What We Believe About Baptism, Resurrection and the World to Come

I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible; And in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Only-begotten, Begotten of the Father before all worlds, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, Begotten, not made, of one essence with the Father, by whom all things were made: Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and was made man; And was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate and suffered and was buried; And the third day He arose again, according to the Scriptures; And ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of the Father; And He shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead, Whose kingdom shall have no end. And I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, Who proceedeth from the Father, Who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, who spake by the prophets; And I believe in one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. I acknowledge one Baptism for the remission of sins. I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

This is a logical extension from, "one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church." This is the fourth use of the word "one" in the creed (one God, the Father Almighty; one Lord, Jesus Christ; one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church; one Baptism for the remission of sins). The way one enters into the one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church is through the one Baptism which is offered for the remission of sins.

Let us look at the sacrament of baptism.

Throughout the Gospel of John one finds almost a preoccupation with water, coming up, it seems, in almost every chapter (there are actually twenty four references to water in John).

• In the second chapter of John’s gospel Jesus turns to water into wine.

• In the third chapter Jesus has this dialog with Nicodemus about being born again of water and the spirit. There are frequent references to the water with which John the Baptist baptizes.

• In the fourth chapter Jesus speaks with the Samaritan woman (Saint Photini) about "the living water."

• In the fifth chapter Jesus heals the paralyzed man who is at the pool.

• In the sixth chapter Jesus walks on the water.

• In the seventh chapter we find another important statement from Jesus.

• In the ninth chapter Jesus heals the man born blind by telling him to wash in the water.

• In the nineteenth chapter we read

Everything that has been said about the life giving water all through the gospel of St. John from the beginning leads up to this blood and water that comes forth from the side of Lord on the cross. From between His ribs, where His side is opened, the Church (His body that is brought to life by His blood) is born. Just as when the first Adam is spoken of as being put to sleep by God in paradise and from his rib God makes Eve, so likewise, from out of the opened side of Christ (the new Adam, the Bridegroom) comes the Bride, the fountain of life-giving blood and water that nourishes. Again, God’s word uses such physical imagery. Our life is given not through an idea, an operation of the brain, but through this contact with the incarnate person of the Son of God. That is how you become part of His body.

So that where the life-giving blood and water of Jesus Christ is, to him who is given the new birth in that water and blood he is also given the new birth in the Spirit. Some people, when they read the third chapter of John and hear about being born again or born from above of water and the Spirit they think that two separate things are being spoken of. This is simply not the case. We see that, for example, in all of the gospel accounts of the Baptism of Christ Himself. For example…

Just as for the Lord in His Baptism the water and the Spirit are there together, so likewise in the one Baptism that is offered in the Church for the remission of sins, where the living water is there the life-giving Spirit is. And in this we see what a sacrament is.

The word sacrament (sacramentum in the Latin) is the way the early western Church translated the Greek word musterion, which, of course, is mystery. When we speak of the sacraments as mysteries we don’t mean it in the common understanding of the word.

The mystery is not that which needs to be figured out. Rather, the mystery is that place, that means that God provides for us to contact Him – that in which God’s people have their contact with what God has done in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit for the salvation of the world. The means by which that life is channeled to God’s people, to the members of His body, the Church, these are the mysteries, the sacraments. St.. Leo the Great (5^th century Latin father of the Church) taught that all that the Lord Jesus Christ has accomplished (in His life, in His teaching, in His passion, in His death, in His burial, in His ascension, in the coming of the Holy Spirit, and in His coming on the last day) is channeled to mankind through the sacraments of the Church. And the sacrament of the Church which provides the God given entrance into this new life is the sacrament of Baptism.

In Orthodoxy, which reflects the whole experience of God’s people – both old and new Covenants - there is never any kind of division between the material and the spiritual. Rather, the two always go together. And that is the nature of all of the sacraments. There is always the marriage of the physical and the spiritual. Whether it is the water of Baptism (which is the vehicle for the new birth in the Spirit), whether it is the oil of Chrismation (which is the vehicle of the seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit - the sign of the pouring out of the grace of God), whether it is the bread and wine of the Eucharist (which are the vehicles of the flesh and blood Christ becoming present for the people of God to feed upon for everlasting life), the nature of the sacraments is that they always bear witness to the incarnation.

We see in this sacramental life of the Church the witness of the holiness of the material creation. God created us as matter. God has saved us as matter, personally, by becoming incarnate. And material we remain until the end of time and beyond the end of time in eternity. Our flesh and blood as it is now cannot inherit the Kingdom of God without being transformed. But it is transformed, it is not destroyed. The transformation of it does not include its destruction any more than the crucifixion and burial of Christ involved the destruction of His fleshly body. His body was not destroyed, it did not dissolve into the elements from which it was comprised. Rather, it went forward into this new eternal mode of existence which knows no corruption, which knows no death.

The water of Baptism is the sign, the means by which both the death and resurrection of Christ are revealed. To baptize (baptizo – the Greek verb) means to be submerged, to be immersed in the water, to go down and be covered by it. We go down and are covered by the water to die with Christ and we come forth from the water dead to sin. I confess one Baptism for the remission of sins. That whole package of evil (corruption, death, emptiness, voluntary sins, sins that are involuntary, the result of the original sin) is drowned in the baptismal water and we come forth a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17).

We would never say that the physical side of the mystery of the sacraments is a secondary aspect. One must be careful, especially if one is a product of some branches of western Christianity, because of the deeply rooted idea that matter is secondary, that matter is not holy. With many of us there is this internal twisting and wrangling at such expressions as "holy water" and "holy oil." Behind that is something that is deeply, deeply un-Christian. It is more a product of the philosophy of Plato which regarded the human body and all material creation as bad. At the basis of the rejection of the sacraments found in some non-Orthodox Christianity is a de-facto rejection of the incarnation itself.

Here are the words of St. John of Damascus (676 - circa 754 A.D.).

What do we mean by there being one Baptism? It is understood in two ways. First of all, the Baptism that Christ has given as the means by which one is joined to His body, can be found only within the communion of the Church. Secondly, one Baptism means that the Baptism is not repeated. It is something that happens once in the life of a Christian. But what begins at the one Baptism is fulfilled or actualized throughout the rest of one’s life.

It is the current and prevailing discipline of the most of Orthodox Church in the 20^th century (for about the last century and a half) that those Christians who been baptized by water in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Sprit outside the communion of the Orthodox Church are not baptized again when they enter into the communion of the Church. The Church can recognize in such heterodox Trinitarian baptisms done in water at least the presence of her own basic faith in who God is and what eternal life is. It is within the authority of the Church (to bind and to loose) to take such baptisms and fulfill them, to provide for what was lacking in them. She does this through the sacrament of Chrismation, the seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit.

However, at the close of the 20^th century, there are some Orthodox who would say that because of the great instability of doctrine and morality that has been going for the last several decades in the heterodox Christian churches (where even the most basic doctrines and standards are flagrantly either violated or are up for grabs) it is becoming more and more difficult to have any kind of assurance that we can assume that there is basic Trinitarian faith in those who come to the communion of the Orthodox Church from outside.

It is at the center of our identity as Christians that in the resurrection of Christ (the first fruit of those who have fallen asleep) the way has been opened for eternal life as God intended it to be. That eternal life is not a vague, non-physical sort of immortality where we are freed from the curse of our bodies and material being. These commonplace notions of immortality are not in any sense Christian notions. Rather they are much more the product of Greek philosophy and Oriental religion. According to both, the reason why we are immortal is not only that we continue to exist after physical death but, also, that we always have existed before physical birth (this is a basic tenet of Mormonism, too). Accordingly, theories of re-incarnation abound in such schools of thought.

On the contrary, the Judeo-Christian understanding of time and history is that they are linear. They have a beginning, they have an ending. They are not some kind of illusion. While not always immediately perceivable to us in our limited way of perceiving it, the plan of God in history is being worked out. History is coming to its climax, its end, that point that the Scripture calls the "day of the Lord," His ultimate intervention.

God intervenes throughout history. His intervention in the incarnation and in the resurrection makes salvation possible. God’s final intervention is when He returns in the flesh at the end of time and, according to the doctrine of the Church, everything that is evil will be righted (except for hose who resist the righting of it through the misuse of their free will which God will not violate throughout time or in eternity). Everything that is unjust will be corrected. Every abuse, all the suffering, all the oppression, all the pain of mankind will be recompensed at the resurrection of the dead on the last day. God, who has entered time, will bring it to its ultimate point of ushering in the Kingdom of God, the life of the age to come.

When we say that we believe in the resurrection of the dead we are saying that at a certain point every member of the human race will come forth from the grave. This promise was heralded in the Old Testament.

There is something beyond this shadowy, incomplete human life when death unnaturally separates the soul from the body. You can’t be a compete human being without your body and so the body must be restored by God without its destruction. At the burial of an Orthodox Christian the Church proclaims that, "the earth is the Lord’s, and all its fullness." (1Cor. 10:26) The Lord Himself has lived on earth and entered into death. And just as He, the first fruits, came forth from the grave, so also on the last day we will be reintegrated as human beings, soul and body, in the ultimate expression of His divine power.

Whether it will be the resurrection of life or the resurrection of condemnation depends on the response of our free will because everything God that has done to make the eternal life possible He has done.

How are we to understand what goes on between the time we die and when we arise on the last day? What kind of life do the dead have? The Scripture speaks of those who die in Christ that they sleep in Christ (1 Cor. 15:18). Death has never been the same since Jesus Christ entered into its state. Death is no longer that which alienates man from God. Death is no longer the empty, bottomless pit because God Himself in the flesh has gone to the bottom of the pit. Rather, death has become the means through which we are united to Him. Those who die in Christ, until the time of the resurrection on the last day, are clothed with His risen body until we as persons are given our own unique risen bodies on the last day. The risen body of Christ, who is the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep, covers the nakedness of mankind in death.

The sleep that we have in Christ is not a kind of suspended animation. The sleep that we have in Christ is the rest that has been made possible by God.

And what do we do in this rest? We are purified from all those things which are not of God in us. There is the necessity of purification after death but the Orthodox don’t try to define it or to say how it happens or how long it takes. But we do acknowledge its existence as essential. The spiritual journey that begins in this life continues after death. "It’s not over until it’s over," and it’s not over until the end of time on the last day.

Those who are purified and united to God, clothed in Christ, do what He does (i.e., make intercession). So the whole body of Christ is together (head and members), the Church in heaven and the Church on earth.

The life of the world to come

The one and only reason why anyone should be an Orthodox Christian is because we seek the life of the age to come, the life of the age in which God will be all in all. (1 Cor 15:28). This is the life that God intended for us when He, in His divine purpose, called us from non-existence into being. We will share His life in a perfected existence that includes the perfection of that marriage of the physical and spiritual that is within each one of us. This existence includes even the perfection of the material universe. While some people think that this material creation is going to be annihilated, the Orthodox say that it passes away in order to give birth to a new heaven and a new earth.

This existence of ours, this flesh and blood which is fallen, cannot inherit the Kingdom of God unless it is transformed, unless it falls into the ground and dies like a grain of wheat. The new life comes forth through the transformation of the old life, not the annihilation of the old life. The risen body of Christ, which is the pattern of our eternal existence, comes forth from the tomb in a way that did not include the annihilation of His physical body through the crucifixion and the death. Likewise, St. Paul describes this creation as groaning in birth pains (Rom. 8:22) for the coming into existence of the new creation.

The universe is not eternal but has a beginning and is proceeding to a purpose intended for it by God alone. That purpose is the life of the age to come, the eternal age where there will be no more time as we know it but only the eternity of God being all in all. Whether or not a human being shares in that life is up to him or her. That is why we have been given the Church.

This is eternal life – to know the true God and Jesus Christ who He has sent (John 17:3); to know Him not simply in terms of intellectual knowledge but to experience His own life that He has entrusted to His Church through the channels of the sacraments. In that life within the communion of the Church, the life of the age to come is already flowing in our veins. Those who belong to the body of Christ are already being transformed into the age to come. We see this particularly and most especially in the lives of the great saints who attained union with God while still in this world, with all of the consequences of sin and the fall being reversed visibly (this being witnessed to by those who were with them). This is possible – it’s not too good to be true. The life of the age to come is the universal call that God offers to everyone. The eternal Hell, which does exist, exists only because there are those who, because they do not want God, reject Him for all eternity.

Concerning the fullness of this life, without any kind of loss or compromise or dilution or betrayal – despite the sinfulness of the members of the Church from the beginning – it is our confession that it is within the Orthodox Church that the fullness of the life of the age to come is to be found.