Sword & Trowel 2018: Issue 1
indeed teach, quite graphically, that the biblical language about baptism
spoke of immersion. This fact is reasonably well known among Refor- mation scholars. In his essay Baptism in the Writings of the Reformers, Robert Letham characterises Luther’s view thus:
‘The old man is drowned, the new man rises. Therefore immersion is the most appropriate mode, a plunging completely into the wa- ter until completely covered. The infant or whoever “should be put and sunk completely into the water and then drawn out again”. This form is demanded by the nature of baptism. It signifies that the old man is to be wholly drowned by the grace of God. “We should therefore do justice to its meaning and make baptism a true and complete sign of the thing it signifies.”’
Luther’s immersionist view appears
in his Small Catechism, one of the defin- ing documents of the entire Lutheran Reformation. The question on the meaning of baptism receives this an- swer:
‘It means that the old Adam in us should be drowned by daily sor- row and repentance, and die with all sins and evil lusts, and, in turn, a new person daily come forth and rise from death again. He will live forever before God in righteousness and purity.’
You cannot drown someone by sprinkling some drops of water on their head. The language here is clearly that of total immersion. Luther’s view, however, did not
flow out into the actual reform of practice in Lutheran churches,
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where the standard mode of baptism remained sprinkling or pouring. When Lutherans entered into lengthy dialogue with Eastern Orthodoxy between 1570 and 1580, one of the points at issue was the mode of baptism, with the Orthodox defending total immersion as the biblical and ancient baptismal form, and Lutherans contending for sprinkling and pouring. Luther’s view, however, does seem to have found its way into the English Reformation; the second edition of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, published in 1552 under King Edward VI, and reissued with minor revisions in 1559 under Elizabeth I, said this in its baptismal order of service for infants:
‘Then the priest shall take the child into his hands, and shall say to the Godfathers and Godmothers, Name this child. And then naming it after them, (if they shall certify that the child may well endure it) he shall dip it in the water discreetly and warily…’
To dip, in 16th century English, is
to immerse. This is why Baptists were nicknamed Dippers. Only if the child is ‘weak’ does the Prayer Book direct the priest to refrain from dipping and instead baptise by pouring. The prevailing practice of the Reformed English Church, however, was to baptise all infants by pouring. So like the Lutheran Reformation, we find in Protestant Anglicanism a discrepancy between ideal and reality – the ideal set forth in the Prayer Book, and the reality practised in parish churches on Sundays. It would be left to pio- neer English Baptists to translate the
Great Advances Sown by the Reformation
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