to realise that all the activities of the Church are in their way sacramental. That is to say, they are activities involving signs and symbols; moreover, they are dependent for their effectiveness on certain fixed signs and symbols. Baptism (as we have said) is in any case, like all the Church’s acts, plainly a human act. If in fact it has the potency of a living and expressive representation, able to represent and denote man, then it owes this to the fact that it is, together with all the other parts of the Church’s proclamation, in itself and in its complete humanity, still indirectly and mediately a free word and act of Jesus Christ Himself. It is this which gives life to all parts of the Church’s proclamation and to baptism along with the others. The Church stands under the government of her Lord, an instrument at His disposal. When she expresses herself in human words and deeds, she lays hold of the promise that whoever listens to her listens to Him. The Church did not found or gather herself. She was founded and gathered by her Lord and so she continues to be. Similarly, the Church did not herself invent the different parts of her proclamation; nor did she invent baptism. She administers it as instituted by her Lord. She obeys His command. By word and deed she serves those who are His, in hope and expectation that through the power of her words and deeds His word and His deed will find expression.
The water-baptism of John witnesses to the baptism with Spirit and fire of Jesus Christ Himself. For that very reason, the mighty dispenser of water-baptism is neither John, nor the Church—but the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, though indirectly and mediately, it is effected through the service of John and through the service of the Church. Who else but Jesus Christ Himself could effectively testify of Jesus Christ? As Luther rightly and repeatedly made clear in his sermons on Matt. 3:13f. (following Chrysostom, Ambrose, Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventura) and Calvin also believed,1 it is the Lord who makes water-baptism powerful for repentance and the forgiveness of sins. He, who needed not these things, submitted Himself to them, thereby setting forth both what happened on Golgotha and also what happened on Easter morning, thus declaring His solidarity with sinners. Baptism was thereby made a living and expressive representation of Christ’s high-priestly death and resurrection. Whoever now is baptized may expect like Him to see the heavens opened, to hear the voice of the Father, and to share in the Holy Spirit. Therefore it is called, and indeed is, baptism in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The covenant of grace was to be established through Christ’s death and revealed in His resurrection. By thus putting Himself already into the representation that pre-figured these things (and afterwards into their mirroring), Jesus Christ “instituted” (eingesetzt) baptism.
All the other passages which occur to one at this point—for example, Matt. 28:19—are to be understood as the ratification and enforcement of this actual “institution” of baptism. By this testimony to the service He was to render—by thus witnessing to Himself as the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53 and the Lamb of God who bears the sins of the world (John 1:29f. Cf. Mark 10:38; Luke 12:50)—Christ made Himself Lord of baptism. He Who, in every baptism which is properly administered in the services of the Church, is the Chief Character, the primary and true Baptizer, thus turned baptism into something powerful, living and expressive. Baptism is the acted parable of His death, in which (according to Romans 6:5) man is at his own baptism “planted.” It is a repetition of Christ’s baptism, in which man himself as the candidate for baptism is now the second most important figure. To quote Luther once more, baptism is “God’s Word in water” (Larger Catechism), that is, Jesus Christ Himself is the first to be dealt with in this act and to take an active part in it. By His own participation in it, He gave command and commission. Therein lies the potency of baptism.
Though it is Christ’s institution of it, His word and deed, which gives potency to baptism, it must of course be emphasized that it is His free word and deed. He Who, when He let Himself be baptized by John in Jordan, prefigured and represented Himself as the servant of all those who baptize and are baptized in His name and that of the Father and the Spirit, thereby showed Himself as also their sovereign Lord and the sole and powerful head of the Church. The potency of baptism depends upon Christ who is the chief actor in it. It has no independent potency in itself. Nor have any other of the parts of the Church’s proclamation. Though the Church utters the Word in baptism and performs the act, what must always be believed in, loved, expected and prayed for is the power of His free Person, sent down for this very purpose. It cannot be manipulated by men. It is always power which Christ Himself personally and freely grants. It is something promised which He Himself alone can provide.
At this point certain qualifications are necessary. All those are right who have drawn attention to the fact that there is a genuine symbolic power in the water itself and who have therefore spoken of its use being necessary in baptism. Tertullian1 and Ambrose2 point back to the movement of the Spirit of God over the waters at the time of the creation. It is certainly permissible for us to ascribe a certain saving significance to our douche of cold water on the morning of each new day. But one must not press such symbolism too far. The natural symbolism of water and its ordinary use can point in every other possible direction, as well as to the death and resurrection of Jesus, the events upon which man’s regeneration depends. Such general symbolism can entirely fail. For anything to be a witness or a sign the necessary power must be present. Water and its use must first receive their special meaning. And they do not receive it because of anything given or attributed to them in a certain way by the Church. They receive it because Jesus Christ is Lord of Nature and because He has of His own free will allowed them to serve His word and work. As Luther in the Shorter Catechism puts it: “Truly water cannot do it, but the Word of God which is with and on the water, and the faith which believes such Word of God in the water. For without the Word of God the water is simple water, and not baptism; but with the Word of God it is baptism.”
Zwingli would have been right had he been content to say that baptism is a symbol of the faith of the Church and of the faith of her individual members, and that its performance is an act of remembrance and therefore an act of confession, and therefore something confirming such faith. How should Jesus Christ demonstrate the power of baptism, if not for faith and in the faith both of the Church and the baptized? Unfortunately Zwingli wanted to say something else; namely, that the potency of baptism is now limited to the power of a faith which strengthens itself by the use of the symbol. To this it must be said that the power of faith is not something dependent on itself—a power which may indeed strengthen itself in pious ceremonies—but that it is the power of the one exercising it and really nothing else; and that even this, and this by itself, and also the power of Jesus Christ, are really the same as the power of baptism. But the power of baptism really lies precisely here—that it shows like a clear mirror that the Church and those baptized within her are not left alone with their own faith, are not dependent on themselves, but that faith has its ground and essence in the objective reality of the divine covenant of grace.
The tradition of the Church of Rome, in its turn, would be right if it is said that the potency of baptism is the potency of the opus operatum of Jesus Christ, the potency of His reconciling work wrought once for all, and ever and again made effective through the free might of the Holy Spirit. Unfortunately this is not what is said. Instead, there is talk of an opus operatum of the correctly administered baptismal rite, which becomes powerful and effectual by its own means, just as faith does in the teaching of Zwingli. To this it must be said that the potency of baptism cannot be a potency dependent on itself or one which itself produces its effects. We read in Acts 8:14f. concerning the Samaritans that those who had (unlike the disciples of John in Acts 19:1f.) heard the mighty preaching of Philip were baptized expressly in the name of the Lord Jesus, and yet that they had not received the Holy Spirit. Is not this passage (together with Acts 19) an explicit warning against any view which would ascribe to the baptismal water, the ecclesiastical rite, or the parts of the Church’s proclamation in general, their own even relatively independent power of action over against the free enactment of the Lord? In 1 Cor. 6:11 it does not say that we are washed, sanctified and justified in baptism, but “in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.” If baptism is a true witness, that means that it is living and expressive not in its own power, but in the power of Him to whom it bears witness and by whose command it is carried out.
