2 What the Sign Says
What the Sign Says
There is an autobiography that begins: “I was born (so I am told) . . . “ That is how I have to speak of my baptism, for I was baptized as a baby. So I expect were many of you. Since the fourth century, if not before (opinions differ), most Christians have been baptized in infancy, and thus have had to take their baptism on trust. If you were baptized in or after your teens, as a first-generation convert or as someone in the Baptist tradition, you will of course remember it vividly. But nothing hangs on that. Baptism, whenever we receive it, belongs now to our past. And we grasp its bearing on today’s living not by remembering it as an event, but by understanding it as a speaking sign, a symbol carrying a message; what Augustine calls a visible word from God.
The Message
Whence comes this way of looking at baptism? Why, from Paul, who appeals to baptism to show Christians their calling. In Romans 6:1-14 he says that because we have been buried and raised with Christ in baptism we may not go on in sin. In Colossians 2:8-3:17 he argued that because we have been buried and raised with Christ in baptism we must not lapse into Christless, worldly, “natural” religion, with its legalism and superstition, but must let Christ’s supernatural risen life find expression in us in the breaking of bad habits and the hammering out of a new, Christlike character.
Living this way, in conscious solidarity with the living Christ, on a basis of total cancellation of guilt through the cross, is what being a Christian means to Paul, and he sees baptism as signifying the whole of it—both God’s work of renewing (our co-crucifixion and co-resurrection with Jesus) and our work of repenting (turning over new leaves to express new life).
Some are puzzled, thinking that Paul, who elsewhere insists that we are justified and saved through faith in Christ, and that alone (Romans 3:27-30; Galatians 2:15ff.; Ephesians 2:8ff.; Philippians 3:4-9), here implies that the baptismal rite as such brings salvation. But this is to misunderstand him, as the following points will show.
(1) Paul writes to first-generation converts whose baptism, according to New Testament custom, would have followed directly on their professing faith; so that believing and being baptized were already linked in their minds as two aspects of the single reality of becoming a Christian.
(2) Assuming this link, Paul reminds them that what they thought of as happening in baptism happened through faith, and not without it. “In baptism . . . you were also raised with him [Christ] through faith” (Colossians 2:11). Despite popular superstition, sometimes encouraged by clergy who should know better, no Christian tradition—Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox—allows that baptized persons capable of faith can be saved without faith, or that genuine believers can be lost for being unbaptized.
(3) For Paul and all New Testament writers the link between believing and being baptized is evidently like that between inheriting the throne and being crowned: through the public ceremony the already existing reality of royal privilege is declared, confirmed, celebrated, and formally regularized. (And in the same sense in which Elizabeth II was “made queen” at her coronation, the Prayer Book Catechism says that in baptism the believer’s child, who is “in the Lord” with his parents from birth, “was made a member of Christ, the child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven.”)
(4) Paul does not in any case invoke baptism as proof of salvation (baptism alone can never be that; think of Simon the sorcerer in Acts 8:13-24). He appeals to it, as we said, only as a God-given sign teaching professed believers what sort of lives they are called, and committed, and privileged, and enabled to live.
Live By Your Baptism
When Martin Luther was tempted, as he often was, to doubt God’s love and lapse into the desperate self-indulgence of despair, he would keep himself steady by telling himself, “Baptizatus sum (I have been baptized).” Thus he recovered assurance that God’s gracious call to him was real, that his new life in Christ was real, and that he must not falter in his faith or his faithfulness. He had got the message of baptism! Have we?
Further Bible Study
Baptism picturing salvation:
Colossians 2:8–3:4
Romans 6:1-14
Questions for Thought and Discussion
What does baptism show Christians about themselves?
What is the relationship between baptism and salvation?
Why did Martin Luther find reassurance through the fact that he had been baptized?