I like much of Peter Leithart’s writing, and I found his recent piece over at First Things stimulating, even if I think I disagree with some of its central premises. Read the whole thing for yourself, but the basic thesis is that NT authorities assumed entire nations can be baptized and (if I read Leithart fairly) converted. At a few points, Leithart also posits that modern democratic instincts are to blame for making us recoil at such a notion.
Because I largely share the conceptual aversion he is describing, I have been pondering that point about democratic reflexes particularly, and upon reflection, I don’t think that’s the real sticking point for me, anyway.
For my money, the uncomfortable part of imagining “baptized nations” is that it seems all the worse for baptism. For his part, Leithart cheerfully invokes the precedents of mass national baptism and conversion as they occurred in the early Middle Ages with groups such as the Franks, the Saxons and the Rus. I’m just not sure we can take these accounts at face value, however. The case of the Saxons is particularly unfortunate. When we say he “required” baptism, Charlemagne had imposed Christianity at swordpoint, mass executing thousands of Saxons who were not keen on the new religion and hanging the death penalty over any others who would not observe Christian practices. Color me skeptical that this is what Jesus or Paul or Leithart himself have in mind.
In other, less brutal instances, the “conversion” in question seems to be more about Christianity adapting to the local culture and the political elite, not the other way around. One need only read a little of Gregory of Tours to start questioning how converted the Franks really were; Gregory appears to have his own doubts at times. And looking at the local synods of the period across the Christian landscape, it is pretty clear syncretism is rampant: it’s arguably the chief concern of bishops and abbots when the start engaging with the majority population that lives in the countryside.[1]
Anyone still inclined to think that mass conversion was thorough, holistic, and basically in-line with the NT has should read Peter Heather’s Christendom, which, in the judgment of this historian, gives a far more realistic, evidence-backed, and decidedly unromantic view of what was actually happening in many of these national conversions. The picture he paints is not flattering to national conversions, to put it simply.
Another reason I doubt that democratization is the real reason someone like me doesn’t love the notion of national baptism: highly undemocratic Christians have argued that the politically uncoerced will is vital to authentic religion. To name just two, Lactantius and post-Milvian-Bridge-epiphany Constantine both insisted on freedom of religious conviction. Whatever else they were, these men were not modern democrats, and we may be grateful that Constantine had more scruples than Charlemagne. Now, there’s an interesting story about why this reasoning dropped out of consensus political theology and Christian social imagination, but in any event, non-coerced conversion was not originally the offspring of modernity, the Enlightenment, or democratization.
Finally, I wonder whether national baptism and conversion are themselves coterminous in the NT. I realize certain theologies and liturgies of individual baptism can at least talk about baptism and conversion in that way, and I don’t really want to prosecute that case here.
But when Leithart references 1 Cor. 10:2, which says our forefathers (Israel) “were all baptized into Moses,” it seems to me that Paul is using that biblical history to issue a dire warning against sacramentalism and the kind of syncretism I reference above. For in fact, “God wasn’t pleased with most of them” (v. 5) despite the aforementioned baptism, and this generation was wiped out in the wilderness. Paul seems to indicate that baptism and communion won’t do you much good if you become an idolater (v. 7). Nowadays, the folks in religious studies have given us a fancier word for idolatry: “syncretism.”
But Leithart also cites Jesus’ own words in the Great Commission in Matt. 28:19, usually translated something like, “Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” So nations can and must be baptized, then, yes? I must say that’s not how the Greek strikes my eyes. In the LXX and the NT, ta ethne is the standardized, semitechnical way of talking about “the gentiles” writ-large, which is also how it is translated in other passages. Without belaboring the point, “Go and make disciples of all the gentiles” has a markedly different resonance.[2]
Indeed, Paul and other early Christian commentators can even speak of gentilic identities being discarded in some sense. In Ephesians 2:11, he asks his audience to remember that they themselves were literally “at one point the nations” (ta ethne), aliens to Israel and strangers to the covenant. But in the present, those gentiles have been brought near by the blood of Christ, which suggests they are no longer “the nations.” Or again in Romans 11, I think the upshot of that profound image of the olive tree is that the certain members of “the nations” have left that identity behind and joined the nation of Israel according to the promise. In addressing puzzled Roman interlocutors, certainly Christian apologists and martyrs would later speak of themselves in ethnic terms: they were a kind of new nation, unlike anything the world has seen before. Based on what he writes in his article, I think Leithart would actually agree with much of this.
Can nations be baptized then? I guess I’m not sure. It may depend quite a lot on how we define “nation,” which is a rather fraught topic of late. That said, where I have doubts, I don’t think they have much to do with democratization or modernity: the discomfort touches something much deeper and nearer the heart of what it means to be a disciple who keeps good faith with the Master.
David Frankfurter, Christianizing Egypt: Syncretism and Local Worlds in Late Antiquity, Martin Classical Lectures (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). This evidence is from Egypt, but the same basic phenomena crop up all over the Roman Empire and its immediate successor states in the West. Egypt just tends to preserve more data for all sorts of issues than other regions. ↑
Further confirmation appears, I think, in the object that follows the crucial participle “baptizing,” which is not the neuter auta, which is what we would expect if the neuter nations were the objects of baptism. Instead, Jesus uses the masculine plural autous, which is how you would talk about a collection of individuals, men and women alike. ↑