It is ironic that after thirty-five years and thirteen volumes spanning 9300 pages, Swiss theologian Karl Barth should put down his pen and leave off work on his Kirchliche Dogmatik with a volume dealing with the first step of the Christian life, baptism. It reminds us that theology, by its nature, never reaches the end of its quest to understand God.
This volume has an unusual structure. Barth devotes the first 42 pages to baptism with the holy spirit, then the remaining 190 pages to baptism with water. This, although for him, the baptism with the holy spirit (a term Barth equates with divine calling) is essential for making a water baptism effective, whereas water baptism, though also indispensable, is secondary. The first is the work of God, the second the work of man.
Barth organizes his discussion of water baptism into three aspects: source, goal, and meaning, answering each Christocentricly. Rather than locating the command to baptize in the words of the resurrected Christ to his disciples at the end of Matthew’s gospel, Barth finds that Jesus’ submission to the baptism of John is the source of our practice. That the goal is Jesus is expressed in the language used when baptism is performed “in” the name of Jesus.
Barth interrupts his discussion of the third aspect, meaning, with what is most famous about this volume: a rejection of the practice of infant baptism. In taking this position, Barth reversed his own earlier teaching on the subject and expressed agreement with a book his son Markus had written that concluded that the practice had no New Testament support.
Barth does a good job of showing the weaknesses of the exegetical and dogmatic arguments for infant baptism and is certainly right that the central issue for the Reformers was the preservation of the post-Constantinian idea that equated the church and society.
So is Barth right to reject the practice? Only if he is right in his insistence that the baptism with the Holy Spirit refers to the divine calling, which allows us the freedom to choose to seek baptism.
Even when one disagrees with Barth, it is stimulating to engage with his arguments. This is the payoff for persevering through his prolix writing style, which often seems to make a point by recasting the same idea in as many as five different formulations. He’s one of the last masters writing in a German that takes the multi-claused architectonic miracle of an elaborate Latin period as its model for scholarly prose. It is prose marvelously suited to the subtle and complex course of Barth’s thought, which often seems to be engaged in a dialectic with itself. Yet it’s a relief that most no longer write like this. ( )