Editorial

Given the central importance of baptism in Christian tradition and practice it is striking how little attention is paid to it in contemporary theological writing. Timothy Radcliffe’s Take the Plunge: Living Baptism and Confirmation (London: Bloomsbury, 2012) is, therefore, a welcome addition to the library of those involved in preparing others for baptism or confirmation. Radcliffe begins by reminding us that when Pope John Paul II was asked what the most important day of his life was, he replied, ‘The day I was baptized.’ In similar vein, when Luther was discouraged he would say, ‘I am baptized, and through my baptism God, who cannot lie, has bound himself in covenant with me.’ ‘Christian community will flourish in the twenty-first century’, Radcliffe claims, ‘if we grasp that the Church is above all the community of the baptized’ (p. 1).

Some years ago I prepared for baptism an Iranian woman who was seeking asylum in the UK. I asked her why she had requested baptism. She told me that from childhood she had dreamed of a figure in whom she sensed great kindness and love. Attending church she had begun to sense that the figure in her dreams was the one of whom Christians were speaking in their worship. We agreed to meet regularly during Lent to read through Luke’s Gospel together. This proved an eye-opening experience for both of us. Everything in the story of Jesus was new to her. She read every event in the Gospel and every saying as if it was happening or being spoken to her in real time. I was taken aback, not only by the reality and freshness of her encounter with Jesus but also by what it showed me about the extent to which my own reading of the Gospel had become jaded as a result of over-familiarity. The shock was greatest when we came to Holy Week. When Jesus was betrayed by his friends, my catechumen went into shock; when he was nailed to the cross, she wept bitterly. On Easter day I baptized her and she wept with a childlike joy and, as she did so, I noted with surprise that others in the congregation were weeping too. Gregory Nazianzen reckoned Christians are born three times: in natural birth, in baptism and in resurrection. The Church that day was present at a birth.

Twenty-odd years ago I was caught up by the fad of narrative theology, an understanding of and approach to theology that made the claim that narrative was a central conceptual category for biblical hermeneutics, theological epistemology, an understanding of theological argument, and of how individuals and societies are made, unmade and remade as moral and political communities. With hindsight the attractions of a narrative theology remain obvious: stories challenge rationalism and empiricism by promoting value over fact. And, with hindsight, the drawbacks are plain also; narrative theology had special attraction to the mentally lazy, those unwilling to work analytically or conceptually; narrative theology never quite lost the odour of the nursery. Yet to recoil from making story an all-encompassing theological category does not mean we should abandon altogether its capacity for shedding theological light. Keeping story in view, we may see not only that in baptism the Jesus story and the story of the catechumen interweave but also that the telling of the story of Jesus in the sacrament functions, just as much as does the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, to ‘do this in remembrance of me’ for the Church as a whole. And if it is more straightforward to glean this insight from a story involving an adult baptismal candidate, for churches that baptize infants the principle remains the same, albeit that parents and godparents acknowledge on their child’s behalf the interweaving that is taking place in baptism of God’s story and the child’s, trusting in God to fulfill his and their promises.

Thomas Aquinas thought that ‘the symbolism of the burial is more expressly represented in immersion and thus this manner of baptism is more common and more praiseworthy’, but he accepted that, however it is done, some part of the body is under water and burial is adequately represented by the symbolism (ST 1a, Q.66,7). But even Thomas, with his care for detail, is clear that the ‘mechanics’ of how a sacrament works is a function of what a sacrament is for. It is a point emphasized by Rowan Williams in expressing the hope, in his own thinking about baptism, that he may:

avoid the risks of an emphasis on what sounds like arbitrary divine power by returning to and exploring St Thomas Aquinas’s admirably and typically simple observation that what makes sacraments distinct is what they are for, the activity in which they are caught up, which is making human beings holy. To put it another way, what makes the Christian sacraments unique is not so much something inherent in the doing of them, some ‘specialness’ in the action, but the uniqueness of Jesus Christ in his dying and rising. (Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 197)