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Every year since 2009 I have co-taught a two-week course on Martin Luther’s theology in Wittenberg, Germany, for Lutheran pastors from around the world. Theodor Dieter, my colleague from the Institute for Ecumenical Research in Strasbourg, France, initially proposed the idea for the seminar. Together we developed the course content under the auspices of the LWB-Zentrum (Lutheran World Federation Center) in Wittenberg. Our alumni, by now numbering well over two hundred, come from places as far distant as Greenland and Senegal, El Salvador and Myanmar. We quickly discovered that, while our pastors arrived positively
disposed toward Luther and his theology (hardly surprising!), overall
they had read little of the reformer’s works. Sometimes the Small
Catechism comprised the full extent of their reading. Those who came
from countries with small Lutheran populations had usually attended
ecumenical Protestant seminaries and so received little exposure to
Lutheran theology in any form. For that matter, those who came from
historically Lutheran countries rarely fared better. Perhaps their
professors took for granted that Lutheranism was in the air, too old-hat
and overfamiliar to be interesting. What Dieter and I didn’t know, when we set out on this project, was
whether Luther’s theology would have any purchase on either set of
students. Maybe cultural conditions were just too different for his
insights to be gripping, in the former case; maybe all of his riches had
indeed been mined and the vein of ore had petered out, in the latter.
To both of us it felt like a risky undertaking. We loved Luther’s
theology, but we had to steel ourselves to the possibility that it was
an idiosyncratic and non-communicable love. Those who voluntarily attend a two-week seminar on Luther in Wittenberg are, to be sure, a self-selecting group. Even so, Dieter and I were startled at the level of enthusiasm that nearly all the students brought to their almost-first encounter with Luther’s writings. It’s not too much to say that a few of them underwent a conversion experience. For most, reading Luther finally connected the dots and wove together the dangling strands of practices, aphorisms, patterns, and instincts that they’d absorbed from their experiences in Lutheran congregations, and then repeated in their Lutheran ministries, without ever really understanding why. But of all the aha moments that our seminar brought about, without
fail the biggest aha was always elicited by the topic of baptism. Dieter and I never started our seminars with baptism. He would kick off the seminar with a review of the Middle Ages, the rise of humanism and calls for reform, Luther’s early years, and the Reformation breakthrough. Most years we included a unit on the Ninety-Five Theses, if only because our students were curious about this rather inaccessible engine of historical change. From there we would press on into the heart of Luther’s theology with an extended study of justification by faith and the distinction between law and gospel as depicted in The Sermon on Two Kinds of Righteousness, The Freedom of a Christian, A Brief Explanation of What to Look for and Expect in the Gospels, and How Christians Should Regard Moses. Good stuff, rich stuff, but a little abstract. The concepts were there, but the application was not. And then—baptism. With baptism, everything fell into place. The
various doctrines knit themselves together into a seamless whole.
Baptism is how the gospel is enacted and how faith justifies, on the
ground, in real time, in people’s actual bodies and lived histories. In our earliest seminars I would set forth a handful of case studies—mostly recalled from my own Lutheran Confessions class in seminary—to engage the participants in a round of what I called “To Baptize or Not to Baptize?” The title was deliberately provocative. Once the students had grasped the grace and glory of baptism, they couldn’t fathom withholding it for any reason whatsoever. Rebaptism was not on anyone’s mind, of course. But the ministry is a messy business, as any pastor knows. Sometimes the issue is not, in the first place, whether to baptize, but figuring out if what took place beforehand even was a baptism. The intense engagement of our seminar participants with these case studies stood out to me, year after year. Many participants contributed tricky cases of their own. I kept a list and added to it. Conversation with other pastor friends over the years gave me more. And these in turn prompted further thought experiments, building off the theo-logic that undergirds baptism. At last it seemed only right and good to share with a larger audience the fruit of this decade-plus set of communal reflections; hence, this book, To Baptize or Not to Baptize: A Practical Guide for Clergy. The case studies you’ll find here range from the all too real to the hypothetical, from the kind you are very likely to encounter to the kind that, God willing, you will never have to encounter. But added up all together, they will allow you to hold baptism up to the light and turn it, like a jewel, to see its many facets. By the end you should have greater understanding of and delight in the extraordinary gift of baptism, on which, as Luther says in the Large Catechism, “God himself stakes his honor, his power, and his might.” You can buy an ebook direct from Thornbush Press or from your favorite ebook seller, or get a print copy through Amazon. You can listen to a podcast about it here, or keep scrolling for the complete list of case studies. And after that—of course—a recipe.
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