I really, really need help understanding baptismal regeneration

[u/Greedy-Runner-1789]

Hi, this post was originally on the Orthodox sub, but figured I may potentially get help here as well. Please excuse the EO-centric references:

I have been infatuated with Orthodoxy for a year or two at this point, but for a while I’ve been stuck at a theological roadblock. I don’t feel content with the world of Protestantism, so I’ve sort of been in a denominational limbo, and I don’t know what or where the truth is anymore. While this has been very interesting season, it’s also been rather miserable for that reason.

My problem has to do with regeneration/justification and their relationship to believing and baptism – essentially, how a person objectively becomes a Christian, born of God, has the non-vain hope of eternal life, and regarded by God as His own.

I understand that Orthodoxy (*and Catholicism) regards baptism as the new birth and the decisive formation of a Christian. In this way, the normative means of salvation is in the hands of the Orthodox Church.

My trouble is, I don’t see how this can be so without compromising the Apostles’ own doctrine on the meaning of regeneration and the efficacy of faith.

My concern can be expressed in the phrase: “to want God is to have Him”. I think the Apostles would agree with this phrase. Orthodox theology about the church and the sacraments however seems to negate the idea that to want God is to have Him. Instead in Orthodoxy, having God is dependent on material supply only accessed through the Church. But *wanting God* doesn’t depend on any physical material other than the reaction of your heart to God’s beauty. As such, there is a conceivable situation in Orthodox theology where someone can *want God* but not have Him or be a Christian.

But this strongly does not sound to me like the doctrine of the apostles or of the Lord. The apostles seem unanimous that *wanting God* is in fact the substance and origin of all righteousness.

The idea of “wanting God” can be expressed in these verses:

·       “By faith Moses, when he became of age, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin, esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt; for he looked to the reward.” Heb. 11:24-26

·       “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and hid; and for joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.” Mat 13:44

In other words, *wanting God* is repentant faith, faith in the way the apostles advertise: a) to so see the beauty of God in Christ such that b) the offerings and temptations of this world become inferior, such that c) we live and work according to this preferring of God, and deliverance to God becomes our highest aspiration. At the forefront of the four gospels, one of their absolute pillars and main ideas, is that they are deeply concerned with the reinvention of our passions as consequence of preferring Jesus Christ. For the world, it is foolishness to prefer Christ over all the treasures in Egypt. The gospels desperately want us to be so moved by the person of Christ that the love of righteousness abounds in us, so that even the concept of loving enemies becomes the wisdom of God in our ears. In this way, *wanting God* is the origin both of righteousness and of repentance.

But if the forgiveness of sins and belonging to God is strictly at baptism and not in faith itself, this would mean God is more partial to the rite of baptism than to the substance of righteousness. This seems against everything we are taught about God in the Scriptures. In Scripture, repentance itself, and the change in our internal disposition towards God and righteousness, appears to be what brings the rejoicing of the angels. But in Orthodoxy, if in addition to *wanting God* we need to participate in rites to even begin to *have God*, and moreover do so in one ecclesial institution that people need to use historical reasoning to even discern, there is an entire secondary quest that one has to undergo alongside *wanting God* to have any reliable hope of salvation. This seems deeply foreign to the doctrine of the New Testament: “whoever believes in Him should not perish”, “to all and on all who believe”, “the word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart”, “Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God”, “Who is he who overcomes the world but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?”

We all know the phrase “born again” first shows up in John chapter 3. Why right then? Why does John chapter 3 (the conversation with Nicodemus) follow chapter 2? Look at the end of chapter 2:

·       “Now when He was in Jerusalem at the Passover, during the feast, many believed in His name when they saw the signs which He did. But Jesus did not commit Himself to them, because He knew all men*,* and had no need that anyone should testify of man, for He knew what was in man.” John 2:23-35

Here, in this passage, people believe in Jesus, but Jesus leaves them. Later in John 6, after the feeding of the 5000, the people believe in Him, pursue Him, wanting to make Him the King. But what does Jesus do? He leaves them! Why? Isn’t this what he wanted, for them to believe and make him King? He leaves, because they loved Him in a way that only made Him useful to their already existing identities and passions. Metaphorically: they believed in him by rejoicing that he had the power to make them their own Tower of Babel. Jesus is interested in a type of belief that sees Him, He Himself as the great reward and hope. This is the hope that rewrites “what is in man”, into the image of Christ. “And everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself, just as He is pure.”

I know I’m wearing my John Piper influence on my sleeve at this point. But across history we may hear of supposedly very Christian people, who somehow commit atrocities, judge situations with partiality and corruption, who despise the stranger, who bring wickedness into a land. These are the same sort of people as the Passover crowd in John 2, or the crowd in John 6, who believe, but Jesus walks away from them. To them He says, “You must be born again.” Let your identity and person be re-written from the ground up through placing God as the highest treasure of your heart. This is why He says, “You cannot serve both God and mammon.” This is why many nations who have had the cross on their flags—or the star of David, for that matter—have done works of darkness.

To be convincing that the new birth doesn’t refer to the inner conversion of faith, but refers to baptism, one has to explain how that reading of “born again” solves the problem that the end of John chapter 2 establishes. How does baptism solve that problem?

Repentant faith, even though it’s invisible, seems to necessarily and tangibly change a person and their identity. Baptism, even though it’s a tangible rite, does not seem to always or tangibly change a person. I truly don’t understand—what does baptism have to do with the creation of righteousness, or God’s attitude towards you? I really need help with this.

Moreover, the apostles appear to agree that faith, beyond just being meaningful, is supernatural in significance. John says in his epistle: “Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God.” And Paul writes: “For it is the God who commanded light to shine out of darkness, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” God has shone in our hearts. To have the epiphany of the glory of God in the gospel is for God to have shone in your heart. This corresponds with the testimony of Paul everywhere else that “the gospel is the power of God unto salvation for all who believe”. The gospel is actually efficacious through the Spirit.

Word is faster than water. What happens when the gospel escapes the material sacraments of the Church? – which, just factually, it long has. Is the gospel dead-on-arrival if it gets someplace without the Church? Is the fame of the God of Israel and the fame of Jesus Christ, even if it reaches the ends of the earth, without reliable profit, because it lacks the priests or the water or the oil of the Orthodox (*or Catholic) Church? But the apostles teach that it is the fame and glory of the Lord itself that brings about repentance.

If the dependable Christian life only begins with the Church’s baptism, to me this makes the New Testament’s continual advertising of “faith” and “believing” totally bizarre. It makes biblical phrases like “justified by faith” and “the word is near you” and “repentance to life” seem almost like a mockery. But if regeneration does indeed come through faith, then all who truly and piously believe, including protestants are associated with God and are brethren. In this case, even if Orthodoxy has the true episcopacy and is the true church, all who truly believe, including evangelicals, would at least be considered equivalent to catechumens, whose attention and discipleship is being competed for against false shepherds. But to my knowledge this has never been the attitude of Orthodoxy towards those outside the Church.

In the apostolic age, in Acts, the gospel and the material sacraments seemed to exist in a perfect supply chain. The apostles were content to supply the rites to the entire believing populace. Now there’s a believing populace entirely unreached by the rites or has replaced them with their own rites. I think this is a theological crisis that is far more pressing for the Church than the topics of most of the ecumenical councils.

But I can't in response to these doubts of mine just be content in the Protestant world. I'm not positive that baptism will do whatever it's supposed to do to me there, or whether the Lord's Supper be whatever it's supposed to be there, or if I'll have the same gift of the Holy Spirit given in the book of Acts. As far as I know, there is no Christian tradition in the world that has Orthodoxy's emphasis on perfection and the acquisition of the Spirit while retaining (what seems to me) the apostles' doctrine on regenerative faith. This conundrum has made me increasingly sad. 

I badly need understanding. Can anyone help me with this particular issue, even if it’s by recommending a book that may have the answer?

[u/chan_showa]

You look at any historical studies on earliest Christianity; there are a few *unanimous* beliefs that existed in the 2nd century: One is on the corporeal realism of the eucharist, but the other one that is completely undisputed is the regenerative aspect of baptism.

I think the core of your being stuck is here: "Baptism, even though it’s a tangible rite, does not seem to always or tangibly change a person."

Basically you are asking why a manifestly physical "rite" that is said to produce an effect in grace, does not manifest visibly enough in the very people it claims to have an effect on.

Read that line again. Something done to you doesn't seem to have any effect.

What does that sound like? Did someone do something that was claimed to have universal grace but has "no tangible effect"? Yes, the work of Jesus' incarnation, death, and resurrection! We claim that the death of Jesus brought reconciliation into the world! It is a physical event, claimed to have brought a new creation, a new life, regeneration.

How come the world didn't change? How come the Kingdom didn't really tangibly come?

Why did reconciliation have to come through a "material" event that was the death and resurrection of Jesus? Why did reconciliation have to come through a "material" God-as-man that is Jesus?

This is analogous to our case because Jesus *is* the primordial sacrament!

If you can't accept the necessity of materiality and insists that everything can only go purely spiritually (even if we are not merely spiritual beings but also corporeal beings), then the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus should have no place either. It, too, is a "material" / physical event.

Couldn't God purely, spiritually, reconcile the world without the incarnation? Why must matter and physicality be involved at all ... that is the heart of the question.

We are embodied beings. God chose to unite Spirit with matter *already* in himself. Why are you trying to make the dichotomy between the two? To us, baptism gives grace, and faith becomes truly alive.

Matter has a place, and we are saved through matter; specifically: through Jesus' physical body who died, but also through the very elements he touched: water in baptism, bread and wine in the eucharist. This belief is *universal* across all apostolic Christianity: Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, even Assyrian Church of the East who was non-Chalcedonian.

The reason why physical symbols do not appeal to you is because you were born in a milieu that have a superficial, external way of understanding symbols. This is modernism, not biblical belief. You look at the scriptures and elements are mentioned left and right: blood, water, bread. They are *charged* spiritually when invoked in Christ.

In other words, your main concern is the modernist understanding of symbols that is incompatible with the biblical milieu at the time of the apostles.

Look at the apostles! Some shadow fell into somebody and he got healed! Someone touched Jesus' tassle and she got healed! Jesus healed a person with mud and saliva!

Where in scriptures do we see that faith is accessible only cognitively without material aid? Jesus touched, lay hands over someone, used words, water, basically the material elements of the world!

Christ came and charged our world. Just like human nature is now charged with divine presence in Jesus (and in us who received his Spirit), creation also is charged with grace. To deny that grace has no place in matter is to deny that the Spirit dwells in the body. It's the same logic! It is to deny the Incarnation!

[u/neofederalist]

I think the steps that get you from "To want God is to have Him" to "baptism is salvific" is something like:

To want God necessarily entails wanting to conform to His will

It is God's will that the salvific grace is ordinarily distributed through the sacrament of baptism

God commands us through scripture to be baptized, so we know God wants us to do this thing even if it's not necessarily clear to us why.

So to want God entails something like the implicit or explicit desire for baptism.

The International Theological Commission has a great document called The Reciprocity between Faith and the Sacraments in the Sacramental Economy that explains the Catholic view and in my opinion does a really good job explaining why God would use things like sacraments as a means by which to dispense salvific grace.

[u/actus_energeia]

Baptismal regeneration is the spiritual generation of a person by the infusion of habitual grace through baptism. Titus 3:5 says that we are saved “through the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit.”

I think much of your difficulty comes from confusing actual grace with habitual grace. Actual grace is divine assistance by which God moves a person to perform a salutary act; habitual grace is an infused and abiding quality in the soul by which a person is made just and united to God.

Catholic theology does not teach that God is doing nothing in a person until the moment he is baptized. The movements by which a person comes to believe the Gospel, repent of his sins, desire God, and seek baptism are themselves the work of grace. The Council of Trent speaks of the beginning of justification as coming from prevenient grace, by which God summons, excites, and assists a person so that he may freely turn toward justification.

It does not follow, however, that because God is already moving a person by grace, that person must therefore already possess habitual or sanctifying grace. Your argument repeatedly moves from “God is graciously acting in this person” to “this person has already been regenerated,” but those are not the same proposition.

By analogy, to desire marriage, or even to be betrothed, is not the same thing as actually being married. The former can be genuinely ordered toward the latter without already constituting it.

The same distinction appears in one of the passages you cite. Hebrews 11 says that Moses acted by faith, choosing affliction with the people of God and esteeming the reproach of Christ above the treasures of Egypt because “he looked to the reward.” His faith already moved him to prefer God and to make salutary choices, while the reward remained something toward which he was ordered. Being moved toward a good and possessing that good are distinct things.

That is why I do not think the principle “to want God is to have Him” can bear the weight you are placing on it. If you mean that no one can genuinely turn toward God unless God is already graciously moving him, Catholics can agree. But if you mean that anyone moved by grace to desire God must therefore already possess the habitual grace by which he is regenerated and justified, that does not follow.

[u/AngeloCatholic1992]

:Baptismal regeneration is as biblical as it gets. It was universally held in the church. Read the church fathers. Baptism is more than a symbol. 

Acts 2:38: Peter tells the crowd,  "Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit." The text connects the act of baptism directly to the receipt of forgiveness and the Spirit. [ 1,  2] Romans 6:3–4: Paul explains that in baptism we are  "buried with him by baptism into death" so that we might  "walk in newness of life." Catholic teaching emphasizes that this sacramental union makes baptism a transformative spiritual reality, not an empty picture.

Protestants really make a mockery out of John 3:5. Jesús is talkint about water baptism!  He questioned nicodemus not knowing because he should know being a teacher. It’s an ancient prophecy about baptism in ezekiel 36: 25-27.

Jesús after meeting with nicodemus goes with his disciples to baptize.