The Theology of Baptism

Baptism is a real dying and rising with Christ: the threefold immersion is a burial in His death and a resurrection into His life, by which sin is remitted, the person is regenerated, and a new member is grafted into the Body of Christ. This file reads the mystery through Romans 6, treats the triple immersion, the remission of sin and regeneration, and the renunciation of Satan by which the candidate turns from the devil to Christ.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Death and Resurrection with Christ

The New Testament’s deepest word about baptism is not that it washes but that it buries and raises. “Know ye not,” Paul writes, “that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:3–4). Baptism is thus a participation in the paschal mystery itself: the candidate goes down into the water as into a tomb, dies with Christ to sin and to the old Adam, and rises with Him into the new creation. The whole later Orthodox theology of baptism is an unfolding of these verses (Schmemann, Of Water and the Spirit, SVS Press, 1974, on baptism as paschal; Cabasilas, The Life in Christ, Book 2, on baptism as birth through death).

St. Cyril of Jerusalem draws out the realism of the image for the newly-baptized: “in one and the same action you died and were born; that saving water was at once your grave and your mother… to you the time to die coincided with the time to be born, and one and the same season effected both of these” (Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogical Catechesis 2.4, trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 7). He is careful to add that this dying and rising is by imitation and participation, not repetition: Christ truly died and rose; we are baptized “in likeness” of His death and so share really in the salvation His true death won (Cyril, Mystagogical Catechesis 2.5–7). Baptism is not a symbol of an event that happened only long ago and far away, but the means by which the one saving death and resurrection of Christ becomes the death and resurrection of this person.

The Triple Immersion

The manner of baptism carries this theology in its very shape. The ancient and normative Orthodox practice is baptism by triple immersion — the candidate is dipped wholly beneath the water three times, at the naming of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19). The threefold plunging confesses the Trinity into whose name the person is baptized and, at the same time, images the three days of Christ’s burial: “by this thrice-repeated immersion,” writes Cyril, “you imitated the three-days’ burial of Christ” (Cyril, Mystagogical Catechesis 2.4). The Apostolic Tradition and the early canons take immersion for granted, and the eighth-century Apostolic Canons direct that a bishop or presbyter who baptizes with a single immersion rather than three be deposed (Apostolic Canon 50; cf. the discussion in Schmemann, Of Water and the Spirit, on the fullness of the sign).

The Orthodox tradition therefore regards full immersion as the proper and expressive form, precisely because the sign should say what the mystery does: one cannot easily be “buried” in a sprinkling. Where extreme necessity has required it — sickness, danger of death, scarcity of water — pouring (affusion) has been permitted from antiquity as a valid form, as the early Didache already allows (“if thou hast not living water… pour water thrice upon the head in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,” Didache 7). But the Church has consistently held immersion to be the norm and affusion the exception, and modern Orthodox theology has insisted on recovering the full immersion of infants and adults alike where it had lapsed (Schmemann, Of Water and the Spirit, on immersion as the norm; Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, 1993, Part II).

Regeneration and the Remission of Sin

Baptism accomplishes at once a cleansing and a birth. It is the “washing of regeneration” (Titus 3:5) and the being “born of water and of the Spirit” without which, the Lord tells Nicodemus, “a man cannot enter into the kingdom of God” (John 3:5). The Nicene Creed confesses “one baptism for the remission of sins,” binding baptism to the forgiveness of sins in the Church’s rule of faith (Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed; see Orthodoxy: The Nicene Creed). In baptism the whole burden of the past is washed away — for an adult, personal sins together with the ancestral fallenness inherited from Adam; for an infant, that ancestral condition, since the Orthodox tradition, unlike the Augustinian West, does not hold the newborn guilty of a personal share in Adam’s sin but understands baptism to heal the mortality and corruption that came upon the race through the fall (Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, Fordham, 1974, ch. on original sin; see Orthodoxy: Ancestral vs Original Sin).

Regeneration is the positive side of that cleansing: baptism does not merely remove but gives. It engenders a new man. Cabasilas makes this the governing idea of his second book: baptism “is a birth,” the beginning of being, by which we who did not exist in Christ are brought into existence and made able to receive the further gifts of the Spirit and the eucharistic food (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ, Book 2, on baptism as birth and being). The baptized are illumined — Dionysius’ name for the whole rite is precisely “illumination” (photismos) — brought out of the darkness of ignorance and death into the light of the knowledge of God (Dionysius, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy 2, trans. Luibheid, Paulist Press, 1987; the newly-baptized are called “the newly-illumined”). This is why the white garment given after immersion, and the candle carried, express not a wish but a fact: “as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ” (Galatians 3:27; sung at every Orthodox baptism in place of the Trisagion).

The Renunciation of Satan

Because baptism is a passage from one lordship to another, the rite requires a decisive turning. In the pre-baptismal rites the candidate (or, for an infant, the sponsor in his name) is turned to face the West, the region of darkness, and renounces Satan: “Dost thou renounce Satan, and all his angels, and all his works, and all his service, and all his pride?” — to which the answer is given three times, “I do renounce him,” followed by the act of blowing and spitting upon the devil in contempt (the renunciation of the Orthodox baptismal rite; described already in Cyril, Mystagogical Catechesis 1.2–8). The candidate is then turned to the East, the region of light and of paradise, to confess adherence to Christ: “Dost thou unite thyself unto Christ?… Dost thou believe in Him?” — answering, “I do,” and reciting the Creed (Cyril, Mystagogical Catechesis 1.4–9, on the renunciation facing West and the covenant facing East).

Cyril reads this double gesture as the making of a covenant. To renounce Satan is to tear up an ancient bond of servitude and to be freed from the tyranny under which the whole race had fallen; to be joined to Christ, facing the East, is to enter the paradise from which Adam was cast out (Cyril, Mystagogical Catechesis 1.2–9). The renunciation is thus no mere formality but the personal ratification of the exorcisms that precede it: the candidate, cleansed by the Church’s prayer of the power of the enemy, himself renounces that power and freely chooses Christ. Baptism does not coerce; it liberates, and liberty must be exercised in the very turning from the devil to God (Schmemann, Of Water and the Spirit, on the renunciation and the exorcisms as the recovery of freedom). The whole drama — exorcism, renunciation, adherence, immersion, illumination — is a single movement out of the kingdom of death into the Kingdom of Christ, and it is this that the Orthodox mean when they call baptism the beginning of the life in Christ.

References

Cyril of Jerusalem. Mystagogical Catecheses 1–2. Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 7; also F. L. Cross, ed., St Cyril of Jerusalem’s Lectures on the Christian Sacraments. London: SPCK, 1951.
Cabasilas, Nicholas. The Life in Christ, Book 2. Trans. Carmino J. deCatanzaro. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1974.
Dionysius the Areopagite. The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy 2. Trans. Colm Luibheid. New York: Paulist Press, 1987.
Schmemann, Alexander. Of Water and the Spirit: A Liturgical Study of Baptism. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1974.
Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology. New York: Fordham University Press, 1974.
Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993.
Didache 7; Apostolic Canons 50. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7, and the standard canonical collections.
Scripture: Romans 6:3–4; Matthew 28:19; John 3:5; Titus 3:5; Galatians 3:27.