The Mystery of Baptism in the Anglican Tradition. Kenneth Stevenson

Church and sacraments were at loggerheads. Whitgift, loyal Protestant though he was, believed in an inclusive Church, where sacraments are effective signs of nature transformed by grace, whereas Cartwright believed in a gathered Church, founded by God, whose prevenient grace was so strong that sacraments had less impact.¹² Defence of the issues these two fought over was to carry on for the next ninety years – and beyond.

      From these two episodes we can see the Church of England defending itself against Roman Catholicism on the one hand, and also entering into strong debate with those who did not think that the English Church had gone far enough in Reformation. Moreover, the position of Cartwright and his colleagues was shared by many, including a group of Scottish Presbyterian ministers who fled to England in 1584, and made a list of twenty-two objections to the English Book of Common Prayer, of which six concern baptism. The list could have been drawn up by the Admonitioners or Cartwright himself: baptism by midwives in necessity, baptism and Eucharist in private places, questions at baptism to the godparents, the sign of the cross at baptism, confirmation by the bishop, and the view that children who were baptized somehow had all things necessary for their salvation.¹³

      With such a strong debate going on, it was inevitable that the English Church would have to look thoroughly and repeatedly at the theology and practice of baptism. On the subject of confirmation, it was not as if the Prayer Book scheme was functioning properly. In 1587 Robert Cawdrey pointed out that most bishops had not been performing confirmations at all for the past twenty-nine years – meaning right from the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth I.¹⁴

      As we turn now to look at each one of our nine writers, we need also to bear in mind the very different people they were and the different means of communication which they adopted. Perkins writes popular treatises for the common man. Richard Hooker writes a single magnum opus into which he poured so much of himself, a work needing to be sipped and mulled over carefully. Lancelot Andrewes preaches brilliant sermons, packed full of ideas and images, but is always able somehow to see things whole. George Herbert writes poems with a simple directness almost unequalled in that remarkable century, as every line – especially if full of monosyllables! – hits its own particular point. John Bramhall tackles a particular topic of conversation at a dinner party – the unbaptized – and cannot stop himself from trying to have the last word. Jeremy Taylor turns the deprivations of internal exile into a God-given chance to pour out lavishly his own utterances on the holy life for the ordinary person. Richard Baxter, ever the self-taught loving pastor, writes at ever greater length in practical exhortation to discipleship. Simon Patrick transforms a sermon on baptism into his first published work, always a love-child for an author. Herbert Thorndike perhaps turns the art of rich and repetitive discourse into its own art form, which is reflected in his sermons too.

      To these we must now turn.

      3

      Inward or Outward?

      William Perkins (1558–1602)

      Is baptism an inward or an outward reality? I have heard many people talk often in quite contrasting ways to this effect. I can remember a person speaking to me with great earnestness about the day when she ‘became a Christian’. It was the result of a special, heart-warming occasion when the Christian faith in all its truth and conviction suddenly made sense to her. There had been a time of hostility – or extended apathy – towards the Church. Then, as usually happens, a friend was involved. A conversation passed that important watershed when people begin to talk about what is really important to them. A powerful experience at a church service convinced her that Christianity was the key to all her longings.

      But what of her previous life? The answer to that question could be given in a number of ways. Perhaps there was no Christian background whatever, in which case she was now baptized as a believing adult. Perhaps she was baptized as an infant by parents who took her along to church, in the hope that she would one day make a more conscious commitment to the Christian faith, whereas in fact she had perhaps discarded Christianity before ‘Sunday School’ (or its equivalent) could beckon her. Perhaps, again, her parents were barely practising Christians, and so this new experience of Christianity pushes her infant baptism back into the recesses of the barely important, even the trivial.

      Another way I have heard the question, ‘Is baptism inward or outward?’ answered was as follows. It consisted of a series of dates, along the lines of how I chronicled my own baptism and confirmation earlier. On that interpretation, I am baptized and born again of water and the Spirit at that same moment. I am given nurture by the Christian community, leading up to my confirmation, where I reaffirm my baptismal vows and receive the gift of the Spirit through the hands of the bishop. Everything that the Church does relies on that basic premise that God acts through the sacraments and the sacramental rites, and human experience responds accordingly. Whereas the person who was converted as an adult experiences that inward baptism and it remains important to her for the rest of her life, the other person relies on the outward baptism in the sacraments of the Church, and any important experiences of faith and commitment that occur at later points interpret that baptism.

      Not everyone would respond in one or other of those rather cut-and-dried ways. But the question nonetheless has to be asked: how far do we rely on our experience, and how far do we rely on the actions of the Church? It is not an issue that is new, for we find it in the New Testament when the apostles Peter and John went to Samaria and prayed for new converts that they might receive the Holy Spirit, after they had been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. (Acts 8:14 ff.) Indeed, it could be said that the apostle Paul himself experienced an inward baptism at his conversion which was rapidly followed by his outward baptism at the hands of Ananias (Acts 9).

      This is the kind of world in which baptism has had to live and adjust to different climates of belief and practice. For example, in the fourth century, there is ample evidence that baptism was deliberately led up to by careful catechesis and dramatic liturgy at the celebration of baptism at the Easter Vigil.¹ On the other hand, by the later Middle Ages, baptism in the West was usually an automatic process. Confirmation had become an episcopal rite, and from the late thirteenth century confirmation in England was made a requisite for Holy Communion in order to gain full recognition.²

      As people reflected on their religious experience, they took on more and more of a new life. The late medieval mystics are a clear example. Walter Hilton (who died in 1396) wrote a classic called The Scale of Perfection in which he takes for granted the sacramental effects of baptism but is much more interested in the relationship between what we would call spiritual renewal and the practice of penance, private confession.³ If you were to ask some of Walter Hilton’s contemporaries who read his work the difference between inward and outward baptism, they would probably have needed the question explained to them. They would not have thought in those terms. But I would hazard a guess that they would remain confident about the effectiveness of the outward baptism given by the Church but would then wax more than lyrical about the different ways in which ‘inward baptism’ is experienced in Christian prayer, contemplation, and living. There is some evidence to suggest that Hilton, perhaps uniquely for his time, built an important bridge between the theological and sacramental traditions of the Church, and the nurturing of the lives of lay folk through knowledge of the scriptures and a spirituality accessible to them. That inevitably makes him a significant figure in the pre-Reformation scene, not least for the strand of Reformation piety often referred to as ‘Puritan’.

      Inward and outward baptism form perhaps the most significant part of the teaching of William Perkins.⁴ Sadly, Perkins is little known these days, partly because he has been overshadowed by the work of Richard Hooker and Lancelot Andrewes, whom we shall look at in subsequent chapters. But the truth of the matter is that he was a far more popular communicator in his own time than either of the other two figures. For example, his A Golden Chain, which first appeared in 1590, went through nine editions in thirty years. It was translated into Dutch and German, and other works by him were translated into many other languages, including Spanish and French.

      Perkins was born in Warwickshire and went up to Christ’s College, Cambridge in 1577, where he associated with the more strongly Protestant