In 1932 Otis Q. Sellers, an ordained Baptist minister, a pastor, walked away from the churches over “baptism.” What idea of baptism replaced what he inherited from the fundamentalists who trained him? Fifty years after the event he set down the results of his studies, “epitomized” he said, in ten four-page leaflets, whose contents we will now summarize in a series of posts.[1]
Sellers begins his story:
It was in 1930 that many circumstances convinced me that it was my duty to God to make an objective study of the subject of baptism. I was then the pastor of a Baptist church and was quite dissatisfied with the attitude of the members toward this ordinance. They were strongly inclined to regard all who had been baptized as Christians and all who had not been as unsaved and lost. My messages to them insisted that one became a believer by believing and not by being baptized. I charged them with making far too much of baptism in the wrong way, giving it saving and cleansing powers that should be attributed only to the Lord Jesus Christ. This angered some since their entire hope was in their baptism and church membership.
In addition to this, I was somewhat exercised about my own personal relationship to this ceremony, having become a church member by baptism at the age of twelve, then finding and believing in Jesus Christ as my savior at the age of eighteen. This was baptism before salvation.[2]
A woman whose husband was about to undergo surgery had come him with questions about his relationship to the Lord.
. . . I dealt with him concerning his need of a savior and set forth Jesus Christ as the savior he needed. He was receptive to the truth and confessed to his wife and myself his faith in and the acceptance of the Lord Jesus as his Savior.
When Sellers related this to his congregation that Sunday morning—the man was to undergo surgery at the hospital that afternoon—they received him as a candidate for baptism to take place after he recovered from the surgery. A controversy arose: if he died on the operating table unbaptized, some reasoned, he’d be lost. That clashed with Sellers’s understanding of salvation as he had been trained, but the dissension made him think.
. . . my views on baptism were hand-me-downs, so I determined to go to the Word of God for myself in order to have firsthand Biblical truth on the subject. I felt quite sure . . . my views would be justified, but my first findings were quite a shock to me. . . . I dropped my penetrating studies for a time in order to absorb and sort out what I had already found. The subject was constantly on my mind and this was forcing a revolution in my thinking.
While in Chicago he found that a “very heated controversy raging on the subject of baptism.” Among the controversialists were John C. O’Hair, Harry A. Ironside, and William McCarrell.
I knew all these men and conferred with them at length. I resumed my studies with renewed intensity and soon concluded that baptism was far more important than I had made it to be, and that this importance could not possibly be related to the water ritual. . . . I knew quite well that the two occurrences of “baptize” in Matthew 3:11 had to set forth two different concepts. And there were occurrences in other passages where it could not possibly denote the same ideas that it does in Matthew 3:11. It then became my task to discover all the many concepts which are described by this word and decide which one is the most transcendent, the “one baptism” of Ephesians 4:5. . . .
In 1935, at the urging of many who knew that I was assiduously studying the subject, I wrote and put into print a pamphlet under the title of The Glory of the One Baptism setting forth the results of my studies up to that time.[3] This was a rather crude presentation, but it was the best I could do then.
Crude or not, it was a step in the right direction, that is, of putting the Word of God over the tradition one was raised in the two conflict.
There has long been an idolatrous attachment to the water ritual that is called “baptism.” The exaltation of this ceremony grows constantly. It is being given preeminence over all things that are called Christian. Millions are finding their completeness in this ritual.
Rather than in Christ (Colossians 2:10). Men who “profess to be teachers of God’s Word”
say water baptism is a seal of believers; it is the final step that puts us into the Kingdom of God; it takes the place of circumcision; it is a witness to unbelievers; it is a confession of our faith in Christ; it is a picture of our death, burial, and resurrection with Christ; it is the door of entrance into the visible church; it is the initiatory ordinance of Christianity; it is the putting on of the uniform of a Christian; that by it we are identified with a rejected Christ; that it is a burial with Christ; that it is a means of grace; that it brings you under God’s covenanted mercy; etc. etc.
In Sellers’s view, such “words as these are nothing more than human opinions.” These “products of man’s reasoning” merely “exalt a ritual.”
. . . many ministers today are assuming the stance that this practice is a divine ordinance, decreed by Jesus Christ, and that He intended it to be a binding obligation upon all who profess relationship to Him. If this be so, why then did Paul say: “Christ sent (apostellō, commissioned) me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel (1 Corinthians 1:17)?
Sellers noted that even the theologians competent in languages and history, such as the Lutheran Jürgen Moltman of Tübingen University and the Presbyterian Paul K. Jewett of Fuller Theological Seminary only left things more unsettled than when they found them. “Both of these men repudiate the idea that baptism as the initiatory rite of Christianity is parallel with circumcision as practiced in Israel.”
. . . the entire idea of the necessity for some kind of a water ritual to be performed as an initiatory rite at the beginning of one’s relationship to Jesus Christ is an unscriptural theory held by millions who have done nothing more than to receive without question a practice that was handed down to them by others.
. . . When they hear this word [baptism], it means only one thing to them—as religious ritual or ceremony performed by a minister in which a person is dipped into water or has water sprinkled or poured upon him. . . . They easily gloss over a passage such as Matthew 3:11 where three baptisms are set forth: baptism in water, baptism in Spirit, and baptism in fire. It does injustice to the Word of God and to His truth if we read into His word the idea of a water ceremony every time we came upon the word “baptism.”
How does this very un-English word “baptize” and its cognates enter our language? As we noted earlier in this book, βαπτίζω (baptízō) is a Greek word that every English-language New Testament transliterates as “baptism,” but never translates. The words so transliterated “must be studied as Greek words . . . and their true historical and grammatical meaning must be sought out if God’s truth is our goal.” To say that baptizō means “to baptize” is to say nothing at all.[4]
To be continued
Notes
[1] “Concerning Baptism,” Seed & Bread, No. 134, March 10, 1981; “What Does Baptizō Mean?,” Seed & Bread, No. 135, March 10, 1981; “Baptism Means Identification,” Seed & Bread, No. 136, March 10, 1981; “The Baptism of John,” Seed & Bread, No. 137, March 10, 1981; “Identification with the Holy Spirit,” Seed & Bread, No. 138, March 10, 1981; “Identification with Jesus Christ,” Seed & Bread, No. 139, March 10, 1981; “Baptism in Matthew,” Seed & Bread, No. 143, August 10, 1982; “Baptism in Mark and Luke,” Seed & Bread, No. 144, August 10, 1982; “Baptism in John and Acts,” Seed & Bread, No. 145, August 10, 1982; “Baptism in the Epistles,” Seed & Bread, No. 146, August 10, 1982. These essays are available for free download as pdfs from seedandbread.org.
[2] “Concerning Baptism,” Seed & Bread, No. 134, March 10, 1981.
[3] Winnetka, IL, 1935.
[4] “What Does Baptizō Mean?,” Seed & Bread, No. 135, March 10, 1981.