From a netfriend:

It seems to me that the biblical mode of Christian Baptism is immersion, but NOT submersion (although submersion is not invalid, just improper). A person would stand in water and a copious quantity of water would be poured on their heads from above. Their whole body would be touched by the water, but they would not go under the water. I hold such a position for a number of reasons.

1. I just don't think that it is possible to make every biblical reference to baptism fit into the submersionist paradigm. Hebrews 9:10 and Luke 11:38 are good examples.

2. We nowhere read of Christian Baptism involving submersion. We read of the baptizer and baptizand going down into or coming up out of the water, but the fact that this happens to both suggests that submersion is not necessarily in view.

3. Where the mode is specified it seems to be other than submersion. The Church's Baptism with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost did not involve submersion. Rather, as the text repeatedly reminds us, the Spirit was POURED OUT on the Church. In Hebrews the reference to baptisms seems to be referring primarily to sprinklings.

4. The common Pauline prooftext that is brought forward to support submersion - Romans 6:5 - seems to depend on a rather strained reading of the text. Quite apart from anything else, submersion in water looks nothing at all like Jesus' death or burial. Hanging on a cross or being laid on a slab in a tomb covered by a stone are not remotely like being dunked. It also seems to me that the common Baptist reading of the verse results in it being a distraction from the flow of Paul's argument. Paul's point in the verse, it seems to me (following Cranfield), is that Baptism conforms us to (or 'unites us to the form of') Christ's death, so that we might also be conformed in our moral life to His resurrection.

5. There are, it seems to me, good theological reasons to resist the practice of submersion and favour immersion by means of affusion whilst standing in water. The world that God has created is full of symbolism. There are two sources of water: the waters above and the waters below. The waters above are commonly seen as the waters of blessing. When the priest was washed, for example, the water was taken from above (from the laver or the bronze sea). The OT passages that speak of the gift of the Spirit also focus on the theme of water from above.

The water from below symbolizes different things. To be submersed in the waters below is to be judged. The wicked are submersed in the waters below (etc. Pharaoh's army, the men of Noah's day). The righteous are delivered through water and are not submerged.

Within Christian Baptism the themes of judgment, deliverance and blessing are all present. We are threatened, as it were, by the waters below, but not overwhelmed (for Christian Baptism is like Noah's experience in the Ark - 1 Peter 3 - and Israel's experience in the sea - 1 Corinthians 10). We have the waters from above poured out upon us as we symbolically pass through the firmament into the presence of God. The fact that the waters are poured from above is not a mere accidental and unimportant detail of the rite. Nor, however, is the fact that we ought to be standing in waters below (ideally, I would say, up to our waists at least). This can be a sign of deliverance from judgment.

Such a mode of Baptism can also explain the development of the various other modes, more easily than the submersionist position. The submersionist position emphasizes the 'waters below' aspect of the rite, the affusionist and sprinkling positions the 'waters above' aspect.

There are better forms of the practice of submersion, which seem to be a bit more symbolically attuned and to these I have less opposition. Such an approach might argue that submersion is necessary because it corresponds with Christ's coming under God's judgment in His death. However, once one comes out of the water one must receive the gift of the Spirit from above (generally in the form of chrismation). Whilst I disagree with such an approach for a variety of reasons, I have a lot more sympathy for it than the standard Baptist positions concerning submersion and non-Baptist positions of ritual indifference that I encounter elsewhere. It should also be recognized that the reasoning for such a position will tend to look somewhat different from the common Baptist arguments concerning mode that one encounters.