When did the Church Come Into Existence?

I find Tom Holland’s work to be the near-perfect balance of creative yet careful, original yet faithful. While many talk about theological exegesis—Dr. Holland actually does it, and he does it well. To whet your appetite for his indispensable Contours Of Pauline Theology, here is Holland interpreting the church’s baptism into Christ through the lens of Israel’s baptism into Moses. In so doing, he answers the deceptively tricky question “when did the church come into existence?”[i]

“Alongside the baptism into Christ is the type of the baptism of the Israelites into Moses in their Exodus. All Jews, according to Gamaliel the second, of all preceding and subsequent generations, were present in the coming out of Egypt, and shared in the baptism that made Moses their leader. It was then that Israel became the son of God and the Spirit was given to her to lead her through her wilderness journey.

This explains why Paul has been so decisive in his use of the preposition sun. There is no unity of believers, either with each other or with Christ, until they have been united together through baptism. Paul has been careful to define this baptism in terms of its occasion, for it was a baptism into Christ’s death. As Moses, in the Exodus from Egypt, took out the people of God, for they were united with him through baptism, so Christ takes those who have been baptized into union with him from the realm of Sin and death. It was a baptism into his death that all believers experienced, in the same historic moment.

There was no union, either with each other or with Christ, until it had been created by the Spirit. It was this baptism that brought the covenant community into existence. Therefore if one asks when did the church historically come into existence, the answer is at the moment of Christ’s death, for it was then that the Spirit baptized all members of the covenant community into union with their Lord and Savior. Once this union had been established, Paul was free to use the preposition en (in), which speaks of the fellowship of believers in Christ. From then on, in terms of ultimate reality, no believer could experience anything apart from all other believers, for their union with Christ is such that all other believers were also partakers in Christ’s saving work.

What I am arguing for is that the baptism passages which we have considered are speaking neither about water baptism nor even of Christ’s baptism into his sufferings, even though these are important related themes, but about a baptism modelled on the baptism of Israel into Moses when Israel came into a covenant relationship with Yahweh through the representative he had appointed. In Romans 6 (and in 1 Corinthians 12:13, Galatians 3.:5ff, Ephesians 4:6 and 5:25-27) Paul is demonstrating how the old order has been brought to an end and how the new eschatological order has come into existence. It is because believers have shared in the death of Christ, with the consequence that they have died to all the covenant demands of the old relationship that bound them mercilessly to Sin and Death (Satan), that they are now free to live lives unto God who made them his own through Christ his Son.”

Holland concludes:

“Once again we have seen that Paul has stayed within the corporate categories of the Old Testament. He has modelled the creation of the New Testament community in the same terms as Israel’s inauguration when she was brought out of Egypt. In reverting to the original Exodus Paul has not abandoned the New Exodus motif, he has simply merged the two exoduses of the Old Testament to form his model. This allowed him to use the Paschal sacrifice of the Egyptian Exodus to interpret the death of Jesus. The Babylonian Exodus was not based on a sacrificial rite and therefore needed augmentation. He joined the sacrificial element of the Egyptian Exodus with the promises of the prophets of a New Covenant to produce his New Exodus paradigm. It was this merger that was unique to the New Testament, for the Jewish material did not look for a suffering Messiah whose death would bring about the salvation of the new covenant community. Paul saw the death of Jesus to be his exodus and identified the moment of the birth of the community under its new representative to be in the moment of its Messiah’s death. Thus all Christians have been baptized into his death. To be outside of that event is to be outside of Christ. Again we see the clear use Paul made of the prophets’ New Exodus model that had been enriched by the sacrificial threads of the original Exodus and fulfilled in the death and resurrection of Jesus.”