This was a comment on r/TrueChristian, but I thought you might all enjoy it. I'll put up the entire conversation, as I don't have the time to edit it into a teaching format.


u/Red773 Writes

Do you have to be baptized in order to get into heaven? link, if you want it

I WRITE

Think of it like marriage. There are 3 components to most marriages.

  • The vows you give creates a covenant.

  • Having sex consecrates the covenant, much like signing a contract, and prevents the marriage from being annulled.

  • The ceremony lets others know you have a covenant.

With our marriage to Christ:

  • Our faith in the blood of Christ is our entrance into his covenant (Luke 22:20), akin to marriage vows.

  • Our spiritual reproduction through the great commission, producing good fruit (ex. Matthew 7:18-20; Malachi 2:15; Luke 13:6-9), is what consecrates the covenant, cementing our place in God's Kingdom.

  • Baptism is the ceremony that lets others know we have a covenant with Christ.

In all of this, can you have a legally binding marriage without a ceremony? Absolutely. But the fact is that most people getting married want the ceremony - and reception! Jesus is no exception. If our groom wants a ceremony, it's a symbol of our submissiveness as his bride to agree and give him one - even if it happens to be weeks, months, or years after our union.

Of course, I can't end without noting that too many congregations miss the reception part after a baptism. Baptism today is not viewed as the ceremony of a wedding. It's viewed as a religious ritual. We treat it as a solemn event, like a funeral, where everyone is in quiet contemplation, but for the brief moment of clapping permitted when they get out of the water, and then nobody thinks of it again.

Go ask any old couple these questions:

  • Do you have any pictures of the first day you realized you wanted to be with each other forever? At best, they'll have engagement photos, which are likely even days after. But even the engagement day happens after the decision to be with each other, and nobody takes pictures for "relational epiphany day."

  • Do you have any photos commemorating the first time you had sex with each other? I have yet to find one - at least that they were willing to show off.

  • Do you have pictures of your wedding day I can see?

Everyone has the wedding day pictures. This is the day everyone thinks of that acknowledges their union, even if it's not even technically required for a marriage. This is the weight that we should be giving to baptism, even though it is not technically required to seal salvation. And don't forget the reception. Nobody wants to attend a wedding, and they wouldn't be all too enthusiastic about it, if there was no reception to give them an opportunity to celebrate afterward. The ritual means nothing without the reception. Celebrate baptisms.

u/Red773 Writes

I really really thank you for this explanation. It put things in a literally sense for me. I do have a question though. If someone was too be baptized when they were younger do they need to again ?

u/Mochaccina Writes

No. It is a work of God, not of man

I WRITE

To be clear, I don't take this marriage metaphor lightly, as I believe it is intentionally established by God, as evident in such passages as Ephesians 5, Isaiah 54:5, when Jesus calls himself our bridegroom, etc. God always wanted his relationship with his people to be mirrored through marriages on earth. This is what it means to be a reflection of God or to have been made in his image. The extension of God's image not only on individuals, but also to marriage also explains why Genesis 1:27 gives extra emphasis at the end: "in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them." The first bit is already plural and covered both. Why add "male and female"? Not to specify both, but to specify the coupling as being a part of his image as well.

From there, the question is when it's appropriate to have a ceremony solemnizing the marriage? And there are differing answers. Mochaccina obviously has a serious dogmatic take on infant baptism and assumes that it is always a valid baptism, and therefore everyone else should agree. The fact is: not everyone agrees. Other theological frameworks don't require this. And saying it's an "act of God" is hardly a justification because our decision in the matter doesn't change the fact that it's an act of God any more than an Arminian choosing to receive God's gift of salvation doesn't diminish the fact that salvation is still an act of God. This is made even more bizarre when you note that Mochaccina is Eastern Orthodox and presumably agrees with their view of synergy, which includes man having a say in salvation. Unless I'm misunderstanding the EO position and they really believe that salvation is an act of man and not an act of God.

That aside, another answer is that the marriage shouldn't be solemnized until the person makes the choice to enter into the covenant. How would you feel if you decided to marry someone and you wanted to have a ceremony and reception for your marriage, but the bride's father says, "Sorry, we're not doing a second ceremony and reception. We already did one for her when she was a baby"? That would be really weird. The logic here (and note I mean logic only, not theology) is that the ceremony should only be after the covenants, or a part of the covenant-exchange itself. To remain logically consistent, EOs and Catholics should be having wedding ceremonies for their children as babies, then deny them the right to a ceremony on their actual wedding day because they already had one.

Of course, God transcends time. If past, present, and future are all the same to God - they are all his present - then from his perspective, he's already married to us, even though from our perspective it will be many years before we ever enter into a covenant with him. In this case, anyone can have a ceremony any time they want, because from God's perspective there already is a marriage. But if that's the case, that's still the same as saying you can have a wedding ceremony any time you want in your life, even before you're actually married, because the people the ceremony is presented to (for whose purpose the ceremony really is designated, because wedding ceremonies are not for the benefit of the bride and groom themselves) will still have the perspective that you're not married yet. And what does all of this make of the people who have ceremonies as babies, but never actually end up getting married later on in life, just as with the people who are baptized as babies, but never actually enter into a covenant relationship with God and live in defiance of the faith?

The logical conclusion is that the ceremony should only occur after the vows have been made. This way the people the vows are expressed to through the ceremony will understand the context of the ceremony and can agree and affirm the validity of the vows as witnesses to them, and they can all celebrate the new union - new life - created through the one-flesh bond by having a reception together. That's the logical conclusion.


[the line is in the comment, not a separate part of this post]

But all of that is really just logic and not actual theology. The fact is that there is no definitive theological answer. There is no theological example of a baby being baptized. At best, there are households that were baptized, but there's nothing that says any infants were in those households, and it would be inconsistent with all other examples of baptism to assume there were.

Matthew 28:19-20 does say we should make disciples of all nations, baptizing them and teaching them to obey everything Jesus commanded. But the obligation of baptism here is after they have been made disciples, not before. Can we call an infant a disciple? Probably not. So, the theological implication here is that the compulsion toward baptism is only for adults who have made a committed decision to follow Jesus. And the biblical examples of baptism are consistent with not only this, but also with the wedding-day metaphor. For example, in Acts 8 Philip shares the Gospel with an Ethiopian, who decides to believe in Jesus, and is baptized at the moment of that decision. There are countless people who in the Gospels were baptized upon making the decision of repentance preached by John - not months later, not years earlier, but on that moment, as if the day of the covenant is the best time to hold the ceremony of the covenant. Make sense?

But admittedly the theology is not absolutely clear. None of these passages say, "Thou shalt not baptize an infant." Affirmative proof that you can do something one way is not proof that you cannot do it another way. For every passage that indicates one way, there are others that indicate the other way. And even at that, in each individual passage there are ways to interpret it one way, and ways to interpret it the other way. Accordingly, there is no clear and definitive theological conclusion to the same degree that I can say with theologically certainty, for example, that Jesus died and rose again. That's definitive. The issue of infant baptism is not.

But in the absence of definitive theological information on the subject, the best we can do is track with the logical conclusion. The logical conclusion I reached above is consistent not only with my interpretation of the individual passages on baptism, but also with the greater reflective imagery God has established between marriage and his relationship with his people. That's what makes sense to me.