Who should be baptised? Part 1

Many Christians are asking questions about the proper subjects of baptism. Some say that baptism should only be given to believers, others say that it should be given to believers and their children, while still others say that it really doesn’t matter too much and churches should be broad enough to include Christians who hold to both positions. Some Christians even claim that baptism isn’t required any more. Let’s see what the Bible says, and what that means for us today.

What the Bible teaches

There are two ways of understanding what the Bible teaches about baptism. Firstly, we can look at specific passages which detail the instructions which our Lord gave to his apostles about baptism, and then we can look at specific examples of the baptisms they carried out under the terms of those instructions. Secondly, we can look at the broader theological issues – especially related to the biblical “covenants” – which some Christians use to modify these instructions about and examples of baptism. The broader theological issues can be quite complex, but fortunately the passages which describe the instructions about and examples of baptism are clear enough.

Everyone agrees that New Testament baptism begins with John the Baptist. John’s baptism was a baptism of repentance, which by definition could only be given to those old enough to repent (Mark 1:4). One of the people he baptised was his cousin, Jesus of Nazareth, who gathered his own followers and began his own baptismal campaign, working for a time in the same area (John 3:22-23), and, like John, only baptising disciples (John 4:1). The baptisms carried out by John and the Lord Jesus are foundational to all later New Testament teaching about the ordinance, and it is clear in both instances that both John and the Lord Jesus called their followers to a baptism of repentance. Only those who were old enough to repent and only those who became disciples were allowed to be baptised.

This pattern continued in the early church. The Lord Jesus gave his disciples only one instruction about who should be baptised. That instruction was included in the Great Commission, in which he commanded his apostles to “make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (Matt 28:19-20). The baptisms recorded in Acts show what the apostles understood the Great Commission to mean. Wherever they went, they preached the gospel and called those who responded to it in faith and repentance to be baptised. And it’s this close link between saving faith and baptism which explains the baptism of households in the New Testament. There are several instances of these baptisms of entire families, and in all but one of those instances we learn that the family that was baptised was a family (and sometimes a very extended family) of believing persons – a family of disciples.

The evidence is simply indisputable. When Peter preached to the household of Cornelius, “the Holy Spirit fell upon all those who heard the word ... And he commanded them to be baptised” (Acts 10:24, 44-48). This was a household of believing persons. Again, when Paul and Silas preached to the Philippian gaoler, he “believed in God with all his household” and so “he and all his family were baptised” (Acts 16:33-34). This was also a household of believing persons. The same point could be made of the family of Crispus (Acts 18:8) and the family of Stephanus, which was baptised as a family (1 Cor 1:16) and which served and led the church as a family (1 Cor 16:15). These were families of disciples.

There is only one example of a household baptism that is not linked to an explicit declaration about that household’s faith (Acts 16:15). But this instance occurs in the wider context of the Lord’s clear example and instruction that only disciples should be baptised, and in the context of other household baptisms in which only disciples were baptised. It would be a very dangerous thing to build our understanding of baptism upon the one exception to the overwhelming New Testament evidence that our Lord and his apostles only baptised disciples.

Of course, the discussion of baptism in the epistles is entirely consistent with this understanding. Baptism was the badge of those who responded to the gospel. In fact it was so much a part of the response of faith that apostles could simply assume that every Christian had been baptised as part of their response to the gospel (Rom 6:3-6). They assumed, as we cannot today, that every baptised person was a Christian, and that every Christian was a baptised person. The teaching of the epistles indicates to us that the instruction about baptism given in the Great Commission – that baptism should only be given to disciples – should continue in the present day.

Continued in part 2.