CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 25
Baptism and the Lord’s Supper in Pauline Thought
Baptism and the lord’s supper were two christian institutions which Paul “received” from those who were in Christ before him, and he “delivered” them as a matter of course to the churches of his Gentile mission field.
1. Baptism
Since John the Baptist distinguished his own baptism in water—a “baptism of repentance for the remission of sins” (Mark 1:4)—from the baptism in the Spirit to be administered by the stronger one who was to come after him, it might have been expected that, when the first Christians experienced the outpouring of the Spirit from the day of Pentecost onward, they would discontinue water baptism as having been superseded by something better. In fact they did not: they continued to baptize converts in water “for the remission of sins” (cf. Acts 2:38), but this baptism was now part of a more comprehensive experience which took character especially from the receiving of the Spirit.1
This was the situation which Paul inherited, but his thinking and practice integrated the water and Spirit baptism more closely together. According to the narrative of Acts 19:1–7, when he met twelve “disciples” at Ephesus who had received John’s baptism—for the remission of sins, presumably—but who knew nothing of the Holy Spirit, he concluded that their baptism was defective. He therefore baptized them afresh, “into the name of the Lord Jesus”, and laid his hands on them, whereupon they gave audible evidence of having received the Spirit.
That Paul himself at his conversion was baptized and so had his sins washed away is the testimony of Acts 22:16 (cf. 9:18). When in his letters he reminds his Christian readers of the meaning of their baptism he associates his own baptism with theirs: “all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death” (Romans 6:3); “in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body” (1 Corinthians 12:13).2 At the same time he gives baptism—theirs and his—a new depth of meaning. Baptism, in Paul’s teaching, initiates believers into their state of being “in Christ”, so that his historical death and resurrection become part of their spiritual experience; the baptism in the Spirit which the risen Lord then effects incorporates them into one body with him—or, as Paul puts it to the Galatians, “as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ … you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:27f.). Paul, who had learned so clearly the religious inadequacy of the old circumcision, was not the man to ascribe ex opere operato efficacy to another external rite; it was the impartation of the Spirit in response to faith that made the convert a new creation. We must beware of forcing Paul’s thought and terminology into the mould of twentieth-century Christian rationalism, but if it be realized that repentance and faith, with baptism in water and reception of the Spirit, followed by first communion, formed one complex experience of Christian initiation, then what is true of the experience as a whole may be predicated of any element in it. We may make logical distinctions between this and that element, but such distinctions need not have been present to the minds of Paul’s Corinthian converts who knew that they had been “washed, … sanctified, … justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God” (1 Corinthians 6:11). It is unlikely that they dissociated the washing from their baptism in water, but it was the divine action in their lives that gave their baptism effective meaning and caused Paul to use what has been called the language of sacramental realism.3
Christians could no more be immunized by baptism (or the eucharistic meal) against divine judgment on their unfaithfulness than the Israelites during the wilderness wanderings were protected by their “baptism” in the cloud and in the sea (or their partaking of bread from heaven and water from the rock) from the consequences of their idolatry and immorality (1 Corinthians 10:1–11). At the same time, the baptism of Christians constituted the frontier between their old unregenerate existence and their new life in Christ: it marked their death to the old order and their rising again to the new order, so that for a baptized Christian to go on in sin was as preposterous as it would be for an emancipated slave to remain in bondage to his former owner (Romans 6:1–4, 15–23) or for a widow to remain subject to “the law of her husband” (Romans 7:1–6). Paul knew himself to have been in bondage to sin before his conversion in the sense that he was in bondage to the law which (without his realizing it at the time) led him into sin; the bondage to sin which many of his Gentile converts had experienced took a different form. When Paul appeals to the logic of baptism, he means that the power of the Spirit, which is the source and stay of the new life, enables the believer to shake off the old bondage, however its form might have varied from one to another.
Paul gives his readers no ground for supposing that baptism makes no practical difference or that it is an optional extra in Christian life. He takes it for granted that all believers have been baptized,4 just as he takes it for granted that they have all received the Spirit.5 When he thanks God that he baptized none but a handful of his Corinthian converts, saying that Christ did not send him to baptize but to preach the gospel, he is not belittling the importance of baptism.6 He indicates rather that by leaving the work of baptizing to others he avoided giving any one ground to charge him with setting up a church or party of his own. It was into Christ’s name—that is, as followers of Christ, not of Paul—that his converts were baptized or, as the Colossian Christians are told, it was with Christ that they were “buried … in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead” (Colossians 2:12). While Paul does not say of the baptismal tradition, as he does of the eucharistic tradition, that he received it “from the Lord”,7 he probably implies that he did so receive it.
What had happened in the experience of individual believers, incorporated by baptism into the new community, is applied in Ephesians 5:25 f. to the community as such when Christ is said to have given himself up for her, “that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word”8—the “word” or utterance being either the pronouncing of the holy name over the persons being baptized or (more probably) the response in which they confessed their faith and invoked the name of the Lord.9
2. The Lord’s Supper
Paul’s references to the Lord’s Supper are fewer than his references to baptism; they are confined to 1 Corinthians. Few as they are, however, they show how this institution, like that of baptism, was integrated in his thinking with the concept of the believing community as the body of Christ.
When he tells the Corinthians that he “received from the Lord” the account of what Jesus did and said “on the night when he was betrayed” (1 Corinthians 11:23), he does not say when or where he received it. He received it “from the Lord” in the sense that it is in the crucified and exalted Lord that all true Christian tradition has its source, as it is by him that it is perpetually validated.10 The probability is that he received it at the outset of his Christian career, even before he went up to Jerusalem to make the acquaintance of the leaders of the mother-church—that he learned it, in fact, from the disciples in Damascus, if it was in their fellowship that he first took the memorial bread and wine.
Paul’s record of the institution of the Lord’s Supper is the earliest one we have: a comparison of it with the others—that in Mark 14:22–25 (reproduced, with minor changes, in Matthew 26:26–29)11 and the shorter and longer forms which are conflated in Luke 22:17–2012—indicates that at an early date variations appeared in the transmission of the dominical words. In the form known to Paul “This is my body” is augmented by “which is for you”; “This is my covenant blood, which is poured out for many” becomes “This cup is the new covenant in my blood”, and the bread-word and cup-word alike are followed by the injunction “Do this in remembrance of me” (which is appended to the bread-word only in the longer Lukan form).13 The memorial purpose of the meal is thus made quite explicit, and when Paul adds, “as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes”, he does justice also to the forward–looking perspective which was present in the original setting.14 But the variations make no material difference to the central intention: of the institution narrative Paul might have said, much as he said of his sharing the basic facts of the gospel with the other apostles, “Whether then it was I or they, this is what we delivered; this is what you received”.15
Paul’s distinctive contribution to eucharistic doctrine lies in his emphasis on the meal as an occasion of communion (koinōnia) and in his interpretation of the bread-word, “This is my body”, to include Christ’s body corporate.
When he warns the Corinthian Christians against participation in idolatrous feasts, he draws an analogy between what happens there and what happens in the eucharist, in order to show the absurdity of thinking they can “drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons” (1 Corinthians 10:21). “The ‘cup of blessing’16 over which we say a blessing, is it not a participation (koinōnia) in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread”, he adds, “we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Corinthians 10:16 f.). Communion with Christ, which they enjoyed together at his table, excluded communion with a pagan divinity at his table; and such communion with a pagan divinity excluded communion with Christ.
But their membership in the body of Christ could be violated at his own table by an unbrotherly attitude or conduct towards fellow-members of his body. When they broke the bread which was the token of the body of Christ they not only recalled his self-oblation on the cross but proclaimed their joint participation in his corporate body. If, then, they denied in practice the unity which they professed sacramentally in the eucharist, they ate and drank unworthily and so profaned the body and blood of the Lord; if they ate and drank “without discerning the body” they ate and drank judgment upon themselves.17 To eat and drink “without discerning the body” meant quite simply to take the bread and cup at the same time as they were treating their fellow-Christians uncharitably in thought or behaviour. So realistically does Paul regard such “unworthy” participation that he warns those who are guilty of it that sickness or death may befall them by way of self-incurred judgment.18 Eucharistic participation in Christ, like baptismal incorporation into Christ, is no solitary matter: both involve sharing the common life in the body of Christ with all other believers, and carry with them serious ethical corollaries which Christians ignore at their peril.19