baptism

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Baptism is the Christian rite of initiation by water: the act, performed once, by which a person is received into the church. In its plainest form it is a washing — pouring, sprinkling, or full immersion, accompanied by words naming the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. From the earliest sources it carries more weight than cleansing. It is read as a passage: the one who goes under the water dies to an old life and comes up into a new one.

The rite has a history before it has a theology. The Gospels open the public career of Jesus with his baptism by John in the Jordan — John, an ascetic preacher offering a baptism “for the forgiveness of sins” to crowds who came out to the wilderness to receive it. Ritual washing was not new; the Judaism of the period knew purification baths, and the immersion of converts. What was distinct in John’s practice, as the texts present it, was its finality and its urgency: a single washing tied to repentance and the imminence of judgment. Whether the movement around John was wholly absorbed into early Christianity, or left currents of its own running alongside it, is a question scholarship has long kept open.

The decisive theology is Paul’s. In the letter to the Romans he writes that those baptized into Christ were baptized into his death, buried with him, so as to walk in newness of life. Here the water becomes a grave. The convert does not merely wash; he dies and is raised. This reading set the pattern for what followed — the rite as the threshold between two existences, the boundary of the community of the saved.

How the churches have held it has divided them sharply. The early centuries favored adult converts, instructed and immersed; but infant baptism became general, on the conviction that the grace conferred need not wait on understanding. The Reformation reopened the question, and the radical wing insisted that baptism without belief was no baptism at all — a quarrel still written into the map of the churches. Disputes over mode (immersion against pouring), over what exactly the rite accomplishes, and over who may receive it have never fully closed.

The death-and-rebirth language drew early comparison to the Hellenistic mystery religions, whose initiates also passed through rites of washing and were said to be reborn. The resemblance is real, and was noticed in antiquity. It is also contested: the mysteries are poorly documented, the directions of borrowing uncertain, and the Jewish roots of baptism do not need a pagan source to explain them. What can be said with less hazard is that the ancient Mediterranean held several languages of passage through water, and that Christianity spoke one of them with unusual force. The image kept its hold long after the doctrines around it hardened: the descent and the rising, the line crossed once.

→ In the library: Mead — The Gnostic John the Baptizer (1924)

→ Related: Christianity · Paul The Apostle · Sin · New Testament · Gnosis