Ritual dimension of union with Christ in Paul's thought
Abstract
The study of the ritual (sacramental) aspect of participation in Christ has long been
marginalised in the literature due to an anti-ritual bias that has several strands. Theologically,
given the Biblical studies conducted under Protestant, word-centred, faith-focused principles in
the past two centuries, any serious study of ritual practices in the nascent Christ movement
would face suspicion of opus operatum. Intellectually, the rational approach to the studies of
religion, developed during the Enlightenment period that so prized human reason, has led to
the downplaying of rituals as superstitious practices, viewing the body as an unreliable source
for truth, as opposed to the structure of the mind, where truth is located. Methodologically, the
historical-critical approach practised by the Biblical studies guild and guided by text-centred
and philologically focused principles, has resulted in the marginalisation of rituals in
scholarship; ritual references are treated as a mere metaphor or a theological discourse. To give
rituals their rightful place in the study of the New Testament, this study proposes that one needs
to treat baptism and the Lord’s Supper in the New Testament as ritual practices rather than
mere metaphor, with the aid of frameworks and theories developed in ritual studies. Chapter
one of this study surveys the current scholarship on the topic and develops a new theoretical
framework, the ritual transformation model, to study baptism and the Lord’s Supper. In
chapters two and three, this study applies the ritual transformation model to study these two
rituals, while chapters four and five address the exegetical issues of the relations amongst ritual,
pistis, and “in Christ” language. In its conclusion, the study demonstrates that ritual and pistis
are not antithetical to each other as body versus mind, that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are
the two cardinal practices of the early Christ movement, and that the New Testament texts point
to the religious experience of early Christ followers’ encounter with the risen messiah, an
experience that is made accessible by the ritual performance.