Over the last few years, I have been working on-and-off on the topic of baptism. As someone who grew up on the Baptist side of the fence but, after moving city, found myself in a paedobaptist Anglican church, I have an appreciation for the perspectives–and the accompanying strength of emotion–of each ‘camp’, which has helped me understand how each side argues, and why each side is unable to properly understand the other.
More than this, my work has led me to a point where I believe I have been able to make some headway through an argument that stands at something of an impasse. Indeed, the fashion in publishing on these kinds of issues is to have scholars from each camp present their views side-by-side (such as Bridge & Phypers’ 1998 book, The Water that Divides, or David Wright’s 2009 edition, Baptism: Three Views). All this really achieves is to further entrench the tendency to talk past one another. In Troubled Waters I have focused on the causes of misunderstanding and the flaws in traditional arguments, while trying to build a better argument from the ground up.
The major reason for our inability to understand one another lies in the fact that even Bible-believing Christians on either side base their beliefs about baptism upon at least two foundational doctrines that rarely if ever are discussed: baptism is founded on our beliefs about the covenants (particularly whether Old and New Covenants are more continuous or more discontinuous) and beliefs about the nature of the church (particularly whether the church is made up of regenerate [born-again] members only, or whether the church should be understood as mixed). Because we differ on these matters, our beliefs about baptism are incompatible with the other camp’s foundations, and therefore appear foolish (or even heretical). And so our discussions for about 400 years have been frustrating attempts to make our view of baptism seem sensible to the other camp, without any attempt at laying the foundations upon which our view depends.
This book is (among other things) a discussion of those foundations, and so it examines biblical evidence that is not usually associated with baptism. This evidence, however, seems properly to support only one of these baptismal camps, and thus may provide a way forward to settle the baptism debate once and for all.
You can get Troubled Waters as an ebook directly from Smashwords, or soon from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and several other retailers.
LongWind 