Re-baptism, when is it done, if ever?

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Pergamum

Ordinary Guy (TM)
We've discussed this before I am sure, but.....



If a baptized professor becomes either very convinced that he was saved AFTER baptism and that he was baptized as an unbeliever, or else the man denies his professed faith and rejects the faith for a number of years before repenting and believing at some later time in life (and is convinced, again, that his former profession and his former baptism was not as a believer), would you advocate "re-baptism" of that man (or, worded more baptist-y, "a first true baptism of that man.")


A thing can be irregular but still valid, right?


But a wrong mode or the baptism of the wrong subject has been held by most baptists to invalidate the action, and thus the above baptism would not merely be irregular but invalid and therefore not a true baptism.


What is your position?
 
DISCUSSED it? Didn't we kill this horse and continue to beat it in the thread we recently concluded?
 
Me and you did.

But you did admit that you were a minority position. I'd like to hear others' views as well.

I can respect and understand your position. But, I am not satisfied with it. Nor am I satisfied with some baptist practices of an every-decade immersion until it "takes" which seem more consistent but strike me as weird, too.

Indulge my desire to gather more data from multiple sources. I am unsettled on this issue and want to feel more at ease with my convictions.
 
As a Baptist, I have long held that the person would be free to choose rebaptism, though I've never been fully at ease with this position. Now, knowing it's in violation of the WCF (and Methodist practice too, just fyi), I have even more questions about it.
 
Tom, they wouldn't be free to choose rebapstim as an option. If they were never Scripturally baptized, then they would need to be scripturally baptized once to be in obedience to Christ. To most baptists wrong mode or the baptism of a wrong recipient (an unbeliever) is thus an invalid baptism and is no baptism at all. Thus, no baptist advocates rebaptism, only scriptural baptism only once.
 
"Any person who, having been baptised while only in a
carnal profession of religion, has since been called by the
Spirit of God to a knowledge of his or her lost condition by
nature and practice, and to living faith in the Lord Jesus Christ,
being desirous of uniting with this church, shall attend to the
ordinance of believers’ baptism, according to rule 2 (last
clause), for “whatsoever is not of faith is sin” (Rom. 14. 23)."

Gospel Standard Articles of Faith and Rules.
 
I do not knowingly baptize those who have been baptized previously in a Protestant church. I have had cases in which I baptized people who were unsure whether they were baptized as an infant or not. As for RCs, I have not had to cross that bridge yet. I would lean toward baptizing RCs.

I agree that baptism can be administered irregularly and still be valid. If this were not true, then no baptism would be valid because everything we do has some irregularities.

I like the closing prayer to the Lord's Supper in the Directory of Public Worship:

"For his rich mercy, and invaluable goodness, vouchsafed to them in that sacrament; and to entreat for pardon for the defects of the whole service, and for the gracious assistance of his good Spirit, whereby they may be enabled to walk in the strength of that grace, as becometh those who have received so great pledges of salvation."
 
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