1 Cor 12:12–13.
1
The Undoing of Baptism
Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.” And he laid his hands on them and went on his way.
(Matt 19:14)
Flannery O’Connor was a Catholic Christian and one of the most distinguished twentieth-century American writers of fiction. One of her short stories, “The River,” provides a provocative and disturbing picture of the baptism of a child. O’Connor’s story functions like a parable, drawing our attention to the issues raised by the baptism of children. I recount it here not as the basis for an argument, but as a heuristic for investigating what is at stake in this book’s thesis.1
“The River” takes place, as many of O’Connor’s stories do, in the religiously flamboyant American South. It begins with a young boy, a child of dissolute parents, being taken by his sitter to a “healing,” an informal revival service featuring a charismatic traveling preacher. On the way there the sitter told the boy that he had been made by a carpenter named Jesus. This was a surprise, as the boy had always assumed it had been a fat doctor with a moustache. He thought that maybe his parents were joking about the doctor. O’Connor tells us, “They joked a lot where he lived. If he had thought about it before, he would have thought Jesus Christ was a word like ‘oh’ or ‘damn’ or ‘God,’ or maybe somebody who had cheated them out of something sometime.”2 The preacher’s rhetorical gifts and rumours of his healing powers had begun to attract a following. A crowd of curious onlookers gathered at the side of a river to observe this spectacle. The banks of the river served as a sort of outdoor amphitheatre accentuating the dynamism of his words; the river itself became a metaphor for the preacher’s pronouncements. He spoke to the gathering crowd: “There ain’t but one river and that’s the River of Life, made out of Jesus’ Blood. That’s the river you have to lay your pain in, in the River of Faith, in the River of Life, in the River of Love, in the rich red river of Jesus’ Blood . . . !”3 He told the people that the river was the one that healed the leprous, gave sight to the blind, and even brought the dead to life. “This old red river is good to Baptize in, good to lay your faith in, good to lay your pain in,” he told them.4
As the singing and preaching reached a natural pause, the sitter called out to the preacher, telling him that the child with her was in need of his help. In trying to figure out what exactly the boy needed, the preacher asked him if he’d ever been baptized. The child, lacking any real religious schooling, didn’t know the meaning of the word. “‘If I Baptize you’, the preacher pronounced, ‘you’ll be able to go to the Kingdom of Christ. You’ll be washed in the river of suffering, son, and you’ll go by the deep river of life. Do you want that’?”5 The child said, “Yes.” He didn’t want to go back to his parents’ apartment; he wanted to go under the water. Events unfolded quickly: “Suddenly the preacher said, ‘All right, I’m going to Baptize you now’, and without more warning, he tightened his hold and swung him upside down and plunged his head into the water. He held him under while he said the words of Baptism and then he jerked him up again and looked sternly at the gasping child . . . ‘You count now’, the preacher said. ‘You didn’t even count before’.”6
The next morning the boy woke up back in his apartment. His parents were still asleep, paying for a late night of inebriated socializing. The child scrounged a breakfast, using whatever his short body could reach in the kitchen. As he waited alone for his parents, the child realized what he wanted to do. He stole a streetcar token and a half packet of lifesavers from his mother’s purse and made the journey back to the exact spot beside the river where the previous day’s events had unfolded. As O’Connor says, “He intended not to fool with preachers any more but to Baptize himself and to keep on going this time until he found the Kingdom of Christ in the river. He didn’t mean to waste any more time. He put his head under the water at once and pushed forward.”7 He gasped for air and sputtered. Pushing his head back under the water he tried again:
He stopped and thought suddenly: it’s another joke, it’s just another joke! He thought how far he had come for nothing and he began to hit and splash and kick the filthy river. His feet were already treading on nothing. He gave a low cry of pain and indignation . . . . He plunged under once and this time, the waiting current caught him like a long gentle hand and pulled him swiftly forward and down. For an instant he was overcome with surprise: then since he was moving quickly and knew that he was getting somewhere, all the fury and fear left him.8
Despite the well-intended efforts of a passerby the boy never surfaced—the river swept him away.
Baptism among Anabaptists
In O’Connor’s story the child’s belief in the efficacy of baptism stands sharply contrasted to contemporary nonchalance. For the early Anabaptists, as is still the case for some around the globe today, baptism was an act of obedience to Jesus that could cost one’s life, yet in North America this same rite is easily carried out. If baptism was once a matter of life and death, here and now it seems to be no longer the case. The story of the drowned child is striking because we find it unbelievable that baptism would be taken so seriously.
An Evolving Practice
One of the most vivid moments in the origin of the modern practice of believers’ baptism occurred in Zurich in 1525. In the growing momentum of the Protestant Reformation a number of young radicals gathered there under the teaching of Ulrich Zwingli. Following the spirit and perhaps even the logic of Zwingli’s reforms, they began to question the validity of the sacrament of baptism. Some took the drastic step of refusing to submit their children to the rite. Highly controversial, this was viewed by authorities as a threat to civil order. In January of that year the city of Zurich held a public disputation on the matter. Conrad Grebel and Felix Manz represented the position of those who would eventually be called the Swiss Brethren against Zwingli, who argued for the more widely accepted and traditional approach of baptizing infants. Zwingli was pronounced the winner of the debate and believers’ baptism was forbidden. Manz, Grebel, and their community were, however, not persuaded. Within a week they had met together, performed new baptisms, and taken communion. Both Manz and Grebel were later imprisoned on several occasions. After finally fleeing the city, it appears that Grebel contracted the plague and died in 1526. Manz was eventually re-arrested and drowned in Lake Zurich in 1527. This series of events represents some of the founding moments of the Anabaptist movement. It is with good reason that the story is often recounted.
Just as most children in North American Anabaptist communities are not baptized by traveling preachers with healing gifts, most are not baptized in opposition to civil laws as were their spiritual forebearers. There are many variances in the way believers’ baptism is practiced. The one essential commonality among communities that practice believers’ baptism is that the process of initiation begins with a confession of faith and a request to receive baptism. The oldest prominent Anabaptist confession, the Schleitheim Confession of 1527, describes this assumption:
Baptism shall be given to all those who have been taught repentance and the amendment of life and [who] believe truly that their sins are taken away through Christ, and to all those who desire to walk in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and be buried with Him in death, so that they might rise with Him;
