“A really Anxious Inquirer,” London. We heartily approve of the step you have taken in being baptized; but we cannot but feel that you both displace the ordinance and attach an undue importance to it. This we gather from your four queries on the subject.
1. In the passage to which you refer in the gospels, the command is given to the apostles to baptize, and not to individuals to be baptized: So also in Acts 10. Peter commanded the believing Gentiles to be baptized. From all this we gather that the normal idea was, that those who preached the gospel were responsible to see that the professed believers were baptized. This is totally different from the way in which your query puts the matter. We dislike the legal style of the expression, “binding upon all true believers.”
2. We are not aware of any passage of scripture in which baptism is presented in connection with the Lord’s Table, or in which it is laid down as an indispensable pre-requisite for communion with the assembly. To make water baptism a term of communion, is, in our judgment, to displace the former, and put the latter on a legal basis. “By one Spirit are we all baptized into one body.” It is not said, “By water are we all baptized into one sect.”
3, 4. These have been anticipated in what we have already said. We cannot see that water baptism has anything to do with the Church’s communion and worship. We might with equal, if not greater, force, ask our correspondent to give a text to prove that the twelve apostles themselves were ever baptized. We have no record of it.
Your postscript is entirely inconsistent with your four queries. The command in Thessalonians to “withdraw” is not, by any means, to be viewed as excommunication, nor yet as a refusal to admit to communion. They were to admonish, as a brother, the disorderly person (one refusing to work with his hands), but not to treat him as an enemy. We believe it refers to personal discipline exercised in private life—a very important point, and one not sufficiently understood.
Finally, we would affectionately suggest to our correspondent the necessity of watching against a legal tendency, as also against a rigid literality. We must ever remember that “the letter (even of ‘the New Testament’) killeth, but the Spirit giveth life” (2 Cor. 3:66Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. (2 Corinthians 3:6)). We would not yield to any in the matter of rightly estimating baptism. We believe that all disciples should be baptized. But we have no sympathy whatever with the rigid, legal, narrow style of some, in reference to this point. We have prayerfully studied the Word of God for twenty-two years, and we here deliberately assert that we can find no warrant therein for making water baptism a term of church communion. We most strongly deprecate the idea of making ordinances a legal yoke to bind upon the necks of true believers. It seems to us destructive of the finest and noblest characteristics of true Christianity.