I am baptistic in orientation. I grew up as the son of a Conservative Baptist pastor. I have shed many distinctives that Baptist doctrine is comprised of, but one doctrine I haven’t shed is the Baptist understanding of Baptism; some would call it Zwinglian, or the memorial position. What I affirm can also be identified as credobaptism; in other words, my position is that a person who is baptized in water must first be a believer in Jesus Christ. I see baptism as a witness to the church and the world that a person has confessed faith in Christ, by the faith of Christ. As a constructive innovation on my position, or we might say, as a ‘dogmatic’ turn, I also maintain that the reality of baptism is first grounded in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. I take Christ’s baptism for us to be decisive, indeed the baptism that sets Christ himself a part for us unto God; indeed in the perfect tense. As such, it is as we are brought into union with Christ’s humanity, by the Holy Spirit, that we partake in the sanctified humanity, the initiate humanity of the risen Christ wherein baptism comes to make sense. As a result, I see baptism as a signum (sign) of God’s reality (res) for us in Christ. As such I see the faith of Christ as the ground upon which baptism makes ultimate sense, in regard to its relationship to justification before God. In this way I can see baptism in a riffed way on the Calvinian motif of what he calls duplex gratia (double grace); I say riffed because I am taking that holistic way of thinking, in regard to salvation, and applying that to what takes place in the baptism of Christ. It is because Christ first trusted the Father for us that we might trust in God. It is in this Spirit moved trust that we see the Son lovingly condescend and assume humanity with the purpose of dying, being buried, and rising again as the new creature of God that we might, in and through union with His humanity, also partake in the new creation that God has destined us for in His pre-destination to not be God without us, but with us. It is in this frame that I see baptism making sense as a ‘sign’ to the world that we have become participants in the Divine nature through the new life we have entered into through the baptized humanity of Jesus Christ.

As a result of my position on baptism I see it grounded in a reality that has objective or ‘carnal’ reality whether we affirm it or not. This is, again, is why I see baptism primarily as a locus that has to do with witness-bearing to the world that God in Christ is for us and not against us. It bears witness to the reality of what Christ has accomplished for us as a work that only God good undertake in our stead as He entered into our status that we might enter His through the risen humanity of Jesus Christ. In this frame baptism is not grounded in the ‘believer’ per se, but in the One who believes for us; in Jesus Christ. So, there is a de jure and ontological character to baptism that is not contingent upon my belief, per se. But it is as I come to a spiritual union with Christ, as that is actuated by the Spirit in and from the faith of Christ that I as a believer come to the point that my confession, grounded in Christ’s, is attested to by entering into the waters of baptism that Christ alone entered first for me. It is in this action that the new creaturely reality I have already entered into, first because Christ entered into it for me in his vicarious humanity that becomes formally acknowledged as my purposeful confession of and for Christ; as that has been realized and fully realized in the reality of Christ’s baptism for us.