Hi, I'm David Bercot. This evening we're going to be looking at a question a reader sent me, and I've been asked this, I don't know how many times, literally, for almost 40 years. And it's a question I had to wrestle with myself, and so I think it's worthwhile to address. Now, I'm not going to—this will be a fairly short session because I can't quote you a lot of passages from the early Christians or from the New Testament on the subject.
And this is a question: I was baptized at the age of 17 with faith, repentance, and a single immersion in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I am uncertain about the validity of my baptism since the early churches practiced baptism with triple immersion. Should I be rebaptized? As I said, excellent question that I had to work through myself because I too had been baptized with faith, repentance, and a single immersion.
Daniel, I'm going to just start over the—I'll leave the question there, but I'm going to start my answer over. My laptop, I forgot it wasn't plugged in, so the battery ran down. Well, thank you for sending in this question. It's an excellent question that literally people have been asking me for about 40 years. It's a question that I ask myself because, like you, I was baptized as a teenager with faith, repentance, and a single immersion in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.
So, yeah, is a baptism like that valid? Now, I can't go to a verse in the New Testament that ever discusses that. I can't go to a passage in the early Christian writings that discusses that. There are plenty of passages in the early Christian writings that show us that their mode of baptism was triple immersion as the preferred mode, and then triple pouring as an alternative if sufficient water wasn't available to make immersion practical.
So there is a clue though there, and that's in the Didache, which is one of the earliest Christian writings. So we see a spirit in the Didache. In fact, it gives us several options. It preferred flowing water or living water, I should say, which had a special meaning in the Jewish setting. That living water was preferable. The Jews, for their ritual cleansing, required living water, and that's a whole nother topic I'm not going to get into tonight. Essentially means flowing water.
There's a little bit more to it than that. So it said that's preferred, but if it's not available, then use other water. It said, you know, immerse three times, but if there's not enough water, then you can pour three times. So what I do see in the Didache is there was a spirit of flexibility. We have a God who is flexible, who's merciful, who isn't looking for little, did we dot every i, did we cross every t, and if not, going to kick you out of the kingdom.
And so the mode of baptism is not ever expressly discussed in the New Testament. I mean, the Greek word that is used had the ordinary meaning of to dip or to immerse, but it wasn't confined to that meaning. But that was its ordinary meaning, so it's not surprising to find that the early Christians immersed as their normal method. But again, they allowed pouring, showing that the word baptizo in Greek did have some flexibility built into it as well.
So yeah, the point is that you're immersed or poured, that you're cleansed with water. There's a bath. You can talk about a bath that you went through. And of course, you know, today you can bathe by getting in a bathtub or by taking a shower. But this represents, of course, the cleansing that comes from Christ's blood. The water itself doesn't cleanse us. It's a symbol of what is happening from the Holy Spirit with the application of the blood of Christ.
Now, it was important to the early Christians that you were baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit because those are the direct instructions given by Jesus in Matthew 28:19 and 20 that you are baptized this way. So if you're baptized just in the name of Jesus or just in the name of the Father or just in the name of God or maybe nothing pronounced over you, then I would say there's a good chance that's an invalid baptism. Now, God, in His mercy and flexibility, may well accept it.
I'm not going to judge anybody. But yes, if that's your case, I'd say probably just to be on the safe side, you should get rebaptized. But I mean, there are literally millions and millions and millions of Christians who believe in the Trinity, who've been baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, but they were just immersed one time with the names being pronounced.
I hereby baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and then they bring them up out of the water, or maybe they pour one time in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And you know, it seems perfectly normal to those of us like myself who were baptized that way. Now that I'm used to triple immersion for nearly, I'd say, the majority of my life, now that seems so perfectly natural that single immersion seems a little odd. But like I say, Jesus never specified that.
He specified the name to say, but he didn't say, "Now make sure you immerse, you know, three times, once with each name." If that was important to Jesus, I would have to believe he would have said that. So one of the things you do see in the early Christians is they were very slow to rebaptize somebody. In fact, I'd say most of the church would have even received somebody in, would have even accepted most of the baptisms performed by Gnostics. Now, a lot of Gnostics, maybe most of them, didn't even baptize.
But if someone came in from a sect that actually did baptize, I would say the majority, from what I can tell from the writings, and this would have, there was a big dispute on this around the year 250 AD. And Cyprian and some others took the position that somebody coming in from an heretical group had to be rebaptized. It wasn't so much because of an error that they held to this error or they didn't get baptized quite right.
It was that they were outside of the church, that they were baptized outside of the church, and so it's not valid because it wasn't performed in the church. Well, in his day, there was only one visible organized church. Today, I don't care even if you're Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, you still have to acknowledge there is a divided church out there. There are the vast majority of Christians who do not likely attend the church that you attend. They're in another church.
Now, maybe if you're Roman Catholic, you could say, well, the majority do claim to be Roman Catholic, but now you're counting extremely nominal Christians who know nothing about Christ, who don't attend church hardly ever or anything like that. They're Catholic in name only. So my own advice, you know, again, I can't give you any scriptural answer beyond the principles I've just declared, but because the early church had such an aversion to rebaptizing people, because once you start, where does it end?
You said you had faith and repentance. Well, someone might say, well, did you repent of all your sins? Did you name all of your sins, you know, before you got baptized? Well, no, I just told God I, you know, was sorry, and maybe I mentioned a few sins that were right on my mind, but I didn't try to go back and make a list. Well, then that doesn't count. You have to get rebaptized. You have to repent correctly. There are a lot of variations. You know, did you have the right understanding of baptism? No.
Oh, you got to get rebaptized. I don't see an end. In fact, I see this in a lot of churches that try to get so picky about the mode of baptism or how it was done that some of the people have been baptized like four times. Well, see, I think now we are offending God because the scriptures say there's one baptism.
If you got baptized, if you believed in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, that he died for your sins, you believed in him as your Savior, you had faith in him for your salvation, and you were repentant of your sins, of your ungodly life, then I would say you have a valid baptism.
It's nice if you were baptized by triple immersion the way they did it in the beginning, but since the apostles never gave that specific command, then I don't think we should take on and say, well, because the early church did this, this now becomes a binding commandment. No, it gives us a model to practice. It shows us the better way. It shows us, no doubt, the way the apostles did it. But I think, again, it's good to not go beyond the New Testament.
If the New Testament doesn't require triple immersion, even though maybe that was understood, then God accepts single immersion or single pouring. That's my take on that. Thank you for answering, for asking the question, and God bless you.
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