Total Immersion
Baptism: A Guide to Life from Death by Peter J. Leithart
What happens at baptism? Ask any five Christians from different traditions and you're likely to get five different answers. This discouraging fact puts a substantial cloud over one of God's great gifts to the church. St. Paul's confession of "one Lord, one faith, one baptism" seems only a distant dream. This lamentable situation lies at least in part behind Peter Leithart's recent book, Baptism: A Guide to Life from Death. As Leithart puts it, "the church has one baptism . . . yet God's sign of unity is a spring of division." This monograph is Leithart's "small contribution to the effort to reunite a church divided by baptism" (1–2).
As part of Lexham Press's Christian Essentials series, the book utilizes thoughtful styling, attractive art, and a reader-friendly layout to match the rest of the series, and it makes for an engaging read. For those familiar with Reformed and Presbyterian intramural debates involving Leithart, his writing a book encouraging Christian unity around baptism may seem a bit ironic, but perhaps those experiences actually make Leithart the ideal author for such a book.
THIS ARTICLE ONLY AVAILABLE TO SUBSCRIBERS.
FOR QUICK ACCESS:
Joshua Pauling taught high-school history for thirteen years and is now a classical educator. He is head elder at All Saints Lutheran Church (LCMS) in North Carolina, has studied at Messiah College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Winthrop University, and has written for Areo, FORMA, Front Porch Republic, Mere Orthodoxy, Modern Reformation, Public Discourse, Salvo, Quillette, and The Imaginative Conservative.
Get six issues (one year) of Touchstone PLUS full online access including pdf downloads for only $39.95. That's only $3.34 per month!
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95. That's only $1.66 per month!
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more on Christianity from the online archives
30.3—May/June 2017
Insider Attempts to Disorient the Orthodox by Alexander F. C. Webster
more from the online archives
31.6—November/December 2018
on the Church's Response to the Anti-marriage Tide by Diane Woerner
32.3—May/June 2019
on the Implications of Changing the Pater Noster by John M. McCarthy
26.1—Jan/Feb 2013
on Abortion as a Matter of National Welfare by W. Ross Blackburn
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
