What does a dry baptism look like?
I love that question! I'm not going to try to answer it but I just had to comment on it. I enjoy the way you think!
Why won't I try to answer it, you might be asking yourself....
Here's the problem. It's a detail. Baptism is one single doctrinal detail that the whole church has divided and split and fought over for two millennia. There's a whole list of such doctrines that Christians debate over and fight each other about.
Do we have to get water baptized?
Will Christians suffer through the Tribulation?
Can Christians lose their salvation?
Are Christian required to tithe?
Are good works required for salvation or is faith alone enough?
Should Christians keep the Sabbath?
Should Christians eat this or that food?
Should Christians.....fill in the blank.
If you get 50 Christians in the room and ask them to answer such questions, you might think you'd get fifty different combinations of answers but actually you likely get two major groups of people. There would be outliers but for the most part, the people who agree with each other on one of those questions also agree on most of the others. Baptism is something of an exception to that general rule. The beliefs about water baptism are sort of all over the place and is likely the single most divisive issue in the whole history of the church but still, the reason that you'd end up with basically two groups in your survey is because these issues are not the disperse, unrelated issues that they might seem to be.
Let's say you wanted to try to get a firm answer for each of those questions. A person starting on such a theological trek would likely start by picking one of them and read some books on the subject. Say they started with trying to answer, "Can Christians lose their salvation?". There's probably a hundred books that have been written about that topic. Some of them seek to prove that you can lose your salvation and the other seek to prove that you cannot. Each has a list of scripture passages that support their position (i.e. their proof texts). The proof texts for one set is the problem texts for the other and whichever book you pick up, regardless of which side of the debate it's arguing, will spend 80% or more of its time focused on its proof texts and the rest of the time explaining why the problem texts don't mean what they might seem to mean.
So you read four books on the topic of losing your salvation and you may or may not have a solid opinion about it when you're done, but then you move on to books about the tithing or the Tribulation or whatever and you find the same process in each of those books and after probably five years of study, you're probably not really any closer to having a firm answer than when you began and you certainly aren't on any firmer ground than is any other Christian regardless of whether they agree with your conclusions or not.
There is a better way!
All this study of doctrinal details is like scrutinizing individual pieces of a jigsaw puzzle without ever looking at the box top. People spends years studying a puzzle piece and say that it depicts a portion of a dog's ear and they spend years studying another piece and say that it is showing you a wrinkle in piece of bread and so on. Some try to figure out how one piece relates to all the other pieces but most don't go that far. Most people are content with just having a bunch of puzzle pieces and will wait to see the big picture when they're dead or when Christ returns.
Wouldn't it be better to at least look at the box top?
Wouldn't it be best to look at the box top FIRST?
The key to getting good answers to these divisive issues isn't by trying to find a bunch of proof texts for your favored answer but to see the big picture. If you get a good overview then the details become easy!
What if I told you that there was a doctrinal system based on that exact idea and that it so completely resolves all of those doctrinal details that it leave you with NO PROBLEM TEXTS! Indeed, all of what used to be proof texts are still proof texts AND all of what used to be problem texts are now also proof texts!
Sound impossible?
IT'S NOT!
The Plot by Bob Enyart
READ IT!