Baptism In The Bible And Church History

Some of us on the Triablogue staff are credobaptists, and some are paedobaptists. But the credobaptists have written much more about infant baptism on this blog. And I'm a credobaptist. So, the material I'm going to reference here is going to lean toward the credobaptist position. But there are a lot of issues related to baptism that we agree about, despite our differences on infant baptism.

Steve Hays has written many posts about baptismal issues. Here's one about the distinction between viewing baptism as a sign and viewing it as a sacrament. Here's a post in which he outlines some popular views of baptism and discusses how we should sort through the arguments. Here's one he wrote about the diverse roles of baptism in Acts.

Gene Bridges has written some posts about baptism and Southern Baptists, like here and here. And here's one he wrote about the timing of baptism, such as how early to baptize those who profess to be Christians.

I've written a lot about the history of infant baptism, especially in response to the claims of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Here and here are a couple of posts that give some broad outlines of the history of infant baptism. Concerning the evidence relevant to infant baptism from particular historical sources: The Didache, Justin Martyr (here and here), Irenaeus (here and here), Tertullian, Hippolytus, and Gregory Nazianzen.

Paul Manata argued for paedobaptism in a 2007 debate with Gene Cook. You can listen to the debate online here.

In a post here, I discuss some of the Biblical evidence against justification through baptism and some of the evidence often cited in support of it. You can find many other such posts in our archives. See here on 1 Peter 3:21, for example.

On whether baptism should be considered a work, see the thread here, especially the comments section.

A common objection to justification apart from baptism is that the doctrine supposedly was absent in early church history or even for the first millennium of church history or longer. For a response, see Steve's post here and my posts here and here. The issue is often framed in terms of claiming that nobody in early church history interpreted a passage like John 3:5 or Titus 3:5 differently than it's interpreted today by advocates of baptismal justification. For a response to that argument, see my post here. You can find an overview of many issues related to pre-Reformation church history, including links to many posts not linked above, here.

One way to illustrate the unreasonableness of some arguments for justification through baptism is to apply the same sort of reasoning to some other activity and other passages of scripture. I did that with foot washing here and here.

Steve has written some posts about Mormonism and baptism for the dead in 1 Corinthians 15:29. See here and here.