Chapter 9 - Baptism

Summary

The dynamics of this movement, from un-faith to faith, has been considered in mythopoieic terms as operating by way of desire: the Christian mythos grasps the would-be Christian aesthetically before it convinces logically. There is nothing to say that this willing seduction by the Christian evangel must happen in the context of the Church or other than over the course of a long period of life. Nonetheless, the entrance into the mythic sensibility of Jesus’ life and the disruptive encounter with the parables’ disclosure of God is marked sacramentally by baptism, as the formal beginning of the Christian’s life in Christ and, through formation and sanctification, in some sense as Christ. It is a decisive response to the call of the beauty of the Christian mythos and the God to which it points. In what follows, I explore the mythic quality of names, unpacking some of the resonances that come with them. With this in mind, I examine the meaning of baptism as an entrance into Christ’s mythic sensibility by way of participation in his name and so his life. In this way, our myth-making can be said fully to participate in Christ, God incarnate, the archetype of our mythopoiesis.