Baptism in the Churches of Christ (Blog comment)

I will also add here the importance of baptism within this church’s soteriology. It has been typical, I think, for disillusioned members to criticize the Church of Christ’s insistence on adult baptism by immersion as too dogmatic, as missing the point of grace, as reducing the salvific act of Christ to a mechanical/automatic gesture, etc. It is ironic that it is precisely here in baptism that the Church of Christ so closely resembles a Catholic sacramentalism, an earthly/mortal gesture which somehow contains within it a divine/grace-ful/spiritual possibility. At one time the sacraments were an acute point of criticism for non-Catholic members: i.e. “it is ridiculous to think that the host literally becomes the body of Christ, that at a given point in the mass the base earthly elements transubstantiate into the body of our Lord etc.” But today I think the situation is entirely different. Are the churches not precisely embracing a sacramental understanding of Church, of the community, of nature? This is why I think it is so ironic that many disgruntled former members of the church have been so critical of baptism (and the same applies to congregational singing, precisely insofar as it too is sacramental in nature). In their pursuit of the “spiritual” they have completely overlooked the possibilities already inherent in their tradition. That baptism is not only sacramental in the Churches of Christ, but also a visible sign of a commitment, an initiation into a community, and of course an intimate gesture made in complete fidelity to the Kingdom and all its citizens (and by proxy, to the whole world as a citizen devoted to peace and the building up, rather than breaking down of humanity), all this seems forgotten in the narrow view of some who elevate human sentiment/feeling (“heavy emotion”) as an absolute, as if in a kind of gnostic ecstasy one can transcend the elemental (all the while disparaging the very thing their “spirituality” depends on and is rooted in, i.e. the human body, the waters of baptism, the basic “stuff” of the world). It is for this reason a substantial approach may be located within the Church of Christ conception. Your blog, in a somewhat more humble way, celebrates this I think.