The Childers-Childers Debate
A Virtual Cross-Time Debate Between Jeff Childers 1996 and Jeff Childers 1998 About the Identity of the New Testament Church
1998 Fourth Rebuttal
(Resolved: The Church founded by Jesus Christ is the Holy Roman Catholic Church, not the Protestant denomination, the Church of Christ.)
The passage from Acts 8 cited by my opponent does not teach that we must be baptized by immersion in order to be saved. While one may be said to "go down into the water" by walking into a lake ankle-deep, this passage can still rightly be said to strongly imply that the eunuch was immersed. The fact that the eunuch was immersed does not mean we must all be immersed: it simply means that the eunuch was immersed.
Early in the Church of Christ, a schism erupted over whether a man's baptism could be considered valid if he had not uttered the same "good confession" as the eunuch. Some men claimed that unless the words "I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God" be spoken prior to baptism, the man's sins would not be forgiven. While some sort of confession rite still precedes most Church of Christ baptisms, the Church as a whole quickly rejected the absurd notion that this story gives us concrete rubrics which we must follow to the letter.
Catholics and other Christians who retain the ancient practice of infant baptism and baptism by pouring consider forcing the eunuch's mode of baptism on everyone as illicit as forcing his words.