Baptism
“into Jesus Christ”
The believer’s belonging to Jesus
Christ, her or his “Christian being,” is, in Paul’s view, made visible through
baptism into Jesus’s death (Rom 6:3-4). In their baptism, believers “die” with
Jesus and are buried with him:
ἢ ἀγνοεῖτε ὅτι, ὅσοι ἐβαπτίσθημεν εἰς Χριστὸν Ἰησοῦν, εἰς τὸν θάνατον αὐτοῦ ἐβαπτίσθημεν; συνετάφημεν οὖν αὐτῷ διὰ τοῦ βαπτίσματος εἰς τὸν θάνατον . . .
3 Do you not know that
all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his
death? 4 Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into
death . . .
--NRSV
In this way they participate
directly into the salvific death of Jesus and, more than merely cognitively
accepting Jesus’s fate and saving work, allow him to become operative in their
own lives. Their “death” through baptism is interpreted as the end of their old
lives and the beginning of their new lives “in Christ.” There are two important
implications of this fact. First, mortality can be integrated into a new
understanding of reality as believers interpret the baptismal ritual as being
conformed to the death of Jesus: Although not freed from physical death,
the baptized are free from death as the result of sin and can therefore
hope for resurrection. Second, by following Paul’s line of thought, they can
understand baptism as the anticipation of that future glory that has already
been seen in Christ. In fact, by “dying to sin,” i.e., by being freed from the
power of sin, believers already experience one aspect of the anticipated,
perfect new creation of God. The Spirit of Christ, who is the same Spirit who
raised Christ from the dead (Rom. 8:9-11), now lives in them. Thus, the
fellowship into which believers enter with Christ involves not only the death
of Jesus but also extends all the way to the future resurrection from the dead
(Phil 3:11). (Christine Jacobi, “Pauline Epistles,” in The Reception of
Jesus in the First Three Centuries, ed. Helen K. Bond [London: T&T
Clark, 2020], 1:6-7)
