The Sacraments. The Christian proclamation
announces an event in history apprehended as the redemptive act of God. It is
by drawing men and women into relation and contact with that event that they
are drawn into the new life created by the event. This drawing of men and women
into the event is itself a renewal of the event itself, and follows the pattern
of the event in that it possesses a double character. On the one hand, the
drawing of men and women into the event of a visible occurrence, and on the
other hand it is the invisible act of God, apprehended by faith. The visible
event takes the form of immersion in water and emergence therefrom. The
invisible act of God, which is the renewal and application of the original
redemptive act, is the translation of the candidate out of his old existence characterized
by sin, which is separation from God, into the new existence which will be
finally his, at the consummation, but which is already available to him in
advance in the life of the Church from the moment of his initiation. This is
the meaning of Paul’s exposition of baptism in Rom. 6:1-6. Baptism has the same
two-sidedness of the original event of redemption: that one side visible, the
other perceptible only to faith. Apart from faith, baptism is apprehended only
as an external human action devoid of theological significance. Moreover, it
needs to be constantly renewed in the decision in the rendering of concrete
obedience:
So you must also consider yourselves unto sin
and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal
bodies. Rom. 6:11-12
Notice how all the verbs in this passage are
in the subjunctive and future tenses: this shows that for St. Paul the
baptismal transaction was not, as in the mystery religions, magical and final,
but dependent for its realization in constant moral endeavour and for its
consummation only at the end. In 1 Cor. 1:17 Paul speaks with apparent
depreciation about baptism:
For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to
preach the gospel . . .
This passage however must be read in its
context. Paul is denying that there is a mystical power inherent in the
minister, binding him to the initiates, as in the mystery religions. Rightly
understood, baptism is the decisive moment in the Christian life, and Paul can
appeal to it as such. (G. Ernest Wright and Reginald H. Fuller, The Book of the Acts of God: Christian
Scholarship Interprets the Bible [London: Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd.,
1957, 1960], 249-50)