Baptism and Who We Are in Christ

With our grandbaby’s baptism coming up this Sunday, I’ve been thinking a lot about what this day means in her life. In Christ, the Christian, and the Church, E.L. Mascall has some wonderful thoughts about baptism as he considers the implications of the Incarnation:

It is almost universally assumed today that becoming a Christian means in essence the adoption of a new set of beliefs or the initiation of a new mode of behavior. A Christian would be defined as one who “believes in Christ” or “worships" Christ” or “tries to follow Christ’s teaching.” Now it is far from my purpose to belittle either Christian dogma or Christian ethics. Nevertheless, it must be pointed out that to define the essence of Christianity in terms either of belief or of practice involves the neglect of two principles that are fundamental to all sound theology. The former of these is that the act of God precedes and is presupposed by the acts of man: “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us”; “Ye have come to know God, or rather to be known of God.” The second is that what a being is precedes what it does; our actions are a consequence of what we are, operari sequitur esse. It will follow from this that the Christian should be defined not in terms of what he himself does, but of what God has made him to be. Being a Christian is an ontological fact, resulting from an act of God.

What, then, is this act by which God makes a man into a Christian? It is, the New Testament assures us, incorporation into the human nature of Christ, an incorporation by which the very life of the Man Christ Jesus is communicated to us and we are re-created in him. “I am the vine; ye are the branches”; “If any man is in Christ, he is a new creature,” or “there is a new creation”; we have been “grafted into” Christ like shoots into a tree. " […]

Now the normal and divinely appointed means by which this re-creation is initiated is clearly the Sacrament of Baptism, the sacrament of new birth, of regeneration. […] “This child,” says the Prayer Book, “is by baptism regenerate” (77-78).

What a magnificent day Sunday will be as we celebrate this outward sign of God’s grace as our grandchild is incorporated into Christ and His Church. It’s an act of grace coming from God, not based on her understanding or merit.

In the opening statement of the baptism service, the minister says:

DEARLY beloved, forasmuch as our Savior Christ saith, None can enter into the Kingdom of God, except he be regenerate and born anew of Water and of the Holy Ghost; I beseech you to call upon God the Father, through our Lord Jesus Christ, that of his bounteous mercy he will grant to this Child that which by nature she cannot have; that she may be baptized with Water and the Holy Ghost, and received into Christ’s holy Church, and be made a living member of the same. […]

Minister. Let us give thanks unto our Lord God.
Answer. It is meet and right so to do.