WHAT IS BAPTISM?
Photo from Unsplash.
For many people, the service of baptism is the celebration of a new life, of a new little human born into a loving family. This is true even when the baptisee is grown-up, even when they have no blood relatives. Every baptism is the creation of a new human being, newly transformed: a new member of the family of the church. This is because baptism is the sacrament of conversion. At baptism we convert to Christianity, in the ordinary sense; more importantly, at baptism we are converted from one kind of human being to another. There is, true, some disagreement between Christians over whether baptism is the symptom or the cause of this conversion, but nearly all (Salvation Army and Quakers exempted) agree that it is fundamental to it.
To put it simply as I can, which is to say, without being diverted too far into what Christians mean when they talk about salvation, the gist is that Jesus entered creation in order to make a path to God with his own body. This was necessary because, Christians believe, something has gone badly wrong with creation in general and the human race in particular. This something is usually described as the Fall, and the bit that relates specifically to the human race is called Sin. This, emphatically, isn’t personal. “Sin” describes the general brokenness of human nature and our difficulty in relating well to ourselves, creation, everybody else and God. The beauty of Baptism is that it grafts the new Christian on to/into the identity and nature of Jesus so that she can become part of his divine life, escaping the brokenness of her own. This is what is often described as dying and rising with Christ, and as being in Christ.
This is more than just changing your allegiance, it is changing your very nature. Christianity teaches that when Jesus was raised from the dead he was raised as something new, something that hadn’t been seen before in all creation. When Christians are baptised, they become part of this revolutionary life that is born out of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This life is both the life that is promised to us in heaven and the life we should have had, had we not Fallen. The baptised Christian, therefore, has one foot, so to speak, in heaven. He is a micro-demonstration of the kingdom of heaven, of God’s intention for humanity.
Repentance
This is such a comprehensive remodelling of what it means to be human that it is not possible to do this to yourself. All Christians are agreed that lion’s share of the effort of conversion belongs with God. Nevertheless, the Christian must be active in choosing this new life and rejecting the old life, which was ruled by Sin (at least eventually, in the case of a baptised infant). This is very much a two-part activity — one does not sufficiently imply the other. In most baptism services, then, we see both push and pull.
By way of “pull”, it’s common for the new Christian to recite prayers and creeds that indicate she has her own conviction, her own desire to undergo this transformation. (This may be done on behalf of a young child, in those corners of the church where the burden of action is more on God-in-the-community than on the individual.) Somewhere, somehow, the new Christian will declare that she is turning to Christ, submitting to God, becoming part of the life of heaven. She will make some kind of categorical statement that she both believes and trusts in the promises of God.
Regarding “push,” the rejection of Sin, this is much more than just trying harder to be good. The new Christian is sloughing off one nature as well as taking on another. Often, he will be asked to express this change of life during the service, sometimes in very simple statement such as, “I repent of my sins.” This comprehensive rejection of his old identity is reminiscent of an exorcism, and you will often find language about the devil or Satan. Rather graphically, both spit and salt were once used to demonstrate this, but now only the oil remains, and that only in some churches. The use of oil dates back to the early centuries of the church when athletes were anointed to make them hard to grasp hold of. The new Christian, then, might still be anointed so that the devil, embodying the corruption of the Sin, cannot get hold of him. Thereafter, having escaped its grip, he is particularly protected against it.
This rejection and dedication is generally considered to be tough. In some traditions it’s prepared for by a period of fasting, retreat, pilgrimage, and other disciplines. The new Christian reflects on the influence Sin has had on her and on the particular pinch points she needs to watch if she’s to do her bit as a trailer for heaven. It is described as “repentance”, but this word in English usually fails to capture the double aspect of the activity implied by the word it translates, “metanoia,” (from the Greek) which means an about turn. In some cases the new Christian will physically be turned round (from facing the door to facing the altar, for example) to demonstrate this 360 degree turn.
The Water
In the Gospels (which were written in Greek), it is John the Baptist who first starts using this word metanoia. He was emphatic about the importance of a new start created by an about turn. He used the Jordan River, where the people of God first entered the holy land, and he’s baptising people in it after telling them to sort their lives out. This message segues nicely into that of Jesus and his disciples, so the infant church picked up the practice — and the word “baptism” — and added a great deal more significance to it. In their new Jesus-baptism the baptisee doesn’t just leave the old patterns of behaviour, but her old self, her old life.
This word “baptism,” coined around John’s activity, is a Greek word meaning to dunk. This means everybody agrees that baptism is a wet activity: you can’t really be said to have done it unless somebody has been dunked, or at the very least made damp. The water that is deployed helps underscore the new start theme. Human beings are almost invariably cheered up by water and like to play in it. It is refreshing, renewing, cleansing. The old life is washed away so that the new can begin. (She might put on a new, white, garment in order to make the point.) In the cultural vocabulary of John and Jesus was the mikvah (a practice continued by modern Jews), a ritual bath by which person could “wash off” different kinds of impurity. Among the new meaning brought to this by the infant church was the idea of washing off not only externally created impurity but internal: the impact of an individual’s participation in Sin.
There’s another layer to the symbolism of the water, brought to baptism by the church, relating to the Jesus-specific aspect of baptism. It draws upon the idea of dying and rising with Christ / being in Christ.
Water is dangerous. It’s a cliché to say that you can drown in a puddle. In the ancient world, when navigating deep waters was a dangerous and potentially fatal endeavour, water was emphatically dangerous. It represented chaos and death. That Jonah story? Chaos and death (and a whale). To enter the waters of baptism is to step down into death itself, to be unmade. Death, remember, is one of the consequences of the Fall, one of the major symptoms of Sin. Remember, too, that Jesus died. All four gospels go out of their way to emphasise this, to emphasise the literal, biological fact that Jesus died, and died on purpose. This death, then, in the waters of baptism, is a stepping into the death of Jesus, with all its saving significance, and becoming part of it, of him.
Then there’s life. The decidedly useful paradox of water is that it is not only fatal in some circumstances, it is also utterly necessary to life. The waters of baptism, then, are the waters of birth, life, revitalisation. The Christian who has just died with Christ in the waters of death and chaos now rises with him into new life. This is the transformation from the brokenness of the post-Fall creation to the wholeness that was always intended for us, and which will be completed in heaven: life in Christ.
The Body of Christ
Because, by baptism, all Christians share this life — the life and character of Jesus-who-is-God — there is, by baptism, a new kind of community formed which is greater than the sum of its parts. This heavenly life is something that not only transforms each Christian into a new kind of human being, but into the same being: the Body of Christ, a.k.a. The Church. This essential unity is expressed in a number of ways during the baptism service, for example most traditions will have the congregation speak words of welcome to the new Christian and will emphasise the importance of the gathered community being present for the initiation of a new Christian. Very often — and with ancient pedigree — the service of baptism is combined with the service of the Eucharist (a.k.a. the Mass/Lord’s Supper/Holy Communion). Here the Body of Christ (i.e. those Christians who have been baptised into the life and identity of Christ) eat the Body of Christ (i.e. the bread Jesus asks us to be eaten in remembrance of him, which he describes as his body), the food of heaven.
While this corporate identity is important for all Christians, for some it has a greater impact on their practice than others. Those churches which are more sacramental in their thinking, tend to have a sense of God-in-Community which means that the gathered church is drawn into the life of God, together, closer even than a partner in a dance. In this light one person can represent the whole (a priest, or bishop), but also the community can be responsible for an individual, which is why baptising otherwise incapable infants makes sense to them.
This unity in diversity, however it’s understood, is a further demonstration of the way the baptised Christian demonstrates something important about heaven. Because God is also unity-in-diversity (the Trinity) then a community which draws its life from God must demonstrate similar properties. This is why the litmus test of Christian baptism that it is done “in the name of” the Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. (This is how it is described at the end of Matthew’s gospel.) The “family” of the church mirrors the Trinity.
The Holy Spirit
Everyone that baptises also agrees that baptism is an activity of the Holy Spirit. However, since the Holy Spirit is harder to pin down than other persons in the Trinity the precise activity of this divine agent is a lot more contentious than the symbolism of water. Again, in those passages in the New Testament that describe baptism it’s very clear that the Holy Spirit is involved, but after centuries of Europeans baptising pretty much everybody, the expectation of what that might look like became considerably more humdrum.
In some corners of the church, then, the activity of the Holy Spirit became something described and discerned by material human activity, because she is most easily discerned in the activity the Body of Christ, God-in-Community. She is invoked to inhabit the water, she is demonstrated by the special authority of the Bishop, she is illustrated with “charismatic” oil (a different oil than the oil of exorcism I mentioned earlier). In these same corners, it is often (but not always) assumed that infants are a bit small and lack sufficient agency for the Holy Spirit, in which case all of this Spirit talk is postponed until the child is old enough, in a second rite called confirmation.
In other corners, however, the Holy Spirit is understood to be principally demonstrated in the life and witness of the new Christian. These churches will often expect a demonstration of this by means of testimony, lifestyle change and sometimes by the display of charismatic gifts. These corners, too, also tend to assume that infants lack sufficient agency, but in this case they instead postpone the whole rite until the child is old enough to demonstrate the presence of the Holy Spirit in his life.
Either way, just as the baptised Christian has become part of the life of Jesus, so the Holy Spirit is considered to become active in her, enabling her to be, like the Holy Spirit, an agent of God’s promises. It is through the Holy Spirit that the transformed human transforms her world.
Conclusion
Thus, baptism is no small thing. In those churches that think sacramentally, it is the first sacrament, the first change that needs to take place before the new Christian is able to eat the food of the heaven (a.k.a. the Eucharist/Holy Communion/the Lord’s Supper/the Mass). In the churches that have more than two sacraments, the rest all hang on this baptised identity. Baptism is a transformation into a new identity in community, sharing the life of heaven.
It’s also a one-way transformation. The change brought about by baptism is so fundamental that it cannot be undone or redone. It is possible that baptised person might stop living as though they were little windows to heaven, just as a butterfly might insist on walking everywhere, but there is no going back into the chrysalis. Even in those churches that might conduct something described as “re-baptism,” it’s usually because the original baptism is considered somehow invalid or insufficient. Baptism is the business of conversion from one reality to another; it is the breaking in of heaven to our broken world. It is the demonstration of the hope of the gospel.
