I was visiting with a Baptist pastor and somehow the conversation got around to baptism. He felt the church to which I belong did not baptize correctly because we did not immerse. I referred him to two passages in the New Testament. In 1 Peter 3, Peter speaks of the ark as an example of baptism and in 1 Corinthians 10 the apostle Paul refers to the passage through the Red Sea as an example of baptism. I said it appears to me that those who are were immersed were not baptized and those who were not immersed were baptized.

“If the Bible says they were baptized, they were immersed!”

Why are some people so fixated on an idea for which there is such flimsy evidence? Robert Young, author of Young’s Analytical Concordance of the Bible, made the following observation:

“I really know of no heresy (a word I use in its original sense, i.e., ‘opinion’) in the Christian church that has less foundation than that of immersion, yet its defenders use the most reckless statements, which have gained ground among critics and lexicographers — who follow one another like a flock of sheep — entirely by the audacity of the assertion.”

The word immersion means to submerge something in water; it says nothing about taking that something, or someone, out of the water. In the example of the ark, all the inhabitants of the world, except those in the ark, were immersed and never seen again. Those in the ark no doubt felt raindrops on their heads before the ark was fully closed. The last part of Psalm 77 speaks of the passage through the Red Sea: “The waters saw thee. . . they were afraid. . . The clouds poured out water,” describes the experience of the Israelites. The Egyptian army was immersed and their bodies washed up on the shore.

Paul speaks, in Romans 6:4 and Colossians 2:12, of being buried with Christ in baptism. I don’t know how the burial of Jesus can be made into a metaphor for immersion. He was not buried in the ground, but on a ledge in a cave hewn out of the rock. Secondly, it was the mortal body of Jesus that was placed in the tomb, not the risen Christ. The water of baptism does not wash away sin, it is a symbol that the old body of sin has died and we are now living in newness of life, with the life of Christ within. Adam Clarke, in his comment on Romans 6:2, mentions that in Rome throwing three handfuls of dust on a corpse was considered to be a burial.

In the New Testament the Greek word baptismos is used to refer to various kinds of washing, including the washing of tables (Matthew 7:4). The true meaning of baptismos is to wash, without any reference to the mode of washing.

There is a baptism that washes our sins away. It is the baptism of the Holy Spirit, which is part of the new birth. Henry Funk (1697-1760), the first Mennonite bishop in North America, wrote a booklet entitled A Mirror of Baptism, wherein he shows that this baptism is the first and most important, and a requirement for those requesting water baptism. And the most suitable way to administer water baptism is in the same manner as the baptism of the Holy Spirit, to pour it out from above.