Baptism — the Basis of Church Unity?: The Question of Baptism in Faith and Order

3. Regarding what is said about the relationship between the gift of God and the human response of faith, "many reactions believe that the necessary inter-relation between divine initiative and human response as expressed in the scriptures has been maintained both in these paragraphs and throughout the entire text".(4)

4. The responses generally approve the emphasis on the priority of God's initiative:

   The balance held in the text between God's gracious gift and the human
   response of faith, the emphasis on baptism as a decisive beginning of an
   initiatory process, and the importance of the community of faith as the
   context for the individual's act of faith and growth in faith are welcomed
   as appropriate bases by many for holding together the two practices of what
   the text calls baptism of believers and baptism of infants.(5)

5. The insertion of the faith response of the candidate within the framework of the faith of the believing community.

6. The portrayal of initiation as a process.

7. The insistence on the ethical implications of baptism.

8. The relationship between common baptism and the imperative of witness to unity.

While the convergences which BEM has identified concerning the meaning of baptism and the relationship between baptism and faith have thus been widely confirmed, it also becomes evident from reading the responses that (1) there are several problems which BEM has not really dealt with but the churches feel must be addressed, and (2) some of the problems surrounding baptism are more serious than BEM portrays them to be. On these points the divergences are still too great to allow us to speak with one voice. The most important of these points are the following:

1. The question remains open whether the rite is to be understood as effecting or signifying the elements of the Christian life into which the baptized is initiated. This is the question of the relationship between the sign and what is signified. Linked to it is the question of sacramentality. It is clear also from what was said in the Faith and Order text on Confessing the One Faith (1991) and by the fifth world conference on Faith and Order (1993) that there is still a difference between churches with a sacramental concept of baptism and those with a symbolic concept.(6)

2. A related area of unclarity is that of grace and the ecclesiological dimension of baptismal grace.

3. While there is some convergence regarding baptism as the beginning of a process, there is a certain lack of clarity about the relationship between baptism, chrismation, confirmation and admission to the Lord's supper. Some insist on chrismation as part of the rite of baptism, others understand chrismation as a different sacrament from baptism, while still others do not recognize chrismation but require a personal confession of faith before admission to the eucharist.

4. The greatest divergence evident in the responses concerns the question of the practice of infant baptism over against the practice of adult baptism. For example, the Baptist churches are generally "not very happy with the way in which the text holds the two baptismal practices together. The text ... has too easily dismissed as fundamental incompatibility between infant and adult believer's baptism. They detect a theological difficulty in maintaining one baptism in two different forms."(7) One Baptist church suggests that "there are still theological difficulties involved in maintaining that the church has one baptism in two different forms that are on the same level".(8) That is, they reject BEM's proposed solution of understanding the different practices as two forms of the same baptism.