Theology/Bible

Spurgeon on Baptism

While preparing to teach on regenerate church membership and believer’s baptism in my church tomorrow, I came across one of my favorite quotes from Charles H. Spurgeon. It’s from his autobiography, and I couldn’t agree more with him.

“If I thought it wrong to be a Baptist, I should give it up, and become what I believed to be right… If we could find infant baptism in the word of God, we should adopt it. It would help us out of a great difficulty, for it would take away from us that reproach which is attached to us,—that we are odd, and do not as other people do. But we have looked well through the Bible, and cannot find it, and do not believe that it is there; nor do we believe that others can find infant baptism in the Scriptures, unless they themselves first put it there.”

—Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Susannah Spurgeon, Joseph Harrald, The Autobiography of Charles H. Spurgeon, vol. 1 (Chicago: F.H. Revell, 1898), p. 155.

4 Comments

  • Donald Johnson

    I agree that I cannot find infant baptism in the Bible and I believe in credobaptism, and am myself a credobaptist.

    However, I find it perplexing that while Hebrews names baptism as one of the basics of the faith, people STILL have different ideas about it, such that Piper dinks Grudem in his revisions to his ST.

    One would think such a thing as baptism would be double nailed down by now, but ain’t.

  • Matt Svoboda

    What a great quote…

    “unless they themselves first put it there.”

    Even though I probably am, I pray that I am not holding to any doctrines that I “put there myself.” For example, this is a great quote by Spurgeon, but yet he believed something that can’t be found in the Scriptures, “unless they themselves first put it there.” What- you might ask? Premillennialism, of course!!!

    We will all be corrected in heaven. But I do agree with Donald, Baptism seems to be an important enough issue to have been nailed down long ago. That darn Constantine and those crazy paedo-Baptists!

Leave a Reply to jeff millerCancel reply