Monday, September 2, 2019

G. Ernest Wright and Reginald H. Fuller on Baptism in the New Testament




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)