Liturgia - Volume 18, Issue 4

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The Body of Christ is the Body of Christ, Part 1

Peter Leithart

Some time ago, I suggested that the biblical teaching on baptismal efficacy can be summarized in three axioms:

1. "Baptism" is baptism. When the New Testament uses the word "baptism," it's normally talking about water baptism.

2. "The body of Christ" is the body of Christ. When the New Testament speaks of Christ's body, it's talking about Christ's body, by which I mean the visible or historical church.

3. Apostasy is possible.

Over the past year or more, I've been using (abusing?) this space to defend the first proposition. It's time now to turn to the second.

This second axiom is the critical one in all the current debates about baptism within the Reformed churches. The question in dispute is not baptismal efficacy per se. No one in the Reformed world says there's magic in the water, and no one anywhere believes that baptism invariably saves everyone who gets wet. The question has to do with the significance of baptismal entry into the visible church, and, behind this, with the question of what the visible church is.

Let's start slow. All parties in these debates agree that baptism admits the baptized into the visible church. Such is the explicit teaching of Westminster Confession of Faith (28.1), which says that baptism is, among other things, "for the solemn admission of the party baptized into the visible church." Continental Reformed confessions teach the same: Through baptism "we are received into the Church of God, and separated from all other people and strange religions" (Belgic Confession, article 34), and baptized infants are "included in the covenant and church of God" and thereby "distinguished from the children of unbelievers" (Heidelberg Catechism #74). The Second Helvetic Confession echoes this: "to be baptized in the name of Christ is to be enrolled, entered, and received into the covenant and family, and so into the inheritance, of the sons of God" (section XX).

The dispute is about what this means. What does a baptized person become a member of when he becomes a member of the church? What kind of bond to Christ, and through Him to the Father and Spirit, is forged when one enters the visible church by baptism? Can we say that a member of the church is, necessarily, a member of Christ? If the visible church is the body of Christ, and if the body of Christ is the community united to the humanity of the Son of God, then baptism joins the baptized to Christ the Son. If the visible church is something less than this, then baptism is of course something less too.

One might think these questions are answerable with a straightforward syllogism:

1. Baptism admits the baptized to the church.

2. The church is the body of Christ.

3. Therefore, baptism admits the baptized to the body of Christ.

There's a crucial missing step in this argument, and I'll return to that in later articles, but to see what the current debates are about, it's worth pausing to reflect that the Reformed tradition has been ambiguous about this syllogism as it stands.

And this is because the Reformed tradition has been ambiguous about premise #2. The Westminster Confession distinguishes between the "invisible" church, which it describes as "the spouse, the body, the fullness of him that fills all in all" (25.1) and the "visible" church, which is described as "the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ, the house and family of God" (25.2). Those who appended the Scripture proofs believed that the visible church is the body of Christ, because they included 1 Corinthians 12:12 among the Scripture texts concerning the visible church. Further, the Larger Catechism (#167) says that we improve on our baptism in part by striving "to walk in brotherly love, as being baptized by the same Spirit into one body," which in context surely implies that the "body" is the visible church. Yet, the Confession itself restricts "body" language to the invisible church. On this view, of course, baptism does not (or not necessarily) join the baptized to the body of Christ, since there is no guarantee that the baptized person is a member of the invisible church. The baptized are members of the kingdom and household of God, but only the baptized elect are, strictly, members of the body of Christ.

The syllogism gets interrupted; at best, a question mark overshadows it:

1. Baptism admits the baptized to the visible church.

2. But the visible church is not the body of Christ.

3. Therefore baptism doesn't admit the baptized to the body of Christ. Or, we don't know whether it does or not.

This confessional ambiguity has produced persistent dualities within Reformed theology, evident most clearly in various formulas concerning the "dual aspect of the covenant." As Berkhof summarizes, Reformed theologians have distinguished between an internal and external covenant, the essence of the covenant and its administration, a condition and absolute covenant, and the covenant as a legal relationship and as a communion of life. Working with one of these dualisms, one might reformulate the syllogism along these lines:

1. Baptism admits the baptized to the visible church.

2. The visible church involves an external/conditional/purely legal covenant relationship with God.

3. Therefore, baptism admits the baptized into an external/conditional/purely legal relationship with God.

This would be fine if it were what the New Testament says. But it's not, and in the next few articles I'll attempt to prove that.

For the moment, we can ask, briefly, what does the New Testament say? It says, "All were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea" (1 Cor. 10:2), and likewise "by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body" (1 Cor. 12:13). And, more fundamentally, it asks, "Has Christ been divided?" (1 Cor. 1:13).