The Spiritual and the Sacramental in the Theology of Baptism

Abstract

"THE QUESTION has often been raised whether Paul was a sacramentarian in the sense that he regarded the sacraments, particularly baptism, as essential to salvation. That the question can be posed in this form shows how much our outlook upon this subject has been conditioned by the emphasis of centuries upon the sacramental or institutional side of Christianity, and the inevitable reaction to this which took place at the Reformation and resulted in the main stress being laid upon the more purely spiritual aspect of personal relationships with God understood as the essence of Christianity. An unfortunate, though inevitable, result of the cleavage between the Catholic and Reformed schools of theology was that a false antithesis was raised between the spiritual and sacramental, as if these two aspects of Christianity were mutually exclusive and could not be harmonised. The emphasis of the ancient Catholic Church tended to be one-sided, so that the belief became current that baptism was the chief means of making Christians"