The Power of the Name

And here is something else, taken from the other side of this argument. The Lord’s own disciples reached this very thing. They had already been baptized, and then at last, on the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came down on them — coming down from heaven by the will of God and not on his own initiative, but poured out for this very office, and poured out on each one of them. These men were already righteous, and, as we have said, had been baptized with the Lord’s baptism, exactly as the apostles themselves had been — the same apostles who are found, on the night he was arrested, to have all abandoned him. Even Peter, who boasted that he would hold to his faith and stubbornly fought against the Lord’s own prediction, denied him in the end. And this was so that something might be shown to us: whatever sins they had taken on in the meantime, and in whatever way, those same sins were beyond any doubt taken away by the baptism of the Holy Spirit, once the faith in them was afterwards proved sincere. [a]

And I think there was no other reason why the apostles, speaking in the Holy Spirit, charged the people they addressed to be baptized in the name of Christ Jesus, except this: that the power of the name of Jesus, called down on a man at his baptism, would give the one baptized no small help toward reaching salvation. So Peter reports in the Acts of the Apostles, saying: “There is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” The apostle Paul opens out the same thing. He shows that God has exalted our Lord Jesus and has “given him a name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow — of things in heaven and on earth and under the earth — and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord, in the glory of God the Father.”

And a man over whom, at his baptism, that call was made on the name of Jesus — even if he received his baptism while he was in some error — would still not be shut out from coming to know the truth at some point, and correcting his error, and coming to the church and to the overseer, and confessing our Jesus honestly in front of other people. Then, when the overseer’s hands were laid on him, he would receive the Holy Spirit as well, and he would not have lost that earlier calling on the name of Jesus. None of us may rule that out — even though such a calling on the name, if it stands bare and by itself, could not be enough to give salvation. Otherwise, on that principle, we would have to believe that even people outside the faith, and heretics, who misuse the name of Jesus, could arrive at salvation without the true and complete thing.

Still, it is extremely useful to hold this. When the name of Jesus has been called on, and along with it the error is corrected, and the belief of the truth is professed, and every stain of the earlier way of life is washed away — if all of that is rightly carried out with the mystery of God among men of this kind — then that calling on the name takes a place it would not otherwise have had. And in the end, within the true faith and for keeping the sign whole, it is no obstacle at all, once the missing part is added to it. This agrees with good sense, and with the authority of so many years, and so many churches and apostles and overseers. And on the other side, it is the very greatest loss and damage to our most holy mother the church that now, for the first time, after so long a run of so many ages, we should suddenly and without reason revolt against the decisions made before us.

For there was one reason and no other why Peter — who had already been baptized, and who had been asked by the Lord himself what he thought of him, and who, with the truth revealed to him by the Father in heaven, had confessed that Christ was not only our Lord but the Son of the living God — was afterwards shown to have stood against that same Christ when he announced his suffering, and was therefore held up as being called Satan. The reason was this, and no other. It was going to happen that some people, wavering in their own judgment and limping a little in faith and teaching, would be baptized in the name of Jesus and yet, if they were able to undo their error within some space of time, would not be cut off from salvation on that account. Whenever they came to their right mind they would obtain by repentance a sound hope of salvation, above all when they received the Holy Spirit — and to be baptized by him is every man’s duty. Something of this kind is what they must have had in view. And we do not understand that Peter alone went through this in the Gospel, but all the disciples. They were already baptized, and yet the Lord says to them afterwards: “You will all fall away because of me.” And all of them, as we observe, once their faith had been put right, were baptized with the Holy Spirit after the Lord’s resurrection. So it is not without reason that we too, in our own day, may believe that men who have been put right from their earlier error may be baptized in the Holy Spirit, even though they were baptized with water in the name of the Lord while their faith was still somewhat imperfect. For it makes a great difference whether a man is not baptized at all in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, or whether he limps in some respect when he is baptized with the baptism of water. That baptism counts for less, provided that afterwards a sincere faith in the truth shows itself in the baptism of the Spirit, which beyond doubt counts for more.

Nor should you take what our Lord said as running against this practice: “Go, teach the nations; baptize them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” That is true and right, and it must be kept in the church by every means, and it has in fact been kept. Even so, we ought to consider that the calling on the name of Jesus should not be thought empty by us, because of the reverence and the power of that very name — the name in which every kind of power is habitually exercised, and now and then even by men outside the church. [j]

And what are those words of Christ for? He said that on the day of judgment he would disown, and say he had never known, the people who would say to him: “Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in your name, and in your name cast out demons, and in your name done many wonderful works?” and that he would answer them, swearing to it: “I never knew you. Away from me, you who do what is lawless.” What is all that for, unless to show us that even people who do what is lawless could do these good works too, by the overflowing power of the name of Christ? So this calling on the name of Jesus ought to be received as a kind of beginning of the Lord’s mystery, common to us and to all the others, which can afterwards be filled up with the rest. Otherwise such a calling on the name would be no help if it were left standing alone, because after such a man dies nothing at all can be added to him, or supplied, or be of any use to him on the day of judgment, when they will begin to be reproached by our Lord with the things we mentioned above. And yet none of them, in this present time, may be so harshly and cruelly barred by any man from helping themselves in the ways we have shown above.

But you will contradict all this, as you usually do, by objecting that when the disciples baptized, they had themselves been baptized perfectly and rightly, and not the way these heretics are; and you must be taking that from their own standing, and from the standing of the one who baptized them. So we answer this proposal of yours — not as accusers of the Lord’s disciples, but because we are forced to it, since we have to work out by reasoning where, and when, and in what measure salvation has been given to each of us. [m]

That our Lord had been born, and that he was the Christ, appeared to his disciples on many grounds, and they were not wrong to believe it. He had been born of the tribe of Judah, of the family of David, in the town of Bethlehem. The angels announced him to the shepherds at the very moment a Savior was born for them. His star was seen in the east, and the Magi searched for him with the greatest urgency and worshipped him, and honored him with splendid presents and remarkable offerings. While he was still a boy he sat in the temple among the teachers of the law and argued so wisely that everyone was astonished. When he was baptized he was glorified as no one else ever had been, by the Holy Spirit coming down out of the opened heavens and settling on him, and further by the testimony of his Father, and of John the Baptist as well.

He understood the hearts and the thoughts of every person, which is beyond what a man can do. He cured and healed weaknesses and disorders and diseases with very great power. He granted forgiveness of sins, with open proof of it. He drove out demons at a word of command. He cleansed lepers with a word. By turning water into wine he filled out a wedding celebration with astonishing gladness. He restored sight to the blind, or gave it to them. He upheld the teaching of the Father with complete confidence. In a deserted place he satisfied five thousand men with five loaves, and what was left over, the fragments, filled more than twelve baskets. Everywhere he raised the dead, according to his mercy. He ordered the winds and the sea to be still. He walked on the sea with his feet. He performed miracles of absolutely every kind.

From these things, and from many deeds of the same kind that told for his glory, this seemed to follow as a consequence. Whatever the Jews think about the Christ — and they do not believe it of Jesus Christ our Lord — even they themselves thought that a person so great as that would last into eternity without any death at all, and would hold the kingdom of Israel, and of the whole world, forever, and that it would never be destroyed. That is why the Jews went so far as to seize him by force and anoint him for the kingdom, which he had to slip away from. And so his disciples supposed there was no other way he would give them eternal life than by first carrying this present life of his own on into that eternal one in his own person. [o]

In short, when they were passing through Galilee, Jesus said to them: “The Son of Man is to be handed over into the hands of men, and they will kill him; and after three days he will rise again.” And they were deeply grieved, because, as we have said, they had formed a very different notion in their minds and hearts beforehand. And this too was what the Jews said, contradicting him, when he taught them about himself and announced to them what was coming: “We have heard out of the law that the Christ remains forever. So how can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up?”

The disciples had this same assumption about the Christ in their minds — as Peter himself, the leader and chief of the apostles, showed when he burst out with his own disbelief. He had been asked by the Lord, along with the others, what he thought about him, that is, who he thought he was; and he had been the first to confess the truth, saying that he was the Christ, the Son of the living God; and for that he was judged blessed by him, because he had arrived at this truth not by flesh but by the revelation of the heavenly Father. And yet this same Peter — when Jesus began to show his disciples that he had to go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and priests and scribes, and be killed, and rise from the dead after the third day — this true confessor of Christ, a few days later, took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying: “Have mercy on yourself. This must never happen.” And so he deserved to hear from the Lord: “Get behind me, Satan. You are a stumbling block to me.” For he was not thinking the things that are God’s, but the things that are men’s.

That rebuke against Peter showed itself more and more plainly when the Lord was arrested and Peter, frightened by a servant girl, said: “I do not know what you are saying, and I do not know you.” And he said the same thing again, this time on an oath; and a third time, cursing and swearing, he insisted that he did not know the man — and he denied him not once, but again and again. And because this frame of mind was going to stay with him right up to the Lord’s suffering, the Lord made it plain long beforehand, so that we too would not be left ignorant of it.

Again, after the Lord’s resurrection, one of his disciples, Cleopas, was sorrowfully telling the Lord himself what had happened — as though he were telling a stranger, and in the same mistake as all his fellow disciples — and he spoke like this about Jesus the Nazarene: “who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people; and how the chief priests and our rulers handed him over to be condemned to death, and fastened him to the cross. But we had hoped that it was he who would redeem Israel.” And on top of all this, the disciples all judged that the report of the women who had seen the Lord after the resurrection was nonsense. Some of them, even when they had seen him, did not believe, but doubted. And the ones who were not there at the time did not believe at all, until the Lord himself afterwards rebuked and reproached them in every way. His death had shaken them so badly that they thought he had not risen — a man who, as they had believed, ought not to have died, and who, against their belief, had died once already. And so, as far as the disciples themselves are concerned, they are found to have had a faith neither sound nor complete in the matters we have gone over. And what is far more serious, they were baptizing other people all the while, as it is written in the Gospel according to John.

Besides, what will you say about the many people who are baptized by overseers of thoroughly bad character — men who in the end, when God wills it, are convicted of their crimes and are stripped of the office itself, or cut off from the church’s fellowship altogether? Or what will you decide about people who may have been baptized by overseers whose views are unsound, or who are badly uneducated — when they may not have spoken the words clearly and properly, or may even have said something other than what belongs to the wording handed down for the rite, or may have put some question wrongly, or, having put it, heard back from those answering what should on no account have been asked or answered in that way? And still this does no great harm to that true faith of ours, even though such plainer men may hand over the mystery of the faith without the polish and the good order that you would use. [v]

And you will certainly say, with that remarkable carefulness of yours, that these people too ought to be baptized over again, since this is exactly what is missing in them, or what keeps them from receiving that divine and inviolable mystery of the faith uncorrupted. And yet, my excellent friend, let us grant the heavenly powers their own power, and let us allow the divine majesty, stooping down to us, the workings that belong to it; and understanding how great the benefit in it is, let us gladly rest in it.

And so, since our salvation is founded on the baptism of the Spirit, which for the most part goes together with the baptism of water: if baptism is to be given by us, let it be given whole and with due solemnity, and with all the means that are written down, and let it be carried out without any part of it being disjointed. Or if the necessity of the case makes it be carried out by a lower-ranking member of the clergy, let us wait for the outcome, so that what is wanting may either be supplied by us, or held over to be supplied by the Lord. If, however, it was carried out by outsiders, let this matter be put right as far as it can be and as far as it allows. For outside the church there is no Holy Spirit, and sound faith cannot exist there either — not only among heretics, but even among people who have settled into schism.

For that reason, those who repent and are put right by the teaching of the truth, and by their own faith, which has afterwards been improved by the cleansing of their heart, ought to be helped by spiritual baptism only: that is, by the laying on of the overseer’s hands and by the ministry of the Holy Spirit. And this is the manner and the principle on which the perfect seal of faith has rightly been given in the church. So the calling on the name of Jesus, which cannot be undone, will not appear to be held cheap by us — which would certainly not be fitting — even though such a calling on the name may come to nothing and be robbed of its saving effect if none of the things we have spoken of follow it.

For when the apostle said there is “one baptism,” it must have been because of the lasting effect of the calling on the name of Jesus, since once that name has been called down, no man can take it away — not even if we should dare, against the apostles’ decision, to repeat it by giving too much, out of a wish to pile on another baptism. If the man who returns to the church is unwilling to be baptized again, the result will be that we defraud him of the baptism of the Spirit, when we hold that we must not defraud him of the baptism of water.