During the nearly twenty years I was a ‘Bible Christian,’ while I liked reading Luther and Calvin and the lives of others I respected, what Christians believed in the early centuries of the Church didn’t matter too much to me.

When it came to determining doctrine, all that counted, really, was ‘what saith the scriptures?’

Then I was introduced to John Henry Newman, one of the most brilliant Christian thinkers of the 19th century. At the age of 45, he left the Anglican Church to enter the Roman Catholic Church and one the main things that drove him was reading the early church fathers.

I picked up the defense Newman wrote of his decision to become Catholic, his Apologia pro Vita Sua, and read it. I also read his extraordinary Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, where Newman makes his famous statement: “to be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.”

I remember thinking that this was quite the bold thing to say. Is he kidding? To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant?

But he went even further than this. He insisted that it’s “easy to show that the Christianity of history [was] not Protestantism.” In fact, he said that if any church like the church I was pastoring at the time ever existed in the early centuries of the Christian history, there’s no record of it.

This utter incongruity between Protestantism and historical Christianity is a plain fact, whether…regarded in its early or in its later centuries…. So much must the Protestant grant that, if such a system of doctrine as he would now introduce ever existed in early times, it has been clean swept away as if by a deluge, suddenly, silently, and without memorial.

It was at this point that I decided I needed to read the church fathers. I wanted to know if there was truth to what Newman was saying.

And anyway, these were of the first great apologists, theologians, bishops, saints and martyrs of Christianity. St. Irenaeus was a disciple of a man who was himself a disciple of John. You can’t get any closer to the apostles. Why not see what these men had to say?

The Meaning of Baptism

As I began to read the fathers, one of the first things that struck me was the way they talked about baptism.

Catholicism teaches “baptismal regeneration” — that in baptism the graces depicted by baptism are actually given. Sins are washed away. We’re spiritually reborn and given the gift of the Holy Spirit.

If you want an image of the Catholic teaching on baptism, think of Naaman the Syrian being instructed to dip himself in the Jordan River seven times in order to be cleansed of his leprosy. Think of Jesus commanding the man blind from birth to “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” in order to receive his sight. In both cases, faith was expressed in an act of obedience through which the blessing was given. So it is with baptism.

Among evangelical Protestants, this teaching is almost universally rejected. Baptism is held to be nothing more than a symbolic act by which a believer makes public profession of his or her faith. It speaks of what God has done in the life of the believer. It doesn’t itself do anything.

This is what I believed as a Baptist.

Baptism in the Fathers

With this background, I began to read the fathers.

I started with the Letter of Barnabas, one of the earliest Christian writings (some date it as early as 70 A.D.). I’m reading along, the subject of baptism arises and I find the author describing baptism as “the washing which confers the remission of sins” and explaining that “We descend into the water full of sins and defilement, but come up bearing fruit in our heart…”

“Hmm… Could mean anything,” I thought.

I finished Barnabas and picked up The Shepherd of Hermas, another of the earliest post-apostolic writings. I’m merrily reading along and suddenly the author says,

“I have heard, sir,” said I, “from some teacher, that there is no other repentance except that which took place when we went down into the water and obtained the remission of our former sins.” He said to me, “You have heard rightly, for so it is.”

At this point I thought, “Well, these two certainly seem to have had some kind of quasi-magical view of what takes place in baptism. But maybe it’s just these two.”

I continued reading and came to Justin Martyr, the first great apologist of Christian history. I’m reading his First Apology, written around 150 A.D. and I run into this:

As many as are persuaded and believe that what we teach and say is true, and undertake to be able to live accordingly, are instructed to pray and entreat God with fasting for the remission of their sins that are past, while we pray and fast with them. Then they are brought by us where there is water and are regenerated in the same manner in which we were ourselves regenerated. For in the name of God the Father and Lord of the Universe, and of our Savior Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit, they then receive the washing with water. For Christ also said, “Unless you be born again, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.

I go on to read Clement of Alexandria, writing around A.D. 191, and find him saying:

When we are baptized, we are enlightened. Being enlightened we are adopted as sons. Adopted as sons, we are made perfect…. This work is variously called grace, illumination, perfection, and washing. It is a washing by which we are cleansed of sins, a gift of grace by which the punishments due our sins are remitted, an illumination by which we behold that holy light of salvation.

I read Tertullian, writing around A.D. 203:

Happy is our sacrament of water, in that, by washing away the sins of our early blindness, we are set free and admitted into eternal life… Baptism itself is a corporeal act by which we are plunged into the water, while its effect is spiritual, in that we are freed from
our sins.

Now, I could go on and on with similar quotations from fathers and doctors of the early Church. Cyril of Jerusalem said of baptism, “You go down dead in your sins, and you come up made alive in righteousness.” St Augustine said, “Baptism washes away all, absolutely all, our sins….This is the meaning of the great sacrament of baptism, which is celebrated among us.” St. Gregory of Nazianzus said, “Baptism is God’s most beautiful and magnificent gift… We call it gift, grace, anointing, enlightenment, garment of immortality, bath of rebirth…”

I’ve selected only a handful of quotations here so as not to bore you to death. But it’s not as though I found other church fathers arguing against the ideas expressed in these quotations. In fact, this is the way all of the earliest Christian writers speak of baptism and how Christians continued to speak of baptism essentially until the late Middle Ages when early forms of Protestantism appeared. Whenever baptism is mentioned, these are the sorts of things that are being said.

This is what Christians believed for the first 15 centuries of Christian history.

In all my reading I did not run into even one passage in which the sacramental nature of baptism was denied. Not even one that taught the view I and every Christian I knew had of baptism.

Baptism in Early Church Historians

Almost in a panic, I turned to the works of great historians of the early church.

For instance, J.N.D. Kelly, whose work Early Christian Doctrines has been used as a textbook in seminaries around the world. This is what he says in his section on baptism:

From the beginning baptism was the universally accepted rite of admission into the Church… As regards its significance, it was always held to convey the remission of sins…. [It is that washing with] the living water which alone can cleanse penitents and which, being a baptism with the Holy Spirit, is to be contrasted with Jewish washings. It is a spiritual rite replacing circumcision, the unique doorway to the remission of sins.

I read the Emergence of the Catholic Tradition by Jaroslav Pelikan, one of the two or three greatest historians of Christian doctrine alive at the time. He refers to Tertullian’s teaching on baptism as illustrating the view of early church. From Tertullian’s treatise on the doctrine of baptism (the first ever written on the subject) Pelikan says we learn that four basic gifts are given in baptism: “the remission of sins, deliverance from death, regeneration, and the bestowal of the Holy Spirit.”

It became more and more apparent to me that no one in the early centuries of Christianity held the view of baptism that I held as an evangelical, the view that everyone I knew held, the view that virtually all evangelical Protestants hold. Strange realization.

How in the world could we be so cut off from history? I wondered.

I remember around this time coming home and saying to Tina something along the lines of: You know, I’ve been crawling around in the early church for months, now. I’ve looked under every rock and behind every tree and for the life of me… there ain’t a Baptist in sight!

And it was true. There wasn’t.

Theological Time Travel

I imagined that I could somehow be parachuted back to the time of Irenaeus and Tertullian and Cyprian and Augustine. And I asked myself the question: Would I oppose them on the basis of my personal interpretation of scripture on this matter of baptism? Would I insist they were all wrong and that I was right on this issue? Would I start my own Baptist Church and denomination?

As someone who still thought mainly in terms of sola scriptura, my answer at the time was that I suppose I might oppose the teaching of the universal church on baptism (making the unlikely assumption that I would have had the courage to do it) and, yes, even start my own church and denomination — but only if it was absolutely certain that the doctrine of baptismal regeneration contradicted the teaching of scripture.

In other words, a shift in my thinking was already taking place. Whereas before, it seemed natural to approach any doctrinal issue by simply going straight to the Bible and asking myself, “What do I think it teaches?” after facing such unanimous historical testimony on the meaning of baptism, I now saw that the burden of proof was on me to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that the Church was wrong.

It wouldn’t be good enough for me to simply read the New Testament and conclude, “I think it teaches that baptism is X, Y or Z.”

No. To overturn what amounted to the universal faith of the Church for the first fifteen hundred years of its existence (and still the faith of the majority of Christians), I would need to believe that the Church’s view was completely irreconcilable with scripture.

Obviously, the next step was to carefully read again what the New Testament had to say about baptism in the light of what I’d seen in the writings of the fathers. If their view cohered with what I saw there, how could I not join them in that view?

If one seeks the truth sincerely, he shall find it.

I have to admit it rattled my Protestant bones to
learn, as I explained in Part I, that the unanimous testimony of the early church — in fact of
Christianity until the time of the Reformation —
supported a sacramental view of baptism. With this historical truth in mind, I turned to the
New Testament. I wanted to read what it had to say
about baptism as though for the first time, in the
light of what I’d learned. I began with the classic passage John 3:3-5: “I tell you the truth, unless a man is born again,
he cannot see the kingdom of God.” “How can
a man be born when he is old?” Nicodemus
said. “Surely he cannot enter a second time into
his mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus
answered, “tell you the truth, unless a man is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter
the kingdom of God… Water and Spirit. Is Jesus talking about baptism,
here? Baptists of course say, no. Some say that Jesus is
drawing a contrast here between natural birth
(water) and supernatural rebirth (Spirit). Others say,
no, water is a metaphor for Spirit. When Jesus says
we must be born of “water and the Spirit” he’s just
saying the same thing in two ways. Some say this, some say that, but everyone agrees
that whatever Jesus is saying, he most certainly isn’t
talking about baptism. But then, the Catholic scripture scholars I was
reading at the time encouraged me to consider the
context of these verses. When I did, I saw some
things I’d never seen before. Water and Spirit in John’s Gospel What do we see when we look at the preceding
context of John 3:3-5? Well, in John chapter one, we read about the
baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River. John the
Baptist recounts that when Jesus was baptized, the
Spirit descended on him. In the parallel accounts in
Matthew, Mark and Luke we learn that at the same
time a voice from heaven was heard: “This is my beloved Son.” And John testified, “I saw the Spirit descend as
a dove from heaven, and it remained on him. I
myself did not know him; but he who sent me
to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom
you see the Spirit descend and remain, this is
he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ And I have seen and have borne witness that this is
the Son of God” (John 1:32-34). Interesting: Water, Spirit and Sonship. Moving forward into the second chapter of John,
we find Jesus performing his first miracle, in which
he transforms six vessels of water used for
ceremonial purification into wine. In the book of
Hebrews these Jewish washings are referred to as
“baptisms”. Again, interesting. Flip forward one more page to John 3, Jesus tells
Nicodemus he must be “born of water and the
Spirit” and immediately after this (now the
succeeding context) we read in verse 22, “After
this Jesus and his disciples went out into the
Judean countryside, where he spent some time with them, and baptized.” By the way, this is the
only place in all four Gospels where Jesus is
described as baptizing. In other words, it turns out that John 3:3-5 is
bracketed on both sides by stories about baptism
and ceremonial washings. The entire context of
Jesus’ words to Nicodemus is baptism! Is it really possible that a sensitive reader of John’s
gospel would not think Jesus was talking about
baptism when he says we must be born of water
and the Spirit? But this was just the beginning. I was encouraged
to examine the idea of water and Spirit in the
context of Scripture as a whole. Water and Spirit throughout Scripture Turns out these are terms and images that appear
together throughout the Bible — and always in
connection to new life. In the story of creation, in the very first verses of
the Bible, what do we find but the Spirit of God
hovering over the face of the waters to bring forth
life (Genesis 1). The Hebrew word translated “Spirit”
here is ruach, which can also be translated “wind.” Water, Spirit and new life. Speaking of this passage, St. Theophilus of Antioch
wrote around AD 181, Moreover, those things which were created
from the waters were blessed by God, so that
this might also be a sign that men would at a
future time receive repentance and remission
of sins through water and the bath of
regeneration. In the story of Noah we again find water and Spirit
appearing together. For a second time waters cover
the face of the earth, for a second time God sends
his ruach to cause the waters to recede, and for a
second time a new creation emerges. Noah releases
a dove (like the dove that descended on Jesus at the time of his baptism) and it returns with an olive
branch in its beak. Water, Spirit and new life. A new creation in which
the world is regenerated. In the story of the crossing of the Red Sea we find
water and Spirit together again. The Israelites have
left their bondage in Egypt and become trapped
between the Red Sea and the Egyptian armies.
Moses stretches forth his staff and suddenly a
“wind” comes from God (again, ruach) and blows across the waters dividing them so that the children
of Israel can pass over on dry land. In I Corinthians 10 St Paul tells us this was their
“baptism” into Moses. In 2 Kings Naaman the Syrian leper is instructed to
dip himself in the Jordan River seven times in order
to be cleansed of his leprosy. He complains that
Elijah hasn’t given him something more impressive
to do, but finally humbles himself to perform this
simple act of faith and is healed. God uses this “washing” as the occasion for a cleansing that he
performs by his Spirit. Writing around 190 A.D., St Irenaeus Bishop of
Lyon commented on this miracle: “And [Naaman] dipped himself…seven times in
the Jordan.” It was not for nothing that
Naaman of old, when suffering from leprosy,
was purified upon his being baptized, but [this
served] as an indication to us. For as we are
lepers in sin, we are made clean, by means of the sacred water and the invocation of the
Lord, from our old transgressions, being
spiritually regenerated as new-born babes,
even as the Lord has declared: “Except a man
be born again through water and the Spirit, he
shall not enter into the kingdom of God”‘ (Fragment 34). Water and Spirit in the New Covenant The idea of ceremonial washings is of course all
through the Old Testament. There were a number
of these “washings” (Hebrews 9:9,10 refer to them
as “baptisms”) prescribed by the Law of Moses (the
washing of hands, of cups and dishes, of sacrificial
animals, etc.) but as the author of Hebrews tells us, these were “not able to clear the conscience of the
worshiper.” He describes them as a matter of
“external regulations applying until the time of the
new order” — that is, the new Covenant in Christ,
when the Spirit of God would grant the realities
these washings merely depicted. And notice how that New Covenant is described in
Ezekiel 36:24-27: For I will take you out of the nations; I will
gather you from all the countries and bring
you back into your own land. I will sprinkle
clean water on you and you will be clean; I will
cleanse you from all your impurities and from
all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you
your heart of stone and give you a heart of
flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move
you to follow my decrees and be careful to
keep my laws. The blessings of the New Covenant are described in
terms of a baptism in which sins would be cleansed,
the Spirit would be given, hearts of stone would be
removed and replaced by hearts of flesh. In other
words, a baptism by which we would become sons
of God. We Protestants were always bashing Catholics for
not knowing their Bibles and here I am reading
Catholic scholars and seeing things in Scripture I’d
never noticed before. God’s Spirit brings forth life through water – in
creation, at the time of the flood, at the crossing of
the Red Sea. Naaman is cleansed by the Spirit
through water. Jesus sends a blind man to wash
and he comes up seeing. I began to see that the
ideas behind baptismal regeneration are profoundly scriptural. Baptism in the New Testament It was time to read on through the New Testament,
see if there were any other passages that might
support the Catholic teaching on baptismal
regeneration. I came to Acts chapter two. The New Covenant has
been established in Christ’s body and blood, the
Jewish feast celebrating the ingathering of the first
fruits of the harvest arrives (Pentecost) and the
Spirit descends on the apostles. Peter preaches, his
hearers are cut to the heart and cry out, “What must we do?” and he responds, “Repent and be
baptized, everyone of you for the remission of your
sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy
Spirit” (Acts 2:38). What? Is Peter saying the Spirit will be given them
through baptism? I read on and came to Acts 19, where Paul
encounters some disciples in Ephesus. He asks
them if they received the Holy Spirit when they
believed and when they answer, “No, we have not
even heard that there is a Holy Spirit,” Paul
responds with the strangest of questions: “Then what baptism did you receive?” I remember thinking, Well, that’s weird. Paul learns
that someone hasn’t received the Holy Spirit and his
mind immediately goes to baptism? Why? What
does baptism have to do with it? I read on and came to Acts 22 where the devout
Ananias says to Saul of Tarsus, “Rise and be
baptized and wash away your sins, calling on his
name.” At this point I was almost wondering whether I’d
ever even read these verses before! “Rise and be
baptized and wash away your sins?” Is he saying
sins are washed away in baptism? I came to Romans 6, where Paul says that in our
baptism we were buried with Christ and raised to
new life, and it’s clear from the context that he
believes something actually happened to us in our
baptism that freed us from slavery to sin. I came to I Corinthians 12:13, where Paul says
Christians have been baptized by one Spirit into one
body and all given one Spirit to drink. Finally, I came to I Peter 3:21, a passage confusing
to most evangelical Protestants. Peter is speaking
about how Noah and his family were saved
through the waters of the flood. And then he says, And this water symbolizes baptism that now
saves you also — not the removal of dirt from
the body but the pledge of a good conscience
toward God, through the resurrection of Jesus
Christ In chapter 1:3 Peter spoke of how believers have
been “given a new birth into a living hope through
the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” Here he speaks of
baptism saving them… “through the resurrection of
Jesus Christ.” In Peter’s mind baptism and the new birth are
related. Peter seems to be saying that as Noah and
his family were saved through the waters of the
flood, so we are saved through the waters of
baptism — not because there’s something magical
about the water or the outward rite. It saves us, we are born anew, through the power of Christ’s
resurrection (the Spirit!) as we pledge ourselves to
God by this act of submitting to baptism. Conclusion There are other passages as well, but that’s
enough. Now, as an evangelical Protestant I might have
thought, these verses don’t prove anything! They
don’t ‘prove’ that the New Testament is teaching a
sacramental view of baptism! There are other ways
to interpret each of these passages. On the other hand, I had to admit that somehow
the apostles spoke in ways I as a Protestant
preacher would never have spoken. Why is it, I wondered, that if had preached a million
sermons I would never have thought to issue
Peter’s altar call from Acts 2: “Repent and be
baptized and you will receive the gift of the Holy
Spirit”? In fact, I’d never heard a single Protestant
pastor use words like that. We called people to ‘believe in Christ.’ We called them to ‘accept Christ as
Savior.’ No one ever said, “Repent and be baptized
and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit!” Why? Why is it I would never have thought to say to
anyone, “Rise and be baptized and wash away
your sins”? Why is it that if I had met someone who said he’d
never heard of the Holy Spirit, it would never have
crossed my mind to respond, “Hmmm, what
baptism did you receive?” Why would I never in my entire lifetime as a Baptist
minister have said, “Baptism now saves you”? Sure, I might not be able to ‘prove’ on the basis of
Scripture alone that all of this evidence added up to
the Catholic teaching on baptism. But what I had said to myself, after learning that
this was the belief and teaching of Christians
essentially until the time of the Reformation, was
not that I would join them in that belief if I could
‘prove’ on the basis of Scripture alone that their
position was correct. What I’d said was that I would join them unless it was absolutely clear that the
Catholic Church’s position contradicted the teaching
of the New Testament, that the New Testament
clearly rejected the teaching of the Church for the
first fifteen centuries of its existence. Could I say that? Not even close. Not even close… And even though this was just one measly little
doctrine, it changed the way I thought about
everything. Here was a doctrine that (a) had been held the first
fifteen hundred years of Christianity, that (b)
appeared to fit very well the teaching of Scripture,
and that (c) was essentially unknown within
evangelical Protestantism. And I mean unknown.
This is how cut off evangelical Protestantism is from history. This is how cut off I had been from historic
Christianity. I became eager to see if what I found to be true of
the Catholic view of baptism might not be true of
other Catholic beliefs.