Baptism

Baptism is the rite of Christian initiation, a washing with water in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It descends from the immersions of John the Baptist and, behind him, from Jewish purification bathing, but the Christian reading reframes the act: Paul in Romans presents it not merely as cleansing but as a dying and rising with Christ, the candidate going down into the water as into a grave and coming up into new life. The oldest church order to describe it in detail, the Apostolic Tradition, has candidates renounce evil, be anointed, immersed three times, and clothed in white.

Two long disagreements run through its history. The first is mode: immersion, pouring or sprinkling, all of which have been defended as valid. The second is age: whether the rite belongs to professing adults or to infants of Christian households. The Anabaptists of the sixteenth century took their name from insisting on the former and rebaptising those christened as babies; most of the older churches baptise infants and complete the initiation later at confirmation.

Baptism's earliest form was full immersion in living water, following the model of John the Baptist at the Jordan and continued by the first Christian communities, who distinguished their washing from Jewish purification bathing by tying it to the death and resurrection of Jesus rather than to ritual defilement. The book of Acts shows converts baptised immediately on profession of faith, often in rivers or cisterns, with no fixed liturgy beyond invoking the divine name. By the second and third centuries a longer catechumenate had developed, weeks or years of instruction before baptism was granted, usually reserved for the Easter vigil.

As Christianity moved into colder regions and into buildings without rivers, affusion, pouring water over the head, and later aspersion, sprinkling, became accepted substitutes for full immersion, a change the early text called the Didache already permits when water is scarce. The font itself evolved from open pools to the small basins familiar today.

Eastern Orthodox and many Baptist and Pentecostal churches kept or later revived full immersion as the norm, arguing it alone pictures burial and rising, while most Western churches settled on pouring for practical and pastoral reasons rather than doctrinal ones. The rite's minister also changed over time: early baptism could be performed by any believer in an emergency, a permission Catholic canon law still preserves for danger of death.