The first of these statements is in the beginning of the gospel story where John the Baptist was preaching the baptism of repentance. His audience at that moment was formed by Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism. He questioned their readiness to receive this sign of repentance: “Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.”1 In other words, to be a child of Abraham is no longer guaranteed automatically by one’s simple hereditary connection to the people of Israel according to the flesh, nor even by a position of prominence in that people. To be a child of Abraham is a miracle, worked by God with no more human collaboration than is provided by a stone, a miracle reflecting itself in a new kind of life, namely in works “worthy of repentance.”2 John is not preaching individualism; he is picturing a new kind of community whose common basis is a novel renewing work of God and not a common family heritage.
In a quite different context as reported in John’s Gospel, Jesus himself discusses the same topic with the Jews:
“If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” They answered him, “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone.” Jesus answered them, “Very truly, I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin . . . So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed . . . If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing what Abraham did.”3
Again the contrast is the same. The true child of Abraham will, like Abraham, believe and obey God. He who does not believe and obey in this manner, whatever his genealogy, is not a son of Abraham but of the devil.4 Thus, sonship is identical with liberty; to be a Jew who is not a child of Abraham by faith and obedience is to be a slave to sin.
The third recurrence of the same pattern of thought is found again in a quite different connection, as Paul instructs the Christians of Galatia concerning the meaning of justification by faith. The promise given to Abraham was a promise based upon his faith. God was bound not to the law, not to the mechanical succession of children from father, but to the spiritual succession of believing obedience. Those who rest in faith are the true sons of Abraham.5 The promise of the covenant, promulgated in the day of Abraham, is ratified and made fully valid only in Christ whose response was perfect obedience and through him in those who believe.
For in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.6
Although the immediate issues with which Jesus and the writers were concerned in these three New Testament texts are varied, the presence of this striking parallelism of thought is evidence that it was not only a device of rhetoric or argument to which a preacher like Jesus or John or a teacher like Paul would refer just once in order to illustrate an argument. This was probably a standard line of thought in all of the New Testament church which, of course, needed to encounter the challenge of Judaism in every city.
What is here described is not individualism but a new kind of community, not a concentration upon the inner experience of guilt and forgiveness which an individual may feel but the incorporation of that individual into a fellowship of the forgiving and the forgiven. Certainly, in an age when modern individuals become more fully conscious of their personalities as individuals and of their feelings and consciousness as modern individuals, it will be appropriate that the increased consciousness of individual personality will find expression and meaning that coming to faith and baptism will have for the individual. But, to center our attention upon the fact that the baptism of individuals is especially fitting in the age of modern individualism and personalism is to shift the focus of the New Testament concern.
Also, at those points in the New Testament witness where baptism is not the issue, it is just as clear that we are to understand the meaning of the gospel as summed up in the creation of a new kind of community. When, in 1 Peter 2, the Christian fellowship is called a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a peculiar people, and told by an application of a quotation from the prophet Hosea that to “be now my people” is the equivalent of “having received grace,” the message is the same.7 The church of the New Testament does not simply pick up the heritage of Judaism according to the flesh and apply the same principle of ethnic continuity to a group founded upon a new doctrine. Rather, it creates a new principle of community and continuity.
Once again the same point is clear in Ephesians 3. Here, the apostle Paul describes the truth that both the abolition of the distinction between Jew and Greek and the rejection of the flesh and the law are ways of maintaining the identity of the people as a mystery. This mystery stands at the center of the divine purpose uniquely revealed to him in his ministry as apostle to the Gentiles.8
Thus, our understanding of what it means that the church in the New Testament is the church of committed believers must begin with the miraculous character of the community of faith in which people of all kinds belong without distinction, if they only believe. We shall not center our attention on the emotions or on the information upon which belief often centers (although naturally humans are the kind of beings who cannot believe without emotions or information). The fundamental definition of the free church is not found in the feelings individuals have had upon entering it but in its character as a community founded upon the redemptive activity of God in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit with its order based only upon that divine work.
The Missionary Community
Only the believers church can maintain its missionary character over the generations. For such a church continues in every generation to be dependent upon evangelization, unable to survive unless even the children of believers are won by gospel preaching to an adhesion that is not taken for granted. Otherwise, if the children of believers are thought of as already within the community of faith, the unavoidable result is that within two or three generations the focus of attention changes from winning those outside the people of God to educating and holding those who were born into Christian families. With the passage of time, this always resulted in the geographic identification of one area as Christian and of other areas as pagan, or of one racial group as Christian and others as pagan. Other deformations also tend to reinstate the spiritual equivalent of Judaism, namely, believing that the people of God is preserved by its external order and by the control that the older generation and the inherited law have over the youth. Not infrequently, this deformation goes to the point of Puritanism or of inquisition, not shrinking from the use of social or even physical coercion in order to make sure that everyone remains faithful.
It is certainly not to be taken for granted that the mere formality of baptizing only adults will avoid these deformations. But it is sure that if we insist that membership in the people of God is a matter of new birth and that mere conformity to the standards and behavior patterns and ideas of the people of God without personal conviction is no help, this is the needed safeguard. The refusal to baptize infants or the immature remains a most appropriate symbol of the refusal to forsake that missionary character that the church is called to retain.
The Fall of the Church
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