34. What is baptism?
Baptism signifies entrance into the household of faith and is a symbol of repentance and inner cleansing from sin, a representation of the new birth in Christ Jesus, and a mark of Christian discipleship.
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Baptism has been the initiation rite by which converts have been joined to the community of Jesus’s disciples from the very first days of the church—indeed, according to Acts, from the very first sermon that Peter preached on Pentecost, fifty days following Jesus’s resurrection (Acts 2:37–38). It enacts, in ritual form, what happens to the initiates who cross over the threshold between belonging to themselves and to the world, on the one hand, and belonging to God on the other. Their sins—the residue of their old life apart from God and God’s redeeming fellowship—are washed away (Heb. 10:19–22; 1 Peter 3:21) and they are plunged into the one body of the church (1 Cor. 12:13), into Christ himself (Gal. 3:27–28), where their new life begins and takes shape. Or, in Paul’s own explanation of the ritual, they are immersed into Jesus’s death and so experience their own deliverance-by-death from their old life of servitude to sin; they emerge from the water, as Christ emerged from the tomb, into a new kind of life, one in which they have become fully alive to God (Rom. 6:3–4).
Paul understood that baptism initiates us into a life of transformation. It encapsulates what is to occupy our full attention for the whole of our journey of discipleship. In his own Larger Catechism, Martin Luther observed that baptism offers “a garment which the disciple is to put on every day, each day putting the old person to death a little more and nurturing the new person toward maturity” (IV, 41).
Baptism is a single, unrepeatable ritual, but there is great value in frequently remembering our baptism. We can remember each and every morning: I am baptized. I belong to Christ. I have died to one kind of life in order to live a wholly new life in the Spirit. And by the same Spirit, I am going to live as an instrument of righteousness in God’s service this day (Rom. 6:11–23).
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What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.
For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. (Rom. 6:1–5 ESV)
For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. (1 Cor. 12:12–13)
See also Acts 2:37–39; Gal. 3:27–28; Col. 2:11–14; Heb. 10:19–22; CoF VI; questions 41–42
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This is an excerpt from Christian Faith and Doctrine: An Annotated Catechism for the Global Methodist Church. Seedbed is pleased to partner with The Global Methodist Church to offer this companion resource to A Catechism of Christian Faith and Doctrine for the Global Methodist Church.
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