Thursday, August 22, 2019

François Cuttaz on Paul's Theology of Water Baptism being Salvific


Commenting on Paul’s theology of water baptism, Catholic theologian François Cuttaz wrote the following which is very insightful, showing Paul did affirm baptismal regeneration, notwithstanding some attempts to claim 1 Cor 1:17 teaches otherwise (for an exegesis of this text, see Refuting Douglas Wilson on Water Baptism and Salvation):

Beyond all others, Saint Paul has sounded the depths of meaning in the baptismal rite to discover its riches and to explain its effects. According to this Apostle, Baptism is a “putting on” of Christ, a “planting together” with Christ, an incorporation in Christ.

A “putting on” of Christ: “For as many of you as have been baptized in Christ have put on Christ” (Gal. III, 27). (“In Christum,” reads the Greek text, using the accusative of motion, signifying that we become but one with Christ). You have “put on” Christ; you have been enveloped by Christ, as a piece of iron dipped in gold is gilded; or, more exactly, as a piece of bread soaked in a delicious wine takes on its savour; or as a piece of poor material becomes valuable through having been coloured by a precious dye.

A grafting, a “planting together” with Christ: “We have been planted together with him”—Complantati facti sumus (Rom., VI, 5); planted together with Him, grafted upon Him, living by the same life, fed with the same sap, co-operating to bring forth the same fruits. This comparison is essentially the same as that of the vine and its branches—the comparison used by Christ Himself (John, XV). We are grafted upon Him, fixed adhering to Him, sustained and nourished by Him, as the branch by the trunk which bears it.

But the comparison most patently dear to St. Paul, the one to which he most frequently returns and whose implications he most searchingly probes, is that of incorporation. Through Baptism, we enter into the Mystical Body of Christ, we become His members, we form but one sole organism with Him. Hence the expression: “In Christ”—or “In Christ Jesus”, or “In the Lord”—“In Christo”, which is St. Paul’s special phrase, characteristic of his teaching, the foundation and summary of his whole dogmatic and moral doctrine. Explicitly or equivalently, it occurs as many as 164 times in his Epistles, most frequently in those of his captivity where he deals especially with the spiritual union of Christians with Christ. It would not be an exaggeration to say that all his writings are but a commentary on this profound and rich formula. Far from leaving it in general terms, he is careful to specify its precise meaning and import; to indicate in what precisely this union between us and Christ, created by Baptism consists.

This Sacrament does not make us one with Christ at whatever stage of His life we like to envisage: it makes us one with the dead and buried Chris, and with the Christ of the Resurrection: “Know you not”, says St. Paul to the Romans, “that all we who are baptized in Christ Jesus are baptized in his death? For we are buried together with Him by Baptism into death; that, as Christ is risen from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also may walk in newness of life . . . Now, if we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall live also together with Christ . . .” (Rom. VI).

The Apostle is able to take for granted that this doctrine is well known to his correspondents: “Know you not?” he repeats. It was emphasised in the sermons of those early years. How many Christians there are today, we may remark in passing, who are totally unaware of the very existence of this doctrine!

According to the sacred writer, the rite of Baptism comprises two moments and two acts: immersion and emersion. This duality signifies and produces two groups of effects, whose study is the object of this present book.

Immersion was total or partial. The water in the baptismal font is the symbolic equivalent of the Saviour’s sepulchre. By entering the water, the catechumen symbolically buries himself with Christ in His tomb; he disappears with Christ from the eyes of the world, and—since only the dead are buried—he dies with Christ; he is united with, identified with, incorporated in Christ in His death and His burial, incorporated in the Christ of the Cross and the Christ of the Tomb. The catechumen makes his own the Sacrifice of Christ and its effects; he enters personally into the sentiments with which Christ thus immolated Himself, and into the merits which derived from that immolation; he makes his own the holocaust of Christ and its supernatural fruit.

But the emersion follows immediately, the symbol of resurrection and of “newness of life”.

Just as Our Lord emerged alive from the tomb, conqueror of death and of his enemies, so too the baptized person leaves the tomb of his sins, supernaturally regenerated. As for what is past, he has been delivered from spiritual death; and as for what is to come, he has been raised up to the lie of grace merited for him by Christ, and given Divine assistance to lead a new life in conformity with that of the Lord.

Thus, Baptism immerses him, places him in the Saviour’s death and resurrection, causing him to participate in both; it integrates, incorporates, assimilates him with the dying Christ and the triumphant Christ, with the Christ of Good Friday and the Christ of Easter Sunday. It causes him to die and to be buried with Christ, and then with Christ to rise again to life. Through baptism, the Death and Resurrection of Christ become our death and our resurrection, as though, with Him and in Him, we had been nailed to the cross and placed in the tomb. For the effect of this Sacrament is that Christ is dead and risen from the dead, not merely for us, but also with us; and we are dead and risen with Him and in Him. Across the two thousand years which separate us from the drama of Calvary, we can re-live the principal scenes and, in a sense, play an active role in them in union with the Divine victim. There is a sense in which, through Baptism, we “complete” Christ, for we constitute with Him “the Whole Christ”; “the fullness of His Body”. A proof of our incorporation with Christ by Baptism—and a rich indication of the nature of this Sacrament—can be found in the explicit affirmations, both by Our Lord Himself and Saint Paul, of the identification of the baptized with Christ. (François Cuttaz, Divine Birth: The Precious Effect of Baptism [trans. Malachy Gerard Carroll; Middle Green, U.K.: St Paul Publications, 1962], 7-11, italics in original)

 As for 1 Cor 1:17, there is an insightful commentary from a work I just read today on First Corinthians:


It appears, then, that as soon as Paul had baptized his early converts, he handed over the baptizing to those he had first baptized, reserving for himself what Christ called him to do—to preach and to found assemblies of “the called,” the ekklēsia, the church. As the church expanded, there was need for catechists to prepare candidates for baptism, and the rite became more extensive. Paul shows the wisdom of an administrator by delegating responsibilities to others and thus raising up new leaders. (George T. Montague, First Corinthians [Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2011], 41)

Such fits with what the Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible has to say on this passage:

Paul’s alleged indifference to baptism in 1 Cor. 1:14-17 refers only to the person of the administrator: Whether one is baptized by Paul, Peter, or Apollos means nothing; one is to be centered on Christ into whom he or she is baptized. This sometimes distorted passage must be interpreted in light of Paul’s clear affirmation of baptism as incorporation into the death and resurrection of Christ (Rom. 6:1-11) and as the putting on of Christ like a garment, thereby receiving a new identity beside which all of the usual distinctions dissolve (Gal. 3:27-29). Paul’s more puzzling comment about Israel being “baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea” (1 Cor. 10:2) actually is quite illuminating once one resists the temptation to suppose the apostle is referring to some literal rite. Paul is suggesting that as a fragmented band of refugees found a new identity in the Exodus and its aftermath in the covenant at Sinai, so those who are baptized into Christ thereby find a new identity through their covenant with God.

So also with Peter’s comparison of baptism to salvation on the ark: both events bespeak a newness given by the grace of God by which humanity is rescued from destruction. In Heb. 6:2-4; 10:32 “enlightenment” alludes to baptism; and the ancient Church when instructing catechumens liberally used John 9, , Jesus’ healing of the man blind from birth. (Laurence Hull Stookey, "Baptism" in David Noel Freedman, ed. Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2000], emphasis added)