Practices of the Church 3: Baptism

I’ve been reading John Howard Yoder’s book Body Politics: Five Practices of the Christian Community Before the Watching World. It was unintentional, however providential, that the book, which focuses on the mission and politics of the church, was chosen in close proximity to the engagement with Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert’s book What’s the Mission of the Church?

The two books are a contrast in visions of the nature, purpose and focus of the church. Both perspectives, however distant, are rooted in the work of Jesus on the cross and its implications for the world.

The fundamental assumption of Yoder’s book is sacrament is not a mystical or an esoteric reality that is purely ritualistic and incapable of being observed by the naked eye. Rather a sacrament is when the church acts decisively and tangibly in the world on the basis of the work of Jesus. In these public acts of humans God is act work.

This is a sacramentalizing of the public activity of the church in response to Jesus’ work; it is the original understanding of the practices of the church in the New Testament. In earlier posts, we’ve look at Jesus’ command to bind and loose and the Eucharist. The third practice is baptism.

Being a good Baptist, I always thought of baptism as strictly identification: I’m identifying myself with Jesus and his church. Further, baptism is the physical sign of an inward spiritual reality. While I don’t think Yoder’s reflections have changed my perspective on either of these points, it certainly reframes and deepens it.

According to Yoder, baptism’s sacramental element forms “a new people whose newness and togetherness explicitly relativizes prior stratifications and classifications” (33); baptism introduces persons into a new humanity in a new creation.

2 Corinthians 5:17 says

Thus if anyone is in the Messiah, there is a new creation. Old things have gone, and look – everything has become new.

This translation is taken from N.T. Wright’s, The Kingdom New Testament. Read it over again. It is quite a different rendering than the one with which I grew up. Compare this with the the NIV 1984

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!

The NIV 2011 revision resembles Wright’s translation:

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!

What’s different? The verse is not about my individual soul’s new creation – the way I have always been taught to read it by both translation and pastor. Rather this verse teaches that with Messiah’s coming, there is new creation. In other words, “Since there are those in Messiah, there is new creation!” Paul announces the reality of a new creation that is accessible through baptism. This new reality is why he doesn’t “regard” anyone from a fleshly (or ethnic) point of view (2 Cor 5:16).

In Messiah, distinctions don’t factor. Paul’s not saying however that distinctions are erased. That would in fact severely water down the point. While distinctions of race, gender and social class remain, they are realitivised in Messiah (cf. Eph 2-3; Gal 3:28-29; 6:15; also Matt 28:18-19). Yoder states, “This new status is a new kind of social relationship, a unity that overarches the differences (Jew/Gentile, male/female, slave/free) that previously had separated people” (30).

The primary narrative meaning of baptism is the new society it creates, by inducting all kinds of people into the same people. The church is (according to the apostolic witness –  not in much of its later history) that new society; it is therefore also the model for the world’s moving in the same direction . . . We start with a ritual act [baptism] whose first, ordinary meaning is egalitarian (32).

When the church baptizes people, it proclaims that the messianic age has begun. It anticipates through its constitution the new society of God’s Kingdom. But we are announcing and enacting an equality that is counter creational. Messiah has begun a new phase in human history; and that phase exists within and alongside the old: the church lives out the equality of the New Age in injustice of the Old.