Tertullian, On Baptism 15

I'm not sure there's anything left to air in the baptism debate, but I'll backtrack and cover what I skipped earlier so I don't look like I'm ducking the implications. There is exactly one baptism for us — grounded in the Lord's Gospel and the apostles' letters — because there is one Lord, one baptism, and one Church in heaven. But what rules apply to heretics? That's a fair question, since the call was handed to us. Heretics have zero share in our discipline; the very fact that we've cut communion with them brands them as outsiders. I'm not about to recognize in them what was commanded to me, because they don't worship the same God we do, nor the same Christ — that is, the identical one. So their baptism isn't the same either, because the source isn't the same. Since they don't have it rightly, they flat-out don't have it; you can't count what isn't there, and they can't receive what they don't possess. We've already hashed this out at length in Greek. The bottom line: we go through the washing once, sins are washed away once, because repeating it is out of the question. Meanwhile, the Jewish Israelite scrubs up daily because he gets dirty daily. To keep that cycle from infecting us, the rule was locked in: one washing. Happy the water that cleanses once and for all — no joke to fishermen, not fouled by constant grime, never turning around and re-defiling the very people it just washed.