Quotes About Baptism

In our ecclesiastical region there are priests who don't baptize the children of single mothers because they weren't conceived in the sanctity of marriage. These are today's hypocrites. Those who clericalize the church. Those who separate the people of God from salvation.

As we have already explained, conversion is a journey that begins for the infant at baptism, during which a seed is planted—a seed that will grow.

Even the most liberal religious scholars will agree on two things: one, the baptism of Jesus happened; and two, the crucifixion was real.

If God welcomed newborns into Israel by means of ritual circumcision for two thousand years, why would He suddenly close the kingdom to babies because they could not understand ritual baptism?

Yes, you and the Baptists have found the only true faith. You are indeed lucky!

I been wading in the water. I been walking all over the River Jordan. But what it get me, huh? I done been baptized with blood of the lamb and the fire of the Holy Ghost. But what I got, huh? My enemies all around me picking the flesh from my bones. I'm chocking on my own blood and all you got to give me is salvation?

Everyone agrees that the three dyads in verse 28 are its central feature, its basic claim. Baptism exposes the follies by which most of us live, defined by the other, who we are not. It declares the unreality of race, class, and gender: there is no Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no male and female. We may not all be the same, but we are all one, each one a child of God.

In baptism they were committed to giving up old identities falsely acquired on the basis of baseless assumptions—Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female—and declared themselves to be children of God.

So Paul did not create the baptismal creed embedded in Galatians 3:26–28. The creed, then, must have preceded Paul. But there is not very much in the New Testament that precedes Paul. His voice is the first voice we hear from the nascent Christian movement. That makes Galatians 3:26–28 one of the oldest statements of faith in all of the New Testament, perhaps even the first such statement in all of Christian history.

Know ye what it is to be a child? It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism; it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief.

The legends describe Patrick as an extremely pious child. In one, the infant Patrick miraculously provides the holy water for his own baptism! A blind and oddly underprepared priest, realizing that he doesn't have any water on hand, takes baby Patrick's hand and makes the sign of the cross over the ground.

The first hour of the morning is the rudder of the day. It is a blessed baptism which gives the first waking thoughts into the bosom of God.

That is the best baptism that leaves the man cleanest inside.

There have been times I would have given anything for such faith, for the belief that divine justice exists somewhere in the universe. Facing Sarah's death without it was an existential baptism of fire. The comfort that belief in an afterlife can provide was obvious in the hospital waiting rooms and chemo wards, where

In their pursuit of "making disciples of every nation" and baptizing all those within the empire, they stumbled into baptizing the empire itself, thus turning sacrament into sacrilege[...]

Just as Luther proclaimed the centrality and sufficiency of faith for justification, so he accentuated with new power the role of faith in the reception of the sacraments. He declared that a sacrament apart from faith is empty; in reference to baptism he said: "Unless faith is present, or comes to life in baptism, the ceremony is of no avail."7

Interestingly, paedobaptists often appeal to Romans 4 to argue that circumcision, as a sign and seal of Abraham's faith, is applied to infants as a sign and seal to them as well, which is then carried over in baptism.128 But this is not Paul's point in this text. Instead, Paul is presenting Abraham as the paradigm for all believers, both Jew and Gentile. To Abraham and to him alone, circumcision was a covenantal sign attesting that he had already been justified by faith apart from circumcision.

I do not elevate the time or mode of baptism to a primary doctrine.

Celestina Giuliani learned the word slander at her cousin's baptism.

Take Jesus for your king, and by baptism swear allegiance to him; take him for your prophet, and hear him; take him for your priest, to make atonement for you.

me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of God." Please, believe me, it's the baptism and the spirit of love behind it that counts, and not the man that does it, or where it's done. We need neither a church nor a font

Fat droplets of rain started spattering against the city's concrete skin, against the glass windows of its eyes. A few people with umbrellas opened them. The rest ran for cover. I walked on, through it all. I tried to think of it as a baptism, a new beginning. Maybe it was. But what a lonely resurrection.

Origen says: " The Church hath received it as a tradition from the Apostles that infants, too, ought to be baptized." 21

St. Augustine says: " Baptism does not consist in the merits of those by whom it is ad ministered, nor in the merits of those to whom it is ad ministered, but in its own sanctity and truth, on account of Him by whom it has been instituted, [it is] for the perdition of those who use it badly and for the salvation of those who use it well." 30