The Borders of Baptism

Identities, Allegiances, and the Church

Michael L. Budde

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781610971355
  9781498213486
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621892892
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

It's a simple claim, really - that for Christians, "being a Christian" should be their primary allegiance and identity. For those who proclaim Jesus as Lord, this identity should supersede all others, and this loyalty should trump all lesser ones. It may be a simple claim, but it is a controversial one for many people, Christians and non-Christians alike. The Borders of Baptism uses the idea of solidarity among Christians as a lens through which to view politics, economics, and culture. It offers Christians a fresh perspective capable of moving beyond sterile and dead-end debates typical of debates on issues ranging from immigration and race to war, peace, and globalization. The Borders of Baptism invites Christians of all traditions to reflect on the theological and political implications of first "being a Christian" in a world of rival loyalties. It invites readers to see what it might mean to be members of a community broader than the largest nation-state; more pluralistic than any culture in the world; more deeply rooted in the lives of the poor and marginalized than any revolutionary movement; and more capable of exemplifying the notion of ;e pluribus unum' than any empire past, present, or future.

Part I

Introductory Concepts on Ecclesial Solidarity

chapter 1

Ad Extra: Ecclesial Solidarity and Other Allegiances

This book outlines an important concept—what I call “ecclesial solidarity”—that must be reclaimed and deepened if the Christian Church is to continue serving the Kingdom of God in our day. By “ecclesial solidarity” I mean the conviction that “being a Christian” is one’s primary and formative loyalty, the one that contextualizes and defines the legitimacy of other claimants on allegiance and conscience—those of class, nationality, and state, for example.

Ecclesial solidarity means that the welfare of one’s brothers and sisters in Christ makes special claims on one’s affections, resources, and priorities. It means that the unity of the churches in visible and tangible ways is a key expression of Christian conviction and vocation, even in the face of centrifugal pressures and the demands of lesser, more partial communities and ideologies. It means that processes of Christian discernment and worship cross the divides of patriotism and other types of tribalism, making one’s coreligionists the “to whom” we owe service, love and mutual support.

Ecclesial solidarity is not in conflict with the love and service that Christians owe their proximate neighbors, those with whom they live and work and interact on a regular basis. Taking care of one’s non-local relatives need not, after all, invariably oppress one’s next-door neighbors or work colleagues. It does, however, prohibit Christians from harming their non-local relatives on the assumption that one’s neighbors always and inevitably present morally determinative claims on Christian allegiance, priorities, and actions.

When Christians take ecclesial solidarity as their starting point for discernment—political, economic, liturgical, and otherwise—it makes them members of a community broader than the largest nation-state, more pluralistic than any culture in the world, more deeply rooted in the lives of the poor and marginalized than any revolutionary movement, more capable of exemplifying the notion of “E pluribus unum” than any empire past, present, or future. Seeing oneself as a member of the worldwide body of Christ invites communities to join their local stories to other stories of sin and redemption, sacrifice and martyrdom, rebellion and forgiveness unlike any other on offer via allegiance to one’s tribe, gendered movements, or class fragment.

Ecclesial solidarity is not a bogus cosmopolitanism that seeks to escape the local and the particular by recourse to an abstract or idealized “world citizenship.” It is emphatically not part of a putative “clash of civilizations,” drawing Christians together in order to wage war (literal or otherwise) against Muslims, Hindus, or secularists. It is not a transnational political party or diaspora political force, orchestrating political takeovers or seeking power in various national governments. Ecclesial solidarity is not a statement that God loves Christians more than other people, that Christians are better than other people, or that God only works through the Christian community.

Properly conceived and practiced, ecclesial solidarity is not a straightjacketed homogenization of faith, nor an imposition of power that denies the integrity of the local church. To the contrary, the absence of ecclesial solidarity across national, ethnic, and other divides has allowed pathologies to fester within churches north and south; the integrity and mission of the churches require the local and universal to exist in a dialectical interplay of creativity and correction.

The fallout from the existing subordination of Christianity to other allegiances, loyalties, and identities is widespread, scandalous, and lethal. That it is no longer noteworthy nor even noticed—when Christians kill one another in service to the claims of state, ethnicity, or ideology—itself is the most damning indictment of Christianity in the modern era. How can Christians be good news to the world, in what ways can they presume to be a foretaste of the peaceful recuperation of creation promised by God, when their slaughter of one another is so routine as to be beneath comment? World War I is described as interstate rivalry run amok, not the industrial butchering by Christians of one another; Rwanda symbolizes the ugliness of ethnic conflict rather than Catholics massacring Catholics; the U.S. wars in Central America are charged to the Cold War account instead of Christians in the United States abetting the killing of Nicaraguan, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan Christians by one another. That no one describes these events as a scandal to the gospel, a cruel inversion of the unity of the body of Christ, is among the most embarrassing charges against contemporary Christianity.

The Way and the Way Not Taken

That the idea of ecclesial solidarity strikes contemporary Christians and others as an idea both foreign and disturbing testifies to the effectiveness of the modern project to subordinate and domesticate Christianity. For the past five hundred years, political and economic leaders have worked to undermine Christian unity and fragment the Church in the interests of nationalism, capitalism, and individualism. At the same time, the now-fragmented parts of Christianity—its ideas and institutions, liturgy and laity—have been enlisted as legitimation and cultural cement in service to the radical political, economic, and cultural transformations of modernity. So effective have these processes been that most Christians are frightened by what should have been part of their ecclesial life all along; those large parts of the Christian story (in Scripture, theology, and church history) in which something like ecclesial solidarity has existed have been ignored, rewritten, or caricatured.

Scripture scholars in recent decades have reminded us that just as Israel was created by Yahweh to be a contrast society set apart to instruct and edify the other nations of the world, so did the followers of Jesus see themselves in relation to the rest of the world.

The disciples of Jesus, those called out from the nations, leave their old identities and allegiances behind by being baptized into the Way of Christ. The claims of the biological family are qualified by bonds to one’s brothers and sisters in Christ; markers of status and hierarchy are set aside in a community in which “there does not exist among you Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female. All of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28). This new type of human community, made possible by the Spirit, creates “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, that you may declare the wondrous deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Pet 2:9).

Over and above the picture of a shared purse described in Acts 2 and 4, the New Testament presumes and recommends a high degree of mutuality, intimacy, and bonding among members of the Church. Gerhard Lohfink offers a brief sampler, which he describes as “far from exhaustive,” on the centrality of the reciprocal pronoun “one another” (allelon) as a marker for the quality of real-world love and mutuality demanded of believers:

outdo one another in showing honor (Rom 12:10);

live in harmony with one another (Rom 12:16);

welcome one another (Rom 15:7);

admonish one another (Rom 15:14);

greet one another with a holy kiss (Rom 16:16);

wait for one another (1 Cor 11:33);

have the same care for one another (1 Cor 12:25);

be servants of one another (Gal 5:13);

bear one another’s burdens (Gal 6:2);

comfort one another (1 Thess 5:11):

build up one another (1 Thess 5:11);

be at peace with one another (1 Thess 5:13);

do good to one another (1 Thess 5:15);

bear with one another lovingly (Eph 4:2);

be kind and compassionate with one another (Eph 4:32);

be subject to one another (Eph 5:21);

forgive one another (Col 3:13);

confess your sins to one another (Jas 5:16);

pray for one another (Jas 5:16);

love one another from the heart (1 Pet 1:22);

be hospitable to one another (1 Pet 4:9);

meet one another with humility (1 Pet 5:5);

have fellowship with one another (1 John 1:7).1

Lohfink adds that the early church, consistent with Jesus’ example in the gospels,

never considered capitulating to naïve dreams of “all men becoming brothers” or of “millions being embraced.” In a very realistic manner they sought to achieve fraternal love within their own ranks and constantly made simultaneous efforts to transcend their boundaries. In this fashion an ever increasing number of people was drawn into the fraternity of the church, and new neighborly relations became possible.2

The earliest Christians would have found nothing exceptional in the idea of ecclesial solidarity. Early Christians saw themselves, and were seen by others, as more than just a new “religious” group, more than a new idea unleashed in the ancient world, and more than a voluntary club like other social groupings or associations.

As noted by Denise Kimber Buell in an important book, early Christians were more often seen as part of a new ethnic group, even a new race of people, in the Roman world. The focus of their worship was so distinctive, their way of life and priorities were so particular, that they were more properly seen as a genos, “a term widely used for Greeks, Egyptians, Romans and Ioudaioi [Jews]—groups often interpreted as ethnic groups or their ancient equivalents.”3

Surveying a number of early Christian texts and narratives, as well as the literature of anti-Christian polemicists, Buell explains why early Christians referred to themselves as a distinct ethnic group or people in the world.

First, race/ethnicity was often deemed to be produced and indicated by religious practices . . . Early Christians adopted existing understandings of what ethnicity and race are and how they relate to religiosity by reinterpreting the language of peoplehood readily available to them in the biblical texts they shared with . . . Jews, as well as political and civic language used broadly to speak about citizenship and peoplehood in the Roman Empire.4

Second, she notes that although ethnicity and race were often used to indicated a fixity of identity, early Christians and their contemporaries also saw them as fluid and changeable categories. Further, that the concept of ethnicity/race was both fixed and fluid meant that Christians could make universal claims for themselves. “By conceptualizing race as both mutable and ‘...

Table of contents

• The Borders of Baptism
• PART I: Introductory Concepts on Ecclesial Solidarity
• PART II: Examining the Hard Cases through an Ecclesial Lens
• Bibliography