%DSWLVPDQG&RVPLF$OOHJLDQFH$%ULHI2EVHUYDWLRQ

'DYLG%HQWOH\+DUW

Journal of Early Christian Studies, Volume 20, Number 3, Fall 2012,

pp. 457-465 (Article)

3XEOLVKHGE\-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV
DOI: 10.1353/earl.2012.0023

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/earl/summary/v020/20.3.hart.html

Access provided by University of California , Santa Barbara (13 Mar 2016 19:43 GMT)
Baptism and Cosmic Allegiance:
A Brief Observation

DAVID BENTLEY HART

For most of the Christians of the earliest centuries, as Ferguson’s book exhaus-
tively illustrates, baptism was understood as nothing less than a personal
rebellion against the cosmic, political, and spiritual order of ancient paganism.
As pagan culture slowly disappeared and was replaced by a Christian culture,
the baptismal rite’s explicit transfer of a new Christian’s allegiance from the
old gods to the risen Lord became less necessary and, ultimately, largely
unintelligible. The gradual introduction of infant baptism reflected the trans-
formation of the ancient religious milieu, as the understanding of baptism as
renunciation of evil gods and demons gave way to a concern to nurture souls
from birth until death within the Christian community. Changes in baptismal
meaning and practice in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages suggest that
further developments lie ahead, as late modern Christianity confronts a post-
Christian future in the developed world.

One of the recurrent themes of Everett Ferguson’s immense, magisterial

study, as well as one of the principal conclusions he takes pains to reiter-
ate in its closing pages, is that the widespread practice of infant baptism
developed only very slowly, over the better part of two centuries. This
seems to me to be an altogether incontestable claim, and it is one upon
which I want to reflect in what follows, if only very briefly. My interest
in the matter, however, is not theological, at least not in the fullest sense.
Infant baptism no doubt raises a number of genuinely theological ques-
tions, and it has certainly had some fairly conspicuous ramifications in
theological history, encouraging Augustine, for instance, to adhere yet
more firmly to his disastrous misreading of Paul on the nature of sin and
the workings of grace, or encouraging later generations of Christians to
view baptism as a purely extrinsic transaction, meant merely to secure
the minimal conditions for salvation. But I do not think that the fact of
the practice’s gradual evolution has any great bearing on how Christians

Journal of Early Christian Studies 20:3, 457–465 © 2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press
458    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

ought to view baptism, or on which form of baptismal practice they should

view as most “correct.” Even if we were able to determine with absolute
certainty what the baptismal practices of the apostolic era were—which
we are not—there would be no reason to regard them as more authori-
tative than the practices that succeeded them in later generations. The
“church of the apostles” is, of course, the golden ideal to which Christian
memory (or Christian fantasy) most instinctively reverts in moments of
uncertainty. Some Christian communities, in fact, subsist almost entirely
upon the myth of a return to the faith’s unadulterated origins, imagining
that they have recreated the Christianity of the New Testament in clap-
board chapels, storefront meetinghouses, or converted garages. But that
is all illusion. Moreover, in truth, either one believes in the workings of
the Holy Spirit in Christian history or one has no reason to trust in any
aspect of the tradition. And, unless one thinks of baptism as some form
of sympathetic magic, whose “efficacy” is bound to the precise repetition
of immemorial formulae, one should scarcely be surprised or scandalized
by the discovery that the rite should take various forms at different times
and places, according to the church’s changing cultural situation and the
spiritual needs of its members. Incorporation into the body of Christ is a
work of grace, which is infinitely capable.
I approach the primacy of adult baptism in the early centuries, there-
fore, principally as a matter of historical concern. I am interested in what
it tells us about the special spiritual significance of the rite in the context
of a pre-Christian world, and so what it might suggest to us about its
significance in the post-Christian world of late modern western culture.
There was a time long ago, after all, when one’s baptism was not only
one of the most momentous events of one’s life—and even perhaps among
the most dramatic, terrifying, and joyous—but also a genuine transforma-
tion of everything one was. Today, at least in the lands where Christianity
has been long established, most Christians are baptized in infancy. Even
those who come from traditions that delay the rite until adulthood have
either been raised as Christians or, at the very least, grown up in a cul-
ture formed by Christian convictions and narratives: having been reared
in the faith, or at least in its atmosphere, their baptisms affirm the lives
they have always led or beliefs they have always held, explicitly or tacitly.
For most of the Christians of the earliest centuries, by contrast, baptism
was of an altogether more radical nature. It was not merely a symbolic
drama marking a casual shift in religious association, like moving from
the Methodists to the Episcopalians; it was a change in one’s social and
spiritual identity, and also—for want of a better phrase—in one’s cosmic
station. The act of becoming a Christian was not only an avowal of faith,
 HART / COSMIC ALLEGIANCE   459

but also a profound act of renunciation, a taking leave of much of what

one had previously known and been, in order to be joined to a new reality
whose demands upon one were absolute. In entering the body of Christ,
one also consciously and irrevocably departed from the world one had
inhabited all one’s life, and from the allegiances that had bound one to
that world. It was, in a very real sense, an act of rebellion.
Now, of course, one has to avoid exaggerations. As a nascent Christen-
dom took root and began to spread out through the empire, inexorably
displacing the older order of spiritual and cultural affiliations, the choice
to enter the church slowly became a less drastic decision than it had been
in the first three centuries and more of the gospel. As association with
the church increasingly became socially advantageous (which for many
persons, in every age, is the matter of chief concern), the rite inevitably
began to acquire the character of a social formality. Nevertheless, one still
should not underestimate the gravity of baptism for those who genuinely
lived between two worlds: that of the slowly withdrawing pagan past and
that of the gradually approaching Christian future. Even in the first several
decades after the Edict of Milan, a sincere convert to Christianity from
paganism was doing something that today perhaps only a new convert in
certain mission fields of the global South or East can quite understand.
There was great wisdom in the insistence of the Christian communities of
late antiquity that a convert be required to endure a long period of instruc-
tion and preparation before baptism. Obviously, catechetical and liturgical
customs varied greatly from place to place, but this aspect of Christian
initiation was very nearly universal. It had to be. The interval of a new
convert’s catechumenate, during which he or she enjoyed only an imperfect
participation in the life of the community, and remained separated from
the Eucharist, was often far more than merely an instruction in the gram-
mar of Christian beliefs. It was also a spiritual probation of sorts, a time
of scrutiny, a liminal state of suspense, lasting quite often for a period that
we today might regard as terrifically excessive. It involved tutelage in the
faith, moral examination, discipline of the will, and a general formation
in the habitus of Christian life, but it also involved, for former pagans,
a profound inversion of vision, a total reversal of how they understood
the cosmos and the powers that presided over it. The story of redemption
that they would learn in their catechesis, after all, was not one merely of
private reformation of character or intention, but of rescue from slavery
to evil and falsehood: all persons, it said, had labored in bondage in the
household of death, prisoners of death and the devil, languishing in igno-
rance of their true home. Then Christ had come to set the prisoners free
and, by his death and resurrection, invaded the kingdom of our captor and
460    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

overthrew it, vanquishing the power of sin and death in us, shattering the
gates of hell, and plundering Hades of its captives. It was into this story
that one’s own life was to be entirely merged, without reserve or remain-
der, when one at last passed through the “life-giving waters” of baptism.
In the risen Christ, a new humanity had been created, free from the rule
of death, and one became part of this new creation by dying and rising
again with Christ in baptism and by feeding upon him in the Eucharist.
The culmination of this process, moreover, could scarcely have spoken
more eloquently of the convert’s passage from one encompassing frame of
reality to another. One sees this in, for instance, the fully developed rites
of the early Byzantine world. Ideally—making allowance, of course, for
variations in local customs and the unpredictability of particular circum-
stances—the convert’s baptism would come on Easter eve, during the mid-
night vigil. At the appointed hour, the baptizand would depart the church
for the baptistery and its baptismal pool or (if possible) flowing stream.
Everything that then followed gave dramatic expression to the magnitude
of the transformation that was taking place: the blessings, exhortations,
unctions, and prayers; the naked descent into the waters, triple immer-
sion, and chrismation; the new garment of white, the first full attendance
at the eucharistic celebration, and—at last—the first taste of the conse-
crated bread and wine. On that night, the new Christian would have died
to his or her old life and received a new and better life in Christ.1 Perhaps
the most crucial features of the rite, however—at least, for understand-
ing what baptism meant for the convert from paganism—were the ritual
acts of renunciation, exorcism, and submission, during which the convert
turned his or her face to the west (the land of evening, and so symboli-
cally the realm of all darkness, cosmic and spiritual), underwent a rather
forcibly phrased exorcism, and rejected—even reviled and, quite literally,
spat at—the devil and his ministers, and then turned to face the east (the
land of morning and light) to confess his or her faith in and submission to
Christ. The traces of these ancient practices, which linger on in the bap-
tismal liturgies of East and West (especially the former), but which are
now usually the province of vaguely embarrassed or bemused godparents,
often seem at best rather quaint. No one involved, at any rate, tends to
feel any great transition is taking place, or that any perilous venture has
been undertaken, or that something of cosmic import is taking place. In

1. For a rich and detailed treatment of the Byzantine rite, see Alexander Schme-
mann, Of Water and the Spirit: A Liturgical Study of Baptism (Crestwood, NY: St.
Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974).
 HART / COSMIC ALLEGIANCE   461

late antiquity, however, for the true convert from the old faiths, this was by
no means mere ritual spectacle; it was an actual and, so to speak, legally
binding transference of fealty from one master to another. Even the physi-
cal posture and attitude of the baptizand was charged with a certain bold
irreverence: pagan temples were as a rule designed with their entrances to
the east and their divine images at their western ends, facing out towards
the forecourt altar. One looked to the west when one looked to see the
god within his house. In thus turning his or her back upon, repudiating,
and abusing the devil, then, the convert was also explicitly breaking all ties
to the gods to whom he or she had formerly been indentured, and doing
so with a kind of triumphant contempt; and, in confessing Christ, he or
she was entering the service of the invincible conqueror who had defeated
death, despoiled hell of its hostages, subdued the wicked powers in high
places, and been raised up the Lord of history.
We today are probably somewhat prone to forget that, though the early
Christians did indeed regard the gods of the pagan order as “false” gods,
they did not necessarily understand this to mean that these gods did not
exist; they understood it principally to mean that the gods were deceiv-
ers. But they were still quite real and quite formidable within their own
spheres: demons, malignant elemental spirits, aerial principalities, occult
agencies masquerading as divinities, exploiting the human yearning for
the divine, and working to thwart the designs of God, in order to enslave
humanity to darkness, ignorance, and death. To renounce one’s loyalties
to these beings was not merely to turn from fantasy to truth, but also to
enlist oneself in the forces of a cosmic rebellion. One was issuing a dec-
laration that one had been emancipated from the “prince of this world”
or “god of this world.” In this sense, the pagan convert was really living
out, at a perfectly personal level, the great spiritual and cosmic drama
described by the writers of the New Testament: in its fallen state, the cos-
mos lies under the reign of evil (1 John 5.19), but Christ came to save the
world, to lead “captivity captive” (Eph 4.8), and to overthrow the empire
of those “thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers” (Col 1.16, etc.)
that have imprisoned creation in corruption and evil. Again, given the
perspectives of our age, even most Christians can scarcely avoid reading
such language as chiefly mythological, or avoid simply missing the cos-
mic and supernatural allusions altogether and reading them instead in a
psychological or political way. This is a pity, because it makes it almost
impossible to grasp the scandal and the exhilaration of early Christian-
ity. These “thrones,” “powers,” “principalities,” and so forth were not,
of course, earthly princes or empires (though princes and empires served
462    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

their ends). Much less were they vague abstractions. Rather, they were
the angelic cosmocrators of apocalyptic tradition, the celestial governors
of the nations, the “archons,” the often-mutinous legions of the air, who,
though they had been overthrown by Christ, were still mighty and dread-
ful in their ruin. It was from the tyranny of these powers of “wickedness
in high places” that Christ had come to set creation free. And so the life
of faith was, for the early church, before all else, spiritual warfare, waged
between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of this fallen world, and
every Christian on the day of his or her baptism had been conscripted into
that struggle, on the side of Christ. From that point on, he or she was both
a subject of and a co-heir to a kingdom not of this world, and henceforth
no more than a resident alien in the earthly city.
The modern tendency, of course, is to view such beliefs as superstitious,
and most modern Christians would regard them as more or less accidental
to the rite of baptism. In late antiquity, however, practically no one doubted
that there was a sacral order to the world, or that the social, political, cos-
mic, and religious realms of human existence were always and inextricably
intertwined in one another. Every state was also a cult, or a plurality of
cults, and society was a religious dispensation: the celestial and political
orders belonged to a single continuum, and one’s allegiance to one’s gods
was also one’s loyalty to one’s nation, people, masters, and monarchs.
One could even say (to risk a very large generalization) that the sacred
premise of the whole of Indo-European paganism was this: the universe
is an elaborate and complex regime, a hierarchy of power and eminence,
atop which stood the great god, and below whom, in a descending scale,
stood a variety of subordinate orders, each holding a place dictated by
divine necessity and fulfilling a cosmic function—greater and lesser gods
and daemons, kings and nobles, priests and prophets, and so on, all the
way down to slaves. This order, moreover, though it was at once both
divine and natural, was also in some ultimate sense precariously poised
and strangely fragile, and had to be sustained by prayers, sacrifices, laws,
pieties, and coercions, and had to be defended at all times against the
forces of chaos that threatened it from every side, whether spiritual, social,
political, erotic, or philosophical. For cosmic, political, and spiritual order
was all one thing, continuous and organic, and its authority was absolute.
In such a world, the gospel as it was first preached was an outrageous
thing indeed, and it was perfectly reasonable for its cultured despisers of
the first few centuries to describe its promulgators as “atheists.” Chris-
tians were—what could be more obvious?—enemies of society, impious,
subversive, and irrational; it was no more than civic prudence to detest
them for refusing to honor the gods of their ancestors, for scorning the
 HART / COSMIC ALLEGIANCE   463

common good, and for advancing the grotesque and shameful claim that
all gods and spirits had been made subject to a crucified criminal from
Galilee who, during his life, had consorted with peasants and harlots, lep-
ers and lunatics.2 This was far worse than mere irreverence: it was pure
and misanthropic perversity, and it was anarchy. One can see something
of this alarm in the fragments we still possess of Celsus’s On True Doc-
trine. It is unlikely, really, that Celsus would have thought the Christians
worth his notice had he not recognized something uniquely dangerous lurk-
ing in their teachings. He would have naturally viewed the new religion
with a certain patrician disdain, undoubtedly, and his treatise contains a
considerable quantity of contempt for the pliant rabble that Christianity
attracted into its fold: slaves and men of lowly birth, the uneducated and
uneducable, women and children, cobblers, laundresses, weavers of wool,
and other common tradespersons. That aspect of Christianity, however,
would have made the faith no more distasteful to him than any of those
other Asiatic superstitions that occasionally coursed through the empire,
working mischief in every social class, and provoking a largely impotent
consternation from the educated and well bred. It would hardly have mer-
ited the energetic attack he actually wrote. What clearly and genuinely
horrified Celsus about this particular superstition was not its predictable
vulgarity, but the novel spirit of rebellion that permeated its teachings.
He continually speaks of Christianity as a form of “sedition” or “rebel-
lion,” and what he principally condemns is its defiance of the immemorial
religious customs of the world’s tribes, cities, and nations. To him it was
obvious that the several peoples of the earth were governed by various
gods who served as lieutenants of the highest god, and the laws and cus-
toms they had established in every place were part of the divine constitu-
tion of the universe, which no one, highborn or lowborn, should presume
to disregard or abandon. It was appalling to him that Christians, feeling
no decent reverence for ancient ordinances and institutions and wisdoms,
should refrain from worship of the gods, or decline to venerate the good
daemons who served as intermediaries between the human and divine
worlds, or refuse to pray to these ancient powers for the emperor. These
Christians were so depraved as to think they had actually been elevated
above the temples and traditions and cults of their ancestors; they even
ludicrously imagined themselves somehow to have been raised above the
immortal servants of God, the divine stars and other celestial intelligences,
and to have been granted a kind of immediate intimacy with God himself.

2. See Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, 2003), 118.
464    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

And in thus claiming emancipation from the principalities and powers,

the thrones and dominions, they had also renounced their spiritual and
moral ties to their peoples and to the greater cosmic order. To Celsus, this
was all too clearly an unnatural and deracinated piety, something unprec-
edented and even somewhat monstrous, a religion like no other, which
sought to transcend nations altogether rather than provide a sacred bond
between the believer and his nation. And, of course, he was entirely cor-
rect. Christians were indeed a separate people, or at least aspired to be,
another nation within each nation, as Origen liked to say. The church,
governed by its own laws and acknowledging no rival allegiances, truly
did aim at becoming a universal people, a universal race, more universal
than any empire of gods or men, and subject only to Christ. No creed
could have been more subversive of the ancient wisdom of the world, and
no movement more worthy of the hatred of those for whom that wisdom
was the truth of the ages.3
All of which brings me back to the issue of the relatively late and gradual
adoption of infant baptism by the church. As I have said, I do not regard
this as an issue with particularly profound theological implications. Need-
less to say, as pagan culture slowly disappeared and was replaced by a
Christian culture, the baptismal rite’s explicit transfer of a new Christian’s
allegiance from the old gods to the risen Lord became less necessary and,
in the end, largely unintelligible. Thereafter, it was only natural that the
practice of baptism should accommodate itself to a radically new social
and cultural situation, one in which the principal concern of the church
was the care of Christian souls from the cradle to the grave, and the forma-
tion of Christian minds within the context of a baptized civil society that
was supposedly identical with the sacramental body of Christ. Those who
today insist on making a theological issue out of adult baptism generally
do so on the grounds that the rite, in their view, ought somehow to give
visible expression to a fully formed adult consciousness freely submitting
itself to God’s grace. However, there is no such thing as a fully formed
adult consciousness, grace does not require our consent to operate upon
us, and our free decision to submit or not to submit to God is something
undertaken daily. None of that seems worth fretting about—unless, as I
have said, one thinks of baptism as a kind of magic spell. Nonetheless,
again, as an historical observation, the practice of adult baptism in late
antiquity is strangely illuminative of certain realities of the culture of late

3. See Robert L. Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 94–125.
 HART / COSMIC ALLEGIANCE   465

modernity. In the context of a Christian civilization, baptism simply could

not retain quite the significance it had possessed in a pre-Christian set-
ting. It simply no longer involved any shift in loyalties, any act of resolute
defiance of familiar powers, or any actual conversion of thought or will.
Today, however, it seems quite clear that the whole developed world is
moving rapidly towards and into its post-Christian future, with America
bringing up the rear. It is worth wondering, perhaps, whether the trans-
formation of our cultural situation will lead once again to a new set of
emphases in baptismal practices and sacramental theology. The church will
increasingly find itself more or less isolated from the center of civic life,
and will increasingly find the circumambient world to be again under the
sway of alien powers—not the gods of old, perhaps, but elemental spirits
of another, somewhat drearier kind. In those circumstances, baptism will
inevitably once again become more and more an elective rite, a choice made
by adults disenchanted with the world around them, and a break with an
unbaptized upbringing. Almost certainly, baptism will once again come
to be understood as a real and momentous change in one’s personal alle-
giances. It will again acquire a somewhat subversive character, and again
be seen as an act not only of affirmation, but also of principled repudia-
tion—of, in fact, rebellion. For the ardent proponent of adult baptism, it
will perhaps be something of a bitter victory if this should come to pass.
It will mean that, culturally speaking, Christianity will have become so
marginal and moribund that most people will have ceased bringing their
children to the baptismal font even out of nostalgia, or (so to speak) just
to be on the safe side. On the other hand, however, it might also mean
that, spiritually speaking, a new epoch of Christianity has begun, one that
requires a particularly chastened and reflective sort of faith from believ-
ers. Whatever the case, though, however the Christian understanding or
practice of baptism may be altered by the new cultural reality, the result
will certainly provide further proof of the infinite versatility of grace.

David Bentley Hart is the author of Atheist Delusions: The Christian

Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies and several other works in
Christian history and thought