Monday, July 13, 2020

Jesuit Scholar D. Mollat on Baptismal Regeneration in Colossians 2:12


 

That ‘circumcision made without hands’ is a reference to baptism can be seen from the other details we find in verse 12: ‘you were buried with him in baptism’ and ‘you were also raised with him’. This analogy has its foundation in the spiritual order. Just as circumcision removes a strip of flesh from a man’s body, so baptism too effects a radical stripping—the putting off of the body of flesh. For St Paul the flesh is the power of sin in man, for ‘the mind that is set on flesh is hostile to God’ (Rom. 8:7). Through it, man ‘serves the law of sin’ (Rom. 7:25) and is ‘sold under sin’ (Rom. 7:14). The ‘body of flesh’ is the body in subjection to the sinful inclinations of the flesh; in Rom. 6:6, St Paul calls it the ‘sinful body’. This body is destined to death. More, it is ‘already dead because of sin’ (Rom. 8:6). It is from this double, and fatal, tyranny of sin and death that baptism delivers the Christian: ‘You, who were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him’ (Col. 2:13). This symbol of the ‘circumcision of Christ’ through the ‘putting off’ of ‘the body of flesh’ is closely linked, as we can see with the images of the putting off of the old man and of burial with Christ. What is more, our text associates them formally.

 

However, this symbol, like the others, is not a completely negative one. The description ‘made without hands’ shows us this. It refers to an eschatological reality of heavenly origin through which God himself fulfils in a new spiritual order what was only prefigured by the institution of circumcision under the old covenant. By effecting within us this putting off of everything that is sinful (something with the circumcision of the old covenant was unable to achieve) baptism opens out to us and associates us with the fulness of Christ, in whom ‘the whole fulness of deity dwells bodily’ (2:9). Baptism—the ‘circumcision of Christ—delivers us from the dominion of ‘the elemental spirits of the universe’ and from the whole realm of the transitory and the ‘earthly’, which is represented by the old prescriptions of the Law, and dedicates us to God.

 

The idea that the ‘circumcision of Christ’s admits us to the new people of God, just as the old rite of circumcision admitted the Hebrews to the old Israel, does not seem to be envisaged in the epistle to the Colossians. But it is perhaps suggested by a text from the epistle to the Ephesians, which may possibly contain a reference to baptism (cf. H. Sahlin, Die Beschneidung Christi Lund, 1950).

 

‘Remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh called the uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands—remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel . . . But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near in the blood of Christ’ (Eph. 2:11-13). (D Mollat, “Baptismal Symbolism in St. Paul,” in Baptism in the New Testament: A Symposium [trans. David Askew; Baltimore, Md.: Helicon Press, 1964], 63-83, here, pp. 77-78)