Wednesday, May 18, 2022

Hans Boersma on "Baptismal Hospitality" and the Salvific Efficacy of Water Baptism

  

Baptismal Hospitality

 

Baptism is the sacrament through which one enters into the Church and is united to Jesus Christ. As the prime sacrament of initiation, baptism does not simply signify the universal call or promise of the gospel, but it actually incorporates one into Christ at the same time into the eschatological community of hospitality. We might be tempted to make fine logical distinctions here, in the hope of establishing the correct order of things. But the Scriptures do not seem concerned about which comes first: our personal union with Christ or our membership in the Church (cf. Acts 2:14; 1 Cor. 12:13). Karl Rahner has rightly cautioned against an individualized understanding of baptism. It is the individual person who is baptized, but this person is baptized into the people of God. To belong to Christ means to belong to his Church and vice versa. Since Christ is the representation of Israel, who recapitulates her life, death, and resurrection, faith and baptism unite us to Christ and lead us into the Church. . . . Baptism into Christ and into his Church implies a bond of unity with everyone who likewise has been baptized into Christ and his Church. We can only deny this objective bond of fellowship (koinōnia) if we radically limit the implications of baptism to the local Church. Such a limitation hardly seems justified. To be sure, the local congregation and the baptized person’s life in and participation with it are of supreme importance. But to be incorporated into the local Church means to be incorporated into Christ and so to become part of his universal body as well. . . . Baptism is often referred to as both a gift and a call. God not only gives us his grace by incorporating us into Christ and into his Church, but he also calls on us to accept the responsibility of this gift. Baptism is a call to continue in faith; it is a call to respond to God’s hospitable invitation both now by joining the Church and in the future by continuing in the meal of the host and by a life of fellowship with Christ and with one’s fellow believers. (Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2004], 212-13, 215)