Visible Signs of Invisible Grace: Sacraments for the “Low Church”

Part 2, "Efficacy of Baptism"

Keith D. Stanglin

This series of posts is a slightly revised version of Keith Stanglin, "Visible Signs of Invisible Grace: Sacraments for the 'Low Church,'" in Distinguishing the Church: Explorations in Word, Sacrament, and Discipline, ed. Greg Peters and Matt Jenson (Eugene: Pickwick, 2019), 69-92.

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In my previous post, I described the traditional understanding of a sacrament: It is a visible sign of invisible grace, practiced by Christ himself and instituted by him for the church, administered by the church, joined with the word of the gospel.  I also provided a short history of how the sacraments were demoted in Protestantism, especially in Reformed and evangelical churches.  Now, what about baptism in particular?

EFFICACY OF BAPTISM

A. The Marginalization of Baptism

For most evangelicals, baptism amounts to human obedience rendered to Christ’s command, sometimes for inclusion in the church, and a mere symbol of an already accomplished justification.  To be sure, Millard Erickson, whose systematic theology may be taken as representative of evangelical academia, denies that baptism is a “mere sign.”[1]  Yet he also adamantly denies that baptism is a “means of regeneration” or a “means of saving grace.”[2]  The concept of “baptismal regeneration,” as he calls it, “contradicts the principle of salvation by grace.”[3]  For Erickson, baptism is “an act of faith” and “a public indication of one’s commitment to Christ,” as well as “a setting forth of the truth of what Christ has done.”[4]  Like Erickson, Wayne Grudem, the author of the most popular evangelical theology handbook, denies that baptism is “merely symbolic.”[5]  Later, though, it becomes clearer what he means by this denial.  “There is the blessing that comes with all obedience, as well as the joy that comes through public profession of one’s faith, and the reassurance of having a clear physical picture of dying and rising with Christ and of washing away sins.  Certainly the Lord gave us baptism to strengthen and encourage our faith.”[6]  Thus, Grudem concludes, “we should not say that baptism is necessary for salvation.”[7]

The early church was not so reluctant to connect baptism directly with the grace of salvation, a point that should be too obvious to necessitate elaboration.[8]  The same goes for the medieval church.  The efficacy of baptism was unanimously held in the early and medieval church.  The development of emergency provisions (baptism for sick infants, affusion for dying adults or when sufficient water was lacking)—that is, aberrations from the norm—testifies to the importance of baptism and the danger of departing this life without it. 

Whence the evangelical reticence?  How did we come to the modern de-emphasis on baptism?  We must return to the Zwinglian separation.  The sharp separation of the sign from the thing signified is almost unprecedented before Zwingli, who was perhaps the first theologian in Christian history to separate so clearly the physical event of the sacrament from the grace it had always been thought to convey.  As Zwingli claims, “Christ himself did not connect salvation with baptism: it is always by faith alone….  The baptism of the Spirit was also given without the baptism of water.  …There is no salvation in external baptism.  We see, then, that water-baptism is a ceremonial sign with which salvation is not indissolubly connected.”^[9] 

The Anabaptist leader, Menno Simons, though he rejected paedobaptism, followed the Zwinglian separation, pitting the sacrament against the reality: “For if we could be washed or cleansed by baptism, then Christ Jesus and His merits would have to abdicate.”[10]  “We are not cleansed by the washing of the water, but by the Word of the Lord.”[11]  “For we are not regenerated because we are baptized, as may be perceived in the infants who have been baptized; but we are baptized because we are regenerated by faith in God’s word.  For regeneration is not the result of baptism, but baptism the result of regeneration.”[12]  Again, one can see how Quakers and the Salvation Army have simply taken the Zwinglian separation to its logical conclusion; if baptism is not integral to the salvation process, then physical baptism, like any physical sign, is superfluous and unnecessary.  Even for those who still practice the physical sign of water baptism, it is not uncommon for them to disparage water baptism in favor of “Holy Spirit baptism,” separating the two, as did Zwingli.

With the Zwinglian separation in full swing, namely, the removal of the visible sign from the invisible grace, there was a new emphasis on the subjective experience of salvation.  Personal salvation became less about the church’s role and the administration of external sacraments.  In the evangelical revivals, salvation became more and more—and, in American evangelicalism, exclusively—about the personal, subjective experience apart from any external sacrament or the church that administers it.  John Wesley felt his “heart strangely warmed” at a society meeting, not at his baptism or in a Eucharistic service of the church.  Charles Finney expressed his “baptism of the Holy Ghost” as the feeling of a “wave of electricity,” coming in “waves and waves of liquid love.”[13]  Such experiences are subjective and individualistic, and none has to happen in the context of the gathered body of Christ, much less through participation in the sacraments.

But water baptism had always been the church’s initiation rite, the objective moment of salvation.  New emphasis on the purely subjective, individualistic experience as the moment of salvation, apart from any external rite, left a vacuum in the conversion process.  Ironically, those who removed the physical sign from the inward grace were then obliged to search for other objective responses to accompany and confirm the subjective feeling, that is, other external events or moments to accompany the inward salvation.  These responses often happened in the context of the gathered church.  For example, Finney encouraged the use of the anxious seat as the proper response of faith, replacing baptism and the commitment that it embodied.  In response to critics of his “new measures,” and in an attempt to emphasize the need for a convert to show his commitment, Finney said,

If you say to him, “There is the anxious seat, come out and avow your determination to be on the Lord’s side,” and if he is not willing to do so small a thing as that, then he is not willing to do anything, and there he is, brought out before his own conscience.[14]

In other words, converts must do something objective.  Finney continues:

The church has always felt it necessary to have something of the kind to answer this very purpose. In the days of the apostles baptism answered this purpose. The Gospel was preached to the people, and then all those who were willing to be on the side of Christ were called on to be baptized. It held the precise place that the anxious seat does now, as a public manifestation of their determination to be Christians.[15]

Here is an interesting admission about the anxious seat replacing baptism in evangelism. In evangelicalism, the historic initiation rite of the church came to have little or no place in conversion.  Then, throughout the twentieth century, especially in Baptist preaching and even viewed through television (for example, Billy Graham), the sinner’s prayer that asks Jesus into one’s heart became the prominent objective response, executed from the comfort of one’s own living room.    

B. Baptism, the Sacrament of Justifying Grace

Although the American Restoration Movement developed in the context of the Second Great Awakening and has been much influenced by it, it charted a very different trajectory on the role of baptism.  Churches of Christ insisted that baptism is an objective moment of salvation and assurance, especially in contrast to the revivalism that emphasized the subjective experience of the Holy Spirit apart from water baptism.  Baptism was the biblical alternative to the revivalist mourner’s bench.  There is no need to wait in agony for subjective confirmation of salvation.  Baptism embodies God’s promise of salvation and its assurance, and, though the external sign is almost always accompanied by a feeling or affections, as an external sign, it does not fluctuate like a feeling, which can be fickle and elusive, as Wesley himself discovered about Aldersgate.  As Henry Rack observed, “There is no clear evidence that Wesley ever received the kind of ‘assurance’ that he was looking for after his conversion in May 1738 and had still failed to find after the briefly warmed heart.”[16]  Based on the New Testament, and distinct from their evangelical neighbors, the Churches of Christ retained the central importance of baptism in the conversion process.

When I say that, in Churches of Christ, baptism is for remission or forgiveness of sins, this is shorthand for all the things God promises at baptism, the importance of which is hard to miss in the New Testament.  Baptism is directly associated with new birth from above and entrance into the kingdom (Jn. 3:3, 5), forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:38), the transition from confusion to joy (Acts 8:39), the washing away of sins (Acts 22:16; 1 Cor. 6:11), the transition from death to new life and the grace that enables it (Rom. 6:1-11), being joined to the body of Christ by the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 12:13), being clothed with Christ and participating in his sonship (Gal. 3:26-27), being united with the dying and rising of Christ (Col. 2:12-13), regeneration and renewal by the Holy Spirit (Tit. 3:5), and salvation from the destruction that awaits the wicked world (1 Pet. 3:20-21).[17]

At the risk of understating the biblical evidence for the sacramental view of baptism, I will omit exegetical summaries of the many New Testament testimonies regarding baptism and, instead, simply point to the baptism of Jesus as the paradigm for our baptism, which incorporates us into Christ.  What we learn from the baptism of Jesus is that when a person accepts the saving grace of God and comes to Christ in penitent faith and baptism, God declares that “this is my beloved daughter or son, with you I am well pleased,” and the Spirit descends to indwell and empower for a life of testing in the wilderness.  As in the case of Jesus, water baptism is Spirit baptism, inasmuch as the justifying grace that is signified accompanies the sign.

This high view of baptism, for which Churches of Christ have often been excoriated by evangelicals, is now increasingly embraced by evangelical leaders and is becoming the ecumenical consensus.  As an example of this emerging consensus, note Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, the document from Lima in 1982.  The Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches, which published this document, includes 120 members, including representatives of some non-member churches such as Roman Catholics and Southern Baptists.  Although no one from Churches of Christ was present at the meeting, based on the document, it sounds like the Churches of Christ infiltrated the group.  “God bestows upon all baptized persons the anointing and the promise of the Holy Spirit, marks them with a seal and implants in their hearts the first instalment of their inheritance as sons and daughters of God.”[18]  “Administered in obedience to our Lord, baptism is a sign and seal of our common discipleship. Through baptism, Christians are brought into union with Christ, with each other and with the Church of every time and place. Our common baptism, which unites us to Christ in faith, is thus a basic bond of unity.”[19]  “In God’s work of salvation, the paschal mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection is inseparably linked with the pentecostal gift of the Holy Spirit. Similarly, participation in Christ’s death and resurrection [i.e., baptism] is inseparably linked with the receiving of the Spirit. Baptism in its full meaning signifies and effects both.”[20] 

See “Visible Signs of Invisible Grace” (Part 1), and don’t change that dial: Part 3 is coming soon!

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[1] Millard Erickson, Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1985), 1101.

[2] Erickson, Christian Theology, 1097-98.

[3] Erickson, Christian Theology, 1099.

[4] Erickson, Christian Theology, 1101.

[5] Grudem, Systematic Theology, 954.

[6] Grudem, Systematic Theology, 980-1.

[7] Grudem, Systematic Theology, 981. After noting that the thief on the cross was not baptized, Grudem offers the following statement on the same page (981): “Baptism, then, is not necessary for salvation. But it is necessary if we are to be obedient to Christ, for he commanded baptism for all who believe in him.” This claim raises the question about the relation between salvation and (dis)obedience to Christ.

[8] For a comprehensive survey, see Everett Ferguson, Baptism in the Early Church: History, Theology, and Liturgy in the First Five Centuries (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009).

[9] Ulrich Zwingli, Of Baptism, in Zwingli and Bullinger (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1953), 134, 136.

[10] Menno Simons, Christian Baptism, in The Complete Writings of Menno Simons, trans. Leonard Verduin, ed. J. C. Wenger (Scottdale, PA: Mennonite Publishing House, 1984), 244.

[11] Simons, Christian Baptism, 245.

[12] Simons, Christian Baptism, 264-65.

[13] Charles G. Finney, Memoirs of Rev. Charles G. Finney Written by Himself (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1876), 20.

[14] Charles G. Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion, 2^nd ed. (New York: Leavitt, Lord & Co., 1835), 248.

[15] Finney, Lectures, 248.

[16] See Henry D. Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast: John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism, 3^rd ed. (London: Epworth Press, 2002), 545. On Wesley’s lack of love, assurance, and emotional experience of God, see ibid., 544-50.

[17] See a similar list in Beasley-Murray, Baptism, 264.

[18] Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, Faith and Order Paper No. 111 (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1982), Baptism, II.C.5.

[19] BEM, Baptism, II.D.6.

[20] BEM, Baptism, IV.B.14.