Baptism (eBook)

I

FAMILY, BODY, TEMPLE

“Worthy to inherit your promise of eternal life.”

ALMIGHTY AND ETERNAL GOD

Talk about baptism, and you’re immediately plunged into arguments. Whom should we baptize—professing converts or infants? How should we baptize—by immersion, pouring, or sprinkling? Why do we baptize—as a sign of God’s claim or as a convert’s public confession of faith? What does baptism do—nothing, something, everything? If it does something, how long does it last—for a moment, forever?1

All Christians use water to baptize. All invoke the Triune name. Beyond that, there’s little consensus. Quarrels over baptism are a travesty. The church has one baptism, as it is one body with one Spirit, one Lord, one hope, one faith, and one Father (Eph 4:4–6). Yet God’s sign of unity is a spring of division. We’re Corinthians, acting as if we were baptized into the name of Thomas or Calvin or Luther or John Piper (1 Cor 1:10–18). Paul’s outrage echoes down the centuries: “Is Christ divided?”

This book is a small contribution to the effort to reunite a church divided by baptism. My approach is oblique. I don’t offer any nice knock-down arguments. As currently framed, the controversies are insoluble anyway. To arrive at unity, we need to recover the baptismal imagination of earlier generations. We need to start at the foundation and work our way up.

The building blocks of that foundation are neatly laid out by Luther’s Great Flood Prayer, which I’ve long used whenever I perform a baptism:

Almighty and eternal God, who through the flood, according to your righteous judgment, condemned the unfaithful world, and according to your great mercy, saved faithful Noah, even eight persons, and has drowned hard-hearted Pharaoh with all his army in the Red Sea, and has led your people Israel dry through it, thereby prefiguring this bath of your holy baptism, and through the baptism of your dear child, our Lord Jesus Christ, has sanctified and set apart the Jordan and all water for a saving flood, and an ample washing away of sins: we pray that through your same infinite mercy you would graciously look down upon this your child, and bless her with a right faith in the spirit, so that through this saving flood all that was born in her from Adam and all which she has added thereto might be drowned and submerged; and that she may be separated from the unfaithful, and preserved in the holy ark of Christendom dry and safe, and may be ever fervent in spirit and joyful in hope to serve your name, so that she with all the faithful may be worthy to inherit your promise of eternal life, through Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.2

For biblical breadth, Luther’s prayer is hard to match. He links baptism with Adam’s sin, the flood, the exodus, and Jesus’ baptism.3 According to Luther, baptism does an awful lot: it separates us from the unfaithful and preserves us in the church; it washes, delivers, judges, and saves.

Some Christians will be dismayed at the power Luther attributes to baptism, taking it as evidence that the great German Reformer didn’t quite purge Catholicism from his soul. But Luther’s prayer expresses the mainstream convictions of two millennia of Christian tradition. Western Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and many Protestants say exactly these things about baptism.

The church says these things because Scripture does. The Bible speaks of baptism as an effective rite: baptism brands us with the Triune name (Matt 28:18–20); washes sin (Acts 2:38a); confers the Spirit (Acts 2:39b); grafts us into Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection (Rom 6:1–14); justifies (Rom 6:7); sanctifies (1 Cor 6:11); joins us with the Spirit-filled body (1 Cor 12:12–13); clothes us with Christ (Gal 3:27–29); regenerates (Titus 3:5); and saves (1 Pet 3:21). By baptism, we are anointed as priests and kings and join the Pentecostal company of prophets (Acts 2:15–21, 37–42). Baptized into one name, we become members of one another (1 Cor 1:10–18; Eph 4:4–6). The Bible never portrays baptism as a picture of some more important event that happens without baptism. What baptism pictures happens—at baptism. Baptism works.

If we’re uncomfortable with what Christians have said about baptism, it’s because we don’t share their convictions about the church. Nearly all errors and confusions about baptism are errors and confusions about the church. At the outset, let me lay out three basic beliefs that are implicit in Luther’s prayer and provide the structural support for our study of baptism.4

First, human beings are created as social beings. If we are saved as humans, we must be saved as social creatures. Salvation must take form as a saved society, a community delivered from the wounds of ambition, fear, hatred, envy, and greed. The church is the community God has delivered, and continues to deliver, from evil desires, habits, and imaginations, as we make our way to a final deliverance. Sinners are out of tune with God, creation, and one another. The church is humanity restored to harmony. The church is salvation in social form.

The New Testament describes the church as the family of the Father, the body of the incarnate Son, the temple of the Holy Spirit. These descriptions are simply true. We members of the church are—without any ifs, ands, or buts—sons and daughters of our heavenly Father, objects of his loving care and discipline. Jesus is no longer present in his personal body, but the church is—without any ifs, ands, or buts—his corporate body. Jesus is still available to the world through the church. Jesus and the church form one thing—“Christ” (1 Cor 12:12), what Augustine called “the whole Christ” (Latin, totus Christus). Jesus acts through us by his Spirit, making us his hands, feet, eyes, ears, and heart. The Spirit animates a living temple in which every member—without any ifs, ands, or buts—is a living stone. This is most certainly true.

Some children abandon their Father. Fruitless branches are pruned from the vine. Stubborn sinners so grieve the Spirit that he abandons them. They betray as children, atrophy as organs of the body, choose death as living stones of the temple. The mystifying tragedy of such traitors doesn’t change the fact that they once communed with the Triune God.

Second, by his resurrection and ascension Jesus burst through death into the life of the age to come. He’s the last Adam, clothed with eternal glory, overflowing with life. Because the church is the body of the last Adam, she shares the life of Jesus. Eternal life erupts into the world through the church. “Whoever is in Christ, behold a new creation!” Paul says (2 Cor 5:17, my translation). By the Spirit, the church is “in Christ.” We have not yet entered fully into the new creation; we strain with the Spirit for creation’s liberation from its bondage to decay. Yet, even now, filled with the Spirit of Jesus, the pledge of our inheritance (Eph 1:14), the church is a whisper of final harmony in a dissonant world.

We think the unalterable past enslaves us, but the gospel scrambles the relation of past and future. Our future isn’t determined by the fall of Adam or the sins of our past. In Christ, God has opened a future determined solely by his promises. On pilgrimage toward new Jerusalem, we already taste the delights of the destination. We are who God’s word says we are. We are now who we will be.

Third, followers of Jesus participate in rites, signs, and sacraments.5 Communion with the Triune God doesn’t take place primarily in a hermit’s cell, in the inner chambers of the heart, or in a flight above the sky. Communion takes place in public, communal rituals. The church is a human (and divine) society, and, as Augustine said, every society is knit together by signs.6 Of course, God can save people without baptism or the Lord’s Supper,7 but the Christian life normally revolves around liturgical rites or signs—baptism, Eucharist, common prayer, confession and absolution, song, reading and hearing Scripture. Someone who says he follows Jesus but never bathes in baptism or eats at the Lord’s Table isn’t a member of Christ’s body. He’s not a Christian, no matter what he says. Christians get a taste of the life to come in the places God designates through the words, liturgies, signs, and rites of the whole Christ. Observe a baptism, a sermon, a Eucharist, and you’re seeing human beings sharing the life of new creation, which is the very life of God.

These three beliefs hang together. The church is the family of the Father, the body of the Son, and the temple of the Spirit because it shares in the new creation that has begun in Jesus. And the church shares in that new creation by hearing the word, confessing sin, assembling at the Lord’s Table, passing through the waters of baptism.

Keep this in mind as we move ahead. Baptism is the doorway into membership in the church. Whenever I say, “Baptism does X,” remember what I’ve said about the church. Big things happen at baptism, but baptism’s energy doesn’t sputter to a halt as soon as we dry off. Baptism is powerful because it places us in the church where pastors, friends, and mentors train us and pray for us—where God corrects and feeds us by his word at his table. Baptism does what it does because Jesus authorizes it. Baptism works because the church works, and the church works because it’s the body of Christ, enlivened by the...