Note: The second portion of the paper on baptismal symbolism. Part Four will be here; the full version will be here at the end of the month. Sources and the article this is a response to are listed here, at the bottom of the post.

Previously: (Part One)(Part Two)

Romans 6 Response:

The third of Lusk’s bullet point contends that, in light of Romans 6, “Baptism is a kind of wedding ceremony, joining the one baptized to Christ in a covenantal relationship. But… the rite itself looks nothing like the covenant-making ceremony that it is said to be.” This statement can take one of two interpretations: the first, that it states baptism to be, like marriage, a covenantal ceremony (though Romans 6 does not support baptism as a ceremony creating or establishing a covenant; it is in conjunction with other scriptures that the role of physical baptism as a symbol of the covenant becomes obvious), a position which would not further Lusk’s point, as two different ceremonies for two different covenants are simply to be expected; second, that it states baptism to be equivalent to (or a kind of, in this case distinction without difference) marriage. The first being manifestly useless to Lusk’s case, this paper will endeavor to answer the second. To note the difference between the typical Christian marriage ceremony and the ceremony of baptism is correct. In equating baptism to a spiritual marriage ceremony, however, Lusk not only raises marriage to a sacrament, al a Roman, in the process demolishing one of the central arguments of classic Protestantism against the celibacy requirements of Catholic ascetics, he implies a theology which would justify polygamy, possibly even demand it, while requiring all women who are married to be simultaneously plural (possessed of many members) and singular, among other issues. In truth, baptism and marriage are not reflective of the same truth or the same covenant; baptism symbolizes the death which all believers die with Christ in His death, and marriage mirrors (derives its authority from) the relationship between Christ and His true church, the body of all the believers, as can be seen in the language of Romans 6 and elsewhere.

Romans 6:5, the crux of Lusk’s argument (it defines what Paul means by ‘uniting’ or being baptized into Jesus Christ and is the most credible choice of a verse in Romans 6 with which Lusk might support his position), uses a peculiar word for ‘unite’ when it says, “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.” This word is ‘συμφυτοι’, ‘symphutoi’ when transliterated, and it does not refer to marriage or to a bond equivalent thereto. This passage is, in fact, the only place in the entire New Testament that uses this word. According to Thayer’s definition (which is echoed, albeit in less detail, by both Strong and Mounce), this word means, “Born together with, of joint origin: connate, congenital, innate, implanted by birth or nature; grown together, united with; kindred” (Studylight). In other words, ‘united’ in this passage refers to brotherhood (or a blood kinship) not marriage. Romans 6:5 might, with some liberties taken, be read, ‘For if we have been made brothers with Him in a death like His, we shall certainly be made brothers with Him in a resurrection like His.’ Why is this important? As stated above, this passage defines what Paul means when he says in Romans 6 “baptized into Jesus Christ” (2). Verse 2, after all, establishes that baptism is a baptism into death, the state of being united with Christ. This is not to say verse 2 establishes the inherent efficacy of baptism; any person not elect is implied not have been baptized into Christ (in verse 3, which implicitly divides baptisms between ‘into Christ’ and ‘not into Christ’), thus negating any inherent efficacy, while verse 6, by placing the death of the Christian at the death of Christ and not at physical baptism (which symbolizes death), entirely shatters all temporal bonds between physical baptism and the spiritual reality. Nevertheless, such discussions are a side-tangent, only tangentially pertinent to the point of this section. Verse 5, in context of verse 2, is, as Lusk recognizes, speaking of what it means to be in Christ’s death, the entrance into which is symbolized by physical baptism. Verse 5, therefore, being entirely disconnected from the marriage covenant Lusk implies it to speak of, renders Lusk’s interpretation of the entire passage null, as baptism is thereby not required to symbolize or accomplish marriage.

Lusk’s equation of marriage and baptism also leads to strange places in regards to both marriage and ecclesiology, arising from the correspondence of marriage to Christ’s relationship with the church and from the use of baptism to symbolize death throughout the New Testament. The first problem is this: conflating marriage and baptism, while bearing in mind the status of baptism as a symbol of death, results in a second sacrifice of Christ at A.D. 70. The second problem is this: conflating marriage and baptism, when bearing in mind the origin of marriage and the composition of the church, results in a violation of basic logic, the partial justification of polygamy (the logic error unfortunately makes the justification’s end result semi-incoherent, if necessary), the fragmentation of the church, and a charge of adultery for every baptized and married Christian.

The culmination of marriage, the archetype which provides its basis, is the marriage feast of the Lamb in Revelation 19, the union of the church with Christ after the final divorce of Israel in A.D. 70. Of that time Scripture says, “For the marriage of the Lamb has come, and His Bride has made herself ready” (Rev. 19:7). If baptism and marriage are indeed an establishing of the same- or an equivalent- covenant, then the reader would expect two things: first, that some of the imagery of baptism, the imagery of washing, would appear, second, that death would figure heavily in the proceedings, given the integral connection between baptism and death in many other passages. How unfortunate, then, for Lusk’s case is it that washing is never a concern in Revelations 19:6-10; the closest it approaches is in speaking of the garbing of the Bride, imagery already proven separate from baptism above (or at least proven to provide no basis for associating baptism with the proceedings). How fortunate, further, for the integrity of historic Christian orthodoxy that ‘death’ does not figure as a part of the ceremony, that neither the Bride nor Christ Himself suffers death on an occasion clearly distinguished from the Crucifixion. If death were to be forced into this ceremony, even purely by equating the covenants, as Lusk implies a desire to do, one of the two participants at least would be required to die; in context of other passages regarding baptism, which symbolizes the union of the believer with Christ in His death, both persons, the Bride (the church) and Christ Himself would have to die. To force this on the passage at hand would, however, not only be eisegesis on an incredible scale, it would be injecting a second sacrifice of Christ, whose death was, according to Romans 6 itself, “Once for all” (6:10). In other words, so associating baptism to marriage would, if carried to its logical conclusion, be baseless heresy, akin to the horrors of the Roman Catholic mass, albeit more daring in what other portions of Scripture it chooses to defile, for it would sacrifice Christ a second time, while simultaneously killing the corporate church (and presumably adding in another resurrection, as marriage is not a ceremony for the dead but the living), all without any basis within either Romans 6 or Revelations 19.

The second accusation is this: the conflation of marriage and baptism results in a violation of basic logic, the partial justification of polygamy, the fragmentation of the church, and a charge of adultery for every baptized and married Christian. This is a long and vivid list, but ultimately it comes down to the fact that the Bride of Revelations 19, like the wife of Ezekiel 16 and the ‘body’ of 1 Corinthians 12, is a corporate, composite entity, whereas the person being baptized (and the person engaging in human marriage) is invariably a singular, non-composite entity. When equating the baptismal ceremony to a marriage (as, once again, Lusk must do in order to make his point), the ceremony thus implies that one participant, the bride (and the person being baptized), is a corporate, composite, singular, non-composite entity, an obvious violation of the basic principle of non-contradiction. Furthermore, in this equation, the church is implied to be composed of many different smaller editions of itself. How so? If the person being baptized is engaging in marriage to Christ (as He is the only possible other participant, unless baptism is some sort of mass polygamy scheme on the part of the clergy, wherein the officiant is wed to the parishioner), then this person is taking the place of the church as a whole; he is also, for a real mind-screw, by baptism rendered a part of the church, thus becoming a church to himself in the same instant as he becomes part of the church. Furthermore, as the church’s relationship to Christ is the archetype of marriage (along with Israel’s relationship, to a lesser extent, which has a whole other set of implications regarding circumcision not to be addressed here), the new nature of the church as being composed of a few billion churches would imply that the bride in any human marriage should be composed of a few billion brides. At the very least, the mass polygamy occasioned in the church-Christ relationship by every baptism being a marriage would justify all Christian marriages being massively polygamous in kind, would justify a view of the church as being a recursive fractal (this is important here mainly in its obvious absurdity), and would imply every baptized Christian woman who marries a human male to be adulterous (or a practitioner of diandry) by virtue of already having been wed (while all Christian men would be engaging in homosexual marriage and, with homosexual union being thus divinely consecrated, they would also be engaging in adultery if they married). As all of these results are obviously anti-Biblical, the whole equation of marriage to baptism must be abandoned, given these results cannot be separated from it due to their nature as logical consequents and not extraneities; this logical necessity leaves Lusk in the unenviable position of either advocating irrational heresy or presenting an argument which stumbles before it can even prove its point.

While the above extensive refutation of Lusk’s possible equation of marriage to baptism might be condemned on grounds that he did not, in fact, posit such an equation (no reasonable person would), the fact remains that if he did not posit the equation, he presented an argument with an equally obvious, if much simpler, fault, as if he merely intended to say that two different ceremonies symbolizing (or establishing) two different covenants, one between two humans and one between a man and his Creator, that these two ceremonies differed and therefore one of them could not be symbolic, by virtue of not representing another, very different covenant (which has an institution apparently symbolic, if Lusk’s implications are to be believed), the only conclusion of the reader should take from the bullet point would be, ‘He didn’t think that through’. To be fair, though, despite the absurdity of this option, the alternative’s horrors, as shown above, would likely elicit the same reaction. It being taken as true, therefore, that Lusk’s apparent position, intended or not, must be counteracted (as it is a possibility), two main lines of attack were perpetrated above: first, that the passage in question, Romans 6, in fact presented no grounds for the conclusion once the original verbiage was considered; second, that the subjection of the assertion to a classic argumentum ad absurdum disqualifies it from consideration upon grounds of irrationality and rank heresy (polyandry, adultery, homosexuality, corporately composite humans, and the like being manifestly not Biblical). In either case, whether Lusk’s argument is toothless or (by implication) heretical, the conclusion is clear: this objection to baptism’s role as a symbol is without merit.

1 Corinthians 12 Response:

The fourth of Lusk’s bullet points contends thus: “In 1 Cor. 12:13, Paul says, ‘By one Spirit we were all baptized into one body,’ namely, the body of Christ. But once again the rite itself fails to picture incorporation into Christ’s body. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how any ritual could picture such incorporation.” This assertion, besides implying a fundamental error regarding the nature of the body Paul here speaks of in 1 Corinthians 12, ignores that, once the distinction between spiritual and physical baptism is understood and accounted for, once the basis of the church’s unity is clarified, the suitability of physical baptism as a means of initiation into the institution of the church becomes obvious. Physical baptism is an exceptionally suitable symbol for entry into the visible church, and spiritual baptism is the means, at least in part, by which entry into the invisible church is accomplished (though clarity must be maintained: spiritual and physical baptism are not temporally or causally united; of the two, spiritual baptism alone has innate efficacy, with the representative efficacy of an instance of physical baptism deriving entirely from its correspondence with a (separately applied in means, origin, and space-time) spiritual baptism).

Now, examine Lusk’s error regarding the term ‘body’: he implies (in using ‘Christ’s body’ rather than ‘the body of Christ’ or ‘the body of the church’ or some similar term) that he believes this to be incorporation into the actual body of Christ, a position consistent with the works of some others of his theological camp. It is not a position consistent with orthodoxy, however. To say that in baptism the believer is incorporated into the actual body of Christ fails both textually and in its varied implications. To substantiate the first charge, the entire chapter of 1 Corinthians 12, both before and after verse 13, speaks of the church. Nowhere in it is the body identified as the actual body which is Christ’s, except, possibly, in verse 27, where Paul writes, “The body of Christ,” in a context which any clear-minded interpreter will realize indicates that this is the body spoken of throughout the chapter. Two problems arise with interpreting this as necessarily identifying the ‘body’ with Christ’s literal body: first, that the construction “of Christ”, while capable of being a possessive genitive, could equally be a descriptive genitive (note: the author of this paper here uses Latin terms due to personal familiarity, but the concept exists in Greek and English both); second, that verse 28 implies an equation between “the body of Christ” in verse 27 and “the church” in itself. To explain, the equation between the church and the ‘body of Christ’ would require, if by ‘body of Christ’ Christ’s literal body were meant, that at the marriage feast of the lamb, Christ weds Himself, albeit both He and Himself would have several billion souls (the same souls). As marriage is the welding of two into one (Mark 10:8), and this bond would be the welding of one into one, the possibility that the church and Christ’s body are literally the same must be discarded. The suggestion that Christ’s body (but not His soul and spirit) is the church denies orthodox Christian doctrine on the hypostatic union to a blatantly heretical extent. If Christ is to wed the church, and the church is His literal body, His body is already one with Him (definitionally so) and therefore the same problem observed above arises from a different quarter, albeit in this case Christ weds not Himself but a part of Himself which He presumably simultaneously possesses, as pure spirit cannot wed pure body (the spirit-body divide being seen in the fact that the dead cannot marry the living). This distinction splits Christ into body- the church, which is thereby incapable of being counted as spirit, being body- and the divine spirit- as the body is apparently the church and therefore inherently creature, not divine, particularly pre-marriage. Under this paradigm, the entirety of the divinity of Christ must be in His spirit, violating orthodox understanding of the hypostatic union). To address the second charge, the reader is invited to re-read the previous few sentences for a primer, though further issues would doubtless appear given time.

Spiritual baptism forms an indubitably fitting method of incorporation into the body of the invisible church. Spiritual baptism is, after all, a passage (1 Peter 3) through death (Romans 6) and burial (Colossians 2) which unites us to Christ (Romans 6) and His resurrection (Romans 6) in new life (Romans 6), thereby dedicating that new life to God (Galatians 3) (apologies for the frequency of ‘Romans 6’; it is remarkably relevant). That all the elect will, by definition of the elect being predestined to justification, undergo this process is self-evident; that the invisible church, the body of the elect which is the Bride of Christ, which the visible church attempts to correspond to, is formed of the elect is, again, definitionally evident (1 Corinthians 12:13, after all, quite clearly identifies the members of the church as those who have received the Holy Spirit, which, as per John 14:26 and similar verses, is a description only of the elect, those eternally justified by God, while 1 Corinthians 1:2 narrows down the “church of God that is in Corinth” by specifically delineating “to those sanctified in Christ Jesus” as its audience.). Spiritual baptism, as will be elucidated below, is the process by which one of the elect is rendered from a man of the flesh, of the world, into a man of God (both qualitatively and possessively); this spiritual baptism is what physical baptism (as shown earlier in this work) represents and symbolizes with remarkable clarity. Because spiritual baptism is the process by which a man is actually saved (justified and adopted, though the seeds of sanctification are laid as well, the three being inextricably connected but not equivalent), and because the invisible church is a body composed of the entirety of those whom Christ redeemed, spiritual baptism is, as 1 Corinthians 12:13 states, the means by which all true Christians, the elect, are incorporated into a single body.

What would be expected of a process which incorporates a person into a definitional, spiritual body? Such a process would have to be a passage-through which fundamentally alters the person, which both separates him from the old and unites him to the new. Spiritual baptism fulfils this requirement. Spiritual baptism (once again, this is the spiritual reality not linked to the physical ritual either temporally or causally; both can exist independently of each other, though the physical achieves fullness only by correspondence to the spiritual) is a passage through: according to 1 Peter 2:18-22, baptism corresponds to the flood in Noah’s day, wherein God brought His people (the person being baptized, here) through the flood (water, a symbol of death, being death itself in spiritual baptism) to new life (the life of the believer). Spiritual baptism fundamentally alters the person: in the process of being washed of sin via death, the person’s heart is changed, being freed from the sin of Adam, and in the resurrection which logically follows from this death (Romans 6:4,7-8), Christ grants a new conscience, a new heart (1 Peter 3:21; Colossians 2:12; Romans 6:10-14; Ezekiel 36:26). Spiritual baptism separates the man from his old estate: the man receives, in his uniting to Christ’s death, the wages of his sin (Romans 6:5,23), that is, death, decisively and totally altering him from his former state (Colossians 2:11; Ezekiel 36:25-26) (which, being prior to spiritual baptism, was a state of not-being-in-the-church (1 Corinthians 12:13; Ezekiel 44:7)). Spiritual baptism unites man to the new: the ending of the unity of the believer with Christ’s death is the resurrection of the believer with and by his Savior (Romans 6:5-11; 1 Peter 3:21; Colossians 2:12), which resurrection is a resurrection into a re-created state (Ezekiel 36:25-26; John 3:1-14). Furthermore, this new life which spiritual baptism accomplishes is a state synonymous with being part of the body of the church: because the church is made up of the sum of all those truly saved, to be truly saved is to be a part of the church. In all its parts, spiritual baptism is a superlative, integral, and necessitous means of entry into the body of the church, of incorporation.

The manner in which baptism acts as a fitting initiation into the body of the visible church, besides being (despite its position in this sentence, the following quality is the most important part of baptism’s role as an initiation) a by-product of its role as a symbol of the spiritual baptism which initiates the believer into the invisible church, is a product of its symbolism of death and passage, its nature as a public, shared ritual, and its inherent statement of participation in the reality it reflects, though the physical element of baptism lacks any inherent spiritual efficacy, that trait being confined to spiritual baptism. The first mentioned path is simple and intuitive: because spiritual baptism accomplishes an essential part of the incorporation of a man into the body of the invisible church, physical baptism, by symbolizing this spiritual reality, accomplishes incorporation, less perfect but still real, into the physical reflection and imitation of the invisible church, the institutional, visible church. Having discussed the nature of spiritual baptism as a passage in relation to 1 Peter 3:18-22 above, let it suffice to say that baptism, a symbol of passage (as will be readily understood from above), forms therefore a yet more fitting symbol for passage from without the church to within it.

The second may seem somewhat out of left field but actually echoes an essential component of an uncounted number of initiations: sacrifice. Three examples of such initiations will suffice. The pagan Polynesian practice of burying a family member alive below one pillar of the house says, ‘I consider this house worth dying for’. The chivalric knight, in holding vigil through the night, declares a sacrifice, that his life, like that night, is dedicated to his new duties. Aaron was marked by God through Moses with the death-blood of the ram of ordination in Leviticus 8 to show to him and to the congregation of Israel the totality of his sacrifice, that even his life was forfeit should he stray from his duties, as is shown in Nadab and Abihu in Leviticus 10, that he had laid down his life for this duty, whether that life were to be spent in duty or destroyed in judgement. In a manner similar to all these but wholly superior, baptism, by symbolizing the death of the person baptized, says in actions louder than words, ‘I have given my life to join this institution; having died in entering the body, will I not also live according to its right precepts? Surely this is a covenant of blood to me, from which I will not stray’ (Romans 6:7-8; Exodus 4:24-26). That this declaration may be a lie none should deny, whether it is a lie of ignorance or intent, but this is the declaration made by every man, woman, and child who is baptized, save that for the child it is a promise by the parents of the child’s rearing, that having died into the church he will also live within it. This declaration is incomplete, of course; its fullness rises only when the fullness of spiritual baptism, with all its implications, is added to the equation, when this declaration says, ‘I, having died with Christ and risen both by and with Him, have entered through that death into the true church, of which this institution is a carnal simulacrum, imperfect but beauteous, and having thus died and risen, I am pledged to my Savior with hands that no longer love sin’ (Romans 6:7-8).

The third manner in which physical baptism provides a fitting means of entry into the visible church is in its nature as a shared, public ritual. The operation of the two components of this, ‘shared’ and ‘public’, may be easily understood by analogy to other ceremonies. A coronation, first, is a public ritual in which, by declaring all his commitment to his nation and by receiving from his nation their commitments, a king is rendered out of a man. All men see his commitment, and therefore it is valid. A king crowned in a secret room where none can see is only a king in potential, crowned in anticipation of his full coronation in public light; a king who is crowned in secret but never in public is not a king but a coup. Aragorn was not king until he was crowned, however much the crown was his by right, and the four rulers of Narnia were heirs, not kings and queens, before they defeated the witch, before their ascension and coronation in Cair Paravel. On the other end of the ‘dignity’ spectrum, hazing is a (chaotic) ritual by which a variety of groups- military men, college boys, etc.- unite. In this ritual, essentially, every person undergoes what his fellows have undergone, and they all know it. They, without so many words, declare to each other that they possess a common commitment and experience which binds them to the institution or grouping they have entered into. These two elements both being present, the ritual of baptism incorporates into the visible body of the church by declaring to all members of the church both a recognized and accepted commitment, one with mutual duties, and by undergoing what every member of the church has previously undergone in a public manner. Furthermore, in fulfilment of the first and fourth path, it not only states, ‘I underwent this ritual which you too underwent’ but ‘I have undergone the fundamental change which the true body of this church also underwent, have undergone the spiritual baptism which I hereby (in this physical baptism) symbolize’ (Romans 6:7-8).

Besides implying a grave error in regards to the ‘body of Christ’, Lusk contends that baptism does not picture incorporation into the body. To an extent he is right (baptism does not directly picture the incorporation); to the extent that he is right, the argument is a red herring. A symbol does not need to be comprehensive; if baptism failed to picture every part of the spiritual reality it symbolized, the wise man will say simply that the physical cannot fully comprehend or reflect the much greater spiritual reality. That is normal in symbols; no symbol can contain all the information and characteristics of what it symbolizes (if it did, it would be what it symbolized, rather than symbolizing it). What baptism does reflect, however, is the spiritual reality which actually accomplishes the incorporation. Furthermore, in reflecting that reality, baptism exhibits several qualities common in initiation rituals: a commitment extending to death, a passage from one state to another, a meta characteristic of being a shared, public ritual, and an oath, implicit and explicit, of loyalty to the central figure and binding force of the institution, Christ. Physical baptism, in actuality, is a ceremony well suited to symbolize the entrance of the believer into new life within the church, a symbol which accomplishes entrance into the visible church by mirroring a presumed and stated entrance into the invisible church which provides the pretext for the existence and composition of the visible church.

Part Four will be published here next week.

Context:

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All verses, unless stated otherwise, are taken from the ESV.

This website was used to provide information on the words of the original text.

The paper as a whole is a answer to a section of the article found here. My anti-virus dislikes this webpage, but it has yet to cause issues. If you are worried, I advise copy-and-paste to move the article into a Word document- it makes taking notes easier. The rest of the paper seems to be of similar quality to the section this paper examines, though I’ve not inspected it as closely.