Baptism is a Myth

Frederick Arthur Bridgman depicts the defeat of Pharaoh in "The Reuniting of the Waters"

“Do not think you can say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham.” -Matthew 3:9

I once heard someone say that “BIBLE” is an acronym which stands for “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.” That’s cute, but should we take that seriously as a way to interpret the Bible? Is the Bible simply a list of instructions? When Jerome of Stridon was translating the Bible into Latin in the late 4th and early 5th centuries, he translated the Hebrew word Torah into the Latin word Lex, or “law” in English. There is good reason, however, to believe that “law” as we understand that word in modern English has become far too narrow in its meaning to replace the word Torah, which has to do with the customs, teachings, and ways of its people. For an Israelite to break Torah, it would be less like a legal infraction and more like an act of running away from home.

The idea of the Bible as mere instruction breaks down when we consider that so much of it is story. Yes, there are commandments and we ought to take them seriously, but even in the midst of a series of commandments we are not far removed from the overarching narrative sense of the Bible. What’s more, it is a drama that we are invited to participate in, and one of the most dramatic ways in which we can do that is through baptism.

The first biblical depiction of water is far more symbolic and mythical than the way we tend to think of it in the modern world. In the creation story of Genesis, water represents chaos; it is a place in which no life can be sustained and out of which God forms creation in all of its ordered beauty. Retaining this sense of water as chaos helps us read other biblical stories which feature water and understand them in a deeper way, like the stories of the flood, of Jonah, and of the exodus. The sea of reeds in the story of the exodus gets translated in English as the “Red Sea” because that’s what the Greeks called it, but we allow this attempt at translation to become an unfortunate exercise in missing the point if we focus too much on the Red Sea as a geographical position rather than as an instance of the sea-as-chaos image that the Bible has already provided for us.

The gospels depict scenes of Jesus living out the story of Israel, and in so doing, being the Israel that the historical people of Israel could not be. His baptism and subsequent fast in the wilderness for forty days should make us think of Israel’s exodus and forty-year wandering in the wilderness. When Jesus–the man who is Life Himself–enters the water, he inverts its mythical significance: It no longer represents chaos and death. Instead, it becomes a path to new life. This is nothing less than a creation event. The Holy Spirit descends and hovers over Christ in the baptismal waters as he hovered over the waters before the creation. When Jesus tells Nicodemus that “unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God” he isn’t drawing on brand new concepts with which Nicodemus should have been totally unfamiliar.

When we are baptized into the Church, the story of the exodus becomes our story. Yahweh is creating a new nation out of the chaos of the sea. God, the great liberator, frees us from the gods of this world which had previously enslaved us in our sin. In a grand inverting of the narrative, the chaos and death that the spiritual powers over this world had intended for us has instead defeated them. What we experience in our baptism is nothing less dramatic than what the ancient Israelites experienced in that story.

In the book of Revelation, John is given an image of the age to come. He sees “a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.” There is no need to take this to mean that there will be no water, but no more chaos and no more death. The transformative work that Jesus began in his own baptism is finally accomplished.

The Church has done well in understanding baptism’s necessity as a commandment to follow, citing the Great Commission in Matthew 28, or the exhortation of the apostles in Acts 2:38. It could further infer its importance by following the example of the early Church as depicted in the conversion accounts in the book of Acts. It has not done as well in my view, however, in explaining how baptism joins us to the grand mythic narrative that the Bible is telling. I don’t want us to stop being an Acts 2:38 Church. I only suggest that when we talk about baptism, we be an Exodus 14 Church as well.