Christian Ritualizing and the Baptismal Process: Liturgical Explorations toward a Realized Baptismal Ecclesiology

By Susan Marie Smith and Louis Weil

Most people, even non-Christians, know that Christians gather for worship once a week, and that they are right there to support each other when there is a baptism or a wedding or a funeral. But what about other poignant, vulnerable, or life-changing times? How does the church help people handle changes that in the past, in Christendom, were considered "secular"? Does the church have a role at retirement when one's ministry changes, or when a family's children leave home and familiar patterns seem to grind to a halt? Is there any rite possible for someone who is called to Christian ministry but not to ordination? Or to someone whose vows are broken in divorce? Christian Ritualizing and the Baptismal Process asserts that baptism marks the beginning of a process of participation in Christ's ministry, so that no part of life can finally be considered secular. Susan Marie Smith shows how every passage, healing, and ministry vocation is "holy," and she lays the groundwork needed for every church to create the rituals necessary to lament and celebrate the endings and beginnings that happen in every Christian life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Nov 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781630878146

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Christian Ritualizing and the Baptismal Process

Liturgical Explorations toward a Realized Baptismal Ecclesiology

Susan Marie Smith

With a Foreword by Louis Weil

2008.Pickwick_logo.jpg

Christian Ritualizing and the Baptismal Process

Liturgical Explorations toward a Realized Baptismal Ecclesiology

Princeton Theological Monograph Series 174

Copyright © 2012 Susan Marie Smith. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Pickwick Publications

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isbn 13: 978-1-60899-741-1

eisbn 13: 978-1-63087-814-6

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Smith, Susan Marie.

Christian ritualizing and the baptismal process : liturgical explorations toward a realized baptismal ecclesiology / Susan Marie Smith ; with a foreword by Louis Weil.

xiv + 272 pp. ; 23 cm. — Includes bibliographical references and index.

Princeton Theological Monograph Series 174

isbn 13: 978-1-60899-741-1

1. Baptism. 2. Baptism—History of Doctrines. I. Title. II. Series.

bv811.3 s59 2012

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

Princeton Theological Monograph Series

K. C. Hanson, Charles M. Collier, D. Christopher Spinks, and Robin Parry, Series Editors

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Foreword

The recovery of the central role that baptism is understood to play in the Christian life has been a major development in the church during the past several decades. This recovery affects far more than merely the norms for the celebration of the Christian rites of Initiation. For the average person in the pew, the most obvious change has been the shift from the common practice of scheduling baptism as a quasi-private event concerning only the family and godparents of the child to the establishment of having the rite of baptism take place at the primary Sunday liturgy, with the entire congregation present. This one change alone signaled that baptism is not a private event understood to effect the salvation of the child as one individual, to a context in which the clear implication is that this rite is related to the life of the church as a whole.

Yet this is only one aspect of the developments related to the recovery of a sense of the fundamental role of baptism in the church’s life. This recovery is related to our understanding of the Eucharist as well. Our understanding of Sunday as the preeminent day of the Eucharist because of its being the day of our Lord’s resurrection, reinforces the link to baptism since it is in baptism that all of the baptized are united with the death and resurrection of Christ. In that sense, the Sunday Eucharist is the weekly renewal of our baptismal identity. The memorial at the heart of all forms of the Eucharistic Prayer is the remembrance of his death and resurrection, which is proclaimed in each form of the prayer and with which the whole body of believers is united in its own self-offering: Recalling his death, resurrection, and ascension, we offer you these gifts. Our oblation of the bread and wine in the eucharistic action is at the same time the offering of ourselves, our souls and bodies.

We should note also that the recovery of the centrality of baptism has played an important role in the renewal of the understanding of ministry in the life of the church. For centuries, ministry was identified almost entirely with the work of the ordained ministers of the church. A major aspect of the recovery of the significance of baptism has been a growing awareness that all the members of the church are, by virtue of their baptism, called to the work of ministry. This does not devalue the importance of the ministries of the ordained, but it sees them within the larger context of the ministries of all members of the church according to the particular gifts of each member, all these gifts serving to build up the common life of all the baptized. The ministries of the ordained bishops, priests, and deacons relate to a particular aspect of the Christian life linked to the celebration of Word and Sacrament. That is the specific area of responsibility which ordination places upon the candidates when they are ordained.

All of this suggests that baptism is not merely a past event in the life of each Christian but rather it continues to operate in shaping the context of daily living. The past ritual event is thus embodied in a life-long process, so that daily each Christian is called to live into their baptism as their life unfolds. This suggests that baptism begins a process of continual growth which culminates in a Christian’s final oblation at the time of their physical death. In this perspective, the entire life of a Christian is lived within the framework which baptism creates.

This renewed understanding of baptism links us to an ancient doctrine that has received long overdue attention in recent decades, a doctrine known among the early Fathers both east and west as entheosis or deification. Without question, this term can cause anxiety, and yet it is a well-established teaching that relates particularly to a renewed understanding of baptism. Irenaeus is thought to have been the first to have expressed it: God made himself man that man might become God.¹ This teaching is echoed in the writings of Athanasius, Gregory Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa. After them, this teaching is repeated down through the centuries, but with particular vigor in Eastern Christianity. The doctrine is understood to refer to the putting on of Christ by initiating a dynamic unfolding of the work of the Holy Spirit in the life of each of the newly baptized. Although not generally well known among Anglicans, A. M. Allchin has shown the place that this teaching has held in the Anglican tradition, beginning with Richard Hooker, and including Lancelot Andrewes, Charles Wesley, and E. B. Pusey. As Allchin states,

the doctrine of our deification, our becoming partakers of the divine nature by God’s grace, is inseparably and necessarily bound up with the other two doctrines which stand at the heart of classical Christian faith and life, the doctrine of God as Trinity, and the doctrine of the incarnation of God the Word. All three doctrines belong together, and it may be our neglect of the one which has made us uncertain about the others . . . God who is utterly beyond his creation yet comes to be present at the heart of his creation comes to identify himself with his creation in order to lift it up into union with himself. This union, established once for all in Christ, is constantly renewed in varying ways in the coming of the Spirit.²

Deification is thus the hope of all Christians: it is the fulfillment of God’s acts in creation, the incarnation, and in the sending of the Holy Spirit; it is the fulfillment to which baptism points us and which is the fundamental orientation of the Christian’s life. It embodies our participation in the divine nature.³

It is probably evident to all of us that this is a vision of the meaning of baptism that is profoundly ecclesial, which roots our individual existence in the corporate body of the church. It will be clear as well that this is not a vision of baptism that sees it as an isolated event in the past but rather as the beginning of a life-long baptismal process. It is in that regard that the common baptismal practice for many centuries has failed: when baptism has been understood as an individual salvation-event in the past with a narrow focus on saving the candidate from the fires of hell, it is probably inevitable that its being the beginning of a process of deification will be scarcely perceived.

The critical question is: how is the reality of putting on Christ to be embodied in the life of each baptized person? Our response must involve the recognition that baptism does not end with the ritual event, but rather is the beginning of a process for which all the members of the church must fulfill their appropriate roles. It is in this context that the work of Susan Marie Smith in the past several years is so important for the renewal of the life of the church and for a more adequate realization of the recovery of the significance of baptism for the whole of the Christian life. One of the great strengths of her teaching is that it unites theory and practice. The theological foundations of this renewal of baptism have been taught in our seminaries for generations, but the pastoral implications of that teaching have seldom informed our ritual practice at the parish level. Christian Ritualizing and the Baptismal Process offers the church an important resource for pastors and teachers to begin the reshaping of our baptismal norms and the recovery of a fully ecclesial sense of our membership in the Body of Christ.

Louis Weil

Hodges-Haynes Professor of Liturgics Emeritus, Church Divinity School of the Pacific Berkeley, California

1. Irenaeus, Adversus haereses V, preface.

2. A. M. Allchin, Participation in God (Wilton, CN: Morehouse-Barlow, 1988), 5.

3. 2 Pet 1:4.

Acknowledgments

It is an inspiring humility as well as a great pleasure to offer my thanks to those whose various maieutic influences enabled the dissertation that underlies this book to be written. My committee inspired, challenged, questioned, prodded, and affirmed me through the doctoral program as a whole and this dissertation in particular: Professor Louis Weil, chair; Professor Michael Aune, Professor Catherine Bell, and Professor Jim Fowler. It has been an honor and a pleasure to work with you, and I am grateful beyond measure. I wish also to thank Professor Don Saliers, Professor Duncan Ferguson, Professor Mary Gerhart, and Professor Mary McGann whose work and friendship have inspired me to begin and to complete this constructive project.

Scholarship requires free time and more material and technology than one would ever imagine. I have been blessed with friends who believed in this project, that it would finally come to fruition, and who supported it (and me) with the means to have bed, board, computers, and community. For these I give deep thanks to Carol and Richard White, Nancy Talbott, Pat Gaines, Judy and Jack Dominic, Karen Hunt, Ed and Cristina Larson, Carol Westpfahl, Katherine Bell, Elizabeth Morrissett, Larry Spannagel, Meg Mealy, Judith Berling and Rhoda Bunnell, Sharon Korwan, Jerry and Randi Walker, Pat and Dennis Sullivan, Wesley and Joyce Veatch, Priscilla Camp, Mary and Malcolm McWilliams, Cheryl and Roy Pettyjohn, and Bill and Catherine Beachy at whose lake cabin the final revisions were made.

I am grateful to the Episcopal Daughters of the King Master’s Fund, the Anchorage Soroptimists, and St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Anchorage, for prayer and financial sustenance. Special thanks to the Datatel Angelfire Fund and the Graduate Theological Union financial aid gurus. Spiritual guides kept and keep me in the former: Maisie Ferrari, S. Arlene Boyd, RSM, S. Marguerite Buchanan, RSM, the Rev. Zoila Schoenbrun, S. Mary Jo Polak, OSB, and S. Therese Elias, OSB.

The Episcopal Evangelical Educational Society awarded me a grant to consider baptismal ecclesiology with reference to parishes. Barbara Smith pointed me toward the Russian Orthodox theologians. Lyle Settle offered his computer expertise. Barbara Hazzard, OSB, gave me a quiet room and the means to meditate. Diana Lynch opened her house for meditation and hugs. Betty Newman wrote news and encouragement every week. The Sisters of Order of Saint Benedict in St. Joseph, Minnesota, have prayed for me for ten years, sine qua non dissertatio.

The women who conducted rituals for me changed my life and showed me the life-changing power of ritualization, which pressed me to do this research. The Anchorage women sent me off with a Blessing Way: Lucia Roncalli, Suzan Nightingale, Mo Dursi, Jane Oakley, Kristin Hanson, Barbara Flaherty, Julia, and Kate. Later, Judith Lethin, Jan Thurston, and Nancy Talbott gathered the women for a pre-ordination re-birthing ceremony. The Cincinnati Grail women prepared me for priestly ordination with a heavenly feast: my thanks to Judy Dominic, Josy Trageser, Mary Ball, Gayle Reichert, Paula Janson, and Brenda, Sandi, Kay, Audrey, Bobby, Dode, Sue, Christine, Nancy, Valerie, and all the other vestment-makers they represent.

My aunts and uncles, Margot and Leonard Smith and Shirley and Phil Woodworth, and my parents, Ruth and Richard Smith, sustained me over the long haul and on many levels. I am grateful to them for dinner parties and tea, the primary sacrament out of which the others arise. For the hospitable sacraments I also give thanks to Nancy and Tom, Rhoda and Judith, Paul and Bill, Claire Creese, the Green Chair Society, Susan Alison-Hatch and the Berkeley jogging team: Margaret, Sally, Andrea, and Meredyth; my partners in creativity, Claire Creese, Richard Stevens, Lea Durard, and Rosemary Dauenhauer; and my immediate family: Carol, Rich, Warren, Wendy, Christopher, Kelly, Amy, Natalie, and Sylvie. My especial heartfelt thanks I offer to Mary McGann, RSCJ, sister in spirit and partner in writing.

My deepest gratitude I offer to my parents, to whose memory this book is dedicated: Richard J. Smith (d. August 25, 2001) and Ruth Elizabeth Baird Smith (d. April 15, 2007). Both were the children of Army officers, and so grew up comfortable with ritual. My father initiated neighborhood rituals everywhere we lived (game day, Fourth of July parade). My mother was the first priest in the family, who taught me how redemption is effected through ritualization. I give thanks to her for life and love, for community and celebration. Her father was a writer; I inherited his writing books, and his motivation to write.

And to friends and family who make up my community, I offer my abundant thanks, for you fill my heart with joy.

For sixty years I have been forgetful every minute

But not for a second has this flowing toward me stopped or slowed.

I deserve nothing.

Today I recognized that I am the guest the mystics talk about.

I play this living music for my host.

Everything today is for the host.

Every thing today is for the host.

—Rumi

—Susan Marie Smith

Season after Pentecost, 2010

Abbreviations

AAR American Academy of Religion

AH Irenaeus, Adversus omnes Haereses

BCP Book of Common Prayer

BEM Baptism, Eucharist, Ministry

CO Calvini Opera

CR Corpus Reformatorum

NPNF Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers

PL Patrologia Latina

1

After the Water the Fire

Experiencing the Spirit of the Baptismal Process after Baptism

This bread signifies to you how you ought to love unity. It was made out of many grains of wheat, which were separate, but were united by application of water, by a kind of rubbing together, and baked with fire. So have you been ground together by the fast and the exorcism, wetted in baptism, and baked by the fire of Christ and the mystery of the Holy Spirit . . . Notice how at Pentecost the Holy Spirit comes: He comes in fiery tongues, to inspire the love whereby we are to burn towards God and despise the world, and our chaff be burnt away, and our heart refined like gold. So the Holy Spirit comes—after the water the fire—and you are made bread, which is the Body of Christ: and here is the symbol of unity.¹

This passionate, animated sermon-excerpt from Augustine is about the eucharist, but the imagery is deeply baptismal as well. After the water comes the Spirit with fiery tongues, to inspire the love whereby we are to burn towards God and despise the world, and our chaff be burnt away, and our heart refined like gold. The Christian life sounds like a process, intense, hot, that will change us forever—and turn us into food, into bread, but more—we will be changed into Christ, into the very Body of Christ.

Sparked by Vatican Council II (1962–1965), the late twentieth century brought a revolution in thinking about baptism. The major Western Christian denominations revised their liturgical rites of baptism, a process that required rethinking connections between what we believe, what we pray, and what we enact. Saying and doing are not the same, and doing is likely to have a greater impact. Theology that is not translated into action or is not manifest in rite or prayer, art or symbol, is empty theory.

—and you are made bread. The fire of Christ and the mystery of the Holy Spirit act. But they do not act theoretically or in general; they act on particular human persons. They act in those persons to inspire them so that they will come to burn towards God. They act in local communities so that each and all are transformed. Is this a theological statement about God, or is this inspiring poetry that will change the person who hears it?

For years I have understood that the study of how it is, though important, is inadequate for drawing a person toward the reality of it. The named theology of life after death is nameless before a grieving person, where explanations are insults and compassion requires silence or poetry. Our words about God are lovely in their proper context, but they are shallow in those moments when Godself is needed; then, it is not our words but our compassionate witness to God’s presence or absence that matters. Theology is a term that has been applied to the first, to the words about God. A term that applies to the second, the being there, the presence, action, happening, doing, or working, is liturgy.

Liturgy is a broad term that, however, has been used with various limits. It has referred only to the eucharist or only to Sunday morning worship. In its broader meaning it has referred to worship and to sacramental enactments, but usually in traditions that hold worship to be authoritative. The study of liturgy as authorized worship is evolving. While sacramental theology (= what worship should mean) began very early in the church (e.g., Augustine of Hippo, late fourth/ early fifth century), the study in the Western church of the worship act (= what actually happens in worship) is more recent. Beginning with instruction to priests as to what to do and say during worship, i.e., a study of rubrics (How do we conduct the rite correctly?), scholarship moved at the beginning of the twentieth century² to liturgical history (What were the texts and sequence of former rites in various provinces?). In the 1960s,³ a Russian Orthodox priest-theologian, Alexander Schmemann, linked theology with the poetry of human experience by asserting that liturgy, the praise of God, is a source of theology. His assertion is associated with the birth of liturgical theology (What meaning should a particular rite communicate?). The development since 1977 of the field of Ritual Studies,⁴ which enabled insights from the human sciences to affect the study of liturgy, led Mark Searle in 1983 to name a fourth: pastoral liturgical studies ("What meaning does a particular rite communicate to the worshippers?").⁵ This more recent field, incorporating ritual theory, focuses on the empirical study of actual worship enactments (which includes factors beyond the text,⁶ such as gesture, music, and space) and on the lived experience of the particular worshippers (which includes an experience of God that may or may not match the words about God carefully prescribed by the liturgist-theologians). It is pastoral liturgical studies that points to the importance of addressing the pastoral dimension of worship: its effect upon the worshippers. It is the effect of worship upon the worshippers that allows the personal story of a baptismal life to be told. It is the effect upon the worshippers that suggests that baptismal theology ought to take account of the baptized; and it is the effect on the worshippers that leads to the question of the role of liturgy in the ongoing growth and formation of the baptized.

Taking account of the baptized brings into serious relief the foundational issue at the heart of liturgical theology: namely, the relationship of the theology of sacrament to the theology of lived Christian experience. The problem arises because the theologies held close to the bone for most of 1,500 years have been concerned with the church’s sacramental mediation of God’s grace, as distinct from the worshipper’s reception of or response to that grace. Among many reasons why this may be so is the elusive and diverse nature of experience and the difficulty of identifying, much less studying, human reception and response. Human experience varies widely; it is often unobservable; and it is always unmeasurable. While we may, from an experiential point of view, affirm that ritual events mediate a variety of meanings,⁷ how shall we interpret them or take account of them? Shall the varied meanings of baptism for each individual be considered with the same valence as the church’s intent to unite the baptized with Christ in the paschal mystery? This focuses the problem, for the ecclesial body is not prepared to suggest that baptism, for example, means whatever you want it to mean as crass relative individualism would have it. As a bishop from my own Anglican tradition, Colin Buchanan, has suggested, the church is not prepared to offer two baptisms, one for infants and another for adults,⁸ according to the experience quotient of the one baptized. Rather, there is one Lord, one faith, one baptism (Eph 4:5). Sacramental theology affirms that God acts in baptism, whether the candidate consciously experiences anything or not.

This tension between what occurs and what is experienced is not only a twenty-first-century issue, not only a Western problem, not only a Christian concern. Anthropologists Sally F. Moore and Barbara G. Myerhoff place the question within the study of human ritual and name the axes of the tension doctrinal efficacy and operational efficacy.⁹ Moore claims that both secular and religious rituals exist within the referential bounds of what they declare and what they demonstrate,¹⁰ what they say and what they do. As Myerhoff observes:

What Moore calls the doctrinal efficacy of religious ritual is provided by the explanations a religion itself gives of how and why ritual works. The explanation is within the religious system and is part of its internal logic. The religion postulates by what causal means a ritual, if properly performed, should bring about the desired results. A religious ritual refers to the unseen cosmic order, works through it and operates on it directly through the performance . . . Doctrinal efficacy is a matter of postulation. As the intrinsic explanation, it need merely be affirmed.¹¹

Doctrinal efficacy must be distinguished from social/psychological effectiveness, here called operational efficacy . . . [O]utcome or consequence . . . is attributed to operational efficacy. Results, successes, failures, are part of the operational effects of a ritual. These are the empirical questions in analysis. For example, healing ceremonies may or may not make a patient feel better. Political ceremonies may or may not succeed in rearranging images, may succeed or fail in attaching positive or negative balances to certain ideas or persons. Rites may vary greatly in successfully convincing their participants and communicating their messages. Such questions about communicative, social/psychological effects are operational.¹²

Michael Aune refers to these as two poles on a continuum, doctrinal efficacy on the descriptive end and operational efficacy on the interpretive end.¹³ Operational efficacy has to do with the experience of the worshipper.¹⁴

The relationship between the doctrinal and operational efficacies of sacramental liturgy, and the need for a hermeneutic to render them mutually coherent and accountable, were brought into high relief for me as I heard a pastor struggle with this very question. The pastor was preaching at the funeral of a woman we shall call Margaret. The sermon attempted to make a link between the meaning (or theology) of baptism and its result or working out in the life of the deceased woman, an issue all the more stark because of the character contrast between Margaret and her now-widower, John. Margaret was a deeply spiritual and pastoral person with a profound sense of community and of beauty. Her mourners included many members of the congregation who had been recipients of her hospitality, her casseroles, her encouraging notes, her love of children, and her faithfulness even in times of despair. If the Christian life can be measured in ethics and in such fruits of the Spirit as love, joy, and hope,¹⁵ Margaret stood radiant within her community. In contrast to Margaret’s radiance was the thick opacity of her husband John. While John also loved the church, he remained unconverted by the gospel. He loved and accepted two of his children but condemned and rejected the other two. His neglect and disparagement of his wife tainted not only their home life but extended beyond in his extra-marital affairs. While understandably vulnerable during the last months of Margaret’s illness when she was bedridden and helpless, John articulated his hope that she would die soon, refusing certain medical procedures for her. His open affair during this period with a woman in the congregation was excruciating and agonizing to family and friends. Yet both Margaret and John had been baptized. Both were active members and supporters of the church.

In the funeral homily, the pastor appropriately sought to connect Margaret’s union with Christ, both in her baptism and now at her death, with the Paschal Mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection. What is it that makes her a saint? he asked rhetorically. Is it her death? No: it does not take death to bring us to the communion of saints. And death does not suffice for sainthood. But Christ in his cross and resurrection enfolded us in a cloak of righteousness, so that when God looks upon us, it is not our blemishes that God sees. It was at Margaret’s baptism that she was cloaked with the garment of righteousness, enfolded in Christ. And it was at her baptism that her sainthood began. As we celebrate Margaret’s life today, we could simply say, ‘her baptism took.’

What does it mean for baptism to take? Is this a metaphor of inoculation, as in the yellow fever vaccination took? Or of fabric dyeing, as in, we dipped both nylon and cotton into the purple dye, and the cotton cloth took, but the nylon didn’t? Or is this a metaphor of tree grafting, where a branch from one tree is engrafted into another, and if the fluids flow between them and the engrafted branch bears fruit, then we know the graft took?

Whichever metaphor we choose, to say that baptism took implies that it is possible that it would not take. In this situation of such sharp family contrasts, would we say that it took for Margaret, but not for John? Or is it only at death that we finally know whether the baptism took? If it had been John’s funeral, would the pastor have shaken his head, and moaned, In the case of this man, even though he had a good sense of humor and came to church week after week, he was nonetheless abusive to his children, controlling and insensitive, unfaithful to his wife, angry at her for living to the point where he had to take care of her. He was childish, a man with no maturity—and we simply have to acknowledge that his baptism didn’t take.

The idea of baptism taking or not taking is at the heart of the tension between the understanding of sacramental action, on the one hand, as an action of God and, on the other, as pastorally effective in the lives of the recipients. From the standpoint of doctrinal efficacy in a wide body of Christian denominations, Holy Baptism is understood to be God’s action. The doctrine of God’s sovereignty prohibits any notion of efficacy as contingent upon human manipulation. God chooses persons as part of a covenantal people. When they respond freely to God’s invitation, expressed in Scripture, tradition, and theology, by coming to the baptismal font, God acts. Through God’s ministers, God unites the persons with Christ in his death and resurrection, seals them with the Holy Spirit, and makes them part of the eucharistic body of Christ. It is God who initiates and God who acts. It is God who calls people into covenant and God who grants grace to the people to keep the covenant. From this perspective, baptism must be effective. Any notion that baptism didn’t take would theologically challenge the notion of God’s sovereignty and omnipotence—which is theologically impossible. From the standpoint of doctrinal efficacy, baptism is effective. There can be no question of its not taking.

What, then, of this funeral sermon? Was the pastor unfamiliar with the doctrine of sin and the fact that frail, finite humans will always tend to fall away from the grace and purity granted them in baptism? It seems to me likely that this pastor knew all about sin, and probably all about John’s sin. The problem of holding Christians accountable to their covenant with God is a large one, one which has been dealt with by public and private penance,¹⁶ ostracism and excommunication,¹⁷ prayer, corporate confession, counseling, spiritual direction, and the reconciling rite of Holy Eucharist. John’s problem is a basic human problem. And sin, while fascinating and fundamental, is not our topic here.

Rather, I think this preacher was proclaiming a celebration of Margaret, a baptismal life well lived. Yet Margaret was a sinner, too. The revealing point which the homilist uncovered with the idea of baptism taking or not taking was the implicit tension between the sacramental efficacy claimed by churches’ doctrinal theologies and the very real issue of a lived Christian life: between doctrinal and operational efficacy. The contrast between John and Margaret reveals grave differences among the lived totality of Christians’ lives, works of art of varying beauty, perceivable as a whole only from their end. Margaret’s baptismal life is worth celebration because it’s beautiful and remarkable—because not all the baptized live lives of grace.

Sin alone is inadequate to account for the discrepancy we witness between doctrinal efficacy of baptism (i.e., God acts to make this person a new creation, united with Christ forever) and operational efficacy, which varies greatly, even for the Margarets of the world who seek to live lives worthy of the Water and the Fire.

The premise of this book is that the life of the baptized is a process, in which developmental stages, or crises, or turning points, afford opportunities to affirm or disaffirm the unity with Christ forged at baptism.

If the baptized life is a continuing process of journeying into Christ, then