I

FAMILY, BODY, TEMPLE

“Worthy to inherit your promise of eternal life.”

ALMIGHTY AND ETERNAL GOD

Talk about baptism, and you’re immediately plunged into arguments.Whom should we baptize—professing converts or infants?How should we baptize—by immersion, pouring, or sprinkling?Why do we baptize—as a sign of God’s claim or as a convert’s public confession of faith?What does baptism do—nothing, something, everything? If it does something,how long does it last—for a moment, forever?1

All Christians use water to baptize. All invoke the Triune name. Beyond that, there’s little consensus. Quarrels over baptism are a travesty. The church has one baptism, as it is one body with one Spirit, one Lord, one hope, one faith, and one Father (Eph 4:4–6). Yet God’s sign of unity is a spring of division. We’re Corinthians, acting as if we were baptized into the name of Thomas or Calvin or Luther or John Piper (1 Cor 1:10–18). Paul’s outrage echoes down the centuries: “Is Christ divided?”

This book is a small contribution to the effort to reunite a church divided by baptism. My approach is oblique. I don’t offer any nice knock-down arguments. As currently framed, the controversies are insoluble anyway. To arrive at unity, we need to recover the baptismal imagination of earlier generations. We need to start at the foundation and work our way up.

The building blocks of that foundation are neatly laid out by Luther’s Great Flood Prayer, which I’ve long used whenever I perform a baptism:

Almighty and eternal God, who through the flood, according to your righteous judgment, condemned the unfaithful world, and according to your great mercy, saved faithful Noah, even eight persons, and has drowned hard-hearted Pharaoh with all his army in the Red Sea, and has led your people Israel dry through it, thereby prefiguring this bath of your holy baptism, and through the baptism of your dear child, our Lord Jesus Christ, has sanctified and set apart the Jordan and all water for a saving flood, and an ample washing away of sins: we pray that through your same infinite mercy you would graciously look down upon this your child, and bless her with a right faith in the spirit, so that through this saving flood all that was born in her from Adam and all which she has added thereto might be drowned and submerged; and that she may be separated from the unfaithful, and preserved in the holy ark of Christendom dry and safe, and may be ever fervent in spirit and joyful in hope to serve your name, so that she with all the faithful may be worthy to inherit your promise of eternal life, through Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.2

For biblical breadth, Luther’s prayer is hard to match. He links baptism with Adam’s sin, the flood, the exodus, and Jesus’ baptism.3 According to Luther, baptism does an awful lot: it separates us from the unfaithful and preserves us in the church; it washes, delivers, judges, and saves.

Some Christians will be dismayed at the power Luther attributes to baptism, taking it as evidence that the great German Reformer didn’t