Reclaiming the Sacramental (Part 2)

The God we as Christians serve is a Living Mystery who surprises us more and more the longer we follow him. The strangest thing about God is that as we come to know him in deeper and ever more profound ways, the more we grow in the realization of how very little we actually know about him. The distinction I want to highlight here is between that of the relational knowledge of God and the intellectual knowledge of him. One would naturally think that these two things exist in a direct relationship—that as one grows the other does as well—but this is precisely the opposite of the way things work. The more we know God, the less we realize that we "know" about him. Believers in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the Father of Jesus Christ have long testified to the ways in which God transcends our understanding and is thus in a very real sense unknowable to our very limited and finite human minds. This sense of mystery stands out particularly strong in the writings of the Hebrew prophet Isaiah: "'For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,' declares Yahweh. 9'For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts" (55:8-9).

In the Christian faith tradition, most notably in its Orthodox and Catholic varieties, one way of sounding Isaiah's theme has been through the negation of positive properties of God. This is called the apophatic way. The apophatic way is designed to bust our idols by clearly defining what God is not. It guards against the danger inherent in all speech about God, which is that of literally conceiving of God in creaturely terms. For instance, while speaking of God as Father is authorized by Christ's use of the term, calling God "Father" can become idolatrous if we conceive of God as a literal father. In order to keep us from doing so, the apophatic way would be to detail how God is not at all like a father. The purpose of this initial negation of the concept of God as Heavenly Father would be to arrive at an understanding of God as Heavenly Father that does not in any way diminish his glory or ascribe to him any similarity to created things. The apophatic way, then, shows us that God is Father in a way that nothing else in the universe can possibly be. Perhaps no group of Christian thinkers excelled in the expression of the apophatic way as did the great 14th-century Rhineland mystics, Meister Eckhart and his brilliant students Johannes Tauler and Henry Suso. The most shocking apophatic statement comes from Eckhart, who provocatively declares, "God is neither good nor better nor best of all. Whoever would say that God is good would be treating him as unjustly as he were calling the sun black." Of course, Eckhart is not denying the goodness of God here but showing how God transcends all of our conceptions of what goodness is. God is good in a way that we never can be and in a way that we never could have been, even if we had never fallen into sin.

In our ways of thinking about God, we must constantly guard against the impulse to reduce God from the Living Presence he is to a rigidly and easily defined set of propositions. The Angelic Doctor Thomas Aquinas famously said, "If anyone claims to have understood God, then what one has understood is not God." I think these ancient words of St. Thomas have a prophetic significance for contemporary American evangelicals when it comes to our understanding of the way God works in the world, particularly in regard to the rites of baptism and the Lord's Supper. Most evangelicals, to use the words of Leonard Vander Zee, deny the ability of material objects, including and especially the sacraments, "to carry the freight of spiritual reality." Though the Reformation is 500 years in the past, to many Protestants the idea of sacraments raises the full specter of the abusive medieval Roman Catholic sacerdotalism against which Luther and Calvin railed as if it were a present reality threatening the integrity of the Christian faith. "Protestant horror" is an appropriate term for this reaction. This Protestant suspicion of all things that sound remotely Catholic arises, I believe, not from a sola scriptura reliance on the explicit teachings of the Bible or from a religious climate like that of the 16th century but a spirit-matter dualism that is more characteristic of Enlightenment rationalism than the Spirit-led theological premises that informed the Apostles' writing of the New Testament. It is more characteristic of the modern mindset to systematize knowledge and reduce it to its lowest common denominator, such as the philosophically simple distinction between spirit and matter, than it was in the first-century Judeo-Christian mind. Whereas we as early 21st-century American evangelicals view the mystery associated with a messy theology that does not radically separate spirit from matter as a problem that must be solved, the Jewish writers of the New Testament embraced a spiritual God who repeatedly humbled himself and used visible, tangible signs, symbols, and personal invasions into history in order to relate to human beings. The God of Israel repeatedly revealed himself in the natural world, speaking to Moses through the flames of the burning bush, guiding the children of Israel in the Exodus in the form of the pillar of smoke in the daytime and the pillar of fire at night, and, most dramatically, becoming one of us in his Incarnation as Jesus of Nazareth. When we deny the possibility that God continues to relate to his people through the elements of this world, we are thus taking a departure from the view of God presented in the Bible.

While our philosophical inheritance from the Age of Reason and modern life may be fundamental to mainstream evangelicalism's rejection of the sacraments, we cannot just dismiss the theological objections and questions that the sacraments raise for evangelicals. In my last posting, some of the ideas I put forward were undoubtedly shocking to many of you. In fact, some of you have expressed alarm at the dangerous ideas I put forward, particularly my foray into ecclesiology, with the direct correlation I made between salvation and the Church and between Christ and the Church. Also, I made some remarks that appeared to denigrate the reality that we are saved by faith alone and that, at face value, seem to make salvation primarily a sacramental affair. I will take this opportunity to moderate some of those remarks, which, upon further reflection, I must admit were put forward with somewhat less nuance than they should have been. Let me first take up the question of the Church's role in salvation.

The most shocking statement I made was that "the Church opens the gates to heaven in some sense through the sacraments of salvation it administers." This statement seems to imply that the Church and the sacraments by themselves can save us, or, inversely, that without the Church and the sacraments we cannot be saved. I too reject the idea that the Church and the sacraments by themselves can save us or that we cannot be saved without them, as would, incidentally, most Catholics. If we personally reject Jesus Christ, the Church and the sacraments can do nothing for us. If, by faith, however, we are in Christ, no power of the Church can separate us from him. Though the Catholic Church would explain this in different terms than I would, consistent with the Reformed tradition, I would say that the Church and the sacraments contribute to our salvation in the sense that they augment and strengthen the faith through which Jesus saves us. In other words, the sacraments strengthen the influence of the Christ event in our lives. They sign and seal our salvation by powerfully and experientially conferring God's promises on us. In the unusual situation in which the sacraments are not available, however, the promises of God's Word remain true, albeit without the additional assurances that the sacraments alone can provide.

I also mentioned how I do not find the teachings of the Catholic Church about its role in salvation to be substantially wrong but object only to the degree to which it understands this role. I stand by that statement. We must realize that this is not the 16th century and that the Roman Catholic Church has done much to address the abuses that led to the Reformation. While many of the popes and spiritual leaders of the Middle Ages were corrupt and abused their spiritual authority for political and material gain, it is undeniable that recent popes, notably John Paul II, and the current Pope, Benedict XVI, are holy men who deeply love Jesus Christ and are earnest and sincere in shepherding the flock. No longer are indulgences and promises of salvation aggressively marketed to poor peasants for the purposes of filling the Vatican's coffers and no longer does the hierarchy of the Church use the threat of excommunication as a political weapon. Furthermore, in spite of the sex abuse scandal, for which the Vatican is truly beginning to express godly repentance, the vast majority of priests are holy and faithful men who love the Lord deeply. That being said, however, I cannot affirm the Catholic teaching that the Church directly and exclusively administers salvation to the faithful through the priesthood. For me, this places too much stress on the Church's role in salvation and makes God's grace too dependent on human mediators. I do not deny that the Church has some bearing on our salvation but only object to the extent to which this is expressed in Roman Catholicism.

This brings us to another question. I mentioned the connection between the Church and Christ. How is Christ present in the Church? Is he first and foremost present through a professional priesthood that can be identified directly with him, or, do we envision Christ's presence in the Church in a more organic sense? As a Protestant, I must choose the latter and affirm the priesthood of all believers. Though my ecclesiology is quite high for an evangelical (high Church evangelical is an oxymoron if ever there was one!), I cannot identify Christ's presence in the Church with a professional clergy. However, I enthusiastically affirm that Christ is present in his assembled body in a more excellent way than he is in each Spirit-filled Christian individually. Jesus affirms this, when he promises in Matthew 18:18-20:

Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. 19Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. 20For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.

Though we cannot say that the Church is Christ and that Christ is the Church (Jesus is locally present only at the right hand of the Father in heaven), we clearly see that the Church has great spiritual power and authority because Christ is among his people when his body is assembled. When we encounter the Church, we are encountering the living Christ powerfully present. Conversely, then, when we reject the Church and the sacraments, we are rejecting the Head of the body, Christ. As a result, we can say that in a real sense we are incorporated into Christ through our incorporation into his body by the sacraments and that we are cut off from him through our dismemberment from his body. That is why the author of Hebrews is so insistent that Christians do not forsake the regular gathering together of believers. It is hazardous to our spiritual health to do so.

Finally, how can we reconcile the saving significance of the sacraments with the Protestant tenant of salvation by grace alone through faith alone when the sacraments involve physical things and actions? This was a difficult question for Luther and Calvin to answer, but our importation of a modernist dualism that radically separates spirit from matter complexifies this question to an even further degree. How we read this into the Christian life of faith is most evident in our interpretation of Jesus' words in John 4:24: "God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth." Protestants, particularly evangelicals, have long used this verse as a proof text to argue against all forms of ritualized worship. True worship is that which occurs in the heart and the head; therefore, ritual actions and ritual objects cannot carry the weight of spiritual reality and are thus unnecessary, if not harmful, to true worship. A look at the context of the passage in which Jesus speaks these words and a discussion of the historical context of the Reformation will introduce needed balance to our understanding of these words.

The biblical context of this verse is Jesus' encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well. We must note that this interaction is unusual because of the animosity between Jews and Samaritans that existed at this time. The Samaritans were the descendents of those Hebrews in the northern kingdom of Israel who were not deported by the Assyrians when Israel fell in the eighth century B.C. Recall that when Judah and Israel divided after the reign of Solomon, Israel set up a temple in Bethel to rival Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem in order to sever the religious connection between the northern tribes and their kinsman in the South. The religion of Israel centered in the temple at Bethel combined elements of monotheistic Judaism with the pantheism of the local Canaanite peoples. The Hebrews who remained in northern Palestine after the Assyrian deportation intermarried with these Canaanite peoples and, in time, became indistinguishable from them, resulting in the rise of a distinct ethnic group called the Samaritans. The animosity that existed between first-century Jews and their Samaritan cousins was thus based not just on race or ethnic identity but also on religious grounds. In the course of Jesus' conversation with the Samaritan woman, she brings up the differences between Samaritan religious practice and that of the Jews. She says, "Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where we ought to worship" (v. 20). When Jesus responds that the day is coming when God's worshipers will worship neither in Bethel nor in Jerusalem but rather in spirit and truth, on the one hand, he is speaking to the pantheistic impulse to identify God directly with a physical location that the woman's words indicate, while, on the other hand, he is also speaking to the Jewish understanding of God's exclusive relationship with the physical descendents of Abraham (v. 21-24). By reaching out to a pagan half-breed Gentile woman, Jesus is showing us that the new covenant is not limited to one specific ethnic group or to a particular region of holy geography. The Messiah has come to claim for the Father worshipers from all peoples, nations, and places who will worship him in spirit and truth. This does not mean, however, that this worship is only expressed in an internal and subjective experience. After all, the greatest commandment is to "love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength." This is worship in spirit and truth—a passionate, engaged, embodied (erotic even) spirituality that ardently worships God with all of one's faculties.

"God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth" was an important statement for the Protestant Reformation, not in the sense that the Reformers were rejecting any and all ritualized expressions of worship but in the sense that ritual worship is not to be the sum total of authentic Christian spirituality. The 16th century was a time of ecclesiastical abuse and neglect by the Roman Church. Secular priests were often poorly trained, bishops were often absent from their dioceses, sermons, when provided, were most often in Latin, as was the liturgy of the Word, and promises of the forgiveness of sins and even salvation were exchanged for money through the purchase of indulgences. What the Reformers were reacting to was a spirituality that was mediated exclusively through the Church and that demanded nothing of Christians but loyalty to the Church, yearly confession, and participation in the Mass, which the vast majority of the laity could not understand and in which they were only occasionally given the Eucharistic bread and never the cup. None of the Reformers rejected liturgical worship and, with the exception of Zwingli, all retained a sacramental understanding of baptism and the Eucharist. Furthermore, while Calvin completely rejected transubstantiation, Luther maintained the physical presence of Christ in the bread and wine and did not forbid Christians from accepting transubstantiation as an explanation of how the Lord's Supper works. For the Reformers, ritual and sacramental worship thus remained an important part of authentic Christian spirituality.

The significance of this for our understanding of how the Reformers affirmed the saving significance of baptism and the Lord's Supper while affirming salvation by grace alone through faith alone is that God uses the material substances of water, bread, and wine to confer his promises on us. The Reformers' focus in the sacraments was not on what people do but rather on what God does in the sacraments. God freely offers his grace through baptism and the Eucharist. It is Jesus who baptizes us with the Holy Spirit in baptismal waters. It is Jesus who feeds us with his flesh and his blood when we come to the Lord's Table. Even the verbs we use in talking about baptism and the Lord's Supper testify to this. For instance, we do not baptize ourselves but we are baptized, and though we do eat the bread and do drink the wine, are they not first given to us?

Yet, this is just the problem, that things somehow bring the grace of God to us? Is this not a works salvation because sacraments are bodily received? It is no more a works salvation than the mistaken belief that sincerely praying to receive Christ in and of itself causes us to be saved. Notice something very important about Protestant ideas regarding salvation. We are saved by grace alone through faith alone. It is not faith that is causal of our salvation but grace. Grace is the cause of our salvation, and faith is simply the vehicle through which God confers this grace on us. Faith cannot appropriate salvation from God or it too becomes a meritorious work that we must do to please God—a "spiritual" work but a work nonetheless. In other words, faith does not work upward from us to God. Faith comes down from God to us. It merely enlightens us to the salvation that is already freely given in Christ. Let's look at Ephesians 2:8-9: "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast." What is the gift here? Is it salvation or is it faith? It is both. Salvation is freely available to us in Christ; faith opens our eyes to this reality.

We still have not answered the question of how we understand faith, though. What does faith mean? I think the modernist spirit-matter dualism we have imported into our understanding of Christianity has dramatically warped what we mean by the word “faith.” Is it a platonic acceptance of the objective truth of certain propositions, or is it a passionate grasping on to and trust in the promises of God that transforms our lives? The witness of Scripture would clearly direct us to the latter. Faith is not an airy, ethereal, abstract belief in objective facts that have little bearing on our lives. No; faith is a passionate, engaged, embodied subjective experience of the objective reality of God's redemption of us in Christ that makes each of us a new creation.

Faith, however, sometimes seems the farthest thing from this experience. Sometimes it is very faint. Sometimes it is all we can do to hang on to it. That is why Christ instituted the physical signs of baptism and the Lord's Supper. Until Christ returns, they remind us that the Christian faith is based on the historical events of the God-man's life, death, and resurrection. In Christ's physical absence, they testify to the fact that he was here, that he was and is one of us, that he loved us and gave himself for us, that he died, that he defeated death and rose again, that he ascended on high and is at the right hand of the Father, and that he will come again to make all things new.

Through the power of the Holy Spirit, the sacraments are the visible words by which we know our Savior. In them, God promises us the realities to which they point. Whenever our faith is weak, whenever the clouds come to make us doubt whether or not we have indeed experienced the saving grace of Christ, each of us can point to our baptism and claim the promises God made to us in those waters. This does not mean that baptism in and of itself is a guarantee of salvation or that it mechanically accomplishes our salvation, but for those who live by faith in the Son of God, we can count God's testimony in baptism that "This is my beloved child in whom I am well pleased" to be true. And if we doubt Christ, that he was crucified and rose again, that he was our Passover lamb, that his sacrifice counts for us, we can come to His Table and receive his body and blood anew. Were you there when they crucified my Lord? When we sit at the Lord's Table, we can emphatically say, "Yes! I was there. It counts for me."

To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, God only wise, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.

Reclaiming the Sacramental (Part 1)

My theological journey has taken me places I never thought it would. I grew up Southern Baptist, thinking that the conservative evangelical Protestant branch of Christianity was the truest expression of Christian faith and practice and thus the tape by which to measure all that Christianity truly should be. Granted, I continue to believe in the principles upon which our movement is based, such as the priesthood of the believer, Scripture as our final and unfailing authority, salvation by grace alone through faith alone, and the need to be born again, but I can no longer hold to a view of the Christian faith common among conservative evangelicals that we alone are good, true, Bible-believing Christians who will be saved and that, by contrast, all other Christians, whether they be mainline Protestants, Catholics, or Orthodox, are only “barely” Christian and that they will be saved only to the degree that they understand and live the Christian faith more or less just as contemporary American Protestant evangelicals do. I absolutely reject this uncharitable, limiting, narrow, and false view of worldwide Christianity. This does not mean, however, that there should be no standards or boundaries for what constitutes orthodox Christian faith. What I’m trying to say is that what constitutes orthodoxy does allow for a broad and diverse range of ways to be authentically Christian. Because of the tremendous ways in which I've been blessed by evangelical Christianity, I do remain committed to the movement and plan to follow God into the future from this base of experience, community, and faith, but I also have come to deeply appreciate what other Christians bring to the table. In this process of appreciative awareness, I have been affected in ways that have far surpassed my expectations and brought me to points at which I have been challenged, blessed, strengthened, disoriented, perplexed, and overwhelmed in the encounter, and as a result, my life, my faith, and my entire worldview have undergone some changes. I want to share some of those with you.

For quite some time, I have been curious about and sympathetic toward the Roman Catholic Church. In light of the history and the continuation of misunderstanding, distrust, and animosity that has existed between Protestants and Catholics since the Reformation, it has grieved me that both of these authentically Christian groups have been at odds with one another when they have shared so much in common and served the same Lord. At first, I was naïve in this regard, thinking that our understandings of and ways of living out the Christian faith differ only on things that are not matters of great importance. That is not true. There are fundamental differences, many of which Protestants and Catholics believe to be significant enough roadblocks to prevent our full fellowship with one another and our inter-Communion and even to prevent the salvation of the other. On the first count, I agree (the ideas of either Catholics giving up the whole sacramental system for "faith only” or of Protestants taking up the whole sacramental system and ecclesial hierarchy are fundamentalist pipedreams, get real!) but on the latter, even though I disagree with these folks, they still have good reasons for thinking so. As a result, I do not think that Protestantism should try to remake Catholicism in its own image in order to ascribe to it saving significance or that Catholicism should try to do the same with Protestantism. This is dishonest, and it is an indignity to the beauty and glory of each faith group's history and also a minimalization of the less positive aspects in each of our histories. I'm going to propose that we accept one another as being different on some very important matters, so much so that we cannot in good faith become organizationally or doctrinally one, while yet striving to be united in love, faith, and the praise of God, accepting and embracing one another as authentically Christian brothers and sisters who have so much to learn from one another, extending the hand of fellowship to one another, engaging in constructive dialogue and work together, and, in all things, viewing our differences as opportunities to bless one another rather than as occasions for strife and discord.

That being said, I do believe that the Bible and Christian faith is made up of theological propositions that are objectively true. Therefore, distinctively Protestant teachings and distinctively Catholic teachings that contradict one another cannot be simultaneously true. Furthermore, God does not expect us to remain completely loyal to the theological tradition to which we belong when he reveals to us that some of that tradition’s teachings miss the mark. As a result, during the course of my theological journey, I have come to reject some of the most sacred of mainstream evangelical Protestant theological assumptions, particularly that grace only comes to us through purely spiritual means and thus that baptism and the Lord's Supper are purely symbolic and in no way communicate grace to those who receive them.

I must clarify a few points, however, before I attempt to show how these assumptions are not biblical and that they are destructive of reaching the goal of a lived Christianity that is adequately engaged with the world and thus fully committed to making "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.” A few of you reading this may come from evangelical Christian traditions that do believe that baptism and Communion are sacraments, particularly if you're Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, or Anglican/Episcopalian. If you’re from a Restorationist tradition like the Disciples of Christ, the independent non-denominational Christian Churches, or the Church of Christ, you're probably familiar with the idea of baptism being part of the salvation process. I ask you to also open your mind to the possibility that the Lord's Supper communicates sanctifying grace. However, since most evangelicals are from Baptist or Baptist-influenced (at least in regard to ritual and church polity) traditions, the notion of baptism and the Lord's Supper as purely symbolic and commemorative ordinances is by far the most common understanding of these two rites in American evangelical Christianity. Though I have great respect for the Baptist heritage—remember, I grew up Southern Baptist—I honestly have to say that it is unfortunate that Baptists have embraced and spread ideas about these two sacraments that do not match up with what Paul, Peter, John, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, the Wesleys, and the vast majority of Christians throughout history have believed to be true. (In all fairness, the Protestant understanding of baptism and Communion as ordinances originates with the Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli. Zwingli's teachings on ritual weren't widely accepted in the early days of the Reformation, being overshadowed by those of Luther and Calvin. However, Baptist traditions later embraced his idea of ordinances, and as these traditions grew, so did the influence of this teaching.)

The connection this has to my appreciation of Catholicism is that my arrival at a more moderately-Protestant view of baptism and Communion is by way of my engagement with Catholicism. I believe that the spiritual descendents of the Reformation have taken the Protestant tenant of salvation by faith alone much further than the original reformers ever dreamed. I think that a second or third-generation Protestant (meaning a Protestant tradition that later broke off from the original Reformation movements or in turn broke off from these breakaway movements as well) understanding of salvation by "faith alone" must be balanced by Catholic and older Protestant views of these two sacraments’ relations to salvation. The key here is balance. Though I take very seriously the possibility that Catholic teachings about the Church are indeed objectively true, it is my current belief that the Catholic Church overemphasizes the Church's role in connecting believers to Jesus, but to me, this is only a matter of degree and not of substance. Anyway, in Catholicism, the Church is Christ's presence on earth, the Body of Christ in the most literal sense, so the sacraments of the Church are the primary means by which the believer connects with Jesus and receives salvation and the Holy Spirit. On the other hand, I think that second and third-generation Protestants go too far the other direction, insisting that the church (notice that church is now lowercased) has no role in bringing people to salvation beyond declaring the Gospel, and thus implicitly that people can be saved independently of the church. In this understanding, the church is merely spiritual, the “invisible” collection of the redeemed that cannot be directly correlated to the visible institution to which believers belong. I think that this distinction between the invisible spiritual church and the visible institutional church, if not outright artificial, is much too sharp. While it is certainly true that there are some who are part of the institutional church but who are not in right relationship with God, the inverse, that there are genuinely faithful Christians outside of the institution and community of the church is not biblical. I will clarify this by saying that not only is the church in us but we are also in the church. The church and the believers in the church are mutually constitutive of one another. There is no church without believers and there are no believers without the church. For instance, then, the New Testament does not consider those who are not part of the church, have intentionally refused baptism, and, for these reasons, are not receiving Communion to be people who are currently in right standing with God. With all fairness, all faithful Protestants insist that Christians should be part of the church but imply by their understanding of the church and grace that people can live a Christian life and be finally saved without the church.

I propose a middle way between the Catholic understanding of the Church's primacy in communicating grace to the Christian and the mainstream evangelical Protestant understanding of the church as having no direct role in bringing people to salvation. I propose that the church is really the Church. Jesus is present in the Church itself in a way that I am afraid that evangelicals have forgotten. God speaks to us through the Church and communicates grace through the Church. In baptism and Communion, the sacraments that all Christians practice, we are personally and powerfully interacting with the Lord. This is not to say that we do not interact with Jesus personally and individually through faith and the Holy Spirit in prayer. We absolutely do. In fact, I believe that this is a very important way in which we relate to Jesus, but the Church itself and the sacraments it provides are channels by which we can know, receive, love, worship, and unite with God in a very special way. Let's consider Matthew 16:17-20:

Jesus replied, "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven. 18And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. 19I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven." 20Then he warned his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Christ.

This has been an historically controversial passage in debates between Protestants and Catholics about the office of the Pope, but here, I want to direct our attention instead to the matter of the keys of the kingdom of heaven being given to Peter and by extension to the Apostles and the Church built on their teachings. There have been a number of ways that Protestants have explained verse 19, including that the church has the keys to heaven only to the degree that it is the Church's responsibility to spread the gospel of Christ. I agree, but I also think this passage implies much more about the function of the Church. I think this also refers to the fact that the Church opens the gates to heaven in some sense through the sacraments of salvation it administers. I think verse 20 gives us a clue that Jesus is referring to the sacraments here. I had always wondered why Jesus is always so concerned about keeping his identity concealed in the synoptic Gospels. Why did he not urge the disciples instead to proclaim it from the hilltops that he was the Christ? It's not because Jesus wanted to keep the message of salvation in him from people, it's because Jesus always intended to reveal who he is through his death and resurrection. It is at Calvary and the empty tomb that Jesus most clearly reveals himself to be God, and it is in his atoning death and resurrection that he wants to reveal to each of us that he is the Christ, the Son of the living God. That is the mystery Jesus’s sense of mystery about his identity is pointing to. Paul and other ancient Christians also talk a lot about mystery, referring to the sacraments of baptism and Communion as part of the Paschal mystery. They are mysteries caught up in the great mystery of redemption purchased on the cross. They are signs rather than mere symbols of Jesus’ atoning death and resurrection. They confer to a significant degree the graces that they signify, so in baptism and Communion, we receive in an important way the benefits of Christ's death and resurrection. Baptism and Communion are thus sacraments: Sacred, Advangtageous Christian Rites And Mysteriously Effective New Testament Signs. By pointing us to Calvary in verse 20, Jesus shows us that the Church is the guardian of the mystery of salvation, both in the proclamation of the Gospel and in the administration of the sacraments. I don't think it means that the Church has any particularly formal role in and of itself to decide who God will save or damn (God most certainly still saves when the Church miscarries its salvific work), but it does point us to our solemn responsibility to help bring people to salvation and our evangelistic and sacramental roles in that process.

Now, I want to turn to the relevant passages of Scripture regarding the sacramental nature of water baptism. We see baptism in the Gospels, the baptism given by John the Baptist to Jews, including Jesus himself. John's baptism of Jesus, while not Christian baptism per se, clearly pre-figures Christian baptism in that God declares that Jesus is his Son and Jesus visibly receives the Holy Spirit in his baptism. This all correlates to the ideas of the Christian’s adoption by God as his child in baptism, the calling, or anointing if you will, of the believer into the Father’s purposes through baptism, and the receipt of the Holy Spirit through baptism. After his death and resurrection, Jesus institutes Christian baptism in the Great Commission in Matthew 28:19-20, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you," and in Mark 16:16, "Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned." Though the second is of questionable biblical origin, it is certainly orthodox even if not written by Mark himself. Notice that Mark does not complete or close the argument regarding baptism. Though he says that "Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved," he does not state the inverse. This passage indicates that salvation comes at least in part through baptism but in no way implies that not being baptized through no fault of one's own contributes in any way to one's damnation. One only guarantees his or her own damnation by rejecting the offer of salvation in Christ.

We must also note that in Mark 16:16 baptism is connected closely to belief. Baptism is known as the “sacrament of faith” in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. I think most sacramental Protestants would probably also speak of baptism in similar terms. Ironically, Catholics and most sacramental Protestants baptize infants. How does belief relate to infants? Are these traditions in conflict with Scripture. I really don't think so. I do not agree with the Baptists, the credobaptist Pentecostal/charismatic traditions, or the Restorationist traditions that only "believer's baptism" is valid. If you were baptized as a young child or infant, I do not recommend rebaptism since the dominant teaching throughout Christian history has been that baptism is not to be repeated. Though the household baptisms mentioned in the book of Acts do seem to indicate that the Apostles baptized infants, this is probably not enough biblical evidence in and of itself to affirm this practice (as a rule of thumb, Protestant Bible interpreters require two or three passages in the teaching portions of Scripture to uphold a doctrine; a passage or two in a narrative portion of Scripture is not sufficient evidence to infallibly uphold a doctrine). On the other hand, I don't think the fact that the word for baptism used in the Greek literally means “to immerse” (it also more generally means to wash) or that the overwhelming majority of, if not all, the first-generation Christians baptized in the Bible were adults who had first professed faith in Jesus (a curiously inconsistent usage by non-sacramental Protestants of narrative passages of Scripture to infallibly uphold a doctrine of universally prescribed credobaptism) to be enough biblical evidence to make a particularly strong argument against baptizing babies.

The truth is that we have not been given a New Testament Leviticus by which to construct the Church and its rituals. The New Testament does not give us a rigid legal code that locks us in to specific, exact, right down to the detail ways to structure our ritual worship the way the Old Testament does. Paul, in 1 Corinthians, seems to indicate that there are many matters that God has left up to the reason and common sense of people in the Church to decide. The particular mode of and candidate for baptism may be one of those things that God has given us some latitude in. The only things the Bible and the most ancient of apostolic traditions insist on is that it be done with water (obviously), be done in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and that it not be repeated. Also, our earliest extra-biblical source, the Didache, dated to about 110 A.D. and, therefore, according to tradition and even some critical scholars, while the ink on the last writings that ended up in the New Testament was still wet, authorizes the baptism of infants and does not absolutely insist on immersion though it prefers it. If we wanted to get really legalistic about this, we could also insist that both the baptizer and baptizand be naked, as Hippolytus, writing early in the third century A.D., shows that the early Christians baptized in the buff. It is thus not improbable that the baptisms in the Bible were done in the nude too. That’s one possibly biblical tradition that I think we all agree should not be revived!

There are a number of ways to reconcile the baptism of infants to the biblical connection of baptism to faith. Catholics and other Christians with a high ecclesiology—theology of the Church—essentially believe for the recipient of baptism. Also, since Catholics believe that an infant who receives baptism has been born again, this means that she will begin to believe in the Lord as soon as she is able. I personally like a Reformed explanation of how baptism is a sacrament of faith. Baptism is the sign and seal of the New Covenant. God speaks to the heart of the child in baptism, and, just as babies hear and respond to the voices of their parents, they hear and respond to the voice of their Heavenly Father as he speaks “This is my son (or daughter) in whom I am well pleased” to them in baptism. They trust in God when they’re baptized in the same way that they trust in their parents when they hear their voices. As Jesus says in John 10, “My sheep hear my voice, and they follow me.” This also points to the fact that God takes the agency in saving us. He calls to us before we even know to call out to him. It also points to our passivity in baptism. It is not a choice; it is not a work. God gives himself to us in the waters of baptism; he works in us, willing that we believe in him. A Presbyterian friend once told me that his baptism as a baby represented to him God’s calling of him from the time of his birth. Patrick's later conversion to faith in Christ was merely confirmation of this call. I will later explain how adult baptism can be, if not done in a legalistic sense, a passive reception of grace, how it is not a work any more than praying to receive Christ is, and how it does not conflict with the Protestant tenet of salvation by grace alone through faith alone.

I next want to point out that Peter and Paul talk about baptism in the Bible in ways that Baptist- influenced or Baptist evangelicals would be very uncomfortable with. For instance, though there are issues with using narrative passages to formulate doctrine, I think a look at the first sermon and first altar call in the history of the Church is instructive. After being cut to the heart at the words of Peter, his audience asks of him, "'What must we do to be saved?' And Peter said to them, 'Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit'" (Acts 2:37-39). You would never hear such a statement from a preacher in most evangelical churches. Regardless of whether or not this is in context, most evangelical preachers or teachers would never make such a statement.

In Romans 6:1-4, Paul directly connects our death to sin and ascent into new life with baptism:

What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? 2By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? 3Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.

Due to the imagery used here, it is highly unlikely that Paul is speaking of a purely spiritual baptism into Christ to which many non-sacramental Protestant authorities point in efforts to negate the apparent salvific implications of baptism put forward in this passage.

Consider also Paul's words in Galatians 3:26-28:

For in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. 27For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. 28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

He connects the putting on of Christ and the radical equality of all believers directly to the baptism that they have all received. Also notice the connection to faith here. We become sons and daughters of God through faith. Paul simultaneously holds in full force both the primacy of faith and the importance of baptism in salvation. He doesn't seem to find any conflict between salvation by faith and the salvific implications of baptism. A further note on the context of this passage, the context of Paul's letter to the Galatians is that Paul is correcting the Galatians legalistic dependence on the Law of Moses to save them. Paul does not consider baptism a work of the Law in the same way he does circumcision. Baptism is thus not a meritorious work. It is not a way to earn salvation by pleasing God. We cannot please God. It is only by his own grace that we can please God. Christ's institution of baptism is simply a tangible way of communicating to us the promise of receiving the righteousness of God by which he makes us pleasing to himself.

Paul carries this argument further, showing how baptism is not something we do for God to try to please him but something that God does in us. In Colossians 2:11-14, he writes:

In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, 12 having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead. 13 And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, 14by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.

Again, we see baptism directly connected to Christ's atoning death by which he earned salvation for us all. Notice here how he connects a circumcision of the heart to baptism. Baptism is a circumcision made without hands, a putting off of the flesh. Granted, of course, water baptism is an external event in and of itself, but this is not the whole picture of it. God works inside us in this physical bath. Baptism is thus not just an external witness to an internal reality that has already taken place. Baptism is God's use of water, of matter, to confirm and seal his promise of salvation to us. Mysteriously, baptism somehow carries with it the grace it signifies without itself being an identity with that grace. We must think of baptism's role in our salvation as conferring the promise of receiving the grace rather than conferring the fullness of the grace itself. Baptism is simply God's visible, tangible way of promising to change us internally, to give us the grace of regeneration, of justification, of rightness with God, of washing from sin. Though I would not say that baptism in and of itself can save us, it must still be reckoned as important to our salvation in the sense that it strengthens our faith. The emphasis in this is not on what we do but on what God mysteriously and counter-intuitively does in us.

Salvation is a mystery. It goes against our logic. Sometimes it just doesn't make sense. What is God thinking? Using something physical to help change us spiritually? But, isn't that what the Incarnation is all about? God taking on a material body, coming to a material earth, spiritually saving beings composed of matter, redeeming physical nature, physical creatures, and a physical earth (which he promises to perfect when he returns), the God-man dying a physical death on a physical cross, the God-man rising physically, bodily from the grave, the risen God-man revealing his identity in the breaking of bread (Luke 24:35), Jesus coming in water and blood (1 John 5:6). Isn't it universal Christian doctrine that God's physical work of conception, birth, life, death, and resurrection accomplished the spiritual salvation of his people; isn't it also catholic, orthodox (meaning universally accepted and doctrinally sound) teaching that we will experience eternal life in bodily form; isn't it true that when salvation in all its fullness becomes a present reality that our bodies will be redeemed and glorified together with our spirits? Could we have been saved without the Incarnation? I honestly don't know. God possibly could have redeemed us some other way, but the fact is that he did it the way he did it. In that light, maybe it does make perfect sense that God continues to use matter in saving us, since the basis for our salvation in the first place is the broken flesh and spilled blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit,
as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be;
world without end. Amen.