Paul’s Theology of Baptism in Romans 6

In Romans 6, a critical New Testament text for understanding baptism, Paul grounds the transformed new life of the believer in a participation with the crucified and risen Lord. And it is in baptism that this union with Christ is, somehow, experienced or enacted.

Rembrandt: The Baptism of the Eunuch

Union and Participation

To feel the force of Paul’s argument of Romans 6, it is essential to grasp his theology of union with Christ. Given that the expression ‘in Christ,’ or variations thereof, occur 151 times in Paul’s writings¹, it seems clear that union with Christ is a major key to the Apostle’s thought. John Murray describes it as “the central truth of the whole doctrine of salvation,” stretching from election in Christ in eternity past to glorification in Christ in eternity future.”² No aspect of salvation — considered either from the angle of salvation accomplished in history by Christ or from the angle of salvation experienced by the people of God — is somehow apart from believers being “in Christ.” Apart from union with Christ, there could be no salvation, for it is exactly through the mystical oneness the Spirit effects between Christ and his people that enables all the good that is in Christ to be enjoyed by those who trust and follow him. This why James S. Stewart entitled his 1935 work on Paul’s theology A Man in Christ, for oneness with Christ is the living experience at the heart of Paul’s mission. Stewart observes, “Within the Holy of Holies which stood revealed when the veil was rent in twain from the top to the bottom on the day of Damascus, Paul beheld Christ summoning and welcoming him in infinite love into vital unity with Himself.”³ Should this animating heartbeat be muffled, we will make the error of viewing the various aspects of Paul’s doctrine of salvation (including baptism) in abstract and mechanistic ways. Union with Christ must be kept firmly in the centre.

How might we describe Paul’s concept of being “in Christ?” After all, it is a concept he alludes to everywhere but defines nowhere. Constantine Campbell, in his magisterial Paul and Union with Christ, points out that even the term “union with Christ” is too narrow to encapsulate Paul’s full range of meaning: he argues for a fourfold definition that includes union, participation, identification, and incorporation.⁴ The nature of the imagery Paul employs — cornerstone and building (Eph 2:20–22), head and body (Eph 1:22–23, 1 Cor 12:12), and husband and wife (Eph 5:32–32, 2 Cor 11:2) — point to a oneness that approaches total absorption into Christ’s very person. For Paul there is almost nothing that can be predicated of Christ that cannot also be predicated of the baptized.

One school of Pauline interpretation that is of particular interest as we approach Romans 6 is the ‘participationist perspective’. According to Michael Gorman, “it stresses transformative participation in the death and resurrection of Christ as the central dimension of Pauline theology.” He goes on to describe this participatory transformation as “taking part, by grace, in the great drama of what God is doing in Christ and through the Spirit.”⁵ Oneness with Christ is therefore not just theoretical or merely “in principle” — it is the lived experience of believers, a new story they inhabit together. The historia salutis and ordo salutis cannot be neatly separated; participation in Christ means that our own stories have merged onto God’s great highway of salvation in history.

Romans 6 in Context

This broad sketch of Paul’s theology of participation in Christ prepares us to read Romans 6 in context. The occasion for his argument is the question of his imaginary interlocutor: “Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?” (Rom 6:1, NIV) Given the theology of free grace Paul has been developing, it is a natural question: “a gift that is given without regard to the worth of its recipients certainly threatens to undercut the moral order.”⁶ If grace is poured out on the undeserving, this would seem to encourage license. Paul’s response is forceful: “By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?” (6:2). The question is absurd because it treats grace in an abstract and transactional way, apart from the gospel story into which believers have been drawn. Believers have been translated from the sphere in which sin reigns; “what the apostle has in view is the once-for-all definitive breach with sin which constitutes the identity of the believer”.⁷ Paul is speaking of a past event: something decisive has already happened for believers.

Paul is speaking of something more than the deliverance from the penalty of sin believers experience through Christ’s death on the cross for their sakes — he points to the decisive change of allegiance effected in believers by the Spirit. “Far from offering a license for sin,” Barclay observes, “the Christ-gift establishes an alternative regime of power.”⁸ This aspect of the gospel has been neglected in the Protestant tradition, which, following Luther, has tended to give justification pride of place, leaving sanctification as the human response to God’s grace rather than as an integral component of God’s saving work. But for Paul sinful humanity is in the grip of slavery to a malevolent power. Gorman capitalizes ‘Sin’ “to indicate that Paul portrays it as a character in the human and cosmic drama”, a dreadful enemy whose aim is to keep it subjects in permanent separation from God in a kind of living death.⁹ For the human race to be saved Jesus must, in his own words, be the deliverer who ties up the strong man and plunders his house (Matt 12:29, Mark 3:27, Luk 11:21–22). If the believer has died to sin, it is a deliverance wrought by the power of the ascended and crucified Lord.

This brings us to verses 3 and 4, where Paul uses baptism to reinforce his argument. “Don’t you know,” Paul asks, “that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” The appeal to what the Roman Christians already knew shows that the basic contours of Paul’s theology of baptism were common enough to apostolic Christianity that he could assume they had been taught to a church he himself had not founded or even visited. What does Paul mean by speaking of Christians having not only been baptized, but “baptized into Christ Jesus”? Does he mean merely being baptized “with reference to Christ,” or is baptism “into union with Christ” intended?¹⁰ Schreiner advances three arguments for the latter interpretation: (1) the argument of Romans 6 speaks frequently of dying, being buried, and raised “with him”; (2) Paul in Romans 5 had spoken of Christ as a representative figure like Adam; and (3) union with Christ is evident in other Pauline texts that discuss baptism, particularly Gal 3:27 and 1 Cor 12:12,13.¹¹ Baptism — in some way not explained — initiates believers into union with Christ. It “signifies and seals a transition in the life of the recipient, a transition from being (existentially) apart from Christ to being (existentially) joined to Him.”¹²

The burden of verse 3, however, is to show that oneness with Christ by definition must involve oneness with him in his death: “Don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” If Christians have somehow become one with Christ, they therefore also “have shared by faith-union with him those experiences which were his historically: his crucifixion and burial, his resurrection and exaltation.”¹³ Participating in Christ means entering into his story — including the story of his death. As Luke Timothy Johnson puts it, baptism is “a ritual of initiation that imprints in believers a certain identity, namely, the paschal reality of the crucified and raised messiah.”¹⁴ Being baptized into Christ means we somehow share in his death — what Paul goes on to describe in verse 4 as being “buried with him through baptism into death.”

“What a strange and wonderful thing!” exclaims Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 385):

We did not literally die, we were not literally buried, we did not literally rise again after being crucified. We experienced these things only in symbols and representations; but salvation we experienced literally. Christ was really crucified and really buried and literally rose again, and all of this he did for our sake, so that by sharing in his sufferings in imitation, we might gain salvation in truth.¹⁵

All interpretations of the text that treat baptism as a mere metaphor fail to do justice to the fact that we are baptized “with Christ”, not simply “as Christ.” Clearly Paul has some kind of participation with Christ and his death in view, not merely a ritualized reenactment. As Beasley-Murray memorably puts it, Paul’s point “is not that the believer in baptism is laid in his own grave, but that through that action he is set alongside Christ Jesus in his.”¹⁶ Baptism is the means through which believers enter into Christ’s own experience of death and burial. Of course, death to sin is something believers experience in their lifetimes, not in the first century. Nevertheless, as Moo argues, “the transition from old age to new, while applied to individuals at their conversion, has been accomplished through the redemptive work of Christ on Good Friday and Easter.”¹⁷

We must keep in mind the social dimensions of Paul’s theology of baptism. Being ‘in Christ’ also means being ‘part of Christ’s people’. For N.T. Wright the concepts are nearly synonymous. “Romans 6.3 clearly refers to entry, through baptism, into the people of God; here Χριστός is basically shorthand for ‘the people of the Messiah’.”¹⁸ One cannot be joined to the head without becoming part of the body. Baptism is thus the sacrament of initiation into Christian community, historically symbolized by the position of the baptistery at the entrance to the church.

Baptism, Faith and Union

This raises the important question of the relationship between baptism and faith. Gorman observes that people are both baptized “into” (Gr. εἰς) Christ and believe “into” (εἰς) Christ (Gal 2:16).

By faith and baptism people are transferred into the realm of the Messiah. They are two inseparable sides of one coin; the combination of conviction and confession (cf. Rom 10:5–13), no doubt made at the moment of baptism, brings about justification (with the promise of future salvation) and entry into the community.¹⁹

Paul may be employing a synecdoche here, using baptism to stand in for the whole experience of conversion. “For Paul baptism, faith, reception of the Spirit, repentance, and confession of Christ are one complex of events that all occur at conversion.”²⁰ Unravelling the rope of conversion into these separate threads may be the proper work of systematic theologians, but it does not concern Paul. He was not interested in how little a person may experience and still be saved; his expectation was for a normal, healthy birth into the faith. Paul has no category either for a believer who has never been baptized or a baptized person who does not believe: “all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus” simply means, “All Christians.”

Solidarity With Christ

Nevertheless, while baptism cannot be separated from the other elements of conversion/initiation, there is good reason Paul has chosen to highlight baptism to demonstrate the believers’ solidarity with Christ in his death and burial. As the public culmination of the whole conversion process, baptism is the threshold that divides the kingdom of darkness from the kingdom of light. Those who submit to baptism have publicly identified themselves with Christ, renouncing allegiance to the old idols that enslaved and submitting to the life-giving lordship of the exalted Christ. “Baptism by water is a public declaration of an individual’s initiation into the drama of redemption as an active participant, an outward expression of the inward grace of baptism by the Spirit, which effectively (albeit mystically) joins a person to Jesus’ history”.²¹ Just as Christ’s burial demonstrated the finality of his death on the cross, so the believer’s baptism demonstrates the finality of his or her death to the reign of sin. Therefore (to return to the argument of Romans 6) it is not possible for those who have made the decisive break with sin, in Christ through baptism, to go on living under its thrall. The gospel Paul is preaching is “the power of God” (1:17), a power that has real effect in the lives of the redeemed. “The gospel that Paul preaches deals not merely with forgiveness but with transformation,” Richard Hays points out. “To be baptized is to pass from the realm of sin and death into the realm of righteousness and life.”²²

Paul has used baptism to demonstrate solidarity with Christ in his death and burial. Now in verse 4 he moves on, quite naturally, to the solidarity with Christ in his resurrection life that follows as the consequence of baptism. “We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.” Death and burial, final though they seem, are not the end of the story either for Christ or for ourselves: they are but the path towards resurrection and new life. With the words “in order that” (Gr. ἵνα) Paul unveils the purpose of baptism — that “we too may live a new life.” Participation in Christ’s resurrection is not an element of baptism per se: it emerges in the transformed life which results from baptism. As Günther Bornkamm puts it, “baptism is the appropriation of the new life, and the new life is the appropriation of baptism.”²³ For Paul therefore baptism has enormous ethical implications; in Romans 6 his explication of the theological meaning of baptism is all designed for the Roman community to feel the scope and force of Christ’s claim over the baptized. In Romans 6, as Leonard Van Der Zee points out, Paul “is answering a practical and an ethical question. He is not constructing a theology of baptism. He is mainly interested in what baptism means in the Christian’s life, a baptized way of living.”²⁴ The moral growth following baptism is the powerful outworking of the mystical union with Christ enjoyed by the believer, his very life within. Gordon T. Smith observes that baptism is both “mystical” and “moral”, and these dimensions cannot be separated from each other.²⁵ Baptism expresses and initiates something more than a private internal experience that operates only in the mind and the emotions; it engages the whole life of the baptized. It is clear as Paul goes on in Romans 6 that the new life experienced by baptized believers is eschatological: Christ “cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him … the life he lives, he lives to God” and therefore believers must “count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus” (6:9–11). Therefore as believers work out the implications of their baptism, they begin to experience the life of the new creation.

Theological Implications

How may we sum up the theological implications of Romans 6 as they pertain to baptism? For one, we may observe that the meaning of baptism has sadly received far less theological attention than the mode and subjects of baptism. In one standard evangelical textbook, Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology, ten pages are dedicated to the proper subjects of baptism and only a meagre paragraph to the sacrament’s meaning.²⁶ It is natural for theologians to dedicate most of their ink to controversial matters, but these peripheral debates often distract from the weighty truths on which Christians have long agreed. The influential 1982 Faith and Order paper of the World Council of Churches entitled “Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry” is refreshing in this regard. While acknowledging differences over the sacraments, it highlights the substantial agreement across traditions. It states that Christian baptism is “incorporation into Christ, who is the crucified and risen Lord.” Under the heading “Participation in Christ’s Death and Resurrection,” (the first of five meanings of baptism), the paper states:

Baptism means participating in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ … By baptism, Christians are immersed in the liberating death of Christ where their sins are buried, where the “old Adam” is crucified with Christ, and where the power of sin is broken. Thus those baptized are no longer slaves to sin, but free. Fully identified with the death of Christ, they are buried with him and are raised here and now to a new life in the power of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, confident that they will also ultimately be one with him in a resurrection like his (Rom. 6:3–11; Col. 2:13,3:1; Eph. 2:5–6).²⁷

This compact statement, which in a mere four sentences sketches the contours of baptism-as-participation, demonstrates that this seam of truth holds rich prospects for Orthodox, Catholic and Protestants alike. One hopes that as Christian theologians explore these themes together, secondary issues will at least recede into perspective.

Paul’s emphasis on baptism as the means of union with Christ keeps the sacrament in perspective. Baptism, as with the Lord’s Supper, has no virtue considered solely in itself. Its value (and an inestimable one) is that it unites us with Christ himself. We would do well to keep Calvin’s words in mind: “I say that Christ is the matter or (if you prefer) the substance of all the sacraments; for in him they have all their firmness, and they do not promise anything apart from him.”²⁸ To look for efficacy in baptism itself is mistaken; baptism always points beyond itself to Christ. “The central truth of baptism,” writes T.F. Torrance, “is lodged in Jesus Christ himself and all that he has done for us within the humanity he took from us and made his own, sharing to the full what we are that we may share to the full what he is.”²⁹

That is not to say baptism is of no value. Of course the bride must not mistake the wedding ceremony for the groom, but if she truly loves her new husband, she will treasure the event as the occasion she is made one with him. In the same way, baptism has value and meaning as a real means of grace, where God seals in us through faith what he promises there. As Marcus Peter Johnson asks, “If baptism is in fact a visible proclamation of the gospel, can we not expect that God gives us, or seals in us through faith, what he promises there? The physical act of baptism can no more save us than the Bible, the preaching of the gospel, or faith can save us. We are only and ever saved in and through Christ. But where do we come to know and experience God in Christ?”³⁰

In many evangelical churches baptism is presented almost entirely as the new believer’s witness of faith, and is usually accompanied by a personal testimony of conversion. But if baptism is the sacrament that symbolizes our participation in Christ, the ritual itself must be understood by participant and observers alike as a testimony to Christ and his work: death, burial, and resurrection. It is therefore entirely appropriate that Easter has traditionally been the time when the church baptizes converts, as the whole community witnesses the ongoing power of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection as it transforms lives in the here and now.

For Paul baptism is the sacrament of participatory transformation in Christ. His concern in Romans 6 is that the baptized live out the ethical implications of their baptism, that they manifest the new life which is now theirs in Christ. The exorcisms which traditionally accompanied baptism announced a decisive break with the old life, a break the engages all the powers of the new believer. Alexander Schmemann observes that “the first act of the Christian life is a renunciation, a challenge. No one can be Christ’s until he has, first, faced evil, and then become ready to fight it.”³¹ The significance of baptism does not end when the water dries: it marks out the baptized as one under new allegiance, pursuing a new ethic through the power of a new life — Christ’s very own.

Citations

1. M. A. Seifrid, “In Christ”, Dictionary of Paul and His Letters (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993), 436.
2. John Murray, Redemption Accomplished and Applied (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1955), 170.
3. James S. Stewart, A Man in Christ: The Vital Elements of St. Paul’s Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1935), 147.
4. Constantine R. Campbell, Paul and Union with Christ (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2015), 29.
5. Michael J. Gorman, Apostle of the Crucified Lord: A Theological Introduction to Paul and His Letters (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), 4, 141.
6. John M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), 496.
7. John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans, Vol. I (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1959), 212.
8. Barclay, 497.
9. Gorman, 167–168.
10. Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 360.
11. Thomas R. Schreiner, Romans, BECNT (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1998), 307–308.
12. Richard B. Gaffin, Resurrection and Redemption (Phillipsburg NJ: P & R Publishing, 1978), 50.
13. F. F. Bruce, Romans: An Introduction and Commentary, TNTC (Downers Grove: IVP, 1985), 141.
14. Luke Timothy Johnson, Reading Romans: A Literary and Theological Commentary (Greenville: Smyth & Helwys, 1997), 104.
15. Cyril of Jerusalem, Myst. Cat., 2.5, quoted in Edward Yarnold, S.J., Cyril of Jerusalem (London: Routledge, 2000), 174–75.
16. G. R. Beasley-Murray, Baptism in the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1962), 130.
17. Moo, 365.
18. N. T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (London: T&T Clark, 1993), 48.
19. Gorman, 432.
20. Schreiner, 310.
21. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Faith Speaking Understanding: Performing the Drama of Doctrine (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2014), 142.
22. Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996), 38.
23. G. Bornkamm, Das Ende Des Gesetzes, Paulusstudien, Gesammelte Aufsätzen I (München: Kaiser, 1958), quoted in G. R. Beasley-Murray, “Baptism,” in Dictionary of Paul and His Letters, 64.
24. Leonard J. Vander Zee, Christ, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper (Downers Grove: IVP, 2004), 86.
25. Gordon T. Smith, Transforming Conversion: Rethinking the Language and Contours of Christian Initiation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010), 141.
26. Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008), 969–81.
27. Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, Faith and Order Paper No 111 (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1982), 1.
28. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, Library of Christian Classics, Vols. 20–21 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 4.14.16.
29. T. F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith: The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Church (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988), 294.
30. Marcus Peter Johnson, One with Christ: An Evangelical Theology of Salvation (Wheaton: Crossway, 2013), 231.
31. Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997), 71.