328 Dimensions of Baptism
between Pentecost and parousia.^4 The powers have been robbed of any
ultimate ability to frustrate the purposes of God. It is in this conviction that
Christians live. It leads them to ways of life, for example concerning
enemy-love, or attitudes to wealth, that they believe reflect the will and
way of the one in whom they are baptized and to whom God has given all
authority in heaven and earth.
In baptism, the believer is incorporated in the life of Christ. There is
solidarity between Christ and all those who are in him. Through God's
work of salvation in Jesus, with the graceful response of faith, and the
sacramental meeting with Christ in baptism, a new ontological relationship
has come to be, one with transforming power and moral consequences.
The New Testament uses language that speaks of the believer passing
from death to life in Christ. It is not simply that the believer following
baptism is expected to obey a new moral law but rather the moral miracle
of faith is the relationship with the triune God which finds expression in a
new way of life in Christ by the power of the Spirit. There is nothing
automatic about that way since it requires faith in the believer, but there
are gifts of God which make transformation more than the result of
obedience to a pattern of moral obligation.
Thus my argument is that in baptism the believer is united with Christ,
and all other believers in the Church, and from this there follow moral
implications. It is an act of faith with moral consequences. The believer is
baptized in the name of the Trinity, into the life and mission of God
revealed in Christ. This is a work of God, before baptism, at baptism and
following baptism. Therefore baptism is more than a moral act alone, a
particular expression of following Jesus. The consequence of baptism
implies further moral obligations. Yet they are not reducible to a moral
'ought' but rather spring from the fundamental relationship which baptism
asserts. It would be reducible to that if there were no corresponding work of
God. But, in fact, salvation is a moral miracle of faith, a work of God and
humankind.
How are faith, baptism and the work of God related in this moral
miracle of faith? And how, in particular, does moral transformation take
place? I shall try to explore this by reflecting further on, first, the life of
faith as miracle; secondly, baptism and the assumption that Christians will
live differently; and lastly, the importance of the church as the place of
Christian nurture of the baptized.
- P. Le Masters, Disciples hip for all Believers (Kitchener, ON: Herald Press,
1992), p. 18.