Some Catholic Anabaptist Reflections on Baptism
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I’m reflecting on my own congregation’s open baptism and communion practices, in light of the very different practices of the catechetical program of the church on the eve of Constantine. My thoughts here are rooted in my efforts to reconcile my own Catholic formation and upbringing, which I still deeply value and have never renounced, and my role as a Vineyard Pastor. I am also enormously grateful for my current role and am at peace with it; although my position is institutionally contradictory, I think it is perfectly coherent at a deeper level.
As Alan Kreider points out in Patient Ferment of the Early Church, the second century practices were themselves a historical development. He suggests that rapid baptism, like that of the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8, contrasts markedly with the multi-year preparation that was developed by the 200’s. Things went from “Look, here’s some water! What’s to stop me from being baptized?” to “We will study for as long as it takes, generally years, for you to learn to practice the core of Christian ethics and then we miiiight just let you get baptized and then you can join the worship service.” In part, Kreider traces this transition to the move from a Jewish context to a pagan one. In my own language, maybe there was a sense that people would need to become familiarized with the seed of Torah first before they could water it with baptism and see it burst open. But Kreider also notes that it came out of a related concern about violent Christians and greedy Christians giving a bad witness to the faith: by their faithlessness, in spite of being called Christians, they would give Christian baptism and Christianity and maybe even Jesus a bad name. What if people thought that Christians were violent people? They wouldn’t be attracted to the church, at least not for the right reasons, and whatever it was they were attracted to wouldn’t be the Christian faith. It would be some other thing masquerading as Christian faith. A third reason involved persecution. Christian practices were driven inward by the need for secrecy, produced by periodic outbreaks of suppression.
So the catechetical practices of the early 200’s already show a creative process of adapting the foundational Christian message to changing circumstances and needs. Still, their catechism was rooted in the same distinctive ethical core that we find throughout the church before Constantine, testified to in the Bible. In spite of these attempts at rigor, it all begins to erode afterward. In light of this, we might look at these catechetical practices as a failed, maybe even desperate, attempt to fend off what was coming: the rise of radical confusion about the meaning of Christian faith and Christian witness, arising from false substitutes for it spreading and even at times taking over the church. The greatest fears of the catechists of that time were realized in less than a century, and their catechetical rigorism was unfortunately unable to hold back the tide of imperial co-optation that soon washed over them.
Christians lost the understanding that the Sermon on the Plain and the Sermon on the Mount are the foundation of Christian faith, even though their texts still testified to what was later effaced. The texts testified against them, but they kept them in a form that seemed muted, like Watergate recordings without a player. They had understood that practice is essential, even to understanding the Gospel. Of course, they also understood that we didn’t always succeed in living it out, but that’s what repentance and reconciliation are for: for gently drawing Christians into these practices of grace, by grace, for the sake of making God’s generosity manifest to all. But they would have been utterly shocked and disgusted by a commonplace that I’ve encountered in both Catholic and Protestant contexts: the notion that faithfulness to basic Christian ethics would be seen as a ridiculous and impossible ideal, meant only to demonstrate our sinfulness and need for emotive ritual exercises. In the church throughout the world, Catholic, Orthodox, Magisterial Protestant and Anabaptist, we all live in the confusing aftermath that the catechists of the 200’s tried to prevent with their rigorous training. But they failed.
So what are we to do now in the wake of this catastrophe? My own view is that there is a kind of grace manifest even here, and it involves the collapse of the idol of a pure church, a church free of error and sin. It isn’t that such a church would be bad, any more than cows are bad, or sex is bad, or even money or power are bad. The problem is precisely the ritual elevation of the church itself and its constitutive ritual life to a central place, just as it is with those other forms of idolatry. The Hebrew prophets already deeply understood the ways in which rituals of sacrifice and identity could become hollow and idolatrous, although this seemed paradoxical to those who had made idols of these things. Aren’t we worshipping the true God? No, and in some ways a parody of worship is worse than a simple mistake. Catechists then and now understand that baptism and communion are signs meant to be fulfilled in the entirety of lives that become signs. They aren’t technology or magic that operate independent of intention and lived practice, and when they’re treated that way they became a reeking, fetid, horrifying abomination. And so they have. This understanding pervades the anxieties of the catechists as well. Why else spend many years forming someone for baptism if the baptism itself was efficacious in a way independent of human apprehension and cooperation with the deep attendant meaning of the practice?
Whether anyone likes it or not, I think it is reasonably clear that we all have absurdly sloppy baptismal and communion practices from the standpoint of foundational Christian ethics. The divide between us and the catechists of the 200’s means that if we are grafted into their tradition, it is only as a scarred and failed tradition: a tradition whose sacredness must include the capacity to bear scars that testify to our own abuses. What denomination, for example, excludes soldiers and police officers from baptism and communion unless they can work while foreswearing violence, refusing to harm or otherwise return evil for evil? What denomination excludes people who live above a basic and minimal level of comfort and dress? But this was the deposit of the faith we were given. Our churches throughout the world are all filled with people who would have rejected Christian catechism in the 200s, even before the catechists had a chance to reject them. More galling, the churches are even full of leaders (people who presume to make disciples!) who don’t even realize they haven’t been trained in the most elementary milk of the faith. From the standpoint of the catechists of the 200s, they wouldn’t have even been fully presented with the Gospel because they couldn’t hope to comprehend it; catechists feared that they would surely misapprehend it, and at least in this they have been completely vindicated. Even though I’m pretty clear on how this all worked in both the Bible and in their practices, I’m not so sure they would have let me into a catechetical class. I’m not exempting myself from the deep problems for Christian catechesis and rituals of inclusion here. I only claim to be able to at least articulate something that I think is essential, but which has largely been lost, and which I am working to recover limpingly.
In this age of sloppy church, the global church is all very sloppy. And what’s worse, a lot of it thinks it isn’t sloppy at all, or that it knows how to unslop itself, but is catastrophically wrong about how to do it. In the absence of the foundation Jesus laid, all kinds of shoddy substitutes have sprung up and the collective bodies created by them rush back to those shoddy substitutes as if they are the foundation of life. Calvinists rush to the doctrines at the roots of their schism and become as hard and arbitrary as that god. Catholics and Orthodox rush to the roots of their schisms. Evangelicals to the roots of theirs. Southern Baptists rush back to circle around their white supremacy and American imperialism. It is true, these may be the basics of their denomination, or at least part of their foundation. But this is all sand and isn’t the foundation Christ laid. And so across all the innumerable divisions, the desire to “clean up the church” and “get back to basics” takes on a sinister air tinged with the stench of death. This is because so many of their basics are bad, at least as basics. Some of their presumed basics might make fine theological speculation, but they aren’t actually basics. Others have basics that amount to the most embarrassing and inept kinds of speculation imaginable. Others have basics that are poison pills, precisely designed to obstruct Christian discipleship. But insofar as these basics aren’t enemy love and solidarity with the poor and reconciliation, they aren’t the basics of the Bible or of the deposit of the faith that is witnessed to in patristics.
So when it comes to communion and baptism, I think that a radical openness is the only posture that can make sense today, paired with a clarity about the foundations of Christian life in Luke 6 and Matthew 5–7. We should be clear, as a matter of integrity, about what these practices are designed to commit us to, even as we refuse to police a boundary that has become (and probably always was) utterly impossible to police. For too many of us, maybe all of us, baptism and communion have become gateways to the possibility of Christian catechism, not the doorway at its end. As a place where the idol of the pure church dies and where catechism begins, maybe they have precisely reached their proper telos.
This perspective informs how I processed this recently-published account of an apparently invalid Catholic re-baptism from Patricia Snow. The story beautifully illustrated some of the dynamics I’d been thinking about and wrestling with for a while.
Snow’s account of her re-baptism sits at the center of her narrative, which involves her internal resistance to a priest who sounds quite authoritarian and insensitive, just like the domineering men she had also known in the charismatic world. Still, she becomes attached to this Father and then defensive of him, much like many children become defensive of parental dysfunction in general. Her internal resistance comes to a head when Father requires that she show her baptismal certificate, so that the Church in its wisdom can decide if she has been properly baptized or not. (This is the unflinching wisdom and challenge that Snow decides, in her closing reflections, that she needed from Father.) She dutifully recovers the baptismal certificate from her mother and, to her horror, discovers that she was baptized by the First Universalist Church of Providence. She concludes that her baptism wasn’t valid, because they’re Unitarians, and that this makes sense of the dreams she has been having of needing to cross water to come home. She wasn’t validly baptized! Fortunately, a kindly priest assures her that it won’t be a problem at all for her to receive real and valid Catholic baptism. The meaning she made of this was that the Church, in its procedural wisdom, knew what she needed sacramentally and demanded she get to the bottom of things.
The conversion account ends with a crescendo, a kind of paean to the intimidating procedural authority and discipline that she didn’t know she needed, but that the True Church knew she needed. There is, however, a pretty glaring problem with this story at precisely the point that seems to warrant Snow’s Apollonian praise for the Church’s prophetic and truth-telling powers. It leapt out at me immediately. The First Universalist Church of Providence isn’t Unitarian even today. It is very clearly and explicitly a Trinitarian Church. If the Catholic Church in its wisdom were speaking and doing rightly in this case, on its own terms, it would have at least taken a few minutes to investigate whether the charge of invalid baptism by virtue of Unitarianism was true, or if it was slander. I did get a chance to talk to Rev. Scott Axford at the church, and was able to confirm that the baptismal formula is in fact proper according to Catholic teaching. For those who don’t know, for us Catholics a Trinitarian baptism in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is valid, whether it is done by groups that have actually been clearly anathematized as heretics (like Calvinists) or by groups that haven’t (such as Providence’s Trinitarian Universalists.) What matters is the Trinitarian formula of the baptism. And so the authoritative pronouncement at the center of this moving conversion narrative, the one that underwrites the wisdom of the Church, is (on the Church’s own terms) a blunder that has now turned into a written libel against this universalist church.
The heart of the visionary-authoritarian narrative is here, by the grace of canon law, completely undercut. The letter of the law brings death to the story told by Snow, and I find that enormously life giving. Here the authority-machine fails on its own terms. And with this failure, the feet of clay are exposed. In the shadowy light of this failure, the creepy, deluded, unhealthy relationship with Father at the heart of the narrative snaps into proper focus as well.
This account of a baptism, with all of its unintentional bathos, reminds me of another area where the authority-machine is also failing on its own terms, with this recent account of a priest who was (officially) invalidly baptized. Here, the issue was that a video was found of his baptism and the deacon who baptized him apparently made the grievous error of baptizing the priest with a “we baptize” instead of with an “I baptize.” Now for non-Catholics especially, a first reaction might be that it seems absurd for the saving work of God to hinge on such a tiny thing. If a god really is that persnicketty and bound by minute ritual deviations, could it really be the God who is pure love, the ever-transcendent ground of Being?
I don’t think this intuition is wrong, but it misses out on the truly Catholic delights that are to be had by thinking about this more on its own terms first. This immediate critique lacks soul, a crucial holistic immanence, that makes it weaker under scrutiny than it might seem at first glance. So here it seems better to me to really bring out my inner Catholic, and point out that the baptismal instructions in the Didache use “we” language rather than “I” language. And the underlying theological discussion, rooted in the priest being in the person of Christ, involves an important opportunity to question today’s clericalism in light of the deposit of the faith. It raises an important and central theological question: is it the congregation as a whole that embodies and represents Christ in baptism, or is it the visible human Father himself alone who embodies Christ? And what’s more, if our baptismal formulas are now wrong, or were wrong at the time of the Didache, then whoever was wrongly baptized back then with an errant “we” couldn’t confer any other sacraments. Including holy orders. This sort of ritual punctiliousness introduces a serious problem for the idea of apostolic succession, a cornerstone of the Church’s claim for authority.
What if, somewhere along the way, we got our “we” and our “I” mixed up and the sacraments were lost? What if some essential bishop along the way was improperly baptized, and therefore unable to confer holy orders? This proceduralism saddles us with all of the problems presented by the Donatists, the first group violently persecuted by the church after Constantine. The Donatists claimed that sacraments could only be valid if priests were morally faithful, even under persecution. This approach was opposed and violently suppressed from the seats of imperial power, because the Church understood that this would create huge heartache. And, perhaps far more importantly for them, administrative problems. What if people couldn’t know if their confessions or baptisms were valid, not by any fault of their own, but because of a failing by their priest? But with this “we” and “I” business, we can see that our procedural Donatism still saddles us with all of the problems of Donatism, without its moral core. Violence didn’t solve the problems raised by Donatism, and instead we’re now stuck wtih an even worse version of the issues it created. We’ve thrown out the baby of moral clarity, but kept the bathwater of invisibly rendering the church’s ritual activities highly dubious on our own terms.
Now on another level, I think that all of this is deeply silly, even as it is also a gateway to reflections that are not silly at all. It is worth wondering seriously if we should baptize with a “we” or with an “I”, and it is worth trying to discern the many ways in which the community behind the Didache would be appalled at our practices. This silliness is the silliness of those who try to bottle the breeze. It is the silliness of Father demanding your baptismal certificate so that he can see if you were validly baptized, and then Father not bothering to follow up on that information to see if you were, in fact, validly baptized. It is proceduralism and law as a piece of charismaniac liturgical theatre, but not taken at all seriously as procedure or law. In Snow’s account we have the bathwater of Pentecostalism, a disconnection of visionary experience from reconciling reflection on whether it was authentic, but without the liberatory aspects of those practices.
And yet, the failure and absurdity of the canon law on its own terms is its own strange grace. I think it invites us to see the visible church as the visible church: the church we can all actually see by looking around us, not the invisible institutional construct that priests contest amongst themselves. I think there was some kind of validity to Snow’s re-baptism by the Catholic Church, even if the Catholic Church officially can’t think so on closer inspection. Baptismal certificates and the institutional apparatuses of churches have a kind of institutional visibility, a visibility to the blind archons of institutional power. But they are generally invisible to us. On the other hand, Snow’s actual infant baptism in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the First Universalist Church of Providence was importantly visible to a group of people. Not as a dusty file, but as Snow’s mother weeping at her real baptism there. I say this knowing that her infant baptism is, in some sense, even more of a salutary affront to my anabaptist side than it is to my Catholic side. If my carefully calibrated universal offense seems hopelessly confused to you, I think it is because you have lost sight of what the visible church must be.
The failures of institutional visibility, the reality that they flailingly try to occlude and make invisible to us, can help shatter the strange notion that the institutional church is the truly visible church.
We can then emerge from the darkness of Snow’s account with all of its flickering shadows, and look around us with fresh eyes. We should look at all of the ways people are loving enemies, doing the work of reconciliation, moving into deepening solidarity with the poor, repenting and forgiving, in the name of Jesus Christ. And if some officially forbidden re-baptisms are visibly part of that, so much the better for the truly visible church, the church we actually see throughout the world. And so much the worse for the absurdity of the institutional church’s claims to bottle the breeze.