THOMPSON Memorial Dimensions of Baptism 323
much Christian anamnesis as their own paramnesia. Even though a type of
baptismal interrogation is included in a recent Southern Baptist ministers'
manual, the focus is on the individual. Rather than the traditional interro-
gation along the contours of the Apostles' Creed, the candidate is led by
the minister to declare, 7take God as my Father, Jesus as my Savior'.^77 No
longer is the triune life of God the object of memory. The wound in
Southern Baptist soteriology remains. In light of the broadly reactionary
tendencies of Southern Baptists in the area of social ethics, we would be
right to ask whether their consciousness is not molded in large part by a
memory quite unlike the 'dangerous memoria passionis' of which Metz
speaks.^78
- A Concluding Proposal for Memorial Recovery
I have explored memorial dimensions of baptism as they have been em-
bodied, for good or ill, in two periods of Baptist life in America. In con-
clusion, I offer a brief suggestion for a possible remedy for Southern
Baptist paramnesia. Recovery of the communal and material aspects of
pneumatology or the fulness of locality in Baptists' definition of ecclesia is
valid. Yet another approach seems more proper still. The problem is not
amnesia, the loss of identity through loss of memory, but paramnesia, the
distortion of identity through distorted memory. The greatest need lies at
the heart of the distortion: this is the relation of baptism to conversion.
Present practice places conversion within an exaggerated emphasis on the
subjective faith to which individuals come. Baptism represents that point
in time at which one comes to faith or 'is saved'. Salvation itself has
become something past. DeConcini suggests that this is the 'Protestant
distortion' of soteriology.^79
Christian memory has to do with another temporality, one defined by
the saving action of God by which each 'now' is taken into the time con-
ditioned by God's salvation. '[W]hat is remembered.. .is part and parcel of
a present encounter. '^80 This suggests that conversion might beneficially be
more firmly connected to a comprehensive vision of Christian formation.
The believer's baptist tradition at its best presupposes baptism within a- Powell, New Ministers, p. 74, emphasis mine.
- Metz, 'Future', pp. 14-15.
- DeConcini, Narrative, p. 95.
- Saliers, 'Affections', p. 201.