But another large portion of the Church believe that the above passage does not refer to immersion in water, but rather to the statement: For by one Spirit have we all been baptized into one body.
They regard it as referring to the inward, spiritual union with Christ which takes place in the new birth, rather than to an outward act. For in the moment of regeneration, every believer is baptized by the Holy Spirit into the Body of Christ.
But even so, the word “buried” still stands in the first passage above, and a burial has to do with the dead, not with the living. Being “buried,” therefore, when the Holy Spirit baptizes us into Christ, it is “into death,” not into an enlarging life, because we are so completely dead that the baptizing Spirit sets the “old man” forever aside as utterly unimprovable, in order that He may make us “partakers of the divine nature” by which we become a “new creation” in Christ.
[p 38] All this, however, is utterly intolerable to the consistent evolutionist. For if man is dead and therefore unimprovable, that makes progress upward impossible, and, if that is impossible, the whole doctrine of evolution is at an end.
And so the evolutionist assumes the presence of life, and conceives the race to be progressing upward out of crude forms and unethical conceptions toward God. It is perfectly consistent, therefore, that he should seek to stir man’s noble aspirations and should present high ideals for him to strive after. For it is not life man needs, they say, it is simply conversion to higher ideals and aspirations in life.
Hence Dr. E. D. Burton is in perfect harmony with this evolutionary conception when he says: Jesus was a teacher of great principles, which it is incumbent upon us to apply to the multitudinous phases and experiences of life, and the embodiment of an ideal, which it is ours to endeavor, as best we can, to achieve.
Dr. Herbert L. Willett, of the University of Chicago, was also in harmony with all this when he said in an address heard by the writer: It is the task of the Church to interpret to the world the ideals of Jesus for men to strive after.
And Dr. J. H. Coffin also voiced the evolutionary position when, in speaking of conversion, he said: It is conversion to something, namely, the principles of Jesus.
Now when the logic of this conception is followed out, it turns evangelism into religious education. And [p 39] so it is easy to see why the advocates of evolution are stressing religious education with increasing insistence. For it is through the methods of religious education, according to Dr. Burton, that the lost are being led to adopt the principles of Jesus and to accept his leadership quietly and gradually.
This makes regeneration simply an added impulse in the direction in which men are imagined already to be going. It also has the effect of altogether reversing the emphasis in the work of the Church with the lost. According to Dr. Burton, it transfers it from the salvation of the individual, with emphasis upon rescue from future woe, to the creation of a human society dominated by the spirit of Jesus.