Washing, Dying, and Being Reborn

Baptism is the rite of Christian initiation, a washing with water in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It descends from the immersions of John the Baptist and, behind him, from Jewish purification bathing, but the Christian reading reframes the act: Paul in Romans presents it not merely as cleansing but as a dying and rising with Christ, the candidate going down into the water as into a grave and coming up into new life. The oldest church order to describe it in detail, the Apostolic Tradition, has candidates renounce evil, be anointed, immersed three times, and clothed in white.

Two long disagreements run through its history. The first is mode: immersion, pouring or sprinkling, all of which have been defended as valid. The second is age: whether the rite belongs to professing adults or to infants of Christian households. The Anabaptists of the sixteenth century took their name from insisting on the former and rebaptising those christened as babies; most of the older churches baptise infants and complete the initiation later at confirmation.