Dimensions of Baptism Biblical and Theological Studies

THOMPSON Memorial Dimensions of Baptism 311

Christ, the work of Christ becomes yet again actualized in and for the

community.

It is within the nexus of collective memory that we may speak of the

dimension of individual memory. Memory is a collective phenomenon,

and within the collective memory and consciousness individual memory

and consciousness arise. 'Memory locates us in the corporate and the par-

ticular', notes Robert Wilken. 'There is no memory that is not rooted in

communal experience.'^25 As Berry has reflected, the lives of individuals

are conditioned by others, and the identities of individuals embody and

reflect a competition between various interpretations of the world.^26 Among

other things, baptism initiates persons into a social body for which truth-

fulness is defined by the life of Christ.^27 Thus we find in the rite preserved

by Edwards the creedal language of the Christian community before the

language of personal experience. ('Is baptism a symbol of the death, burial

and resurrection of Christ; of the resurrection of the body; and of death to

sin, and rising in the newness of life?') It is in the community of faith that

the world is rightly remembered, and individual identity rightly given.

Thus we find the newly baptized being admonished to consider the day of

their baptism as the day of their new birth into the Christian community.^28

25. R. Wilken, Remembering the Christian Past (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995),
    p. 179. Cf. Connerton, Societies, p. 58, who notes that particularly in ritual activity, the
    collectivity is bound into 'a kind of corporate personality'.


26. Cf. DeConcini, Narrative, pp. 69-71, and p. 139, in which she asserts that not
    all projects are equally plausible in every community, but that 'what is to come is
    modified by what has been'; R.L. Kidd, 'Baptism and the Identity of Christian Com-
    munities', inP.S. Fiddes (ed.), Reflections on the Water: Understanding God and the
    World through the Baptism of Believers (RSG, 4; Macon, GA: Regent's Park College,
    1996), pp.85-99; and R. Clapp, 'Tacit Holiness: The Importance of Bodies and Habits
    in Doing Church', in S. Powell and M. Lodahl (eds.), Embodied Holiness: Toward A
    Corporate Theology of Spiritual Growth (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press,
    1999), pp. 62-78 (71-72).


27. Clapp, 'Holiness', p. 75. Leithart, 'Modernity', defines baptismal regeneration
    in terms of this relocation of identity into a new community. Baptists in seventeenth-
    century England also bound closely baptism as the sacrament of regeneration to its
    being the sacrament of initiation. Cf. W. Kiffin, A Sober Discourse on the Right to
    Church Communion (London: George Larkin, 1681), pp. 23,59, among the Calvinistic
    Particular Baptists; and T. Grantham, An Apology for the Baptized Believers (London:
    Tho. Grantham, 1684), p. 15, among the Arminian General Baptists.


28. The individual is not lost, however, dissolved into the communal reality in a
    manner such as when the one is significant only as s/he is in service to the good of the
    collective whole. The individual's personal narrative is taken into the communal, but