Albert Vanhoye and Peter S. Williams on Paul's Theology of Baptism in Galatians

Commenting on Paul’s theology of water baptism in Gal 3:27, Albert Vanhoye and Peter S. Williams wrote the following insightful note:

Paul speaks of baptism as the means by which believers enter into this very close relationship with Christ: For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. Baptism is the concrete expression of adherence to Christ in faith. Paul virtually identifies faith with baptism in these verses, illustrating that Christian faith is not only assenting to a creed or having a religious experience. Faith follows the pattern of the incarnation and therefore involves the body as well. Baptism expresses and beings about the incorporation of the whole believer—body, soul, and spirit—into the body of Christ. Paul will explain in Rom 6:3-14 how baptism unites believers to Christ’s bodily death and resurrection, both in the present and in our ultimate future (In Rom 6:5 Paul uses the analogy of grafting a branch onto a tree: “For if we have grown into union with him through a death like his, we shall also be united with him in the resurrection” [italics added]). Baptism actualizes faith in Christ.

In this way baptism differs radically from circumcision. It is not just a rite but a means of truly joining the lives of two persons, the believer and Christ. While circumcision leaves a permanent, visible mark on the body that indicates belonging to a particular nation, baptism leaves no mark of nationality and is offered to people of very nation.

In speaking of baptism Paul does not say “baptized in Christ”; he literally says, “baptized into Christ.” In other words, Christ is not the element in which a believer is immersed bur rather the person to whom the believer is united through baptism. Immersion happens “in water” (see Matt 3:11) and “in the Spirit” (see Matt 3:11; 1 Cor 12:13), but because of the union it effects, it is baptism “into Christ.”

Baptism produces not only a change in relationship but also a change in one’s being that Paul describes with the verb “to clothe”: you have “clothed yourselves with Christ.” This statement is a bit perplexing. How is it possible “to clothe oneself” with another person? The expression could be misunderstood as merely an external superficial change: changing clothes does not transform a person. But here, as in certain Old Testament passages, “clothing oneself” expresses a change that redefines a person’s life. For example, in a text that Paul may have had in mind, Isaiah writes:

I will rejoice heartily in the LORD,
my being exults in my God;
For he has clothed me with garments of salvation,
and wrapped me in a robe of justice [righteousness]. (Isa 61:10; see Ps 132:16)

To be clothed in Christ brings a profound transformation (1 Cor 6:11).

Being clothed with Christ is so profound that it reaches the most important part of a person’s identity and transforms it. Paul has the boldness to proclaim that in Christ Jesus the religious difference between Jew and Greek, the civil difference between slave and free, and finally the sexual difference between male and female no longer exist. Paul indicates the context in which these differences do not matter with the phrase “in Christ Jesus”: in our relationship with the risen Lord, these distinctions are no longer important. (Albert Vanhoye and Peter S. Williams, Galatians [Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2019], 127-29)