310 Dimensions of Baptism
tered on the present banks, his presence sought in the present flood, and
the time of his action thus continues. Following the administration of
baptism, the newly baptized were for this reason enjoined, 'hold this day
as your birth day; and this place as Antioch where the disciples were first
called Christians, and had that better name given them'.^23 The past is
neither magically re-opened nor merely recollected. The present is taken
into time conditioned by God's entry into the world.- Dimensions of Baptismal Memory
We see embodied in Edwards's baptismal prayer dimensions of memory
itself that relate to time conditioned by God's action in Christ. Each
dimension implies and is implied by the others. The first dimension is the
corporate. Living memory, state Fentress and Wickham, is social.^24 In
Edwards's prayer, it is not simply the one seeking baptism, but the
gathered community that remembers the saving acts of God in Christ. The
Lamb of God is bidden to meet not the individuals awaiting baptism, but
the community of disciples gathered on the riverbank. Indeed, there is
even a certain priority given to the community, for the common life pro-
vides the context within which the rite is performed. The prayer is first
dominated by the first person plural pronoun. Only later does the focus
come to rest on the third person singular. The prayer asks that the commu-
nity be an equal recipient of the encounter with Christ in the sacrament.
Yet this is not assumed as automatic. Memory is fragile. The efficacy of
the rite for the candidate is not doubted, 'but ah! let it not be here as at the
first on the banks of the Jordan when thou didst stand among the croud,
and they knew it not! O let us find the messiah here!' Much is obviously at
stake. In the rite by which the community remembers the saving work ofPeters notes that time is thereby 'christologized and eschatologized', but also that
' [t]his interweaving of future and present in the Christ-event cannot be explicated fully
within the strictures of the Western notion of linear time with its three successive
stages of past, present, and future... To try to do so would consign the Christ-event to
just one point on a time line and would limit it to being strictly past for us today'.
God—The World's Future: Systematic Theology for a Postmodern Era (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1992), pp. 307-309.
- Edwards, Customs, p. 82.
- J. Fentress and C. Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992),
pp. 1-8. They note further that since the late nineteenth century, memory has come to
be regarded more and more exclusively as an individual phenomenon, and so a source
of private rather than social knowledge.