Belief and Practice
Reflections on the Lectionary for January 12th
For most of my life, I have heard that a Christian becomes a Christian by believing things. My experience might be skewed, admittedly, because I have spent most of my life among Protestant Christians, and especially among evangelical ones in the early part of my life. But even if it’s especially true among Protestant and evangelical Protestant Christians, I think it’s broadly true of many other kinds of Christian too: many Christians claim that one becomes and remains Christian by believing certain things. Many Christians claim that being a Christian means assenting to certain propositions, and that belief is the most important action that a person can take.
I am not so sure that is true. I have noticed, even among the Protestants and evangelicals who claim that belief is central, that it is not belief but practice that seems to matter most. After working in a couple of Protestant churches for nearly 25 years, and after speaking and teaching in dozens of others and teaching hundreds of students as they prepare for religious leadership, I have noticed that even in communities that are ostensibly organized around shared belief, it’s rare for two people to actually believe the same thing. Many people think they are the only ones—they think they are the standouts who mumble the parts of the creed or confession that they don’t believe or secretly question some claim made by the pastor—but it turns out that nearly everyone is an exception to the thing that everyone agrees ought to be the rule. Shared belief, at least in the sense of assenting to a list of propositions or claims, does not actually lie at the center of Christianity in the way many people claim.
Practice, though—practice does seem to play a central role, and practice seems to be the thing that best describes belonging and identity in a Christian community. Practice can take a lot of different forms. It can have to do with musical style, preaching style, or worship style. Practice can describe a preference for a certain Bible translation or approaches to teaching or study or giving, or practice can be about old and deep traditions like a women’s luncheon or Sunday School or a choir rehearsal night or a youth group fundraiser. I have found that if you ask people why they belong to a particular church, they probably won’t describe what they believe (even if they think that belief ought to be important). Instead, they usually describe the practices of that community and the way those practices give their life meaning, comfort, and structure. I’m generalizing of course, and maybe I’m overstating the case, but once I began to notice how much practice and not belief structured people’s religious lives, it became more and more obvious. Judging by how people actually behave, doing certain things is at least as important as believing certain things, and it’s probably more important most of the time.
At a big-picture level, the Christian tradition has two historically dominant practices: baptism and eucharist. Different parts of the Christian tradition name these differently, calling them sacraments, ordinances, rituals, or acts of obedience. And different strands of Christianity sometimes include other practices on the same level as these (penance, confession, confirmation, ordination, tongues, etc.). Although Christians don’t always think about baptism and eucharist the same way, and although they certainly don’t practice them identically, baptism and eucharist are as close to a universal Christian thing as there is—certainly more universal than any given belief.
For churches following the Revised Common Lectionary, this week is the Baptism of the Lord, the week we celebrate Jesus’ own baptism. Every canonical gospel includes an account of Jesus being baptized by John the Baptist (though careful readers will notice that in the Gospel of John, Jesus does not actually get baptized by John, but the text only has Jesus meet John at the river and then skips to the part where John describes the Spirit descending like a dove). All four gospels considered the baptism story important enough to include, suggesting that baptism was central to people’s understanding of Christianity from the very beginning. The passage from Luke, which is included in the lectionary for this week, has John the Baptist saying some interesting things about the practice of baptism. “I baptize you with water,” John says, “but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the strap of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” To my mind, the gospels never quite make it clear what this means. There are no scenes of Jesus calling down fire from heaven to engulf anyone, and for all the rhetoric of fire and fiery baptism, fire does not end up playing much of a role in Jesus’ ministry. But it’s undoubtedly a powerful symbol. Arguably the second chapter of Acts—the scene of Pentecost—provides a plausible meaning for this saying, since in that passage the Holy Spirit is connected to flame in a kind of anointing. But if all we had were the gospels, this claim to baptism with fire would remain a little mysterious.
The Pentecost story is not in the lectionary this week, but another passage from Acts is—Acts 8:14-17. This passage is fascinating, I think, for what it tells us about understandings of baptism in the first or second centuries. Here we have evidence of a little rift between two different practices of baptism, or maybe between two different beliefs about the practice of baptism. The Samaritans “had accepted the word of God,” the text says, but their baptism was deficient because “they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus,” and they had not received the Holy Spirit also. It seems that the group representing the views of Acts—“the apostles” as represented by Peter and John—thought that post-Pentecost, a baptism in the name of Jesus was not sufficient, but that some action of the Spirit was also necessary. This reminds me a bit of another passage in Acts, later on in chapter 18 (verses 24-28), where someone named Apollos was a powerful teacher and preacher, “though he knew only the baptism of John.” Apollos too received emissaries from the group representing the view of Acts—this time from Priscilla and Aquila—to help him fully understand “the Way of God,” which seems to have had something to do with a fuller understanding of baptism. Both of these passages suggest that the group of protagonists in Acts—Peter and John and the crowd that had been there at Pentecost—felt that they held some special knowledge or understanding about baptism that others did not. They had a pattern, at least judging from Acts, of going around explaining to other Jesus-followers how their understandings of baptism were deficient.
This all points to the centrality of practice. The apostles thought that the practice of baptism was important, and they thought that it was important to do it correctly and to have the right understand of what the practice accomplished. Something similar happens in our communities today, with baptism and with other practices. Some of the fiercest debates and disputes between and within religious communities happen because of differences of opinion about practices. These can happen on a grand scale; the Protestant Reformation, for example, was in many ways a dispute over the proper enactment and meaning of practices. Or it can happen on a smaller scale, in disagreements about how people ought to stand while receiving communion, whether there ought to be announcements in worship, or what kind of music is appropriate for Sunday mornings. Just like in the Book of Acts, our disputes about practices can become intense because our practices are where our religion is most fully lived, and where our faith comes into the most contact with the ideas and actions of other people.
Many churches use this Sunday and its story—the Baptism of Jesus—as an occasion to renew baptismal vows. I’ve seen that ritual done several different ways, but all of them have asked people to remember their own baptism and to recommit to the life they chose at their baptism. The ritual has always held a lot of fascination for me, because in most communities, most people have diverse experiences of baptism. Even people who were all baptized in the same community might have been baptized by different pastors in different settings using different liturgies at different phases of their lives. And in most communities, a lot of the folks were actually baptized somewhere else—in a different church or a different theological tradition—so that the baptism being remembered might differ from person to person. The act of remembering our baptisms communally is its own kind of Pentecost, with many different languages of memory being spoken at the same time. One person might have been baptized as a baby in a Lutheran church and later confirmed, another might have been dunked in a river at a Tennessee church camp, and a third might have been baptized as an adult, anointed (“sprinkled”) with water when they decided to join their partner’s church. And all three might be sitting on the same pew, remembering together but remembering very different things.
That’s a nice model for thinking about practice, and the way it can unite us despite our diverse histories and distinctive preferences. Belief, which we often claim unites us, seems to divide us more than anything, or else we pay it lip service and then proceed to believe differently anyway. But practice has something about it that allows for difference and a range of experiences. Practice can make room for many understandings within one way of doing, if we let it. Practice has a way of recognizing that we all come by different paths, even when we are walking together. None of that stops us from sometimes insisting that others should share our understandings of practice (as Acts sometimes does), but it does provide us space to see each other’s experiences and share in them.
That’s what Jesus was doing when he approached John the Baptist at the Jordan River: he was participating in someone else’s practice. Jesus didn’t invent baptism, and John likely didn’t either; both were joining a long and fascinating history of evolving ritual bathing practices. Whatever John was doing at the Jordan, Jesus joined in on it and in a way he made it his own, and he made it ours too. It’s funny to think about that—that one of the central practices of Christianity came from a time before Christianity existed. But that’s how it is with practice: we weave in and out of communities of practice, doing things together for a while but differently, and doing things the same apart, and sometimes even doing the same things together for a while. And when we do all of those things, together and apart and the same and different, it’s always worth remembering.