Debates on Baptism

Mr. Campbell’s Baptist colleagues may have considered him heretical about the covenants, but they could not fail to value him as a champion of immersion. So when a Seceder Presbyterian minister, John Walker of Mt. Pleasant, Ohio, issued a challenge for a debate on that topic, they urged him to accept it. Mr. Walker, as challenger, affirmed that the infant children of believers are proper subjects for baptism and that sprinkling is a proper mode. As to the baptism of 78 infants, he rested his case almost wholly on the proposition “that baptism came in the room of circumcision, that the covenant on which the Jewish church was built and to which circumcision is the seal, is the same with the covenant on which the Christian church is built and to which Baptism is the seal.” This is precisely the proposition that Mr. Campbell had denied in his “Sermon on the Law,” and it gave him opportunity to elaborate and reinforce his argument as to the radical newness of Christianity and its freedom from Old Testament law. In addition, he made use of his careful studies of the Greek word baptizein and the prepositions used with it in the passages describing baptism. He quoted pedobaptist lexicographers and commentators to prove that the Greek verb means “to immerse”; and he stressed the distinction between “positive” and “moral” precepts to show that the former, including baptism, demand implicit obedience with no reasoning on our part as to the expediency or value of the thing commanded.

The debate with Walker was held at Mt. Pleasant, Ohio, in June, 1820. It greatly enhanced Campbell’s reputation, especially among the Baptists of the Mahoning Association in eastern Ohio, and brought him many invitations to preach in the churches of this association. The publication of the debate as a book gave much wider publicity to his ideas and brought on another debate, in October, 1823, with W. L. Maccalla, a Presbyterian minister of Augusta, Kentucky. This debate was held at Washington, Mason County, Kentucky. On the horseback trip from his home to that place, Mr. Campbell was accompanied by Sidney Rigdon, then a young Baptist minister in Pittsburgh, later one of the three who constituted the “first presidency” of the Mormon Church and still later a rival 79 of Brigham Young for its leadership after the death of the “prophet” Joseph Smith. The text of Campbell’s side of the discussion, as subsequently published, is based on Rigdon’s report.

In the Maccalla debate, Campbell began to develop his theory of the design of baptism. Baptism is appropriate for penitent believers, not for innocent infants, because it is the “washing of regeneration,” designed to cleanse, not from inherited original sin, but from the guilt of actual personal sins. Yet it is not a magical “water salvation,” though he was often accused of teaching that. “The blood of Christ really cleanses us who believe.... The water of baptism formally washes away our sins.” This distinction was never again so clearly stated, and it may be argued that it represents a stage through which Mr. Campbell’s thought passed, rather than a conclusion on which it rested. However, it brought into prominence the conception of “baptism for the remission of sins.” When the distinction between “real” and “formal” remission was dropped, other ways were found for avoiding the morally repugnant conclusion that, if remission comes by baptism and only immersion is baptism, then the unimmersed must necessarily be damned. Neither Campbell nor the Disciples after him ever believed that.

The journey to Kentucky to meet Maccalla was the first of Alexander Campbell’s many visits to Kentucky. It put him in touch with men and churches that were going his way—the “Christians,” and a strain among the Baptists that was to furnish powerful reinforcement to his cause. And on that long journey by horseback he carried in his saddlebags copies of the first issue of his new magazine, the Christian Baptist.