reason to walk through an in-depth study of this topic is because of the temptation for those who appreciate Reformed theology to adopt the error of infant baptism.

Everyone appreciates a coherent system of thought, theology, or set of philosophical beliefs. Furthermore, people in our day are often disconnected from the past, tradition, and substance, so they are looking for something that seems historically rooted, that has strong tradition, and that has the feeling of being substantial. These two factors combine in such a way that all too often, people who begin to discover the theology of the Protestant Reformation move away from the biblical view of believer’s baptism toward an unbiblical position of infant baptism. They see infant baptism as part of a larger system, and they adopt that theology wholesale despite the lack of biblical support.

Today we are also seeing a resurgence of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, with many people adopting the tenants of these religions and drifting away from what Scripture teaches about the gospel, salvation, and baptism. There are significant consequences to getting baptism wrong, as we will see over the next several posts. As a shepherd, my heart is to guard the flock from these errors and protect the sheep from doctrines that will have negative impacts, not only in the lives of those who hold them, but in the lives of their children as well.

Our method of studying baptism is quite simple: we will see what Scripture says about baptism. We will look at what the biblical text teaches and dissect the various passages throughout the New Testament relating to baptism. We’ll also consider some theological arguments believers have made throughout the centuries that are not quite as exegetically or textually grounded in order to understand how such arguments arose and how we should apply the biblical text(s) to those arguments.

However, I think it is quite instructive to look at what the Bible says about baptism when it speaks to this important doctrine. Our goal is not to fit our beliefs into a system or philosophize or theologize our way to some belief about baptism, but to draw our views and understanding about baptism from the biblical text itself.

In the next post, then, we will introduce this subject by considering various views about baptism and why these differences are so important to understand and evaluate biblically.