# Going Under: Why Baptism Is Not a Photo Opportunity Last summer I watched a man get baptised in a paddling pool in a car park in East London. His name was Dmitri, he was a former drug dealer, and he was crying before he even got in the water. Afterwards someone handed him a towel printed with a Union Jack and we all ate samosas. It was undignified, slightly chaotic, and I think it was one of the most cosmically significant things I have ever witnessed. Most of us there had no idea why. That last sentence is the one that nags at me. We sang, we cheered, somebody filmed it on a phone for the church Instagram, and a woman I had never met before pressed a Tupperware of jollof rice into my hands. But if you had asked the people standing in that car park — myself included, on a tired day — what exactly was happening to Dmitri as he went under, I suspect we would have produced answers ranging from the vaguely sentimental to the theologically embarrassing. He was "going public." He was "showing what God had done." He was "taking the next step." All of which is true. And none of which comes anywhere near sufficient. ## What We Have Reduced It To In most evangelical churches I know — including, at times, my own — baptism functions as a kind of testimony-in-water. The candidate stands up, often with a microphone, tells the story of how they came to faith, and is then dunked as a vivid full-stop on the narrative. Family come who would never normally darken the door of a church. There is cake. It is sincere, often deeply moving, and I would not want to lose any of it. But notice what has happened. The subject of the verb has quietly migrated. The baptism has become something the candidate is doing — declaring, demonstrating, performing — rather than something being done to them. The water is illustrative. The words are explanatory. The whole event hangs on the authenticity and articulacy of the person in the tank. This is what I mean by the sign being severed from its substance. If baptism is essentially a public statement of a private decision, then it differs in kind from any other public statement not at all. It might as well be a press release, or a tattoo, or a particularly damp Instagram post. The water becomes decorative. It does nothing. It only points at something else — your faith — which is doing all the actual work. And once you have made that move, several other things follow. Baptism becomes optional in practice, however much we insist it isn't. It becomes infinitely delayable, because the candidate must first feel ready, articulate enough, sure enough. It becomes individualistic, because it is fundamentally about my journey. And it becomes oddly weightless — a milestone rather than a hinge. I do not think the New Testament knows this baptism. ## The Archaeology of the Rite When Paul writes to the Galatians that "all of you who were baptised into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Gal. 3:27-28), he is not describing a religious ceremony. He is describing a political and social rupture. Read the sentence with first-century ears. Jew and Greek was the deepest ethnic and religious cleavage in the Mediterranean world. Slave and free was the basic economic ordering of society. Male and female was a binary on which household, inheritance, and citizenship hinged. These were not abstract categories. They were the load-bearing walls of every imaginable identity. And Paul says: the waters dissolved them. Not, notice, that we now feel warmly towards one another across these divides. Not that we have committed to working on our biases. He says the dividing line has been buried. Something has happened to you — passive verb, divine subject — that has relocated you. You are now "in Christ," and being in Christ is the only social location that ultimately counts. The Greek preposition Paul keeps using is eis — "into" Christ. You were baptised into him. Into a person. Into a body. The image is not of a private soul washed clean and then sent back to its previous address with a new disposition. The image is of a transfer. You lived in one country; now you live in another. You answered to one lord; now you answer to another. The water was the border crossing. This is why the early church took so long over baptism, months, sometimes years of catechesis, and why, in the Roman world, getting baptised could cost you your job, your family, your inheritance, and occasionally your life. Nobody was confused about whether it was a photo opportunity. It was the moment your old life was confiscated. ## Augustine in the Changing Room There is a wonderful scene in book eight of the Confessions where Augustine describes the conversion of Victorinus, a famous Roman rhetorician. Victorinus had come to believe privately, and told his friend Simplicianus as much. Simplicianus's response was sharp: "I shall not believe it or count you among the Christians unless I see you in the Church of Christ." Victorinus laughed and said, "Is it then the walls that make Christians?", a line worthy of any contemporary evangelical who prefers his faith uncluttered by institutions. But over time, Augustine tells us, the man's heart changed, and eventually he presented himself for baptism. The clergy offered him the option, customary for the eminent, of making his confession privately in a side room. He refused. He went forward in front of the whole Roman congregation, who began to whisper his name in delighted disbelief, "Victorinus! Victorinus!", as he stepped down into the water. Augustine's point is not that Victorinus was finally brave enough to "go public." It is that there is no such thing as a Christian who has not been incorporated. The walls do not make Christians, but neither do interior convictions floating free of a community and a sacrament. Christians are made by being put, bodily, publicly, irreversibly, into the company of the baptised. This is alien to us. We have been formed by a religious culture in which the inner life is the real life, and external rituals are at best expressions of it, at worst distractions from it. Augustine, writing fifteen hundred years before our therapeutic age, already saw the problem. The interior was not enough. The interior had to be given hands and feet and a date in the parish register. ## Buried and Relocated Romans 6 is the passage I most wish every Christian could read slowly, perhaps three times, before their next baptism service. Paul writes: "Or don't you know that all of us who were baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life." Notice the verbs. We were baptised. We were buried. We will live. None of these is something the candidate does to herself. All of them are things done by God, through the rite, to the person. This is not metaphor. Or rather, and this is where we get confused, it is not *only* metaphor. Paul is not saying that baptism is a vivid picture of something happening invisibly elsewhere. He is saying that in baptism the person is being united to Christ's death and resurrection. The water is the grave. To go under is to die with him. To come up is to be brought up with him into a new mode of existence. The protestant in me wants to add immediately: of course this is by faith, not by water magic, and of course an unbeliever dunked in a font has not been saved by hydraulics. Yes. Fine. But we have been so anxious to fend off sacramental superstition that we have ended up emptying the sacrament of any real action at all. Calvin, who was not a sentimentalist about these things, still spoke of baptism as the means by which God truly engrafts us into Christ. The reformers did not believe in magic water. They did believe that God works through water and word together to do something he does not do otherwise. And what is done is a transfer of allegiance. The baptised person belongs to a different king now, has a different family, owes a different set of debts, will be judged by a different court. This is why Paul, two chapters later in Romans, can speak of being "slaves to righteousness", the language is the language of ownership changing hands. The water is where the title deed gets signed. ## One Body, Poor Doors and All Pull this thread and the social consequences come fast. If baptism puts a person into a new body, actually puts them, not just signals it, then the congregation gathered around the font is no longer an audience watching a private milestone. It is the body receiving a new member. The candidate is not joining a club; the candidate is being grafted into a family that already exists by the work of God, and the family is being changed by the addition. Which means that the kind of congregation we are matters enormously to what we are doing in baptism. If, in practice, our churches are sorted by income, by ethnicity, by education, by accent, by which side of the river you live on, and most London churches are, mine included on its less self-aware days, then we are quietly contradicting the act we keep performing. We dunk people into a body that, on paper, knows neither Jew nor Greek, and then we send them to a small group of people exactly like themselves. I keep coming back to those poor doors. New buildings in this city, with one entrance for the leaseholders and another for the social housing tenants. The architecture of segregation, in steel and glass, in our most diverse city. It is grotesque, and it has become normal. The church, if she means what she does at the font, cannot be a body with poor doors. There cannot be one liturgy for the lawyers and another for the cleaners they employ. There cannot be a side entrance for Dmitri because he is unsettling to the regulars. The baptismal pool is the front door, and it is the only door, and everyone who comes through it comes through it on their knees. I am not pretending this is easy. Sociologists have shown for decades that homogeneous churches grow faster, and church planters are quietly told as much in private. We respond to the people who feel like us. But if baptism is what I think it is, then a comfortable, class-bound, ethnically narrow congregation is not just a missiological shortcoming. It is a baptismal contradiction. It denies in its life what it performs in its liturgy. ## The Paedobaptist Question We Cannot Avoid I should say where I stand. I baptise believers, not infants. I think the New Testament's pattern is closest to that. But I have spent enough time in conversation with paedobaptist friends, Anglican, Presbyterian, Reformed, to know that the argument is not as one-sided as my tradition sometimes pretends. What is the paedobaptist trying to protect? Above all, the objectivity of the act. The fact that baptism is something God does to a person, not something the person does for God. The fact that the covenant precedes the response, that grace is prior to faith, that the child of believers is born into the orbit of the promises and not outside them. These are not nothing. These are weighty Reformation instincts, and they are exactly the instincts the contemporary evangelical needs to hear. What is the credobaptist trying to protect? The integrity of conscious discipleship. The fact that to be in Christ is to have died and risen with him, which is not an event one can undergo unconsciously. The fact that the New Testament knows nothing of a two-tier membership in which some belong by birth and others by faith. The fact that the rite, however objective, is administered to someone, and that the someone is a respondent. Both, at their best, are trying to honour the same thing: that baptism is not a photo opportunity. The paedobaptist insists on this by pointing to the helpless infant, who can perform nothing. The credobaptist insists on this by pointing to the cost of the public confession, which is no light thing to undertake. They guard different flanks of the same fortress. What unites them, and what should unite us against the prevailing sentimentalism, is the conviction that something real and objective is happening at the font, something that does not depend, in the end, on the eloquence of the candidate or the mood of the congregation or whether the worship band is in tune. God is acting. The person is being named, claimed, relocated. Heaven is leaning in. ## Why Dmitri's Paddling Pool Was Cosmic Which brings me back to the car park. I remember thinking, while Dmitri was speaking before he went under, that the scene was almost comically un-photogenic. The pool was the kind you buy at Argos for £14.99. The water was cold. The Union Jack towel was somebody's leftover from the Jubilee. A toddler was crying because she wanted to get in with him. The samosas had been delivered late and were still in their plastic containers on a folding table next to a half-deflated football. And yet. The water was the grave of Christ. Dmitri was being buried into the death of the Son of God and raised into his risen life. The neighbours peering over the fence, one of whom, I am told, has since started attending, were witnessing a person change kingdoms. The toddler crying for the pool was, whether she knew it or not, watching a citizen of a new city receive her papers. Heaven was leaning over the car park in E14, and most of us were busy worrying about whether there were enough samosas. This is the scandal, and the comfort, of the Christian sacraments. God does not require dignified surroundings to do the cosmic work. He works through water and word, bread and wine, the bodily and the local and the slightly chaotic. He has always preferred mangers to palaces. He has always preferred to act in the kind of places where the toddlers cry and the food is late. But the pastors and the people presiding over these moments, and I am writing to myself as much as to anyone, need to recover the weight of what we are doing. Baptism is not a milestone. It is a hinge. It is not a declaration. It is a transfer. It is not optional, delayable, or decorative. It is the moment a person is buried with Christ and raised with him, named into a body that ignores poor doors, made a citizen of a country whose borders run through every car park and font and paddling pool where the water has been blessed and the name of the triune God has been spoken over a human being going under. If we believed that, really believed it, not just intellectually conceded it, I think we would plant churches differently. I think we would catechise more slowly and celebrate more loudly. I think we would stop sorting our congregations by postcode. I think we would weep more often at baptisms, and not only with sentiment. Dmitri, last I heard, is doing well. He helps run the foodbank. He still cries easily. He has a Union Jack towel folded in his cupboard that he refuses to wash. "For we were all baptised by one Spirit so as to form one body — whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free — and we were all given the one Spirit to drink" (1 Cor. 12:13). Go under, and come up, and live like it is true.