IB World Religions 3.5.2. Conversion: Personal Revelation and Adult Baptism Notes

3.5.2. Conversion: Personal Revelation and Adult Baptism

Conversion in Christian terms

1. Christians use conversion for a turning of the whole person toward God. The New Testament word behind it is metanoia, a change of mind that reorders a life rather than a passing feeling.
2. Almost every tradition teaches that conversion begins with God and not with the convert. Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants all speak of grace arriving before any human decision, though they weigh the human response differently.
3. Evangelical Protestants often speak of being born again, taking the phrase from the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus in John 3, where new birth is described as the work of the Spirit.
4. Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox teaching treats conversion as lifelong. The Catechism of the Catholic Church applies the call to continual conversion to the baptized as firmly as to newcomers.
5. Christians also use the word of people already inside the Church. A cradle Catholic returning to practice after twenty years describes the same turning as an adult who has never believed.
6. Across the denominations the word holds three things together: repentance for sin, faith in Christ, and a changed pattern of living that others can see.

Scripture, Christ and encounter

1. The syllabus lists six places where Christians say they have met God, and the Bible is the one named most often. Believers describe a passage read many times before that suddenly seems to address them directly.
2. Augustine of Hippo gives the classic account. In the Confessions he hears a child chanting "take up and read", opens Paul's letter to the Romans, and dates his conversion to that moment in a Milan garden.
3. Bible-based conversion is often communal rather than solitary. Courses such as Alpha, begun at an Anglican parish in London and now used in Catholic and Pentecostal settings, work through scripture in small discussion groups.
4. The sixth locus is Jesus himself. Christians speak of a personal relationship with the risen Christ, met in prayer, in the Eucharist, or in a sense of being addressed and known.
5. Eastern Orthodox Christians usually describe that encounter through the icon and the liturgy rather than through sudden insight, holding that Christ is met in worship over many years.
6. Charismatic and Pentecostal Christians add the language of the Holy Spirit, reporting encounters through prayer for healing, prophecy or glossolalia, speaking in tongues.

History, nature and people

1. Christians also claim to meet God in history, reading the Exodus, the life of Jesus, or the turns of their own biography as places where God has acted.
2. That reading is contested within Christianity. Some believers find providence in national events, while others hold that God's action cannot be read off outcomes without arrogance.
3. Nature supplies a second route. Christians appeal to Psalm 19, where the heavens declare the glory of God, and to Romans 1, which says the created order makes God's power visible.
4. Francis of Assisi shaped how this is expressed. His Canticle of the Creatures addresses sun, water and earth as brother and sister, and Pope Francis took its opening words for the encyclical Laudato Si'.
5. People are the third route, and converts name them constantly. A parent, a friend, or a stranger met during a crisis is described as having made the faith credible before any argument did.
6. The Church is listed as a place of revelation in its own right. Converts describe the experience of being received by a congregation that wanted nothing from them in return.

Sudden and gradual patterns

1. The Damascus road narrative in Acts 9 is the model for sudden conversion. Saul is travelling to arrest Christians, is blinded by a light, hears Jesus name himself, and is baptized three days later.
2. John Wesley supplied the Protestant version. He recorded that at a meeting in Aldersgate Street in London in 1738 he felt his heart "strangely warmed" and trusted Christ alone for salvation.
3. Sudden conversion then became a public expectation. The Great Awakenings and later crusade preaching by Billy Graham closed with an altar call, asking for a decision on the spot in front of witnesses.
4. Gradual conversion is at least as common and is what most churches assume. Children raised in the faith are expected to grow into it rather than to break with a former life.
5. The Roman Catholic Church formalizes the gradual pattern in the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, a staged journey of enquiry, catechumenate, purification and reception that normally runs for a year or more.
6. Conversion can also lapse and be repeated. Evangelical churches speak of backsliding and rededication, and Catholic and Orthodox practice puts the same renewal into confession and the yearly renewal of baptismal promises at Easter.

Adult baptism and testimony

1. Adult baptism, usually called believer's baptism, is the rite most directly tied to conversion, because it requires the candidate to speak for themselves rather than through parents.
2. Anabaptists in sixteenth century Europe baptized adults on profession of faith and were persecuted by Catholics and Protestants alike for doing so. Their descendants include the Mennonites, the Amish and the Hutterites.
3. Baptists, Pentecostals and most independent churches practise it today, normally by total immersion in a pool or a river, following the pattern of Jesus's baptism in the Jordan.
4. The theology comes from Romans 6, where Paul reads going under the water as burial with Christ and rising from it as a share in his resurrection.
5. Many of these churches expect a spoken testimony to the congregation first. The candidate gives a short account of life before and after conversion, which makes a private experience public and accountable.
6. Adults baptized in Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican churches are normally received at the Easter Vigil. The individual conversion is deliberately set inside the church's yearly celebration of the resurrection.

Conversion across the denominations

1. Roman Catholic parishes run converts through the catechumenate with a sponsor, and receive them at Easter with baptism, confirmation and first communion given together.
2. Eastern Orthodox churches receive adults by baptism, or, where an earlier Trinitarian baptism is recognized, by chrismation with holy myron followed immediately by communion.
3. Anglican and Methodist churches baptize both infants and adults, and treat confirmation as the ordinary occasion for personal profession before the bishop and congregation.
4. Pentecostal Christians add a further stage, baptism in the Holy Spirit, often evidenced by tongues and understood as empowering for service rather than as conversion itself.
5. Quakers and the Salvation Army use no water baptism at all, holding that the inward experience, what Quakers call the inner light, needs no outward sign.
6. Christians moving between churches describe conversion too. Some churches receive them on a simple profession of faith while others ask for baptism, and that difference has occupied ecumenical dialogue for decades.