Baptism is God’s work

My friend Fred Thompson made a tremendously illuminating comment about baptism recently. With his permission (thanks Fred) I wanted to say a few words about it. Here’s what he said:

“I keep thinking of the Red Sea baptism, a baptism of a nation, a mixed multitude, a nation that did not know where she was going, a nation that did not understand baptism. It was a new nation that left Egypt and she needed grace above all else, grace given through water and manna to all”

Fred has in mind the well-known typological connection between baptism and the crossing of the Red Sea during the exodus (e.g. 1 Cor 10). Pressing this point, it becomes obvious that many evangelical assumptions about baptism are at best only a part of the biblical picture.

For example, we readily treat baptism as an expression of our faith towards God, part of our response to him. But baptism is in the first instance an act of God’s grace towards us. Though of course Israel was called to trust the LORD, it would be a strange reading of the Red Sea crossing that placed the emphasis on the faithfulness of the Israelites’ response to God.

We often imagine that baptism, a “visible word” (as some of us have been taught to describe it), must (like audible words) be understood if it is to have any significance for us. But the efficacy of the Red Sea crossing depended very little, if at all, on the Israelites’ understanding; they had very little clue what was going on, but experienced the benefits of God’s grace all the same.

(We might not in passing that this highlights some potential shortcomings of the very idea of the sacraments as “visible words”. As others have pointed out, if such a conception of the sacraments is taken to imply that understanding is necessary in order to benefit from them, or indeed that their main function is served by merely looking at them, rather than partaking of them, then the idea is misplaced. The Lord’s Supper is not there to be looked at; it’s there to be eaten.)

We speak as though the relevance of baptism lies in some secondary aspect of the “significance” of the act, rather than in the act itself. (Perhaps we’re all fighting off imaginary Roman Catholics with their doctrine of ex opere operato sacramental efficacy.) But the significance of baptism, like that of the Red Sea crossing, is found not only in what the act represents, but also in what the act itself accomplishes. The people were in a different place after their Red-Sea-baptism than before it, regardless of their understanding of what was going on.

Finally, we tend to fear that speaking in this way about the objective efficacy of baptism diminishes the significance of God’s grace, placing the emphasis on human works – in this case, the human “works” of eating bread and wine, or washing with water. But in fact quite the opposite is the case. It is precisely by emphasising the objective efficacy of the sacraments as divine acts, along the lines of the parallel with the Red Sea crossing, that God’s grace is underscored.

Indeed, God’s grace is highlighted in part by the de-emphasis on the role of human understanding: God acts in mighty power and bountiful grace towards weak, ignorant, sinful people like us, despite the fact that we have not the slightest clue most of the time about how he does so.

Rev Dr Steve Jeffery is Minister at Emmanuel Evangelical Church, London, England (Blog, Facebook, Twitter)

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