Baptism

grave from the mud that covered him. He simply walked out of the coverings
and walked out of the cave.
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Thus symbolically baptism by total immersion is far from the symbol it is
supposed to represent. The only mode, which replicated the believer’s
identification with Jesus and his resurrection, is the baptism by pouring of
water over the head or sprinkling while the candidate is standing erect. This
has been the method of baptism practiced through the ages until the reaction
to corruption of the institutionalized church had to be expressed in concrete
forms. Total immersion was one of the expressions against traditional
Christianity. A revival and regeneration and converting the symbolism into
meaningful everyday experience became necessary. To the modern man death
and resurrection were always associated with burial and exhuming. The old
forms were not recognizable to the generation or were indeed misunderstood.
The message was to be retranslated into current cultural understandings. In
that sense what better form of baptism is there than total immersion.
Immersion represents clearly my death and my resurrection (even though it
does not represents my identification with Christ). So I can identify with it. I
am simply declaring to the rest of the community that the old me is no more.
It is spiritually a great transformation. I have seen this happening in many in
my life. They would not have received these spiritual blessings the established
this transformation by anything else. It does not matter whether physically it
is the baptism which Jesus’ disciples and early Christians gave or not. We
need to translate them into our cultural norms. Haven’t we translated the Bible
into English and other languages? We have revised our old languages into
modern form so that it may become intelligible to our generation
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