Editorial

We believe that the baptism of believers with water is a sign of their cleansing from sin. Baptism is also a pledge before the church of their covenant with God to walk in the way of Jesus Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit.—from Article 11, Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective

What does baptism mean today? As John D. Roth says in his article (page 8), when members of our church are baptized, the vows they take should be the beginning of a covenant relationship taken as seriously by the church as are marriage vows. But uncertainty about what baptism means leaves the vows anemic; many who are baptized drift away from their vows and the church.

Jesus’ baptism is our reference point: His baptism is the only place in the Bible where God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are together in ways recognizable to the human senses. When John baptized Jesus in the Jordan River, the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus “like a dove,” and God spoke from the clouds, saying, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased” (Mark 1:11).

The highlight of my trip to Jordan some two years ago was visiting the place where Jesus was baptized—called Bethany Beyond Jordan. It is located near where the Jordan River ends at the Dead Sea—the lowest spot of dry land anywhere in the world. As I stood by the river to pray, I had an epiphany: Jesus’ baptism was a vertical moment that reached from the lowest spot on earth to the highest elements of heaven.

When we are baptized—and when our children our baptized—we commemorate this individual, vertical moment within the horizontal faith community: In baptism, the church calls for the person being baptized to allow the power of the Holy Spirit to infuse every word and action—from the lowest point in life to the highest.

But baptism has another historical element for Mennonites, and I fear this element may get in the way. Because Anabaptist leaders during the Reformation established their “rebaptism” as the line across which they would not cross—and many were martyred for it—we add historical freight to baptism.

The commentary for the baptism article in our confession of faith does not mention the role baptisms played in our church’s history. But when we talk about being Anabaptist, we use as a reference point a political act from the 1500s in Europe: rebaptism of church members who had been baptized as infants. However, few of us today have been “rebaptized,” since we were not baptized as infants. If “Anabaptist” means rebaptized, only those who were baptized as infants in another Christian tradition and then baptized as adult believers are really “Anabaptists.” The rest of us are just plain baptists.

This is not an unimportant matter. In formal, interchurch conversations in 2006, the Lutherans challenged us on the matter of infant baptism. While they heard—and accepted—our concerns about baptizing infants, they also confronted us with an important point: Our theology appears to minimize the possibility of God’s grace working in the baptism of an infant.

Perhaps it all comes down to nuances. We have baby dedications. Later, when a person—dedicated as an infant—asks to join the faith community, he or she is baptized. Lutherans do something similar. They baptize infants; when that person reaches the age of accountability and asks to join the church, he or she has a “confirmation” ceremony. Each is a reference point for a person’s faith journey; the two moments establish a trajectory. But when the trajectory ends—or drifts off course—how does the faith community respond?

There is irony in an Anabaptist tradition that insists baptism is for people making the decision of their free will and then allowing many to forget about those vows. The faith community must regularly remind us that baptism—that vertical moment in our lives—is a vow we make to invite God into each moment of our lives.