One Baptism for the Forgiveness of Sins

Susan Wood, a Roman Catholic, begins her essay with these words:

Reflection on the line, “I acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins” in an ecumenical context invites reflection on three questions. First, how can we adjudicate between those Christians who practice believer baptism and require a conscious, explicit, adult profession of faith for the mutual recognition of baptism and those other Christians who practice infant baptism? Second, how can we profess belief in one baptism in an environment of a divided Christianity? Third, how can we articulate the relationship between baptism and the forgiveness of sins? (189)

She thus dives right into Nicene Christianity analysis of the Creed’s “one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.” Through addressing these questions, she sets up a framework through which she can analyze each portion of the creedal phrase:

“I Believe…
in
One Baptism
For the Forgiveness of Sin”

Accordingly, her essay is divided into those three sections. My review will follow her pattern, with my own credobaptist reactions added in for flavor.

“I Believe”

This statement, as in any other portion of the Creed (or any creed, for that matter), invites two questions: “What do you mean by ‘belief’ ” and “What kind of faith is necessary to believe?” It is particularly necessary to ask the question regarding what we believe about baptism, because the nature of belief and faith is at the very heart of Christians’ differing beliefs about baptism.

There are those traditions that honor the whole of church history and baptize infants, allowing the faith of the church, the family, and the godparents to “stand in” for that of the infant; that is, to act as a proxy. By this understanding, faith resides first in the community of faith. The baby is baptized, the people of God raise the child into the faith, and–when ready–the child grows to accept and respond to the faith as her or his own.

Then there are those who follow the pattern of baptism expressed in the New Testament and baptize only those who are able to personally express faith in Christ and his gospel. Faith is personal in this case, and the basis of entry into the church is the explicit response of the Christian to the call of God. Faith begins in the faith community, so the people of God raise the child into the faith, and–when ready–the child grows to accept and respond to the faith as her or his own, and then is baptized.

Faith and response are present in both credobaptism (baptism of believers) and pedobaptism (baptism of infants), so the difference is one of focus on the locus of faith at the time of baptism.

Acts 2:41-42 lays out the normative pattern for baptism, the pattern, that is, that best expresses the theology behind baptism. Wood explains, “This understanding of baptism presupposes a sequence and pattern within Christian initiation, including formation in the faith or conversion, baptism in water in the name of the Triune God, postbaptismal chrismation in the sacrament of confirmation, participation in the public prayer of the church (especially through admission to the Eucharist), and finally, life in the Christian community.” (190) Wood says that this puts Roman Catholic baptismal theology closer to those who practice believer baptism, although most Roman Catholics have been baptized as infants.

In an ecumenical setting, it is not that should necessarily believe that infant baptism is inherently wrong or ineffectual. It is the belief that baptism upon personal profession of faith follows the biblical pattern that drives us to insist on its adherence within our churches. For those of us who see the church as consisting of those who have expressed faith in Christ as Lord and Savior, credobaptism becomes intimately tied to a Christian’s conversion and admission into the church. It is the watery doorway into the life of the community of God’s people. What many credobaptists cannot abide in the life of our own churches is pedobaptism’s artificial separation of baptism from conversion and ecclesial life, including participation in the Lord’s Supper, the rite that reconstitutes the community as the people of Jesus Christ.

Because response and the will are foundational aspects of our ecclesial being, faith–and the dying and being raised again to new life that goes with it–is an intensely personal affair. It’s a relationship with our risen Lord.

“One Baptism”

The one baptism of the church is not to be found in reunion or in mutual acceptance of one another’s baptisms. It is found in the one Lord our God. We are constituted into the body of Christ, and he alone is the basis of our one church and one baptism. This confessional perspective has its basis in Ephesians 4:4-6. With this in mind, we interpret baptism with a eucharistic theology and communion with a baptismal theology. These two sacraments work one with the other to build the life of the individual Christian and the church as a whole. We are baptized once for the forgiveness of sins, appropriating for ourselves the finished work of Christ’s death and resurrection. We partake of communion to bring us to a daily renewal of our baptismal vows and to give thanksgiving for the living out of our forgiveness. Forgiveness is having our transgressions wiped away from the sight of our holy God and then living in such a way as to reflect our new reality in Christ. We are invaded, really, and not just changed or adjusted. We are made completely new. We are truly reborn.

Baptism effects both a union with Christ and an ecclesiological unity. In the theology of Romans 6, we are baptized into Christ Jesus and his death so that we may walk in newness of life just as Christ was raised from the dead (Rom. 6:3-4; Col. 2:12). Baptism in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (Matt. 28:19) leads us into communion with the Triune God. It also knits believers together into a communion with each other because “in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body–Jews or Greeks, slaves or free–and we were all made to drink of one Spirit” (1 Cor. 12:13 NRSV). Christians who recognize one another’s baptism affirm a common unity in Christ and a unity in the Spirit. We affirm a unity in the christological body of Christ, but we balk at affirming an ecclesial unity effected by baptism. Why? (194)

Wood answers this question by turning to Vatican II’s Decree on Ecumenism, which states that baptism is an imperfect unity that serves to point us toward the more complete unity found in the Lord’s Supper: “Baptism is incomplete at a certain level of visibility and particularity. Visible communion involves the concrete particularity of ecclesial communities in space and time” (195). This involves communion, both among members of a particular local church and among churches. The church is a visible framework, and it cannot be reduced to a “communion of the baptized,” as Wood says. Rather, “the emphasis is not just on faith but also its profession” (195). This profession is made in the life of the believer, the work of the church, and the breaking of the bread and sharing of the cup. (Here, Wood appeals to the imagery expressed by Kathleen Hughes to paint communion as “our daily dip in the baptismal font.”) For Wood, this is the particularity that secures the concrete unity to which baptism points:

Both baptism and Eucharist celebrate the same mystery, namely the death and resurrection of Christ in the power of the Spirit. We are baptized only once, but our regular celebration of the Eucharist recalls the once and for all sacrifice of Christ represented on the altar and enables us to join ourselves to Christ and to one another as the body of Christ (1 Cor. 10:16-17)…. In the Eucharist, our communion in the body of the Lord, both in Christ dead and risen and in his ecclesial body, achieves a repeatable visibility. Our participation in the Eucharist is as profoundly baptismal as our baptism is profoundly oriented to the Eucharist. In baptism we become the priestly people of God, and in the Eucharist we exercise that priesthood. The incomplete unity achieved in baptism finds completion in the Eucharist because it is there that ecclesial and christological communion achieves repeatable sacramental visibility. (197)

But again, this synthesis is destroyed–or at least warped–when baptism is separated too distinctly from the Supper, leading to strange wanderings in which open versus closed communion is debated, as well as whether to mandate credobaptism of those who were baptized as infants. It feels unnatural to ask these questions and have these debates because it is unnatural.

All work of the Spirit must be viewed eschatologically. Dr. George Mason, pastor of Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas, has framed it thusly: “One way [to see our disunity] is to speak of baptism as one event from eternity’s side of things, even if the journey from pedo- to credobaptisms seems two separate occasions. Eternity reckons time backward as well as forward.” The important thing is to recognize that God is involved, no matter the process or order.

Wood concludes her thoughts on our one baptism with the following:

We are accustomed to thinking that ecclesial unity will result when we will have achieved mutual recognition of each other?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s baptism and Eucharist. We have failed to recognize that, for the most part, our historical divisions did not result from a lack of mutual recognition of sacraments, but from what were perceived as discrepancies from the apostolic faith. We will not mend these divisions with mutual sacramental recognition or common sacramental practice.

This leads us to the conclusion that we may have to complete our assertion that sacraments signify and create unity with a corresponding claim that ecclesial unity leads to the mutual recognition of sacraments. The two assertions stand in a relationship of mutual polarity. They cannot be separated. We are baptized into Christ and into the church, inseparable from him and identified as his body. The church is not simply the place of our baptism. We are baptized not simply in the church, but into the church. In John Zizioulas?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s meaning of the term, we are ecclesial beings. This is much more than church membership or a matter of confessional identity; it is an ecclesial way of being in the world. Baptismal unity forges ecclesial unity, and ecclesiastical being witnesses to the one baptism in Christ. (198-199)

“For the Forgiveness of Sins”

The Nicene Creed must be interpreted in its fifth-century theological and liturgical contexts. When the Creed was written and, before that, all the way back to apostolic times, baptism and the Eucharist were intimately tied as the constitutive sacraments of the church.

The early church was battling Donatists (who demanded rebaptism, carried out by their ordained clergy) and Pelagians (who refused to acknowledge that infants lived in original sin). By the fifth century, Augustinian concepts of original sin had become catholic. It was taught that original sin was inherited biologically through childbirth, thus leading–of necessity–to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.

We must wrestle with the words of Scripture and the Creeds to make them relevant to our modern understanding and sensibilities. This is not a call to postmodernism but to claiming the text as our own. I have chosen to refrain from directly engaging Wood’s writing through this section and, rather, to take a path that, God willing, will lead to the same conclusions, even if Wood and I might disagree on how to get there.

We all grow, as does our theological understanding. Scientific understanding has grown beyond the prevalent fifth-century metaphysical theories. It is hard to find mainstream, modern-day Christians who believe that sin is physically transmitted through birth. Sin is a reality of our broken world, and that broken world is something into which we are all born. Sin is a state of being that we inherit. We didn’t have a choice in the matter, so we sin; however, there is nothing physically malformed about us that would demand a baptism to correct or prepare us for heaven.

Knowledge of matter has also advanced over the centuries. Medieval thought was that grace was a substance passed around from God to his people, mediated through the sacraments of the church. This view of grace lent itself to the establishment of relics, the doctrine of transubstantiation, and an ex opera operato (Latin, “out of the work itself”) view of baptism. The sacraments were vessels or means of conveying this “stuff” called grace.

But biblical grace is restored relationship with God, freeing human beings from preoccupation with themselves (original sin) to be as God created them to be. In other words, grace enables us to live in accordance with our created nature; it is not something that is added to enable us to achieve some divine status. We were created to be humans, not gods. By extension, then, the position of baptism within this economy of salvation is that baptism is a grace in and of itself, and not merely a means of grace. God’s grace is more ubiquitous than Roman Catholic doctrine implies through the Council of Trent. We do not receive something in baptism to which we do not have access through the normal course of life. Baptism and communion serve to focus us on the kingdom of God and its manifestation in the church, and to ground us in the work and life that God calls us to live here and now.

The church is also a community of those for whom Jesus Christ died, whose sins are forgiven. However, to be identified as a community of salvation also expresses the demands of Christian living. By taking the name Christian in baptism and being incorporated into Christ’s body, the baptized assume the responsibility to offer forgiveness to one another in imitation of the one into whom they are baptized.
Baptism is not necessary for salvation; the Spirit moves where he will. Nevertheless, baptism does effect salvation. Wood ends well here, “Baptism effects something, namely life in Christ and life in a community of salvation, the church” (201).

Baptist theologian James McClendon advocates calling baptism a performative act–an act that does what it says:

It has the special quality, according to Christian belief, of involving both the human participants (the church and the candidate) and God. Baptism is a “word” addressed by the candidate to God. (It is “the appeal of a good conscience toward God” I Peter 3:21 ASV margin.) It is that “word” in which the candidate claims the power of the resurrected Christ for himself. It is a prayer, but an acted prayer rather than just a spoken one. Like every petition, it is performative. It is also a “word” from the church to the candidate, a “word” in which the church says something like: “We receive you as our brother in Christ.” And it is a “word” from the candidate to the church, a “word” in which the candidate says something like: “Brethren, I take my place in your midst. Receive me!”

But baptism, on the Christian view, is a prayer which God answers–and the baptism itself is the God-given token of his answer. Indeed, it is more than that. Baptism is first of all God’s word to us. In it he declares, “This is my son; this day have I begotten him.” In it he offers us initiation into new life. In it he proclaims in sign the good news to which our submission, our being baptized, is only the answer. (James McClendon, “Baptism as a Performative Sign,” Theology Today 23:3 [October 1966] 403-416.)