Dimensions of Baptism Biblical and Theological Studies

MEMORIAL DIMENSIONS OF BAPTISM

Philip E. Thompson

1. Introduction

In the 1968 Christmas holiday quiet of the Stanford University library,

American essayist Wendell Berry penned The Hidden Wound, a medita-

tion on race relations and the 'wound' of racism. He finds this wound

embedded in family stories and practices from his Kentucky childhood,

and he frequently considers implications for memory. His memory is itself

wounded, shaped by family stories and practices freighted with racism. It

is also 'conditioned from the beginning by the lives of black people'.^1 In

memory lie woundedness and the potential for healing. For good and ill,

memory is an active force:

as long as the memory of [one's formative experiences] stays alive they

remain formative; the power of change remains in them, and they never

become quite predictable in their influence. If memory is in a way the

ancestor of consciousness, it yet remains dynamic within consciousness.^2

Berry gestures toward Christian memory, the ancestor of Christian con-

sciousness, and toward a particular woundedness. Evangelicalism in the

American South, he reflects, faced a contradiction presented by slavery in

the nineteenth century: how could white Christians own the bodies of other

persons whose souls were as equally worthy of salvation as their own?

This contradiction, Berry suggests, opened a wound in the lived religion of

these Christians; a chasm between earth and heaven, between body and

spirit. Salvation by faith became salvation by belief, even salvation by

proper feeling, the mystical overshadowing rather than engendering the

moral. Berry notes, 'it is a bogus mysticism, mysticism as wishful magic,

a recipe to secure the benefits of eternal bliss without having to give up the

1. W. Berry, The Hidden Wound (New York: North Point Press, 1989 [1970]), p. 3.


2. Berry, Wound, p. 49.