The Mystery of Baptism in the Anglican Tradition. Kenneth Stevenson

and the fifth, by far the longest, was published in 1597. (The remaining books appeared much later: the sixth and eighth in 1648, and the seventh in 1661. While it is clear that they represented Hooker’s completed thought, they may have been prepared for publication from a semi-completed text.)

      Sharing in the life of God is perhaps one of the dominant motifs of Hooker’s writings, for near the beginning of Book I of the Laws, we come across the following statement:

      No good is infinite, but only God: therefore he our felicity and bliss. Moreover desire leadeth unto union with what it desireth. If then in him we are blessed, it is by force of participation and conjunction with him. Again it is not possession of any good thing that can make them happy which have it, unless they enjoy the thing wherewith they are possessed. Then are we happy therefore when fully we enjoy God, even as an object wherein the powers of our soul are satisfied, even with everlasting delight; so that although we be men, yet being unto God united we live as it were the life of God.³

      This is a fundamental statement of the nature of humanity’s yearning for God, and God’s response to humanity. We desire God for he is our fulfilment. And desire draws us into ‘participation and conjunction with him’, in other words to share with him and to be joined with him. But this sharing and being joined to him is more than a psychological uplift or assent to attractive ideas. It is a deep connection between ourselves and God which is made by Christ, through the Spirit, and effected in the public worship of the Church, above all in the sacraments. The soul’s ultimate satisfaction, therefore, is to be united with God, and that union is a way of sharing in God’s life itself.

      As John Booty remarks, ‘the straightforward interpretation of Book V is to view it as a defence of the Book of Common Prayer against the objection of the Puritans who contended that it was full of superstitious practices’.⁴ The opening chapters tackle head-on the Admonitions to Parliament of 1572, that Puritan manifesto for the reform of the Church of England, in which Thomas Cartwright was a leader, and for which he was nearly arrested before he fled the country.

      The structure of Laws V in its published form of 1597 is a sheer delight. Hooker begins by dealing with superstition, the general principles for the use of a set liturgy, and the use of church buildings, and then goes on to discuss the need for public prayer, with some discussion of the offices of Morning and Evening Prayer.

      Chapters 50–68 are the sacramental heart of the book. The remainder deals with the liturgical year, the pastoral offices, and questions of ordination and the discipline of the clergy. In this central portion, Hooker discusses the doctrine of the Trinity, the incarnation, and sacraments in general. He moves on to baptism in chapters 58–65, confirmation in the following chapter, and in chapters 67–8, the Eucharist. It is as if he were moving carefully along an awkward road, watching the condition of the track, and determined to reach his destination by covering every flank!⁵ His discussion of sacraments links closely with what he said at the beginning of Laws I, for he states, ‘participation is that mutual inward hold which Christ hath of us and we of him’.⁶

      How does this ‘participation and conjunction’ operate in baptism? Perhaps Hooker answers this question in the following words much later on: ‘whether we preach, pray, baptize, communicate, condemn, give absolution, or whatsoever, as disposers of God’s mysteries, our words, judgements, acts and deeds are not ours but the Holy Ghost’s.’⁷ Baptism in Hooker has been little discussed, because much of the attention of various writers and commentators has been taken up either with the general principles with which the book opens, or with the section on the Eucharist and ministry.⁸ Moreover, the way Hooker approaches, arranges and discusses his material on baptism is an object-lesson in method. The topics covered in these chapters can be identified as follows:

      Chapter 58: the meaning of baptism, its objective character, and the concluding reference to ‘things accessory’.

      Chapter 59: a discussion of John 3:5 in relation to baptism.

      Chapter 60: the necessity of baptism and its availability for all.

      Chapter 61: no scriptural evidence for set times or set places for baptism.

      Chapter 62: baptism by women – a thorny issue because practised in some places by midwives.

      Chapter 63: the profession of Christian faith at baptism.

      Chapter 64: the questions to godparents.

      Chapter 65: the sign of the cross.

      Chapter 66: confirmation.

      John Booty believes that Laws V was originally drafted as a much shorter book, to which was added, at the instigation of Edwin Sandys and George Cranmer, more contentious material to answer specifically the objections in the Puritan Admonitions to Parliament. On his reckoning, the only part which belongs to the original draft on baptism is Chapter 58.⁹

      Booty’s theory is based on stylistic grounds and it makes a great deal of sense. For example, if we apply his theory to Hooker’s discussion of the Eucharist, chapter 67 is a discussion of eucharistic theology, which could indeed stand on its own, whereas chapter 68 – which Booty makes part of the additions to the book – deals with specific Puritan objections, for example, the words of distribution for each communicant, kneeling, and debarring from communion. If this view is correct, then we can expect that chapter 58 can also stand on its own in irenic splendour apart from the remaining chapters, which deal with disputed areas in as polemical a style as Hooker could manage. Let us look at each chapter on baptism in turn, starting with the one which may have been intended to say it all.

      In chapter 58, Hooker discusses the relationship between the outward and the inward from two points of view. ‘Grace intended by sacraments was a cause of the choice, and there is a reason for the fitness of the elements themselves’.¹⁰ In other words water is used at baptism because of water’s properties in creating and sustaining life. (We shall come across this anthropological approach in other writers.) Secondly, he asserts that a sacrament needs three features: the grace which is offered, the element which signifies that grace, and the word which expresses what is done by the element. We are far from Perkins’ view of sacrament as a ‘prop to faith’ and well into a world where sacraments retain their objectivity. Moreover, he trusts what he refers to as ‘the known intent of the church generally’ to say what baptism is. And he recognizes that in the baptism liturgy there are certain matters which are ‘but things accessory, which the wisdom of the church of Christ is to order according to the exigence of that which is principal’.¹¹

      That is the point at which the discussion might end. If Booty is correct, all that follows was added by Hooker under pressure from his friends, in order to answer controversial matters in a specific sequence and in a sharper style.

      The beginning of chapter 59 marks a change of gear, for it sets out to answer those who would deny the necessity of baptism. Here, Hooker relies on the words of Jesus to Nicodemus, that no-one can enter the Kingdom of Heaven without being born again of water and the Spirit (John 3:5). Not all Hooker’s contemporaries agreed with the medieval Catholic view of the absolute necessity of baptism. His championing of the text from St John that to be thus born again is a consequence of baptism certainly set him apart from Puritans like Cartwright and Perkins. He ends this chapter with a characteristically pithy assertion:

      If on us he accomplish likewise the heavenly work of our new birth not with the Spirit alone but with water thereunto adjoined, sith [since] the faithfullest expanders of words are his own deeds, let that which his hand has manifestly wrought declare what his speech did doubtfully utter.¹²

      Chapter 60 carries on the discussion of the necessity of baptism and insists on the unity of the inward and outward, at some variance with Perkins:

      And, if regeneration were not in this very sense a thing necessary to eternal life, would Christ himself talk to Nicodemus that to see the Kingdom of God is impossible, saving only for those men which are born from above?¹³

      . . . baptism is a sacrament which God hath instituted in his church, to