One of the ways in which I moved from partial to fully biblical (that is, Catholic) faith was by discovering that my little dorm group was wrong about baptism.\u00a0 In the early Church, to believe and profess your faith and to be baptised were the same thing.\u00a0 If you believed, you sought baptism and if you were baptised, you were, ipso facto, a believer. Controversies dating from a millennium-and-a-half after the time of the New Testament still have many Christians today splitting hairs over \u2018water baptism\u2019 vs. \u2018Spirit baptism\u2019 or vs. \u2018profession of faith\u2019, but none of that would have been intelligible to the authors and original readers of the New Testament.\u00a0 What they took for granted was not the\u00a0distinction<\/em>\u00a0between baptism in water and the gift of the Spirit or the profession of faith in Jesus, but the\u00a0identity<\/em>\u00a0of all three of these things.\u00a0 To ask them to choose between these three things was like asking them which blade on the scissors does the cutting.\u00a0 It was a nonsense question.<\/p>\nProfession-of-Faith-and-Baptism was how you both entered the Body of Christ and how God the Father gave you his Spirit through Christ the Son.\u00a0 You were \u201cborn again of water and the Spirit\u201d (John 3:5).\u00a0 Accordingly, with the sole exception of the Good Thief (who is, tellingly, understood by the early Church as having been\u00a0baptised<\/em>\u00a0in blood, not water), every convert in the New Testament is baptised when they believe the preaching of the apostles whom Jesus commanded:<\/p>\nGo therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.\u201d (Matthew 28:19-20)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Much more here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In which I finish up my little series for The Catholic Weekly on the necessity of the Creed to a faith rooted in remembering actual events. One of the ways in which I moved from partial to fully biblical (that is, Catholic) faith was by discovering that my little dorm group was wrong about baptism.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[836],"class_list":["post-103826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-catholic-weekly-stuff"],"yoast_head":"\n
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