Bucer on Baptism

In his essay in Martin Bucer: Reforming Church and Community , David Wright observes that the early Bucer sharply separated the baptism of the Spirit from water baptism. During the mid-1520s, he “accommodated infant baptism by minimizing it” (97).

By the late 1530s, though, the “rupture” between the two baptisms has disappeared. In a “Brief SUmmary of the Christian Doctrine and Religion (1548), Bucer wrote, “We confess and teach that holy baptism, when given and received according to theLord’s command, is in the case of adults and of young children truly a baptism ofregeneration and renewal in the Holy Spirit, whereby those who are baptized haveall their sins washed away, are buried into the death of our Lord Jesus Christ, areincorporated into him and put on him for the death of their sins, for a new andgodly life and the blessed resurrection, and through him become children and heirsof God” (98).

A decade earlier, he had written:

“Our baptism, then, is Christ’s baptism, which the church must use, the symbol(‘symbolum’) of our acceptance before God. By this symbol for the first time ourregeneration and renewal through the Holy Spirit are offered and presented(‘exhibetur’) by words and washing in water, out of God’s kindness towards us inChrist earlier revealed to us. By it we are first consecrated to and ingrafted into theFather, the Son and the Holy Spirit.”Wright argues that exhibere “cannot mean anything less than ‘confer, impart, bestow’” (99). Otherwise, the point would be redundant, since Bucer has already indicated that baptism signifies .

Wright summarizes the change: “Whereas originallyBucer allowed to baptism little more than a purely significative function(‘Water baptism is an outward sign of the baptism of Christ’), and wasadamant that it actually imparted nothing, now he affirms that for infantsthe ‘only’ thing it does is actually impart God’s blessings, even when itssignificative force is futile. Lest it be objected that the subject of ‘exhibuit’ isGod and not ‘the sacrament’, Bucer has said on the previous page that ‘thesacraments of God are precisely what they are said to be since they reallyconfer (‘re ipsa exhibent’) what they signify – the covenant of the Lord, thecleansing of sins, communion in Christ’. From the mid-1530s Bucerinstinctively attributed to the rite itself what a decade earlier he hadsteadfastly reserved for the baptism of Christ or the Spirit” (100).