Yet even as a symbol of purification, water is necessary for Christian baptism. It was indispensable even earlier for symbolic, pre-Christian baptism. St. John the Baptist baptized with water alone. This was not actual baptism, but symbolic prefigurative baptism. It was just a shadow of Christian baptism.
Christian baptism means a complete purification.
This baptism represents the doors through which people enter Christ's Church. They do not enter two or three times, but once. Hence, there is one baptism. Therefore, avoid those who tell you that a person needs more than one baptism. Through baptism that most shameful stain, with which the ancestor of our race sullied himself and which he bequeathed to his descendants as an in hentance, is removed from the image of God within us.