The Winter 2008 edition of Journal of Early Christian Studies (JECT) has three articles that I think are of a bit of interest. It opens with an article by Ellen Muehlberger entitled "Ambivalence about the Angelic Life: The Promise and Perils of an Early Christian Discourse of Asceticism." The volume continues with "how Thin Is a Demon?" by Gergory A. Smith, then has "A Cure for Rabies or a Remedy for Concupiscence? A Baptism of the Elchasaites" by Andrea Nicolotti.
All three articles have some strikingly recurring themes. In all instances we are discussing, well, not surprisingly, early Christian belief and practice, particularly in the period we'd probably think of as late antiquity, rather than the Middle Ages. In the early years of the monastic movements we see believers who wish to set themselves apart by their life of holiness and separation to God. While this is generally considered a noble thing, and is certainly approved by Scripture, many of these people thought by their overt and visible acts of asceticism they could earn merit in the eyes of God. They had moved from a life conformed to the Gospel into a life conformed to the Law. In this monastic life the believers would humble themselves, depriving themselves of many of the normal things of life, including relationships with believing and unbelieving elements of the society at large. They would seek to purge themselves of evil through departing from society as completely as possible. Then, lo and behold, the monks would in fact find evil in their midst. They would find that they were subject to the same temptations in their monastic life that they had been subject to prior to separating themselves to that monastic service. Leaders would seek revelation from the Holy Spirit about sins to confront, but would wonder if they were being led by the Holy Spirit or by demonic forces. The believers in late antiquity, just like believers today, found that they were not able to earn merit before God, that they were not able to flee temptation completely, that they found sin within themselves, and that even in their attempts to weed out and confront unconfessed sin they were not always reliably right.
This leads us to the idea of the demonic presence. It was apparently a fairly common idea in late antiquity that demons frequently took on some sort of semi-corporeal form. They seemed to have the characteristics of angels, which makes sense since they are, biblically speaking, fallen angels. But the demons would apparently show themselves to people and have at least apparent corporeality. This brings us again to what I mentioned above. Demonic and angelic revelation is often indistinguishable to the human mind and heart. Believers must be on their guard against the kind of revelations they perceive which are not explicit in Scripture, which cannot be mistaken for something else.
Finally, we find that believers often seek some sort of remedy for sin, and seek it in physical means. While I would confess that baptism is sacramental by nature, i.e., it actually accomplishes something through the physical application of the Word of God and the water, as God's appointed means to wash us from sin, there was something going on among a group known as the Elchasaites which was not biblically defensible. The Elchasaites were apparently not well accepted. They did not appear to be within the mainstream of Christian faith and practice. Yet they were accepted at least in some areas. One of their odd practices was to rebaptize people. We see this to some extent today in American Christianity, where people who hold to a symbolic view (baptism is an outward sign of an inward change) of baptism will insist that only those who are already confessing their faith in a persuasive manner should be baptized, and that those who were baptized as infants should be baptized again once they make a persuasive confession. Some of these groups will baptize believers multiple times as those believers find and confess sins which persuade them that they were not really Christians before, so should be baptized again. The Elchasaites took this to an extreme, apparently. They applied baptism as a cure for various physical ailments, affirming that the ailments had a demonic source and would therefore be cleansed by the waters of baptism. They even prescribed the number of times over a particular number of days that those suffering from rabies or consumption were to be baptized.
How does all this tie together? Do we in this day and age seek to flee from our sin only to find that we could flee it only by leaving ourselves? Do we persist in unbiblical views of reality, including denial of the bodily resurrection, assuming that angels and demons are different in ways other than the fact that demons are fallen, or deciding that we can seek spiritual information and depend on the revelation we receive in prayer as something definitive? Do we assign uses and conditions to baptism which aren't there in Scripture? In fact, we do fall into all the errors I just mentioned and more. What will serve to rescue us from these errors which so many generations of Christians have fallen into before us? Dependence on God's Word and the sacraments, the means of grace which our Lord has appointed, giving promises of their efficacy. Do we want a revelation from God? Let us look to the Scripture where we have all God wished to reveal about life and salvation laid out in a definitive way, using a format that we can study and review. Do we want to flee from sin and seek cleansing from sin that we commit? Let us look to the means God has appointed - the baptism which washes our conscience and cleanses us, drawing us from the corruption of the world as God drew Noah and his companions on the ark from the corruption of the world. Let us look also to the daily nourishment our Lord has given us in His body and blood, given and shed for us, in which he offers us this divine κοινωνία - a "participation" as Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 11. Let us cling to what our Lord has given us, not falling into the error that we so easily find when we try to devise a better plan ourselves.
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Dave Spotts
blogging at http://capnsaltyslongvoyage.blogspot.com and http://alex-kirk.blogspot.com
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Dave Spotts
blogging at http://capnsaltyslongvoyage.blogspot.com and http://alex-kirk.blogspot.com
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