Category Archives: Baptism

Christ’s baptism, Christ’s confession

Posted by on January 8, 2012 1 comment

A fitting reflection I think, for this Sunday, the Baptism of the Lord:

When He had Himself baptised with water by John, Jesus confessed both God and [humankind]. A better way of putting it is that because He confessed God, the God whose will was soon to be done on earth as it is in heaven, therefore He confessed [humankind], the [humans] who are in view in this doing of God’s will. Because He is committed unreservedly to subordination to God, therefore He is committed unreservedly to solidarity with [humankind]. He who as God’s Son was very different from all [people], being one with the Father who sent Him, and therefore Himself God, negated this difference, this distance, this strangeness between Himself and others, even to the last remnant. He became wholly and utterly one of them, not in an act of secret or even public condescension, like a king for a change donning a beggar’s rags and mingling with the crowd, but by belonging to them in every way, by being no more and no less than one of them, by having no point of reference except to them. He became one of them, not in order to renounce full fellowship with them when the game was over, like the king exchanging again the beggar’s rags for his kingly robes, not in order to leave again the table where He had seated Himself with publicans and sinners , and to find himself a better place, but in order to be one of them definitively as well as originally, unashamed to call them brethren to all eternity because He was their Brother from all eternity (Heb. 2:11), a veritable King in this true form of His, and at His place of honour. With the men of His people, then, He received the Word of God which came to John and to which John bore witness. With them He looked forward to the intimated new act of God which would change all things. With them He looked forward to the establishment of God’s kingdom, the threatened judgment, the remission and taking away of their sins. With them He obeyed the call for conversion issued to his people. With all the rest He had Himself baptised with water. With them He thus confessed His sins. His sins? If we do not say this, we question and even deny the totality of His self-giving to [humankind], and therewith the totality of His self-giving to God. We say that He had Himself baptised with the rest only improperly, contrary to the meaning of John’s preaching and baptism, in a demonstration which had neither truth nor necessity for Him. We say at root that this was just a theatrical show. But it was not a theatrical show. The seriousness with which others, frightened before God and setting their hope in Him alone, confessed their sins, is infinitely surpassed hereby the divine earnestness with which this One, when faced by the sins of all others, their confusions and corruptions, their big and little acts of ungodliness, did not let these sins be theirs, did not regard, bewail or judge them from a distance with tacit or open accusation, did not simply characterise them as sins by His own Otherness, but as the Son of His Father, elected and ordained from all eternity to be the Brother of these fatal brethren, caused them to be His own sins, confessed them as such, and therewith confessed that He was baptised in prospect of God’s kingdom, judgment and forgiveness. No one who came to the Jordan was as laden and afflicted as He. No one was as needy. No one was so utterly human, because so wholly fellow-human. No one confessed his sins so sincerely, so truly as his own, without side-glances at others. He stands alone in this, He who was elected and ordained from all eternity to partake of the sin of all in His own person, to bear its shame and curse in the place of all, to be the man responsible for all, and as such, wholly theirs, to live and act and suffer. This is what Jesus began to do when He had Himself baptised by John with all the others. This was the opening of His history as the salvation history of all the others.

~Karl Barth, CD IV/4, 58-59.

The solidarity of baptism

Posted by on March 8, 2011 9 comments

I’ve been thinking for a while about the whole issue of what it means to be united, one to another through our common baptism in the body of Christ. In light of the many discussions that have been had about the relevance of an apocalyptic conception of the church as mission, what then are we to say about the notion that, in baptism, Christians enter into a special sort of solidarity with one another, a solidarity that makes them uniquely a peoplehood, a family? If we conceive the church-as-mission, that is, if we hold that the church exists only as it gives itself to the world in kenotic service, what then does that leave of the notion that the members of the church share a unique sort of unity?

As I see it there is no dispensing with the “specialness” of baptism, if you will. To be baptized together is to be brought into unity with each other in a way that is irreducible and singular. But what sort of solidarity is this that we have with each other in baptism? If we understand our baptism in light of Christ’s baptism, whereby he is commissioned by the Father in the power of the Spirit to proclaim the kingdom of God in word and deed to the poor and oppressed, how can we understand our baptismal solidarity as anything other than being given over, together, to and for the world? Baptismal solidarity means we find ourselves, by virtue of God’s action, to be united together as partners in giving ourselves away to “the least of these.” To be united in baptism is not, then to share a unity that exists within borders, which draws lines, establishes “in” and “out.” Rather the unity of baptism is a solidarity in proclaiming and enacting the end of all such separations and divisions.

To be united in baptism is indeed to share a special unity, a unity that binds us together closer than any other form of human unity. But it does so not by establishing us as an “alternative” form of unity, rather it unites us precisely in the traversal of all walls of division wherever they might be. The solidarity of baptism is solidarity in self-giving unto the world which God loves and for whom God came in Jesus. When we proclaim that we are united, one to another in one body we are not claiming to be an alternative cultural matrix, rather we are proclaiming that, because of what Christ has done and continues to do, we have the joy of finding ourselves sent out together in God’s service, the service of giving our lives away, of dispensing with boundaries, divisions, and all forms of alienation. Baptismal solidarity is missionary solidarity. To be united in baptism is to be united, not towards ourselves, but towards all those for whom the kingdom of God is coming. Indeed, one might say that baptismal solidarity, by its very nature is a solidarity of being turned outward, of being sent out in Christ to follow him into the world in all its brokenness. Baptism, then, does not establish a new “inside” a new cultural seat of coherence and stability, rather it propels us — together! — out into the world which God loves, the world still in tragic, broken rebellion. We are baptized, not for ourselves, not for the church, but for the world, whose destiny it is to be transformed into the kingdom of God.

Baptismal identity

Posted by on May 28, 2010 22 comments

Rowan Williams has a great new lecture available online, which, to my mind is remarkably germane to some of our recent discussions about the nature of Christian identity:

. . . the identity of the baptized is not first and foremost a matter of some exclusive relationship to God that keeps us safe, as opposed to the rest of the vulnerable and unlucky world.  It is at one and the same time living both in the neighbourhood of the Father and in the neighbourhood of darkness.  That is why we speak of being baptized into the death and resurrection of Christ, not simply baptized as a mark of our affinity or alignment with Jesus in a general way, not baptized as an external sign that we more or less agree with what Jesus says.  Our baptism is a stepping-into Jesus’ place with all that that entails.  And it means that Christian baptismal identity is—again at one and the same time—both a depth of human experience that brings us into at least the potential of intense, transfiguring love, the Trinitarian love in which Jesus himself lives, and a continuing experience of expectation, humility, penitence and hope.  The experience of the baptized is not the experience of endings, but of repeated new beginnings.  We don’t simply acquire a relationship with God the Father which then requires us to do nothing more.  On the contrary, to be baptized is to be constantly re-awakening our expectation, our penitence, our protest, our awareness that the chaos and darkness of the world is not what God wills; our awareness that we are colluding with that state of chaos which God does not will.  So as baptized persons we look constantly into ourselves, rediscovering over and over again the hope that comes out of true repentance.

Baptism into the damned

Posted by on February 4, 2010 6 comments

Bob Eckblad makes some interesting points about Jesus’s baptism in his subversive and challenging book, A New Christian Manifesto. Noting, as many have done, the obvious parallels between Jesus being baptized and then going into the desert for forty days and the story of Israel and the Exodus, Eckblad notes some crucial differences. In the Exodus, the children of Israel go through the Red Sea on dry land while the Egyptians in turn are drowned in the flood. However, when Jesus is baptized in the Jordan, he is immersed. He descends down into the depths of the flood where Israel has never trod.

According to Eckblad this has some fascinating ramifications. According to his analysis, Jesus’s baptism was a “symbolic entry into the fate of the ‘bad guys’—Pharoah, his army, chariots, horses, and riders. Jesus’ acceptance of this baptism and the entire New Testament teaching on baptism is nothing less than a call for all future followers to join in the fate of the enemies of God’s kingdom, the ‘them’ that we may deem worthy of exclusion, punishment, or death” (p. 34).

Interestingly, as Eckblad notes, this seems to shed some light on the description of Christ’s descent into Hell in 1 Peter 3:18-22. There reference is specifically made both to Jesus’s act of preaching to those who died in the flood (clearly also connected with baptism and the Exodus notion of salvation) and his lordship and dominion over “angels and authorities and powers.”

Thus, as Eckblad argues:

Here we see a distinction between human beings who died in the flood, whom he went and preached to, and the angels, authorities, and pwoers that became subject to him through his victory. The fate of God’s enemies is nothing less than death. yet death itself is undone by Jesus’ own death with and for the unrighteous. . . .

All distinctions between insiders and outsiders, the saved and the damned, perpetrators and victims, the righteous and the unrighteous, clean and unclean, Israel and the nations are leveled when insiders go under water, instead of through it on dry ground. Under water we all die totally. Under water, God’s chosen people join the damned. Wee come up dead to the flesh—that is, dead to any distinctions that would mark us as in any way superior, worthy. (p. 36, 37)

Jesus and Baptism

Posted by on January 13, 2010 5 comments

John 4 marks the beginning of Jesus’s ministry with his disciples. Picking up in the train of John the Baptizer, Jesus is reported to be “making and baptizing more disciples that John” (4:2). But then it gets interesting. The next verse claims that “it was not Jesus himself but his disciples who baptized” (4:3).

Why this little detail? Why did Jesus, in contradistinction to John refrain from baptizing anyone himself? Jesus in John does not come as a baptizer (in fact John’s Gospel omits even the mention of Jesus’s own baptism), but rather as the Word of God. Likewise throughout the Gospel of John there is a constant theme of hearing Jesus’s voice as the voice of God. In John Jesus is not a baptizer, but the speaker of the words of God. It is his disciples, those who hear and follow him who become the baptizers.

In John baptism lies always in the realm of human response, of obedience to the Word that precedes it. The disciples baptize and receive baptism in obedient submission to the one who “has the words of eternal life” (6:68b). In John baptism is not something that Christ does to us, but rather what we cannot but do after hearing the Word made flesh. Thus, baptism is not an act of moral accomplishment, but of a certain sort of apocalyptic resignation to the truth of Christ’s reality: “Lord, to whom can we go?” (6:68b)

On Denying Baptism

Posted by on October 2, 2009 2 comments

Ben posts some characteristically helpful comments on the relation between baptism and ordination:

Since baptism is itself vocation to discipleship, ordination — or preparation for ordination — can often become a denial of baptism.

  • If you want to be ordained in order to become a really serious and committed disciple of Christ, then you have denied your baptism.
  • If you want to be ordained in order to progress beyond ordinary discipleship, then you have denied your baptism.
  • If you want to be ordained in order to “serve the Lord full-time”, then you have denied your baptism.

For more on this, see the work of William Stringfellow.

Baptism and Nationalism according to Barth

Posted by on September 13, 2009 35 comments

In response to the recent discussions of baptism here, Kevin has posted the following quote from Karl Barth on infant baptism:

The real reason for the persistent adherence to infant baptism is quite simply the fact that without it the church would suddenly be in a remarkably embarrassing position. Every individual would then have to decide whether he wanted to be a Christian. But how many Christians would there be in that case? The whole concept of a national church (or national religion) would be shaken. That must not happen; and so one proposes argument upon argument for infant baptism and yet cannot speak convincingly because fundamentally he has a bad conscience. The introduction of adult baptism in itself would of course not reform the church which needs reforming. The adherence to infant baptism is only one — a very important one — of many symptoms that the church is not alive and bold, that it is afraid to walk on the water like Peter to meet the Lord, that it therefore does not seek a sure foundation but only deceptive props.

“Die christliche Lehre nach dem Heidelberger Katechismus,” Lectures given at the University of Bonn, Summer Semester, 1947.

The Heidelberg Catechism for Today, trans. Shirley Guthrie (John Knox Press, 1964), p. 104.

Is Conversion an Act of the Will?

Posted by on September 12, 2009 31 comments

To continue with the theme of voluntarism, let us examine a claim often made against advocates of believers’ baptism. It is generally argued that to require the subject of baptism to be professing believers is to make the grace of God contingent upon an act of the human will (voluntas). That is, by insisting that the baptized be believers, the church places human volition above God’s divine initiative. The act of the will to believe in Christ is prior to and more determinative than God’s baptismal grace. So the argument goes as I understand it. I trust my interlocutors will correct me if I have stated this in an unbalanced way.

The problem with this argument lies in its hidden premise, namely that believing and wanting to follow Jesus as some sort of self-asserting act of willpower. Biblically and theologically this is simply wrong. No one comes to Christ unless drawn by the Father (John 6:44; 65). To respond to Christ’s call to discipleship is not the act of human self-assertion, but rather of submission to God’s own initiative which has taken hold the person called. Following Christ is not an act of heroic effort that we chose, rather it is something that we cannot do other than choose on the basis of God’s action towards us in Christ: “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68).

As such, believers’ baptism does not rest on any sort of enshrining of human voluntas. Conversion to Christ, commitment to discipleship—none of this is a heroic act of the will. Rather it is simply the response of evoked love that is manifest whenever the Father draws people to the Son through the Spirit. An advocacy of believers’ baptism simply reflects a commitment to respond to God’s action in human beings with a Yes. Baptism is merely our agreement with what God has done, our recognition of the truth of how God has drawn a person into the Triune life.

More on the Voluntariness of the Church

Posted by on September 12, 2009 63 comments

According the free church tradition, only those who believe in Christ as Lord should be baptized into the church as members of his body. As such, for this tradition membership in the body of Christ is voluntary. It is not imposed, but rather is given to those who come to baptism out of a desire to follow Christ.

The majority tradition of the Christian faith labels this an unacceptable form of modern voluntarism, claiming that it places the priority on the self-determining autonomy of the human subject rather on the free grace of God. Now, clearly a whole discussion could be had about the nature of grace and how it draws human beings toward the church. Let us leave that aside for the moment.

If we cut through the fog generated by the scare word of “voluntarism,” it seems to me that there are only two possible construes of how baptism ought to go down. If the voluntary baptism of believers is illicit as the normative practice, what is the alternative? The only alternative to voluntary baptism is involuntary baptism, is it not?

Now, everyone agrees that voluntary baptism is acceptable and right. No on is opposed to converts being baptized upon profession of faith. The question, as I see it, must rest on what theological reasons  we have for baptizing those who do not believe in Christ and do not have the ability to consent or dissent from baptism? What theological reasons are there for involuntary baptism? That seems to me to be a reasonable question. I have yet to see, theologically, why involuntary baptism should be the norm of the church’s practice.

The Voluntary Church

Posted by on September 12, 2009 11 comments

John Howard Yoder often gets critiqued (the work of Oliver O’Donovan is a good example) for his alleged “voluntarism.” Yoder, being an Anabaptist is, of course, opposed to infant baptism and insists that membership in the church must always be a voluntary, free, and uncoerced reality. Thus, the baptism of children is suspect for Yoder as it is an act totally void of active participation on the part of the baptized.

Now, whatever we might think of this I just want to make one point. Yoder is not guilty of voluntarism in any sort of modern sense. Yoder and Anabaptism as a whole does not emphasize the voluntary nature of the church for the sake of enshrining the freedom of the individual to be self-determining. Indeed, this is impossible on the basis of the Anabaptist vision of ecclesial discipleship which always involves strong communal commitments and mutual submission.

The only point Yoder makes in emphasizing the voluntary nature of the church is that membership in the body of Christ cannot be coercively imposed. That is all. The church is voluntary in Anabaptist theology, not because the modern self requires it, but because unilateral coercion cannot be used to make disciples. The one and only point of speaking of the church as a voluntary community is to say that no one is either forced into it or born into it. Rather persons are drawn into it through Christ’s to discipleship.

The Church as Apocalyptic Event, Baptism, Eucharist, and Discipleship

Posted by on February 27, 2009 1 comment

Continuing this series of responses to Steve Long‘s queries about “filling out” some of the details of what conceiving of the church as apocalyptic might mean, here is his third question:

Would [an understanding of the church as apocalyptic event] acknowledge the necessity of the relation between baptism (and thus a commitment to a life of discipleship) and the Eucharist?

The first point–which has been made in other ways in regard to the first two questions–is that an apocalyptic conception of the church places its primary emphasis on the centrality of God’s prior action in Christ singular historicity. What is central about an apocalyptic conception of the church is that it seeks to consistently bear witness to the radically interruptive and transformative action of the Trinitarian God in and for the world. As such, the supreme characteristic of the church is its struggle to adjust their vision, as it were, to the radical new world that God has wrought in Christ. And apocalyptic conception of the church requires us to think the church in distinctly responsive and active terms, because the church lives “after the event”, seeking to discover what it means for us to live in light of the great transformation that God in Christ has effected.

So, bearing that in mind, baptism and Eucharist name gifts of the Christ’s Spirit to the church, through which the church shapes its life in a manner fitting to the great transformation of the world in the apocalypse of Christ. Baptism is a sign of the new world that has been created in Christ, through the singular outpouring of God’s Trinitarian agape. Baptism is the gift of Christ’s Spirit who, in the midst of our own contingent histories, translates us into Christ’s own singular historicity by drawing us, in baptism, into God’s own radical love. From an apocalyptic perspective, the strongest possible connection between baptism and discipleship is drawn. For, baptism names the Spirit’s action of drawing us into Christ’s own apocalyptic victory over the powers, effecting liberation for slavery and death. As such, baptism is fundamentally our pneumatological induction into what Christ has apocalypsed–the transfigured creation in which God comes to dwell with humankind and be their God. Being such an induction, baptism translates us into a whole mode of life, the life of being engrafted into God’s radical love. The admonitions of the New Testament often follow these lines: “Welcome one another as God in Christ has welcomed you” (Rom 15:14).

Now, in regard to the connection between baptism (and the life of discipleship) and the eucharist, there is much to say indeed. The first thing to be noted is that from an apocalyptic perspective, the Eucharist’s quality as anamnesis is of the utmost importance. The Lord’s Supper is fundamentally an act of remembrance of Christ’s historical action for our salvation. The Eucharist is the constant embodied remembering of God’s singular apocalypse which is our salvation. As such the  Eucharist remembers and reenacts Christ’s own dispossessive love for us unto death, the same love into which we are inducted in baptism. The Eucharist constitutes our continual reimmersion into the agapeic pattern of Christ’s life into which we are called as disciples.

Moreover, the Eucharist is also to be understood as a modality of Christ’s presence to the church. As such it recalls Christ’s promise to be with his disciples to the end of the age (Matt 28:20) in their missional vocation to proclaim the gospel. Thus, Christ’s Eucharistic presence is helpfully understood as his empowering accompaniment, in the Spirit of his missional church. In the Eucharist, Christ abides with his church through the Spirit, leading the church in its missional vocation to embody the radical love of God. From an apocalyptic perspective, Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist is not separable in any sense from his promise to, through the Spirit, accompany and empower the church in its missional encounter with the world.

So, what, in a nutshell is the connection between baptism and Eucharist? In baptism we are inducted in the radical love of God, in which our lives are reshaped according the cruciform image of Christ. In the Eucharist Christ we remember the agape of Christ into which we have been inducted in baptism, and Christ himself, through the Spirit is present to us in the sacramental act, accompanying us in our missional vocation to embody the irruptive and transformative agape of God in all the world. There is certainly a great deal more that should be said about the sacraments and their relation to apocalyptic, but for now, I hope this at least begins to shed some light on how we might understand some key aspects of their connection.

The Church as Apocalyptic Event and Common Confession

Posted by on February 26, 2009 Comments Off

Having already touched on the previous question of how conceiving of the church as apocalyptic informs our understanding of church discipline, here is my response to Steve Long‘s second question regarding the issue of the church’s common confession:

Does the Church as apocalyptic event recognize the need for a common confession such that anyone who could not confess the Nicene Creed should not be baptized?

In thinking about this question, it seems to me that the question of conceiving the church apocalyptically does not directly bear on the question of creedal prerequisites for baptism. Indeed, the relation of creedal confession to the proper subjects of baptism is far more of a conflict between peadobaptist and free church traditions, and to my reading has no direct correlation to whether or not one adpots an “apocalyptic style” in doing theology (see David Toole, Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo for a discussion of doing theology in an “apocalyptic style.” Note also that Toole is Roman Catholic.).

However, having said that, I do think that an apocalyptic conception of the church does strongly orient ecclesiology towards highly prioritizing creedal confession. From an apocalyptic perspective, the church has its being precisely in its pneumatic orientation to the prior event of God’s invasion of the cosmos in Jesus’s death and resurrection. Our existence as God’s people is solely due to our reception of God’s agape, as poured out in Christ’s victory over the powers of death. As such, the participation of persons in the liberating reign of God, of which the church is a sign, sacrament, and foretaste, can only be realized on the basis of truthful confession of the lordship of Christ. Thus, for a church that understands itself apocalyptically, truthful confession regarding the nature of Jesus’s lordship and the character of the triune God is of the utmost centrality. For it is only in our acknowledgement of the truth about Christ that we are, by the Spirit freed into sharing the life of Christ’s apocalyptic victory over the powers.

So, in sum, given that an apocalyptic understanding of the church places its emphasis consistently on the priority of God’s invasive and transformative action in Christ’s history, truthful confession is of the utmost importance. What is central to the church’s apocalyptic identity is what God has done in Christ and the Spirit. The Creed serves as a truthful codification and narration of God’s prior divine initiative, to which we bear witness. As such, from the perspective of apocalyptic ecclesiology, confession of the Creed is of the utmost importance, both in terms of doxology and mission. For it is in proclaiming the truth about Christ’s lordship and the divine nature that we respond rightly to God in the form of worship. Likewise, this very movement of doxology is coextensive with the church’s missional existence which is solely concerned with our call to “proclaim the excellencies of him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light” (1 Pet 2:9).

A Further Thought on Baptism

Posted by on January 10, 2008 20 comments

The key issue that pedobaptists have with advocates of believers baptism is the way in which believers baptism ties the recpetion of baptism to the ability of the recipient to make a confession of faith and a commitment to a life of discipleship.  It is alleged that this requirement being placed on the baptized mitigates the gratuity of God’s grace.  However, all acknowedge that in the New Testament there is an integral link between faith and baptism.  There can be no administration of baptism without faith if it is to be true to the pattern of the New Testament and the early church.  Advocates of pedobaptism have typically responded that it is required that the parents of the infant being baptized do so on the basis of their faith and commitment to raise the child as a Christian.

So, in truth there is not really a difference between advocates of believers baptism and infant baptism as to the role of faith in baptism.  Both believe it is indispensible that the act of baptism be united with the act of faith.  Pedobaptists simply argue that the parent’s faith is sufficient grounds for the baptism of their children (thus, the children of unbelievers are not the subject of baptisms, for there is no way for baptism to be united with faith on that account).

The point I simply want to draw out is that neither pedobaptism nor believers baptism is more voluntaristic than the other.  Both require that the human response of faith is necessary for a valid baptism.  It is not that one insists on human response whereas the other is purely gift.  Both require that the gift of baptism be recieved in faith.  The question that pedobaptists have to answer is why and how it makes theological sense for the faith of parents to merit the baptism of their children who do not have faith.

Baptism, Voluntarism, and Violence

Posted by on January 10, 2008 19 comments

One of the critiques often leveled at the Anabaptist churches is their alleged voluntarism.  The practice of believers baptism and the rejection of infant baptism has often been critiqued on the basis of how it seemingly ties together the human activity of personal commitment to discipleship with God’s divine act of saving grace.  In other words, it is alleged that refusing baptism to those who are unable to make a commitment to discipleship denies the gratuitousness of the grace of God and rather, in a Pelagian fashion makes the work of grace dependent upon our act of repentance.

To make a full argument against this characterization would be far more extensive than is possible here.  However, I want to underscore two fundamental points that are often neglected by critics of Anabaptist baptism.  First, the fundamental political reason why the Anabaptists rejected infant baptism was due to the way in which baptism in the context of medieval Christendom was basically coterminous with allegiance to the sovereign.  It not longer signified a break from the world, an induction into a radically new form of life in the Spirit, but rather sanctified and fused the world of domination and violence with the church in a synthesis that was contrary to the gospel.  As such, believers baptism, in addition to having stronger biblical support seemed the only way for the act of baptism to be reformed in a way that would enable it to “say” what baptism is supposed to proclaim.

Second, fundamental point that must be understood about the relationship between believers baptism and grace is rooted in the commitment of the Anabaptists to nonviolence.  Fundamental to the Free Church ethos is firm devotion to the teachings of Christ on non-coerciveness and peacemaking.  The reason that baptism is refused to those who are unable to make a profession of faith is because membership in the community of the cruciform Lord cannot be coerced.  No one can be born into membership in the community of the Spirit, they must be reborn into it.  To apply baptism to an infant does not yield an image the sovereignty of grace, but rather of grace as coercion.  The reason that baptism is only offered to those capable of making a confession of faith is because of the conviction that the radical grace of God is ultimately nonviolent and non-coercive.  God’s grace does not foist itself on us but rather woos us, drawing us to the Father, through the Son in the Spirit.  The insistence on believers baptism, far from denying the gratuity of grace is rather a testimony to the non-coercive nature of the event of grace as one of gift and response. For adherents of believers baptism the gift of baptism can never be imposed, it can only be recieved.  Properly understood, believers baptism is not voluntaristic in the least, but rather is a testament to the fact that grace of the triune God is not coercion, but liberation, new life, indeed the glorious creation of a new world.

For those who would critique the practice of believers baptism, I think these two points should be taken with much greater seriousness, and I have seen very little substantial engagement along these lines.  The tradition of the Free Churches with their insistence on the baptism of believers constitutes an important challenge to the practice infant baptism which should at least be taken with seriousness by exponents of the mainline tradition.

Also, for those wanting to see some of my further thoughts on this issue, as well as some qualifications about infant baptism, see my earlier post on Baptism, Voluntarism, and Politics.

Baptism, Voluntarism, and Politics

Posted by on June 6, 2007 15 comments

In my last few years of theological stumbling around, I’ve found myself becoming quite a bit more “ecumenical” than my younger evangelical self would once have been comfortable with.  And, of course any of you who know much about my interests, know that Hans Urs von Balthasar, and much of contemporary Catholic theology has become incredibly influential in my thinking. 

However, I still find myself to be, at the core, a free-church anabaptist.  At least of some sort.  Principally, I am an anabaptist in my beliefs about Christendom and specifically how the church must be an alternative culture in the midst of the nations in the world.  In this brief bit of theological rambling I want to look a bit at how our practice of baptism shapes and is shaped by how we undertstand the church in relationship to the world.

A comprehensive treatment of the logic of anabaptist baptism is found in Thomas Finger’s A Contemporary Anabaptist Theology, which is a very thorough and balanced historical and theological study of anabaptism. Lee Camp’s account of baptism in Mere Discipleship also shows the logic of anabaptist baptism in a very accesible way.  It was primarily because of the conflation of baptism and citizenship under Christendom that the anabaptists insisted on viewing baptism as an initiatory act, entered into in faith whereby one’s allegiance is given to God and his people (the church) over against other social formations. The practice of infant baptism essentially inscribed all persons at birth into the church by virtue of the fact that they were part of a nation with which the church was conflated. That is why the anabaptists felt compelled to reject it — because of its enmeshment with the Constantinian settlement.

Now, are there ways of practicing infant baptism that are not Constantinian? I certainly think so. Nor do I dismiss the legitimacy of infant baptism out of hand (leaving aside for a moment the discussion of biblical warrant).  However, I think the connection between baptism and discipleship is eroded when infant baptism becomes the standard practice.

Today, proponents of infant baptism strongly draw a correlation between baptism and circumcision in ancient Israel.  And that connection is, of course undeniable, at least on one level.  Namely, they are both signs of being included in the covenant community.  But the crucial question is how one comes to be included in the church versus how a child came to be included in biblical Israel. For you this answer should be obvious. We enter into the church through God’s act of justification by grace through faith. If entry into the church is based on justification by faith, it seems at best theological awkward to confer baptism on infants where personal faith and discipleship cannot become a factor in their inclusion in the church (except through their parents as Luther argued, though I don’t think this holds much water).

It seems to me that infant baptism can undercut the distinctiveness of the church as an alternative social reality because it renders church membership a function of a different social reality, either through the family or through the state. If one’s identity as a member of a “Christian nation” or a “Christian family” is enough to place one inside the church, it seems to me that the distinctive nature of the church’s social reality as a community created de novo by the work of the Spirit which transcends nation and family ends up getting eclipsed.

Finally, while infant baptism does have a long history in the tradition, the tradition is not unambiguous about the practice of baptism. There were standard practices of delaying baptism until death because of different medieval theologies of the impossibility of postbaptismal sin. None of this serves to refute or support infant baptism, but I do think we need to acknowledge the variety in the tradition on this topic.

And if cultural realities are factors in how we are to rightly embody our sacramental practices, the real question before us is what mode of baptism captures the essence of what is being “said” (vera visibli) in baptism? To my mind anabaptist baptism and the clear imagery contained therein of passing from one life and one social reality to another most rightly “says” the truth about what baptism is.  In administering baptism to believers who committ their lives to following Christ we say that there is indeed a break between our “former way of life” and our new life in Christ.  Our citizenship is transferred from Babylon to Jerusalem.  And none can be born in Jerusalem, we must be reborn as children of the Jerusalem from above.  Only then is she our mother.

Believer’s baptism is not about some sort of voluntarism, in which we get baptized because we made a choice to join a voluntary association of individuals.  It is about recognizing that Christ’s call to discipleship requires full allegiance and committment from the one who emerges from the waters.  Believer’s baptism is, in my view the most inherently and rightly polictical mode of practicing this sacrament.  It presents what is at the center of the Christian faith, that in Christ we die and rise again with him into the realm of his Lordship, his Kingdom.  The life we rise to with him is precisely the life of following him, of continuing to traverse the road from Jerusalem to Golgatha.  Baptism is indeed our induction  into the community of faith, but most centrally it is the stripping off of one mode of life – life in the flesh – and the putting on of a new life – life in the Spirit.  These considerations, in my view lend credibility the the tradition of believer’s or disciples baptism.  The politics of baptism must never be forgotten.  In baptism we die to the powers of Babylon and are reborn into the cessation movement of the Lamb. 

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