Paul on Baptism

Nicholas Taylor

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780334054764
• eBook ISBN: 9780334054788
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Studi biblici

Drawing on recent scholarship, this book examines Paul's theology of baptism ad explores the implications of this reconstruction for contemporary issues of baptismal practice, pastoral care and mission.

1

Paul in Context

Saul, later known as Paul, was a devout Jew whose convictions as a Pharisee led him into vigorous opposition to the early Christian movement. After a radical conversion experience, he became at least as vigorous an apostle of Christianity, particularly among the non-Jewish nations, conveniently and collectively known as gentiles (from the Greek gentes, nations). During two decades and more of evangelization, Paul established churches in several cities in provinces of the Roman Empire that now lie within the modern countries of Greece and Turkey. It was in his continuing pastoral oversight of these churches that Paul wrote most of the letters bearing his name, which now form part of the Christian New Testament.1 The exceptions are Romans and Colossians, which are addressed to churches Paul had not himself founded. These two letters apparently represent Paul’s first direct communication with the Christian communities in Rome and Colossae. Letters such as Galatians and 1 and 2 Corinthians are not Paul’s first communication with the churches addressed, but supplement his previous teaching in the light of new circumstances that had arisen in those communities. In the case of Corinth, the letters follow up not merely Paul’s mission preaching and initial teaching to his converts but also return visits Paul had made to Corinth and previous written and oral communications, alluded to in the canonical letters, but which we no longer have.

The Christians who first read letters such as Galatians or 1 Corinthians, or heard them read aloud in meetings of the church, would previously have heard Paul’s mission preaching, and been converted through it; the exceptions, of course, would have been any converts made by the church subsequent to Paul’s departure. We can nevertheless assume that recipients of Paul’s letters had, either directly or indirectly through the agency of the church, previously received his initial teaching to his new converts, and its continuation for as long as Paul and his companions remained in that particular place. In some cities, such as Corinth, this may have been for a period of a year or more (Acts 18.1–18). In others, such as Thessalonica, Paul’s mission was limited to a matter of weeks on account of local hostility (Acts 17.1–10). Even in the latter case, the recipients of these letters were not strangers to Paul but communities who had heard his oral preaching and teaching and been formed by them into a church, and had received directly from him the traditions concerning the gospel (cf. 1 Cor. 15.1–7), and instruction concerning Christian life. The letters continue an established and dynamic relationship between Paul and his churches, and therefore build on previous knowledge of Paul and his theology. As the recipients of the letters, members of these communities were familiar with the specific pastoral situations Paul is addressing, and he therefore does not need to describe them in detail. For our purposes it would of course have been very useful if Paul had done precisely this. We would then have been able to see more clearly how he applies Christian teaching to specific issues, and have gained some insight into precisely how doctrines and principles were brought to bear upon practical pastoral questions. As it is, however, we need to work with the material that is available to us: the letters, texts separated in time, space and culture from the contexts to which they were originally addressed. This gives us the responsibility for working out how we apply Christian doctrine as contained in the New Testament to the life of the Church today.

While the letters form part of a continuing pastoral relationship between Paul and the churches he had founded, for us today they are all that remains of his teaching. Nevertheless, the letters have acquired an authority for Christians of all time by virtue of their inclusion in the New Testament. They are also frequently cited, often referring to Paul simply as ‘the apostle’, by the church fathers of the second and subsequent centuries, as Christian doctrine was being debated and defined. If we are to begin to understand Paul’s theology, and what it means for Christians living in the twenty-first century, we need first to understand so far as possible the situations to which the letters were originally addressed. Many specific details will always be beyond our grasp, but the process of attempted reconstruction can in itself be informative. The more we can bring alive the situations in which the first Christians lived, the more we can understand the teaching they received from Paul.

The churches Paul established were located in cities, many of them seaports and trading centres, linked by Mediterranean sailing routes and by the network of roads built by the Romans throughout their vast empire. The dominant culture in this area is known as Hellenism, the Greek system of beliefs, values and customs that had been superimposed on the other cultures of the region from the time of Alexander the Great (c.330 bc), and even earlier in those areas to which the Greek city states had extended their influence eastwards in competition with the Persian Empire. For people living in the areas we now call the Middle East, Hellenism was an imperial culture, akin to the European cultures that have been superimposed on African societies during the past centuries, and on South American cultures for much longer. By the time of Paul, Hellenism had been the dominant culture for a period much longer than that of European dominance in Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and of approximately equal duration to the period of Roman rule in Britain during the first centuries of this era. In urban areas especially, Middle Eastern societies may have become more thoroughly Hellenized than many modern African and Asian societies have become Westernized.

Hellenization, like Westernization, did not mean that local cultures were completely eradicated or absorbed into the dominant culture; on the contrary, a coalescence of cultures gradually took place, so that distinctive local customs, languages, beliefs and values persisted within and alongside the dominant Hellenism. In cities, many of which had large and diverse immigrant communities, much more complex processes of cultural contact, including both assimilation and conflict, took place within the wider phenomenon of Hellenism. Some cultures and belief systems were more resistant than others to assimilation into the dominant culture, and this was particularly true of Judaism. The Jews’ belief in the one true God distinguished them from other nations of the region, most of whom worshipped many deities and easily identified their own gods and goddesses with those of Greece and Rome. Jews, on the other hand, needed to negotiate their coexistence with their neighbours in Hellenistic societies. While some sought to demonstrate an affinity to philosophical schools that articulated monotheistic ideas, the majority accommodated themselves to their surrounding societies as the circumstances permitted. While some Jews living in diaspora undoubtedly assimilated to Hellenistic cults and culture in ways that would have outraged their compatriots in Judaea, others found ways to preserve and promote Jewish identity, way of life and forms of worship in alien places. Not only were vibrant communities established in many places but these Jewish communities attracted adherents to their worship and way of life from among their gentile neighbours. Some undoubtedly converted fully to Judaism, the males among them undergoing circumcision as a sign of their incorporation into God’s covenant with Abraham. But the majority would have remained on the periphery of the Jewish communities, adopting some beliefs and customs but retaining their inherited identity and commitments also. Gentiles such as these would have been among the first to hear the Christian gospel proclaimed. One of Paul’s principal achievements was to find a way gentile Christians could remain within their inherited nations and cultures while accepting all that was essential to the gospel, including the Christian claim to Abraham’s inheritance. His teaching on Baptism, as we shall see, was an important aspect of this.

The way human beings understand themselves is a product of their culture and environment. The modern Western world emphasizes the human being as an individual, a self-sufficient and autonomous entity with inalienable rights in society. We can easily recognize that this has influenced many contemporary understandings of Baptism, including such notions as ‘believers’ Baptism’, which depend on a conception of personal conversion, a personal faith and a personal saviour; ‘a personal relationship with God’ as it is sometimes expressed, with ‘personal’ understood to mean ‘individual’. It is in such individualistic cultural contexts that questions might be raised about the propriety of parents’ entering their children into the lifelong Christian commitment symbolized by Baptism. The society in which Paul lived perceived the human being in a very different way. ‘Personal’ did not mean ‘individual’. The individual was not understood as autonomous and self-sufficient but as a dependent and integral part of a community, and in particular of the family or household into which he or she was born or was transferred through marriage, employment or sale as a slave. To be was to belong, to be integrated, to be identified as a member of a family or household and of the wider society of which the household was an integral social and economic unit. Anthropologists have termed this phenomenon dyadism.2 Common identity and association were therefore much more important than individual identity and autonomy in all aspects of life, including activities that might be classified as ‘religion’ in modern societies. The African concept of ubuntu may well approximate the ancient sense of identity and belonging more closely than do modern Western individualistic notions of personhood.

Dyadism has considerable significance for understanding early Christian teaching about Baptism, including that of Paul. Individuals’ self-understanding, and the ways they were perceived by others, were fundamentally different from modern individualist notions of identity. People were defined by membership of groups and not in terms of their own individual and particular characteristics or qualities. Characteristics perceived in people were regarded as having been derived from and as reflecting the group to which they belonged and from which they derived their identity. A Christian was therefore someone who belonged to a Christian group, a church. Belonging to a church meant accepting the doctrines and observing the customs of that particular group, and reflecting these in the wider society. The same would apply to membership of any other group. In other words, to be a Christian in the world of Paul was primarily a matter of belonging, and only secondarily and consequently of believing in the sense of giving intellectual assent to a particular set of doctrines. Believing, in fact, means far more in the biblical sense than in modern usage. The Greek verb pisteuo, commonly rendered into English as ‘I believe’, derives from the same root as the noun pistis, meaning ‘faith’. In English, ‘faith’ has a wider semantic range than ‘belief’ and entails commitment as well as intellectual assent. This applies also, and more emphatically, to the Greek pisteuo and pistis. To believe in the biblical sense means not merely to acknowledge the truth of certain teachings but to embody them through belonging to the community that represents those teachings, and through living in accordance therewith. For the early Christians, faith was a matter of living out Christian doctrine, complying with a way of life defined by the Church, and not a matter of adopting certain opinions. This has significant implications for our understanding of Paul’s teaching on Baptism, as we shall see.

The basic unit of society in the cities of the Graeco-Roman world was the family or household, oikos or oikia in Greek, domus in Latin. The notion of family is quite unlike the Western nuclear family or, for that matter, the African extended family. It is not defined by biological kinship at all but by the relationship of dependence and subordination between its members and the head or patron of the household. This personage was known as the oikodespotes in Greek or paterfamilias in Latin. As well as the biological family of the head, the household included any slaves, servants, clients and any other retainers directly or indirectly dependent upon the patron. Any business interests of the head were an activity of the household, which accordingly embraced all persons engaged in the business, whatever their status and role and however geographically distant from the residence of their patron they might be located.

A household did not necessarily occupy a...

Table of contents

• Paul on Baptism
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Paul in Context
• 2 Baptism in the Pauline Letters
• 3 The Practice of Baptism in the Pauline Churches
• 4 Pauline Baptism and Contemporary Issues
• Concluding Remarks
• References and Further Reading