Recently, on an almost unreasonably beautiful November day, I baptized my daughter in the Chicago River. Certain elements of my extended family had nagged me during my daughter's first year on planet Earth about doing this, despite my lack of a formal designation, "In Case Something Happens." What they meant couldn't be clearer. They were afraid that if my daughter died in a terrible accident, she would be sent to hell or purgatory because of her failure to be baptized. Growing up and until adolescence I had thought of baptism as a sort of insurance policy; children are too young to accept Jesus as their savior, so baptism is one way to do that for them, just in case. I no longer think about baptism this way, mostly because I refuse to accept the idea of ​​a God who would damn children. to hell (or purgatory) because they never had the chance to have an old man splash water on their head. As a result, I initially had no intention of even bothering to baptize my daughter. But something was tormenting me anyway. One of the things we can be most sure of about Jesus is that he was baptized by John before his ministry began. If it was good enough for Jesus, who am I to argue? Of course, all doctrine about hell and purgatory is post-biblical, post-Jesus. What did baptism really mean for Jesus, for John? Mark (the first gospel) says, near the beginning of his story, "John appeared baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins." (Mark 1:4) Josephus, a first-century Roman-Jewish historian, also mentions John in his Antiquities, noting that: “Herod killed [John], who was a good man, and commanded the Jews to practice virtue, either as on the right... in the center of the paper... communicates through the High Priest. In the story, Jesus rebukes them and proceeds to heal the paralysis to demonstrate his authority. Therefore Jesus' forgiveness of sins and John's baptism for the remission of sins must be understood as assertions of the non-exclusivity of God's will. forgiveness; in other words, of the universal accessibility of God. Having understood this, I had no problem baptizing my daughter. Her godfather held her and I poured water over her head, and I baptized her in the name of the Kingdom of God, not in Heaven, not in a Temple or Church, but among the followers of Christ walking on the narrow path. I did it not for her, not to avoid a hell that doesn't exist, but simply to affirm that no man-made institution has a monopoly on access to God and that whatever spiritual path my daughter chooses to follow, she will. be your decision.