May 2005

ARTICLE TOOLS

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BAPTISM beautifully conveys how Christ has transformed our peril: water is both perilous and life-giving; and Christ has transformed the peril of drowning in sin into the gentle, cleansing bath of salvation.
Debra Rienstra, So Much More: An Invitation to Christian Spirituality

THE SIGNIFICANCE of baptism is the objective fact to which it witnesses, the historic event of redemption and the present gift that it makes possible, embraced through faith in that God who acted and yet acts.
G.R. Beasley-Murray, Baptism in the New Testament

IN THE WATERS of baptism we are reminded that we are not born in a vacuum, nor do we journey entirely alone (although loneliness is often part of the burden). Being reborn, being made alive, involves being born into a community. So there are strings attached to this adventure.
Alan W. Jones, Journey into Christ

BAPTISM CONSECRATES us, and consecration is a conscriptive rope that takes us to where we would rather not go, namely, into that suffering that produces maturity.
Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing

BAPTISM CELEBRATES and effects the merging of the Jewish and the Gentile stories. A people with the law and a people without it, a people walled off from the world and a people open to it, become a single community, melding the legacies of both. . . . This new status is a new kind of social reality, a unity that overarches the differences (Jew/Gentile, male/female, slave/free) that previously had separated people.
John Howard Yoder, Body Politics

BAPTISM IS VALID, even though faith be wanting. For my faith does not make baptism, but receives it.
Martin Luther, The Large Catechism

FAITH DOES NOT follow from baptism, but baptism follows from faith.
Menno Simons, Foundation of Christian Doctrine

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