The Teaching of the Church Regarding Baptism

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Karl Barth. The Teaching of the Church Regarding Baptism

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Karl Barth

THE TEACHING OF THE CHURCH REGARDING BAPTISM

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This is the essence of baptism: to be this picture, this witness and sign. That it is only a picture is evident, apart from anything else, from the inadequacy with which the threat and deliverance—ultimately harmless even in the most pointed form of the representation—correspond to the actual death and actual eternal life of man, with which it deals objectively.

What John 1:8 says of John the Baptist: “He was not the light but came that he might bear witness of the light”; what the Baptist according to John 1:20; 3:28, so confessed of himself: “I am not the Christ,” and Jesus conversely said of Himself: “The witness which I have is greater than that of John” (John 5:36); all this holds good also of baptism and points to a limiting principle which in a sound doctrine of baptism must be neither put on one side nor rendered ineffective. One does no honour to baptism by interpreting it as if it were in its essence more than the representation of the sacred history (Heilsgeschichte) which comes to pass between God and man in Jesus Christ. It has its full honour precisely in being in fact the most living and expressive picture of that history: the visible sign of the invisible nativitas spiritualis at the entrance gate of the Church and at the beginning of every Christian life.

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