Dimensions of Baptism Biblical and Theological Studies

'GETTING IN AND STAYING IN': UNEXPECTED CONNECTIONS BETWEEN

E.P. SANDERS ON PAUL AND EXPECTATIONS OF BAPTISM TODAY

Hazel Sherman

The most recently published British handbook for any leader conducting a

service of believer's baptism in a Baptist church urges remembrance that

'Baptism is our response to all that God has done for us in Christ, and a

celebration of all that he gives of himself in his Spirit. The initiative is

God's, and in baptism his grace is displayed.'^1 This is to be followed by a

reminder that this gift of grace issues in a changed life, using the image of

changed clothes from Gal. 3.27.

At certain points in the Church's history, not least in the years before

the Protestant Reformation, a sharp conflict arose between a preaching of

the possibility of working one's way into God's favour (specifically

through monetary gifts to the Church as a gateway to salvation) and the

simplicity of faith which simply responds to God's grace in repentance

and trust. The hinge of Martin Luther's discovery of the integrity of real

Christian identity was found in his interpretation of 'justification by faith',

as he drew parallels between Paul's turning away from Jewish 'works of

the law' to 'justification by faith' and his own turning away from Roman

Catholic legalistic requirement and expectations to the belief that it is

justification by faith alone to which Scripture bears witness.

Protestant Christianity generally retains this view that the heart of the

gospel may be derived from Paul's theology drawn out from proof-texts

such as Rom. 3.19-25 and Gal. 2.16. Regardless of any difficulties of trans-

lation and interpretation between SIKOUOCO and 5iKouoauvr|, what sets Paul

apart from the Judaism of his contemporaries is the difference between

justification by faith rather than by law. For Protestant scholarship of the

nineteenth-century and its extension into twentieth-century Christian exis-

tentialism through the theology of Rudolph Bultmann, it became axio-

1. Baptist Union of Great Britain, Patterns and Prayer for Christian Worship: A
   Guide Book for Worship Leaders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 98.