314 Dimensions of Baptism
ticular groups of Baptists 'repaired hither for the sake of fulfilling all right-
eousness'. Each gathered faith community had a particular narrative of its
own that recounted God's faithfulness to it, and each rite of baptism became
part of that specific local narrative as well as that of the Church catholic.
Christ's saving work, if truly actualized through the memorial rite, did not
exclude those particulars. We might argue that the gospel's embodiment
requires the particularity, for faithful memory of Christ's saving work will
be connected to the particulars of place and community.^39
Also in this connection, human bodies are formed in memory through
ritual repetition. Casey assigns to the body a primary role in commemora-
tion.^40 The identity formation of individuals and communities takes place
over time through bodies becoming habituated in certain behaviors and
attitudes by the repetitions of life together.^41 Over the course of time, the
saving memory of Christ takes form in the bodies of individuals and the
social body of the faith community through the rhythms of gathering,praying, confessing, rejoicing, lamenting, forgiving, taking, blessing, eat-
ing, and so forth.^42 Christian bodies, individual and corporate, thus come
to bear the memory of God in the world. Baptism marks the entry into this
life of memory. In the special case of baptism, the body of the baptized
itself becomes a 'commemorabilium', through which memory is medi-
ated.^43 In receiving God's grace in the rite, the baptized is a sign of God's
grace that is known and received in and through a particular community. It
is not too much to say that the earlier Baptists' prayer that the community- M. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1992), pp. 128-40, noted that memory unfolds within a spatial framework, and that
place and group imprint each other. This is a most valuable insight for Baptist
ecclesiology, with its stress on the locality of ecclesia. For instance, the church I serve
as pastor held baptisms in Stephen Sykes's Mill Pond in Northampton County, NC,
through the mid-1920's. Illustrative of Halbwachs's observation, that particular place
mediated memory in the community's life on several levels: daily provision (the mill
ground flour for locals); recreation (most children learned to swim there); and spiritual
(it was the place of baptism). - Casey, Remembering, p. 245.
- Cf. E.B. Bolles, Remembering and Forgetting: An Inquiry into the Nature of
Memory (New York: Walker and Company, 1988), pp. 26-27. - D. Saliers, 'Liturgy and Ethics', JRE 7 (1979), pp. 173-89 (175), notes that
worship is Christians' 'way of remembering and expressing their life unto God'. Thus
it characterizes people, and gives a fundamental location in and orientation to the
world. - Casey, Remembering, pp. 246-50.