RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Baptism
applying the water. The Didache makes provision for baptism by affusion whenever water in sufficient
quantity for immersion is not at hand
4. Archeo- (cf. A. Harnack, Lehre der zwolf Apostel,
logical Leipsic, 1884, pp. 23-24; F. X. Funk,
Considera- Doctrina duodecim apostolorum, Tiib-
tions. ingen, 1887, p. 3); and Cyprian (Epist.,
lxxv Qxix], 12-14; ANF,v, 401) argues the whole case out with respect to the baptism of the sick by affusion. No contrary voice is ever raised; but in various ways a full body of testimony is borne to the unhesitating acceptance, throughout the early Church, of baptism by affusion as equally valid with that by immersion. And despite the consentient testimony of the literature of the period to immersion as normal baptism, the entire testimony of the monuments is to the opposite effect (cf. C. F. Rogers, Baptism and Christian Archwlogy, in the Oxford Studia Biblica et Ecclesiastica, IV, v; also Bibliotheca Sacra, Oct., 1896, pp. 601-644). This monumental evidence comes, it is true, from only a single section of the Church, — that which had its center at Rome; but it makes it clear that from the second century down to a comparatively late date baptism as actually administered, in that region at least, was not an immersion but an affusion, although ordinarily apparently affusion upon a nude recipient standing in shallow water. When we realize that this was the actual mode of baptism in the early Roman Church, we catch apparent allusions to it in the literature of other portions of the Church also, and begin to suspect it may have been prevalent elsewhere too. Indeed, we are deterred from confidently ascribing it to the Apostolic Church itself chiefly by the gulf of a century's width which separates the Apostolic Church from our earliest evidence, literary or monumental. This is not a century over which we may lightly leap. During its course the church usages for which we have both first and second century evidence changed greatly; and all the conditions for a development of new usages with respect to the mode of baptism were present in the circumstances of the times. Nor can we be helped over the gulf by the analogy of the Jewish proselyte baptism. For, in the first place, the points of departure of the two usages were different. The Jewish rite was rooted specifically in the bath preliminary to sacrifice; the Christian took hold through the command of our Lord and the baptism of John of the entire lustration system and tradition. And in the next place, the Jewish usage, just because a development of the presacrificial bath, owed its elaboration into a separate rite, to the cessation of the sacrifices, which threw the bath into an importance it could not have had in their presence; it is therefore too late in its origin to have served as a model for Christian baptism
We are left, therefore, to the essential symbolism of the rite to indicate how it must needs be administered, and how, therefore, the apostles must have administered it. If, indeed, it could be established that the essential symbolism of the rite is burial and resurrection with Christ, an application of the water in such a manner as to suggest this might well be thought necessary to its proper
administration. There are many who take this view, and seek support for themselves in the connection instituted between baptism 5. Consid- and dying and rising again with our
erations Lord in Rom. vi, 3-5; Col. ii, 12. from Sym- The Church Fathers from a compara-
bolism. tively early date (certainly from the fourth century — Cyril of Jerusalem, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Chrysostom) were accustomed to speak familiarly of the Christian enacting in baptism the drama of redemption through death and burial and resurrection. But the Church Fathers never lost sight of the fact that the fundamental symbolism of the rite was cleansing; to them it was before all else the bath in which sins were washed away. And certainly the passages cited from the New Testament can scarcely be fairly adduced as implying that in its very mode of administration baptism signified for the Apostolic Church burial and resurrection with Christ. Their reference is not to the mode of baptism but to its effects. So little does Paul depend upon the' very mode in which baptism is administered to suggest burial and resurrection with Christ, that he actually labors to make his readers connect their baptism with the death and resurrection of Christ by the aid of another mediating thought; viz., that their baptism was with respect to Christ's death for their sins. He repeats the heavy clause, " through baptism unto death " (Rom. vi, 4) in order to prevent them from missing a point which, if baptism in its very mode symbolized burial and resurrection with Christ, they could not in any event miss. This may not prove that baptism as known to Paul was not by immersion. But it seems to indicate that its symbolism to him was not burial and resurrection with Christ. And, indeed, it is hard on other grounds to maintain that this is the inherent symbolism of immersion as a religious rite. Few will maintain that this is the inherent symbolism of the Jewish lustrations. Few will maintain even that the baptism of John the Baptist, which most advocates of immersion as the only valid form of baptism will suppose to have been by immersion, was charged with this symbolism. It seems clear enough that baptism, the matter of which is nature's great detergent, has as its essential symbolism just cleansing. And this being so, there seems nothing in the essence of the sacrament to demand one mode of applying the water above another, within the limits of this symbolism. And we can not forget that our Lord Jesus himself said on a memorable occasion : " He that is bathed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit "; and that the Lord Jehovah declared through his prophet that he would " sprinkle clean water upon his people and they should be clean " from all their filthiness. From which we may perhaps infer that out of the circle of ideas of neither the Old Testament nor the New Testament would it be imaginable that a complete bath were necessary in order to symbolize a complete cleansing.
It would hardly appear probable that the mode of applying the water in baptism can enter into the very essence of the sacrament, when it is so difficult to obtain certainty as to what that mode was
Baptism