Meta Chestnutt Sager's Letter to Eva Heiliger, February 11, 1945 (7)

Sager critiques the practice of baptism by sprinkling or pouring, and advances baptism strictly by immersion, along several different lines. Specifically, she appeals to the New Testament phrase "one baptism," to church history, Greek philology, and the particulars of the setting in Acts 8:26-39, which tells the story of Philip's baptizing the eunuch from Africa. Using the language of Paul's Letter to the Ephesians 4:5, she writes: "the Church of Christ, the Kingdom of heaven on earth, has one Lord, one faith, one baptism." She adds that the "one baptism"--which she takes to as a reference to only one form of baptism--"was practiced until about three hundred years after Christ when the Catholic Church was formally established; and the one baptism was practiced by all Catholics until for convenience the Pope decreed the change to sprinkling. . . . Ask any priest and he will admit that immersion was the original form." There is no evidence that Sager ever studied Greek, the language of the New Testament. But she is able to cite what she regards as a personal authority: "I asked a Greek from Greece what they understood by baptize and he said no Greek understood anything else but to immerse." Finally, much like a good defense attorney, Sager preempts the suggestion that because the baptism of the eunuch took place in the "desert" (Acts 8:26), he could not have been immersed: "I know some try to say there was no water at that place in the desert, but it is a known fact from history that at that particular place and particular time of the year there was a pool of abundant water. No informed person will risk his scholarship in denying the fact."[1] Here, Sager is in all likelihood relying on her memory of having read J. W. McGarvey's commentary on Acts, or her memory of sermons by men like David Lipscomb and T. B. Larimore. Perhaps she had even heard McGarvey himself, who wrote:

The term desert is not here to be understood in its stricter sense of a barren waste, but in its more general acceptation, of a place thinly inhabited. Such an interpretation is required by the geography of the country.  . . . The only road from Jerusalem to Gaza, which passed through a level district suitable for wheeled vehicles, was that by Bethlehem to Hebron, and thence across a plain to Gaza. According to Dr. Hackett, this is "the desert" of Luke i: 80, in which John the Immerser grew up. Dr. S.[sic] T. Barclay, who traversed this entire route in May, 1853, says that he traveled, after leaving "the immediate vicinity of Hebron, over one of the very best roads (with slight exceptions) and one of the most fertile countries that I ever beheld."[2]

Notes

[1] Meta Chestnutt Sager to Eva Heiliger, February 11, 1945.

[2] J. W. McGarvey, A Commentary on Acts of the Apostles, 7th ed. (Lexington, KY: Transylvania Printing and Publishing Company, 1872), 95-96. The Barclay to whom McGarvey refers was J. T. Barclay, who became the first international missionary of the Stone-Campbell Movement when in 1850 he traveled to Jerusalem to launch a mission to Jews who lived there. See Paul M. Blowers, "Barclay, James Turner (1807-1874)," in Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004), 69-70.