Baptism

A Guide to Life from Death

Peter J. Leithart

• Publisher: Lexham Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781683594642
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Rituals & Practice

You've been baptized. But do you understand what it means? Baptism is the doorway into membership in the church. It's a public declaration of the washing away of our sin and the beginning of our new life in Christ. But the sacrament that is meant to unite us is often a spring of division instead. All Christians use water to baptize. All invoke the triune name. Beyond that, there's little consensus. Talk about baptism and you're immediately plunged into arguments. Whom should we baptize? What does baptism do? Why even do it at all?Peter Leithart reunifies a church divided by baptism. He recovers the baptismal imagination of the Bible, explaining how baptism works according to Scripture. Then, in conversation with Christian tradition, he shows why baptism is something worth recovering and worth agreeing on.

I

FAMILY, BODY, TEMPLE

“Worthy to inherit your promise of eternal life.”

ALMIGHTY AND ETERNAL GOD

Talk about baptism, and you’re immediately plunged into arguments. Whom should we baptize—professing converts or infants? How should we baptize—by immersion, pouring, or sprinkling? Why do we baptize—as a sign of God’s claim or as a convert’s public confession of faith? What does baptism do—nothing, something, everything? If it does something, how long does it last—for a moment, forever?1

All Christians use water to baptize. All invoke the Triune name. Beyond that, there’s little consensus. Quarrels over baptism are a travesty. The church has one baptism, as it is one body with one Spirit, one Lord, one hope, one faith, and one Father (Eph 4:4–6). Yet God’s sign of unity is a spring of division. We’re Corinthians, acting as if we were baptized into the name of Thomas or Calvin or Luther or John Piper (1 Cor 1:10–18). Paul’s outrage echoes down the centuries: “Is Christ divided?”

This book is a small contribution to the effort to reunite a church divided by baptism. My approach is oblique. I don’t offer any nice knock-down arguments. As currently framed, the controversies are insoluble anyway. To arrive at unity, we need to recover the baptismal imagination of earlier generations. We need to start at the foundation and work our way up.

The building blocks of that foundation are neatly laid out by Luther’s Great Flood Prayer, which I’ve long used whenever I perform a baptism:

Almighty and eternal God, who through the flood, according to your righteous judgment, condemned the unfaithful world, and according to your great mercy, saved faithful Noah, even eight persons, and has drowned hard-hearted Pharaoh with all his army in the Red Sea, and has led your people Israel dry through it, thereby prefiguring this bath of your holy baptism, and through the baptism of your dear child, our Lord Jesus Christ, has sanctified and set apart the Jordan and all water for a saving flood, and an ample washing away of sins: we pray that through your same infinite mercy you would graciously look down upon this your child, and bless her with a right faith in the spirit, so that through this saving flood all that was born in her from Adam and all which she has added thereto might be drowned and submerged; and that she may be separated from the unfaithful, and preserved in the holy ark of Christendom dry and safe, and may be ever fervent in spirit and joyful in hope to serve your name, so that she with all the faithful may be worthy to inherit your promise of eternal life, through Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.2

For biblical breadth, Luther’s prayer is hard to match. He links baptism with Adam’s sin, the flood, the exodus, and Jesus’ baptism.3 According to Luther, baptism does an awful lot: it separates us from the unfaithful and preserves us in the church; it washes, delivers, judges, and saves.

Some Christians will be dismayed at the power Luther attributes to baptism, taking it as evidence that the great German Reformer didn’t quite purge Catholicism from his soul. But Luther’s prayer expresses the mainstream convictions of two millennia of Christian tradition. Western Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and many Protestants say exactly these things about baptism.

The church says these things because Scripture does. The Bible speaks of baptism as an effective rite: baptism brands us with the Triune name (Matt 28:18–20); washes sin (Acts 2:38a); confers the Spirit (Acts 2:39b); grafts us into Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection (Rom 6:1–14); justifies (Rom 6:7); sanctifies (1 Cor 6:11); joins us with the Spirit-filled body (1 Cor 12:12–13); clothes us with Christ (Gal 3:27–29); regenerates (Titus 3:5); and saves (1 Pet 3:21). By baptism, we are anointed as priests and kings and join the Pentecostal company of prophets (Acts 2:15–21, 37–42). Baptized into one name, we become members of one another (1 Cor 1:10–18; Eph 4:4–6). The Bible never portrays baptism as a picture of some more important event that happens without baptism. What baptism pictures happens—at baptism. Baptism works.

If we’re uncomfortable with what Christians have said about baptism, it’s because we don’t share their convictions about the church. Nearly all errors and confusions about baptism are errors and confusions about the church. At the outset, let me lay out three basic beliefs that are implicit in Luther’s prayer and provide the structural support for our study of baptism.4

First, human beings are created as social beings. If we are saved as humans, we must be saved as social creatures. Salvation must take form as a saved society, a community delivered from the wounds of ambition, fear, hatred, envy, and greed. The church is the community God has delivered, and continues to deliver, from evil desires, habits, and imaginations, as we make our way to a final deliverance. Sinners are out of tune with God, creation, and one another. The church is humanity restored to harmony. The church is salvation in social form.

The New Testament describes the church as the family of the Father, the body of the incarnate Son, the temple of the Holy Spirit. These descriptions are simply true. We members of the church are—without any ifs, ands, or buts—sons and daughters of our heavenly Father, objects of his loving care and discipline. Jesus is no longer present in his personal body, but the church is—without any ifs, ands, or buts—his corporate body. Jesus is still available to the world through the church. Jesus and the church form one thing—“Christ” (1 Cor 12:12), what Augustine called “the whole Christ” (Latin, totus Christus). Jesus acts through us by his Spirit, making us his hands, feet, eyes, ears, and heart. The Spirit animates a living temple in which every member—without any ifs, ands, or buts—is a living stone. This is most certainly true.

Some children abandon their Father. Fruitless branches are pruned from the vine. Stubborn sinners so grieve the Spirit that he abandons them. They betray as children, atrophy as organs of the body, choose death as living stones of the temple. The mystifying tragedy of such traitors doesn’t change the fact that they once communed with the Triune God.

Second, by his resurrection and ascension Jesus burst through death into the life of the age to come. He’s the last Adam, clothed with eternal glory, overflowing with life. Because the church is the body of the last Adam, she shares the life of Jesus. Eternal life erupts into the world through the church. “Whoever is in Christ, behold a new creation!” Paul says (2 Cor 5:17, my translation). By the Spirit, the church is “in Christ.” We have not yet entered fully into the new creation; we strain with the Spirit for creation’s liberation from its bondage to decay. Yet, even now, filled with the Spirit of Jesus, the pledge of our inheritance (Eph 1:14), the church is a whisper of final harmony in a dissonant world.

We think the unalterable past enslaves us, but the gospel scrambles the relation of past and future. Our future isn’t determined by the fall of Adam or the sins of our past. In Christ, God has opened a future determined solely by his promises. On pilgrimage toward new Jerusalem, we already taste the delights of the destination. We are who God’s word says we are. We are now who we will be.

Third, followers of Jesus participate in rites, signs, and sacraments.5 Communion with the Triune God doesn’t take place primarily in a hermit’s cell, in the inner chambers of the heart, or in a flight above the sky. Communion takes place in public, communal rituals. The church is a human (and divine) society, and, as Augustine said, every society is knit together by signs.6 Of course, God can save people without baptism or the Lord’s Supper,7 but the Christian life normally revolves around liturgical rites or signs—baptism, Eucharist, common prayer, confession and absolution, song, reading and hearing Scripture. Someone who says he follows Jesus but never bathes in baptism or eats at the Lord’s Table isn’t a member of Christ’s body. He’s not a Christian, no matter what he says. Christians get a taste of the life to come in the places God designates through the words, liturgies, signs, and rites of the whole Christ. Observe a baptism, a sermon, a Eucharist, and you’re seeing human beings sharing the life of new creation, which is the very life of God.

These three beliefs hang together. The church is the family of the Father, the body of the Son, and the temple of the Spirit because it shares in the new creation that has begun in Jesus. And the church shares in that new creation by hearing the word, confessing sin, assembling at the Lord’s Table, passing through the waters of baptism.

Keep this in mind as we move ahead. Baptism is the doorway into membership in the church. Whenever I say, “Baptism does X,” remember what I’ve said about the church. Big things happen at baptism, but baptism’s energy doesn’t sputter to a halt as soon as we dry off. Baptism is powerful because it places us in the church where pastors, friends, and mentors train us and pray for us—where God corrects and feeds us by his word at his table. Baptism does what it does because Jesus authorizes it. Baptism works because the church works, and the church works because it’s the body of Christ, enlivened by the Spirit.

If the church is what the New Testament says it is and if baptism is the doorway to the church, then certain things necessarily follow: baptism is adoption into the Father’s family, union with Christ in his body, installation as a living stone in the temple of the Spirit. If the church is what the New Testament claims, baptism gives us a share in the resurrection life of the Son and his Spirit. If the church is as the New Testament describes it, baptism is the gift of a future, propelling us toward the unending joys of a new heaven and a new earth. It is indeed, a “saving flood.”

II

RITES OLD AND NEW

“Prefiguring this bath of your holy baptism.”

WHO THROUGH THE FLOOD, ACCORDING TO YOUR RIGHTEOUS JUDGMENT, CONDEMNED THE UNFAITHFUL WORLD, AND ACCORDING TO YOUR GREAT MERCY, SAVED FAITHFUL NOAH, EVEN EIGHT PERSONS

Baptism is a sign. We grasp what it signifies when we locate baptism in the flow of biblical history. If we want to renew our baptismal imagination, we need to be immersed in Scripture.

The apostles read the Old Testament as a preview of Jesus, full of blurry snapshots of the coming Savior. Jesus is the last Adam (Rom 5:12–21). He’s the seed of Abraham, a resurrected Isaac (Heb 11:17–19), the living temple of God (John 1:14; 2:13–22), the son of David (Rom 1:1–4), a prophet like Moses who leads his people in a new exodus from the Egypt of sin and death (Luke 9:31; Acts 3:22; 7:37). Jesus is the key to all the puzzling riddles of the Old Testament. The second-century Greek bishop Irenaeus used a beautiful image to explain this: the Old Testament contains the fragments of a mosaic; when you put all the pieces together, the mosaic portrays the face of a handsome prince, Jesus, the Prince of Peace.8 The church fathers called the Old Testament fragments “types” (from the Greek, typoi) and saw Jesus as the fulfillment or “antitype” that pulled all the pieces together.9

This has everything to do with baptism. Jesus’ baptism is the primary baptism. In a sense, it is the one and only baptism. Every other baptism unites us to the baptism of Jesus. That’s why the apostles found blurry snapshots of baptism in the Old Testament, along with snapshots of Jesus. Like Jesus himself, baptism gathers together all the great events and characters of the Bible. Baptism makes us living epistles of God, full of his living words.

Baptism is the reality prefigured by the waters of creation and Eden, Noah’s flood (1 Pet 3:18–22), and Israel’s exodus through the sea (1 Cor 10:1–5). The church fathers found types of baptism in Joshua’s river-passage into Canaan, Elijah’s drenched sacrifice, Elisha’s floating axe head, the cleansing of the Syrian commander Naaman, and Jesus’ healing of the lame man at Bethsaida and of the man born blind.10 Jesus arranges all the shiny fragments of the mosaic into a beautiful picture. When we’re baptized to become members of the “whole Christ,” all the pieces of Jesus’ portrait become part of our portrait. All the types that prefigure Jesus also prefigure the baptized.

Augustine explains the distinction between the old and new covenants with a grammatical illustration. Using the future tense, we say, “The Messiah will be raised.” In the perfect tense, we say, “The Messiah has been raised.” The root word is identical; the two phrases refer to the same reality. In Latin, the ending is the only thing that changes, but that tiny alteration of form generates a momentous shift in meaning, the difference between “I hope for a new life” and “I’ve started a new life.”11

Biblical rites are like root words of a language. All of them share a common meaning. All of them signify God’s promises, which are fulfilled in Jesus. Jesus is the meaning of every biblical ritual, but the form of the rituals varies with the times. As a future-tense rite, circumcision signified Israel’s hope for the Messiah’s advent and triumph. As a present-tense sign, baptism announces the Messiah has come. Jesus is the word of promise, conjugated by the rites of Israel and the church.

Baptism is a present-tense sign of the gospel, the good news that Irenaeus’s prince has arrived in the world. And so baptism makes a claim about the world. It tells us we don’t live in the world of Abraham, Moses, David, or Jeremiah. We live in a new world and a new time, the world of King Jesus, who rules in the age we call AD (Anno Domini, “Year of our Lord”). The mere fact that Christian baptism cascades over planet Earth tells us something has happened to the world, the happening we call Jesus. Baptism shouts, “The time is fulfilled! The kingdom has come!” It tells us that Jesus and the Spirit have completed, and are completing, all that the Father promised (2 Cor 1:20–22), restoring the world t...