Today’s Culture and the Meaning of Baptism

Charles Davis

The text of the WCC Commission on Faith and Order, “Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry”, formulates the meaning of baptism under five heads: Participation in Christ’s Death and Resurrection; Conversion, Pardoning and Cleansing; The Gift of the Spirit; Incorporation into the Body of Christ; The Sign of the Kingdom. I want to take each of these themes and discuss its interpretation in the context of today’s culture. What can and do these doctrinal formulations mean to people today?

A preliminary point. To suppose that our understanding of baptism changes with the wider cultural context is not an extreme thesis. It should not create the fear that the spectre of doctrinal relativism is raising its ugly head. The permanence of the baptismal rite and the continuity of its meaning both imply that baptism will be found in a variety of historical situations and in different cultures. It would become a meaningless oddity, did not its interpretation in its content and emphases, in its imagery and language, reflect its changing context.

Let me give an example. Traditionally, a prominent part has been given in the baptismal liturgy to the casting out of Satan, the rescue of the candidate from Satan’s power and the renunciation of all Satan’s works by the baptizand or godparents. But there is no mention of Satan or of the forces of evil in the Faith and Order text on the meaning of baptism. It is true also, I think, to say that the exorcisms are downplayed in the revised liturgies. There is caution in speaking of a personal devil. The Church of England liturgy of 1980, as given in the collection of Thurian and Wainwright,’ is satisfied with the renunciation of evil with a small “e”, simply adding at the signing that follows a passing allusion to fighting valiantly against sin, the world and the devil. Many Christians today question the doctrine of a personal devil, and are uncomfort-

0 Prof. Charles Davis teaches in the Department of Religion, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. This paper was read at a meeting of the Canadian Liturgical Society in May 1986. ’ Max Thurian and Geoffrey Wainwright, Baptism and Eucharist: Ecumenical Convergence in Celebrurion, Geneva, World Council of Churches, and Grand Rapids, Wm B. Ekrdmans, 1983.

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able with the imagery of the armies of Christ fighting the powers of darkness, understood as armies of evil spirits. They are trying to reinterpret the traditional imagery in terms of social sin and of what may be called the transpersonal dimension of evil. Whatever one’s views on that, it is undeniable that in its origin, development and present decline, belief in Satan is a culturally conditioned interpretation of the Christian message concerning sin and redemption. But let us consider cultural impacts of a more positive and less obvious kind.

Participation in the death and resurrection of Christ I will begin with baptism as a participation in the death and resurrection of Christ.

That Pauline theme exploits the universal, archetypal symbolism of water as represent- ing both the forces of dissolution and disintegration and the source of life. Water has a twofold meaning. It is the element of death and the origin of life. Let me take each side of that double symbolism in turn.

To go down into water is to return to formless chaos. It is to be submerged in a sea where order and form are dissolved, and therefore it is to enter the realm of darkness and death. When given a historical, Christian reference, the water of baptism becomes symbolic of our sharing in the death and burial of Jesus. We are buried with him by an immersion into death. That death means a death to sin through the saving power of Christ’s death. The death of Jesus altered the relationship between humankind and God by establishing a process of redemptive reversal, according to which the consequences of sin are made the means of redemption. By our baptism we follow Christ into his death, the result of sin, in order to emerge into the new life of resurrection.

The sacrament of baptism establishes a fundamental direction in our lives and empowers us to follow it. But we have to live out our baptism, first, in our daily lives, by dying to sin and living with a new life, but, second, in making our physical death the completion of our baptism. At this point the teaching on baptism has to be related to the changing understanding of death in our present culture. How can death in the literal sense become a renewal of our baptism?

We have just passed through a period in which everything was done to hide the fact and repress the thought of death. The dying were removed from the personal context of home and family to the impersonal environment of the hospital, where they were left to die alone. The practices of the funeral industry were so many attempts to deny death, even to grotesquerie. There was a repudiation of grief and mourning. Now, while that denial of death is still widespread in our culture, a developing reaction has made death an open, prominent and much-discussed theme, and the practices concern- ing death are being modified.

The stress today, as in the hospice movement, is to make death a personal act through palliative care and the control of pain, so that, instead of a mocking monster, it becomes the last stage of human living. That concern is joined by a concern arising out of advances in medical technology that create the possibility of keeping the body functioning well beyond the point when a cure or human living of any,quality can be obtained. People now call for death with dignity and speak of the right of a person to insist on the cessation of treatment when this can no longer secure a meaningful level of human life. That right is extended to include an anticipatory declaration of unwillingness to be subjected to such treatment, if an accident or illness should prevent a personal decision at the time.

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So far there is nothing that does not accord with Christian belief. On the contrary, the denial of death is un-Christian and so are frantic attempts to prolong life. Nevertheless, there is a trend here that could easily come into conflict with the Christian conception of death and mark a further secularization of outlook. The stress on death as a personal act may lead one to cover over its arbitrariness and forget its negativity as an image of sin.

Christianity has a negative attitude towards death. Death is in terrifying contradic- tion to its belief in the ultimacy of love and life. Cullmann has pointed out the contrast between the death of Socrates and the death of Jesus.2 Socrates faced death serenely with complete tranquillity, and died peacefully after taking the poison. Jesus struggled in agony against his coming death and died a frightful death by crucifixion. The Greek model and the Christian model of death are very different. The disciples fled in despair from the sight of the death of their leader. Even after their reassembly through the experience of the resurrection, they had difficulty in interpreting theologically the meaning of the death of their Christ.

The resurrection does not eliminate the experience of death or remove its negativity. It gives victory over death, but it does not remove the arbitrariness of death, its destructiveness of human meaning, its threat to our faith, hope and love. The image of death as the tranquil closure of a completed life, a peaceful passing into final fulfilment, does not fit the deaths of the majority of humankind. Death strikes down most people in the midst of life, destroying their life before it has been completed, before it has significantly begun in many instances. It strikes people of all ages. The association of death primarily with the old is a recent development. Death most often comes inopportunely, causing a waste of human goodness and talents.

Let us not labour the point. It is good to overcome the recent denial of death, but let us not replace it with a more subtle denial. The serene acceptance of death is a secular not a Christian ideal. The conception of death as natural is a half-truth of unbelief. In this concrete order, viewed religiously, death is the embodiment and image of sin. Death is thus an enemy to be overcome by the saving power of Christ, and it is that saving power in baptism that enables us to conquer death, though not without a struggle. Physical death renews our baptismal immersion into the forces of chaos and disorder.

From that dissolution we emerge into the new life of the resurrection. I shall not dwell here upon our individual sharing in the risen life of Christ. Enough

to say that the new life of the resurrection is not postponed until after our physical death nor until the end of history. Already here and now, through our baptism, we begin to live a transfigured life of grace, even though that life will find its full expansion and manifestation only after our individual deaths and the death of the human world. It is a misunderstanding of the symbolism of the resurrection to suppose that it occurs only at the last day.

But the greatest threat to a sound belief in the resurrection is the threat of megadeath, the annihilation of the human species in a nuclear war. Does not the possibility, indeed the probability, that human beings will themselves by their own action bring human history to an end contradict belief in the final resurrection and hope in its promise as pledged in baptism?

* Oscar Cullmann, Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Body, London, Epworth Press, 1958.

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Here, I think, we must make a distinction between the end of the world as brought about by nature or by human beings and the end of the world in the sense of the eschaton. The two are not identical. The distinction between them parallels that between the beginning of the universe as a scientific hypothesis and creation under- stood as the origin of the universe in God. The doctrine of creation does not tie us to any particular view concerning the phenomenal beginning of the universe as put forward by science. Likewise, belief in the eschaton or fulfilment of God’s purpose in Christ for the human race does not carry with it any particular account of how history will end. Even apart from the nuclear threat, we knew that, sooner or later, the human species will have run its course. It is a crude literalism to suppose that God would have brought it to an end before its time by a supernatural intervention. Hence a nuclear annihilation will be neither an act of God through human instrumentality, that is it will not be the Armageddon of the fundamentalists, nor a practical denial of our hope for the escharon. Like our individual death the end of history will be an image and embodiment of sin, here taking on a monstrous visage, but also like our individual death it will become by a divine reversal a path to new life. The eschaton means the transfiguration of the death of the species, just as the resurrection of Christ was the transfiguration of his death.

Baptism takes on two new nuances of meaning in the context of megadeath or nuclear annihilation. First, as a sharing here and now in the power of the resurrection, it is the ground of a never-failing hope. The baptized, with Christian hope, should continue to insist that nuclear disaster is never inevitable, however black the prospect. In the power of Christ’s risen life which we share, there is always the possibility of changing the situation, so as to achieve peace and reconciliation. Second, if, as we cannot exclude, the human race does exterminate itself, then baptism promises that even that event will not prevent the fulfilment of God’s design.

Conversion, pardoning, cleansing The next heading under which the meaning of baptism is formulated in the WCC

text is “Conversion, Pardoning and Cleansing”. Baptism implies a conversion of heart and brings a cleansing pardon. Here, again, I would like to deal selectively with questions raised by our cultural situation.

What about children? From what sins does baptism cleanse them? From original sin? There is a conflict between the modern conviction of the innocence of childhood and the traditional Christian view derived from the doctrine of original sin.

Let this quotation from Hannah More stand for the traditional conception:

Is it not a fundamental error to consider children as innocent beings, whose little weak- nesses may, perhaps, want some correction, rather than as beings who bring into the world a corrupt nature and evil disposition, which it should be the great end of education to r e ~ t i f y ? ~

Against that conception it does not help to object that Christian children are baptized and therefore released from original sin. According to the standard teaching, baptism, while removing original sin, leaves its consequences, notably concupiscence, that disposition to evil.

Quoted in Barry Qualls, The Secular Pilgrims of Victorian Fiction, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982, p.5.

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It was in explicit contradiction to that Christian doctrine of original sin that there developed the Romantic concept of the child’s nature as one of original innocence, a concept, going back to Rousseau, which informed the work of Blake, Wordsworth and Dickens.

Innocent or guilty? “Trailing clouds of glory” or sinfully corrupt and evilly disposed? Does baptism commit us to the traditional view? Perhaps the two views are not so far apart as it seems.

Original sin has been reinterpreted as social sin. Sin is cumulative. Over the course of time, the multiplication of sinful choices and actions creates a sinful situation, which transcends the guilt of any single individual. Sin becomes built into social institutions, attitudes and customs, so that a society or culture may be dubbed sinful. A society organized on the principle of apartheid is an example of social sin; it is the embodiment of a cumulative series of sinful choices. But every society has its evil elements, so that an undiscriminating adherence to any social and cultural context is an alliance with evil. So, every child is born into a sinful situation; its unredeemed state is integration into the cumulative sinfulness of the human race. However innocent individually, each child is mired in social sin. Long before reaching the age of personal responsibility, the child has been initiated into attitudes and actions that violate moral and Christian values.

Now, that interpretation of original sin, paradoxically, coincides with the insight that lies behind the concept of childhood innocence. The Romantic writers who developed the theme of the innocent child used the image of the child to express their dissatisfaction with the society they saw emerging around them. They were looking for an image to oppose to the new industrial society, which for them was, in its exaltation of the machine, destructive of humanity and given over to utilitarian values and mechanical procedures. The child became the symbol of spontaneous life, imagination and sensibility. The image of the child thus expressed their awareness of a conflict between human innocence and the cumulative pressures of social experience as brought to a new intensity in industrial ~ o c i e t y . ~

There would seem to me no need for Christians to deny entirely the idea of the innocence of the child until corrupted by society. What is necessary is to remove it from its individualistic context. Just as original sin may be reinterpreted as social sin, rather than as a sin inherited by the individual, so also the innocence of the child may be seen as the incorporation of the child by baptism into a redeemed community, counteracting from the beginning the evil influence of worldly society. What infant baptism does by bringing the child into the Christian community is to change a purely negative original innocence into a positive force, capable of resisting the blandish- ments of sinful society. That positive force is the Spirit.

The Gift of the Spirit That is the third heading under which the WCC document analyzes the meaning of

baptism. Nowhere, perhaps, more than in its conception of Spirit does modem culture contrast with traditional religious culture. Traditionally, to be moved by the Spirit is to

See Peter Coveney, The Image of Childhood: the Individual and Society. A Study of the Theme in English Literature, revised ed. with an introduction by F.R. Leavis, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Penguin, 1967, passim

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be taken out of oneself. The inspired prophet is a person not speaking from the self, but serving as a channel for a divine message. To receive the Spirit is in principle an ecstatic experience, at the opposite pole from a sense of autonomy. For a modem person, however, Spirit is an expression of subjectivity. It is associated with autonom- ous reason, with freedom and with self-awareness. For Hegel, the philospher of modernity, Spirit was the movement towards rational self-awareness in f r e e d ~ m . ~ But to remain at the level of ordinary language, think of the expressions “a person of spirit” or “a spirited reply” - both focused upon the subject. We may, therefore, say that the pressing question of the Spirit today is the apparent opposition between a human, self- conscious autonomy and the religious sense of dependence, or between rational self- realization or self-determination in freedom and a passive receptivity to salvation as the unmerited gift of God.

What we have here is an opposition created by exaggeration on both sides. The modem claim to autonomy in its current individualistic form is false; its concept

of freedom is unreal. People are not independent monads; they depend upon others for their living and development. The dependence across space is community in its various forms; the dependence across time is tradition. Each person belongs to a larger whole within which alone it is possible to grow into maturity and freedom. To join a community is not to relinquish freedom, but to gain it. To belong to a tradition is to be moved towards self-realization by the cumulative force of past generations. The Spirit resides in community and tradition. The isolated individual is spiritless and powerless. Genuine individuality is when the individual is carried forward as the moving edge of the tide of history, namely of community and tradition. Baptism as the gift of the Spirit in a communal and traditional rite is an acted rejection of modem alienation, an alienation masquerading as the autonomy of a human being come of age.

But there is another side to the story of modernity. One of the reasons why human freedom has been conceived as a rejection of community and tradition rather than as an effect of their mediation of the Spirit is the repeated sliding of religious faith into idolatry. By idolatry I mean the granting of unconditional authority to conditional forms. Again and again, the finite elements - beliefs, doctrines, laws, rites, institutions and so on - intended to serve as a mediation of the Absolute or Unconditional have been made absolute or unconditional. Church authority has identified itself with divine authority. Culturally conditioned elements which should change with the culture that originated them are frozen into an immobility that is confused with ultimacy. Religious faith proceeds to canonize obsolete cultural elements as sacred. Because these elements drawn from the past are no longer features of contemporary culture, they can be proclaimed as sacred. The social relationships of a bygone age may thus be mystified as the sacred structure of Christ’s church.

When religion becomes idolatry by absolutizing its finite elements, it becomes destructive of human freedom. It is then necessary to throw off a religious authority that is smothering human development and blocking human achievement. Without denying the part played by human pride and lust, one can still say that modernity is the story of human freedom as forced by the idolatrous pressure of religious authority to conceive itself as a defiance, as a human rebellion against a tyrannical God. We have to teach that human freedom need not be a rebellious defiance, but a gift, received

’See Charles Taylor. Hegel, Cambridge, Cambndge University Press, 1975, p.88

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through the mediation of community and tradition. The problem is how to retain a continuous, unbroken basis for the dynamic mediation of the Absolute, while remaining open to the constant changes of finite human culture.

Baptism, in brief, must express the rational self-awareness in freedom of the modern subject, while retaining its traditional character as the reception in humility of God’s gift of the Spirit.

Incorporation into the Body of Christ The fourth heading under which the meaning of baptism is articulated in the Faith

and Order document is “Incorporation into the Body of Christ”. Here our common baptism is seen as a basic bond of unity and therefore in our present divided state “a call to the churches to overcome their divisions and visibly manifest their fellowship”.

The questions at this point that arise out of our cultural context concern pluralism and exclusiveness.

Pluralism is the inevitable consequence of finitude. Because our knowledge, our institutions, all our achievements are finite, the only way we can ensure an adequate richness and efficacy is by allowing a diversified plurality. From that standpoint a unity that suppresses variety is an impoverishment. There should be a plurality of theologies, a plurality of rites and practices. a plurality of institutions. The ecumenical movement rightly aims at overcoming the division of Christians into hostile groups out of communion with one another. But it would be wrong to attempt to establish a centralized uniformity. We have to learn to envision the Christian church as mani- festing at any one time the same high degree of diversification as has existed sequentially in the course of history. But where does one draw the line?

The widespread recognition that doctrinal formulations and ritual practices are culturally conditioned and subject to development and change has led to the toleration of differences of belief, not just of theology, within a continuance of communion. There are, for example, today different beliefs brought under the central confession that Jesus is Lord. The human condition in its finitude and imperfection will never allow the elimination of all such differences. It is also inevitable that those sharing a common understanding on certain fundamental issues should wish to organize a community restricted to those who subscribe to that same understanding. They should, however, retain an openness in fellowship and dialogue with other Christians. Can we learn to differ without hostility or bitterness?

The limits of diversity in unity cannot be laid down beforehand. What is certain is that our common incorporation into the body of Christ is not to be identified with the unity of a single organized institution. The Christian church at present finds institu- tional expression in a great number of different organizations, having different origins and histories. I see no reason to deplore that or to suppose that such diversity should be abolished. The archetypal symbolism of baptism allows it to express a unity deeper than that of an institutional organization. The visible unity of Christians should be interpreted as a communion of mutual recognition and interaction, not as the structural unity of an organized social body.

But what challenges us today is not just the acceptance of differences among Chnstians, but a recognition of the legitimacy of religions other than Christianity. Christian exclusiveness is now in question. Gone are the days for most Christians when the unbaptized were assigned, infants as well as adults, to hell. Baptism by

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desire, which at first was devised for individual exceptional cases, has been reworked so as to provide a normal means of salvation for the majority of the human race. The end of that line of thinking is Karl Rahner’s hypothesis of “anonymous Christians”. But even that does not go far enough, because in making good pagans crypto- Christians, it refuses full recognition to their own religions. Admittedly, Rahner does go beyond the earlier conception, which held that non-Christians who lived according to their conscience were saved through baptism of desire despite the religions to which they belonged, rather than because of them. Other religions were refused any salvific function, even though their members could be saved individually by an implicit baptism of desire, which meant an implicit faith in Christ. For Rahner, a purely individual path to salvation contradicts the historical and social character of all religious faith. He therefore allows other religions a mediatory role in the process of salvation. All the same, while granting religions other than Christianity a positive saving function, Rahner refuses to place them on the same level as Christianity. Faith, he maintains, has everywhere a Christological character. It comes in and through Jesus Christ. That is the justification for speaking of an anonymous Christianity. Where there is faith, there is Christianity, even though it is not recognized as such and even when it has not been fully realized according to its proper nature.

Hence, Rahner’s “anonymous Christianity”, while representing a positive approach to other religious traditions, falls far short of acknowledging the pluralism in unity of religious history and the present movement towards a truly global religious self-consciousness. It is well, however, to point out that the proposed alternative to Christian exclusiveness is not that all religious traditions are identical or even equal; nor is it necessary to deny the universal significance of some of them and to limit the relevance of each to a single cultural milieu. The alternative to exclusiveness is not relativism, but complementarity. No Christian need deny that the event and truth of Jesus Christ is of universal, decisive significance, provided that Christians are prepared to allow that the events and truths embodied in other religious communities and traditions may also be of universal and decisive signifi- cance. What is being asked is that religious communities acknowledge their complementarity and articulate their plurality in unity in the formation of a global though variegated self-consciousness.6

The sign of the kingdom The theme of pluralism has led me to anticipate what is said in the WCC text under

the fifth and final heading, “The Sign of the Kingdom”. Through the gifts of faith, hope and love, baptism, we read, has a dynamic which embraces the whole of life, extends to all nations, and anticipates the day when every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. My question has been whether we should interpret that according to a principle of complementarity or a principle of exclusiveness. Arguing for complementarity, I have suggested that the dynamic of baptism is universal insofar as it finds complementary expression in other religions, and that the universal acknowledgment of Jesus Christ is to have its counterpart in a universal acknowledgment of other instances and forms of access to the Transcendent.

For a further elaboration, see M. Boutin, C. Davis, Norman King, “Trois approches rtcentes dans I’ttude des religions”, Science er esprit, 35, 1983, pp.325-351.

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Notice that baptism is said to have a universal dynamic “through the gifts of faith, hope and love”, not in virtue of its particular ritual matter and form.

There is, however, a further point to be made when the meaning of baptism is considered under the heading “The Sign of the Kingdom”. In the words of the text, baptism “initiates the reality of the new life given in the midst of the present world”. Now, I want to put that forcibly and provocatively by saying that baptism is a political act. It summons us to take a stand on issues that are the subject-matter of politics and political and social action. It involves us i n the worldwide striving for liberation and emancipation. That is the insight behind the spontaneous formation at the grassroots level of the hundreds of Base Communities in Latin America, especially in Brazil, and to the elaboration of the various types of liberation theology, such as Latin American theology, political theology, black theology, feminist theology.

To understand these developments, let me distinguish three levels of Christian communion. The first or deepest level is designated by the biblical name of the kingdom of God. It is not a community in the institutional sense, but rather a community-forming principle. It is the reality of God’s grace and power, calling human beings to freedom and communion. As we have seen, it is not limited to Christianity and its particular history, but is a presence in the universal history of humanity and throughout its various cultures. The second level is that of the Christian people as an expression and embodiment of the kingdom in a particular history, founded upon the originating event of Jesus Christ. The third level consists in the multiplicity of changing social forms in which the Christian people of God finds transitory manifestation. Here it is found as a movement, there as an emergence of small groups; here as a church, there as a dissenting sect. Many and various have been the forms of Christian community at the institutional level.

With these three levels in mind, we can say that in baptism we become receptive to the community-forming power of the kingdom, so as to continue the emphases and values proper to Christian tradition, and under that power and in the context of continuing Christian history are called upon to find the social forms and action appropriate to our present situation.

The dynamic of the kingdom in its Christian manifestation is a force throwing down the barriers dividing nations, races, social classes, the sexes. As Paul put it: “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:27). Further, the gospel message clearly calls for an option in favour of the poor and the oppressed. The Christian, following Christ, will identify in love and compassion with the humiliated, abused and suffering. The good news is a word of promise and of hope.

The truth that the kingdom will not be fully realized this side of death and the end of history but in a new risen existence does not excuse us from submitting here and now to its community-forming dynamic. Christians cannot, without betraying their bap- tism, accept passively the fact of racism, sexism, oppression, poverty and social injustice. Death and sickness are permanently with us. That does not diminish our duty to care for the sick and dying. Nor does the eschatological character of the kingdom exclude partial manifestations of its power in this present world.

Moreover, a Christian concern for the poor and oppressed will, if consistent, lead to social and political action. As I wrote elsewhere:

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Unless we arbitrarily place a limit upon what we are prepared to do, we shall find ourselves concerned about our neighbour’s world, his work, his living conditions and resolved to set about changing what is wrong in his social position and environment. Very soon we shall be up against defects and injustices in the legal system, struggling with the destructive effects of the economic system and angry at the stunting of human freedom, the psychic maiming of so many people by the structures of society. Politics means taking a definite stand on practical public issues. Unless we are prepared to say in the name of Christ to our brother and sister in need, “1 can help you so far but no further”, our Christian love will become political in virtue of its own logic. In short, the Christian practice of love niediatcs a political interpretation of Christian faith.’

Hence my final statement that baptism is a political act is not so extreme as it might have seemed. It is being given practical expression, as I said, in the Base Communities of Latin America. As the rite of Christian initiation, baptism has to embrace in its meaning the whole of the Christian faith and life and do so in a manner that corresponds to the concrete situation of Christians today.

’ Theology and Political Society, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1980, p.53

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