Quotes about baptism
Thomas F. Madden - From Jesus to Christianity: A History of the Early Church
Prominent Christians in Constantine's time waited to be baptized until their deathbeds lest they commit a "major"sin that couldn't be forgiven of those already baptized. Others felt anyone who did anything to avoid martyrdom were apostates had no valid subsequent ministry.
Lailah Gifty Akita -
Be baptize with the Holy Spirit.
Alaric Hutchinson - Living Peace
Living in the present moment is the recurring baptism of the soul, forever purifying every new day with a new you.
Craig Olson -
Under the leadership of religious professionals, modern worship has become passive—listening to a message and singing some songs. Seldom is there a call to service or an invitation to trust Christ. Baptisms take place inside the church where it is safe and comfortable rather than in public where there is opportunity to give witness to the saving grace of Christ. The great needs of society are left to para-church groups, government agencies, and other social service organizations. All the while t
Brian Doyle - a
Simple, powerful, poignant, the Sign of the Cross is a mnemonic device like the Mass, in which we sit down to table with one another and remember the Last Supper, or a baptism, where we remember John the Baptist's brawny arm pouring some of the Jordan River over Christ. So we remember the central miracle and paradox of the faith that binds us each to each: that we believe, against all evidence and sense, in life and love and light, in the victory of those things over death and evil and darkness.
Alaric Hutchinson - Living Peace
Accept the past as the past and realize that each new day you are a new person who doesn’t need to carry old baggage into the new day with you. It’s amazing how many people ruin the beauty of today with the sorrows of yesterday. Yesterday doesn’t exist anymore! For example, if ever I feel foolish or guilty about something I’ve done, I learn from it and attempt to do better the next time. Shame or guilt serves no one. Such feelings actually keep us down, often lowering the vibrations of those aro
Hans Urs von Balthasar - Unless You Become Like This Child
The Church does not dispense the sacrament of baptism in order to acquire for herself an increase in membership but in order to consecrate a human being to God and to communicate to that person the divine gift of birth from God.
William Shakespeare - Romeo and Juliet
I take thee at thy word:Call me but love, and I'll be new baptized;Henceforth I never will be Romeo.
Hans Urs von Balthasar - Unless You Become Like This Child
It would be unjust toward children to introduce them to Christian teaching and existence only as little pagans and catechumens, in order to leave it up to them to choose the Faith on their own responsibility at a point in time difficult to determine.
Veronica Roth - Divergent
I breathe in. The water will wash my wounds clean. I breathe out. My mother submerged me in water when I was a baby, to give me to God. It has been a long time since I thought about God, but I think about him now. It is only natural. I am glad, suddenly, that I shot Eric in the foot instead of the head.
Noam Chomsky -
Since Jimmy Carter, religious fundamentalists play a major role in elections. He was the first president who made a point of exhibiting himself as a born again Christian. That sparked a little light in the minds of political campaign managers: Pretend to be a religious fanatic and you can pick up a third of the vote right away. Nobody asked whether Lyndon Johnson went to church every day. Bill Clinton is probably about as religious as I am, meaning zero, but his managers made a point of making s
Lailah Gifty Akita -
The grace of being is gift of baptism by washing in water. And in Spirit of Christ Jesus.
Sunday Adelaja -
Teach the people the Word before converting and baptizing them
Charles de Leusse -
Love is tears of joy, this is the baptism of fingers. (L'amour, c'est larme de joie, - C'est le baptême des doigts)
Aberjhani - The American Poet Who Went Home Again
I called it a baptism in flaming ink that forced me to shed my shyness about recognizing myself as a poet and to accept the fact that life had never given me any choice in the matter. And then I had to discover exactly what that meant.
Robert G. Ingersoll - Some Mistakes of Moses
At present, the successful office-seeker is a good deal like the center of the earth; he weighs nothing himself, but draws everything else to him. There are so many societies, so many churches, so many isms, that it is almost impossible for an independent man to succeed in a political career. Candidates are forced to pretend that they are catholics with protestant proclivities, or christians with liberal tendencies, or temperance men who now and then take a glass of wine, or, that although not m
Lailah Gifty Akita - Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind
One Lord, one faith and one baptism.
Lailah Gifty Akita - Think Great: Be Great!
We are members of God’s family. One faith, one hope and one baptism.
Lailah Gifty Akita -
Then Peter said to them, "Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the Name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins; and you shall recieve the gift of the Holy Spirit." ACTS 2: 38
Max Lucado -
Tragically, some people believe they are going to heaven when they die just because a few drops of water were sprinkled over their heads a few weeks after their birth. They have no personal faith, have never made a personal decision, and are banking on a hollow ceremony to save them. How absurd.
Max Lucado -
Tragically, some people believe they are going to heaven when they die just because a few drops of water were sprinkled over their heads a few weeks after their birth. They have no personal faith, have never made a personal decision, and are banking on a hollow ceremony to save them. How absurd!
Thomas C. Oden - The Transforming Power of Grace
The Spirit of God draws or leads the sinner from one phase to another, gradually, in proportion as one is found having a disposition to responsive hearing. Grace flows ordinarily from prevenient grace through the grace of baptism through the grace of justification toward sanctifying grace leading toward consummation in glory. The power by which one cooperates with grace is grace itself. In this way God draws all to himself, eliciting a hunger for righteousness and a desire for truth.
Sunday Adelaja -
Baptism in the Holy Spirit belongs to them that believe and are not of this world
Ben Witherington III - Making a Meal of It: Rethinking the Theology of the Lord's Supper
We have seen some gatekeeping or fencing-the-table language already beginning to rear its head in this context. One needed to be baptized to take the meal; one needed to repent to take the meal; one needed a bishop or his subordinate to serve the meal. This was to become especially problematic when the church began to suggest that grace was primarily, if not exclusively, available through the hands of the priest and by means of the sacrament. One wonders what Jesus, dining with sinners and tax c
Dietrich Bonhoeffer - The Cost of Discipleship
The earthly form of Christ is the form that died on the cross. The image of God is the image of Christ crucified. It is to this image that the life of the disciples must be conformed; in other words, they must be conformed to his death (Phil 3.10, Rom 6.4) The Christian life is a life of crucifixion (Gal 2.19) In baptism the form of Christ's death is impressed upon his own. They are dead to the flesh and to sin, they are dead to the world, and the world is dead to them (Gal 6.14). Anybody living
Jared Brock - and Revived
You know it’s a real salvation when Baptists use cold water.
J.E.B. Spredemann - Amish by Accident
Bishop Hostettler explained that baptism was not the means by which one is saved, but simply an outward sign of salvation. Just as an Amishman’s beard is an indication of his marriage and commitment to his wife, so baptism symbolizes our covenant with Christ.
Marilynne Robinson - Gilead
We lost track of which was which, but we were fairly sure that some of the creatures had been borne away still in the darkness of paganism, and that worried us a good deal.
Tayeb Salih - Season of Migration to the North
I entered the water as naked as when my mother bore me. When I first touched the cold water I felt a shudder go through me, then the shudder was transformed into a sensation of wakefulness.
Liturgy Training Publications -
When the convert emerges from the water, the world seems changed. The world has not changed, it is always wonderful and horrible, iniquitous and filled with beauty. But now, after baptism, the eyes that see the world have changed.
Peter Leithart -
Baptism is one of those more effective rites that come in with the new covenant. The fact that baptism takes the place of the multiple, complicated cleansing rites of stoicheic order is itself a sign that salvation has come to the world. And the fact that baptism does the miraculous work of binding diverse flesh into one body means that baptism is one of the rites that effects the social salvation of humanity.
Alexander Schmemann - For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy
There has been a rediscovery of the meaning of baptism as entrance and integration into the Church, of "ecclesiological" significance. But ecclesiology, unless it is given its true cosmic perspective ("for the life of the world"), unless it is understood as the christian form of "cosmology," is always ecclesiolatry, the Church considered as a "being in itself" and not the new relation of god, man and the world.
Alexander Schmemann - For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy
Dost thou renounce Satan, and all his Angels, and all his works, and all his services, and all his pride?" ...The first act of the Christian life is a renunciation, a challenge. No one can be Christ's until he has, first, faced evil, and then become ready to fight it. How far is this spirit from the way in which we often proclaim, or to use a more modern term, "sell" Christianity today! ... How could we then speak of "fight" when the very set-up of our churches must, by definition, convey the id
William Stringfellow - Instead of Death: New and Expanded Edition
Thus the vocation of the baptized person is a simple thing: it is to live from day to day, whatever the day brings, in this extraordinary unity, in this reconciliation with all people and all things, in this knowledge that death has no more power, in this truth of the resurrection. It does not really matter exactly what a Christian does from day to day. What matters is that whatever one does is done in honor of one’s own life, given to one by God and restored to one in Christ, and in honor of th
E.L. Mascall - The Mother of God: A Symposium
It is because baptism is a real insertion of human beings into the ascended manhood of Christ that the Church is Christ's own body, flesh of his flesh and bone of his bones.
John Calvin -
How do you know yourself to be a son of God in fact as well as in name?”Answer: “Because I am baptized in the name of God the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” - John Calvin (from his catechism)
Billy Sunday -
Religion needs a baptism of horse sense.
Samuel Butler -
Vaccination is the medical sacrament corresponding to baptism. Whether it is or is not more efficacious I do not know.