Page 33 - Orthodoxy Zizioulas

T H E B A P T I S M A L E X P E R I E N C E O F T H E C H U R C H
The Baptismal Experience of the Church
If the Church is a way of existence, we must ask: how does
one enter into this way of being?
The first answer is that the Church is a Mother. She gives
birth to children. Each time a person becomes a member of
the Church through baptism, a new identity is born—a new
person, a new hypostasis.
Baptism, however, is not simply a rite of initiation. It is an
event of death and birth: the death of the old man and the
birth of the new. Baptism is such a decisive point in our exis-
tence that it automatically creates a limit between the pre-
baptismal and post-baptismal situation: if you are baptized,
you immediately cease to be what you were. You die, as St.
Paul says, with regard to the past, and there is therefore a new
situation. Yet we must ask: what is it that truly dies?
Too often, this is understood in purely moral terms, as a
change of behavior or an ethical improvement. But such an
interpretation reduces baptism to something external. A per-
son may change their conduct and yet remain the same in the
deepest sense. Baptism does not simply make us better; it
makes us new.
The problem that baptism addresses is not merely moral,
but ontological. The “old man” is not simply the sinful self, but
the human being as bound to mortality. From our biological
birth, we enter into a mode of existence governed by death. As
the Psalmist says, “In sin did my mother conceive me”—not
simply as a moral condition, but as a condition of existence
marked by corruption and mortality.
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