The Sign of the Gospel: Toward an Evangelical Doctrine of Infant Baptism after Karl Barth by W. Travis McMaken (review)

In The Sign of the Gospel, W. Travis McMaken (assistant professor of religion at Linwood University) demonstrates that Barth’s mature doctrine of baptism is deeply consistent with his broader theology, while also proposing an alternate doctrine of baptism that is rooted in Barth’s broader theology but allows for the legitimacy of infant baptism. McMaken’s hope is that his proposal would be attractive to credobaptists and might thereby contribute to moving beyond the current ecumenical impasse concerning baptismal practice.

McMaken is a perceptive reader of Barth, deftly drawing out the connections between Barth’s doctrine of baptism and the earlier volumes of his Church Dogmatics. He sets the stage for his discussion of Church Dogmatics iv/4 by showing how Barth’s doctrine of election shapes his soteriology and his understanding of role of the community in the covenant of grace in ways that undercut traditional sacramental and covenantal arguments for infant baptism. Noting that criticisms of Barth’s exegesis in cd iv/4 have been insufficiently developed, two significant exegetical excurses accompany his argument.

In his explication of cd iv/4, McMaken fleshes out Barth’s concise discussion of both Spirit baptism and water baptism through exploration of sections from previous volumes of the Church Dogmatics. He argues that Barth holds together the divine and human sides of the foundation of the Christian life, countering recent criticisms that Barth’s soteriology leaves no room for genuine historical contingency and that Barth undermines both the significance of human response and the work of the Spirit. McMaken argues that Barth’s understanding of humanity as God’s covenant partner is at the root of his ethical interpretation of baptism as “the decisive event in which one awakened to faith in Spirit baptism takes up the task of Christian vocation,” this task being that of bearing witness to Christ (196, 199). Barth’s rejection of infant baptism follows from the inability of infants to take up the task of witness.

McMaken responds most fully to concerns about dualism in Barth in the context of his constructive proposal. His perceptiveness and creativity as an interpreter of Barth is on full display in his suggestion that the concept of “paradoxical identity” offers an alternative to either instrumentalist or parallelist notions of the relationship between divine and human activity that clarifies elements of Barth’s thought that have been misconstrued by many interpreters.

Retaining Barth’s conception of baptism as an ethical act, McMaken’s key move is to shift the agency in baptism away from the baptizand to that of the baptizing community. He argues that this shift accords with New Testament emphasis on the role of the community and also corresponds to Barth’s discussion of the mediate and mediating role of the community in his doctrine of election. Rejecting Barth’s argument that the baptism of Jesus is the basis for Christian baptism, he draws on Matthew 28 to argue that baptism is a holistic mode of gospel proclamation that accompanies teaching, the church’s instructional mode of proclamation. Whether a person is baptized as an infant or an adult, baptism is a concrete event in a person’s history that “confronts those baptized with the message that they were baptized in Jesus Christ’s baptism, died in his death, and were raised in his resurrection,” and calls them to “walk in newness of life” (233-234).

McMaken creatively draws out the themes of vocation and witness in Barth to propose an understanding of baptism as gospel proclamation. But does his description of the community’s role in baptism as passive in Barth do justice to Barth’s emphasis on baptism as the conversion of both candidate and community acting in concert (cd iv/4, 152, 161)? And has McMaken done justice to the New Testament accounts of...