Karl Barth
THE TEACHING OF THE CHURCH REGARDING BAPTISM
TRANSLATED BY
ERNEST A PAYNE
Wipf and Stock Publishers
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The Teaching of the Church Regarding Baptism
By Barth, Karl
Copyright©1948 Theologischer Verlag Zurich
ISBN: 1-59752-799-8
EISBN: 978-1-4982-7082-3
Publication date 6/23/2006
Previously published by SCM Press, 1948
Copyright©1943 of the German original version
Theologischer Verlag Zurich
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
BOTH the theology and the practice of the Church in regard to baptism are today the subject of searching thought and discussion in many different Christian traditions. Communions which practise infant-baptism, as well as those which, since the Reformation, have stood for the baptism of believers only, are alike compelled to re-examine their doctrine of the Church and the sacraments. On these matters, as on so many others, the Swiss theologians, and in particular Dr. Barth and Dr. Brunner, have important things to say to the English-speaking world as well as to their own. Professor Emil Brunner discussed baptism in the last chapter of Wahrheit als Begegnung (available for English readers as The Divine-Human Encounter, S.C.M. Press, 1944).
A quarter of a century ago Dr. Barth in his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans wrote as follows:—
“Baptism is a sacrament of truth and holiness; and it is a sacrament, because it is the sign which directs us to God’s revelation of eternal life and declares, not merely the Christian ‘myth,’ but—the Word of God. It does not merely signify eternal reality, but is eternal reality, because it points significantly beyond its own concreteness. Baptism mediates the new creation: it is not itself grace, but from first to last a means of grace. As the question which men put to God is always also His answer to it; as human faith is enclosed invisibly by the faithfulness of God; so also the human act of baptism is enclosed by that action of God on behalf of men which it declares” (E.T., p. 192).
Since then Dr. Barth has developed and systematized the prophetic insights which have made him one of the most stimulating and influential thinkers of our time. He is engaged upon the exposition of a comprehensive Christian dogmatic which will treat in due place of the doctrine of the Church. In the meantime, however, the lecture which follows makes a particular and distinctive contribution to the current discussion of baptism and shows the conclusions to which Dr. Barth has been led by his study of the New Testament. The lecture was delivered to a gathering of Swiss theological students on 7 May, 1943, at Gwatt am Thunersee and was subsequently printed under the title Die Kirchliche Lehre von der Taufe as No. 14 of the series of Theologische Studien, edited by Dr. Barth himself and published by the Evangelischer Verlag A. G. Zollikon—Zürich.
I am grateful to my friends, the Rev. and Mrs. Kurt Emmerich, who first called my attention to the pamphlet and helped to secure Dr. Barth’s permission for this translation. I am very conscious that I have not overcome all the difficulties or avoided all the pitfalls which beset the translator. They are formidable indeed in the case of a theologian of Dr. Barth’s calibre, and with such a subject. How shall Bild, Abbild, Darstellung, Zeichen, etc., be adequately rendered and distinguished in English? My translation, which is from the second edition, would not have reached its present form but for the co-operation of others. Dr. Hugh Martin and the S.C.M. Press Board encouraged me to essay the task when others, more competent than I, drew back. Dr. P. W. Evans gave me encouragement and help on a number of different occasions. Miss Joyce Booth typed my manuscript. Dr. and Mrs. A. B. Crabtree generously and carefully read the typescript and made a number of valuable suggestions. However many the blemishes that remain, I hope it will be clear to every reader that Dr. Barth has things to say to which all those concerned for a true doctrine and practice of baptism should give heed.
ERNEST A. PAYNE
Regent’s Park College,
Oxford.
THE TEACHING OF THE CHURCH REGARDING BAPTISM
I
CHRISTIAN baptism is in essence the representation (Abbild) of a man’s renewal through his participation by means of the power of the Holy Spirit in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and therewith the representation of man’s association with Christ, with the covenant of grace which is concluded and realised in Him, and with the fellowship of His Church.
The Greek word βαπτίζειν and the German word taufen (from Tiefe, depth) originally and properly describe the process by which a man or an object is completely immersed in water and then withdrawn from it again. Primitive baptism carried out in this manner had in its mode, exactly like the circumcision of the Old Testament, the character of a direct threat to life, succeeded immediately by the corresponding deliverance and preservation, the raising from baptism1. One can hardly deny that baptism carried out as immersion—as it was in the West until well on into the Middle Ages—showed what was represented in far more expressive fashion than did the affusion which later became customary, especially when this affusion was reduced from a real wetting to a sprinkling and eventually in practice to a mere moistening with as little water as possible. Who would think that Paul, according to 1 Cor. 10:1 ff., saw the prefiguration of baptism in so critical an experience as the passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea? One may surely agree with Luther1 that it would be well to give so complete and pregnant an affair its full and complete expression: sicut et institutum est sine dubio a Christo. Is the last word on the matter to be, that facility of administration, health and propriety are important reasons for doing otherwise?2 Or will a Christianity return whose more vigorous imagination will be satisfied no longer with the innocuous form of present-day baptism any more than with certain other inoffensive features of modern Christianity?
Luther, however, did not regard the original form of baptism as necessary to salvation. He was therefore opposed to all those who wished to make this an actual article of faith (Glaubensfrage), on the well-founded ground, first, that βαπτίζειν signifies historically aspergere, affusion, wetting—though a really efficacious wetting. Further, in regard to certain of the New Testament narratives (e.g. the baptism of the three thousand at Pentecost) it is questionable what outward form of baptism is in mind. Moreover, it is certain that soon after the time of the apostles, at all events in the case of the baptism of the sick (the so-called baptismus clinicorum), the original rule was broken from time to time. These considerations, however, do not alter the fact that it is impossible to understand the meaning of baptism, unless one keeps in mind that it implies a threat of death and a deliverance to life; nor that, generally speaking, the custom followed in baptism is to be called good or bad as it more or less adequately represents such a process.
What baptism portrays, according to the basic passage in Romans 6. If., is a supremely
