Romans 6:1–11. The addition of such explanations to the ritual could strengthen
existing memories of already baptized members and make the ritual more
memorable for new initiates.
5.5 RITUALASAMEANSOFCHANGING
THE STATE OF AFFAIRSAt the beginning of this chapter, we referred to Thomas Lawson and Robert
McCauley’s work on rituals, which is often considered to be the starting point of
the Cognitive Science of Religion. Let us now take a closer look at their Ritual
Form Theory. The basic question Lawson and McCauley asked about rituals is
how people understand them intuitively. Their answer is that participants rely
on the same cognitive structures to reason about rituals that they use to make
sense of other actions (Lawson & McCauley, 1990, pp. 87–95). Consider, for
example, Helmut going to a restaurant on Saturday night (he picks one with an
open kitchen) and watching the work of a cook whipping eggs with a whisker.
According to Lawson and McCauley, Helmut will use hisaction representation
system to make sense of this perception. The action representation system
consists of three slots: agent, action, and patient. As Tamás Biró (2013,
pp. 122–33) pointed out, Lawson and McCauley’smodelisbasedonthe
linguistic concept ofthematic roles. On the semantic level of a sentence, a
certain number of roles belong to each verb, including the roles of agent, patient,
and instrument, but also beneficiary, source, goal, etc. (Biró, 2013, p. 125). On
the syntactic level, these roles arefilled by arguments, such as subject, direct
object, indirect object, with-phrase, etc. The underlying assumption of the
Lawson–McCauley model is that grammatical structures reflect mental struc-
tures; in this particular case, grammatical structures allow us to understand how
the human mind represents actions. In our example, the action representation
system in Helmut’smindwillfill the slot (in grammatical terms, the thematic
role) of theagentby the cook, the slot of theactionby the act of whipping, and
the slot of thepatientby the eggs (see Table 5.2). The slot of the action can also
contain aninstrument, which is the whisker in our case. Now consider Helmut
going to Church on Sunday morning and witnessing a baptism. Helmut will use
thesamecognitive structure (action representation system) as before to make
sense of this event. Instead of the chef in the previous example, however, the
priest will be theagentof the action; instead of whipping, theactionwill be
baptizing; and instead of the eggs, the action is directed at the infant as apatient.
Theinstrumentof the action will be water.
Just as any native speaker of a human language iscompetentto judge if a
sentence is grammatically well formed or not (as suggested by Noam Chomsky
114 Cognitive Science and the New Testament