Canter Bridge

Theologians would eventually invent the term ‘mystical union’ to describe the solidarity between Christ and his follower that the apostle Paul is at pains to describe in the fifth chapter of his letter to the Roman believers. Others would talk about ‘covenantal solidarity’, a way of underscoring that God the Father views believers in the same terms by which he assesses the beloved son, since the former have seen their identity inseparably and even juridically joined to that of Christ.

Paul prefers the language of baptism. Its physical lowering down into a realm where one cannot breathe and therefore must die and its seconds-later raising of the same person into the revivifying, oxygen-rich realm of life serve as a visible parable of what it means to cast one one’s lot with a crucified and resurrected messiah.

It is a way of tracing the renunciation of a past life—with what Paul considers its shame—in favor of a new life that is joined at the hip and a thousand other places with the living messiah. It is at the same time a matter of competing powers and the conflict between them. Paul considers that his readers were once under the power of sin and death but by baptism have come under the mutually exclusive power of righteousness and life. That is to say, under the dominion of God himself.

There is a newly acquired legacy in the mix, for in the Pauline worldview acts of righteousness live forever. They are a contribution to God’s own redemptive project, promising even in the small moment when the baptized believer struggles to put off old ways and bring the shadows of his life under the new dawn of God’s gift.