ABSTRACT OF DISTINCTIONS ABOUT THE NECESSITY OF BAPTISM
ABSTRACT OF DISTINCTIONS ABOUT THE NECESSITY OF BAPTISM
Virgil Warren, PhD
1. A distinction needs to be made between standard situations and special cases. Denying the necessity of baptism applies only to special cases. Special cases include those in which
(a) a person would be risking health or life in being baptized,
(b) people honestly misunderstand that baptism is immersion or should have been a personal adult response of their own,
(c) someone is “killed on the way to the baptistry.”
2. A distinction needs to be made between intended meaning and perceived meaning.
3. A distinction needs to be made between formal and dynamic acts. Formal acts are not inherently necessary to interpersonal process, whereas dynamic acts like faith, repentance, moral behavior are inherent to relationship to other persons—God and other people.
4. There is a distinction between the necessity of baptism and the kind and degree of its necessity.
5. There is a difference admittedly between God’s having to include baptism in salvation and, when he does include it, including it as a legal requirement. The interpersonal nature of the covenant determines that baptism is not a legal requirement. Baptism does not have inherent necessity because it does not have legal necessity. When God established this—which he did not have to establish, he did not establish something with legal necessity but interpersonal necessity.
6. There is a difference between God’s sticking by his “rule” about being baptized and our reading into his commandment a kind or degree of necessity that he did not mean.
7. There is a distinction between fellowship and leadership when in special cases we consider the reasons for not being baptized are insufficient.
8. We distinguish between other people’s disagreeing with the New Testament and their disagreeing with “our” understanding of it. Respecting the latter case does not mean we are considering truth itself relative or unattainable; we only acknowledge that we all can honestly misunderstand.
9. There is a distinction between misobedience and disobedience.
10. There is a distinction between things equally true and things equally important.
11. There is a distinction between legal, natural, and logical necessity, on the one hand, and interpersonal necessity, on the other.
12. There is a distinction between sincerity not making you right and sincerity not making you forgivable. Sincerity does not change the truth itself, but it does change the attitude another person can take toward the sincere person who honestly misunderstands the truth. Making you forgivable is not just something that can happen after you repent after being corrected; it can be something able to be overlooked before you get corrected. Sincerity does not make you right, but it does make you forgivable.
13. There is a distinction between speaking in principle and speaking in particular about an individual person. In talking about the non-inherent necessity of baptism, we are not implying anything about the state of any person.
14. There is a distinction between the nature of baptism as formal act and the subject relative to which that formal act is performed. The fact that baptism is associated with salvation rather than with Christian worship, church organization, or Christian fellowship does not change the degree and nature of its necessity. The kind and degree of necessity pertains to the nature of the act as formal vs. dynamic, not the relatively greater decisiveness of the topic (salvation vs. post-salvation, or non-salvation matters).
15. We know that baptism is not inherently/legally necessary because
(a) baptism stands in an interpersonal covenant, so it is interpersonal.
(b) formal acts are not inherent to interpersonal relationships.
(c) we know how God has dealt with the other failures in special cases to do other formal observances. He has looked at the heart’s motives and intention.
(d) statements on baptism address standard situations.
16. (a) Baptism is a formal, performative act vs. a dynamic act. God is not as concerned about the outward formal behavior as he is about the intent of the heart.
(b) If not being baptized is a matter of honest misunderstanding rather than disobedience, it belongs among “special cases” or “hard cases.”
(c) “Necessary/essential for salvation” is an ambiguous expression. It has been intended to mean baptism is “part of” the process of salvation, but it can sound like it means salvation is not possible without it.
17. Denying inherent necessity is for purposes of fellowship in special and hard cases. It does not address
(a) what we preach to unbelievers.
(b) what we teach believers so they may know the way of the Lord more perfectly.
(c) what we practice when we baptize people.
(d) the eternal destiny of any person. That is God’s business.
18. On special cases and hard cases, we cannot simply suspend judgment and leave it up to God.
(a) The issue is not their actual eternal destiny or actual present state, but our present fellowship. It is not simply a matter of their relationship to God; it is equally a matter of our relationship to them.
(b) Baptism is something people do, not just something they understand. Likewise, our fellowship with them is something we do, not just something we understand. We cannot, then, handle the issue the way we handle millennial questions, the exact view of the trinity, the precise way divine foreknowledge is compatible with human free will, questions about canonicity of specific Bible books, the interpretation of somewhat unclear passages that deal with historical or scientific matters.
19. Baptism is related to salvation more than to church membership or Christian witness.
20. The baptism-circumcision comparison in Romans 2:25-29 (or elsewhere) does not lie so much at the level of the ordinances themselves, as at the more general level of formal acts and the different kinds of covenants in which they stand.
21. Baptism did not come in the “room of circumcision” as if there were a change of signs for the same covenant, to which certain amendments were then made. Rather, there has been a change of covenants, which have different formal acts of initiation into these different covenants. The different covenants are also different kinds of covenants so that their respective signs have correspondingly different meanings.
22. By getting rid of local church membership, we stay out of officialness that forces us to decide the salvation status of given individuals. It would seem right to say that those who are part of the universal, invisible church have a right to participate in any local, visible expression of it. We keep fellowship in purely interpersonal terms and relate in Christ to the extent of our considerable common ground.
23. Baptism was not established for
(a) God’s benefit (so he could tell when a person is saved),
(b) for the result (as if it produced the result or we produced the result by doing it), but
(c) for our benefit (to help us define ourselves, crystallize our self-awareness; in this respect it is like a commencement exercise or, more exactly, like receiving the properly endorsed diploma).
24. It is necessary to do whatever God commands about anything. The issue about baptism is not whether it is necessary, but the sense in which it is necessary. Systems/categories/acts can have a different kind of necessity. The kind of necessity in (1) logical deduction is different from the kind of necessity in (2) natural processes or (3) legal operations, and all three are different from the kind of necessity in (4) interpersonal processes. The first three are deterministic, while the latter is not. The latter is not deterministic because a person has a will (as commander), and there is a distinction between subjective intention and objective fact, among other things.
Within interpersonal operations, the kind of necessity is further defined in terms of whether the act in question is (a) inherently interpersonal or (b) interpersonalized; that is, whether it is really interpersonal or symbolic. Inside interpersonal necessity also is the question about (c) the necessity of personal consistency, that is, whether God would be “going back on his word” if he saved someone who unintentionally misunderstood a performative act God commanded as a condition for salvation. The answer to that depends on what kind of necessity God meant when he established the act, which brings us back to what we would expect him as a person to mean in commanding a performative act in connection with an interpersonal process. In theory, different performative acts can fulfill the same role, so one performative act is not inherently necessary. It could only be absolutely necessary if God so dictated that it should be the one.
25. The necessity or importance of baptism is not determined by the importance of the subject/meaning that the commandment is attached to, but by the nature of the act itself relative to that meaning. Both the interpersonal meaning and the performative act should be present. In doing the act, however we should not think of the formal part as if it were such that (a) doing it would be valid even if the consequences would come without the interpersonal, or that (b) the absence of the formal for appropriate reasons would mean the invalidity of one’s status with Christ—as if the consequences could not come even if the formal were missing for inescapable reasons.
Alexander Campbell’s Lunenburg Letter is something many people among the Christian Churches/Churches of Christ may not know about; or if they do, they consider it an inconsistency in his thinking. Nevertheless, he says rather forcefully,
“I cannot, therefore, make any one duty the standard of Christian state or character, not even immersion into the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and in my heart regard all that have been sprinkled in infancy without their own knowledge and consent, as aliens from Christ and the well-grounded hope of heaven “Salvation was of the Jews,” acknowledged the Messiah; and yet he said of a foreigner, an alien from the commonwealth of Israel, a Syro-Phoenician, “I have not found so great faith—no, not in Israel.” . . . There is no occasion, then, for making immersion, on a profession of the faith, absolutely essential to a Christian—though it may be greatly essential to his sanctification and comfort.”
This approach and spirit may not always be maintained as time goes on. As with many movements, this one that to a great extent derived from him may have crystallized over time, and many contemporary participants in it have little idea that thoughts like this one from Campbell’s later years were entertained in that founding age. Alexander Campbell cannot be of any more importance to a Christian as a measure of sound teaching than can Luther, Calvin, Augustine, or Aquinas; but if people are inclined to respect his opinions, they do well to remember that this was one of them.
26. The necessity of baptism is not determined by the importance of the meaning that the commandment is attached to, but by the nature of the act itself relative to that meaning.
Notation: Both the interpersonal meaning and the performative act should be present. We should not, however, in doing the act, think of the formal part as if it were such that (1) the doing of the formal act would be valid even if the interpersonal were not there—as if the consequences would come without the interpersonal [proxy baptism], or that (2) the absence of the formal for appropriate reasons would mean the invalidity of one’s status with Christ—as if the consequences could not come if the formal were missing for inescapable reasons. This last point relates to the fact that none of us speak to the salvation status or eternal destiny of any other person.
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