Introduction
Throughout Church history, but more notably and rancorously within the past several hundred years, debates over Christian baptism – what the rite itself actually signifies and does, by what mode it ought to be administered, and who may qualify as its proper subjects – have continued without abatement. One notable characteristic of the question, which has doubtless served to keep an easy and obviously irrefutable answer out of reach, is that the entire biblical witness to the nature of baptism is not exhausted by the relatively few passages directly addressing, by precept or historical example, the actual administration of the New Covenant sign, but on the contrary, many broad and far-reaching biblical themes and motifs have a necessary and compelling impact on virtually every point of the debate. We will not understand what is intended by the sign of baptism until we know what it is to be in covenant with God in Christ Jesus; and we will not understand his Covenant until we go back to the beginning of his dealings with his people, and take careful note of how God has inaugurated, clarified, and expanded his covenant, to whom he has always made it firm, how he advanced it to its final state of immutable certainty in the atoning work of Christ, and what that means for us today who are heirs of the Covenants of Promise. Nor will we understand the manifold significance of the rite until we have adequately accounted for God’s saving of Noah and the children of Israel through the waters by which he destroyed the world, the washing rituals of the Old Testament priests, and many other such things. But although the question is multi-faceted and complex, and although many well-meaning persons have therefore failed to take into account certain vital and necessary pieces of information pertinent to the subject, and have thus become inadvisedly dogmatic in an opinion which cannot adequately account for great and inextricably related truths which are the most ardently and emphatically proclaimed throughout the scriptures, it is my firm belief that the scriptures alone, when laid out in due order, may cast such a brilliant and inextinguishable light upon the whole topic as to render a few much-debated conclusions firm beyond cavil. God grant that his holy scriptures may here dispel much fruitless and misdirected groping after answers through the wrong means and reconcile all true and pious Christian brothers (of whom there are doubtless many on every side of the question) in a singleminded opinion!