When Modes of Baptism Attack

OK, so my mother in law just got back from a trip to Turkey. At one of the early Christian sites her tour group visited, the guide pointed out a baptistery constructed in the shape of a cross. I don't know if the word "immersion" was part of the spiel, but the idea was conveyed that a candidate would enter the water and lie in it with his or her arms extended, cross-shaped, to be baptized.

Not so! insisted a member of the tour group, a clergyperson from a tradition where sprinkling is the norm. She went on to take apart the hapless tour guide for daring to teach on a subject he knew nothing about: everyone knows, she assured him, that Jesus "could not" have been immersed (covered in water) for his baptism because the Jordan River is too shallow to allow it. He would have stood in water up to, say, his shins, and John the Baptist would have scooped up water in his hands and poured it over Jesus' head. (This little lecture, by the way, was delivered in front of a bunch of unbelieving tour participants who probably wondered what the big deal was. I'm sure the Kingdom was advanced and God was glorified by this outburst...)

Now this pastor actually has some early Christian art on her side, I understand. I read recently (please don't ask for the citation because I've already lost it!) that there are early mosaics and such showing baptisms in just this manner. And I belong to a church that baptizes infants and young children with an ounce of water or less applied to their heads. If I was against the practice, I wouldn't have had our three children baptized in just this manner.

But, c'mon. Does anyone really know with certainty that immersion baptisms did not take place anywhere in Asia Minor in the first few centuries of Christian history? And for those of the immersion persuasion, is there really incontrovertible evidence that all baptisms in the apostolic age were immersions? Apparently lots of people in both camps think so, judging by the amount of ink they've spilled.

I'm much more interested in what I consider weightier questions: what baptism signifies; what benefits, if any, it conveys; its proper recipients; that sort of thing. I've never seen the debate over the mode of baptism as worth getting into. In my mind, it would be like arguing over the size of the pieces of bread served as the Lord's Supper. Am I missing something? Is there an issue of faithfulness to the gospel that is completely evading me here?

While this is only the rough draft of a theory, I wonder if both sorts of "modalists" are really arguing over things they associate with the mode of baptism, rather than the mode itself. For the sprinklers, especially in the mainline and self-professed liberal churches, the enemy is "fundamentalism." Since most baptisms by immersion take place in conservative, inerrancy-professing, Rapture-promoting, wife-subjugating churches, immersion becomes the symbol for everything the sprinklers are against. For theological and moral conservatives on the other hand, there is a mental association between the non-gospel of liberalism and the baby sprinkling that most of these churches practice. In both cases, the wrong mode becomes the symbol for all that is wrong with the opponent.

As a conservative evangelical who affirms baptism of infant children of believers, I find myself sort of in the middle: agreeing with my fellow conservatives about the abyss that is liberal theology while disagreeing (but only recently! remember, I'm Reluctantly Reforming) with their talking points about immersion.

The theory may need some work. Or, the theory may need to be taken behind the barn and killed with an axe. Whichever. At any rate, I'm willing to talk over the issue of mode of baptism with anyone who can make a case for why it needs to be talked over at all. And I also hope we Christians can do a better job of recognizing that debates like these are, or ought to be, intramural ones. Let's leave the pagans on the tour completely out of it. And maybe, you know, talk about Christ with them instead.