Christian Dogmatics: Volume 2

4. Baptism

4 Baptism We are canonically commanded to initiate into the church those whom the mission proclamation brings to penitence, by washing them in the triune name. To those who have been thus initiated, baptism promises the forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Spirit. The task of baptismal theology is to understand how baptism can be regeneration, that is, at once an audible and visible word that promises these gifts and the past fact to which such promises can appeal. The task of the church at the present moment is to recover the integrity of baptism. The task of believers is always to use their baptism. THE COMMAND For any missionary community, initiation must be the chief rite, and Chris­ tianity has always retained enough missionary self-consciousness to regard bap­ tism as the chief sacrament, or at least as the gateway to other sacraments.1 Moreover, baptism is the only sacrament confessed in the ecumenical creeds. The primal church apprehended a command to baptize, directed to themselves and to their successors, as a direct command of the risen Lord and as integral to the church's founding mandate. It is time to cite in full the passage in which this apprehension appears most explicitly: "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you" (Matt. 28:19-20). The pseudo-Markan parallel is close (Mark 16:15—16).2 Exegetes often regard these passages as retrojections of the church's self-consciousness, but if there were indeed appearances of the risen Lord, there is no reason the giving of this mandate cannot have been among their incidents. In any case, the New Testament would mandate baptism also without record­ ing these particular resurrection appearances. In all strands and strata of the New Testament witness, no distinction is conceived or conceivable between the church's doing its mission and people being baptized. Paul assumes that 315 1 0 / THE MEANS OF GRACE all believers come into the fellowship by baptism, including himself (Rom. 6:1-9; 1 Cor. 1:11-17; 10:1-12; 12:13). In Acts the very syntax is controlled by the supposition that to be converted, to enter the church, and to be baptized are all the same thing.5 And the same supposition is apparent wherever else in the New Testament the matter comes up (e.g., 1 John 2:18-27; Titus 3:5). We are commanded to baptize merely in that we take the mission command as directed also to us. This logic was established by the circumstances in which the primal church made "baptizing" its practice, which circumstances we must now briefly describe. What, after all, does "baptize" mean? The New Testament texts simply assume that all readers know what rite is referred to, and indeed in a way we do, insofar as the rite has been practiced continuously from then to now. But for exegesis of the texts, we need also more historical confirmation. Beyond reasonable doubt, the primal church adapted baptism from the practice of John the Baptist.4 John preached repentance, renewing the prophetic proc­ lamation of God's coming triumph with such immediacy that those convicted by him had only one remaining possibility: instant self-abandonment to the judgment of God. For such penitents, John provided a rite: he washed'them, exploiting the act's obvious symbolic possibilities. That he immersed them is not certain,' and that baptism must be by immersion is nowhere said in the New Testament. Jesus himself and probably some of his disciples had submitted to John's baptism. When Jesus' resurrection and the pentecostal experience of the Spirit launched the mission of the gospel, those granted faith by the apostolic proc­ lamation became penitents exactly in John's sense, though that was not all they became. The apostles welcomed these penitents with the same rite by which they (or some of them) had themselves repented. Thereby baptism became what it had not been for John: an initiation. The Christian community is a missionary community; and every such com­ munity, drawing people from outside itself into itself, accomplishes the transfer with some rite of passage. More specifically, the character of the gospel message is such that those who believe it are merely thereby recruited to be its messengers, drafted into the company from whom they have heard it...