Editorial Advisory Board
- Sean Freyne, Trinity College, Dublin
- Elizabeth Clark, Duke University
- Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Brown University
- Bernard McGinn, University of Chicago
- Charles H. Lippy, University of Tennessee, Chattanooga
- Steven E. Ozment, Harvard University
- Rosemary Radford Ruether, Pacific School of Religion
Volume 1
Christian Origins
Edited by Richard A. Horsley, University of Massachusetts, Boston
November 2005
Volume 2
Late Ancient Christianity
Edited by Virginia Burrus, Drew University
November 2005
Volume 3
Byzantine Christianity
Edited by Derek Krueger,University of North Carolina, Greensboro
June 2006
Volume 4
Medieval Christianity
Edited by Daniel E. Bornstein, Texas A&M University
2006–2007
Volume 5
Reformation Christianity
Edited by Peter Matheson, Melbourne College of Divinity
2006–2007
Volume 6
Modern Christianity to 1900
Edited by Amanda Porterfield, Florida State University
2007–2008
Volume 7
Twentieth Century Global Christianity
Edited by Mary Farrell Bednarowski, United theological Seminary of the Twin Cities
2007–2008
There have been many books about bishops and kings,
clerics and theologians, but what do we know about
the Christian life of "ordinary" people across the last
2,000 years of Christian history? Very little ... until now!
Using newly developed research methods, over 100 scholars
uncover the neglected side of church history as they lay bare
the religious ideas and consciousness of "the people" - their
assumptions, beliefs, values, habits, longings, terrors, anxieties
and comforts. This is history "from below" and the revelations
and insights are fascinating.
Each volume includes 10-12 essays by leading experts in the
field about the lives of ordinary Christian women and men
of the time. Included in each volume are over three-dozen
graphics and maps, as well as extensive bibliographies.
TCW — The CyberWalrus
"The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things..."
Walrusers, Fortress Press is publishing a set of volumes of Christian history: A People's History of Christianity. Here's the perspective for the series from the General Editor, Denis R. Janz:
This seven-volume series breaks new ground by looking at Christianity's past from the vantage point of a people's history. It is church history, yes, but church history with a difference: "church," we insist, is not to be understood first and foremost as the hierarchical-institutional-bureaucratic corporation; rather, above all it is the laity, the ordinary faithful, the people. Their religious lives, their pious practices, their self understandings as Christians, and the way all this grew and changed over the past two millennia-this is the unexplored territory in which we are setting foot.
He's right, it does make a difference. One of the chapters by Robin M. Jensen of the Vanderbilt faculty is devoted to baptism. As a Baptist of some sort for fifty years, I was drawn to that chapter — and it is indeed fascinating. As I read, the breadth of this history of baptism generated considerable guilt, to be added to the general regrets I have in my old age about not reading more about a lot of things-including a better understanding of baptism's history.
Robin Jensen's treatment opens up all sorts of possibilities and awareness and could contribute to a contemporary practice of believer's baptism. For the first 700 years people were on the whole baptized by immersion. But Jensen flicks back and forth as the dynamics of that experience seeks many levels and many constructs.
Towards the end of my ministry as a Baptist minister, baptism — and the Communion service — took on meaning that I can't ever remember being presented in a seminary classroom, or in the "practicing" we did as students in immersing one another to learn how to do it. I drew a short fellow who floated – it was a problem.
Well, anyway, toward the end of my checkered career, finally, baptism became far more than a dunking, or a dipping or as a religious fraternity initiation. By the time I retired, I had long moved to a liturgical order of worship, with all the rest of the liturgical elements leading up to the baptism-always one candidate per service.
The candidates would be brought up out of the water (death), to the full strains of the organ playing the Doxology, (resurrection); the offering of money, matching the offering of a life together in the Body of Christ was brought forward. The whole process ended in a prayer of thanksgiving for the offering of the people and the offering of new person's life; all were part of the prayer of thanksgiving which followed.
It came to be a deeply moving service for me. A problem arose with members who had joined our churches from paedobaptist traditions, who had been baptized as infants, and who wanted to be rebaptized. This was awkward because there was no intention of suggesting that other forms of baptism were in their several traditions inferior in some way. The churches I served were or became "open" to membership to all regardless of their baptism history.
Oddly, in a way, the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer has the theology succinctly but exactly right: "We thank you Father, for the water of baptism. In it we are buried with Christ in His death. By it we share in his resurrection. Through it we are reborn by the Holy Spirit."
I used that quote with enthusiasm in my sermon at the ordination service of our daughter Susan who was entering the Episcopal priesthood. I did look over at the Bishop and noted, that "a little more water wouldn't hurt." (Fortunately for me, and perhaps more importantly for Susan, the Bishop thought it humorous.)
As Professor Jensen goes through the early centuries, in a way I have not known before-which proves little other than my parochialism-she shows the depth and possibilities of baptismal meaning for those early Christians. The dynamics seem relevant to our current thinking.
If you have a sense of history, this series of volumes will be worth your attention: two volumes thus far; Christian Origins and Late Ancient Christianity. The latter is the one that has Robin Jensen's thorough chapter on baptism.
Here is Robin Jensen's preface to her chapter on the history of baptism:
Christian identity is claimed, developed, and reinforced through ritual practice as much as-or perhaps more than-by the doctrines articulated by theologians. Both day-to-day communal experiences of worship and seasonal rites and festivals are essential to the way ordinary believers understand their place in the social and cosmic orders. Among these practices, baptism is the special ritual of entry and identity. It simultaneously requires and creates explicit boundaries between insiders and outsiders- boundaries that the rite renders permeable, even as it reinforces and affirms them. And, like all rituals, the actions, gestures, symbols, physical environment, and images are the essential and efficacious elements that make the rite work-that make it happen in a particular place and time and with specific human participants.
To some extent, shared sacred texts and common performative elements underlie and thus unite all enactments of this ritual. Yet, regardless of its foundational mythology and idealized universality, Christian baptism, like all religious practice, can only be explained and understood as the expression of a particular community in a specific time and place. Despite a relatively high degree of coherence in its basic symbols, asserted origins, and explained significance, the rite of baptism always has a regional character, habitation, and language.
In late antiquity, the boundaries established by local Christian communities-as expressed in words, actions, and material artifacts-often emerged in the midst of controversies over the essential character of the church's core values, organizing structures, disciplinary processes, and acknowledged markers of membership. The shape, meaning, and context of Christian baptism in Roman North Africa were simultaneously affected by a desire to resolve conflicts, to discipline perceived deviance, and to forge and reinforce personal and communal identity: This chapter begins by considering three distinct cases, from three key periods in the history of African Christianity that also involved three of the most significant thinkers in the shaping of later Latin Christianity.
In each of these cases, the ritual was delineated in response to challenges posed by particular persons, historical events, practical problems, and encounters with practices or teachings perceived to be foreign or even heretical. Although the arguments advanced in each case claimed to be consistent with ancient and changeless traditions, as well as acknowledged authorities, the rite as well as its explained meaning inevitably was adapted to accommodate new circumstances and needs. Furthermore, since the evidence for rituals includes the actual places, elements, and objects that the participants employed, a concluding examination of the extant material artifacts and physical environments of baptism in Roman Africa will help to illuminate the experience of Christian initiation for those who underwent or performed the rite. Attention to the baptismal chambers and fonts, as well as to their visual decor, provides a different kind of window onto a practice that cannot be understood solely by examining texts.
This chapter on baptism in Late Ancient Christianity has colored plates, and clear pictures of the shape of the "baptisteries":-some having profound theological and symbolic implications-several new to me. These ancient accounts are not examples to be followed as much as serving to stimulate our own theologies of baptism. Paedobaptists would also find this exciting history of value, certainly new insights as to how the dynamic of baptism, both by immersion and sprinkling, affected the church through the centuries.
Robin M. Jensen has other works that have found a place on my shelves: Face to Face; Portraits of the Divine in Early Christianity, Fortress, paper, and The Substance of Things Seen; Art, Faith, and the Christian Community, Eerdmans, paper.
In the near future, I'll point up some material from other volumes in this excellent series of A People's History of the Faith.
