The first, by water, seems rather formal and ineffectual to me: being sprinkled with water in the first year of life, before you are even really conscious, probably has little effect on your mind or spirit.

The second, by the Holy Spirit, is more interesting. Though it is also given – or alluded to – at birth, it seems to relate, at least ultimately, more to the more meaningful moment, when you make a conscious decision in your own mind and “spirit,” to accept the axioms, the “spirit,” of God.

But finally it is the third,the baptism of “fire,” that seems far more relevant and important, to adults. Roughly it seems to be the apocalyptic moment or “day,” when God arrives to “judge” us – and among other things, when God comes to note sins, even in those who think they are very religious, very Christian. In that moment, even priests and holy men, are “test”ed with “fire”; and false ideas are burned away, like dead “chaff,” “tares,” or dead “branches.”

What is that baptism of “fire” about? For me, the baptism of “fire” is at least anticipated, by the moment when we “mature” in our religion. When we learn go beyond the formulas we learned in church. In fact, it is in part the moment we are exposed to a more critical, scholarly theology. When we find that growing “judgement,” teaches us that many common ideas about God seem not to hold up, to the “fire” of critical review.

Whether or not the practice of infant baptism is alluded too in Scripture (which I think it is) matters little, if at all. So Forsyth: ‘To say that infant Baptism, as a witness to the Gospel and its faith by an act of the Church directed on the individual, is not scriptural because it is late, would be also to say that no existing form of Church government is scriptural, since none reproduces exactly the conditions of the first century. Or it would be to say that the spirit had no power in the Church to modify practice so as to give effect to faith’s principle in new circumstances, but that the praxis of the first century is binding for ever. It would mean, for instance, that the Supper should be a real meal or follow it, and should be weekly, and taken reclining, or that we should restore for the sick extreme unction. The full scope of Baptism, or any other institution or doctrine, could not be reached in the practice of the first century. Let us correct any magic by a scriptural principle to which both Protestant forms bear witness. Both can express the evangelical conception of faith. And in both Baptism acts on the subject psychologically and not subliminally, in the one case by a crisis, and in the other by a nurture. In the one case it embodies a new and fontal experience, in the other it begins a regenerative education, or what would now be called a creative evolution’.

For what it’s worth, I’ve always felt that the argument that infant baptism is the ‘new covenant counterpart to circumcision’ is, to put it mildly, something of a stretch. It’s certainly not Calvin at his best!

Some time back too, Byron Smith posted a number of thoughts on this (which I link to here: http://cruciality.wordpress.com/2010/01/30/thinking-baptism/). As did Andrew Errington: http://andrewerrington.wordpress.com/2010/01/21/why-i-believe-in-infant-baptism-%E2%80%94-ten-thoughts/