Friday, October 14, 2022

Duane Spencer on the "mode" of baptism being "the breeding ground of much heresy"

  

[John] Murray and [Duane] Spencer deny that Romans 6:3-4 has any reference to immersion as the symbol for being baptized into Christ or raised up with Him. They do this by trying to make each detail of the figure incompatible with dipping or immersion. Their emphasis upon Jesus’ burial in a tomb instead of in the ground enables them to overstate the importance of tomb burial and thereby reject the figure of immersion as a burial and resurrection.

 

For example, Spencer claims that Romans 6:3-4 could not refer to immersion because, he claims, burial in the Bible always occurred in tombs, never in the ground. In fact, Spencer ridicules Baptists for being ignorant of this supposed fact:

 

Ignorance of meaning of key words and oriental customs common to people of the Bible lands during the period during which the Scriptures were written, is the breeding ground of much heresy . . . lowering the body into the ground was totally foreign to Paul’s thinking. (Duane Spencer, Holy Baptism: Word Keys Which Unlock the Covenant [Tyler, TX: Geneva Ministries, 1984], 149) (Fred A. Malone, The Baptism of Disciples Alone: A Covenantal Argument for Credobaptism Versus Paedobaptism [rev ed.; Cape Coral, Fla.:  Founders Press, 2008], 237-38, emphasis in bold added; comments in square brackets added for clarification)