And Now, a Magic Trick

Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, in order that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.  Romans 6:4  NASB

Baptism – We have already noticed that baptism, the practice of ritual ablutions through water, is very old, much older than its institution as a Christian sacrament.  Now we must note that baptism in the religious circles of Judaism and the early Messianic community is also not magical nor efficacious for salvation.  In other words, baptism has no intrinsic meaning.  It doesn’t save.  It doesn’t cure.  It doesn’t transform (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:17, Hebrews 9:9-10, 1 Peter 3:21).  Proof texts that attempt to require baptism as a rite of passage from sinner to saint do so at the expense of its predominate usage in Scripture and in violation of its cultural understanding in Judaism.  Baptism might have been a magical rite in pagan thinking, but it certainly is not in Paul’s words or in the thought of the other New Testament authors.  There is no magic in this flowing water.

However, that doesn’t seem to have stopped some Christian sects from adopting the magical formulation of baptism.  Christian and Jews alike commonly acknowledge that baptism is a sign of legal transition.  The one baptized acknowledges God’s act of pardon; an act that occurred independently of the water ritual.  But by the time of the early Church fathers (Ignatius, Tertullian), baptism became a “syncretistic mystery” similar to the mystery of the eucharist.  Pagan beliefs infiltrated the thinking of the Gentile predominate community, shifting the understanding of baptism from an outward sign of God’s redemptive efficacy in the life of a person to some sort of actual transformative event.  Et voilà.  Baptism becomes a means of salvation.  Ah, if we had only paid attention to the history.

But this isn’t the only magic trick associated with the Greek word.  “Since the NT either coins or reserves for Christian baptism (and its precursor) a word which is not used elsewhere and has no cultic connections, and since it always uses it in the sing. and never substitutes the term employed elsewhere, we can see that, in spite of all apparent or relative analogies, it understands the Christian action to be something new and unique.”[1] Do you see the magic?  The noun is not found in Greek writings prior to Paul and is not found in the LXX.  Therefore, Oepke concludes that the concept must be uniquely “Christian.”  But this ignores that fact that Hebraic concepts are verbs, not nouns.  Oepke desires to find uniqueness in the “Christian” concept of baptism – and he does.  But he ignores the fact that Paul and all the other authors were Jewish and the common understanding of the term, even in Greek, would involve Jewish practices.

Now you get to ask yourself, “How do I understand my baptism?”  “What do I think it did for me?”  “What does it mean in my community?”

Topical Index:  baptism, baptismos, Romans 6:4