Baptism seems to have been understood during the first Christian
generations more as a ritual of aggregation to the community, essentialy
based on the imitation of Christ's humility and repentance pattern,
rather than a ritual performing a man's ontological transformation.
Being the first western treatise entirely devoted to a/this "sacrament",
Tertullian's On Baptism allows us to better understand the shift in
conciousness and meaning attributed to a ritual system that marked
Christianity in the third century.
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