HAYMES The Moral Miracle of Faith 329
The life of faith of the baptized is a miracle in three senses. First, the
gift of faith as trusting obedience towards God has its origin in the gift of
God. My trusting and obeying, while indeed it is an act of my will, theo-
logically has its origins in God's faithfulness and grace. This is the truth in
the doctrine of election which I take to be more than a matter of divine
selection. God has elected to be for us all in Christ and our realization of
this gospel truth has its root, inevitably, in the divine choice. Thus faith is
received as a gift, a divine work in us, before we call it ours and empha-
size the human response. Indeed, there is a sense in which I do not have
my faith so much as, in Christ, I am my faith by grace. Coming to faith,
though it includes my own commitment by free choice, is fundamentally
the work of God.
Secondly, baptism is also a work of God. I wish here to avoid two ex-
tremes, as I see them. One is the notion of baptismal regeneration in the
sense of sacramental grace ex opere operato, the suggestion that simply by
going through this rite, unconsciously if necessary, the candidate's status
before God is changed, washing away original sin and guilt. The second is
that of seeing baptism merely as some personal confession of faith and a
rather elaborate act of public witness. The one throws everything onto the
work of God through his authorized agents with no need for human
response and faith, a transformation of relationship without the will of the
candidate. The other sees the human response to God as the saving quality
and baptism only as a public expression of that. Neither of these tworesponses occurs in such crude forms but I have so expressed them in
order to argue, by contrast, that baptism is a work of both God and
humankind. Drawn by God's gracious invitation, the candidate comes to
the pool where God has promised to meet with the believer.^5 This is not a
magical moment of transformation but rather is to be understood as part of
a process whereby 'God draws near to transform persons in a special way.
Salvation cannot be isolated within the act of baptism.. .but it can be
"focused" there in the moment when the Christian believer is made a part
of the covenant community of Christ's disciples.'^6 Baptism is not an event- See the survey of Baptist thought on a sacramental understanding of baptism in
A.R. Cross, Baptism and the Baptists: Theology and Practice in Twentieth-Century
Britain (SBHT, 3; Carlisle; Paternoster Press, 2000). See also his 'Dispelling the Myth
of English Baptist Baptismal Sacramentalism', BQ 38 (2000), pp. 367-91. S.K. Fowler,
More Than a Symbol: The British Baptist Recovery of Baptismal Sacramentalism
(SBHT, 2; Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2002). - P.S. Fiddes, 'Baptism and Creation', in Fiddes (ed.), Reflections on the Water,
pp. 47-67 (60-61).