Saturday, March 26, 2022

Sheila E. McGinn on the Salvific Efficacy of Water Baptism in Romans 6

  

Are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? (6.3) Another rhetorical question, equivalent to saying, “as you know.” Roman Christians instructed in the apostolic catechesis, can be expected to be acquainted with the sublime effects of baptism, but Paul takes the opportunity to remind that the audience of the death-to-life symbolism of the rite. In the NT, baptizein refers either to Jewish ritual washings (Mark 7:14; Luke 11:38), to John the Baptist’s ritual washing, or to Christian baptism (John 1:25, 28; Gal 3:27). Here Paul’s discussion of the last is most easily understood of immersion, but one need not assume that early Christian baptism was always administered in that form. The phrase eis Christon, while reflecting the immersive ritual of baptism, goes beyond mere metaphor. Nor is it short-hand for a bookkeeping term (eis to onoma Christou, “to Christ’s account”), as if baptism merely established Christ’s proprietorship over the baptized. Like other Pauline prepositional phrases, it designates the relationship of the Christ-believers to Christ, occurring most often with words denoting “faith” or “baptism” and connoting the movement of incorporation by which one is born to life “in Christ.” Sometimes viewed as a mystical relationship (e.g. Ambrose of Milan), sometimes as a metaphysical change (cf. the “character” imparted, CCC §1272). Paul’s language is best understood within the overall apocalyptic framework of his gospel. The Christ-even inaugurated the beginning of the end of the “age” dominated by Sin, and baptism “into Christ” incorporates believers into the Christic body that, enlivened by the Holy Spirit, lives already-but-not-yet in the age to come. Paul boldly claims that Christians are not merely identified with the “dying Christ” who has won victory over sin but are incorporated into the very act by which that victory has been won. Hence Christians are “dead to sin” (6:11) associated with Christ precisely at the time when he formally became Savior.

 

Just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life. . . . we shall also be united with him in the resurrection (6:4-5). Paul’s experience with the Philippians has made him cautious about an overly realized understanding of Baptism: believers enter into the death of Christ, united with this saying event of the past, but do not yet share fully in Christ’s rising to new life. Thus, Paul avoids the “gospel of glory” he had to combat at Philippi (e.g., Phil 2:5-8). The baptismal rite symbolically enacts the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, converts descend into the baptismal bath, are covered with its waters—thereby dying to sin and being buried. Paul uses one of his favorite compound verbs, synthaptein (“co-buried”), to vividly express the significance of the baptismal event. While those undergoing the rite actually are raised up from the water, illustrating their emergence to newness of life in Christ, Paul carefully avoids mention of that part of the rite. Believers live in union with the risen Christ, a union that will find its term when they will one day “be with Christ” in glory (syn Christō), but that realized glory lies in the future for all but Christ himself.

 

As in Romans 4:24, the efficiency of the resurrection is ascribed to the Father’s doxa, “glory.” As the OT (Exod 15:7, 11; 16:7, 10) exodus miracles were ascribed to Yahweh’s kābôd (see 3:23), so too the raising of Christ (see Fitzmyer, TAG, 202-17). Indeed, the doxa o the Father shines on the face of the risen Christ (2 Cor 4:6) and invests him with “power” (Rom 1:4) that is “life-giving” (1 Cor 15:45). This transforms believers (2 Cor 3:18), who will be glorified together with Christ (Rom 8:17).

 

The baptismal incorporation of Christians “into Christ” enables them to live with the life of Christ himself (Gal 2:20); a “new creation” is involved (cf. 2 Cor 5:17). “To walk” is another favorite Pauline expression, borrowed from the OT (Mic 6:8; 2 Kgs 20:3; Prov 8:20), to designate the conscious ethical conduct of the faithful. Identified with Christ through baptism, they are enabled to lead a new life under the ruling authority of the Spirit of God rather than under Sin.

 

We know that our self was crucified with him. . . . We believe that we shall also live with him (6:6-8). These three verses affirm of baptized Christians what Paul will say of Christ himself in 6:9-10. The “former self” having been crucified with Christ (cf. Gal 2:20; 5:24; 6:14), the “body of sin” has been destroyed and with it the bonds of Sin. Paul is no Gnostic; as the rest of the verse shows, “the body of sin” denotes the whole of an earthly being, dominated by a proneness to sin. In 7:24, Paul speaks of a “body of death” (cf. Col. 1:22); in each case the genitive expresses the element that dominates the earthly, natural human being. Death brings liberation, since it ends all obligations that impinged upon the former reality. This affirmation provides the final answer to Paul’s rhetorical question posted in 6:1.

 

Paul asserts that the dead are dedikaiōtai (“acquitted, absolved”) of sin, a difficult verb related to the dikaios word group that took so much of his attention in the earlier discussion of dikaiosynē. Understood in a forensic sense, dedikaiōta means that a dead person is acquitted of sin since sin has no standing to bring a claim or a case against the dead. Possibly Paul is thus echoing a Jewish notion: the death of a guilty person ends all litigation. The other explanation seeks to interpret the verb without forensic connotation (so Lyonnet, Romans 89; Cranfield, Roman, 310-11): The one who has died has lost the very means of sinning, “the body of sin,” so is definitively freed of sin. In either case, a change of status has ensued; the old condition has been brought to an end in the baptism-death, and a new one has begun. This new life, a future reality perceived even now with the eyes of faith, is the definitive form of new life syn Christō, “with Christ,” in which Christians proleptically share through the Spirit (cf. 6:4; 2 Cor 4:10-11). (Sheila E. McGinn, “Romans,” in The Jerome Biblical Commentary for the Twenty-First Century, ed. John J. Collins, Gina Hens-Piazza, Barbara Reid, and Donal Senior [3d ed.; London: T&T Clark, 2022], 1555-56)