It has been said that, in the Bible belt, everyone is a Christian until they get their drivers’ license. As soon as a child is old enough to leave his upbringing, he does so. And, after a time of wild living, he frequently comes back to the church so that his kids can go to Sunday School, but no one takes the charade very seriously.
Because consistent Christians are appalled and disgusted with all forms of such nominalism, they often react strongly to this problem. But reactions are frequently overreactions, which lead in turn to new distortions and errors. One such reaction has led us to minimize and underestimate the cultural potency of water baptism.
Because of our opposition to nominalism, it has come about that one of our definitions of the word “baptized” says that it means nothing more than to place a religious veneer on something, always to no effect. Thus we talk about baptized secularism, or baptized humanism, or baptized feminism. Baptism is thought to be the whitewash we use to clean the outside of a sepulcher. The only thing it does, we think, is make hypocrisy possible.
Having acknowledged that nominalism is a sin and a great evil, let me suggest that we have greatly misunderstood what kind of sin it is. A culture in which a great number of people are baptized — whether they live consistently with their baptismal vows or not — is a culture which is under covenantal obligation. This obligation is external and objective, and is based upon an external and objective criterion — water baptism.
Too often parents haul their infants down to the front of the church for a feel-good Kodak moment. The baby is cute, the baptism is performed, and the flesh applauds. But the true meaning of baptism is objective, and rests outside of all hypocrisies and doctrinal misunderstandings. It means that the mark of Christ has been placed on that person, and that he now has an obligation to repent and believe. A baptized individual has the obligation to have his life point the same direction his baptism does — to Christ and to His righteousness. The fact is that many refuse to do so, but this does not alter their obligation in the slightest. When many individuals in a culture have received the mark of baptism, the presence of this obligation works its way out into the cultural assumptions held in common by all. And this is how a culture can come to be very wicked, and yet be, to use Flannery O Conner’s phrase, Christ-haunted.
Suppose a man marries and he knows that he is going to be unfaithful to his wife — in fact, he already has adulterous plans. But for various reasons, he thinks it expedient to be married, so he goes to the church and makes the vows. Now, is he married? Of course he is — he is under covenantal obligation to keep his vows, whether or not he meant them. Using a figure of speech, we might say that he was not being a “real” husband to his wife, meaning that he did not treat his wife the way a husband should. But in another sense, he is very much a real husband. In using the figure of speech, saying he is not a real husband, we are not saying that he has no obligation to keep his vows. We simply mean that he is being a scoundrel. In the same way, baptized infidels are not “real” Christians, and unless they repent, they will all perish. But this is where evangelicals must take care. These hypocrites are under the obligations of the covenant, and so in another sense, they are Christians.
This is related to another common misunderstanding of infant baptism, a misunderstanding shared by nominalists and sincere Christian alike. It is thought by many that to have a child baptized is “better than nothing.” A child may not make it to heaven because of this, but at least he is off to a good start. But the Bible teaches that to whom much is given, much is required. Those covenant members who despise the covenant are under a much stricter judgment than the pagans outside. Parents who know what the covenant obligations are should tremble at the baptismal font. And parents who do not take the sacrament very seriously should come to realize that they are in reality heaping condemnation upon their children.
So the fact remains that we are living in a country where a great many of the unbelievers surrounding us are . . . baptized unbelievers. This should not make us dismiss baptism as a nullity; that would be to make the same mistake that everyone else is making. Rather, we should see the prevalence of baptism as a wonderful tool for covenantal, cultural evangelism. Oddly, many unbelievers have a better sense of this than we do. They know that a claim of Christ rests upon them — they feel the weight of it. They want to ignore this claim, but it still presses on them. Sadly, they are helped in their attempts to suppress this claim by our neglect of their status. We ignore the claim of Christ on them too. But Matthew Henry’s father said once that, whenever his children misbehaved, the first thing he would do would be to “grab them by their baptism.” In our presentation of the gospel to a nominally Christian nation, this is what we must learn to do. We must grab them by their baptism.