Not Given by Measure

You also asked me, dearest son, what I think about people who receive God’s grace while they are sick and weak — whether they are to be counted proper Christians, since they are not washed with the saving water but only sprinkled with it. On this point my own hesitation and reserve settles nothing for anyone else. I am not stopping any man from holding what he thinks right, or from doing what he believes is right. [a]

As far as my small understanding takes it, here is my view. God’s gifts cannot be cut short or weakened in any way at all. Nothing less can happen in a case where what is drawn from those gifts is received with the whole and undivided faith of the one who gives and the one who receives. In the rite that saves, the infection of sin is not washed off the way the dirt of the skin and the body is washed off in an ordinary bodily washing — where you need soda and other preparations besides, and a tub and a basin to scrub this poor body clean in. A believer’s heart is washed in another way altogether. A man’s mind is made clean in another way, by the worth of his faith. In the saving rites, when necessity presses and God shows his mercy, God’s own way of working hands believers the whole benefit. So no one need be troubled that sick people appear only to be sprinkled or poured over when they receive the Lord’s grace. Holy Scripture speaks through the mouth of the prophet Ezekiel and says:

“Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean. From all your filthiness and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit within you.”

And in Numbers: “And the man who is unclean until evening shall be purified on the third day, and on the seventh day he shall be clean. But if he is not purified on the third day, on the seventh day he shall not be clean. And that soul shall be cut off from Israel, because the water of sprinkling has not been sprinkled on him.” And again: “And the Lord spoke to Moses and said: Take the Levites from among the children of Israel, and cleanse them. And this is what you shall do to them, to cleanse them: you shall sprinkle them with the water of purification.” And again: “The water of sprinkling is a purification.”

From all this it is clear that sprinkling with water counts for every bit as much as the washing that saves, and that when it is done in the Church, where the faith of the receiver and of the giver alike is sound, everything holds good and can be brought to completion and to perfection by the majesty of the Lord and by the truth of faith.

Then there is this: some people refuse to call those who have received the peace of Christ by the saving water and by lawful faith Christians at all, and call them Clinics instead. I cannot find where they picked up the name — unless perhaps they have been reading more widely than the rest of us, and in more out-of-the-way books, and have got their Clinics out of Hippocrates or Soranus. [g]

For my part, I know of one Clinic in the Gospel. And I know that for that paralyzed and helpless man, who had lain on his bed through a long stretch of his life, being helpless was no obstacle whatever to receiving heavenly strength in the fullest measure. God’s own kindness did not merely raise him from his bed. His strength came back and grew, and he picked up the bed itself and carried it off. And so, as far as faith allows me to grasp it and think it out, this is my view: anyone should be reckoned a proper Christian who has received the grace of God in the Church under the law and by the right of faith. Or if someone thinks that people who were only sprinkled with the saving water have gained nothing, and are still empty and hollow, let him not fool himself — as though, if they came through their illness and got well, they ought then to go looking for baptism. But if they cannot be baptized, having already been made holy by the Church’s baptism, then why are they made to stumble over their own faith and over the Lord’s mercy? Or is it that they have indeed received God’s favor, but in some shorter and narrower measure of his gift and of the Holy Spirit, so that they count as Christians and yet are not to be reckoned equal with the rest?

Far from it. The Holy Spirit is not handed out by measure. He is poured out whole on the believer. If the day comes up the same for everybody, if the sun spreads the same equal light over all, how much more does Christ — who is the true sun and the true day — give out in his Church the light of eternal life with exactly that equality? [k]

We see that equality set out as a sign in Exodus, when the manna came down from heaven. It was a picture of what was to come: it showed in advance the nourishment of the bread from heaven and the food of the Christ who was on his way. For there, with no distinction of sex and none of age, each person gathered the same two quarts. Which showed that the mercy of Christ, and the heavenly grace that would follow after it, was shared out equally among all; that with no difference of sex, no distinction of years, no favoring of anyone’s rank, the gift of spiritual grace was poured out on the whole people of God.

To be sure, the same spiritual grace that believers receive equally in baptism is afterwards either increased or diminished by the way we live and behave. In the Gospel the Lord’s seed is sown equally, but according to the differences in the soil some of it is wasted and some is multiplied into a great and varied plenty, with a full crop of thirty or sixty or a hundredfold. But then again, each of the workers was called up to be paid the same denarius. So why should what God shares out equally be cut down by human interpretation?

Now if anyone is troubled by this — that some of those baptized while sick are still harassed by unclean spirits — let him understand that the devil’s stubborn malice holds out right up to the saving water, but that in baptism it loses every drop of its poison. We see an instance of it in king Pharaoh. He held out a long time and dragged his treachery on, and he was able to resist and to have his way until he came to the water; but once he came there, he was both beaten and destroyed. And that that sea was a sign of baptism, the blessed apostle Paul states, saying: [o]

“Brothers, I do not want you to be ignorant that all our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.” And he added: “Now all these things were examples for us.”

The same thing happens today, when the devil is whipped and burned and tortured by the exorcists, by a human voice and by God’s power. He often says he is going out and will leave God’s people; and in saying it he lies. He does over again what Pharaoh did before him, with the same stubborn and cheating deceit. But when they come to the water of salvation and to the making holy that is baptism, we ought to know and to trust that there the devil is put down and the man dedicated to God is set free by God’s mercy. Scorpions and snakes have their power on dry ground; throw them into water and they cannot use it, and cannot hold their venom. In the same way the wicked spirits — the ones that are called scorpions and snakes, and that we tread underfoot all the same by the power the Lord gave us — cannot stay any longer in the body of a man who has been baptized and made holy, and in whom the Holy Spirit is beginning to make his home.

And this, in the end, is what we actually find in practice. Those who are baptized in sickness because there is no time to wait, and who receive grace, are free of the unclean spirit that used to trouble them. They live in the Church with credit and honor, and day after day they go further forward in heavenly grace as their faith grows. On the other side, some of those who are baptized in good health, if they afterwards begin to sin, are shaken by the return of the unclean spirit. Which makes it plain that the devil is driven out at baptism by the faith of the believer, and comes back if the faith afterwards gives way. [s]

Unless, of course, it seems right to some people that men outside the Church, among our opponents and antichrists, defiled with unhallowed water, should be judged to have been baptized — while men baptized inside the Church are supposed to have come away with less of God’s mercy and grace. So much consideration is to be shown to heretics that those who come over from heresy are not even asked whether they were washed or sprinkled, whether they are clinics or peripatetics; but among ourselves the sound truth of the faith is run down, and in the Church’s own baptism the majesty and holiness of it are cut back.

I have answered your letter, dearest son, as far as my slight ability could manage, and I have shown what I think as far as I was able. I lay down no rule for anyone: any man set over a church is free to settle what he thinks right, since he will give an account of his own doings to the Lord. So the blessed apostle Paul writes in his letter to the Romans: [u]

“Each one of us will give an account for himself. So let us not judge one another.” I wish you, dearest son, always and heartily, farewell.