Baptism & Vocation; Identity & Purpose

Baptism & Vocation; Identity & Purpose October 3, 2024

There is a connection between baptism and vocation, which in turn connects to our identity and our purpose.

I’ve made that point, but Peter Leithart makes it too and goes on to show how the eclipse of baptism and vocation has brought about our society’s confusions about identity and secular modernity’s rejection of purpose in science, philosophy, and individual lives.

He does so in the course of an article in First Things that I’m less certain about:  Can Nations Be Baptized?  He argues that they can, citing Christ’s Great Commission:  “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,  teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:19-20).

Here, Leithart says, we are told to baptize nations.  And, indeed, he points out, entire nations were baptized in the early days of the church.  When King Clovis of the Franks converted to Christianity and was baptized, the rest of the Franks followed suit, giving us the nation of France.  When Vladimir the Great was baptized, so did the rest of the “Rus” people, giving us Russia (and the war in Ukraine, since Vlad I’s baptism was at Kiev in Ukraine, a sacred site that Vlad Putin wants for Russia).  When Charlemagne conquered the Saxons, he gave them the choice of either getting baptized or getting executed, giving us the German principality that would give us Martin Luther and the founders of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod.

So Leithart thinks that nations as a whole can and should be baptized, making Christian nations possible.  I don’t agree with that.  I think that Christ’s words are an example of the figure of speech synechdoche, in which the whole refers to the parts, or the parts to the whole.  But even if it isn’t, the baptizing of the nations that Leithart cites happened not just by baptizing the King, thought to represent in his person the entire nation, but by baptizing each individual who constitutes the nation.

But this isn’t what I’m posting about.  In the course of Leithart’s discussion, he says this:

As the Presbyterian missionary Wes Baker has argued, baptism has to do with both identity and vocation. When Jesus is baptized, the Father’s voice confirms his identity as beloved Son, and Jesus is simultaneously commissioned to his Messianic work, initially by combatting Satan in the wilderness. Because baptism incorporates the baptized into the one baptism of Jesus, our baptisms have the same double significance as Jesus’s own. We are sons in the Son, beloved in the Beloved, and also sent in the Sent One.

These facets of baptism are inseparable. Vocation is inherent in identity. To be in Christ is to be sent by Christ. Our vocations set the contours of the unique human beings we are, lend purpose to our lives, and so thrust us forward into the future. Through baptism, that future is folded into the future of the kingdom of God. Baptism clashes with secular modernity, which is founded on the separation between identity and purpose. Modern science removes purpose from the natural world. Modern philosophy removes purpose from human nature and relocates it to the realm of will. The only purposes that define me are the ones I choose. This seems liberating, but it’s the opposite. Detached from a given vocation, identity collapses. We don’t know who we are unless we know where we’re going and why, and we know the way forward only when we’re called by an unchosen future. By conferring identity and direction, baptism heals the rift in secular modernity, reintegrating who I am with what I do.

I get into some of this in my book Embracing Your Lutheran Identity, which begins with the identity we are given in baptism, as in the sample I posted.  But that “baptism clashes with secular modernity, which is founded on the separation between identity and purpose” raises the stakes.  As does “baptism heals the rift in secular modernity.”

 

Illustration:  Charlemagne Forcing the Saxons to be Baptized, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36897903

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