A life in letters: Baptism 2

Over the years, after my experience of encounter with God in December 1973, I wondered periodically whether I was displeasing God because I had messed up when I was baptised. Given that my baptism had been completely insincere, I reasoned, how could I expect to enjoy the blessings God had promised? Surely what I needed to do was to go back to the beginning and be re-baptised. Then, somehow, all would be well.

I remember one Saturday when I was working at the Scripture Union bookshop in Falkirk being troubled by a neurotic sense that I should ask to be baptised again at the baptismal service I knew was scheduled to take place at our church, Ebenezer Hall in Coatdyke the following day. It would, I recognised, take courage to broach the subject with my parents and with the church leaders but it was something I felt I had to do. As I was locking up the door of the shop in Cow Wynd in the late afternoon sunshine I held the handle longer than I needed to. ‘The next time I touch this,’ I said to myself, ‘I will have been baptised properly.’

Well, Monday came, and I opened the bookshop door again, but nothing had happened. I’d told my parents of my wish to be re-baptised, but they’d managed temporarily to persuade me that this was unnecessary. Affirming my wish to be baptised again would have meant accepting that my original baptism had been insincere and this I suppose was simply too hard for them.

Later, when I was living on my own, and a member of Airdrie Baptist Church. I spoke to the minister, about my inclination to be re-baptised. He listened attentively and was in theory comfortable about baptising me again, but he didn’t advise me to take this step. Even though my faith had been defective on that Sunday back in 1968,  the person baptising me had done so in good faith. Baptism is not so much what you do, as what is done to you on behalf of the church. You are taken and immersed in water as a sign to yourself as well as to those watching that you have been spiritually cleansed and immersed in Christ, that you share in the benefits of his death and resurrection and that in fact in seeking and finding the spiritual life which is given in Christ you have in a spiritual sense died and risen again.

My pastor argued that perhaps my baptism had  by virtue of the faith of the person baptising me and of the people in the congregation, in some way led to the future fulfilment of what it symbolised. I could see that he was also concerned about how our church as a whole and especially the leadership would perceive my re-baptism if we were to go ahead. There would, he felt, be consternation. And yet many Baptist churches regularly re-baptise people who have been originally baptised as babies by ministers who believe, just as my pastor had suggested might have happened in my case, that the faith of those involved in the ceremony of baptism leads to what is symbolised by the sprinkling of a few drops of water later becoming a reality in the child’s experience. However, once again not seeing the way ahead, I dropped my request for re-baptism.

In 1989, I read The normal Christian birth a then new book by the Baptist Bible teacher David Pawson. (b1930) He argued that many of us live unsuccessful Christian lives because something has gone wrong in the process of our coming to faith, with some key stage  omitted. The four stages of Christian birth, according to Pawson are repentance towards God,  believing in Jesus, baptism in water and receiving the Holy Spirit.  If one of these stages is omitted, Pawson reasoned, then the only way to enjoy the full blessing God wants to give us is to go back and resolve the problem. As I read, I once again felt the conviction that I should be re-baptised. It was, I think, not so much a quiet sense that this was something I had to do, but an almost superstitious compulsion that this step would unlock the spiritual blessing I was seeking.

By this time the minister who had advised me before at Airdrie Baptist Church had moved to Kirkintilloch Baptist Church. Once again I spoke to him about re-baptism, and this time he was prepared to baptise me in the Kirkintilloch Church where because I wasn’t well-known the ceremony wouldn’t provoke the same degree of controversy as it would have done in Airdrie. But somehow I never followed up on this, because in parallel with my recovery from the worst of my anxiety and depression I realised that it was more important to seize the future than to spend time trying to fix the past. 

A life in letters: Baptism 1

Christians are united in recognising the importance of baptism, but hold different views on who should be baptised, and the manner in which baptism should be carried out. Some churches baptise the infants of believing parents as a sign that they are in some sense already members of God’s family, in anticipation of the longed-for day when, prompted by the grace of God and nurtured by the community of believers they make their own, personal commitment to the faith in which they have been brought up. Roman Catholics, indeed, believe that it is the very act of baptising an infant which carries it into the church. 

Other Christians, however, noting that in the New Testament the candidates for baptism who are specifically mentioned are all adults, and that the outward symbol of baptism is seen as a sign of the inner transformation and cleansing which occurs when we come to faith, insist that baptism is part of the initiation process for those who are coming to personal faith after mature reflection. In addition, rather than baptising by sprinkling with a few drops of water, they totally immerse those being baptised in a tank of water, symbolising the spiritual death and resurrection of the new convert as the benefits of Christ’s dying and returning to life become a reality in their life. It was this second view of baptism which prevailed in the church my parents and I attended.

When I was 16, some time after telling the fateful lie claiming to have been converted, I completed the form applying for baptism and membership of Carluke Baptist Church simply because this was the next step expected of me. I sat at the typewriter, conscious of my hypocrisy. Prior to being baptised, you attended ‘baptism classes’ with the minister, conducted in the small church vestry. Had the pastor been just a little more sensitive as he talked me through the significance of what I was about to do, had he questioned me with a compassionate probing, had he been able to convey to me that it was safe to be real, he must surely have uncovered the confused mix of hypocrisy and yearning in my heart, for I think I would have welcomed the opportunity to come clean. As it was he made assumptions without questioning, and I continued to play my game.

The  date for the baptism of myself and a couple of others was fixed for Sunday 1^st September 1968 a year after my supposed conversion. All summer, I was filled with dread at the prospect. I was almost sure that God’s wrath at my falseness would be unleashed as I stepped down into the water, and subsequently as I took for the first time the bread and wine at communion, having been accepted into membership of the church. Didn’t the New Testament say ‘Whosoever eateth and drinketh unworthily eateth and drinketh damnation to himself’?

There was to be a Sunday concert in the Royal Albert Hall Proms season on the appointed night - a concert performance conducted by Colin Davis of Berlioz’s opera The Trojans. I thought, fancifully, that this wonderful music would be in the airwaves all around me when I went down into the waters of God’s wrath, and in this there was a terrible poignancy.

The day arrived. Those of us who were to be baptised sat at the front of the church, the guys in short-sleeved shirts and casual trousers, the girls wearing long purple robes, weighted with lumps of lead so that they didn’t float up revealingly at the crucial moment. My father sat beside me. When the time came, I went forward, walked up on to the platform, and down the steps into warm water in the old, tile-lined cistern. I clasped my hands together in front of my chest, and the minister put his left hand over them. His right hand he placed on my shoulders. ‘On your confession of faith in Jesus Christ, I baptise you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,’ said the minister and then, pushed me back, down into the water, before returning me to a standing position. Later he said it had been hard to get me under. It was, he said, as though I were resisting him.

Dripping copiously, I walked out of the water and through to the little room at the back where I dried myself and put on a change of clothes. My father passed me a towel, and I thought I saw tears in his eyes. ‘Little does he know,’ I said to myself sadly. Back in church the bread and wine was passed from person to person symbolising the death of Christ for his people, wine representing  his blood, bread for his body. For the first time I took one of the tiny, melt-on-your tongue cubes of white bread, and drank from the individual glass cup filled with a sweet cordial and I didn’t die. Not that Sunday.

But each week thereafter, as I morosely toyed with the bacon and egg my mother made for breakfast as a Sunday treat, I couldn’t forget that once again I would be eating bread and drinking wine unworthily. Would this be the week judgement was unleashed?