I cannot remember my own baptism.
That is perhaps not so surprising. I was baptized as an infant, long before I could understand what was happening and long before I could form any opinion about God, faith, or the Church.
What may be a little more surprising is that I also cannot remember baptism later being given any significant place as a source of comfort or an anchor in my personal life of faith.
It was there. I knew that I had been baptized. I belonged to a tradition that regarded baptism as a means of grace. Even so, I was not taught to return to my baptism when faith became difficult.
Instead, I remember a warning against doing precisely that.
The warning that remained
I can just barely remember a preacher once saying that we must not put our trust in baptism.
I do not remember what he thought we should put our trust in instead. It may have been Christ, the gospel, or faith. I do not want to put words into his mouth, and it was a long time ago.
But the warning itself remained.
That may not be accidental. When you are already preoccupied with whether your faith is genuine, whether your repentance is serious enough, or whether you have truly found your way to God, warnings have a special way of taking root.
What was meant to prevent false security could also make it difficult to know where true security was to be found.
This does not mean that baptism was rejected in the community in which I grew up. On the contrary, infant baptism was a natural part of the church setting to which we belonged.
But there is a difference between acknowledging a doctrine and using it when someone needs help.
An understandable fear
I can understand why a preacher would warn against putting one’s trust in baptism.
In a society where almost everyone was baptized as an infant, it was easy to assume that baptism had settled everything by itself, regardless of how one later related to the faith.
A person could be baptized but never pray. Baptized but never care about the gospel. Baptized but indifferent to both God and neighbor.
Revival preaching wanted to challenge that assumption. It sought to remind people that Christian faith was not merely an entry in a parish register.
That was not an unreasonable concern.
The Catholic Church also teaches that baptism is not a free pass to live without faith, conversion, or responsibility. A person can turn away from the life to which he or she has been called.
But the question is whether fear of false security sometimes became so strong that the true comfort of baptism disappeared as well.
If baptism was spoken of mainly as something we must not trust, what were we to do with what God had actually promised in it?
What Luther actually said
It is interesting that this reserve existed within a tradition that understood itself as Lutheran.
For Martin Luther, baptism was far more than a solemn celebration marking the arrival of a child into the world.
In The Small Catechism, he explains that baptism works forgiveness of sins, rescues from death and the devil, and gives eternal salvation to those who believe God’s word and promise.
He also explains that water alone does not do this. It is the word of God joined to the water, together with the faith that trusts this word.
This means that baptism and faith are not opposites.
Faith is not asked to choose between Christ and baptism, as though baptism were his rival. Faith holds fast to Christ and to what he gives through his word and his means of grace.
Luther also connects baptism with the whole Christian life. Through daily repentance and conversion, the old self is to be drowned and a new self is to arise.
Baptism, then, is not merely something that happened once and was subsequently left behind.
It is a beginning that continues to matter on the road ahead.
This makes it difficult to dismiss baptism as an anchor without at the same time weakening something central to the Lutheran tradition.
When baptism disappeared from the conversation
This difference between doctrine and practice is not simply something I seem to remember from my own childhood.
Egil Sjaastad has studied the Rosenian tradition of pastoral care as it appears in the work of the preacher Gudmund Vinskei. In his article “The Order of Salvation” in Rosenian Pastoral Care (in Norwegian), he compares Vinskei’s pastoral correspondence with the writings of Carl Olof Rosenius.
For Rosenius, baptism could serve as a source of comfort for people troubled by spiritual doubt.
In Vinskei’s work, it receded much further into the background.
This does not mean that Vinskei denied baptism. He defended it as a means of grace and maintained that children should be baptized. But when young people wrote to him about guilt, anxiety, and salvation, he referred them primarily to the gospel as it was proclaimed.
Baptism was rarely brought into the conversation as help for a baptized person who was struggling.
I do not know whether my own experience can be explained in exactly the same way. Preachers differ, and it would be unfair to describe the entire prayer-house culture on the basis of a few memories.
But I recognize the pattern.
Baptism was important as doctrine. It was less visible as comfort.
It was understood as something God had done for the child. But when that child became an adolescent or an adult and began to ask whether his faith was genuine, other concerns received greater attention.
Had I experienced a real conversion? Had I understood the gospel correctly? Had I entered into a personal relationship with Jesus?
These could be important questions. But they could also direct my attention very strongly toward what was happening within me.
When faith becomes a question of experience
In the communities I knew, it was often emphasized that salvation must not be built on feelings.
That was an important reminder.
Preachers and devotional writers warned against measuring God’s grace by how warm or strong faith felt. We were to turn our eyes toward Christ and the promises in God’s word.
Even so, questions about experience could find their way back in.
How do I know that I truly believe? How do I know that I have turned my eyes toward Christ in the right way? How do I know that it is not merely knowledge, habit, or wishful thinking?
It is entirely possible to hear that you must not trust your feelings while spending a great deal of time examining whether you feel in the right way.
Baptism could have opened the door to a different question:
What did God do before I began examining myself?
I was not baptized because I had strong religious feelings. I was not baptized because I could explain the gospel or point to a decisive conversion experience.
I was baptized before I could accomplish any of these things.
That does not mean that my later response to faith was unimportant. But it does mean that the story did not begin with my ability to put my spiritual life in order.
It began with a gift.
A promise before I could answer
Infant baptism can seem strange if faith is understood primarily as a personal decision.
How can a child take a position on something he or she does not understand?
But if baptism is first and foremost an act of God, the question changes.
Must a person understand everything before God can meet him?
Both the Lutheran and Catholic traditions answer no.
The child does not arrive with a fully formed life of faith. The child comes with empty hands.
Or, to put it more precisely: The child is carried forward by others.
That is an image I have begun to reflect on more deeply. Not necessarily because I feel any strong emotional attachment to the day of my own baptism, but because it says something about the nature of grace.
Someone else carried me forward. Someone else spoke the words. And God acted before I could explain what was happening.
It is not difficult to see how this could have been an anchor for someone who later became preoccupied with whether his faith was good enough.
I did not first have to establish a connection with God through a particular experience. I had already been met by a promise that came before the experience.
What I later began to see
When I later became acquainted with Catholic faith, I encountered an understanding of baptism as the foundation of the entire Christian life.
The Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church describes baptism as birth into new life in Christ. It connects baptism with the forgiveness of sins, incorporation into the Church, and participation in the life that God gives.
The Catechism also emphasizes that baptism leaves a permanent spiritual mark and therefore cannot be repeated.
This is more than a technical statement about how many times a person can be baptized.
It expresses the fact that baptism does something that does not have to be recreated each time faith grows weak or life takes a difficult turn.
A Christian who has been validly baptized in a Lutheran church is therefore not baptized again when received into the Catholic Church.
This also says something important about the connection between the traditions.
Lutheran baptism does not stand outside the Christian life one later lives as a Catholic. It remains part of the foundation on which that life rests.
The journey from the prayer house to the Mass does not therefore mean that everything must begin again.
Something had already been given.
Baptism as part of everyday life
Catholic practice also provides several visible reminders of baptism.
Upon entering a church, one may make the sign of the cross with holy water. At Easter, the baptismal promises are renewed. Baptism is understood in relation to Confirmation and the Eucharist.
None of these practices replaces faith.
But they give faith a form that does not exist only within the mind.
The water, the sign of the cross, and the words remind us that the Christian life also has a bodily and visible dimension.
It is not necessary to feel anything in particular each time one makes the sign of the cross. Nor is it necessary to explain exactly how baptism has worked through all the detours of life.
The reminder lies in the action itself:
I do not belong merely to my own changing thoughts about God. I have been met by God through something that happened outside me.
This does not mean that I suddenly began thinking about baptism all the time, or that it solved all the questions I carried overnight.
But it acquired a different place within the whole.
It was no longer merely the beginning of a story I could hardly remember. It became part of my understanding of how the Christian life could be sustained at all.
Not a free pass
It is nevertheless important to take the old warning seriously.
Baptism is not a guarantee that a person can never turn away from God.
A promise can be rejected. A relationship can be neglected. A person can live contrary to the life to which baptism calls him.
Both Lutheran and Catholic Christianity therefore emphasize the importance of faith, conversion, and a life that continually returns to God.
The difference is not that one tradition takes sin seriously while the other assumes that everything will work out automatically.
The question is what we return to when we have lost our way.
If baptism becomes only a memory of something that might once have been important, it is easy to think that we must begin entirely anew whenever faith grows weak.
If baptism is instead understood as an abiding call into life with Christ, conversion can also be described as a return to what God has already given.
Baptism then ceases to be an excuse for indifference.
It becomes a reason to return.
Baptism and the person who struggles
I cannot know how my life would have unfolded if I had learned to think differently about baptism at an earlier age.
It would be too simple to say that everything would have improved if only someone had reminded me more often that I was baptized.
The anxiety I lived with was not only about theology. It was also about loneliness, belonging, and questions about who I was.
Such experiences do not necessarily disappear because someone presents a correct doctrine of baptism.
Even so, I believe baptism could have given me a different language for something I lacked.
Not a language that declared my feelings unimportant.
But a language that reminded me that my worth and my belonging could not be determined by how I experienced my faith from one day to the next.
In baptism, I was not first asked to prove that I was a believer.
I was met by a promise that Christ had made room for me.
There is a difference between the two.
What the traditions share
It may be tempting to tell this story as though the Lutheran tradition lacked something that only the Catholic Church could give me.
But it is not that simple.
Luther himself gave baptism a far more prominent place than it often received in the communities I encountered. Rosenius could use baptism as comfort for those troubled by spiritual doubt. And Lutheran pastors and theologians have emphasized for generations that baptism is not merely an event in the past, but a reality from which one can live.
At the same time, there are differences between Lutheran and Catholic understandings of the Church, the sacraments, and Christian life after baptism. Those differences should not be concealed.
But here it is important to see that the distance between the traditions does not necessarily run where I once thought it did.
The decisive question is not whether I should trust Christ or baptism.
The question is whether I can also trust Christ as he meets me through baptism.
Baptism has no value apart from him.
But if he is the one who acts in it, it also seems strange to push baptism aside when someone needs to hear that grace does not begin with personal achievement.
An anchor I almost overlooked
Looking back, then, I do not see baptism as something I rejected.
It was simply something I was rarely taught to use.
With the Lord’s Supper, the problem was that I knew about the medicine but took it too seldom.
With baptism, the problem was different.
I had already received the gift. I simply did not know, to any significant degree, that I could live from it.
Perhaps the fear of false security made true security more difficult to see.
Perhaps the questions about my own faith became so insistent that what God had already done receded into the background.
And perhaps this is precisely why infant baptism still has something to say.
I cannot remember my own baptism.
But God’s promise did not depend on my ability to remember, understand, or explain it.
It came before my answer.
Before the experience.
Before the achievement.
Perhaps baptism had been an anchor all along.
I simply never learned to rest in it.