Baptism and the Theological Ratchet

Abstract

While the connection between baptism and creedal formulas has long been recognized, it was Hans Lietzmann who suggested that “the root of all creeds is the formula of belief pronounced by the baptizand, or pronounced in his hearing and assented to by him, before his baptism.” More recently, Wolfram Kinzig argued that during the first three centuries, “there was no declaratory profession of a triune God,” recent scholarship has abandoned the search for an original creed (Ursymbol), and all we can find in the early centuries are baptismal questions. However, as we will see, the search for baptismal questions in the early centuries is not straightforward. In this article, I will outline a model of “theological ratcheting” and apply it to the problem of the early development of baptismal practice and its connection with doctrine and storytelling. The model implies that religions change over time due to internal processes involving evolutionary forces, as well as being constrained by evolved cognitive mental and cultural formations external to religion. Following a brief discussion of creedal formulas, I will turn to a selective review of the early evidence about baptism, then discuss the problem of baptismal questions, which will lead us to the model of theological ratcheting and its application to baptism in the final part of the article.