Contemporary Theologies Of Water Baptism

In this section we find that in the Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions, baptism itself is a saving sacrament. For Eastern Orthodox churches, baptism begins the process of salvation and growth toward participation in the divine nature. In the Western tradition, baptism washes away the guilt of original sin. For Martin Luther also, baptism remained a saving sacrament that carried the power to drive out original sin. Subsequently, all three traditions continued to baptize infants. In the Reformed tradition, infant baptism was also retained. However, baptism does not accomplish salvation. Instead, it is a seal confirming and ratifying the saving promise found in God's Word, setting the infant on a path toward conversion to personal faith and repentance, a path that takes place within God's covenant community, the church. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Anglicans retained the Catholic understanding of baptism as a sacramental washing away of sin although this understanding was challenged by the nineteenth-century evangelical party that emerged from the Wesleyan revivals. After much theological discussion, most Anglicans now admit baptized but unconfirmed children to Communion. While retaining infant baptism, some twentieth-century Anglican theologians have abandoned the theology of original sin that undergirded infant baptism in the West. Mennonites, Amish, and Hutterites are divided into hundreds of individual groups. In the twentieth century, a number of Mennonite scholars and leaders have begun to draw their theology from the sixteenth-century Anabaptists, from whom these three branches descend. For Anabaptists, baptism depended on a personal, adult faith commitment made in the context of a community of believers. Methodists take their theology of baptism from John Wesley's insistence on infant baptism as the ordinary means of salvation. Yet Methodism also emphasized, for adults, the possibility of a conscious conversion that may not necessarily be tied to the sacrament. This conversion experience contributed to the development of Holiness, Pentecostal, and charismatic movements from the later nineteenth century onward. North American evangelicals emerged from revivalism. Most baptize only upon profession of personal, adult faith. However, some evangelical denominations are branches of infant-baptizing Reformed or Lutheran churches. Modern Pentecostal denominations emphasize the experience of sanctification by an inward baptism of the Holy Spirit, but also retain water baptism on the basis of personal conversion. According to these denominations, baptism has no saving efficacy.

1. An Eastern Orthodox Theology Of Baptism
2. A Roman Catholic Theology Of Baptism
3. Baptism In Contemporary Roman Catholic Thought
4. A Lutheran Theology Of Baptism
5. A Reformed Theology Of Baptism
6. An Anglican Theology Of Baptism
7. An Anabaptist Theology Of Baptism
8. A Wesleyan Theology Of Baptism
9. A Restorationist Understanding Of Baptism
10. An Evangelical Theology Of Baptism
11. A Pentecostal Theology Of Baptism
12. A Charismatic Theology Of Baptism