Four questions: What is it? What does it do? How does it do that? What does that mean? Those are four questions that we ask of anything that is new or novel to us.
Think about artificial intelligence, AI. We want to know what it is first, to have some sense of understanding of what we can call AI and what doesn’t rightfully deserve the term. Next, we want to know what it does. Largely at this point, we are seeing that it can generate lots of text – like a newsletter article (although I promise I’m not using ChatGPT to write this). Next, we want to have some small working knowledge of how it works. So Bard, Google’s AI, works largely by synthesizing the information that it gets from that company’s huge catalog of explored webpages. Lastly, we start asking questions about what it means. Now that we have AI, do we need writers? pastors? artists? journalists? historians? or can all of those vocations be automated like many auto manufacturing jobs were in the last century?
When Luther writes about Baptism, he uses these same four questions in his Small Catechism. What is it? It is “water included in God’s command and combined with God’s word.” What does it do? “It works forgiveness of sins, rescues from death and the devil, and gives eternal salvation.” How does it do that? “The word of God in and with the water does these things, along with the faith which trusts this word of God in the water.” And lastly, what does that mean? The end effect is that “a new (hu)man should daily emerge and arise to live before God in righteousness and purity forever.”
Like artificial intelligence, Baptism promises to have a profound effect on the way that we live our lives. It opens up new possibilities for us and it even closes the door on things that we used to do – things like sins that lose their effectiveness for our lives when we find the gift of Baptism and how much better it works for us.
The next time you’re confronted with ChatGPT or Bard or any of the many AI services popping up, think about how Baptism has popped up in your life as well and what that means for you today.