My name is Clark Ray. I am one of the team members here at Sattler College, and I probably don't need to introduce David at this point, but I'll go ahead and do that anyways. Our brother David Bercot from Scroll Publishing is joining us. He is the author of many books. His most recent book is a commentary on the gospel according to Matthew, really a perspective with how the early Christians saw the Gospel of Matthew.
He's a leading expert regarding writings of the early church, and I'm looking forward to picking his brain today on a couple of very interesting and also meaningful topics. We're going to be talking about baptism primarily is where the majority of the questions came from, but also the Lord's Supper. All of these are questions that have come from you for this Q&A specifically or from surveys in the past on these topics, survey questions on the courses.
So one more thing I wanted to say before we get started is that if you have any questions as we're going, we are going to have a little bit of time towards the end to do some follow-up questions regarding what we discussed here today. So if you have a question, private message it to me in the Zoom chat, and we'll try to get to as many of those as we're able to. And go ahead and send them as you think of them so that we have them at the end. All right, David, are you ready to get started? I'm ready, yeah. All right.
Well, thank you for joining us. So we're going to start off discussing baptism. And the questions kind of came in in three different categories. The first being questions regarding the meaning of baptism. The second is regarding infant baptism or age of baptism. And then the third is mode of baptism. So we'll be kind of covering some of those topics or taking questions regarding some of those topics this afternoon. The first question is regarding the meaning of baptism.
And we had three people ask very similar questions. So I'm only going to read one of them, but thank you, Kendra, Schrock, Sean Tanner, and Justin Zier for sending those in. I'm just going to read Kendra's question here, and hopefully it'll cover the other questions as well, or maybe we can fill them out later if you have follow-ups just to clarify anything. So let me get it here on the screen. All right. So Kendra asked or said I was a little confused by the lesson on baptism.
The quotes from the early church leaders sounded like they may have believed that you were not born again until you were baptized. Is that the case? And if so, what did they do with verses like 1 Corinthians 1:17, " For Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel, not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made of none effect.
" Okay, so Kendra, you've basically asked the same question that I asked myself when I first started reading the early Christian writings, which was, let's see, 35 plus years ago. And I was not expecting to come across a different view of baptism. I probably grew up with a somewhat similar view that you grew up with. Baptism was something we did, but I was not connected with the new birth. And I noticed writer after writer after writer.
They were all saying the same thing, that we are born again, our sins are forgiven in baptism. And I was really shocked. I mean, I didn't know what to do with that. Of course, it wasn't the only surprise. There were a number of other doctrines that surprised me that they were teaching. And somewhere, I don't know, I'd been reading for three or four months every night in the early Christian writings. And I finally, I was so confused.
I thought, I'm just going to stop and I'm going to just take an evening and read the whole New Testament through. I think I skipped Mark and Luke and just read Matthew for the synoptic gospels. And, you know, I started about five in the afternoon and I just read till I don't know when, you know, two in the morning, all the way through Revelation. I just wanted to get the whole New Testament all at once. And I couldn't believe it.
As I read, there was just verse after verse after verse popping out about baptism that were so clear. And I thought, how on earth did I not see all of these verses all of my life? Well, the answer was clear. The church I belong to, they explained every one of these verses away. And so even though I read them numerous times, probably hundreds of times, they never sank in because everything was explained away. And so I realized, okay, I've got to just clear my mind out. Start with a blank slate.
Hear what the early Christians are saying and see if it matches scripture. And when I did that, I saw just about everything they taught. It just lined right up with scripture. So I want to share the verses that I noticed that night when I just read through the whole New Testament. I didn't read Mark that night, but I've added that in here. So Clark's going to put them up and I'm just going to read them. I want to read them all together just so the impact of it hopefully will be fairly strong.
So we'll start with John 3:5. Jesus answered, " Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. " Now, of course, that verse had been explained away most of my life. But it was interesting when I read that as a young boy, my first thought was, oh, that's talking about water baptism and spirit baptism. That seemed obvious to a child, but then it was explained away. And so I had forgotten it.
But they all understood that to be water baptism and spirit baptism. But then it gets stronger. Okay, Mark 16:16. He who believes and is baptized will be saved. This is Jesus talking. And I noticed, yeah, he tied in baptism with salvation. But the big one that I just, I couldn't believe I had ignored it my whole life. Acts 2:38.
Then Peter said to them, this is on the day of Pentecost, " Repent and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. " So he told them right there, baptism was for the remission or forgiveness of sins, and that they would receive the Holy Spirit right after baptism. Acts 22:16. This is Paul when he's relating his testimony. He relates what was said, " Arise and be baptized.
" I think Ananias is talking to him and wash away your sins, calling on the name of the Lord. So there with baptism, it tied it into washing away your sins. Again, I had read that so many times. It just never sank in. Galatians 3:27, " For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. You can't put on Christ if you haven't been baptized into Him.
" Romans 6:4, " Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. " So the early Christians understood that very clearly. We're buried with Him, we die to our sins, we come out to walk in the newness of life just as He was resurrected. Paul says something similar, but in more detail in Colossians, Colossians 2.
In him also, you were circumcised with the circumcision made without hands by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ. Okay, so what is that? He says, " Having been buried with Him in baptism, in which you were also raised with Him through faith in the powerful working of God who raised Him from the dead.
And you were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our trespasses by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This, he set aside, nailing it to the cross. So he's tying in forgiveness, the newness of life, everything with baptism that we're baptized into Christ. Again, Titus 3:5, according to His mercy, He saved us through, I noticed there's a comma there, which shouldn't be there.
According to His mercy, He saved us through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit. I mean, again, that had been explained away, but it's so clear the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit. Again, baptism of water, baptism of the Holy Spirit. We are regenerated at the time of baptism. And then one more, 1 Peter 3:21. There is also an anti-type which now saves us, namely baptism, not the removal of the filth of the flesh.
In other words, it's not the fact that we're in the water that would wash away the dirt on our skin. He said, but the answer of a good conscience toward God. So in baptism is where because we receive the forgiveness of sins, we now have this good conscience with God that we want to have. So like I say, after reading those that night, it was like, how could I not have seen all of this all of my life? Well, like everyone else, the way we're indoctrinated is the way we tend to read Scripture.
But I realized, how can I doubt the early Christians when they all teach this, every single one of them? Am I to believe that within a few years after the apostle John died, they all went through some kind of brain transplant and no one remembered what baptism was anymore. They all came to this same wrong conclusion separately, independently. These people, you know, were all over the world. They all believed the same thing.
So yeah, that's why the early Christians believed that the new birth, the forgiveness of sins is tied in with water baptism and the baptism of the Holy Spirit. You can't leave that out. The two have to be there at the same time. Now you asked an interesting question, and this is not by any means of put down, Kendra. It was just interesting.
You quoted there 1 Corinthians 1:17, where Paul says, " For Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel, not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made of none effect. " And I say why it's interesting is the only group in the days of the early church who doubted that baptism was something more than a symbol, that it was something essential for salvation in the normal realm of things were the Gnostics. They did not believe in water baptism.
Some of them practiced it and said it was just, you know, just something you do, a ritual that had no particular meaning. A lot of them didn't baptize it at all. But this is the scripture they so many of them pointed to was 1 Corinthians that say, oh, Paul said he didn't send me to baptize. See, we don't need to baptize. Well, as the early Christians pointed out to the Gnostics, go back and read what Paul is talking about. What's the context of that statement? He was talking about divisions in the church.
And he said, yeah, I'm glad I didn't baptize many of you, because then you would be saying, oh, I was baptized by Paul. You know, somehow I'm better than the rest of you. And he lists a couple of people. He did baptize a couple of households. And he says he was glad it was, you know, none other, because he was sent to preach. He left the baptism up to other people, which proved to be wise, because it would have caused even more division.
So, again, I would encourage you to go over again the message we have on the historic faith about what the early Christians believed on baptism, which obviously you've listened to, but I encourage you to go back, listen to it again, look at those scriptures. And yeah, just if you weren't already preconditioned, if you were just reading the Bible by itself, could you really doubt that in baptism, there is a saving effect, there is a forgiveness of our sins.
Not that it's magical, that by itself, it can do any of this, but this is how the blood of Christ is applied to us. This is the occasion he gave us. How do we become born again? How do we become united with him? How do we receive justification? Okay, he gave us a way to do it. And it wasn't come forward and invite Jesus in your heart. You don't read anyone in acts doing that. You read every single time they got baptized.
As soon as they believed Paul or whomever it was immediately baptized them from the day of Pentecost onwards. Okay. Thank you very much for that. I really appreciate it, especially there how you ended. It definitely clicked for me when I recognized that somehow saying the sinner's prayer is not a work, and yet getting baptized is a work as far as like work salvation arguments of baptism. And why not just simply do it the way that we're called to do it and not come up with a new means to receive God's grace.
So thank you very much for all that answer. And I'm going to link a resource that we've read around here a decent amount. It's called Baptism by I can't remember the author, Cottrell maybe, or Cottrell, that was helpful for me also with understanding some of that. And he goes through some of the early church views as well. It has some issues, but it's a good resource to continue to explore the topic on the context of the meaning of baptism or the power of baptism. All right, next question here by Sean Tanner.
Thank you very much, Kendra, Sean, and Justin for those questions. The next question here by Sean Tanner. What did the early Church believe in regards to baptism and the expulsion of demons? OK, and I'm going to give you just a real brief one on this, Sean. It's a very good question because there was a connection and how they practiced baptism and it's so universal, I have to believe it goes back to the days of the apostles.
They would, before they were baptized, they would renounce Satan, his pomp, and his angels, his pomp meaning his glory and that sort of thing. And then they would make a profession of faith and belief in the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, along with what that meant. And so in that, they would renounce Satan specifically. They would point to the West, which was viewed symbolically as the realm of darkness and evil because the sun rises in the east, sets in the west, and make that renunciation.
And so they were publicly renouncing Satan and his demons before they were baptized. And then when they were baptized, they were free from any connection with Satan and his demons, unless they went back and started serving them again. So there was, I don't know if you would call it a exorcism. Some have used that term. I don't know if I would call it that. But yeah, there was a definite step there that baptism severed that tie with Satan and his demons and their world. That's really interesting.
When I was baptized, one of the things that was instructed to me was the question got proposed, do you renounce Satan in all of his pernicious ways? And I didn't realize how old that went back, basically that statement or a statement to that extent. I didn't realize that that was I thought that was kind of a localized practice within my church community there. Very ancient, almost you know to the doorsteps of the apostles. And like I say, I feel pretty certain it was started by them. Yeah.
That's really interesting. All right, so now we're going to move into questions regarding infant baptism and rebaptism. The first question here by Cynthia Conrad. Having grown up in the Anglican Church in Canada, I was baptized as a baby, then as a teenager, sorry, I'm going to put this up for everybody. I forgot to do that. Then as a teenager was confirmed in the church by the bishop. To be confirmed, we had to take a course taught by the Rector of the Church on the basics of Christianity.
If I know that anabaptism, I know that anabaptism requires adult baptism. Do you think that someone in my situation should be rebaptized? And if so, for what reason? Okay, and if Clark, if I could get you to go ahead and read Derek's right after that, because they're very similar, I can answer them together. Yeah, so with Derek as well, I'm not sure how to pronounce your last name, but I'll say Sullyot. Does a born-again Christian who was baptized as an infant need to be rebaptized as an adult?
Would this be a salvation issue for the Christian who is baptized only as an infant? Does it matter who is baptizing them as long as they are genuine professing Christian denomination, pastor, elder, standing, et cetera? OK, so yeah, Cynthia, I really found your question exciting because I spent a few years in the Anglican church, not the more liberal one, but what were called the continuing Anglicans, who were the conservatives who left because of so many liberal godless things happening among the Anglicans.
And so I understand exactly your situation. In the early church, and this is one of the things, probably one of the very few things I haven't been able to fully reconcile or bring it all together in my mind. In the early church, you had some who practiced infant baptism, and you had those who didn't. And I don't know how widespread infant baptism was. I don't know when it started. The earliest clear references are around the year 200, and they're actually in the writings of Tertullian, who was opposed to it.
On the other hand, he did not call it heresy, and there were no church splits over it, which it really surprised me when I read, because in my experience, that was always something you could not possibly compromise. I mean, you know, you would definitely form a new church over that issue one way or the other. So I don't know fully what God's answer is on that. I can just tell you my own feelings and what I would be comfortable with.
I would definitely want to get rebaptized without having to judge others whose only baptism has maybe been as an infant. Throughout the history of Christianity, so many of my heroes of the faith, that was the only baptism they had. I mean, John Wesley, William Law, Jeremy Taylor. I mean, Francis of Assisi, you can go down the line. The Waldensians, the Moravians. I mean, wow, it would be a long list. That was the only baptism they ever had was as an infant.
I kind of reconcile that in my mind, that God and His graciousness, once somebody comes to their own personal faith, that he can revive that water baptism and make it valid at that time. That's my own personal, you know, trying to figure out how do I look at all of these, you know, great men and women through the centuries. Having said that, like I said, I would recommend getting baptized as an adult on a profession of faith. Not just so you can join the Anabaptists, but to remove any doubt.
I mean, to me, when you're dealing with something, we just saw how vital baptism is, that do I want to take a chance on that? In my own case, I was baptized as an adult, well, as a teenager, on a profession of faith with full understanding, full commitment to Christ. But it was as a Jehovah's Witness. I was baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, but their understanding of the Trinity is defective.
And so I wondered years later, when I came to a correct understanding, plus they wouldn't teach, you know, the correct meaning of baptism. Yeah, should I get rebaptized? Am I missing anything out? Was my baptism valid? And I finally decided it's too vital of a thing. I'm going to get baptized anew. So I did, and there was absolutely no change in my life. So in my own situation, I would say it evidenced to me that God accepted my first baptism, but it was a believer's baptism.
Infant baptism, yeah, I would recommend that. I'm not saying that judgmentally towards somebody who hasn't done that. You know, John Wesley or William Law, I'm just saying, with something that important, I would do it. Now, talking about the Anglicans, as you may know, something they have, which I think is a really nice practice. It's called conditional baptism.
And the minister, when he's baptizing someone who doubts their first baptism, he will say, " If you have not already been validly baptized, I hereby baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. " To make it clear, we're not, you know, practicing a second baptism, but if your first one was not, then we are baptizing you now. And we did that a lot in our church back in Texas of people who had doubts. So, and Derek, that, I think, answers directs your question. Does it matter who does it?
Well, obviously, I would prefer to be baptized by somebody who has a correct understanding of baptism and shares my, you know, the apostolic historic faith. But no, I think if I'm baptized by a Baptist minister, by, you know, some other minister who is himself a Christian, I think that's certainly acceptable to God. There was, in fact, the early Christians, I mean, they would hardly never rebaptize. The question came up, what about baptism by heretics?
And most churches said that's still a valid baptism because the true minister at baptism is not the man who brings you into the water, immerses you, or pours on you. It is Jesus Christ. He is the minister at baptism. So even if it's a heretic who baptizes you, it's still valid. Now, other churches said, yeah, but the Gnostics, they're hardly even Christians. And so I think they rebaptized you if you came from the Gnostics. And not every church, like I say, some did and some didn't under rebaptism.
But normally it would be a church leader who would baptize, but definitely any brother could baptize. Normally a sister would not, I would say if it's a life and death issue, I mean, you're in a situation where there is no brother available and it has to be done right then. I think God would accept that, but you know that's not a common situation. Thank you for that.
Yeah, and I guess almost what Paul said there that Christ sent him not to baptize, but to preach the gospel, almost infers that there wasn't more power in a Paul baptism versus a Silas baptism versus the man doing the baptism wasn't the working agent within that action. I really appreciate that. All right, so next I have a question by we're going to actually possibly go a little bit long here to get through questions. We might have to skip a couple. I'm going to ask one more in the context.
One more question here on rebaptism. And then we'll move on and we'll come back if we have time. Unfortunately, we have a lot of questions. Well, unfortunately, or fortunately, we have a lot of questions to get through. So a question here by Justin Zier.
Should we encourage folks who come from a very traditional Anabaptist setting and who did baptism merely to join church so they could go on with their life, for example, getting married to be rebaptized when coming to a setting of more earnest expectations and accountability? OK, that will be somewhat up to the church. I don't want to try to contradict what another church may be practicing. Personally, since, you know, the early church, like I say, they rarely, if ever, rebaptized. You know, they saw Paul's words.
There's one baptism, one faith. And so it was really rare that they rebaptized. I mean, like, if you got baptized with John's baptism, which wasn't even a Christian baptism, yes, you had to get rebaptized. So personally, I would say if you believed in Jesus Christ, if you were baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, if you knew what you were doing, in other words, someone didn't force you into it. You weren't intoxicated or something. My personal feeling is that it's a valid baptism.
What you need to do then is to make sure your life is now committed to Christ that you're walking with Him. However, the practice in our church is if somebody is really bothered in their conscience, they really, really feel their baptism was not valid because they understood nothing about it, they had not repented of their sins, then we will do a conditional rebaptism. I mean, again, I don't want to force somebody against their conscience if it's bothering them.
But at least our congregation would not encourage, you know, actively go out, well, you need to get rebaptized because your church didn't teach the right thing about baptism. On Neil's, yeah, I think time-wise, we're going to have a little trouble there, Clark. So let me just sum up what he has asked. All right, yeah. That's a good question. And that, yeah, it's, and I appreciate, Neil is a fellow attorney.
He and I have, well, been in touch, I don't know how many years, 10 years or so, a very committed brother out in California. And yeah, he's asked an interesting question of looking at the Jewish practice and is quoting from the Talmud, the Babylonian Talmud. My one response on that, Neil, I think it's, there's a lot of validity of trying to see what Jews practiced in Jesus ' day.
And that's one of the things when I was working on the Matthew commentary was reading Philo and Josephus to see what they were saying because they were both contemporaries. Well, Philo was a contemporary of Jesus. Josephus would have been a contemporary of Paul and on Beyond Paul's lifetime. They didn't really shed any light on it. Now, the Talmud, it dates actually to 500 AD.
I'm really hesitant to quote it to say, this is what people did in Jesus ' day, and that the Jews kept the traditions perfectly for 500 years. Particularly, you know, when people say, well, 25 years after the apostle John died, well, we can't pay any attention to what the early Christians are saying. I mean, that's, you know, that's 25 years later.
And it's like, wow, so you think the Christians didn't hold on to anything for 25 years or 50 years, but somehow the unbelieving Jews who rejected Christ, yeah, whatever they're doing 500 years later is what they were doing in Jesus ' time. I'd rather doubt that. But your point is valid about, yeah, looking at historical evidence of Jewish practices. And of course, yeah, I agree with what you're driving at of baptism on the profession of faith, of people who are coming knowingly to baptism.
So I'm not dismissing your line of argument. I would just personally think going to the Talmud is not a valid way. A lot of people go there. I'm very familiar with that line of argumentation on all kinds of topics. To me, it's just not valid to say the Jews kept something perfectly for all those centuries and where the Christians were unable to do the same thing. Yeah, thank you for that summary.
So just to clarify on his question, it looks like I didn't quite get all the question there, at least the reference to the Talmud. Because this is the question I've had. Was baptism the standard process for proselytizing people into Judaism at or before Christ? Is that the question there? Yeah, and I didn't, Neil, did I miss something? Because reading your quote from the Talmud, I didn't see any reference to bad. Yeah, that's what I was missing in that. So maybe we can do a follow-up with that later. Yeah.
And I do know, I mean, there was a form of baptism in the days of John the Baptist. I've been to the Qumran community. They had seven, I think, what are called Mikvas, where Jews would go down into the water, come back up. They did it several times a day. It was a ritual cleansing, very different from what John the Baptist had of repent. None of the Jewish baptisms had anything to do with repentance. It was all about ritual cleansing. So I don't think there was baptism when converting a proselyte.
I have seen no evidence myself, but yeah, if you have something to send later on, I'm always happy to look at that. And I think the early Christians speak of Naaman as kind of like an example of baptism of some sort. I don't know. I remember that coming up at some point, but they quote him all the time. And of course, that wasn't on the conversion. It was on the leprosy that, yeah, he baptized seven times a symbol of perfection and leprosy being a symbol of our sins. And he came out of the water cleansed.
So yeah, they all point that as a prophetic type of baptism. Good point. All right, so we're going to move on to mode of baptism. And we're going to do this. We're probably only going to ask this one of these. Are they both the same? Yeah, they are pretty much the same. Yeah. And I can answer them in really one. Yeah, I guess go ahead and answer the question from Justin Zier there, what mode of baptism was most often the priority mode, or did early Christians have a specific mode that they held to? OK.
You're going to put it up there on the screen? Yeah, I put it up there. Yeah, yeah, okay. So in the Didache, which is very likely was written right at the time of the apostle John, while he was still alive, certainly within a couple of decades after his death. And it mentions, and this surprised me, because I grew up, immersion was the only form of baptism. And he says, you know, baptized by immersion or baptized, meaning immerse.
If there's sufficient water available, living water, if available, if not, any water is fine. And living water would be like water, right? Living water was like moving water potentially, or is that? Moving water. And I discovered when I was digging into Judaism, that's actually a requirement on the Mikvas, even today. It has to be living water, which like you say, it's moving. It has to come from a source and move out. And it's interesting. So that goes back into Judaism, actually.
But if that's not available, any kind of water, if you not enough water to immerse, then pour. It was three times, either immersed three times or pour three times. And this is, that to me was so refreshing because growing up Jehovah's Witness, I mean, there was only one way to do everything. If you didn't do it that way, it was false doctrine, false practice. You were not a Christian. And a lot of the other churches I was around, it was the same way.
And the early Christians, so many of these things we fight about, it was like, hey, do it this way. They preferred immersion. Hey, if that doesn't work, pour. The important thing is you get baptized. Like you say, that surprised me so much. But it has changed my spirit from this dogmatic person, if you've known me as a Jehovah's Witness, to, yeah, a person who recognizes we can be flexible because God, we have a flexible God. Our church, we prefer immersion. If someone wants to be poured, we will do that.
We will honor their conscience. We recognize someone coming from a Anabaptist background, Mennonite or Amish are going to prefer pouring. Often they'll change their mind when they see the evidence, but if not, I will say this, the one thing I'm very much against is, and I've seen it personally in some Mennonite churches, they dribble. They take a cup of water and there might be five people being baptized and have a one little cup and dribble a little water on their head. That is not a washing.
Now I'm not going to say that baptism was invalid. You need to go back and redo it. I'm not going to make a judgment call there. But that is not what the Didache is saying. That in no way is a washing. When Peter says the removal of the dirt of the flesh, he means, I mean, either you dunked down in water or somebody poured a pitcher of water on you. I mean, it was a washing one way or the other. It's not a dribble or a sprinkling. So yeah, if you're going to pour, then it needs to be a drenching.
And if you're going to do that, you might as well immerse. So I'll stop there giving my thoughts on that. All right. Thank you. Tyra Root had a similar question, but I think we'll move on there. So timing of baptism. We have one more question here, and then we'll do we'll get into communion. Majority of the questions regarding baptism, so we have less on communion. I'll go ahead and read this from Calvin Frey, put the question up. This question is regarding the timing of baptism.
I find that it is normal for Christians in our culture to delay baptism. For example, a youth accepts Jesus Christ as Savior, but delays baptism for a number of years. One of the reasons I think this is happening is that our church attaches church membership to baptism. We instruct applicants for baptism in the doctrines of the Holy Scriptures prior to baptism and then receive them as members of the church at the baptism service. I've always struggled with this concept.
It seems to me like the church described in Acts, baptized believers promptly after they accepted Jesus as Lord. Do we make an error in our churches today by delaying the baptism with weeks or months of instruction classes and also by attaching membership to the baptism? OK, a very good question. One I have asked myself many times. I would have to say I do not know of a single church today who follows the practice of acts. Now, if someone knows of one to correct me on that, that's fine.
But what you see consistently in acts is as soon as someone believed, they were baptized. But they and their whole household, I think every time, unless it was a single person like the Ethiopian eunuch or something, I mean, who was by himself, it's always the whole household. I don't know of any church that baptizes whole households. I've never been to a baptism that the whole household got baptized. It's always an individual. I don't know how to reconcile all of that.
Our church doesn't practice whole household, and I'm not going to be one asking to do that. I don't know how to reconcile many things that we see like that other than, again, we have a flexible God, and I think we have to do the best we can looking at the Scriptures and what we're experiencing in life around us. Now, on the immediate baptism, there is a difference between what we see in Acts and what we see in the earliest records in the early Christians.
And someone may say, well, the early Christians erred, they moved away from it. My own personal guess is, you know, Acts, we're talking about the first couple decades of Christianity. I'm guessing that maybe by the time of the Apostle John, that they saw a lot of people who had dropped out, who had got baptized and had not walked faithfully, and that they saw there was some wisdom in making sure people realized the commitment that they were undertaking and getting baptized.
Because in the earliest descriptions we have, there's always some kind of instruction and some delay. I mean, Justin Martyr mentions that the person would confess all of their sins to the bishop or whoever was doing the baptism. And that then they would fast for a few days and the people who had brought them into the faith would fast with them. And so there was a, yeah, a time of reflection. And they may have realized, yeah, this isn't the age of apostles. We're not having the same kind of miracles.
And it's wiser to the delay isn't going to cost anyone their eternal life, but it may save them from getting baptized and having a liability than when they turn around and don't walk in the faith because it was a momentary impulse. So they do instruction. I don't know if it's just New converts Origen. That was one of his responsibilities. I assume it's the children of Christians that they got instructed in the faith as well as new converts before they were baptized.
I don't think anyone made it an absolute requirement that if you didn't go through this, we would not baptize you. But I do think it's a wise practice. Now what I don't think there's any scriptural basis whatsoever is baptism is if you want to join our church and some churches make you get rebaptized, not just Anabaptists. I mean, the Southern Baptist did that. If you wanted to become a member of the Southern Baptist churches, you know, where I lived, where I grew up, you had to get baptized again.
It didn't matter. You know, if you'd already been baptized as an adult, you still had to get baptized again. Well, that's turning baptism into a sectarian initiation. And to me, that's profaning baptism. You become a member of Christ's church. You don't become a member of a specific denomination or that sort of thing. And so I would, I certainly encourage, I try to do it gently, but in the sphere of influence I have, we need to move away from that.
That baptism isn't admission into a particular church, it's into Christ's church, and we should recognize that. Yeah, I really appreciate that. In my little bit of involvement in discipling people coming into the church, one of the things that I really want them to understand is that they're joining the Universal Church of Jesus Christ, not a local body only. And that people are going, you're going to get hurt by people. And if you tie your faith to one group of people, it can really be dangerous in the future.
But having that hope that's setting something much larger while still engaging the local body is really important. Appreciate that. So now we're going to move on to communion. David, are you on a hard deadline stop time at 3 o'clock? I am not. OK, so we might go over a little bit. So if anybody needs to leave around 3 o'clock or whenever, this will be recorded. That was one of the questions. So you'll be able to watch the remainder of it later.
But I think we'll keep going and try to get through these questions here and then wrap up as soon as we can. So we have another question here by, I don't know if I'm butchering your name, but Tyra Root. Let me put it up. What are the principles, practices, and/or mindsets the early Christians had did in regard to the Lord's Supper that you think would be most edifying to the church today? Okay, I gave some thought to your question over the last day. And I think narrowing it down to two things.
One was, every Sunday, they celebrated communion. That is universal. It's there from the earliest mentions of communion. And it's terrible that the church got away from that. The early Anabaptists, is it Bern? I believe so, the confession of faith, Bern Switzerland, not Berne Indiana, that every time they met, they had communion, which I take that to mean several times a week. And there's nothing wrong with that.
In fact, in the early church, yeah, some churches, every day, you could come to church in the morning before you went to work and have communion before you went to work. So to have it less than once a week, to me, we're robbing ourselves of a wonderful channel of grace and a wonderful benefit. So that would be one of the practices I would highlight. The other one was a feeling of reverence, not of worshiping the bread and wine. But yeah, this is something reverential. Jesus said, this is my body, this is my blood.
And to treat it with respect, not to go to the extreme of the Roman Catholics, but I have seen churches. It sort of bothered me. I mean, they'll do it in a paper cup. That's valid. I mean, you can do that. But to me, that's not showing reverence for the blood of Christ to treat it that way. It doesn't have to be a silver goblet, but at least something that shows some reverence. So, and the mood of it should be also a respectful, reverent mood.
So those would be the principles or practices that I would bring out myself. Thank you for that. The next question is going to be from Alan and Joni Gruber. Oh, Clark, let me interrupt you because she had a second part. And she said, are we adding to the Bible if we do that? And no, the things I've mentioned, you're certainly not adding to the Bible. You're following it. Now, yeah, if there were a lot of other things, yeah, possibly you could be adding to Scripture, particularly if you made them commandments.
And that's why I limit it to those things that are totally scriptural. Thanks for that. So the next question here is from Alan and Joni Gruber. Is it necessary to use unleavened bread and wine, or can any kind of bread, food, and juice, any beverage be acceptable for communion? Yeah, my, I guess, firm belief is whatever Christ told us to do, whatever practice example we have in the Scriptures, if at all possible, let's follow that, particularly if there's no contradiction or that sort of thing.
So as far as unleavened bread, this was a surprise to me that I actually would not have learned from the early Christian writings because of my unfamiliarity with the nuances of Greek, of Koine Greek. It wasn't until I visited an Orthodox church and I noticed the bread they used was ordinary bread, leavened bread. And so I asked the priest, I thought it needed to be unleavened bread. And he pointed out to me that the Greek word that's used there when it talks about the bread just means ordinary bread.
There is a specific word that means unleavened bread. And that's not the word that Jesus uses there. Now, on the other hand, the word that means ordinary bread would include unleavened bread. So it could have been unleavened bread that he instituted it with and just, for whatever reason, did not use that specific word. But so on that basis, I would have to say, I don't think the scriptures require it to be unleavened. Our church does unleavened, and that's, I guess, what I've been most used to all of my life.
But I would not quibble with someone who used leaven bread. Wine, I feel somewhat, yeah, let's do it how Jesus did it. If someone's going to use grape juice, again, I'm not going to have a big argument with them. It calls it the fruit of the vine. So you could argue grape juice meets that. But now your further question, any kind of bread, food, juice, beverage? No, no, we don't have any basis for that. It's bread and it's the fruit of the vine, which would have definitely meant from the grapes.
So whether it's leavened or not, I think there's some flexibility. Perhaps flexibility on whether it's fermented or not, but no basis to use rice or, you know, kool-aid or something like that. Now, if you're in a prison in isolation, and the only way you can have communion is by using rice or something similar. Again, we have a flexible God. I mean, I think there are circumstances that might allow that. But yeah, we're not faced with that today.
And I think it would be very wrong, very disrespectful to ignore how he set it up and just do it our own way. Yeah, I had a pretty strong view on that as well myself until I heard about a church community in a part of the world that didn't grow grapes, and they were very poor, and they used grape Kool-Aid because they didn't have another choice. I was like, all right, that's not normal, but at least not normal from our perspective. But I do appreciate that.
It seems to be almost like a trend is that there's the normative approach. And then the grace of God is pretty amazing for where we're not able to live up to certain things. But yeah, I would have grown up and still practiced unleavened bread, but that's interesting. Would there be any connection between that being done around the time of Passover and the connection to unleavened bread being used at that time? So the assumption would is that where the assumption of unleavened bread comes from?
Yes, that's where the assumption comes from. And the question is, and yeah, we'd have to spend a whole session just on that. The chronology in Matthew and the synoptic gospels, it makes it sound like it's on the night of the Passover. And then you go to John and it's all before the Passover because he dies, it says when they were going to offer up the Passover lamb. So the Passover had not started yet. So that would explain why they would be using unleavened bread.
I mean, leavened bread on the chronology that we have in John, that the Passover had not started yet. The Feast of Unleavened Bread had not yet begun. Whereas in the other chronology, it sounds the other way. So, yeah, to me, it's safe to use unleavened bread, and it's my tradition. And again, I'm just not going to quibble over it because I think there is some gray area there in the Scriptures. Is there any language in the early church regarding type of bread that comes to mind?
No, only they use the word that means ordinary bread, but they never describe it specifically beyond that that I've caught. Okay. All right. Well, thank you very much for that, Alan and Joni. Next question from Kendra Schrock here. How would you respond to people who say, sorry, I always forget to do this, who say that Jesus did not actually turn water into an alcoholic beverage, but rather a thick grape juice-like drink?
Probably my response to so many things back then, I've been hearing that for at least 30 years, is do you have a primary source? I'm open to anything. You know, just show me a primary source, meaning something from the time of Jesus or from the early Christians after showing that such a thing was there. And no one has ever been able to show me that. They've shown me all kinds of hypotheticals, this is and thats. You know, I did some my own research on that way back in those years, back in the 1980s.
And what I saw, and no one has ever contradicted that, is that grape juice was invented by Mr. Welch, you know, the same one, Welch's grape juice. He invented it for the specific purpose of communion because it was the time of the big temperance movement and they were scandalized that, you know, they were not drinking any alcohol, even beer or wine. But in communion, now they were drinking wine, you know? I mean, had always drunk wine and it kind of was a scandal.
And so he came up with a way of preserving grape juice, I say invented it, you know, of preserving it so it would not ferment. Because you do not have to add yeast to turn grape juice into wine. It's got enough there already and enough sugars. It's going to turn into wine on its own in just a few days. So yeah, I mean, anything is possible, but there's no evidence of that.
And since the early Christians had communion every Sunday, well, there's no way they could have used grape juice throughout the year because it would have fermented. You know, you could do it right that minute during the grape harvest, but not all throughout the year. So to me, there's no question that it was wine that was being used. That's interesting. I hadn't thought about that. I also don't know why they would have talked about bringing out the best wine for last in that context. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
All right. Well, thank you all very much for your questions. We have some follow-up questions here. Let me make sure I didn't miss any. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go back and forth between baptism questions, follow-up baptism questions, and follow-up communion questions. And we'll go till about 3:10. Clark, yeah Clark, you did miss one. Oh, I did? Colleen Barnhart. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Is there a precedent from early Christian church early church writings for withholding communion?
This is an important one. For withholding communion from Christian visitors to your fellowship who don't believe and practice exactly the same as you do. Yeah. And I wanted to address that because I thought that was a really timely question because that's how in among the Anabaptists, yeah, they don't share communion. A lot of churches don't. It seems like when you get serious about being obedient to all of Christ's commandments, then we tend to want to be very careful with our communion, which makes perfect sense.
But it also starts, we have all these divisions in the body then. I can't have communion with you and this sort of thing. So your question was about the early church, okay? What their practice was, when you went to some other congregation where people didn't know you, you had to bring with you what were called letters of communion from your bishop saying that you were in good standing and were admitted into communion in the church where you came from.
And if you brought those with you, I guess you could have forged them, but you brought those with you, then you were admitted into communion, any church in the world. There was only one church. If you were a Christian, then you were admitted to communion in any other church. But they had to have the evidence that, yes, you were in good standing.
Otherwise, you could be put out of one church and just go somewhere else and start taking communion there, which would be a different kind of division in the body of not honoring each other's church discipline, or maybe you were even agnostic or had never been baptized. So that's why you had to bring proof with you of that. Now, I'm not saying that we should necessarily institute that same practice today. It's a little easier with phone calls and, you know, we generally know a little bit more about people.
But I do believe if somebody is honoring the basic teachings of the New Testament, and I guess every church could decide, you know, where they want to draw the line on that, they should be admitted into communion in another church. Communion should not be a sectarian thing. You know, you mentioned Clark about baptism shouldn't be that way. Communion shouldn't be that way. I mean, that's the one meal that unites us as Christians.
And to use it as a sectarian thing, you know, you don't hold to all of the articles of our specific church. Therefore, we will not break bread with you, I think is very wrong. Now it's equally wrong to have an open communion where it's lax and anyone who walks into your church, you're going to let them participate in communion. I think that's very wrong too. Tertullian makes the comment. We have a closely guarded communion. And I've always liked that. Not a closed communion, but closely guarded.
We want to make sure you're baptized. We want to make sure that you're in good standing, either in our church or in some other church that's part of the body of Christ. Yeah, I appreciate that. A place for the sojourner that's passing through or visiting. Yeah, I really appreciate that. Thank you for that. All right, so we're going to go back and forth on some follow-up questions here. Kendra asked oh, this is regarding the recording. There will be a recording after this. Next is from Sean Tanner.
Should a person be baptized if he doesn't agree with the church for the sake of being baptized? I think it's maybe asking basic he's maybe asking if I can't get if I can't if I'm the only church community near me I can't be united with should I go ahead and get baptized anyways out of the conviction for baptism is maybe what he's asking. Well, OK, yeah, I wasn't quite certain what he meant. But if he means, do I need to get baptized?
Even though the church I'm a member of, I don't agree with all of their teachings and they have some wrong teachings. I would say yes, get baptized. Now, if you're in a position, obviously, to move somewhere and be part of a church where you're more in agreement, that might be better. But you may not be in that position, particularly if you're a minor. And yeah, I would not put off baptism to wait to be in a church where maybe there are a little bit more in accord with scriptural practices on things.
I would personally, once I was ready to commit my life to Jesus Christ and I had that faith, I would want to get baptized then. Again, he is the minister of baptism, not the bishop of that church or whoever it is. I mean, that person acts as an agent, but it's Jesus Christ who makes it valid, not that particular church. Yeah. Amen. And one thing I really appreciate about baptism is that we're being baptized into the body of Christ.
So while we might have some conflicts with a local church or with church, as far as a group of people, to recognize that you can't separate the two. When you're baptizing into the body of Christ, you're being baptized into the church and to seek out that fellowship if you can't find it locally. But don't delay baptism any more than you have to. Marvin Yoder asks, " Are you saying that a person who prays a sinner's prayer is not truly born again? " I'm assuming that he's saying and never got baptized.
Perhaps he's not saying that because normally baptism follows that. So, no, I'm assuming they are born again. They just got their theology backwards. One way I like to explain it, a big part of the problem is semantics. And that is what people are calling being born again, what they really mean is conversion. That they had a conversion experience. They had a profound spiritual experience with Christ. They gave their life to Christ. All of that's good.
But the term born again in the Scriptures, and certainly is understood in the historic faith, is referring to baptism, both of water and the Holy Spirit. So the conversion experience is not the new birth. It's the baptism in that. But it's not negating the conversion experience. And if it's followed with baptism and you call conversion the new birth, okay, again, I think we have a gracious, flexible God who recognizes, you know, Christianity has been so divided, so much erroneous teaching.
It is hard putting all the pieces together perfectly, you know, in our century. So no, I assume if that person got baptized, they're born again. Now, if they never got baptized, I would have to say no, they're not born again. They're converted. They need to get born again. Unless there's a reason like the thief on the cross. I mean, again, the early church said that was a baptism of blood. I mean, that, you know, they recognized, again, a flexible God.
If for some reason you couldn't get baptized, it wasn't your fault. God recognizes and honors that. Yeah, the book by Jack Cottrell in Baptism, he mentions that there's baptism by water. The early Christians had a few different perspectives, but it was always baptism. It was either baptism by water, baptism by blood, if you were martyred, or baptism by yearning if you died in prison and couldn't get baptized. But they always use the term like baptism and associated it with that. Baptism. Yeah.
All right, so the next question here. I didn't realize we had royalty in the audience, but we have a question from King Solomon. I don't have his real name. That was the username. How important was the Eucharist Cup with the Davidic kingship of Christ to the early church? In the Didache, they refer to the communion cup as the Holy Vine of David. I would have to look at that quote from the Didache. I'm familiar with them talking about the Holy Vine of David.
In my mind, the Holy Vine of David was talking about Jesus. I may be remembering that wrong. So that could be my faulty memory, and I don't have a Didache in front of me. I thought the holy vine of David is talking about Jesus Christ, that he's the holy vine. But I think it's in that prayer, the communion prayer where that is mentioned. So I don't know if the Eucharist Cup was directly tied to the Davidic kingship other than in the sense, you know, that Jesus is, that Jesus is tied to that, and this is His blood.
This is, you know, one of the channels of grace connecting us with Jesus. So there is that connection that way. Yeah, I mean, yeah, through Jesus, there's a direct connection. It's interesting. Maybe we'll be able to get some more clarity on that in a follow-up Q&A if we have more on this. But I think the kingship of Christ or the Anointed One of God is definitely incredibly important to see that in all of it. All right, I asked a couple of questions about baptism.
So I'm going to do one more here about the Lord's Supper from Boaz and Rebecca. Harmson. Lord's Supper question. Someone said that taking the bread and wine is only for the saints. So who are the saints? Aren't we all saints if we accepted Christ baptized, et cetera? I think you already answered this question. Yeah, I understand why they are asking that. Like me, they come from a Jehovah's Witness background. And Jehovah's Witnesses limited who could participate in communion.
And yeah, in the New Testament, Paul always addresses his letters to the saints, you know, dwelling in Rome, the saints here and there. That's the whole church. It's not anyone special as I think, you know, you guys know. And so, yeah, if you were baptized, unless you were under church discipline, you were entitled and expected to participate in communion. OK, I'm going to ask one more follow-up question, then we'll wrap up. It's 3:15 here. I'm not sure. It's a bit of a it's a good question.
Let's see if we can get it all up here. It's a little long, but this is from Kevin Keane. The early church seemed to have a lot to say about people who sinned after baptism and reception of the Holy Spirit. What would you say about someone who had fallen away? Has their baptism, as the Catholics teach, made it so that if they have apostasized, they cannot be saved. And he says where he read that from. OK. I would have to look and to my knowledge, that is not the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church.
I would have to look at that whole quote. I mean, I've read their, you know, new catechism and that. I don't think that's what they teach. You may be misreading reading it, but anyway, the question is equally valid. Well, if you've fallen away, you can come back. I mean, the early Christians never put a bar of somebody coming back if they repented. Now, sometimes they might make you wait a number of years before they would accept you into communion again.
They did view it very seriously to like deny Christ and persecution or commit adultery or something like that. But if you repented, they always accepted you back. There's no instance of their not doing that. Now, there is the unforgivable sin and the people who've committed that don't repent. They don't come back. You know, they're gone. And I think that happens to a lot of people. And they are eternally lost because they never have, they never will repent, you know?
But if someone repents, then it's evidence they have not committed the unforgivable sin. And yeah, I mean, they should at some point be admitted back into communion. And again, if I'm wrong on the Catholic Church there, my apologies there, I just like to say, if that's their teaching, that is a surprise to me. Yeah, that would be a surprise to me as well.
Even when they got into burning heretics at the stake, from my understanding, and I could be wrong at this, is that it wasn't even if someone was deemed a heretic and then they repented and then they committed heresy again and repented, oftentimes they would accept the repentance but still burn them like as a purifying effect. It's bad practice. I don't recommend it. But even in that context, they had some form of hope for the one who repents. But like I said, they did. I'm not sure where that comes from.
OK, well, thank you very much, David. I really appreciate you taking the time. We went a little over. Thank you, everybody, for joining us for this Engaged Faith Q&A. A couple of things I want to remind people of. We started a giveaway this month on the first. We're hoping to do that monthly. And we really appreciate you taking the time to share the historic faith with others. You've made it possible to get us to a point where we're going to heading towards sustainability.
So we actually have hopefully a future path for all of this to keep going and growing. And it's only because of all of your support and sharing the news about all of it. So we really appreciate that. Check out our blog. I think we're going to be having more regular releases there. We have a recent post up from David's book on Origen, or the book wasn't on Origen, but he had a little biography in there on Origen. And then we also had a new course released recently.
And we're hoping to have at least one more video course out within the next month or so. So we have some exciting more new content coming down the road. I want to thank everybody behind the scenes. I won't go through all their names right now, but there's a team that makes all this possible. And it's been a blessing to work with all of them. So I want to thank you all for joining us today. Thank you for your good questions.
I pray that this was edifying, encouraging, and built you up in your love faith relationship with Jesus and His kingdom. Thanks, everybody.
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