Mere Discipleship by Lee C. Camp

Author:Lee C. Camp
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2003-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

8

Baptism

Why Disciples Don’t Make Good Americans

(or Germans, or Frenchmen)

As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

Galatians 3:27–28

One is either a good German or a good Christian. It is impossible to be both at the same time.

Adolf Hitler1

The Politics of Baptism

When “everyone was a Christian,” the means by which “everyone” became a “Christian” was infant baptism. The late medieval world saw the development of the regular practice of paedobaptism, and this practice stood at the heart of the full flowering of the Constantinian church. The radical change the apostle Paul attached to baptism in Romans 6—putting to death the “old man” and being “raised to walk in newness of life”—no longer could be said of baptism. Everyone was baptized—even though not everyone walked in that new way of life enjoined by the gospel. Infant baptism thus stood at the heart of the Christendom project. Though the pews may have been filled, discipleship was not for the ordinary person in the pew. Instead, it was reserved for the religious in the monastery.

In the sixteenth century, a group of so-called radical reformers questioned the practice of infant baptism on a number of grounds. Typical among these reformers were the Swiss Brethren, led by Michael Sattler, previously a Benedictine monk. After being convinced by Luther and fellow reformers that there was need for fundamental reform in the practice of the Christian faith, Sattler had forsaken his calling as a monk, and had married. But Sattler took the efforts at renewal further than the so-called magisterial reformers. Reformers like Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli continued, in many respects, Constantinian Christianity, seen most clearly in their dependence upon the “magistrate,” the governing authorities, to carry out the reforms of the church. Just as Augustine of Hippo had done not long after the rise of Constantine—using the coercive power of empire to bring to “repentance” those whom he believed to be preaching error—so did the sixteenth-century magisterial reformers.

For the Anabaptists,2 baptism represented the point of entrance into a community of faith that had “been taught repentance and the amendment of life.” According to the Schleitheim Confession, a document considered by many to serve as a classical statement of Anabaptist distinctives, baptism was to be given “to all those who desire to walk in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” Baptism must not serve as an empty symbol of entry into a state-run church; baptism epitomized discipleship, and infant baptism cut out the very heart of the New Testament vision of the practice. Instead of baptizing a culture and calling it “Christian,” the Anabaptists desired that the church baptize those who sought to walk in the way of Jesus.3

For these “radicals,” the primary mark of identity became the baptized community. For them, identity, oneness, and social grouping revolved around the baptized believers. Those who

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.