138 Dimensions of Baptism
material from one of his doctoral research students, Stephen Wright, in
distinguishing metaphor from simile: 'in a simile the words continue to
bear their conventional sense, whereas in metaphor a word is used "in such
a way that it means something different from the literal referent, but con-
nected to it through some similarity" \^64 However, Wright also discusses
other tropes, which are figures 'in which the meaning of an individual
word, or short phrase, is altered or "turned" from its conventional sense'.^65
As well as metaphor, other tropes are irony, synecdoche, metonymy, hyper-
bole and metalepsis,^66 but Dunn only considers the metaphorical use of
baptism.
Of these other tropes it is possible that 'baptism' in 1 Cor. 12.13 is an ex-
ample of metonymy, which is when a word is used 'to stand for something
associated with the literal referent, for example as cause for effect, attribute
for thing itself, or vice versa'.^67 So, for example, Daniel Tappeiner writes,the New Testament certainly uses language which can be regarded as
realistic, that is, language which indicates an actual ontological efficacy in
the sacraments, yet this can be viewed as an example of spiritual metonymy
resulting primarily from the actual historical situation. In baptism, for
instance,... [the] basic New Testament emphasis on faith as a response to
the gospel and on faith as the fundamental instrument in justification pre-
cludes the need for careful, logical distinctions in regard to baptism.
Baptism was not a subject of controversy in the early Church. Therefore
baptism and the Lord's Supper, rich in the basic content of the Gospel
message, served as a basis for parenetic expression which would be
common to all in the Christian community. The incidental nature of all the
references to the sacraments not only accounts for the obscurity, but also
accounts for the lack of precision in speaking of them.^68Hayden White maintains that 'By metonymy...one can simultaneously
distinguish between two phenomena and reduce one to the status of
a manifestation of the other'.^69 Then, applying Wright's discussion of- Dunn, '"Baptized" as Metaphor', p. 297, citing the unpublished thesis which
has subsequently been published as S.I. Wright, The Voice of Jesus: Studies in the
Interpretation of Six Gospel Parables (PBTM; Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2000), p. 8,
italics original. - Wright, Voice, p. 7.
- These are defined by Wright, Voice, pp. 7-8.
- Wright, Voice, p. 8, italics his.
- Tappeiner, 'Hermeneutics', p. 50.
- H. White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century
Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), p. 35, cited by Wright,
Voice, p. 32.