New Life in the Risen Christ: A Wesleyan Theology of Baptism

This timely and helpful volume addresses a tension in the Wesleyan theological tradition. From its founders and their Anglican formation, it has inherited a strong sacramental understanding of baptism and an appreciation of the place of infant baptism in the life of the church. As a movement of evangelical revival, however, it has placed a strong emphasis on personal conversion and the inner experience of faith, together with a firm suspicion of any suggestion that religious rituals are, in themselves, spiritually efficacious. The fifteen essays gathered together here, all but one of them written by North American pastors and educators, aim to tease out this tension and to look at its implication for a number of issues in the contemporary church.The essays are arranged under three headings. The first, ‘Baptism and the Triune God’, deals directly with the tension outlined above, providing an analysis of Wesley’s teaching in relation to baptism and regeneration. Michael Pasquarello draws out Wesley’s dependence on the patristic tradition, with baptism related to the confession of a Trinitarian faith. Stephen Bruns and Sarah Lancaster examine, respectively, Wesley’s baptismal theology in relation to regeneration and justification. They bring out the ambiguity and tension in Wesley, who taught both that infant baptism was an effective cleansing from original sin, and that baptized adults needed to be ‘born again, again’ through conversion. Lancaster teases out the difficult relationship between sign and signified. Peter Bellini’s essay on pneumatology links the outer sacrament of water with the inner sacrament of transformation.The second part of the volume takes up a number of issues relating baptism to Christian Life. This begins with a helpful survey of New Testament evidence by Frederick David Carr, focusing particularly on I Peter 3 and on Romans 6 and concluding that Methodists should take more seriously the salvific role of baptism in the New Testament. The essays that follow deal with baptism in relation to discipleship, evangelism, social justice, social holiness, and the means of grace. The section concludes with David F. Watson’s chapter on ‘Baptism and People with Developmental Disabilities’. This combines the author’s experience as the father of a son with Down syndrome, and theological reflection on God’s gracious relationship with all people, whatever their intellectual status. The church, and the sacrament of baptism, need to reflect this mysterious, universal grace.The third and final part of the book is headed ‘Baptism and the Church’. These were among the strongest contributions to the collection. South African Dion Forster broadens the perspective by reminding us of the multiple cultures and identities through which contemporary Christian faith is mediated. He sees baptism as a sign of a new identity that is corporately formed in the church and is not dependent on the will of the individual. R. Matthew Sigler, writing on ‘Baptism and the Eucharist’, critiques the frequent assertion that an ‘open table’ is intrinsic to the Wesleyan tradition, and pleads for a renewed link between ‘font and table’. In ‘Baptism and Eschatology’, Brent D. Peterson gives a broader historical perspective and situates baptism in the tension between the ‘already’ of Christian initiation and the ‘not yet’ of God’s kingdom. Finally, Karen Westerfield Tucker addresses ‘Baptism and Ecumenism’, calling for more commitment to a ‘sacramental bond of unity’. Here, the perspective is broadened to include different Methodist traditions and the relationship between Methodism(s) and such ecumenical partners as the Roman Catholic Church and the World Council of Churches.This is, then, a comprehensive collection of serious theological contributions. It will be a rich resource for theological educators and church leaders. A few comments might be made in the spirit of constructive critique. First, the large number of authors in a single volume makes for a certain amount of repetition, especially where the same Wesley texts are repeatedly analysed. This occasionally tests the reader’s concentration. Secondly, and more importantly, the volume suffers from its overwhelmingly North American provenance. Only one of the authors is not United States-based and this does narrow the ecclesial and cultural perspective. I found myself wondering, for example, about the potential links between Christian initiation and the cultural initiation rites in Africa. I would have also liked more engagement with existing Methodist scholarship on the topic. There is only one, brief, reference to Geoffrey Wainwright’s Christian Initiation and none to, for instance, W. F. Flemington’s The New Testament Doctrine of Baptism or Neil Dixon’s Troubled Waters. Third, the arrangement of the essays means that the broader perspective, especially the ecumenical one, is only brought in toward the end, when the terms of the discussion have already been set. Finally, this is, as it sets out to be, a theological volume. Nevertheless, it would be good to relate the theology of what happens in baptism more firmly to the liturgical description of what happens.Readers will be grateful for insightfulness and the clarity of thought in this work.

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