Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, in order to make her holy by cleansing her with the washing of water by the word, so as to present the church to himself in splendor, without a spot or wrinkle or anything of the kind--yes, so that she may be holy and without blemish. (Eph 5:25-27 NRSV)
Commenting on Eph 5:25-27 and its theology of baptism, one recent scholar wrote the following:
The 'washing of water' whereby the Church is sanctified and cleansed is clearly the rite of Baptism. Whereas Christians are baptized individually or in families, the Church as a whole is baptized corporately, as it were, in Christ's death. If all Christians are baptized into Christ's death on the cross, then it follows that all Christian baptisms are to be identified with that event. Therefore the whole Church, and not just individual Christians, is identified with Christ through Baptism. It is possible that this text is influenced by a nuptial purification rite. In this case the bath that purifies the bride from any contamination in her premarital life serves as a model for Christian Baptism, in which the Church is cleansed of impurity and corruption before the consummation of its spiritual marriage to Christ. The Baptism of the Church is realized in the lives of individual Christians when they themselves are baptized, but an eschatological consummation of this union is still anticipated. In their Baptism, Christians become members of the Church, the bride of Christ, part of the body cleansed of sin and sanctified through his death on the cross. The image of the Church as the bride of Christ may at first sight seem inconsistent with that of the Church as the body of Christ, also employed in this letter. As husband and wife are distinct persons, at least to modern Western perceptions, identifying the Church as the bride of Christ would be understood to imply a less intimate identification between Christ and the Church than is the case with the image of the Church as the body of Christ. The symbolic and mystical nature of these images, however, means that they are not mutually exclusive or incompatible and that they are not intended to be understood in an absolute or literal sense, still less a mutually exclusive one. Furthermore, in his moral teaching Paul presupposes that sexual intimacy realizes complete identification between the two parties, and relates the Christian's membership of Christ's body directly to the conduct of sexual relationships (I Cor. 6:15-16). We cannot therefore infer from the imagery of the Ephesians text two different degrees of intimacy and identification with Christ. Even if the images of marriage and of the body convey different aspects of the early Christian understanding of this relationship, but are to be understood as complementary rather than contradictory. (Nicholas Taylor, Paul on Baptism: Theology, Mission and Ministry in Context [London: SCM Press, 2016], 86-87)
Further Reading: