One Baptism: Reconsidering a New Testament Church Ordinance

Why the ordinance meant to unite the church became a reason to divide it — and what Scripture actually says about the "one baptism" of Ephesians 4.

Baptism is one of two rites most churches recognize as ordinances of the New Testament church, alongside the Lord’s Table. Few topics generate as much confusion — or as much unnecessary division among believers.

A common evangelical doctrinal statement frames it this way:

We teach that two ordinances have been committed to the local church, baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Christian baptism by immersion is the solemn and beautiful testimony of a believer showing forth his faith in the crucified, buried, and risen Savior, and his union with Him in death to sin and resurrection to a new life. It is also a sign of fellowship and identification with the visible body of Christ.

That is the traditional, evangelical, largely Baptist understanding of baptism. Not every church shares it. Some understand baptism quite differently, while still affirming its necessity and importance — a position that can sound confusing at first. What follows aims to do two things: lay out clearly what Scripture actually teaches on the subject, and, to be forthright about it, make the case for it.

Why This Matters

This is not merely an academic question.

Picture a woman who wants to get involved in ministry at her church but doesn’t believe in water baptism the way that church defines it — so she’s barred from serving until she submits to it there. It’s a common story. Picture, too, a man baptized as a young believer in the church he grew up in, who later finds that neither a seminary discount nor membership in a new church is available to him unless he is baptized again, this time by their hands.

Scenarios like these have enormous practical bearing on service and fellowship in the church. Not to mention they can be extemely discouraging. This discouragement can even intensify when those same individuals go to scripture and see none of what some churches or seminaries even do or claim is in God’s Word. Too often it reduces to this: a congregation knows its numbers, knows its members, based on who has been water baptized by its own hands. That is a form of Corinthianism — the very pattern for which the believers at Corinth were corrected. The aim here is to leave the reader instead with what Paul sets forth in Ephesians 4 as the one baptism: to know what it is, to know when it takes place, and to let it be the ground of fellowship between believers — a ground that transcends local church membership and denominational lines. Imagine the local church as it ought to be - believers recognized by that which they profess as faith in Christ, His person, work, and merit - not an ordinance administered by man’s hands.

Paul writes in Ephesians 4:1–6:

I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called, with all lowliness and meekness, with longsuffering, forbearing one another in love, endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.

Paul is addressing unity — how to walk in it, how to forbear one another in love, how to keep it. He grounds that unity in a series of realities: one Spirit, because the Godhead is one; one Lord, the second Person of the Godhead; one God and Father; and one body, since there is one church, not two. But notice also: one baptism.

It is easy to read past that phrase, or to assume it simply means water baptism performed by human hands. Many assume baptism and water are synonymous — that there could be no baptism without water. But Scripture does not support that assumption nearly as firmly as tradition suggests. Water is a real and significant thing in biblical history, but as redemptive history advances, its role becomes increasingly symbolic, and eventually it recedes from the picture of baptism altogether. To see that clearly, it helps to work through Scripture in four stages: define baptism, survey the doctrine of baptisms (plural), trace water baptism as it is progressively revealed and progressively fades, and then arrive at what this one baptism actually is.

1. Defining Baptism

A working definition, gathered from a collection of passages, proves useful here: baptism is a purification or cleansing unto sanctification and a new identification. Some kind of washing takes place — not always by water — that results in a separation from what once was to what now is (sanctification), and issues in a new identity.

Scripture bears this out through numerous washings, not just one. Hebrews 9:7–10 describes the Levitical priesthood:

But into the second went the high priest alone once every year, not without blood, which he offered for himself and for the errors of the people: the Holy Ghost this signifying, that the way into the holiest of all was not yet made manifest, while as the first tabernacle was yet standing... which stood only in meats and drinks, and divers washings, and carnal ordinances, imposed on them until the time of reformation.

Notice: divers washings — plural — and carnal ordinances, having to do with the flesh, the body, external things. And notice the timing word: until. These washings were time-stamped. There would come a time when they were done away.

The Old Testament confirms this plurality. In Leviticus 15, various uncleannesses — not necessarily sins, but ceremonial impurities — required washing with water before a person was pronounced clean (Leviticus 15:14, 25–27). In Numbers 31:22–23, purification came not only by water but by fire, depending on the material. In Exodus 29:4, Aaron and his sons were washed with water as part of their consecration to the priesthood. Cleansing, in that context, became the doorway to a new identity — the priest was set apart, washed, anointed, and given new standing in relationship to God.

The New Testament likewise identifies more than one agent of cleansing: the blood of Christ (1 John 1:7), the washing of water by the Word (Ephesians 5:26), and the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Ghost (Titus 3:5). Paul tells the Corinthians plainly: “Ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Corinthians 6:11). Notice the agent there — the Spirit of God, not human hands, and not literal water.

2. The Doctrine of Baptisms

Hebrews 6:1–2 speaks of “the doctrine of baptisms” — plural — as part of the foundational principles the Hebrew believers were being urged to leave behind in order to go on to maturity. That single phrase should stop us: Scripture itself acknowledges more than one baptism, and instructs believers to move past them, not to keep re-administering them. Now, surely, we recognize in “The Great Commission” the Lord commands the nations to be “baptized” and whoever believes and is baptized is saved (Matt. 28:19; Mar. 16:16) but more on this in point 3.

Consider Matthew 3:11, where John the Baptist says of Christ: “I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance, but he that cometh after me... he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire.” One verse. Three baptisms. Two baptizers. Water, fire, and the Holy Ghost are not the same element, and John and Christ are not the same baptizer. We learn later in the gospels that Christ didn’t baptize it was his disciples (Jn. 4:1-2).

Consider also 1 Corinthians 10:1–4, where Paul writes that “all our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea.” Israel went through the Red Sea dry-shod — a dry baptism, yet a real one, marking their new identity as a nation separated from Egypt. When the word baptism appears in Scripture, water should not be assumed by default. The text itself will not permit it.

Two chapters later, Paul makes the connection explicit: “For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free, and have been all made to drink into one Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:13). If the baptism under Moses produced unity, equality, and shared provision among Israel, and if believers’ baptism into one body produces that same equality and fellowship in Christ, why does water baptism so often become a ground of division in the church at large?

That question was not hypothetical for the Corinthians. Paul had to address exactly this in 1 Corinthians 1:10–17, where factions had formed — “I am of Paul,” “I of Apollos,” “I of Cephas” — and Paul asks pointedly, “Were ye baptized in the name of Paul?” He goes on: “I thank God that I baptized none of you but Crispus and Gaius, lest any should say that I had baptized in mine own name... For Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel.” Here is an apostle, writing after the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, thankful he had done little water baptizing — precisely so no one could claim to belong to him by it. Alongside Hebrews 6, which tells believers to leave the doctrine of baptisms behind, and Hebrews 9, which time-stamps the diverse washings, this is not a favorable picture for making water baptism an ongoing church ordinance whether for church membership or not.

3. Water Baptism: Progressively Revealed, Progressively Fading

None of this denies that water baptism was real and significant in its time. But Scripture shows it receding as redemptive history advances.

At Pentecost, believers were water baptized, and shortly after, the Spirit came upon them — matching the pattern of Matthew 3:11. But the pattern is not uniform. In Acts 10, Cornelius and his household believed and received the Spirit before they were water baptized, catching Peter off guard. And in Acts 19:1–6, Paul meets disciples at Ephesus who had only known “John’s baptism.” When they heard about Jesus, “they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus” — a text that does not mention water at all (typically the assumption is there was water involved which would mean that he most likely was dunked or sprinkled twice), only that they were baptized “when they heard this.”

From that point forward, water baptism largely disappears from the narrative. Even at the end of Acts, when Paul is under house arrest in Rome and people are believing his message, he is not found administering it. Romans through Revelation — the bulk of the church’s instructional letters — are nearly silent on water baptism. In the pastoral epistles, where Paul gives Timothy detailed instruction for ministry, he never once tells him to administer water baptism to new believers. An argument from silence isn’t the strongest argument, but that silence, set against a document that elsewhere speaks so specifically to church practice, is telling.

Even Peter’s later reference in 1 Peter 3:18–21 confirms the pattern rather than undermining it. Reflecting on Noah’s ark, Peter writes: “The like figure whereunto even baptism doth also now save us (not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God) by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” In the parenthesis there is clarity — almost certainly anticipating that his readers would assume he meant water — and explicitly rules it out. Peter’s parenthetical focus isn’t fleshly filth washing, but conscience filth washing. The baptism that saves is not an outward washing of the flesh; it is the answer of a good conscience toward God, now laid hold of by faith in the risen Christ.

4. The One Baptism

This brings us to Romans 6:3–4: “Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?... that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.”

This baptism is not performed by human hands. The baptizer is the Spirit of God; the element is the Person of Jesus Christ Himself — His death, burial, and resurrection. It happens the moment a person believes the gospel: that we are sinners, dead in trespasses, under wrath — and that Christ took our place, bore our sin, and rose again. When a person believes that, their relationship to sin changes — not because of an event on a certain day involving water, but because they were, by the Spirit, placed into Christ. There may be no felt emotional experience attached to it. But it happens, and it is settled.

This is the one baptism of Ephesians 4 — the baptism that grounds unity among believers, because every Christian (one that truly believes in Christ and His atoning and redemptive work for them), regardless of church membership or denomination, has been placed by the same Spirit into the same Christ. No one becomes part of the family of God by joining a local church. A person becomes a member of Christ’s body the moment they believe the gospel. A local church, at its best, is simply a local expression of people trying to live in accord with that truth.

A Gentle Appeal

Baptism, then, is not optional — Scripture is emphatic that it is necessary for eternal life. But it is the Spirit’s baptism into Christ, not an ordinance administered by hands, that saves and unites. Many believers hold both the one baptism and water baptism together without seeing any tension between them; the difficulty comes less from believing in water baptism itself than from what churches sometimes build on top of it — restricting service, fellowship, or membership to those baptized by their own hands, in their own name, and often times make the one baptism of none effect by their holding on to a principle Paul thanked He was sent to do, Hebrews says to leave in view of its time stamp, and Peter inserts such baptism is the answer of a good conscience toward God by faith in the resurrected Lord.

For those who hold to the traditional view, none of this is meant to condemn, nor is the aim simply to win an argument. It is an invitation to consider these texts prayerfully. And for those who find this case something to study further, please do. For those that find it persuasive, the appeal remains the one Paul makes in Ephesians 4: walk worthy of your calling with lowliness, meekness, longsuffering, forbearing one another in love, endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. Don’t cause practical division by how to communicate truth. Have empathy. Have understanding. Be gentle. Be meek. Where there is opportunity, share this truth — but leave people where they are, and love them regardless. Remember they are not a part of the body of Christ because they believe in water baptism or that it has receded - they are part of the body of Christ because they believed the gospel of Christ and the Spirit baptized them in the same body you are in.

It is not being identified with a particular church, but with Jesus Christ, that makes believers one. That is the wisdom by which fellow believers ought to view one another — remembering what the Spirit of God did, once and for all, the moment each of them believed.

Look Up,

—Josh Strelecki, Pastor-Teacher