THOMPSON Memorial Dimensions of Baptism 305
benefits of temporal vice: corrupt your soul and save it too! '^3 The wounded
soteriology has extended into the memory and consciousness of such
denominations as the Southern Baptists, the largest Protestant body in
America and, until recently, my ecclesial tradition.^4
In this essay, I shall explore memorial dimensions of baptism and the
relation of baptismal memory to wounded soteriology. My touchstone
shall be baptism as practiced by Baptists in America from the eighteenth
to the twentieth centuries. Anthony R. Cross argues helpfully and persua-
sively for baptismal reform guided by the 'one baptism' of Eph. 4.5.^5 Inpresent practice, however, there is no 'baptism as such' except as ab-
stracted from an ecclesial tradition within which baptism is accorded a
particular significance. Thus, while Peter J. Leithart rightly notes that each
act of Christian baptism is an event in the history of baptism, and so a
moment in the Church catholic's story, the approximation of any baptism- Berry, Wound, pp. 16-18. The classic study of the continuing influence of this
soteriology and its attendant ethic remains J.L. Eighmy, Churches in Cultural Captiv-
ity: A History of the Social Attitudes of Southern Baptists (with an Introduction by S.S.
Hill; Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1972). We should note that while
the past twenty years have seen Southern Baptists, in the wake of the rightward shift of
the denomination, assume a prominent place in the American 'Religious Right', the
soteriology Berry describes remains to a large degree. Cf. BJ. Leonard, God's Last
and Only Hope: The Fragmentation of the Southern Baptist Convention (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), pp. 9-24.
This social factor was not alone in bringing about this stereological configuration. If
it were, we should expect not to see this configuration emerge either outside the
American South or before the institution of slavery became entrenched as the South' s
'peculiar institution' in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Neither was the
case, however, as we shall see. There were philosophical and theological factors that
contributed to the reality Berry describes. For discussion of these, cf. C.W. Freeman,
'Can Baptist Theology Be Revisioned?', PRS 24 (1997), pp. 273-302; and P.E.
Thompson, 'Re-envisioning Baptist Identity: Historical, Theological, and Liturgical
Analysis', PRS, 27 (2000), pp. 287-302. - Cf. Berry, Wound, p. 18. Cf. P. Connexion, How Societies Remember (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 1 -4, who argues that experience of the
present largely depends on unconscious collective memories. These memories com-
monly serve to legitimate a present social order. See too J. Schotter, 'The Social
Construction of Remembering and Forgetting', in D. Middleton and D. Edwards (eds.),
Collective Remembering (London: Sage Publications, 1990), pp. 120-38 (121-23). - Cf. A.R. Cross,' "One Baptism" (Ephesians 4.5): A Challenge to the Church',
in S.E. Porter and A.R. Cross (eds.), Baptism, the New Testament and the Church:
Historical and Contemporary Studies in Honour ofR.E.O. White (JSNTSup, 171;
Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), pp. 173-209.