Gnostic subtraction story
How evangelicals on the sacraments are uncomfortably similar to the gnostics…
McGowan refers to a non-canonical “gospel” fragment, probably from the late second century, in which a Pharisee named Levi has an altercation with a figure called “the Saviour” about baptism. The Pharisee is very proud of his water baptism, but is soundly rebuked by the Saviour: “I and my disciples, who you say have not bathed, we have bathed in waters of eternal life, which come down from the God of heaven” (McGowan, Ancient Christian Worship, 163). Or, your water baptism doesn’t matter because we have had a spiritual baptism.
McGowan explains:
This “Savior” speaks for a group that saw the material character of Christian baptism and other ritual performances as missing the real and wholly spiritual point of salvation and enlightenment. Such implied opposition to baptism is spelled out in some of the documents founds at Nag Hammadi […] which expound the sort of world-renouncing, speculative theology often referred to as “gnostic.” (McGowan, 164)
The quoted fragment understands the move from the Old to the New Covenant as a version of what I have elsewhere described as a subtraction story. On this view, the Old Covenant marked by physical rites and symbols is replaced by a spiritual New Covenant; the “spiritualness” of the New implies the removal, or at least minimisation, of physical rites and symbols per se. On this account, the rite of water baptism seems to be an out-of-place holdover from Judaism.
It is hard not to notice how similar these gnostics sound to contemporary evangelicals when they talk about the sacraments! In much evangelical thought and rhetoric, the Christian sacraments are put asunder from faith in Christ, and then are conflated with the fleshly rites of the Old Covenant; once that move is made, the sacraments can be subjected to the same kinds of denunciations that Christ and the apostles made about the traditions of the Pharisees and the Judaizers—which is exactly what the fragment quoted above does, setting the Saviour against the sacrament. To their credit, evangelicals are almost always good enough to recognise that the Lord did institute the rites of baptism and the Supper for some reason or other, and so awkward attempts are made to explain the presence of these rites in what is otherwise a heavenly, spiritual religion—or more often, to explain them away. The sacraments are usually salvaged as a Christ-prescribed means for an individual Christian to declare to others what is happening in his heart.
The heart of the problem for both gnostics and sacrament-suspicious evangelicals is in drawing the distinction between the spiritual and the non-spiritual in ways that Scripture itself does not. Consider how Paul messes with these tidy categories in Colossians: according to the Apostle, the saints in Colossae have died to the elements of the world and must therefore not place themselves in captivity to fleshly rites like circumcision; they must instead cling to Christ, who is the real substance of those things. So far so good. But what was it that effected their death to the elements of the world? What was it that joined them to Christ? As it turns out, it was Christian baptism. In baptism, the saints are buried with Christ and thus they share in his own cutting-off of the flesh that he endured in his crucifixion. Far from being a holdover from the elements of the world, it is baptism that brings about their deliverance from that realm. Baptism belongs on the heavenly-and-spiritual side of the ledger, not the elemental-and-fleshly side.