33. Do you believe that there is but one baptism?
Yes. I acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
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In the context of early Judaism, people performed multiple immersions for the ritual purification of their bodies and participated in multiple animal sacrifices for the removal of guilt, the most dramatic of which occurred annually on the Day of Atonement. The logic of “one baptism” (Eph. 4:5) is closely tied to the Christian conviction that there is now but one unrepeatable sacrifice for sins—the death of Jesus—into which we also are plunged in baptism. This was a connection made more pointedly in the practice of the church in its first centuries, when baptism was regularly practiced on Easter or during the vigil of Easter as Saturday passed into Sunday.
The church has also stressed that baptism should happen once because there is only one new birth. Baptism was not like the routine, repeated purifications that both non-Christian Jews and pagans could undergo. Those merely returned a person to his or her starting point, as it were, in terms of ritual purity by washing away accumulated pollution. Christian baptism, however, marked a radical break with one’s old life and a passing into an entirely new life in the Spirit. It was not a return to a starting point but a transition into a whole new existence.
Those who were baptized early—whether as infants, children, or adults—and come to feel that they have failed to take hold of the new life offered to them in baptism do not need to repeat the ritual. It is sufficient for them to remember their baptism (which can be done with water, as an aid to their spirits), to trust Christ’s promise of new life conveyed in their baptism, and to keep moving forward into that new life in which we continue, by the Spirit’s power and our diligent attention to the Spirit, to put all sin behind us.
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Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” (Acts 2:38 ESV)
Baptism . . . now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers having been subjected to him. (1 Peter 3:21–22 ESV)
One Lord, one faith, one baptism. (Eph. 4:5)
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This is an excerpt from Christian Faith and Doctrine: An Annotated Catechism for the Global Methodist Church. Seedbed is pleased to partner with The Global Methodist Church to offer this companion resource to A Catechism of Christian Faith and Doctrine for the Global Methodist Church.
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