Acts 19:1-7 contains a record of what may be the first time in the Church’s history that the hierarchy had to inform Christians they had been baptized with an inadequate formula.
That isn’t exactly what happened, but we can still see this as setting the tone for the Church’s subsequent series of dealing with problems involving baptism. The Apostle Paul, having come to Ephesus, discovers disciples who have never heard of the Holy Spirit. When pressed, they explain that they were baptized by John the Baptist. As the Gospels record, when John would baptize, the words he pronounced–the “baptismal formula”, as we call it–only mentioned repentance, not the Holy Spirit. Paul promptly rectifies this by baptizing the Ephesian believers, who thereupon experience the kind of charismatic phenomena that reveals that the Spirit has come down upon them.
The centuries following would see many further controversies over the way the ritual of baptism was conducted which the Church had to officially resolve. Some will look at these issues with skepticism: Why is the Church getting so worked up over such seemingly trivial details? But Acts supplies us with the precedent: These seemingly small and procedural issues are important. The Spirit did not come with power until the correct baptism was performed. The devil–and, in this case, God–really is in these kinds of details.
In the Roman Catholic Church, baptism is conducted with the Trinitarian formula “I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” Church teaching states that baptism done with an incorrect formula is invalid; if the minister said the wrong thing when you were being baptized, then you weren’t actually baptized. The Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith recently issued a Responsum to the question of whether baptism done with the formula “we baptize you” is valid, and, if not, whether those who were baptized in this formula need to be re-baptized (or, more accurately, baptized for the first time). The answers were, respectively, no and yes.
Subsequently, a priest in the Archdiocese in Detroit discovered that the deacon who had conducted his baptism had used this invalid formula. This meant that this priest’s confirmation and ordination had also been invalid (since only a baptized person can receive those sacraments) and that all the Masses, absolutions, and confirmations he had performed were also invalid. He had to promptly be baptized, confirmed, and ordained, and everyone to whom he had administered the relevant sacraments needed to be contacted, as did everyone else who was baptized by this particular deacon.
The reaction to this in some corners was contempt. How imprudent of the Vatican to create doubt in people’s minds about their own salvation during a worldwide pandemic! Saying the difference in validity depends on a difference between “I” and “we” is just rank Pharisaism, straining at gnats and tying heavy burdens to the consciences of the faithful, making, as they say, a mountain out of a molehill.
Of course, if we had discovered that this priest had contracted COVID-19, most of us wouldn’t hesitate to contact everyone he’d so much as spoken to in a concerned panic, even though there would be unmasked individuals in other corners of the Internet who would just as quickly roll their eyes and pontificate that worries over the coronavirus are exaggerated and we shouldn’t be freaking out so much over it.
What we miss is that Jesus doesn’t actually criticize the Pharisees for being meticulous in laying down rules, per se, but for their accompanying moral failures. He tells his disciples to do everything the Pharisees instruct, but not to imitate them; “do as they say, not as they do” (Matthew 23:2-3). When He calls them out for “tithing mint and dill” while neglecting “justice, mercy, and faithfulness,” He does not say they shouldn’t have tithed mint and dill; He says instead that they “should have practiced the latter without neglecting the former” (Matthew 23:23). We will see shortly what actual Pharisaism looks like in our age.
As it happens, I have a problem with this document, too, but first we should break down why such a seemingly minor topic like the personal pronoun of the baptismal formula matters. (Canon lawyers would have a different way of explaining this, but we should have the concepts down first before we get into technical language.) We’ll take this laboriously slowly, because points which may seem glaringly obvious can sometimes still get lost in these kinds of discussions.
- Does baptism matter? Is baptism what makes someone a member of the Church? If so, being baptized is the difference between Christians and non-Christians. To think otherwise, and baptism is not ultimately that important, is Zwinglian memorialism, a view which is both unbiblical (1 Corinthians 12:13; Colossians 2:12; 1 Peter 3:21) and rejected by the Church. The Church recognizes that you must be baptized to be born again (John 3:5), thus baptism is of immense importance.
- Granting that baptism matters, the next question is: Can anything be baptism? Is blowing on someone baptism? Is waving a spatula at someone a baptism? Is giving someone a bag of nuts baptism (as in one fascinating scene in The Brothers Karamazov)? In other words, do rituals that have no water at all count as baptism? If not, then, to put it as starkly and obviously as possible so that we don’t miss the point, some things are baptism and some things are not baptism. There is some line between the two.*
- Does just getting wet count as baptism? Obviously not, or every bath or swimming session (every “wettening”, if you will) would be a baptism. Thus, some words must be uttered for a wettening to also be a baptism.
- Do any words make a wettening into a baptism? According to Acts 19, no, since John’s baptism was inadequate. In fact, there is still a religious group called the Mandaeans who venerate John as a prophet and practice (weekly) baptisms with the formula, “N., son of N., you have been signed with the sign of Life and the name of the Life and the name of Manda d-Hiia (‘Knowledge-of-Life’) were pronounced on you.” But we would not consider this Christian baptism–not because the one administering the baptism is not a Christian (as Augustine put it, even Judas could baptize), but because the words uttered do not qualify as a Christian formula.
Let’s unpack point #4 further. Jesus says to baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, but doesn’t give an exact phrase. Some have seen some flexibility here. Thus there have been (attempted) baptisms “in the name of the Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier”. After all, those refer to the Persons of the Holy Trinity, right? But let’s stretch that: Could you baptize “in the name of the chicken, the pelican, and the dove”, since each has respectively been used in the Bible or Christian history to refer to a member of the Trinity? This might get a little shakier. That could refer to the Trinity, but it’s obviously fuzzy. Remember: we recognize that there are such things as invalid formulas, without which the wettening is not a baptism. Is baptism into “the chicken, the pelican, and the dove” an invalid formula? Maybe some people would be willing to stretch this to the point where it counts as baptism; others wouldn’t. In other words, we would have different definitions of baptism.
But go back to point #1: Baptism is the difference between being in the Church and outside of her. This means different people disagree about the central rite and sacrament that brings people into the Church based on nothing stronger than their own theological intuitions. In the Bible, it is the Apostles who pronounce who is inside and outside of the Church. So, in other words, if we allow flexibility in the baptismal formula, what we effectively do is make everyone into their own Pope. This is a quick way to cause factionalism, and if you think the Vatican seems hair splitting when it comes to matters like these, look at how much worse it is among schismatic groups; witness, for example, how vehemently Traditionalists debate over whether the Thuc consecrations were valid, or whether the SSPX is canonical.
(Some would try to avoid this by dismissing all of this as pointless pedantry and say the Church should be more focused on the corporal works of mercy. But look more closely at the people suggesting this and you’ll find just as much infighting amongst them over who’s really fighting for social justice, i.e. whether one can vote for Biden/Harris and still count as a leftist. This is no solution to the problem of drawing precise boundaries lines; all it does is change what boundaries we’re drawing. But I digress.)
This is one of the reasons why the Church has to define so strictly what baptism is. St. Paul indicates that we only have “one body” because we have “one baptism” (Ephesians 4:4-5) and that means we all need to have an agreed upon understanding of baptism. The Bible itself is not sufficient for this: The Book of Acts can be read as endorsing baptism done simply in the name of Jesus, a practice which persisted in the early Church alongside the Trinitarian formula until the Council of Florence put a stop to it in 1439 (it is still practiced by Oneness Pentecostals who affirm Sabellianism). So the Church must do as St. Paul did in Acts 19: Make a clear pronouncement so that there is no confusion. It may seem silly that the Church specifically pronounced that baptism cannot be done with “oil, saliva, wine, tears, milk, sweat, beer, soup, the juice of fruits, and any mixture containing water which men would no longer call water”, but remember point #2: We all know that not just anything can be baptism. We all draw the line somewhere, but the entire Church needs the same line drawn everywhere for us to be one body. This is the Magisterium’s role: To make it clear what “stuff” needs to be used in baptism (as canon lawyers and theologians would more precisely put it, the “matter”) and what words need to be said at baptism (the “form”). This is why it issued Responsa like this, such as when it pronounced that baptism with formula like “Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier” is invalid.
This may sound as if the Magisterium’s job is simply to establish consistent rules so that we’re all on the same page, however arbitrary they may be. That isn’t true, of course; the Magisterium draws these lines in order to protect the deposit of faith. It rejects practices, even those as time-honoured as baptism in the name of Jesus, that it is guided to recognize as doctrinally wrong. It does not reject baptism by spit arbitrarily; it has theological reasons for recognizing that baptism must be done with “flowing water”. But, in my opinion, the Responsum does not stress enough that Christ has granted the Magisterium this authority as an arbiter in order to ensure the unity of the Church.
The Responsum explains that “we baptize” is theologically wrong and invalid because the assembled congregation does not bestow the sacrament by its own power; Christ makes this community a Church by working in the sacrament through the minister, who “enacts…the sign-presence of Christ.” It cites Thomas Aquinas (who amusingly speculates about whether a mute and an armless person could jointly baptize a baby) to this effect. In other words, the Responsum stresses that this formula should not be used because it is doctrinally inaccurate.
This is fine and correct, but there’s a further complicating factor that Aquinas recognizes: Jesus did not give us a set baptismal formula that all Christians everywhere were always required to use. There is more than one valid baptismal formula. As Aquinas points out, priests in the Eastern church say over neophytes, “The servant of God, N., is baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” This completely avoids any reference to the minister (possibly a deliberate effort to refute the Novatian heresy that the minister’s lack of faith could invalidate a baptism). Yet it is just as valid, and Aquinas uses the Church’s acceptance of these two markedly different formulae to refute the argument that it is never lawful to add words to the sacramental form.
If there is more than one valid formula, we end up wandering back into the problem we mentioned before: Some formulae are open to both orthodox or heretical interpretations. Aquinas says that a baptism “in the name of the Father Almighty, and of the only Begotten Son, and of the Holy Ghost, the Paraclete,” would be valid despite the added (but Biblical) phrasing. But what about a baptism “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, and of the Blessed Virgin Mary”? Aquinas says it depends on how this is interpreted. If the intention is to place Mary on the same level of the Trinity, “such a sense would be contrary to faith, and would therefore render the sacrament invalid,” but if this addition is understood “as intimating that her intercession may help the person baptized to preserve the baptismal grace, then the sacrament is not rendered void.” In other words, it could be valid, or it could be invalid. It would boil down to the intent of the minister–which might be impossible to determine–and someone baptized with that formula would always be uncertain if they were actually baptized. Their membership in the Church–for all intents and purposes, their salvation–would be in doubt because a minister decided he was going to improve on the ritual.
If you’re looking for Pharisaism, this is actually much closer to what Jesus castigated the Pharisees for: Adding manmade customs to what God had commanded (Mark 7:1-13) which, in turn, created heavy burdens for the consciences of God’s people (Matthew 23:4).
And I think the Responsum should have brought this out more clearly. There is a realm of formulae which are clearly orthodox, a realm of formulae which clearly are not, and an ambiguous swamp between the two. The Magisterium mandates certain formulae that it can be sure are always safe. Some shepherds nevertheless choose to herd their sheep out into the uncertain marshland based on their own smug intellectual confidence that they are sure they know which spots are safe. Maybe they happen to bring their sheep through that swamp safely, but the point is that they have put them in danger based on how highly they prize their own theological judgments. This is not being a good shepherd. It is the opposite of being pastoral.
As pettifogging as it seems, insisting on “I baptize” is done for the sake of feeding Jesus’ sheep. Perhaps the Responsum did not want to strike too authoritarian a tone by “pulling rank” and asserting the Magisterium’s authority in these matters, but it’s important for the faithful to understand that, just as in the Book of Acts, these rules are there so that the body can be one. The priests and deacons who chose to use the formula “we baptize” were probably trying to stress the communal nature of baptism. But, ironically, in breaking off from the Church’s prescribed formula, they were breaking with the rest of the Western Church and acting with supreme individualism and egotism. And, as Acts 19 shows us, in doing so, they run the risk of getting between their parishioners and God.
*The Church does acknowledge baptism of desire and of blood for those who would have been baptized but were unable to during their lifetime. (It only applies to those who have died: someone could not “receive” baptism of desire and then subsequently be physically baptized, or else they would receive two baptisms, which is impossible.) But this does not minimize the importance of baptism; it actually heightens it. The Church’s recognition of this is also part of her “drawing the boundaries” around the Church for the sake of safeguarding rather than troubling the consciences of the faithful.
Graham Crackers 