I’m not sure when people began using the term “water baptism.” Seems like it’s becoming more and more common. The phrase is often used by those who want to take passages about baptism and argue that we don’t know if it’s baptism in the Spirit or baptism in water. [Jr used it in a comment the other day; I’m not implying that he meant anything by that.]
I consider ‘water baptism’ to be a redundancy. It’s like talking about water swimming or food eating. I can be swimming in debt. I can eat my words. But when I tell someone that I was swimming, rarely do they ask, “In what?”; when I talk about eating, they don’t ask me if it was food that I ate.
In the same way, when Jesus told his disciples to make disciples by baptizing and teaching them, the disciples didn’t walk away saying, “I wonder what we’re supposed to baptize them with.” When Peter told the crowd at Pentecost that they were to repent and be baptized, no one shouted out, “Baptized in what?”
The Bible does refer to the outpouring of the Spirit as Jesus baptizing with the Holy Spirit. And Jesus refers to his death as a baptism (Mark 10:38–39). Neither of these figurative uses of the term “baptism” change the fact that the word was understandable to the original hearers. By context, they knew when a usage was figurative. Otherwise, they knew to take the word at face value: immersion in water.
Let’s not muddy the waters by using a term that only obscures the original meaning.
I would suppose the term came about because of confusion. I can think of at least four ways baptism is used in the NT. It is interesting that words do pick up other connotations besides those they were originally imbued with. Thus the need for clarification. But as terms just for arguing, that doesn’t appeal to me either.
I don’t know that I use that term … if I do it is unconsciously … I have had people argue with me that all the references to baptism were Spirit baptism. That, to me, sounds like a dodge. But anyhow… it is funny how a little phrase like that can catch on and be used a lot without a lot of thought about it.