Through the perpetual return to baptism the Christian is able to enter the reality of Jesus’ death and resurrection, although this event is historically distant. Thus, a key implication of Luther and the historic Lutheran tradition’s teaching on communicatio idiomatum is that Christ’s humanity is not confined by time and therefore he can make himself available through the promise of the gospel in any era. Herein we again encounter in Luther implicit appropriation of Scripture’s distinction between chronological time and kairological time.[1] Even though Scripture does describe the history of salvation as an orderly development, there is a perichoresis of the ages. God’s kairological time has manifested itself at specific points in chronological history. Nevertheless, the Lord is not bound to the chronological order of history in manifesting his kairological salvation. Hence, the risen Jesus who transcends time makes the eschaton present to the believer at the appointed time of his redemption in baptism in order to actualize God’s electing and justifying purposes. Christ thereby makes it possible to incorporate the believer into eschatological redemption in the present through a return to the kairological event of his baptism, just as baptism is a return to the kairological event of his death and resurrection.
As Oswald Bayer observes: “Luther’s apocalyptic understanding of creation and history opposes modern concepts of progress. For Luther, the only progress is return to one’s baptism, the biographical point of rupture between the old and new worlds. Creation, Fall, redemption, and completion of the world are not sequential advance, one after the other, but perceived in an intertwining of the times.”[2]
In emphasizing the possibility of returning to one’s baptism, Luther responds to the issues that gave rise to the problem of post-baptism sin. This problem in turn generated the Latin doctrines of penance, purgatory, and indulgences which he combated in his early Reformation theology. Like the New Testament and the ante-Nicene Church,[3] Luther saw baptism as the apocalyptic rupture between the old person and new person in Christ.[4]
[1] Elert, The Christian Ethos, 286-9; Paul Tillich, The Interpretation of History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936).
[2] Oswald Bayer, “Martin Luther,” in The Reformation Theologians: An Introduction to Theology in the Early Modern Period, ed. Carter Lindberg (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 51-2.
[3] See: Everett Ferguson, Baptism in the Early Church: History, Theology, and Liturgy in the First Five Centuries (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2009).
[4] Trigg, Baptism in the Theology of Martin Luther, 92-8.
From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).