Monday, July 13, 2020

Jesuit Scholar D. Mollat on Baptismal Regeneration in Ephesians 1:13


 

‘You were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit’ (Eph. 1:13)

 

We may ask whether this image of the seal in Eph. 1:13 really does refer to baptism. But the context seems to admit of no doubt on this question. We can, in fact, note how precisely St Paul distinguishes in this verse between the different stages of the pagans’ coming to salvation: first evangelization then faith, and finally the intervention of the Spirit who marked the believers for the full redemption. This spiritual sealing certainly does seem to refer to a specific act, which followed preaching and the awakening of faith and which admitted the pagans into the Church. It is thus an act of Christian initiation.

 

The seal of which St Paul is here speaking is simply the presence of the Holy Spirit in the Christian faith—an active presence, which imprints the character of holiness that is of consecration to God—on the Christian. What we can learn of this baptismal consecration from the preceding texts is that it set the Christian apart from the unjust world, and made him a son of God and an heir to the promise. Here Paul is specifying, very forcefully, that baptism admits the Christian to the people of God. The language of the whole passage is significant. In it, we see the most characteristic ideas of the theology of the covenant appear one after the other: after references to the blessing and to election come references to the promise, the inheritance, the redemption and the people which God had acquired for himself. All the religious privileges of the old Israel are transferred to the Christians, the true beneficiaries of the blessings promised in Abraham to all the nations of the world. And it is the Holy Spirit who signs the baptized for the inheritance, and already communicates the first fruits of it to them by his own presence. Sealed with the seal of the promise in order to be the true spiritual posterity of Abraham, Christians are again marked by the Spirit for the full redemption on the day when God will finally carry out his promise and will give the full possession of the inheritance to those who belong to him. (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. 79-80; such eschatological interpretation of the “sealing” of the Holy Spirit is noted elsewhere in Eph 4:30 [see ibid., 80])