Preface
Double vision, like a double exposure in photography, is a displeasing thing. You see two pictures, and that is the trouble, for you ought only to be seeing one, and each of the two that present themselves detracts from the other. The person with double vision sees nothing clearly, and dare not drive a car. The photographer who superimposes one picture on another spoils both.
Something like double vision and double exposure marks much of our thinking about the start of the Christian life. Our minds seem to be split. We talk of Christian initiation, meaning admission to the church by baptism, which many of us underwent as infants, and we talk of becoming a Christian, referring to the reception of Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord in conversion, which many of us experienced at age. But when we try to relate the two themes, the result is like a doubly-exposed photograph. You can see both pictures, but you cannot make one picture out of them. Each gets in the way of the other, so that neither can be appreciated properly.
Whence comes this split mind? It is the legacy of two centuries of pietism and opposition to pietism. Pietism concentrated on conversion in denominations which were dead or deadish, in which baptism had become an empty formality. Anti-pietists challenged “conversionism” as not appreciating the objectivity of grace in the church’s corporate life. To safeguard the importance of conversion, some proponents of infant baptism argued that the regeneration which baptism in some sense mediates is a different thing from the regeneration into which the converted man has come; and some Baptists affirmed that true water-baptism (as opposed to the Spirit-baptism of conversion) is the believer’s witness to his response to grace, rather than a sign or means of God’s work of grace itself. Thus people have put asunder what God had joined.
The following studies express the view that we cannot think biblically about Christian initiation without focusing on the theme of becoming a Christian, nor vice versa. You only deal as you should with baptism when you concentrate on the Christian’s conversion and commitment, on his path and on his prize. The themes of baptism and conversion are not like oil and water, which will not mix, but rather they are like treble and bass in music. You cannot see the full point of either without the other, and you need both to give you proper harmony.