Ask a Question! Question: Can anyone baptize a person, meaning someone who is not considered an "ordained" minister? What is the unpardonable sin? Where is the best place to pray? Does God answer all prayers? Location of New Testament churches! Bible Answers - Beginners - In-Depth. But what about the person who does the baptizing? Some churches require that a person have some special qualifications before they can perform a baptism.
What does the Bible say about who may or may not baptize another person? Occasionally the Bible tells us that people were baptized by the Christians who taught them the truth Acts But in most cases we are not even told who actually did the baptizing Acts ; ; ; ; ; We are simply told that the people were baptized. The important thing was obeying God in baptism, not who performed the act. Yet what we see in these verses is that the effectiveness of the baptism of those in John 4 was not lessened or diminished because the apostles did the baptizing instead of Jesus.
Some have looked into the New Testament and concluded that every instance of baptism in the New Testament is one in which a Christian man does the baptizing. Thus, they have concluded, that in order to be properly baptized, a person must be baptized by a man who is a Christian.
The principle of following biblical examples and precedents is often an important key to determining biblical authority for certain actions, when explicit commands and other information have not been given. In this case, however, there is major problem with this approach. What if a person claimed to be a Christian, but was not, and baptized people while claiming to be a Christian? Would the fact that he was not a Christian negate the validity of the baptisms that he performed?
Think through that scenario. Suppose a person was baptized by this charlatan. That person then went out and baptized people who each baptized people, who each baptized , etc. Certainly not. Fortunately, the characteristics of the one doing the baptizing have no bearing on the legitimacy of the baptism. When Paul instructed the 12 men in Acts to be re-baptized, he did not ask them who baptized them, or what were the characteristics of the person who baptized them.
He asked them about their baptism , not their baptizer. When we look into the New Testament, however, we do not see any such stipulation. After Saul had seen the Lord on the Road to Damascus, he was instructed to go into the city and wait for a person named Ananias to come to him. In the texts of the narrative, there is no indication that Ananias held any type of official leadership position in the church.
In addition, it is the case that every example we have in the New Testament of a person being baptized has a male doing the baptizing. Does that mean that a woman cannot baptize, or that a baptism that might be performed by a woman would be nullified? If we are correct that the characteristics of the baptizer do not matter as we have shown from previous biblical passages , then we must conclude that the gender of the person would not matter either.
Upon learning this, they immediately want to be baptized, but there is no Christian man available to perform the baptism. All rights reserved. Tagged as: Baptism , Baptizing. He did his graduate work at Moody Theological Seminary. Read them in the archive below. If you like what you're reading, you can get free daily updates through the RSS feed here.
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