A New Look at Baptism

By Robin Jensen

Countless Christians are familiar with the rite of baptism. But Christian baptism was one of the most complicated of ancient initiation rituals insofar as it served many and varied objectives.

More than representing a simple rite of passage—from outsider to insider—Christians believed that baptism accomplished a variety of transformations in the individuals who received it. Each of these changes was constituted by certain actions, speech, and symbols. It also took place in stages and was profoundly sensory.

In the earliest centuries, once applicants (mostly adults) were received as catechumens (converts under instruction), they commenced a period of formation that might stretch over years. This process included formal enrollment, the assignment of sponsors, regular catechetical lessons, frequent exorcisms and scrutinies, and continuing exclusion from the eucharistic meal. Once they were ready to proceed to the final step, these catechumens were entered into the ranks of those about to be illuminated. At this point they participated in a culminating phase of intense preparation that included bodily disciplines (e.g., fasting, vigils, abstaining from baths and sexual intercourse), and, in the last week, the transmission of the creed and the Lord’s Prayer. The ritual that these “competentes” would undergo together normally took place at one of the church’s main feasts (Easter, Pentecost, or Epiphany) and at the cathedral within a separate chamber or building built especially for that purpose.

The actual baptism ritual was held to impart several benefits: to cleanse its recipients of personal and inherited sin, unite them with the community, bring about their spiritual illumination,represent their death to a former life and rebirth to a new one, and join them to Christ’s death and resurrection. It also signified a renewal of creation insofar as it was believed to return its recipients (at least temporarily) to the status of Adam and Eve prior to their fall and thus anticipate the restoration of creation.

Each of these effects was conveyed through certain spoken words and physical movements. They were also reflected in the design and decoration of the built spaces that surrounded the participants. Gestures, speech, and the surrounding environment reinforced the teaching about baptism that had been presented through the catechumenate period. Thus both theological explanations and actual ritual acts, along with the shape of baptisteries and fonts, the paintings on the walls, or the mosaic patterns on the floors of those specially-designed chambers contributed to the rich blend of visual, kinesthetic, and verbal signs that communicated the diverse yet interconnected implications of the ceremony as it unfolded.

In addition to those actions and their settings, Christian teachers explained the baptismal ritual as one step in the fulfillment of a divine plan for human salvation that had been put in place from the beginning of time and was foreshadowed by events described in the scriptures. These prophetic events were understood as prefiguring baptism, and included Noah’s rescue from the Great Flood and the Israelites’s passage through the Red Sea. Thus, Christian baptism was not something that emerged de novo, but belonged to the history of Israel and part of God’s salvific intention. This perspective imparted the authority of antiquity to the ritual and assured Gentile Christians that they were grafted into a long-standing and divinely favored community.

Yet, membership in that society was not all that baptism promised. For example, cleansing of both personal and inherited (original) sin was achieved through stripping off one’s clothing, receiving pre-baptismal exorcism, renouncing Satan and all his works, confessing faith in Christ, and undergoing a symbolic bath in a pool of water. This purification paralleled the rescue of the righteous Noah and his family and the healing of Naaman the Syrian. As an escape from enslavement to sin, it recalled the story of the People of Israel safely passing through the Red Sea into the Promised Land with the pursuing and evil Pharaoh and his armies representing Satan and his minions.

Incorporation into a new religious family was reflected by the ritual on enrollment, the assignment of sponsors (godparents), imparting the mark of the cross, and encouraging the newly baptized to think of themselves as members of a new race, adopted children, the newest lambs in the Good Shepherd’s flock, or members of a cohort: soldiers, priests, or saints. This identity change also was symbolized in the decoration of baptisteries with images of the shepherd with his flock as in Dura Europos, Naples, or the Lateran baptistery in Rome.

Spiritual enlightenment—a central rather than subsidiary (or postbaptismal) act in the early Christian ritual—was accomplished by the imposition of the bishop’s hand and anointing with chrism, the consecrated oil. It was symbolized by a postbaptismal procession with lit torches or lamps. The physical surrounding featured images of the descending dove to reinforce the importance of this part of the ritual. Normally an action restricted to the bishop, this confirmation ceremony eventually became detached from the water bath in order to accommodate the growing practice of baptism soon after birth. Nevertheless, even those baptized on their deathbeds, without the presence of a bishop, hoped that they might receive this gift of the Holy Spirit in the next life. Salvation required it no less than the ritual of water immersion.

Death and rebirth, as well as being joined to Christ’s own death and resurrection, were signified by the understanding that the stripping of the body and its immersion in the font represented death, while emerging from the font and being clothed in a white garment was like coming from the mother’s womb as a newborn baby. The newly baptized were assured that they had become heirs of God’s covenantal promises and urged to think of themselves as brothers and sisters, children of one father (God) and one mother (Church). This aspect of baptism was supported by two key passages in the New Testament: Jesus’ conversation with the rabbi Nicodemus about whether one could reenter a mother’s womb to be reborn (John 3.3–5), and Paul’s declaration in his epistle to the Romans, that in baptism one participates in Christ’s death and resurrection (Rom 6.5). The shape of the baptismal font, either as cruciform or as recalling the mother’s womb or birth canal, was one way this aspect of baptism was symbolized.

Although all of these baptismal motifs aimed at individual transformation, the last has a universal or cosmic significance. In this respect baptism was linked to the return of the entire human race to Paradise. Yet, while each newly baptized Christian represented Adam and Eve, he or she also testified to God’s plan to return everyone to the state of prefallen innocence. Perhaps even more than the human race, this eschatological significance would bring about the restoration of creation itself. Symbolized in many ways, both in ritual and text, this is also illuminated through the octagonal shape of baptisteries and fonts, as the number eight indicates the first day of the new creation. Walls, floors, and even the fonts themselves were often covered with allusions to paradise: trees, birds, vines, flowers, deer drinking at streams, and pools of fish.

Thus, early Christian baptism was a synthetic, corporeal, and tremendously sensory experience as well as a spiritual and intellectual one. Symbols and actions, space and gestures, words and pictures all contributed to the ways those who received the ritual experienced it and understood its many purposes.

Robin Jensen is Luce Chancellor’s Professor of the History of Christian Art and Worship at Vanderbilt University. Her most recent books are Baptismal Imagery in Early Christianity (Baker Academic, 2012) and, with J. Patout Burns, Jr., Christianity in Roman Africa: The Development of Its Practices and Beliefs (Eerdmans, 2014).

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