Why Not Re-baptize the Re-baptized?

What the other side believes

Churches that practise believer’s baptism do not think they are rebaptizing anyone. In their view a baptism without faith was never a baptism. Most also teach that a true believer cannot finally be lost: “All true believers endure to the end” (Baptist Faith and Message, 2000). So a true believer would never need a second baptism. That is consistent. But it only works if a believer can know that their faith was true on the day they were baptized.

Nobody can know by looking inside

The same churches say “they were never saved” about people who believed, prayed, testified and were baptized, and were sure. If they could be wrong, anyone can. Scripture agrees: “The heart is deceitful above all things” (Jeremiah 17:9). Paul would not let his own clear conscience acquit him (1 Corinthians 4:4). Even the Westminster and Baptist confessions say a true believer “may wait long” for assurance, and a hypocrite may deceive himself with false hopes.

Now follow one believer. Baptized at fourteen. Years of sin. Hears “they were never really saved,” believes it of himself, repents and is baptized again at twenty-eight. Falls again, doubts again, and asks again at forty-five. At each step he is only using what his church taught him. On what ground could the pastor refuse?

It has happened, and the early Church said no

John Smyth, an English Separatist in Amsterdam, rejected his infant baptism in about 1609, baptized himself, then doubted that baptism too and sought to join the Mennonites. (His doubt was about who could baptize him, not about his faith.) In a 1995 Southern Baptist survey, six in ten adults being baptized had been baptized before, many of them in Southern Baptist churches at about age ten.

The early Church met this question after the persecution of 250, when many Christians denied Christ. Some would not take them back at all. The Church took them back by repentance. Nobody baptized them again. Peter was restored by three questions (John 21). Luther called the Christian life “a daily baptism, once begun and ever to be continued.”

“They went out from us”

1 John 2:19 is about “antichrists” who deny that Jesus is the Christ (2:18, 22). A few verses earlier John says, “if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father” (2:1). A believer who sins and still confesses Christ is in verse 1, not verse 19. The preacher means “never saved” about those who left. The people who stay hear it about themselves.

Most churches that rebaptize once will not do it a third time. At some point they say: stop looking inside and trust God’s promise. That is good advice. It is what the historic Church said at the first baptism.

A doubting believer should be told neither “you were probably never saved” nor “get back in the water,” but pointed to what God has done: “as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ” (Galatians 3:27); “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us” (1 John 1:9).