PROCEDIMIENTO DE LABORATORIO

The event of baptism not only constitutes the Christian person, it also reveals the shape of Christian existence between Pentecost and parousia as a communal life of repentance and forgiveness in faith. Zizioulas understands the communion of the church to be the very fabric of the Christian life—from the very first moment. Baptism requires both the baptized and the church, for just as “[n]o one can say ‘I believe’ unless as a reply to this community.... Faith is possible only within the community that puts this question to us” (LCD, 34). By answering the baptismal call in the affirmative, the believer accepts the crisisprovoked by God’s “eschatological gift” which brings “all existing relationships under judgment” (“The Church as Communion,” 8), as the church asks the candidate “to give up their identity and receive a new one, not based on any set of known relationships,” and “the believer places their security in what they can have no confirmation of” (LCD, 35, cf. 33–34). In other words, the believer repents of looking to his or her past or nature as the source and guarantee of life and identity, turns in faith towards the eschata, and receives life and identity from Jesus Christ.38

Thus, baptism requires faith, for as a fundamentally eschatological act, it “takes us into

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37. See Zizioulas’s extended discussions of otherness in “Communion and Otherness” and “On Being Other,” inC&O, 1–12 and 13–98, respectively.

38. Rather strangely, Zizioulas’s discussion of early Christian baptism sounds some promising, typically “free church,” notes: “The first Christians were asked to do two things at their baptism. Firstly, they said goodbye to all the identity and security they received from their families.... The second thing... is that when they were baptised as Christians they ceased to have any civic identity,” but without explanation he qualifies, “though not for us” (LCD, 36).

a situation in which nothing is in our control,” and “[e]verything is as yet unconfirmed biologically, historically, socially or by our own experience, or by logic” (LCD, 36).39

Indeed, “Faith,” Zizioulas holds, “is an about-turn by which we turn to face the direction from which our true life comes,” receiving an “identity... based on [Jesus Christ’s] promises about our future” (LCD, 34 and 36). For this reason, the church associates baptism with forgiveness:

Every baptized person by being forgiven ceases to be identified by his or her past and becomes a citizen of the city to come, i.e., of the Kingdom... forgiveness receives its concrete application in the Church through Baptism (LCD, 6).

Until the parousia, the Christian will continue to live in faith, existing repentantly and expectantly.

This is to say that the Christian life conforms to the pattern of transformation set forth in baptism. As Zizioulas says, “the essence of Christian existence in the Church is metanoia (repentance)” (LCD, 4). All of this depends upon our life actually being in Christ, on God not letting fate run its course—dooming us to death. Thus, at the core of this metanoiastands the initiative taken by God to address our idolatry-unto- death: “From the moment that man became trapped in this cycle of life and death, it was impossible for him to free himself. So the uncreated God took the initiative” (LCD, 103). Moreover, this initiative involved much more than the forgiveness of sins as forgiveness alone does not give life. Through God’s initiative, as it only could be, the created-uncreated relationship (union) necessary for life was established in Jesus Christ (LCD, 103).40 _{Given that Zizioulas takes thisestablishmentwith the utmost ontological}

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39. Volf could not be more mistaken when he asserts, “Strikingly, faith plays no role in Zizioulas’s soteriology and ecclesiology,” for “he is indeed involved in screening out faith soteriologically” (95). Volf goes on to claim that “in the few places” faith does appear in Zizioulas’s work, “it leads a kind of peripheral soteriological existence... not at all as faith in God or in Christ.” The real issue, however, is that Zizioulas simply does not share Volf’s definition of faith as an “individualactivity” that “is essentially a cognitive act.”

40. Surprisingly, Volf protests vehemently against this dimension of Zizioulas’s soteriology: “faith does not, as it were, always lag behind the relation to God that has already been formed. Faith is not a necessary accompanying phenomenon of the fundamental relation to God underlying it” (171, though what of Romans 5:6 and 1 John 4:19?). However, if Volf did not reject participation in Christ as soteriologically aberrant and non-sensical (cf. 164, 181-82 and 188), there could be

seriousness, he refuses to take the Christian experience of simul iustus et peccator as indicative of Christian being (C&O, 242–43). Despite our ongoing experience of fallenness, we reallyarewho we are in Jesus Christ, and the Christian life means clinging to this truth in faith. This does not, however, result in some sort of self-satisfied, triumphalistic diffidence regarding our sin as Russell surmises (180). For although our central, ontologically determinative relationship is established in Christ and becomes our own in baptism as we become “sons in the Son,” receiving his filial schesis demands further transformation, that is,

the reconstitution of every relationship by which we are constituted.... All these relationships and our direction and desires undergo a re-ordering and purification as they are brought into this relationship with God. This represents a radical purification,which is what the life of the Christian is. The reordering of our relationships brings us finally into being, setting us definitively with the relationship to the persons of God that will secure our life without limit (LCD, 31*).

In language Zizioulas uses elsewhere, this means a conversion to loving the other. This love does not happen naturally, simply emanating from us. We must will this love, and as we are still in the midst of sin, willing this love

requires the experience of the Cross. Unless we sacrifice our own will and subject it to the will of the other, repeating in ourselves what our Lord did in Gethsemane in relation to the will of His Father, we cannot reflect properly in history the communion and otherness we see in the Triune God (LCD, 5, cf. especially 111–12).41

Baptism highlights that the way to God, from the very first step, conforms to the Cross: “Only when Christians are ‘weak’ can they be really ‘strong’ (2 Corinthians 12:20); capacity is identical with incapacity, with loss of one’s soul (Matthew 6:39), of one’s very life” (“The Early Christian Community,” 24). The Christian life, then, continues the mystery of Christ’s scandalous strength in weakness and victory through suffering death.

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substantial agreement on Volf’s main point, “[faith is] the mode in which this relation itself takes place” (171).

41. Zizioulas offers the early martyrs as volitional examples, as they “related single-mindedly to Christ, so all other relationships are subordinated to this one” (LCD, 114)—contra Volf’s criticism that Zizioulas’s doctrine of faith is not volitional (168–69).