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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 July 2024
In a previous article, we were considering the Pentecostal doctrine of the ‘baptism in the Spirit’, and concluded that it all really belongs to the full New Testament understanding of baptism, of what it is to be a Christian at all. Baptism should be—indeed (so far as the evidence shows) clearly was—a real spiritual turning point, leading a person into a whole new world of experience, with its own canons of understanding and behaviour, its own distinctive principles of action, moral and charismatic. We saw that there was an indissoluble complex of faith in the exalted Christ, metanoia (conversion, new heart), renunciation of Satan the Prince of this world (dropping out, apotaxis), the experience of the Spirit of God ‘who explores even the hidden things of God’, who ‘convicts the world’, who ‘leads us into all truth’.
We then had to admit the fact that this is not, generally, our experience of being baptized, and saw that the Pentecostal theory is one way of coping with this situation, though one that we cannot follow, as such. I shall now mention various other ways, and, with the theological basis thus broadened, shall attempt some theological and practical synthesis, showing how I think we can learn much from the Pentecostals, without betraying anything that the Church has always held dear.
Already in the New Testament we find some important guidelines. For instance, there is a very significant shift between Matthew and Mark. For Matthew, faith is a key concept, closely tied to his concluding scene, the exaltation of Jesus. The question Jesus asks is, ‘Do you believe that I can do this?’ (9, 28). The answer must be, simply and totally, ‘Yes, Lord’, an answer that entails a radical abandonment of care, a total upheaval of the normal procedures of social life.
page 324 note 1 He will Baptize you with the Holy Spirit. New Blackfriars, June 1971.
page 325 note 1 Although I make no claim to be a New Testament scholar, it seems pretty clear that Mark's Gospel is a highly sophisticated piece of work, much more so than Matthew. I incline strongly to the minority view that Mark and Matthew share a common source (rather than Matthew using Mark), so that Mark's divergences from Matthew are just as significant as the other way round.
page 328 note 1 Adapted from the translation by T. W. Arnold.
page 328 note 2 As Sir Thomas Browne said (in all solemnity, though he seems to have changed his mind later) about ‘this triviall and vulgar way of coition': ‘it is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his Me, nor is there any thing that will more deject his coold imagination, when hee shall consider what an odde and unworthy piece of folly hee bath committed’. (Religio Medici.)
page 329 note 1 Harpu in Hebrew: literally, ‘let go, relax’.
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