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EFORMATION VOLUME 6 NUMBER 3

HOW DO WE RECEIVE CHRIST: Godâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Sacraments or Ours?

A Publication of Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals Editor-in-Chief Dr. Michael S. Horton

EFORMATION MAY/JUNE 1997

HOW DO WE RECEIVE CHRIST: God’s Sacraments or Ours? 3

MYSTERIES OF GOD AND MEANS OF GRACE Michael S. Horton

16 FEEDING THE WORLD: THE LORD’S SUPPER IN LUKE’S GOSPEL Arthur A. Just, Jr.

20 BAPTISTS AND THE ORDINANCES Tom J. Nettles

27 WHY BAPTISM? W. Robert Godfrey

33 A PRESBYTERIAN ON THE WITTENBERG TRAIL Rick Ritchie

41 BELIEVERS’ BAPTISM: MORE THAN AMERICAN INDIVIDUALISM Timothy George

48 CALVIN ON THE EUCHARIST W. Robert Godfrey IN THIS ISSUE NEXT ISSUE SUMMARY OF POSITIONS QUOTES WHY BAPTIZE INFANTS? WE CONFESS MR BACK ISSUE ORDER FORM FOOTNOTES

Page 2 Page 2 Page 15 Page 26 Page 32 Page 38 Page 51 Page 52

Managing Editor Benjamin E. Sasse Copy Editors Ann Henderson Hart Deborah Barackman Layout and Design Lori A. Yerger Production Coordinator Irene H. Hetherington Proofreader Alyson S. Platt ACE Council Dr. John H. Armstrong The Rev. Alistair Begg Dr. James M. Boice Dr. W. Robert Godfrey Dr. John D. Hannah Dr. Michael S. Horton Mrs. Rosemary Jensen Dr. J.A.O. Preus Dr. R.C. Sproul Dr. Gene E. Veith, Jr. Dr. David F. Wells Contributing Scholars Dr. S. M. Baugh Dr. D. A. Carson Dr. Sinclair B. Ferguson Dr. Timothy George Dr. D. G. Hart Dr. Carl F. H. Henry Dr. Arthur A. Just Dr. Robert Kolb Dr. Richard A. Muller Mr. Kenneth A. Myers Dr. Tom J. Nettles Dr. Roger Nicole Dr. Leonard R. Payton Dr. Lawrence R. Rast Dr. Kim Riddlebarger Mr. Rick Ritchie Dr. Rod Rosenbladt The Rev. Harold L. Senkbeil Dr. Robert Strimple Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals © 1997 All rights reserved. ACE exists to call the church, amidst our dying culture, to repent of its worldliness, to recover and confess the truth of God’s Word as did the Reformers, and to see that truth embodied in doctrine, worship and life. For more information, call or write us at: ALLIANCE OF CONFESSING EVANGELICALS 1716 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103 (215) 546-3696 Subscribe to: modernREFORMATION US 1 YR $22 Canada 1 YR $25 Europe 1 YR $34

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InThis Issue… By Michael S. Horton

mong other things, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are supposed to unite us not only to Christ, but to his body. In other words, the unity of Christ’s people is at least one key fruit of these marvelous means of grace. And yet, they have caused some of the widest divisions among professing Christians. The Eastern Orthodox disagree with the Roman Catholics over the mode of Baptism; Rome differs with Protestants over the way grace operates in Baptism and over transubstantiation with regard to the Supper. Lutherans and Calvinists disagree over the mode in which one receives Christ and his saving benefits through the Lord’s Supper (physical or spiritual eating), while both disagree with Baptists over whether infants ought to be baptized. The Church of Christ members insist that one must be baptized in their church in order to be saved, and in many Southern Baptist churches, non-Southern Baptists must be rebaptized in order to join. At the other extreme, Episcopalians and many Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists, and other bodies will often baptize just

about any child, even if he or she does not have Christian parents. No wonder many Christians simply shake their heads and conclude that unity is more important than these doctrinal distinctives and suggest a truce. However appealing that may be, it is not the panacea for which we might hope. Whatever the correct views are, it is impossible to read the Bible without realizing that Circumcision and Passover in the Old Testament and Baptism and Communion in the New Testament are regarded with the utmost seriousness. We cannot claim to be “Bible-Christians” if we fail to investigate God’s Word on these important subjects, even if that means that we will disagree with our brothers and sisters who have reached different conclusions. Often the richest treasures are buried beneath the most violent seas. In this issue, we’ll explore some of these important questions and we hope you will let us hear your comments.

NEXT ISSUE:THE THEOLOGY OF THE CROSS VS. THE THEOLOGY OF GLORY he wisdom of the cross is today very much hidden in a deep mystery,” wrote Luther (W.V., 84, 10). It is “not only unheard of, but is by far the most fearful thing even for the rulers of the church. Yet it is no wonder, since they have abandoned the Holy Scriptures in favor of the unholy writings of men and the dissertations on finances instead” (W.V., 42, 8ff.). Hauntingly familiar in the light of the popularity of church growth and fundraising manuals over texts of theology, this message of the cross is in need of recovery once more. Only a year after the nailing of the rather conservative Ninety-Five Theses in 1517, the German reformer began to clearly distinguish two antithetical theologies: glory and the cross. Just as Paul’s theology contrasts the cross as foolishness to the wise, weakness to the powerful, and suffering to the fit, and the Gospels emphasize the humiliation of the cross as our Savior’s way of securing future glory for us, so Luther found that throughout Scripture these two theologies struggled for dominance

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like Jacob and Esau in the church’s womb. The theology of glory rests on the premise that we can find God by climbing ladders of religious or philosophical speculation, mystical experience, or moral achievement. At the end of the “seeker’s” ascent is God alright, but this “naked God” is not salvation, but the “consuming fire” (Heb. 12:29). “Truly,” Isaiah declared, “You are God, who hide yourself, O God of Israel, the Savior!” (Is. 45:15). While we hide ourselves in order to conceal something, says Luther, God hides himself in order to reveal something. If we were to encounter God directly (as the theology of glory urges in its various forms), we would be turned to ash. But God wants to have a saving relationship with us through the Mediator, Jesus Christ, and has graciously devised a way of clothing himself in flesh, clothing us in his righteousness, and then raising our bodies as the victorious fruit of his own physical resurrection. One day there will be glory, but for now, the cross. “For now we see in a glass darkly, but then face to face!”

MODERN REFORMATION

Mysteries of God and Means of Grace MICHAEL S. HORTON

ry a personal Communion service to enrich your relationship with God.” “Supper for One,” an article in a leading evangelical magazine, advocates supplementing private devotions with Communion. “I didn’t have wine or unleavened bread around the house, but I did have water or juice and crackers....Communion helped me focus blurry thoughts in the morning.” The writer recalled the hatred she was harboring toward a friend. “Yet as I crunched the cracker in my mouth, I remembered the breaking of Jesus’ body and prayed, ‘Lord, please break this hatred in my heart.’ After several days, something inside me changed.” It seems that the “Supper for One” worked, and on this basis it is commended to the rest of the church. No attempt is made to derive support from Scripture or even from tradition for this astonishing practice. But this woman would probably, as an evangelical, criticize Rome’s Sacraments as being unscriptural. Doubtless, the writer is a convinced evangelical who accepts the Bible’s authority, but yet seems to have no test for what is a “means of grace” beyond its pragmatic usefulness.

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Unlike the Supper instituted by Christ, this new practice is private rather than public, subjective rather than objective, and does not even require the specific material elements commanded by Christ! Evidently the spiritual and moral effects are all that matter. “After three months of daily remembrance, I wondered if Communion would make the same difference for others. The Communion Project was born.” Pastor Mac tried private Communion for three months. “Mac used juice

and graham crackers (he has kids, too).” The article offers testimonials from those for whom this new Sacrament “worked.” Each person focused on a different spiritual need and envisioned Jesus as the answer. Alma, mother of five, “began to focus on portraying the Spirit of Jesus and His humble service” while taking Communion. “As a result, Alma saw changes in the way she spoke to and served her children.” “I’m still enjoying Communion on a regular basis,” says the writer, “although not every day (the carpool changed again).”1 For a group that is often fond of denouncing Rome’s additions to Scripture, evangelicals have done a fairly radical job of liturgical and sacramental innovation. (Like a new exercise for losing that spare tire, getting in shape spiritually is a matter of finding the right technique.) Most evangelicals wouldn’t call them Sacraments, but they believe that their innovative techniques do convey God’s grace. Ironically, the same would probably not be said of the Sacraments that our Lord actually did establish. Even in more traditional days, we would try to prepare our heart for Jesus, making sure that we had surrendered all. Each summer at camp in my youth, we would do penance, as the final night would lead us through the stages of contrition, confession, and satisfaction. Thus prepared, we would write our sins on a piece of paper or wood and throw them into the fire, MAY/JUNE 1997

promising never to do them again. No, I was not reared a Roman Catholic, but as an evangelical Protestant. And we would return to camp the next summer, after passing a number of “sacramental seasons” in between, to get back lost grace and keep our reservoirs as full as possible. Instead of seeing the Christian life as one long experience of being simultaneously justified and sinful, fully accepted by God in Christ, and yet always striving against my sinful heart, my practical theology resembled that of my Roman Catholic friends. Even the central event in worship was called the altar call. While we would never have referred to the place where God speaks and acts in Word and Sacrament as an altar, we had no trouble calling this other place—the stage around which we gathered as we “came forward” to receive Christ—by that name. To this day, I hear Christian brothers and sisters defend this practice by saying, “Surely you wouldn’t deny that many people are saved by coming forward!” In other words, the altar call is regarded as a means of grace. In fact, the medieval view of the Sacraments as working ex opere operato (i.e., just by performing the act, one is saved) finds a Protestant parallel in this new Sacrament. After all, doesn’t the pastor declare, “Now, if you prayed that prayer after me, you are a Christian”? (In fact, if you pray that prayer at the end of some tracts, there is even a place to sign your name and the date of your new birth!) While the ancient church condemned as Pelagian the idea that grace is conferred by saying a prayer (the Council of Orange, 529 A.D.), it is now regarded as a guarantee of saving grace in many circles. Although few evangelicals would be comfortable hearing a Lutheran or Reformed minister announcing God’s forgiveness in connection with Baptism or the Lord’s Supper, they do not seem to mind when the same grace is linked to “receiving Christ” in an altar call, a Promise Keepers’ meeting, a small group, in spiritual disciplines, or at summer camp. It is so easy to set aside God’s ordained means of grace and to create our own private and public rituals. We can turn a means of grace into a Sacrament of penance as easily as the next fellow. Even if we are antiritualistic, a praise band becomes a “means of grace,” or “testimony time” becomes sacramental. In a recent issue of Christianity Today, Richard Foster lists numerous Sacraments, from physical labor to spiritual disciplines, actually calling them “means of grace.” Yet Foster belongs to the Quaker tradition, a religious group that repudiates Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. In reality, we are an individualistic and self-assured lot. We believe that the Christian life consists chiefly in finding out what needs to be done, and doing it. Inveterate Pelagians by birth, we do our best to climb the spiritual rungs into God’s hidden presence, but he 4

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has plainly warned us against this strategy. For he has come near to us, through the Incarnate Word, the written, and especially, preached Word, and the visible Word (i.e., the Sacraments). If we really believe that we are helpless to save ourselves, as Christians any more than pagans, the Sacraments become for us not a means for attaining grace, but for receiving grace. They are not rituals through which we proclaim our willing and running, but through which God proclaims his willing and running. But how seriously do we take the two Sacraments instituted by our Lord? Contrast our contemporary pictures with the answer of Reformed theologian Johannes Wollebius (1586-1629): “The visible church is a fellowship of people called to the state of grace by Word and sacrament.” In fact, although the Church often considers other activities “ministries” that reach the world for Christ, the Church, as Louis Berkhof reminds us, “is not instrumental in communicating grace, except by means of the Word and of the sacraments” (emphasis added). The goal of this article, and this issue, is to try to recover the force of this viewpoint. During the Reformation, the church recognized that the recovery of the radical God-centeredness and grace-oriented apostolic message was not only a matter of orthodoxy, but doxology; that is, not only sound doctrine, but sound praise and worship that was shaped by the mystery of Christ revealed. Liturgical reform was necessary. Something parallel is going on in our day, as a new generation—largely consisting of converts to the evangel in evangelical circles—cries out for the Bread of Life in the place of stones. Burned out after years of hopping from one spiritual bandwagon to another, they are looking to churches that believe it’s more important to feed the flock than appease the goats. They are beginning to understand that when the Savior calls the unbelievers to himself, it will be only here that they will hear God’s gracious call, however strange it may sound at first. As we learn to become less ashamed of the Gospel, we are beginning to recover our own voice again, our own divinely-taught language. In the light of that, this article will introduce the Reformed perspective on the Sacraments. What Are the Sacraments? “Sacrament”: the very term may perplex some people. However, it is quite clearly derived from Scripture, as the Greek word for “mystery” (musterion) is translated into Latin as sacramentum. In the Roman world, a sacramentum was the oath of a secret society, especially of soldiers, for whom military interests and religious rituals were virtually indistinguishable. Not surprisingly, then, when the ancient church wanted to MODERN REFORMATION

talk about the ways in which God confirmed his promise to Abraham and his seed by an oath (Heb. 6:13-18), they adopted this idea. Not only is the Gospel referred to as a mystery, hidden under types and shadows until Christ’s advent; ministers are to be regarded “as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God” (1 Cor. 4:1). In the early church, adult catechumens would study the teachings and practices of Christianity and then be initiated, with their children, into the church by the mystery of Baptism, instituted by our Savior in his Great Commission (Matt. 28:19-20). The Holy Supper was regularly celebrated along with the preached Word (Acts 2:42). However, before the service of the Supper began, the general public was dismissed with the announcement, “Ite, missa est!”, meaning, “Go, it is dismissed.” Over time, the missa in that formula gave us our word for the Mass.

We simply cannot say that we take a literal approach to the text while interpreting these clear passages as allegorical of a spiritual reality detached from the obvious reference to physical sacraments. But eventually, the human temptation to invent new forms of worship, as Israel had done at Mt. Sinai with the golden calf, expressed itself in the medieval proliferation of additions to the ancient Mass. (Seekerworship is, after all, not all that new!) Medieval theologian Peter Lombard defined a Sacrament as “a sign of a sacred thing,” which was so broad, of course, that it is little wonder that as many as thir ty “Sacraments” were suggested! Eventually, the magisterium settled on twelve and then reduced the number finally to the seven that stand to this day in Roman Catholicism.

Again, for the reformers, theological reform led to liturgical reform. This, of course, did not mean a wholesale abandonment of the first fifteen centuries, since the church had not in every respect abandoned God’s Word. Instead, Luther, Calvin, and the other magisterial reformers insisted on reforming the Mass. Far from ignoring the ancient forms of the church, they carefully studied Scripture and realized that if the layer of medieval accretions in the Latin Mass was peeled away, the resulting service was both more biblical and more ancient. Calvin expressed the criterion employed: “It is certain that all ceremonies are corrupt and harmful unless through them men are led to Christ...As to the confirmation and increase of faith, I should therefore like my readers to be reminded that I assign this particular ministry to the sacraments” (Institutes 4.10.15 and 4.14.9). Thus, to qualify as a Sacrament, an act had to be instituted by Christ and it had to strengthen faith in Christ rather than undermine it. First, the reformers considered a Sacrament to be a divine act. Just look at the alleged Sacraments that Rome had adopted: Many not only failed to be sanctioned by Christ, but were recent in origin (dating officially from the 13th century). Further, they did not offer grace, but merit. Was marriage a divine action, or a human pledge? Is God rewarding me by making these vows or is he bestowing unmerited favor? It is quite strange to think of marriage as the bestowal of the Gospel, a means of grace rather than a Christian vow. How could penance be a Sacrament, a means of grace from God to us, when in fact it consisted of three human acts (contrition, confession, and satisfaction—that is, making restitution)? Like many of the new Sacraments we invent as Protestants, medieval Rome had confused human actions (good and important as they are in the Christian life) with divine grace. The indicative and imperative were confused. Contrition and confession are Christian duties, but they are our response to grace, and the effect of grace, not a means of grace from God. Rome had even taken the Lord’s Supper and turned it into our act of resacrificing Christ instead of promising us “that because of the one sacrifice of Christ accomplished on the cross he graciously grants us the forgiveness of sins and eternal life” (Heidelberg, Q. 66). The Reformers found another problem with the medieval notion of even those Sacraments instituted by our Lord. In Rome, one brought a worthy disposition or habitus to the Sacraments, and obstacles could prevent the effective flow of grace into the soul. Where the Scriptures portray grace as God’s unmerited favor toward us, medieval theology had taught that grace was a spiritual and moral quality within the believer. Like water filling a bathtub, grace could leak out of the soul due to venial sins and be entirely lost by committing a mortal sin. MAY/JUNE 1997

Thus, Rome’s Sacraments (especially penance) served to merit new infused grace. In contrast, Calvin says that Christ’s Sacraments are instituted so that “believers, poor and deprived of all goods, should bring nothing to it but begging” (Institutes 4.14.26). The Sacrament’s “force and truth” do not depend on “the condition or choice of him who receives it. For what God has ordained remains firm and keeps its own nature, however men may vary” (ibid). So for Calvin, as for Luther, “sacramenta conferunt gratiam” (Sacraments confer grace). They are not rewards for the strong, but mercies for the weak. Not only did the Refor mers oppose Rome’s meritocracy; they fiercely opposed the opposite tendency to subjectivize the Sacraments by making them mere signs or tokens to evoke piety. For this, too, would only lead the struggling believer to look for help within himself. From the mid-sixteenth-century confessions to the Westminster Confession of 1647, the entire confessional testimony of the Refor med and Presbyterian churches defends the objective character of the Sacraments as means of grace. The Scots Confession of 1560 declares, “And so we utterly condemn the vanity of those who affirm the sacraments to be nothing else than naked and bare signs. No, we assuredly believe that by Baptism we are engrafted into Christ Jesus, to be made partakers of his righteousness, by which our sins are covered and remitted, and also that in the Supper rightly used, Christ Jesus is so joined with us that he becomes the very nourishment and food of our souls” (Ch. 21). “The Holy Spirit creates [faith] in our hearts by the preaching of the holy Gospel and confirms it by the use of the holy Sacraments” (Heidelberg, Q.65). The Second Helvetic Confession reminds us that what is given in the Sacraments is not merely “a bare and naked sign,” but Christ himself, with all of his saving benefits. It warns against the “sects,” who “despise the visible aspect of the sacraments,” exclusively concerned with the invisible (Ch. 19). The Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England repeat their sister churches in affirming this point (Art. 25). “The sacraments become effectual means of salvation,” according to the Westminster Larger Catechism, “not by any power in themselves or any virtue derived from the piety or intention of him by whom they are administered; only by the working of the Holy Ghost, and the blessing of Christ by whom they are instituted” (Q.161). Moving to our day, most Reformed theologians have upheld the confessions. Princeton’s A. A. Hodge wrote, “Christ uses these sacraments, not only to represent and seal, but also actually to apply, the benefits of his redemption to believers.” Furthermore, according to Hodge, while they are not Sacraments, the church ought to retain as ordinances confirmation, absolution, 6

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marriage, and ordination. Penance and extreme unction are rejected entirely. Exulting in the biblical and historical evidence, Hodge declared, “We have, on the one hand, the great body of the historical Christian churches, and on the other hand, the Protestants of Protestants, our Baptist brethren. In this point of view the advantage appears to be on our side.” It is important to realize that the Calvinistic Baptists hail not from Anabaptism, but from English Puritanism. Unlike the various “sects” of the so-called Radical Reformation, the Baptists were in other respects committed to the magisterial Reformation, but separated from their Reformed churches over the issue of infant Baptism. What is odd about our day is that the more radical elements of Anabaptism, rather than even the more moderate views of the Baptists, show up occasionally in our churches. It is, therefore, astonishing that so many who go by the name “Reformed” in our day seem to deny, at least in the practical treatment of these Sacraments, the efficacy of these means of grace. As I have attempted to highlight in In The Face of God, the gnosticism (spirit against matter emphasis) of our age seems to pervade evangelical thinking and this has not been without its effect in our own churches. The hidden assumption appears to be that God works immediately and directly, without means, in bringing us to faith and keeping us there. Spirit is set against matter; in this case, the material elements of human preaching, water, bread and wine. The Anabaptistic, pietistic, and then revivalistic strains of evangelicalism eventually triumphed over the Reformation’s evangelical stance and to the extent that Reformed churches today follow these general evangelical trends, they lose their Reformed identity. In many conservative Reformed and Presbyterian circles, it is as if the prescribed forms for Baptism and the Supper were too high in their sacramental theology, so the minister feels compelled to counter its strong “means of grace” emphasis. In this way, the Sacraments die the death of a thousand qualifications. The same is true when we read the biblical passages referring to Baptism as “the washing of regeneration” or to the Supper as “the communion of the body and blood of Christ.” Why must we apologize for these passages and attempt to explain them away? Our confessions do not do this. Our liturgical forms (if we still use them) do not do this, but we feel compelled to diminish them these days. We hear quasi-gnostic sentiments even in Reformed circles these days, such as the “real baptism” that is spiritual, as opposed to “merely being sprinkled with water,” or the “real communion” with Christ in moments of private devotion. How can we truly affirm the union of earthly and heavenly realities in the Incarnation? Or how can we regard the Word of God as a means of salvation if MODERN REFORMATION

it is but ink and paper or human speech? A subtle Docetism (the ancient gnostic heresy that denied Christ’s true humanity) lurks behind our reticence to see these common earthly elements as signs that are linked to the things they signify. Surely the Sacraments can remind us of grace, help us to appreciate grace, and exhort us to walk in grace, but do they actually give us the grace promised in the Gospel? The Reformed and Presbyterian confessions answer “yes” without hesitation: A Sacrament not only consists of the signs (water, bread and wine), but of the things signified (new birth, forgiveness, life everlasting). And yet, the experience of Reformed and Presbyterian churches in the odd world of American revivalism has challenged the confessional perspective. In The Presbyterian Doctrine of Children in the Covenant (Yale, 1940), L. B. Schenck noted, “The disproportionate reliance upon revivals as the only hope of the church...amounted to a practical subversion of Presbyterian doctrine, an overshadowing of God’s covenantal promise.” As Richard Muller has carefully shown in his Calvin Theological Journal article, “How Many Points?”, our system has been reduced to a pale reflection of its former self. Eugene Osterhaven states, “Thus the Reformed tradition, with most of the Christian church, believes it pleases God to use earthly materials—water, bread, and wine—in the reconciliation of the world to God.” But does Scripture teach this? The best way to answer that is to simply read the passages, where Baptism is called “remission of sins” (Acts 2:38), and those who believe and are baptized will be saved (Mk. 16:16). Paul announced, “Arise, and be baptized, and wash away your sins, calling on the name of the Lord” (Acts 22:16). The Sacrament and faith were not separated in Paul’s mind, for apart from the latter the benefits of the former were not received although the Sacrament was performed. In Baptism we were buried and raised with Christ (Rom. 6:3-5). Far from viewing Baptism as a human work, Paul said “not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior, that having been justified by his grace we should become heirs according to the hope of eternal life” (Tit. 3:5-7). A. A. Hodge writes, “Men were exhorted to be baptized in order to wash away their sins. It is declared that men must be born of water and of the Spirit, and that baptism as well as faith is an essential condition of salvation. The effect of Baptism is declared to be purification (2 Kings 5:13, 14; Judith 12:7; Lk. 11:3739).” As Hodge observes, in infant Baptism, there are four parties: God, the Church, the parents, and the child, and the only party wholly passive in the affair is the very person being baptized!

We simply cannot say that we take a literal approach to the text while interpreting these clear passages as allegorical of a spiritual reality detached from the obvious reference to physical sacraments. Here the Reformed found great assistance in Augustine’s terminology, often employed in medieval theology, but later abandoned in Rome’s attempt to explain transubstantiation. Especially important in the Augustinian tradition was the relation between “sign” and “thing signified.” Analogous to the relation between Christ’s human and divine natures united in one person, the earthly signs of water, bread and wine are united with the things signified: regeneration, forgiveness, and adoption. This “sacramental relation” is central to the Reformed understanding of these passages. It helps us to avoid either a ritualism that places the efficacy in the signs themselves and a spiritualism or rationalism that deprives the signs of their efficacy. So when we read that Baptism is “the remission of sins,” we embrace neither baptismal regeneration nor spiritualization. The sign is not the thing signified, but is so united by God’s Word and Spirit that the waters of Baptism can be said to be the washing of regeneration and the bread and wine can be said to be the body and blood of Christ. To say that Christ is not in the water, bread and wine is not to say that he is not in the Baptism and the Supper, since both Sacraments consist of signs and things signified. We live in a sensate era, looking for “sensory overload” experiences. Since the Fall, we have always sought that which is “pleasing to the eye” (Gen. 3:6). Hence, the golden calf, the perpetual temptation to idolatry, and the medieval superstitions. The corrupted Mass replaced the Word with colorful and exciting feasts for the eyes and ears, but where was Christ? So too, in our day, we demand visual and aural stimulation, and are being led to idols rather than to Christ. A Word and Sacrament orientation touches our senses, but also fastens us to the reality which they offer beyond themselves. The Word consecrates the Sacraments, not transubstantiating the substances of bread and wine into body and blood, but making these visible signs means of grace. Unlike our own clever substitutes, the Sacraments lead us beyond the signs to the Lamb. Calvin goes so far as to stress the relationship between the physical character of the elements and our own bodies, suggesting that God “testifies his benevolence and love toward us more expressly by the sacraments than he does by his word” (Institutes 4.14.6). The Sacraments do not give us something different from the Word; rather, both conspire to give us Christ. We have no trouble when Scripture tells us that “the Word of God is living and powerful” (Heb. 4:12), or that the Gospel is “the power of God unto salvation” (Rom. 2:16). When we say that someone was converted MAY/JUNE 1997

by hearing a sermon, we are not attributing saving efficacy to language, or ink and paper in their own right. Rather, we are claiming (whether we realize it or not) that God has graciously taken up these human things and, by uniting them to the heavenly treasures, has made them effective himself. Precisely the same is true of the Sacraments. If one rejects the Gospel as it is given in the preaching of the Word and in the Sacraments, it remains the Gospel, still the power of God unto salvation, but “...for everyone who believes, to the Jew first and to the Greek.” Apart from faith, one is no more saved by Baptism and the Lord’s Supper than he or she is by the preached Gospel. Rome is fond of charging the Reformation with subjectivizing the Sacraments by denying their efficacy ex opere operato (i.e., “by the doing it is done,” the view that Baptism and the Supper confer grace apart from faith). As Berkouwer points out, Philip Melanchthon’s Loci communes (1521) and the Augsburg Confession both condemn the view that the Sacraments grant justification. “That, of course, is an error,” says Melanchthon, “for justification comes only with faith.” Thus, “...belief is necessary for the correct use of the sacraments” (Apology). “It is striking that so much agreement exists between Lutherans and Reformed precisely in the rejection of ex opere operato. Both continually point to the relation between Word and sacrament, and therefore to the relation between faith and sacrament (cf. Institutes 4.14.14). This is not because they both subjectivize the sacraments, but because they both have a correct insight into them.” It is Rome that subjectivizes the Sacraments by making their effect depend on the moral disposition and worthiness of the recipient. Faith is not a holy disposition within us, but a looking away from self altogether to lay hold of the righteousness of another. I am convinced that evangelicals and Roman Catholics share so many ironic affinities in their view of their respective Sacraments precisely because they share similar views of justification and faith. The medieval theologian Peter of Poitiers said that we had to prepare our heart to receive Christ, as a guest prepares his house. How different is this from the Ar minian altar calls or similar exhor tations to “surrender all” and prepare the heart for Jesus? In Scripture, not even faith is a work of human beings, but the receiving of Christ’s work. And yet in both medieval and Arminian schemes, human cooperation subjectivizes the Word and Sacraments, so that their real efficacy lies in the disposition, will, and activity of the very sinner who finds himself or herself destitute! On Ezek. 20:20, Calvin replies, “Man’s unworthiness does not rob the sacraments of their significance. Baptism remains the bath of regeneration 8

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even though the whole world was faithless; the Lord’s Supper remains the distribution of Christ’s body and blood, even though there was not the slightest sparkle of belief left.” The Belgic Confession points out that the Sacraments, like the Word, are given because of our weakness, not as a reward for our strength (Art. 33). How can the Reformed position be distinguished from Rome, then? For the Reformed, the Sacraments are objective means of grace, but not of infused grace. It is the promise of the Gospel, identical to the proclaimed Word, that is confirmed by the use of the Sacraments. Just as the Gospel proclaimed retains its nature and efficacy whether we believe or not, we do not make the Sacraments effective by our faith, preparation, works, or any other activity. And yet, we must receive Christ in them if we are to profit from them.

I had, without malice but with plenty of ignorance, turned the Sacrament of Christ’s doing and dying into my sacrament of feeling and remembering. Why did I even need bread and grape juice to do that? Making use of the Sacraments is not like turning on a faucet to drink water, but like being given a gift. It is not a moral quality within us that makes the Sacraments effective (as in Rome), but the objective promise, received in faith through the mighty working of the Holy Spirit. This phrase, “received in faith,” does not mean that faith makes the Sacraments effective any more than that faith itself justifies. We know that it is God who justifies us, on the basis of Christ’s righteousness and not our faith, and the same is tr ue of the Sacraments. Sacraments remain Sacraments, just as Christ remains Christ and the Word would be true if nobody ever accepted it as such. But the reality they exhibit and confer must be embraced. John 3:16 MODERN REFORMATION

remains John 3:16 apart from anyone’s acceptance. If anyone fails to believe, he has not made Word and Sacrament ineffective; he has simply refused to accept that which was truly offered to him, objectively, by God. G. C. Berkouwer warns against the spiritualizing tendency to see the sacraments as “merely jogs for the memory, whose only effect is psychological.” The Refor med want to emphasize that the Sacraments, no less than the Word, are means of grace, made effective by God, not merely an occasion for grace, made effective by us. Although he sometimes expressed eccentric views on the subject, Abraham Kuyper reminds us, “What you need is the anointing of grace itself,” not merely a reflection of it. He refers to Zwingli’s “deplorable representation,” calling his view of the Supper “intellectual” as well as “bar ren and mendacious,” insisting that he would rather err on the side of Luther than Zwingli’s. Berkouwer complains, too, that in Zwingli “the sacrament is reduced to the level of any phenomenon we experience as edifying, such as the starry heaven, a death bed, or a praying child.” According to Kuyper, “Even if a person had already confessed before his baptism that salvation is in Christ, and even if he were already incorporated into Christ, he makes the real transition only through baptism.” He is quite right when he says, “The Reformed stand with Rome, Luther, and Calvin against Zwingli in their adherence to a divine working of g race in the sacrament.” In a classic understatement, Berkhof declares, “There is a very general impression, not altogether without foundation, that Zwingli’s view of the Lord’s Supper was very defective,” since “for him the emphasis falls on what the believer, rather than on what God, pledges in the sacrament.” Sadly, many churches today calling themselves Reformed and Presbyterian embrace in practice Zwingli’s view of Sacraments as “bare and naked signs,” even though this view is rejected by every one of our confessions. But doesn’t God communicate his g race in devotions, in personal testimonies, and in similar expressions of piety? Is God bound to only these means of Word and Sacrament? That is the wrong question, from our point of view. Let’s say you promised me that you would meet me at the cafe on the corner of Fourth and Maple. There is nothing magical about the corner. You would have been free to select another spot, but that location—especially if my life depends on this meeting—takes on a particular status because of your promise to meet me there. Similarly, God could meet us anywhere on earth. Filling the heavens and the earth, he speaks to us in general revelation every time we climb a beautiful mountain or attend a Mozart concert. But he appears to us there in his role as Creator. We learn nothing from general revelation that is able to save. It

can lead us to the Gospel, but it is only in the Gospel given in Word and Sacrament where we see God in the particular act of saving people. The Grand Canyon can show you God’s majesty, but only special revelation—in particular, the Gospel of Christ, reveals God the Redeemer as your Savior. Omnipresent Spirit has met us in the Incarnate Word, and he continues to meet us but only where he has promised to meet us for the purpose of saving us. A Sacrament is distinct from other important spiritual disciplines not only because it is attached to a definite divine promise, but because it is God’s activity. While your testimony might reveal God’s work in your life, the preached Word and Sacraments reveal God’s work in history for my redemption and that of the whole church. In other words, your testimony tells me about your experience (which is not wrong in itself, of course), but the Gospel, in Word and Sacrament, actually gives me Christ! There are many Christian duties, and Baptism does mark us with Christ’s sufferings, leading us to a life not only of assurance of God’s grace, but of opposition from the world, the flesh, and the devil. Far from opposing Christian duties, the Sacraments make them possible. In such duties (prayer, talking to others about Christ, praise, discipline), we are the speakers and actors, but in Word and Sacrament, God is the one speaking and acting. There is a place for our response in grateful praise and obedience, but we can only be thankful after we have been given something and obedient after we are grateful. As the gracious indicative makes way for the imperative in the preached Word, the sacraments give and we bring nothing of ourselves but our cry for grace. Like little birds waiting in the nest with beaks open wide to receive their daily food, we are God’s own children huddled together in his church to receive Christ as the food of our souls. As a number of friends in the Reformed ministry have told me, frequent Communion requires them to make Christ central in their preaching as well as in the Sacrament itself. In both forms, Christ is, as Paul said, “placarded” or “posted” before the congregation as crucified. At the heart of the Reformed doctrine, shared also with the ancient (especially Greek) churches, is the eschatological parallelism between heaven and earth: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Or, “Whatever you bind or loose on earth will be bound or loosed in heaven.” Do you see the “as on earth, so in heaven” parallelism? The kingdom is the in-breaking of Christ’s new world by the Spirit’s recreation. It is the age to come shooting forth fruit-laden branches of the heavenly Tree of Life into this present age. From the Reformed perspective, the “already” and “not-yet” of redemptive history bars us from a realized MAY/JUNE 1997

eschatology of Christ’s physical presence on earth before the eschaton, marking our difference with Rome and Lutherans. But it also sets our view off from the entirely future eschatolog y of Zwinglians and rationalists who deny the mystery. Zwinglians and Roman Catholics are the only ones who deny mystery: the for mer, by reducing the Sacraments to mere signs and symbols; the latter, by arguing that the sign is no longer united to the thing signified, but replaces it! Lutherans and Calvinists embrace mystery, though at different points. While Calvinists ask Lutherans how Christ can be physically present at every altar and still be said in any sense to have a human body, Lutherans ask Calvinists how they can honestly say that they are really feeding on the true body and blood of Christ in heaven, without identifying this with a physical mode of eating. For centuries, the difficult business here for both parties has been accepting each other’s claim to be truly feeding on Christ according to his institution. But at least they are both claiming the same act and effect, even if they differ on the mode of eating. Here, both concede mystery, a wonderful exercise of the miracle-working Savior still at work in our world, and this is at least a good place to start. Even with the Word and Sacraments, our feeblemindedness, willful ignorance, and pride keep us from raising our eyes to heaven as we should. From the Reformed perspective, Roman Catholics and Lutherans fail to take into sufficient consideration the implications of the angelic announcement, “He is not here, for he is risen!” And yet, he promised in his Great Commission that as his church preaches and baptizes, “I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:10). This finds a more focused elaboration in John’s Gospel, where Jesus prepares the Church for his death, resurrection, and ascension. Although he must go, it is good, he says. His absence means that he will send the Holy Spirit, not as a new Savior, but as the one who unites us to Christ now in heaven. He promises that believers will see him in the flesh, but only on the last day. Until then, he is still present but it is the Holy Spirit now who leads us across the Rubicon of this present age into the age to come. “These things I have spoken to you while being present with you,” he says. “But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you” (Jn. 14:24-26). “It is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you; but if I depart, I will send him to you” (Jn. 16:7). This two-age model (“this present age” and “the age to come”) forms the horizon of the New Testament and our own Christian experience. Jesus presents this model (Mk. 10:30; Lk. 20:34), and it is found throughout the 10

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epistles. Hebrews 6 warns lapsed believers from committing apostasy by returning to Judaism and Gentile paganism. These are people who “were once enlightened, and have tasted the heavenly gift, and have become partakers of the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come...” (Heb. 4-5). In the ancient Church, “enlightened” was a term for the baptized, while tasting of the heavenly gift most likely refers to Holy Communion. Through these means of grace, says the biblical writer, especially “the good word of God,” the members of the visible Church have actually tasted the powers of the age to come. This is the “already” aspect of the kingdom. And yet, it is the age to come in all its fullness when Christ returns physically in glory. “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12). The Reformed view wants to avoid the tendency to deny the future of this face-toface encounter, but it also insists that we do see in a mirror, however dimly. That mirror or looking glass in which we see our Redeemer is Word and Sacrament. It is the Spirit who makes the connection between these two ages, and it is through the instruments of the preached Word and Sacraments that the “already” and “not-yet,” this present age and the age to come, converge. Here Christ meets with his people before his final return in judgment and consummation. For here we are seated with him in heavenly places even before we are physically raised. Having briefly sketched the Reformed view of a Sacrament, let’s take an even more cursory look at Baptism and the Supper particularly, and try to ascertain some agreements in spite of our differences. Baptism: The Sacrament of Initiation While Reformed theology has historically agreed with the Law-Gospel distinction of Lutheranism (while leaving a larger place for the positive role of the Law in the Christian life), the system increasingly organized itself around that key biblical motif of diatheke or covenant. In creation, God established a covenant of works with Adam: If he would perfectly obey, he would earn for himself and his posterity the right to eat from the Tree of Life and enjoy eternal happiness without the possibility of falling away. Having broken this covenant, God was not obligated to redeem his image-bearers, but he chose to do so. And from eternity past, Christ was appointed as the Mediator of the elect. After the fall, therefore, God established a covenant of grace with Adam and Eve, and all believers with them. The Gospel was preached by God himself to the guilty race in the announcement of the woman’s Seed who would triumph over the serpent. The whole of biblical history then becomes an outworking of this plan of redemption, this covenant of grace. In the Old Testament, believers place their faith in this Redeemer to come. Abraham is called MODERN REFORMATION

out of the world to be the father of many and after he is justified by grace through faith in this Coming Son, he is circumcised by divine command. But God also commands him to circumcise his children. All children of Abraham henceforth are to be circumcised on the eighth day, to separate them from the covenant of works and place them under God’s protection in the covenant or treaty of grace. Just as Adam and Eve were redeemed from God’s avenging wrath prefigured by the sacrificial skins they wore in the place of their own fig leaves, and Abraham was called out, justified, and circumcised, the Israelites were spared by sprinkling the blood of a sacrificial lamb on their doorposts. God leads his people out of Egyptian bondage through the Red Sea after the event of the “passing over” of the avenging angel. Along with Circumcision, Passover is divinely instituted as a sign and seal of the covenant of grace. But God’s people rebel in the wilderness journey toward the Promised Land. On the verge of crossing over, they express their unbelief in the promise and God bars that generation from entering his rest. Joshua leads Israel into the Promised Land and God establishes in the ear thly Jerusalem (City of Peace) a figure of “the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God” (Heb. 11:10). But even in this land of promise, Israel repeatedly turned to idols and to her own righteousness for salvation. Again and again, the church is threatened with extinction, either by internal apostasy or by external oppression, often the latter a divine punishment for the former. There is always a remnant, a true Israel, a faithful seed that still holds onto the promise and looks for redemption from Zion. Finally, the Messiah arrives and is announced by John the Baptist as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” He declares that the kingdom has come in his very person. He is the Second Adam who will fulfill the covenant of works, earning for us the right to eat from the Tree of Life. By fulfilling the covenant of works, we are able to receive eternal life in the covenant of grace. He is Abraham’s son and so are all believers,

Jew and Gentile together, one flock with one Shepherd. Now he replaces the Sacraments of Circumcision and Passover with Baptism and the Supper. This narrative summary does not require proof-texts, as it follows the familiar biblical story. We might only encounter strong objections when we reach that last claim: that our Lord replaced Circumcision and Passover with Baptism and the Supper. And yet, this is not only the most obvious interpretation of the events; the comparisons are drawn by the apostles themselves. Paul tells the Colossians, Greeks and Jews alike, “In him [Christ] you were also circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the sins of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ”—so far, so good. Instead of a physical circumcision done by human hands, New Testament believers are actually circumcised spiritually. Christ’s circumcision counts as ours, as we are in him. Yes, but Paul has not finished his sentence: “...buried with him in baptism, in which you also were raised with him through faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead” (Col. 2:11). Paul does not merely link Circumcision (promise) to the New Birth (fulfillment), but to Baptism as its sign and seal. But Paul not only makes a correspondence between Circumcision and Baptism; he does the same with Passover and the Supper. “For indeed, Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast...” (1 Cor. 5:7-8). Later, he tells the Corinthians, “Moreover, brethren, I do not want you to be unaware that all our fathers were under the cloud, all passed through the sea, all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank of that Rock that followed them, and that Rock was Christ” (1 Cor. 10:1-5). Peter, too, makes the parallel between the baptism through the Red Sea and New Testament Baptism (1 Pet. 3:21). But Paul’s remarks here are in the context also of his discussion of the Lord’s Supper. Far from marking a contrast between the Old and New Testaments, Paul insists that our Jewish brothers and sisters, when they drank from the rock in MAY/JUNE 1997

the wilderness (Ex. 17:5-7), were actually receiving Christ under the figure of a broken rock. To be guilty of the bread and the cup is equivalent, says Paul, to being guilty of Christ’s body and blood (1 Cor. 11:27): this underscores the relation of the sign to the thing signified. While the bread is not transformed into a physical body, nor the wine into blood, the sacramental union enables us to refer to the one as the other. “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ?” (1 Cor. 10:16). How seriously are we going to take these passages? I remember how foreign they were to me years ago and how suddenly they transfor med my view of the Sacraments. How could I possibly have claimed to interpret the Bible according to its ordinary, literal sense, and end up with a rationalistic and spiritualistic understanding? It was a classic case of assuming a perspective and expecting the Bible to conform to it, and here, I submit, is an example of how easy it is for us to evade Scripture even if we claim to practice a straightforward hermeneutic. Eugene Osterhaven notes, “Within Protestantism there were those who saw Baptism as little more than a badge indicating belief or sign of the covenant. But most Reformed people, including the Church of England, believed that Baptism was a real means of grace with multiple significance: the acknowledgment of sin, of cleansing through Christ, union with Christ, the gift of the Holy Spirit, and Baptism as a sign of covenantal status.” Calvin observed that in Scripture Baptism is “a token and proof of our cleansing” and “in this sacrament are received the knowledge and certainty of such gifts” (Institutes 4.15.2). In drawing the parallel with Circumcision, Calvin emphasized the covenantal status of children of believers. They receive Baptism not in order to be made worthy of the kingdom, but because they are already the seed of the Lord. In other words, as Isaac was a child of promise at birth, Baptism does not make children Christians, but seals them in the covenant to which they are already entitled by Christ’s mediatorial work. “Through baptism, believers are assured that this condemnation has been removed and withdrawn from them” (Institutes 4.15.10). Parents are given confidence in God’s promise to their children “because they see with their very eyes the covenant of the Lord engraved upon the bodies of their children...Finally, we ought to be greatly afraid of that threat, that God will wreak vengeance upon any man who disdains to mark his child with the symbol of the covenant; for by such contempt the proffered grace is refused, and, as it were, forsworn (Gen. 17:14)” (Institutes 4.16.9). “But how (they ask) are infants, unendowed 12

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with knowledge of good or evil, regenerated? We reply that God’s work, though beyond our understanding, is still not annulled” (Institutes 4.16.18). Rather than sharply dividing between an external and internal covenant of grace, as some have done in American theology, Calvin simply concludes that infants “receive now some part of that grace which in a little while they shall enjoy to the full” (Institutes 4.16.19). Of course, not every baptized infant is confirmed and not all confirmed members of the visible church exercise faith, which alone is the instrument of justification. But this was true in the old administration of the covenant of grace as well. Further, it is as true in bodies that do not practice infant Baptism, as not all baptized adults persevere to the end. Louis Berkhof treats the question of baptismal regeneration in his Systematic Theology (pp. 627 ff), providing a helpful summary of the various Reformed positions within the spectrum (p. 639). “Some would proceed on the assumption that all the children presented for baptism are regenerated, while others would assume this only in connection with the elect children,” while still others regarded Baptism as the sign and seal of the covenant and differed somewhat on how to interpret that. He points out the Belgic Confession’s comment: “Neither does this baptism avail us only at the time when water is poured upon us, and received by us, but also through the whole course of our life” (Art. 34). Berkhof appeals to the Conclusions of Utrecht in 1908: “...Synod declares that, according to the confession of our Churches, the seed of the covenant must, in virtue of the promise of God, be presumed to be regenerated and sanctified in Christ, until, as they grow up, the contrary appears from their life or doctrine....” The Reformed tradition veers away from ex opere operato (again, the view that the application of water in Baptism necessarily effects regeneration) on the one hand and a mere symbolism on the other. In Baptism, God does confer grace—special grace, not merely common grace—but its effect is often that of planting a seed that will grow, not creating a full-grown plant. “Not all who are descendants of Israel are Israel” (Rom. 9:6), so that apart from faith there is no regeneration even for the baptized any more than there was for the circumcised. And yet, this view also stands opposed to the other extreme, according to Berkhof: “Under the influence of Socinians, Arminians, Anabaptists, and Rationalists, it has become quite customary in many circles to deny that baptism is a seal of divine grace, and to regard it as a mere act of profession on the part of man.” This is calculated, of course, to make the point that those who hold this non-Reformed view within Reformed churches are keeping bad company. MODERN REFORMATION

The Lord’s Supper: The Sacrament of Communion Called to belong to Christ, his Church is sustained along the way by that same Christ. Calvin borrowed from Augustine the reference to the Word preached as the verbum audibile (audible word) and the Sacraments as the verbum visible (visible word). “For as in baptism,” he writes, “God, regenerating us, engrafts us into the society of his church and makes us his own by adoption, so we have said, that he discharges the function of a provident father in continually supplying to us the food to sustain and preserve us in that life into which he has begotten us by his Word” (Institutes 4.17.1). If Baptism is seen as the announcement of our decision and testimony, the efficacy of the Lord’s Supper will also be found in our remembering and in our recommitment. I recall how, on those rare occasions in my youth when the bread and little plastic cups of grape juice were passed down the rows, my focus was on trying to make it really “work.” Was my selfexamination real, or was my heart in it? The preacher tried to vividly por tray the nails going into Christ’s wrists, but I still wasn’t sure how I was supposed to remember an event at which I was not present. Was I sad that Jesus died? And what if I had some unconfessed sin that I could not recall: that could make whatever was supposed to happen not happen, couldn’t it? It seemed that so much depended on the combined imaginations of the preacher and my own, along with the special music that accompanied the distribution. Was God doing anything at all? I had, without malice but with plenty of ignorance, turned the Sacrament of Christ’s doing and dying into my sacrament of feeling and remembering. Why did I even need bread and grape juice to do that? After all, even as a youngster I knew it was pretty silly to go through all of this to provide an object lesson. And what of this warning about eating and drinking unworthily? I could not quite put my finger on what that meant, and since the pastor was fairly vague about it, too, my accusative conscience often made this a quasi-rededication ceremony. In other words, it was an act of penance. Eating and drinking worthily required intense response, feeling sorry for Jesus and sorry

for my sins. But was I sorry enough? If you can identify with these experiences, you will find the following words from Calvin concerning his experience of medieval practice intriguing: Commonly, when they would prepare men to eat worthily, they have tortured and harassed pitiable consciences in dire ways; yet they have not brought forward a particle of what would be to the purpose. They said that those who were in state of grace ate worthily. Then they interpreted ‘in state of grace’ to mean to be pure and purged of all sin. Such a dogma would debar all the men who ever were or are on earth from the use of this Sacrament. For if it is a question of our seeking worthiness by ourselves, we are undone; only despair and deadly ruin remain to us...To heal this sore, they have devised a way of acquiring worthiness: that, examining ourselves to the best of our ability, and requiring ourselves to account for all our deeds, we expiate our unworthiness by contrition, confession, and satisfaction…On what ground are we confirmed in the assurance that those who have done their best have performed their duty before God? For by their immoderate harshness they deprive sinners, miserable and afflicted with trembling and grief, of the consolation of this Sacrament; yet here we have all the delights of the gospel set before us...Therefore, this is the worthiness—the best and only kind we can bring to God—to offer our vileness and our unworthiness to him so that in his mercy we may be taken as worthy; to despair in ourselves so that we may be lifted up by him; to accuse ourselves so that we may be justified by him (Institutes 4.17.42). Even some Protestants, he said, put in the place of the worthiness of works the worthiness of their faith. This can be attained no more easily than perfect personal holiness in this life. “For it is a Sacrament ordained not for the perfect, MAY/JUNE 1997

but for the weak and feeble...” (Institutes 4.17.42). The liberating news of Scripture is that even here, even now, God is acting for my salvation. Just as the Gospel is about God doing everything in Christ for my salvation, not giving me any place to boast, the Sacraments have the same message. It is because Christ is truly present in the Sacrament that I can turn from myself to the one outside of me. Although the signs (bread and wine) remain what they are, and Christ is received by faith and not by the mouth, the thing signified (Christ and his benefits) is so united to these earthly elements by Word and Spirit that I can raise my eyes to heaven and receive the food and drink of eternal life. Reformed people are sometimes unfairly regarded by Lutherans as holding that Christ is only spiritually present in the Supper. But in fact, the confessional Reformed position is that Christ is physically present in the Supper, at the right hand of God in his ascended body. Who are we to pull Christ down or, by an act of will, climb up to him? This is Paul’s rhetorical question in Romans 10. For Christ is brought near to us by the preached Word, he says, although Paul surely did not believe that he was brought bodily to us in the sermon. Instead, the Reformed maintain that the Holy Spirit, in this Sacrament, raises us to Christ where, mysteriously, we feed on his true body and blood. It is not a spiritual or symbolic presence of Christ, as if he were only spirit and no longer flesh, but the manner of eating is spiritual rather than physical. This is a key difference from the caricature. It is the mode, not the substance, that is spiritual. It was Zwingli, however, who advocated the view that is often taken for the Reformed position. Allowing merely for a “spiritual presence” of Christ in the Supper, Zwingli denied that Christ is present in his human as well as in his divine nature, and this was repudiated by Calvin (and even by Zwingli’s successor, Heinrich Bullinger), and by all the standard Reformed and Presbyterian confessions. It is a real presence of Christ, according to both natures, but the mode of the eating is by faith and not by physical eating. The Zwinglian view is not on the spectrum of possibilities within a Reformed confession. And yet, neither is the Lutheran view acceptable to the Reformed, although Calvin did sign the unaltered Augsburg Confession. As Johannes Wollebius (1586-1629) expressed it, “It is one thing to say that Christ is present in the bread, and quite another to say that he is present in the holy supper.” It is not that Christ is only present in the Supper according to his divine omnipresence, but that he is truly and really present according to both natures (even physically present) in the Supper, but not in the bread. Because of its importance, said Wollebius, “The holy supper ought to be observed often.” As is often noted these days, Calvin argued that the Supper should 14

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be observed whenever the Word is preached, but at least weekly. It is delightful, surely not for that reason alone, that many Reformed and Presbyterian churches are restoring this practice. “Lift Up Your Hearts” Historically, the Reformed have emphasized this line in the ancient liturgy of the Eucharist, the so-called sursum corda. It is the invitation to be lifted mystically into the presence of our faithful heavenly Shepherd. We have touched briefly on the eschatological thrust of the Sacraments in Scripture, and will conclude here with these thoughts. In Baptism, we have been swept into the new creation and in the Supper we are actually fed with the body and blood of Christ as pilgrims on the way to the Promised Land, and yet, by promise already living there. How all of this actually happens, we cannot say exactly. Like the man born blind, we can only exclaim, “I once was blind, but now I see.” In this inner sanctuary of the Triune God, the Holy One whose mere voice sent terror into Israel’s bones clothes himself in humility, as he did two thousand years ago. Then as now, the unclothed God would destroy us, but he has become flesh of our flesh. And even though he is ascended, to return physically in glory at the end of the age, he invites us now to come boldly into his Most Holy Place through his body and blood, the Temple’s torn curtain. Believing sinner, behold, Eden’s Tree of Life, Noah’s Rainbow, the divine Flame walking alone between the sacrifice’s severed halves, Abraham’s Circumcision, the blood on the doorpost, the true Israel’s Pillar of Cloud by day and Fire by night, the water and blood flowing from the Messiah’s side! Perhaps you have heard in God’s Word marvelous things, but you still doubt whether all of this was done not just for others, but for you. So God has placed his gift not only in your ears, but on your head and in your hands. “Oh, taste, and see that the Lord is good!” (Ps. 34:8).

Dr. Michael Horton is the vice-president of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals and a research fellow at Yale Divinity School. He is a graduate of Biola University, Westminster Theological Seminary in California, and Wycliffe Hall, Oxford/University of Coventry. He is ordained by the Christian Reformed Church.

MODERN REFORMATION

A SUMMARY OF POSITIONS ROMAN CATHOLIC

LUTHERAN

REFORMED

BAPTIST

Confers regeneration, forgiveness. As the “first justification,” it is by grace alone; thereafter, justification is merited by cooperating with grace

Confers regeneration, forgiveness

Confers grace as sign and seal of regeneration, forgiveness

Symbolizes regeneration, forgiveness

Means of Grace?

Yes

Does it save those who die in unbelief?

Can grace be lost?

Yes

Covenant children can lose their membership in the covenant of grace, but the elect will persevere to the end

Warrant?

Church’s Response to God’s Promise

God’s Promise

Believer’s Response to God’s Promise

Subjects?

Roman Catholic adults and their children

Believers and their children

Adult Believers

Normally sprinkling/pouring

Normally pouring

Normally sprinkling/pouring

Full immersion

Confers forgiveness as Christ is resacrificed by his people and offered again up to God for sin

Confers forgiveness and the perpetual saving benefits of the life of Christ, once offered

A solemn memorial of Christ’s death for one’s sins, once offered

No (since it is the reward for a human work)

Yes

The Bread and Wine become the Body and Blood of Christ by the miracle of Transubstantiation, upon the Priest’s words of consecration

In, with, and under the Bread and Wine; He is eaten physically by the mouth

At the right hand of the Father, He is eaten spiritually by faith through the Bread and Wine, as signs linked by the Promise to that which they signify

N/A

BAPTISM Chief Purpose?

Mode?

THE LORD’S SUPPER Chief Purpose?

Means of Grace? Is Christ really and truly present according to both natures? Mode of Presence?

(Note: This is only a summary. Variations among churches and theologians within these bodies become apparent on closer inspection.) MAY/JUNE 1997

Feeding the World: THE LORD’S SUPPER IN LUKE’S GOSPEL ARTHUR A. JUST, JR.

o be a Christian is to be united to Jesus Christ, the source of all life. This life of communion with Jesus begins at the font where we were cleansed from our uncleanness and made whole in him. His suffering and resurrected flesh restores our impure and unclean flesh to wholeness and wellness.

As we jour ney toward the parousia, our restoration to health is ongoing by our communion with him in his holy Church where he is present in his flesh to continue our health and holiness. In his presence and the presence of a restored creation, we are fed by his flesh as he speaks to us in his Word and feeds us of his very body and blood at the banquet he has prepared. The goal of all preaching, catechesis, liturgy, and pastoral care in the Church is to bring God’s people into communion with Jesus Christ. Through him we receive health and wholeness. This is the essence of Christ’s fleshly presence in his Church’s life and her ministry to the world. In his body, the Church, Jesus Christ bears witness to a fallen humanity that he, the Creator of all things, has come to his creation to take flesh and bring in a new creation. Jesus and the New Creation The evangelist St. Luke records how Jesus Christ brings in this new creation through his incarnation, passion, resurrection, and ascension. He first announces the new creation in his astonishing sermon at Nazareth. There he sets forth his program for the world based on the Old Testament prophecies from Isaiah 61 and 58 (Luke 4:18-19). Jesus the Messiah is present in the world to proclaim good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom to those who are oppressed, and the year of jubilee. Jesus declares that the essence of his proclamation is release: he is present to release creation from its bondage to demon possession, sickness, sin, and death. This release is 16

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always attached to his flesh, for he says “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21). These four categories of bondage—demon possession, sickness, sin, and death—are manifestations of the fallenness of the creation that needs restoration. Creation is restored only when it is released from this bondage. The word for release is often translated as forgiveness, release from the bondage of sin, but for Jesus there no distinction between spiritual and physical bondage. Both are demonstrations that we are captive to a world that needs restoration to wholeness. The captive and the oppressed include both those who are physically in bondage to sickness or demon possession, or spiritually in bondage to sin and death. The good news is that this release is present in him. MODERN REFORMATION

Christ was crucified to accomplish that release and raised from the dead to proclaim that now in him all of creation has been freed from the bondage of its fallenness. The fiftieth Jubilee year liberated slaves, forgave debts, returned people to their homes, and stopped all sowing and reaping (Lev. 25). The Jubilee year in the Old Testament anticipated the Messiah’s eschatological salvation. Jesus announces in Galilee that the Jubilee year is now present in him and his ministry. Thus, this message of release unites the Old and New Testaments.

Table fellowship is one of the means by which the evangelist proclaims the arrival of the eschatological kingdom, the dawn of a new era. Jesus’ ministry continually expresses release to the captives. In his teaching and healing, Jesus makes no distinction between physical sickness and demon possession. Immediately following his sermon at Nazareth, he rebukes the man possessed with demons (Luke 4:35), and then rebukes the fever of Peter’s mother-in-law (Luke 4:39). Jesus rebukes both fevers and devils, saying, “I must preach the good news of the kingdom of God to the other cities also; for I was sent for this purpose” (Luke 4:43). The kingdom consists of the proclamation that in him all things are released from bondage and that a new era of salvation is now present. “Which is easier,” Jesus asks the Pharisees, “to say ‘your sins are forgiven’ or to say ‘rise and walk?’” (Luke 5:23). Jesus tells them that the Son of man has authority both to forgive sins and heal paralytics. Both are a demonstration that the Creator has come to his creation to release it from its fallenness. When Jesus raises the widow’s son at Nain (Luke 7:11-17) and Jairus’ daughter (Luke 8:40-56) he shows his power to release them from the ultimate bondage of death. Jesus touches dead rotting flesh (which should render him ceremonially unclean), and through his flesh restores it to health and wellness. Jesus performs miracles as a sign that the new era of salvation is present in him. Miracles

testify that in Jesus God is present to release his creation, to recreate it, and to restore it to wholeness. As Jesus journeys to Jerusalem and the Cross, he absorbs into his flesh the world’s sickness and sin, releasing people from bondage through his flesh. The great and final miracle of release is his passion and death. Creation demonstrates that it is being re-created by the darkness that covers the earth (Luke 23:44). This is an act of God in his creation because the creator of all things has died. The darkness is a sign that the bondage of creation, which Jesus has been absorbing into flesh since his conception, and bearing publicly since his baptism, is now completely laid upon him. All demon possession, all sickness, all sin, all death is now placed upon him at his crucifixion, and this full concentration of the world’s bondage creates an unnatural darkness for three hours. The creation is being re-created and healed, and the process of recreation causes it to plunge into darkness. The Creator who has come to his creation is at this moment of death bringing in a new creation. The darkness is an eschatological sign that already now the end of all captivity and brokenness has come in the death of Jesus, even though it has not yet come in its fullness. When Jesus rises from dead on the third day, after his Sabbath rest in the tomb, he brings all creation with him. Through his crucified and resurrected flesh, creation’s restoration is ongoing in the life of the Church. His miracles continue in the Gospel and the Sacraments which testify that Jesus is still present to perform acts of release for his creation as he continues to re-create it and to restore it to wholeness. It is therefore in the Church’s liturgy of Word and Eucharist that we find God re-creating the world through the flesh of his Son: The Sunday liturgy is not the Church assembled to address itself. The liturgy does not cater to the assembly. It summons the assembly to enact itself publicly for the life of the world. Nor does this take place as a dialogue with the world, often a partner whose uninterested absence reduces the dialogue to an ecclesiastical monologue. The liturgy presumes that the world is always present in the summoned assembly, which although not of “this world” lives deep in its midst as the corporate agent, under God in Christ, of its salvation. In this view, the liturgical assembly is the world being renovated according to the divine pleasure—not as patient being passively worked upon but as active agent faithfully cooperating in its own rehabilitation. What one witnesses in the liturgy is the world being done as the world’s Creator and Redeemer will the world to be MAY/JUNE 1997

done. The liturgy does the world and does it at its very center, for it is here that the world’s malaise and its cure well up together, inextricably entwined.1 Jesus and Table Fellowship The Lukan community was liturgical and sacramental, but it did not use the eucharistic nomenclature of later centuries. Table fellowship with God was a natural metaphor for Jewish Christians to describe how God communicates his salvific intentions. Indeed, the history of the Jews is a history of God’s presence at significant times in the context of a meal. The Passover meal was central, but so also was the weekly remembrance of the Passover in the Sabbath evening seder that gave a weekly shape to the religious life of the Jews. In the various covenants made between Yahweh and his people, a meal often sealed the covenant, e.g., the meal on Mt. Sinai in Exodus 24:9-11 where Moses, Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, and seventy elders “beheld God, and ate and drank.” It was within this milieu that Luke records the table fellowship of Jesus. God feeding his people in the intimacy of the table would not have been unusual for the Jews. But for God to become flesh and sit at table with them and give them food from his own, fleshly hands was scandalous. God was present as divine logos in the Old Testament; now he was present in the flesh of Jesus Christ who established a table fellowship of eating and drinking with his people. The common ground between the Passover seder, the kiddush meals, and the early Christian Eucharist is that they are acts of table fellowship. This language more accurately describes the relationship between Old Testament meals, the New Testament repasts, and the early Christian Eucharist’s, for table fellowship is the language of the culture in which these meals were celebrated. Luke makes use of table fellowship metaphors and language as he systematically develops Jesus’ table fellowship to teach about the Eucharist, about Christian liturgy, and ultimately, about Jesus Christ and his kingdom. Because it is catechetical and liturgical, this is a dominant matrix in Luke’s Gospel. Jesus’ table fellowship is one of the reasons he is put to death by the chief priests and the Pharisees (the rulers in Luke 24:20).2 Table fellowship is just one expression of the role of food as a means of communicating God’s faithfulness to his creation. But table fellowship must not be restricted to what is expressed around a table. Much of Jesus’ teaching includes table metaphors that reflect his view of table fellowship and the eschatological kingdom. The table fellowship of Jesus consists primarily in his teaching at the table. The act of table fellowship, 18

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including both the meal itself and the meal’s participants, is also a form of teaching.3 Neither the teaching nor the eating is of greater importance than the other; both must be considered together as one and the same activity. When one sits down at a table with friends, one talks and one eats; both activities are integral to table fellowship. The unique character of this juxtaposition of teaching and eating is reflected in the classic liturgical for mulation of Word and Sacrament.4 Table fellowship reveals something about the participants in that fellowship, particularly the host at the table. The table fellowship of Jesus reveals something about who he is, therefore it has a direct relationship to Lukan christology. Table fellowship is one of the means by which the evangelist proclaims the arrival of the eschatological kingdom, the dawn of a new era. Table fellowship in Luke demonstrates that Christianity is a religion embracing both sinners and righteous, both Jews and Gentiles. Table fellowship reveals the most intimate nature of the kingdom of God, namely that God and man have fellowship with each other through teaching and eating together. This is the basic, elemental stuff of human existence that all people of all times understand. Jesus’ manner at the table is one of service, and he renders the ultimate service to humanity as God’s innocent, suffering Messiah by giving up his life for the world—and offering up that life at the table, for a table is the ultimate place of fellowship for those who will live together without end. This table fellowship “reveals a God who wants to sit down at table with all men and women and will remove all obstacles, even that of death, which stand in the way of the accomplishment of that communion.” 5 Table fellowship, then, is an act of communion and revelation, making known to the world a God who comes to teach about forgiveness through death and resurrection, who offers that forgiveness in the breaking of the bread. Luke’s table fellowship provides the perfect vehicle for teaching about the nature of Christian eucharistic fellowship. Luke best develops this theme because he records many meals between Jesus and different categories of people: tax collectors, Pharisees, and disciples. There are numerous table scenes and metaphors which signal the meal as a place of fellowship and intimacy. Luke highlights there are three key elements to table fellowship: teaching, eating, and the presence of God. The presence of Jesus at the meal makes this table fellowship with God different from all other meals. At each table scene, Jesus is present to teach the participants about himself, a teaching of the kingdom of God in which he, the King, is present to offer the forgiveness of sins. The occasion is always marked by the theme of conversion, a turning to God in MODERN REFORMATION

repentance and faith. The true participants of this fellowship meal are repentant sinners, personified by Levi the tax collector, who initiates the table fellowship of Jesus with his invitation to feast at his house (Luke 5:27-39), and by Zacchaeus, the chief tax collector in whose house Jesus must stay and eat (Luke 19:1-10). In every Lukan meal, the teaching of Jesus is part of the table fellowship and essential to the meal. The meal becomes a seal of the forgiveness taught by Jesus.6 Each of these meals contain three elements of Jesus’ table fellowship: a) It is a table fellowship with sinners, i.e., it is an inclusive event; b) It is a table fellowship where Jesus teaches about the kingdom; and c) The table fellowship is itself an expression of the New Age. From its initiation at the feast with Levi to its climax at the Emmaus meal, the basic pattern of Lukan table fellowship reveals that there is always teaching at the table, and eating as a seal of the fellowship, both of which take place in the presence of God. All of Jesus’ meals are acts of table fellowship—teaching/eating in the presence of Jesus—even though every meal is not the Eucharist. Each meal must be measured against the cross and the resurrection. During the Galilean ministry, the meals of Jesus establish that the essence of his teaching is the kingdom of God—a teaching about his rejection to the point of death—where forgiveness is the benefit of table fellowship with Jesus. Jesus’ meals are for repentant sinners who receive the forgiveness of their sins because of their fellowship with Jesus (cf. the meals of Luke 5 and 7). The climactic meal during the Galilean ministry is the feeding of the five-thousand where the constellation of language links it with the Last Supper and the Emmaus meal, the other climactic moments in Jesus’ table fellowship. Here the King rules his kingdom by offering now the food that satisfies, a foretaste of the eschatological banquet that is not yet. As Jesus journeys to Jerusalem, his table fellowship becomes increasingly eschatological. Luke 13, 14, and 15 all contain references to future, eternal eating that is now inaugurated in the meals of Jesus. The unmistakable elements of table fellowship are here. As Levi’s meal was programmatic for the fellowship, the meal with Zacchaeus is climactic for Jesus’ fellowship outside Jerusalem. As the chief tax collector, Zacchaeus represents all sinners. Jesus’ words to him are representative of his salvific ministry to the world as it is expressed in his table fellowship: “Today salvation has come to this house … for the Son of man came to seek

and to save the lost” (Luke 19:9-10). Until the Last Supper, Jesus is present to teach and to eat in the flesh. But in the Last Supper in Jerusalem Jesus is present in the flesh and in the meal, that is sacramentally. The Last Supper is Jesus’ farewell discourse to his disciples that is prophetic for the future of the Church. The prophecy that he will eat and drink with them when the kingdom comes is fulfilled at Emmaus where Jesus teaches them on the road (the Word) and breaks bread with them at Emmaus (the Meal). He is present with them in a unique way, as the crucified and risen Christ in crucified and risen flesh. The evangelist’s final word about Emmaus sums up the meal and is programmatic for all Christian dining until this day: “And they expounded the things he taught on the road and how he was known to them in the breaking of the bread” (24:35). In this description the church found the pattern for its liturgical worship. Acts 2:42 confirms that the Church from the beginning followed this pattern and celebrated meals in which there were teaching and eating and prayers. This pattern is the basis for a liturgical theology that is eucharistic even though it is described in the language of table fellowship. New Testament worship is a continuing table fellowship with God that reaches back into the Old Testament and looks ahead to the eschatological banquet of God in the parousia. Jesus’ table fellowship goes to the very core of the meaning of the kingdom of God as it is now present in the liturgical life of the church.7

Dr. Arthur Just is Professor at Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He is ordained by the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod.

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Baptists and the Ordinances TOM J. NETTLES

ometimes discussions on ecclesiology are difficult and tense. History instructs us that the line between compromise and irascibility is a fine one. Maintaining both tr uth and brotherly kindness calls for “wisdom from above which is first of all pure and then peaceable” (Jam. 3:17). In the early days of denominational definition, polemics struggled like Jacob and Esau in a common womb. As Puritanism ebbed and flowed toward a view of the church composed of visible saints only, the relation of Baptism to church membership naturally became a vital topic. This subject engendered literally hundreds of pamphlets and debates. Quakers rejected water Baptism, considering it an ordinance given strictly to John the Baptist prefiguring Christ’s Baptism with fire and the Spirit. In the United Kingdom, Presbyterians, in the 1648 Blasphemy Ordinance, threatened with imprisonment any who denied the legitimacy of infant Baptism or who affirmed that only believers should be baptized. Baptists argued against both Quakers and Presbyterians. These debates, and even the Blasphemy Ordinance itself, were important steps in establishing toleration and eventually religious liberty in the modern era.1

The debates were often acrimonious. When Gyles Shute wrote more scurrilously against the Baptists than even Richard Baxter did (and “few men who have had to do with us in this Controversie shewed a more sour Spirit than Mr. Baxter”), Benjamin Keach felt compelled 20

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to answer. The lengthy title of his rejoinder speaks: A Counter-Antidote, to purge out the Malignant Effects of a Late Counterfeit prepared by Mr. Gyles Shute, an Unskillful Person in Polemical Cures: Being An Answer to his Vindication of his pretended Antidote, to prevent the Prevalency of Anabaptism. Shewing that Mr. Hercules Collins’s Reply to the said Author remains unanswered. Wherein the Baptism of Believers is evinced to be God’s Ordinance, and the Baptized Congregations proved true Churches of Jesus Christ. With a further Detection of the Error of Pedo-Baptism. While Keach professed much of “the same faith” with Shute, he felt no patience toward “Scoffing, Reproaching, Railing and opprobious [sic] Language” cast on the Baptists and his friend Mr. Hercules Collins. MODERN REFORMATION

A Resolute Struggle for Harmony With equally strong conviction, on the other hand, Keach poured enormous spiritual energy into protecting the doctrine of justification by faith from all the subtle attacks on it in his day. He saw a central Protestant distinctive endangered when infused grace and human progress in sanctification were trumpeted as inherent in the doctrine of justification. Keach warned against removing the ancient landmark. “Why,” he asked, “should that glorious Doctrine of Justification, that shone forth in the days of Martin Luther, and has been the ground of so many godly Christian’s Hope; nay Martyrs, now be struck at?”2 Keach shared the conviction of many dissenters after the Interregnum (1642-1660) that they must rally on their common faith and present a united front against oppression. For this reason both Particular (Calvinistic) Baptists and General (Arminian) Baptists in the last half of the seventeenth century adopted baptized versions (and in the latter case, slightly Ar minianized) of the Westminster Confession. While giving an account of the distinctive of Baptism, they also wanted to concur in “those articles (which are very many) wherein our faith and doctrine is the same with theirs.” Having no “itch to clog religion with new words,” they decided to proceed for the most part “without any variation of the terms” and to use “the very same words with them.”3 Hercules Collins, in adopting the Heidelberg Catechism as a starting point for the development of a Baptist catechism, was eager to show unity in the common places of evangelical theology. Explaining that he did “concenter with the most Orthodox Divines in the Fundamental Principles and Ar ticles of the Christian Faith,” he hoped his readers did not have an “Athenian Spirit” and that they agreed that “an old Gospel (to you that have tasted the sweetness of it) will be more acceptable than a new.” Even when indicating the importance of the articles on Baptism, Collins maintained that though “some differences between many Godly Divines” and the Baptists existed in issues of church constitution, “those things are not the essence of Christianity.” Surely, because of agreement “in the fundamental Doctrine thereof,” sufficient likemindedness exists to “lay aside all bitterness and prejudice, and labour to maintain a spirit of Love each to other, knowing we shall never see all alike here.”4 In 1817, at the tercentenary year of the Reformation, English Protestants remained silent throughout the year demonstrating no public approval of the events three centuries before. When editors of the Baptist Magazine met at the beginning of December, they issued an urgent call to “every religious denomination, who cherish the principles of the Reformation...to express publicly the judgment they have

formed, and the sentiments they feel.”5 They affirmed that “the Reformation...deserves to be had in everlasting remembrance.” The resulting meeting of more than 1000 “Protestant Christians, of all denominations” listened with the “liveliest demonstrations of delight” to speeches on the Reformation and passed unanimously seventeen resolutions. They deplored the systemic repression of the Holy Scripture from the third to the sixteenth centuries which had created darkness and corruption. The resolutions stated: [T]heir sacred truths were displaced by corrupt traditions; and simple, true, and spiritual worship by superstitious forms: —that crusades were substituted for the peace-announcing gospel, ignorance for knowledge, and persecution for good-will to men: —that priests, operating by their dogmas on the fears and on the hopes of the deluded and untaught, exclusively amassed both wealth and power: —that absolutions and indulgencies [sic], purchasable from them, encouraged crimes: —that admission even into heaven was made dependent on their dearbought masses, and their prayers: —that the people groaned in wretchedness, and that monarchs trembled on their thrones; —and that a domination, interested, arbitrary, and injurious, extended over the fortunes, the intellect, and consciences of men. The Refor mation, they rejoiced, “exchanged knowledge for ignorance, freedom for oppression, and a purer Christianity for corruptions, anti-christian and absurd.” Its leaders must be regarded as “great among the greatest of mankind” whose talent, industry, and zeal should be recommended to our children and children’s children as examples of dauntless courage and steady perseverance. They realized this was particularly important in light of the recent restoration of repressive measures and enforced ignorance of Scripture in many parts of Europe. The promulgation of Reformation truths should be sought “only by the energ y of argument, and through the force of truth.” Toward the Roman Catholics “whose errors they regret, and whose principles they disapprove,” the resolutions disclaimed all sentiments “which Christian charity could censure, or religious freedom would condemn.” Western intellectual history in the twentieth century has had the effect of forcing believers to close ranks in order to confess a common doctrinal core believed by evangelical Christians worldwide. Not only is it strategically advantageous, Christian witness and joy come from a display of unity in affirming the reality of divine revelation, the glory and wonder of the triune MAY/JUNE 1997

God, the startling humiliation of the Lord Jesus Christ for the sake of sinners, and the manner in which God’s great grace operates to redeem guilty and depraved creatures. Evangelicals of different persuasions concerning Baptism have nevertheless worked together on such strategic theological issues as the inerrancy of Scripture, the doctrine of justification by faith, and, at another level, the doctrines of grace. Agreement in a common cause is much more enjoyable than the search for reasons to separate. The Integrity of Diversity The importance of the doctrine of the Church, however, simply will not allow Christ’s people to pass over the subject as unimportant. Since the Lord nourishes and cherishes the Church (Eph. 5:29), we must do the same; each person must “take heed how he buildeth thereon” (1 Cor. 3:10). We have absolute confidence that the Church is more important to Christ than it is to anyone else, and he will not allow any of our errors to defeat his sovereign purpose. For sure, nothing can reverse the victory Christ already has accomplished over all foes for the sake of the Church, “which is his body” (Eph. 1:19-23). The Lord knows those who are his. He will present the Church to himself insuring that its spotless and blameless character will finally prevail (Eph. 5:26-27) by the power of him who subdues all things to himself (Phil. 3:21). Nevertheless, since the church is the “pillar and ground of the truth,” we must take care how we behave ourselves in the house of God (1 Tim. 3:15). This involves careful attention to ordinances as well as officers. How does the Church handle rightly the visible signs of the believer’s union with Christ in his death, burial, and resurrection? Both Baptism and the Lord’s Supper picture this. The Lord’s Supper Baptists practice the Lord’s Supper in conformity with the Zwinglian view of its essence. John Gill states very simply that it is “to Shew forth the death of Christ till he come again; to commemorate his sufferings and sacrifice, to represent his body broken, and his blood shed for the sins of his people.” Any who desires to take it should examine himself to discern if he “has true faith in Christ, and is capable of discerning the Lord’s body.”6 The emphasis on commemoration and representation reflect Zwingli’s interpretation of Scripture and his understanding of the distinctive idioms of human nature in conformity with the teachings of the Council of Chalcedon concerning the undivided person of the two-natured Christ. In his Exposition of the Faith sent to King Francis of France, Zwingli argued that “in the Lord’s Supper the natural and essential body of Christ in which he suffered and is 22

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now seated in heaven at the right hand of God is not eaten naturally and literally but only spiritually.” The Roman Catholic view of transubstantiation he contended was not only “presumptuous and foolish” but, more importantly, “impious and blasphemous.”7 Though this view has been described as “bare symbolism,” for Zwingli it was no more bare than powerful spiritual meditation on the truths of the gospel. “To eat the body of Christ spiritually,” he explained, “is equivalent to trusting with heart and soul upon the mercy and goodness of God.” This meditation may become a spiritual feast and a means of renewed assurance and sanctification. Zwingli sought to make this clear to the Roman Catholic King Francis: So then, when you come to the Lord’s Supper to feed spiritually upon Christ, and when you thank the Lord for his great favour, for the redemption whereby you are delivered from despair, and for the pledge whereby you are assured of eternal salvation, when you join with your brethren in partaking of the bread and wine which are the tokens of the body of Christ, then in the true sense of the word you eat him sacramentally. You do inwardly that which you represent outwardly, your soul being strengthened by the faith which you attest in the tokens.8 The Supper may only be taken by those who are baptized. The major Protestant confessions agree on this. A very important question then arises concerning the other ordinance, Baptism: Who may properly be baptized and thus be eligible for the Supper? Baptism Virtually all historic Christian groups view Baptism as organically related to Church membership. Although Baptists share the conviction that Baptism is the door to Church membership and thus prerequisite to it, they reject infant Baptism in pursuit of a principle of regenerate Church membership. The dominant argument for this has been the prima facie evidence of the New Testament. First, there is a clear command to baptize believers but no command to baptize infants. Second, every Baptism recorded is a Baptism of a professed believer (e.g. Acts 8:12; 35-38). There are no instances of infant Baptism, including the household passages. One should compare the following Scriptures: Acts 10:2, 47, 48; Acts 16:14, 15, 40; Acts 16:31-34; 1 Corinthians 1:16; 16:15 (cf. with 2 Thess. 2:13 where “first-fruits” may be read according to several reliable witnesses instead of “from the beginning”). When all household passages have been taken into view, two significant conclusions can be MODERN REFORMATION

drawn. One, the descriptions given of households never mention an infant and show that a household does not necessarily include infants. Two, every description of baptized households gives compelling evidence that all the baptized people exhibited personal faith before they were baptized. They were instructed, they feared God, they rejoiced, they served. Third, the cognitive and experiential traits of those baptized and the spiritual description of the church calls for believers’ Baptism. Those who repent and believe, whose good consciences make inquiry unto God (1 Pet. 3:21) are those whose Baptism pictures saving identification with Christ, the only New Testament picture of Baptism (Acts 2:38; Rom. 6:3-6; Gal. 3:24-27; 1 Pet. 3:21). As Gill summarizes the point, “Upon the whole we must be allowed to say...that Infant Baptism is an unscriptural practice; and that there is neither precept nor precedent for it in all the Word of God.”9 Baptists also point to the reality that everyone accepts believers’ Baptism no matter what else they may add. In 449, Leo I, Bishop of Rome, speaks of the creed as “the words which everywhere in the world are exacted from those about to be baptized.” Alcuin, the educational tutor of Charlemagne, protested his harshness with the pagans in not allowing them sufficient time to understand the Christian faith and believe it before they were baptized. Augustine, though his mother Monica was a Christian, was not baptized until after his conversion under the preaching of Ambrose. Those who accept infant Baptism, therefore, must say that it is the same as believers’ Baptism or it is different. If different, then there are two theologies of Baptism, one plain in the Scripture and one hidden. If the same, then paedobaptists (I use this word only for etymological convenience, not as a pejorative or condescending term) must consider infants as believers capable of giving evidence of their belief, or that the belief of a substitute is in no way inferior to their own. That is a difficult case to prove. Beyond prima facie evidence, however, Protestant Christians who practice infant Baptism point to a broad coherent biblical theolog y which provides the interpretive framework within which infant Baptism is deemed acceptable, and even required. Baptists and Reformed Christians share historical, confessional, and theological roots. Particularly from within the Puritan stream of ecclesiology, they share the ideal of a pure Church. In spite of common roots, however, some would argue that a Baptist identity prevents embracing ideas that are Calvinistic, Reformed, or Covenantal. One cannot plunge into the brilliant stream of historic Reformed thought unless he carries his infants with him into the water. In addition, it is argued the traditional covenantal approach to Scripture

differs so fundamentally from Baptist hermeneutics that one cannot be a Baptist theologian and a Covenant theologian at the same time. Several historical theological ideas should help amend that impression. First, Baptists do recognize a relationship between Circumcision and Baptism. Colossians 2:11-13 establishes this relationship. But to insist that a direct analogy exists in which Baptism fulfills Circumcision (or replaces it) has no warrant from the New Testament. Circumcision typifies, not Baptism, but regeneration (v. 11). As Paul emphatically states in Galatians, “For in Christ Jesus neither Circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature” (Gal. 6:15). Circumcision foreshadowed by type the specific work of Christ, by his Spirit, in the “removal of the body of flesh” (Col. 2:11). Baptism includes a picture of fulfilled Circumcision, the quickening of the sinner while he is dead in trespasses and sins, but it includes much more. While the removal of death by the power of life makes Baptism an apt image for this fulfilled Circumcision, Baptism opens one’s view to the much fuller intent of Christ’s historical work. Baptism expands the focus, not only on the inner life of the sinner, but on Christ’s historical work by which life, forgiveness, and righteousness come. The “faith according to the operation of God” (v. 12 translated by Conybeare “faith wrought in you by God”) refers to the quickening work of the Spirit raising sinners from death to life by which we are granted the faith which unites us to Christ. Baptism assumes spiritual Circumcision as one aspect of the complete salvation purchased by the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ. Second, Baptist principles of interpretation function on an assumption of discontinuity as well as continuity. The spirituality of the New Covenant introduces a new order of things, a reality built upon, but different, discontinuous, from the past. “More are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife” (Is. 54:1). The principle of continuity/discontinuity may be demonstrated in the Pauline treatment of Circumcision. Circumcision in the Old Covenant signified three things. It was given to mark physically God’s people, as separate from the Gentiles. Next, it spiritually pointed back to the righteousness of faith which was imputed to Abraham (Rom. 4:11-25). Finally, it pointed forward to the true Circumcision of heart which would identify the true spiritual children of Abraham (Rom. 2:25-29). Now that Christ has come, these three elements of Circumcision have been fulfilled in the gifts he brought. One, God’s people have distinctive characteristics described in terms of holiness, conformity to Christ, and emulation of the cross-bearing of Christ. Two, the righteousness which Abraham had before Circumcision and of which Circumcision was the seal was fully MAY/JUNE 1997

realized in the satisfactory work of Christ. The faith Abraham demonstrated by actions of belief on his part must be manifest just as clearly in his spiritual descendants. Scripture identifies those “who are of the faith of Abraham,” as those “to whom it will be reckoned...who believe in Him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead” (Rom. 4:11, 12, 16, 24). Three, instead of Circumcision of the flesh, those evidences which inevitably accompany the new birth will now be the identifying characteristics of the people of God. They are to “walk in newness of life” (Rom. 6:4). Precisely those three elements constitute the apostle’s refutation of the Judaizers in his letter to the Philippians. Paul calls believers the true Circumcision: “For it is we who are the Circumcision, we who worship by the Spirit of God, who glory in Christ Jesus, and who put no confidence in the flesh” (Phil. 3:3 NIV). Thus, the three elements of Circumcision are fulfilled: 1) worshipping by the Spirit of God signifies the new bir th (Circumcision of the heart); 2) glorying in Christ Jesus points to justification by an imputed righteousness (fulfilling Abraham’s righteousness of faith clearly pictured in Phil. 3:9); and 3) “no confidence in the flesh” clearly excludes biological pedigree as gaining any standing before God (Phil. 13:4-7). To regard infant Baptism as properly picturing a fulfilled Circumcision builds upon an unwarranted and massive confidence in flesh relationships, precedes any evidence of the work of the Spirit in the new birth, and reduces to nothing the need for manifest faith, that is, “glorying” in Christ Jesus. Contrary to the bold claim of the Reformed scholar Bannerman in his The Scripture Doctrine of the Church, Baptism does not have a one-to-one correspondence with Circumcision as if Circumcision could picture all the provisions and promises of the New Covenant and its Mediator as well as Baptism. Baptism goes beyond a mere continuation of the old and shows the points in which the new is superior to the old. Baptism includes both continuity and discontinuity. Circumcision is fulfilled; Baptism looks back at its fulfillment in regeneration, forward to the fruition of the reign of grace in resurrection (Rom. 5:21), and the present safety of union with Christ in justification and in the fullness of his redemptive work. “For if we have been united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall be also in the likeness of His resurrection” (Rom. 6:5). It is precisely at this point that the paedobaptist call for proof of the exclusion of infants is answered. When the covenant which included them passed away to be replaced by a better covenant with better promises more apposite to the spirituality of the people of God, the inclusion of members without spiritual evidences ceased. Reformed paedobaptists agree that no one inherits the kingdom of God on the basis of a flesh relationship. It 24

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is this, however, that makes their willingness, even insistence, that the sign be given on the basis of the flesh relationship incongruous with their soteriology. Baptism, therefore, in replacing Circumcision as a physical sign, more powerfully displays Circumcision’s antitypical reality. Those who are baptized presently testify, volitionally and symbolically, that they experience the substance of that which it symbolizes (Gal. 3:26, 27; Col. 2:12; Rom. 6:1-11). Believers’ Baptism does not shrink and circumscribe God’s grace or deprive anyone of a legitimate blessing. Instead, it signifies the deliverance of God’s people from a yoke of bondage (Gal. 5:3) by another who has already shed his blood to fulfill the Law’s demands: It signifies the putting on, or union with, Christ by faith (Gal. 3:25-29); his doing and dying has become my doing and dying. His life is my life. Third, in recognizing the analogy between Baptism and Circumcision, we must affirm and not deny the explicit characteristics of the New Covenant. As stated in Jeremiah 31:31-34 and recalled in Hebrews 8:8-12 the covenant says: “The time is coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them,” declares the Lord. “This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time,” declares the Lord. “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest,” declares the Lord. “For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.” Several elements of this covenant contradict the supposed application of the covenant of grace in infant Baptism. The partakers of this covenant have the law of God already in their minds and hearts. This cannot be affirmed of new-born infants. If any doubt this, the next provision should clarify the case, for those in the new covenant do not need to be taught, “Know the Lord,” for they already know him. They have already been regenerated. This is sure, because the final provision mentioned is justification, that is, forgiveness of sins. Again, those who ask for an explicit and revolutionary prohibition of infant Baptism should find it here. Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus illustrates MODERN REFORMATION

the nature of the change and the blindness of some to it. The positive qualifications manifest in this announcement of God’s covenant admit the application of its sign only to those who are qualified. Perhaps the reason Baptists find it difficult to understand the subtlety of the paedobaptist argument is that the immediate words of Scripture have given a simplicity to the issue that resists confusion. Pierre Marcel’s argument forsakes the purity and sovereign power displayed in the covenant. The children of believing parents are baptized by reason of the fact that they are the children of the covenant and, as such heirs of all the promises made by God at the institution of this covenant, included in which are the promises of the remission of sins and of the Holy Spirit for their regeneration and sanctification. In the covenant God endows children with certain gifts in a definite and objective manner; He requires that in due course they should accept these gifts by faith, and He promises that through the operation of the Holy Spirit these gifts will become a living reality in their life.10 Sadly, this treatment makes the New no better than the Old, for its promises are made provisional. God said, “They shall all know me.” Marcel requires that they be taught to know the Lord and even speaks of a minister seeking to reclaim “the rebellious and unregenerate children of the covenant” in direct contradiction to the nature of the New Covenant.11 It is exactly the characteristics of rebellion and an uncircumcised heart (being unregenerate) that are eliminated by entrance into this covenantal relationship, for it is God’s sovereign and effectual provision for those he calls his holy nation, his peculiar people. So What About Our Children? The paedobaptist may object, “You have a deficient view of the standing of your children. You treat them virtually as pagans.” John Owen, the great Puritan theologian of the seventeenth century, when he said that those who reject infant Baptism (as taught within the Reformed tradition) “leave the seed of believers, whilst in their infant state, in the same condition with those of pagans and infidels; expressly contrary to God’s covenant.”12 This is an unfair, but emotionally understandable, response from people whose theology has taught them to view their children as participants in the covenant of grace (even believers, according to Thomas Shepard) by virtue of their flesh relationship with their parents. The meaning of the objection, however, is not quite clear. Does it mean that Baptists act as pagans and teach

their children to worship idols? Does it contemplate Baptist parents having altars on which they offer sacrifices to appease or please various pagan deities? Do Baptist parents hide the Law and the Gospel from their children and await the coming of an apostle into the home like Paul into Lystra or Athens to preach to their pagan children? Do we account our children as practicing participants in a superstitious system which worships and serves the creature instead of the Creator? These fabricated scenarios are absurd, and it is obvious that Baptists do not treat their children like pagans. But if the question means that we acknowledge that they are children of wrath even as the children of pagans are children of wrath, we must say, “How else can they be regarded?” Titus 3:3-4, Ephesians 2:1-3, and Romans 3:9 affirm the unity of all people, Jew and Gentile, those living under special revelation and those not under special revelation, as “all under sin,” “by nature children of wrath,” and “foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving divers lusts and pleasures.” Since the children of believers are not exempt from that verdict, we withhold from them the sign which says “I am resurrected to walk in newness of life.” This in itself should be considered a great advantage, for we do not give children any false hope from a supposed covenantal relationship. We call them to repentance, not to a facade of Christian deportment plastered over a wrath-deserving heart. Baptists do recognize, however, that by God’s grace, these children are born into homes in which the light of the gospel has dispelled the darkness of this present evil age and the knowledge of Christ informs the actions and attitudes of each day. They thus have great privilege and great responsibility. But everyone should see, with all candor, that none of these benefits is either commenced or augmented by infant Baptism. They are surrounded with Christian friends and a loving, prayerful environment. They come to know some of the choicest people on earth as mature Christians in the Church befriend them and encourage them. Regular and fervent prayers are offered to God for their physical and spiritual protection and their conversion. They are instructed daily in the home in gospel truth and week by week in the church through the preached Word. This is perhaps the greatest blessing since God is pleased through the foolishness of what is preached to save those who believe; faith comes by hearing, and hearing through the Word of Christ.

Dr. Tom J. Nettles is Professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He is ordained by the Southern Baptist Church.

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Q UTOES It is a mystery of Christ’s secret union with the devout which is by nature incomprehensible. If anybody should ask me how this communion takes place, I am not ashamed to confess that that is a secret too lofty for either my mind to comprehend or my words to declare. And to speak more plainly, I rather experience than understand it. — Calvin, Institutes, IV, 17, 32.

The children of believing parents are baptized by reason of the fact that they are the children of the covenant and, as such heirs of all the promises made by God at the institution of this covenant, included in which are the promises of the remission of sins and of the Holy Spirit for their regeneration and sanctification. In the covenant God endows children with certain gifts in a definite and objective manner; He requires that in due course they should accept these gifts by faith, and He promises that through the operation of the Holy Spirit these gifts will become a living reality in their life. — Pierre Marcel, Baptism: Sacrament of the Covenant of Grace (Cherry Hill, NJ, 1973), 198.

Strictly speaking, only the Word and the sacraments can be regarded as means of grace, that is, as objective channels which Christ has instituted in the Church, and to which He ordinarily binds Himself in the communication of His grace...They are in themselves, and not in virtue of their connection with things not included in them, means of grace. Striking experiences may, and undoubtedly sometimes do, serve to strengthen the work of God in the hearts of believers, but this does not constitute them means of grace in the technical sense....The Word and the sacraments are in themselves means of grace; their spiritual efficacy is dependent only on the operation of the Holy Spirit... The mystics stress the fact that God is absolutely free in communicating His grace, and therefore can hardly be conceived of as bound to such external means. Such means after all belong to the natural world, and have nothing in common with the spiritual world. God, or Christ, or the Holy Spirit, or the inner light, work directly in the heart, and both the Word and the sacraments can only serve to indicate or to symbolize 26

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this internal grace. This whole conception is determined by a dualistic view of nature and g race...[The rationalists] thought of the means of grace as working only through moral persuasion, and did not associate them at all with any mystical operation of the Holy Spirit. In fact, they placed the emphasis more on what man did in the means of grace than on what God accomplished through them, when they spoke of them as mere external badges of profession and (of the sacraments) as memorials. The Arminians of the seventeenth century and the Rationalists of the eighteenth century shared this view. — Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979).

We now enter the innermost Most Holy Place of the Christian temple. We approach the sacred altar on which lies quivering before our eyes the bleeding heart of Christ...Christ is present. If he is not present really and truly, then the sacrament can have no interest or real value to us. It does not do to say that this presence is only spiritual, because that phrase is ambiguous. If it means that the presence of Christ is not something objective to us, but simply a mental apprehension or idea of him subjectively present to our consciousness, then the phrase is false. Christ as an objective fact is as really present and active in the sacrament as are the bread and wine, or the minister or our fellow-communicants by our side….It does not do to say that the divinity of Christ is present while his humanity is absent, because it is the entire indivisible divine-human Person of Christ which is present. When Christ promises to his disciples, “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world-age,” and, “Where two or three are met together in my name, there am I in the midst of them,” he means, of course, that he, the God-man Mediator they loved, trusted, and obeyed, would be with them. His humanity is just as essential as his divinity, otherwise his incarnation would not have been a necessity... “Presence,” therefore, is not a question of space; it is a relation... So we need not speculate how it is that Christ, the whole God-man, body, soul, and divinity, is present in the sacrament, but we are absolutely certain of the fact. He has promised it. — A. A. Hodge, Evangelical Theology: Lectures on Doctrine (Banner of Truth, 1990), 355-7. MODERN REFORMATION

Why Baptism? W. ROBERT GODFREY n Reformed theology Baptism is a means of grace; that is, an institution God uses to g row our faith. Yet how many Christians really see their Baptism as an important element of their Christian identity and growth?

Neither Magic nor Mirage Calvin war ned that when we study the Sacraments—whether Baptism or the Lord’s Supper—we must avoid two errors. We can call these errors on the one hand, the error of magic and, on the other hand, the error of mirage (Institutes, IV. 14, 16). Evangelicals are particularly sensitive to the danger of magic—placing some magical power in water or in bread and wine. Seeing grace so present that it irresistibly bowls people over. Calvin says that the danger here is that we so focus our attention on the elements that our minds are not lifted to Christ to experience him. The equal danger (perhaps the greater danger for us as evangelicals) is to treat the Sacraments as a mirage, mere ceremonies that have very little real meaning. We do them because, yes, they are commanded in the Word of God, but they do not seem to have much reality for us. They do not seem to bring blessing into our lives. A Prominent Sacrament Baptism is amazingly prominent in the New Testament. We need to let that truth of biblical revelation grip us. We see that prominence in our Lord’s ministry. His way was prepared by John the Baptist, who came to call people to repent of their sins and be baptized. Our Lord began his public ministry by being baptized by John. Jesus could summarize his ministry in terms of Baptism, for when he looked forward to his death he could say, “I have a baptism to undergo” (Luke 12:50). His final commission to his disciples emphasized Baptism: “Therefore go, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe

everything I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:19-20). Baptism is also underscored in the apostles’ experience as we see in Acts. The Church was founded by the great Baptism in the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. As the apostles went out preaching, we see repeatedly that people believed and were baptized. The church was established in place after place by those who were baptized in response to the preaching of the Word. In the epistles we find numerous references to Baptism as a basis for ethical exhortation to God’s people. Baptism testifies to what we are in Christ. So the apostles urge believers to live out what they are in him, to be true Christians as their Baptism testifies they are. We find this kind of exhortation in Romans 6, 1 Corinthians 10, Ephesians 4, Colossians 2, Titus 3 and other places. It is a frequent occurrence. Some of the Bible’s statements about Baptism are very strong. Ananias said to Paul after his conversion, MAY/JUNE 1997

“Get up, be baptized and wash your sins away, calling on his name” (Acts 22:16). Galatians 3:27 says, “For all of you who were baptized into Christ have been clothed with Christ.” 1 Peter 3:21 even says, “Baptism…now saves you.” What do these powerful expressions mean? How are we to understand them? God’s Pledge Baptism’s prominent role and the strong statements about it testify that God makes a pledge to us in this Sacrament. Calvin repeatedly stresses that God makes such a pledge to us because of our weakness. As Christians live out their faith, they are weak and need God’s pledge made to them in their Baptism. Why? It is because, as Calvin observes, we are not disembodied spirits (Institutes, IV, xiv, 3). We are not just ears to hear the Word. As those who struggle with temptations and doubts in soul and body we need the Word where we can touch it and taste it as well as hear it. In the Sacraments, God presents his Word to us in a tangible form. It is the same Word, but in a different form, a form that particularly speaks to our senses. Calvin is very insistent that none of us must ever think that we become so strong that God’s Word is irrelevant to our weakness. Rather, the more we grow in faith, the more precious that visible Word becomes. There is a preached Word. There is a written Word. There is an incarnate Word. There is an eternal Word. But there is also a visible Word which speaks to our senses to encourage us in our weakness. Only God could establish a Sacrament that could help us in our weakness. Only God could say of physical elements that they are useful to us in building up our faith. But that is what God has accomplished. He has given Baptism as a rite of initiation into his church, into the covenant community. We see Baptism as that initiation to the Church right after Pentecost when Peter preached his sermon and there was a great response. The people said, “What shall we do?” Peter replied, “Repent, and be baptized” (Acts 2:38). The Bible then records that as many as believed were baptized and added to the Church. Baptism comes as God’s pledge at the initiation into our life within his Church. It is once and for all, definitive, as is the beginning of our Christian life. Calvin says that the element itself speaks of beginning. He writes that there is a particular fitness that water is the element, for it speaks of the washing away of sin, conversion, and regeneration. That is what Baptism pledges to us: our sinfulness and a new creation in Christ. This pledge comes to us with God’s promise, and the promise of God in our Baptism is that we are cleansed, forgiven, and renewed. Calvin says that in Baptism we have represented to us that by the blood of 28

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Christ our sins are forgiven and we are justified and that by the Holy Spirit we are introduced into newness of life and are sanctified. All of this is represented and promised to us in Baptism. Hence, Calvin continues, the great function of Baptism is that it assures us of God’s will individually, because it comes to us individually. Even in the preaching of the Word there is a possibility for people to say, “Well, that’s true in general, but it may not be true for me.” So God comes to each with the water of Baptism, that visible Word of his, and says to each of us in our Baptism, “I have a promise for you, not just for ‘y’all,’ but for you.” Therefore in times of distress or doubt or weakness, we have that objective promise of God to look back to. We are strengthened and assured that God does love us, and has promised us forgiveness and renewal, and that the promises of God are without repentance. Calvin likes the little phrase “just as” when he talks about the Sacraments, saying that “just as” water washes dirt from the body, so does Christ wash sin from the soul. That is the correspondence between the two. “Just as” we need that cleansing of the physical body by water, so the soul needs and receives that cleansing by the blood of Jesus Christ. Calvin insists that Baptism “presents what it represents.” It is not just a representation but also a presentation, a communication of the blessing it represents. Faith does not make the Sacrament. Faith does not create the promise of God. God’s promise comes before faith and through faith. Nevertheless, faith receives the Sacrament unto blessing. The Sacrament is like the preached Word, Calvin says. It can be the savor of life to life or the savor of death to death. It comes with God’s promise to all who will receive it. But only those who receive it by faith receive the blessing. Only those who receive the Sacrament and hear the Word really experience in their own lives that assurance, upbuilding, and strengthening that is the proper function of Baptism. Calvin stresses this point. The promise of God is there. The promise of God is real and reliable. But for the fruit of that promise to take root in our hearts, we must live in it by faith. God makes this wonderful pledge for us in our Baptism so that in our weakness we can look to it again and again and be reassured that God loves us. If you have been baptized, you have put on Christ Jesus. That is what the apostles say repeatedly to believers. Believers have a right to look to their Baptism and see that God has cleansed them from their sin and renewed them unto eternal life. It is reported that Martin Luther was once asked, “How do you know you’re a Christian?” and Luther’s response was, “I’ve been baptized.” That is a bad answer if it means that just because “I’ve had some water sprinkled MODERN REFORMATION

on me” or “I’ve been dunked in some water,” willy nilly, “I’m a Christian.” That’s magic! But that is not what Luther meant. Luther believed that in order to answer the question, “How do I know I’m a Christian?”, I need an objective standard. I do not want to be left awash with my feeling in the matter. Feelings are inadequate. God has said something objective, just to me. He has said, “In Baptism, you are mine.” So Luther was making a statement of faith: “I know I’m a Christian because when I look to my Baptism, I am reassured in my soul that I’m a Christian; I look to it by faith.” God’s People We come now to the question: To whom does God make this pledge? Or, more particularly, What about infant Baptism? Should only believers be baptized (the Baptist position) or should believers and their children be baptized (the paedobaptist position). What follows is a brief defense of the traditional Reformed or paedobaptist argument. The question is: Who is a member of Christ’s church? Who is a member of his covenant community? In the Old Testament the answer to that is very clear. It is believers and their children. This was the explicit teaching given to Abraham in Genesis 17. The promises were to Abraham and his seed. The rite of initiation into the covenant made with Abraham was Circumcision, and Abraham is called the “father of the faithful” in the New Testament as well as the Old. In Romans 4, we read that Circumcision was given to Abraham after he believed. So the apostle is really saying that Circumcision was given to Abraham on this basis: “Believe and be circumcised.” Yet in spite of this pattern, children were included in the old covenant. We have that ringing statement of Joshua, “As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord” (Josh. 24:15). Joshua did not reach that conclusion after surveying the family to see what they wanted to do. Rather, as the responsible head of his household, he dedicated his entire family to the Lord. What about the New Testament? In the New Testament there is no command and apparently no example of what was done with the children of

believers. There is no command either that believers’ children should be baptized as infants or that they should wait until they professed faith. There is no instance of a believer’s child being baptized as an adult believer. So we are left to try to reason theologically and ask: Has the grace of God in the new covenant become more restricted than it was in the old covenant? The normal pattern in the new covenant is that God’s grace is reaching out to more people in the new covenant than was true in the old. The restricted communication of grace in the old covenant is being expanded. Is grace, then, being restricted in only this one instance, namely, in the case of children? Are children in the new covenant worse off than they were under the old covenant? One would require very convincing evidence, it seems, to reach that conclusion. One would need an absolutely clear statement that children who were included previously are now excluded. But we have no such statement. Indeed, as we look at various evidence in the New Testament, we find that children are being related to in just the same way as they were in the old covenant. The assumption that permeates the New Testament is that believers’ children are included in the covenant community. Abraham is described as the “father of the faithful.” In Galatians 3:29, for example, there is no problem in the apostle’s mind in relating the promise given to Abraham and his seed to the promise given to us (and our seed) in Baptism. We find our Lord receiving children as members of the covenant community as, for example, in the famous case of Matthew 19:14 where he says, “Let the little children come unto me.” His disciples did not think it appropriate that children should have bothered the Savior. But Jesus was irritated with them for such an assumption and insisted that the children should come. He received them and blessed them. This was not something Jesus did to everybody. He resisted blessing the Canaanite woman, for example (cf. Matt. 15:21-28). But Jesus warmly received and blessed covenant children. Writing in 1 Corinthians 7, Paul talks about the children of believers and develops his argument MAY/JUNE 1997

assuming that the children of believers are holy. He is talking about marriages between Christians and nonChristians, and he is willing to call such marriages holy on the assumption that the children of believers, indeed even of one believer, are holy. So it seems that the apostle is presuming that believers’ children are in the covenant community. That idea seems to be reinforced in Colossians 2:11-13 where Paul appears to equate Baptism and Circumcision as parallel rites. In Acts, we have five cases of household Baptisms where it is recorded that the head of the household believed and the household was baptized. None of these clearly says that there were infants in those households. However, the household pattern that we see in the old covenant seems reflected or appropriated in these new covenant teachings.

As Calvin observes, we are not disembodied spirits. We are not just ears to hear the Word. As those who struggle with temptations and doubts in soul and body we need the Word where we can touch it and taste it as well as hear it. We have Peter’s word at the end of his Pentecost sermon when he said, “The promise is to you and your children and for all who are afar off.” (Acts 2:39). There are various ways of reading those words, of course. They can be read as saying, “The promise is to you (if you believe), to your children (if they believe), and to many who are afar off (if they believe).” But isn’t Peter here really echoing the word of God to Abraham? God had said, “It is to you and your children, and also to the nations that the blessing will come” (cf. Gen. 22:17-18). It seems to me that Peter is picking up that Abrahamic promise and saying, “Yes, it is to you and your children—that principle remains—but now at last we see the nations brought in too.” 30

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Finally, there may actually be a case of infant Baptism in the New Testament. Look at 1 Corinthians 10:1-2: “For I do not want you to be ignorant of the fact, brothers, that our forefathers were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. They were baptized into Moses.” In this chapter Paul is reflecting on Israel’s experience in passing through the Red Sea as a warning to the Church. He is stressing the similarity of the experiences of the Church and Israel. In stressing that similarity, Paul presents the Israelites’ experience of passing through the Red Sea as a Baptism. But were there not infants in the nation of Israel that passed through the Red Sea? Had Pharaoh been so effective that there were no infants left? Of course, there were children. And so Paul says that all Israel— including infants—was baptized in passing through the Red Sea. We see that Paul assumes the continuity of God’s dealing with children in the Old and New Testaments. They are always treated as members of the covenant community. As we reflect on this, must we not conclude that children need God’s pledge as much as adults? Don’t children as they grow need that objective promise of God? We have no idea when faith may be born in a child’s hear t, but whenever it is, it needs to be stimulated, strengthened, and assured by the pledge made to him or her in Baptism. Even a pledge that he or she cannot self-consciously remember can be testified to by the community. We have evidence in the New Testament that faith was born in the heart of at least one child at a very early age: John the Baptist, who had faith already in the womb. It is recorded in Luke 1:44 that when Mary came to visit her cousin Elizabeth and entered the room where Elizabeth was, John the Baptist leapt in his mother’s womb because he was in the presence of the Savior. Indeed Elizabeth records that he “leaped for joy.” We moderns may be skeptical about that, but it is what the Scripture says: this unborn baby in the presence of the Savior leapt for joy—an act of faith of some sort. Joy is a fruit of faith. So if faith can be in the heart even of the unborn, don’t our children need to be nourished and strengthened for faith by the promise of God as they develop and live their lives? Pierre C. Marcel, in his book on Baptism, says, “Little by little the child will come to a clear comprehension of the significance of his baptism, which will become for him the instrumental cause of the growth of his faith” (Baptism: Sacrament of the Covenant of Grace, Cherry Hill, NJ, 1973, 227). A covenant child should be reared then, being told, “You have been baptized. God has made his promise to you. You need rest in it by faith.” Calvin expressed himself fairly strongly when he said, MODERN REFORMATION

The reason why Satan does his utmost to deprive our children of the ceremony of baptism is that he may efface from our gaze this attestation that the Lord has ordained for confirming to us the blessings which he desires them to enjoy, and that thus at the same time we may forget, little by little, the promise which he has given to them. From this there must follow not only ingratitude and contempt for God’s mercy toward us, but failure to instruct our children in the fear and discipline of his law and in the knowledge of his gospel. For it is no small incentive to us to nurture them in true piety and obedience to God, when we understand that from their birth the Lord has received them amongst his people and as members of his church. Therefore let us not turn our backs on that great kindness of our Lord but boldly present our children to him (cited by Marcel, 241). Calvin, in his catechism, asked the question: “When do the Sacraments produce their effect?” He answered, “When one receives them with faith, seeking only Jesus Christ and his grace.” In another place, in a rather autobiographical statement, which is rare in Calvin, he says, We for a long time did not grasp the promise that had been given us in baptism. Yet that promise, since it was of God, ever remained fixed and firm and trustworthy. We therefore confess that before that baptism benefited us not at all, inasmuch as the promise offered us in it, without which baptism is nothing, lay neglected (Institutes, IV, 15, 17). But when the Spirit worked to create faith, that Baptism performed so long ago became effective and a precious pledge of the promise of God. A Perpetual Profit We need to remember the perpetual profit of Baptism. The promise that God makes to us in our Baptism, his pledge, is not just the pledge of a mechanical relationship, like a train on a downhill track, so that all we need to do is get it started and it will run irresistibly to the bottom of the grade. Our Christian life is too often conceived in those terms. In reality, our relationship to God is not mechanical; it is vital and growing. The reformers stressed that Baptism is crucial in that developing relationship.

Baptism that marks the beginning of our Christian life goes with us as we live it. Luther called it “a daily garment” that we must wear by faith, meaning that it is with us every day in our relationship with God (Larger Catechism, Part IV). Calvin called it the “shield to repel doubt” (cited by Marcel, p. 172). We need a shield to repel doubt—doubt about whether God can really love such sinful people as we, doubt of the modern age that impinges on us from every side: Is there a God? Is there meaning to life? Can Christianity’s outrageous claims to be the only truth be credited? And in the midst of these doubts, problems, wrestlings, and temptations, Baptism is a shield. Baptism is that visible word in which God says, “Yes, I am your God and you are mine; that water Baptism is my pledge to you that you can live by faith.” One last quote from Calvin: At whatever time we are baptized, we are once for all washed and purged for our whole life. Therefore, as often as we fall away, we ought to recall the memory of our baptism and fortify our mind with it, that we may always be sure and confident of the forgiveness of sins...For Christ’s purity has been offered us in it; his purity ever flourishes; it is defiled by no spots, but buries and cleanses away all our defilements (Institutes, IV, 25,3). God’s promise to each of us in Baptism is that Christ’s purity covers our impurity and that we are to know by faith that through Christ we have a loving heavenly Father.

Dr. W. Robert Godfrey, a member of the Council of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, is President and Professor at Westminster Theological Seminary in California. He is ordained by the Christian Reformed Church.

Above all the narrow, meager patriotism on earth is the large, free, ecumenical patriotism of those who embrace in their love and fealty the whole body of the baptized. All who are baptized into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, recognizing the Trinity of Persons in the Godhead, the incarnation of the Son and his priestly sacrifice, whether they be Greeks, or Arminians, or Romanists, or Lutherans, or Calvinists, or the simple souls who do not know what to call themselves, are our brethren. Baptism is our common countersign. — A. A. Hodge, Evangelical Theology: Lectures on Doctrine (Banner of Truth, 1990), 355-7.

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Why Baptize Infants? Some paedobaptist arguments…

Household baptisms in the New Testament are common (see esp. Acts 16:15, 33; 1 Cor. 1:16), and when the jailer asked how to be saved, Paul replied, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved—you and your household.” We are told that this same night “he and his family were baptized” (Acts 16:31-33).

Even though bringing someone under the protection of God’s covenantal faithfulness does not guarantee that every member possesses true, persevering faith (Heb. 4:1-11), that does not mean that it is unimportant whether a person is in Christ and his covenant of grace.

Children were included in the covenant of grace in the Old Testament, through the Sacrament of Circumcision, and in the New Covenant (called the “better covenant”), God has not changed in his good intentions toward our children (Acts 2:35, 38). Circumcision has been replaced with Baptism (Col. 2:11). Therefore, our children must be brought into the covenant of grace and united to Christ through Baptism as the people of God in former times were brought into the covenant through Circumcision.

The children of unbelievers are unholy, but the children of believers are set apart unto God. This is a distinction not only of the Old Testament (see the Passover, Ex. 12:1; also the distinction between the “house of the wicked” and the “house of the righteous,” especially in the Psalms), but is continued in the New Testament as well (1 Cor. 10:2). How are they marked or distinguished from unbelievers? Scripture teaches by the sign and seal of the covenant.

God has brought us into a covenant of grace and although not all members of this covenant will persevere (i.e., they are not elect), they enjoy special privileges of belonging to the covenant people of God. This was true of Israel (the Church in the Old Testament), and the New Testament simply applies this to the New Testament church (Hebrews, esp. 4:1-11 and 6:412; Dt. 4:20 and 28:9 with 1 Pet. 2:9,10; Gal. 6:16; Hos. 2:23 and Is. 10:22 with Rom. 9:24-28).

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There is an unbroken record in church histor y of the practice of Infant Baptism. The earliest documents report that Infant Baptism was practiced in the period immediately after the death of the apostles, by the command of those who were trained by the apostles themselves. Where was the debate, assuming these immediate successors to the disciples were departing from the apostolic practice? There is no record of such a debate, which would have been momentous in the life of the church.

Baptism is the work of God, not man. It is not a sign of the believer’s commitment to God (which would, therefore, require prior faith and repentance), but the sign and seal of God’s promise to save all who do not reject their Baptism by refusing to trust in Christ. For the nature of Baptism, see Mark 16:16, Acts 22:16; Rom. 6:3; Tit. 3:5. The reason these references are to those who have first believed is that the first converts, obviously, were adults when they believed. Household Baptisms indicate that they baptized their children. The same was true of Abraham, who believed before he was circumcised, but then had his children circumcised as infants.

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A Presbyterian on the Wittenberg Trail: GOD’S LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT RICK RITCHIE never would have guessed that I would end up as an adult convert to Lutheranism. And I further would not have imagined how central the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper would be to my conversion. My conception of denominations was typically evangelical. My understanding of Lutheranism was very vague. I respected the Lutheran church as the church of the Reformation, but I thought that my Presbyterian church had probably reformed things a little more completely.

The Presbyterian church of my childhood was the perfect setting in which to become a convinced Zwinglian (follower of the Swiss Reformer Ulrich Zwingli who held that Communion was merely symbolic) without knowing it. I had no knowledge of the ritual until my early school years. I remember sitting in church and seeing a table up front on which were eng raved the words “Do this in Remembrance of Me.” This was like “Jeopardy!” on a deeper level, begging the question, “What is this that we do in remembrance of Jesus?” The answer was, Communion. Instead of the more usual case where a person is aware of Communion and later asks, “What does this mean?”, I was told what this action meant without knowing what this action was. I was blissfully unaware that anybody denied this interpretation, except for Roman Catholics. Then, in college, I remember hearing Sunday morning radio where Catholic Mass was followed by a Lutheran service. Both the priest and the pastor preached from John chapter six. From that passage the priest taught that the bread and wine were the body and blood of Christ. Then I discovered that that Lutheran pastor was to preach on the same text. I couldn’t wait until he

provided the correct symbolical interpretation of the passage. But it never came. To my chagrin, the Lutheran pastor taught that in Communion we receive the body and blood of Christ. I was shocked! I had never been told that only a minority of the early Protestants held to a purely symbolic view of Communion. I had probably heard that the Roman Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation was invented in the year 1215, as if before that everyone believed it was a symbolic memorial. Then I thought that all Protestants rejected the Catholic view in favor of the memorial view. It was only later that I realized that while Transubstantiation was a recent invention (as far as MAY/JUNE 1997

church history goes), almost everyone—Lutheran, Calvinist, Roman Catholic—held to some kind of belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Sacrament. Many of the early Protestants rejected Transubstantiation without rejecting the Real Presence. A small branch of early Protestants held to a memorial view of Communion. As time went on, their numbers increased. The greatest increase in their influence came during the years of rationalism. During the eighteenth century Enlightenment, belief in the miraculous was challenged by unbelievers, and explained away by embarrassed clergy. Later, there was a return to faith, but the Real Presence wasn’t reappropriated along with the other teachings. In America, the memorial view became dominant as Churches lost their historical sense. They forgot their roots in earlier teachers who believed in some form of the Real Presence. But as I said, when I first heard this Lutheran pastor on the radio, I was unaware of all of this. I retained my respect for the Lutheran church. After all, John Warwick Montgomery was a great Christian apologist. I figured this church must be something you would have to be born into, however. They had most important things right like other Protestants, and I could understand the decision not to leave a church in which one had been reared over a variation on a minor point. In my upbringing, Communion was given so little emphasis that I considered it a peripheral issue. Not that it was taken lightly. It was given a Presbyterian solemnity that few things were ever given. Yet I couldn’t have seen it as an indispensable practice. It was administered too rarely, and I had been taught on it too infrequently for that. The blow to my complacency came a little more than a year after I became a Calvinist. My university campus was an ideal place for religious argumentation. Debating your position against another is a very helpful method of finding out what you really believe. I engaged in several arguments with Disciples of Christ and Church of Christ people (Campbellites) on Baptism. They taught a baptismal regeneration that made Baptism a human work and denied salvation to the unbaptized. I knew that something was wrong with this position. It couldn’t do justice to the thief on the cross, or give a good answer to the question of what would happen to someone who believed in Jesus but was run over by a truck on the way to being baptized. But I realized in arguing with them that I had completely overlooked some important verses which linked Baptism to salvation. I decided that I needed a position which would do justice to that link without making folly of the exceptions to the rule. When I read the Reformers, I found them taking a mediating position that I did not expect. They did not 34

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separate Baptism from salvation like those I had grown up with. They would have been shocked by the “I’ll get around to it someday” approach that is so common. Yet they were clear that faith in Christ was saving without regard to Baptism. About this time I heard the line, “It is not the absence of Baptism that damns, but the despising of it.” I also heard the argument: “You can’t look at this like a Greek who is saved at one point only. You have to think like a Hebrew who says ‘I have been saved, I am being saved, and I will be saved.’” If Baptism follows faith, then it saves the saved. If faith is kindled by Baptism, then it saves the lost. This way of thinking does justice to the text without sacrificing the teaching of salvation by grace alone. In a way that may not be understood by those who were not born evangelical, one fear occasioned by the Lutheran teaching on the Lord’s Supper is the fear that to receive the Lord’s Supper for the forgiveness of sins is to be saved by works. We perform an action and receive salvation in response. This is how I first understood the teaching. In one discussion, a Lutheran woman spoke of how we bring our sins to the Lord’s Table and return forgiven. I thought this was odd. What would happen if you died on the way up there? (I know, this is the same question I asked of the Disciples of Christ view of Baptism. But it is a good question!) The difference is that in this case there is an answer. The woman knew her teaching. She assured me that my sins would be forgiven even then. This did alleviate my misgivings, but I was still uncertain. The view did not violate known true doctrines. What I came to see, though, was how many other aspects of my Christian life in evangelicalism functioned in a similar fashion to the Lord’s Supper. When I was aware that I had sinned, I had been taught to pray and ask for forgiveness. I was assured by the promise in I John that Jesus forgave when I confessed my sins. But I was also taught that I was already forgiven before I prayed. (Hence if I died before I prayed...) Yet I could not erase the passages that spoke of forgiveness following confession. The two truths had to coexist. The Sacraments were the same. They offered a forgiveness that most people who partook of them already possessed. As far as the Sacrament being a work, I sometimes begin to wonder if the true fear of evangelicals is not of salvation by works, but of salvation by grace! We see a member of the congregation go forward to receive the body and blood of Christ. This is no work, for the individual could do nothing to earn this privilege. In addition, the salvation is not a reward for partaking of the meal. We feast on salvation itself. I believe that the real fear is that things cannot be so easy. Yes, God does all the saving, but surely what we need to see for genuine salvation is an authentic spiritual experience—an MODERN REFORMATION

encounter, an inner moral change. Otherwise anyone could be saved! Yes. That is the point. The Reading of the Will When I first approached the issue of the Lord’s Supper, it took a while to formulate the right question. There is a strong tendency toward thinking that the question boils down to asking, “What is the Lord’s Supper?” and choosing the most rational-sounding answer. I had been reared an evangelical, so I knew that I had to bow to clear Scripture, but I wasn’t expecting Scripture to answer this question until it was put in front of me. The reason for this is simple. As an evangelical, I was taught that we held to biblical doctrine while the Roman Catholic church held to traditions of men. I knew that our views were definitely more biblical on certain issues, so I assumed that this would hold true in every controversy. When it came to the Lord’s Supper, things were different. The words Jesus spoke at the Last Supper, what we call the Words of Institution (“This is my body” and “This is the cup of the New Testament in my blood,” etc.) are taken more literally by Roman Catholics than by many Protestants. The Lutheran theologians that I read made it clear to me that the Words of Institution were not to be treated as just another passage of Scripture. Not only were they the words of God, as other Scripture, but they were special words of Jesus spoken on his last night on earth before his death. As the second generation Reformer Martin Chemnitz said, “The words of the Lord’s Supper are not to be treated in a light or frivolous way, but with great reverence and respect and in the fear of the Lord, because they are the words of the last will and testament of the Son of God.” 1 This changed everything. Before realizing this, I would have decided that since the Words of Institution were problematic if taken literally, I could consider them obscure words that needed to be clarified in light of clearer passages (i.e., passages which did not offend my reason). But if they were Christ’s Last Will and Testament, I could not do this. Even in the will of a mere human individual, a last will is sacred. It is understood that such a document is written in order to be a clear expression of a person’s will. No tampering is allowed. Would not the Lord of the universe take as much care to communicate clearly as someone planning the ultimate destiny of his worldly estate?

Another problem arose with the attempt to argue against the literal meaning of the text. The problem was not that the argument had no persuasive power, but that it proved too much. If you hesitate to accept the Real Presence preferring to believe that the bread and wine only symbolize the body and blood of Christ, you may find the Incarnation problematic as well. Someone who has problems believing in an Incarnation could use the same argument to say that Jesus just rep-resents God. After all, how could a creature be the Creator of the universe? The words “Jesus is God” can be taken to mean that Jesus is the best representation of God to us. When we accept the Incarnation, we forget about the problems and take the text literally, seeing that this is the most natural understanding. The same is true of the Words of Institution. But if difficulties in our understanding cause us to read them differently from their natural meaning, why can’t we do the same with the texts establishing the deity of Christ? Many have had problems with those, too. An Early Debate Some have claimed that the Lutheran view is the result of not reforming sufficiently. The Lutherans kept too much Catholic baggage, while the other reformers made a more thorough examination of the Bible. This argument might be plausible if there weren’t such a clear record of the controversy between the early Lutherans and their adversaries. Luther conducted a lengthy written exchange with Swiss Reformer Ulrich Zwingli over the meaning of the Words of Institution, and met him at Marburg for a formal discussion of the matter. He was aware of Zwingli’s arguments, and demonstrated a profound grasp of the points at issue. Some of Luther’s best writing is on this very subject. Luther said that Zwingli argued against him in the following manner. Zwingli argued that “This is my body” must be read to say “This represents my body.” According to him, “is” means “represents” here. After claiming that this substitution of words is necessary, they argue that there is no passage of Scripture that says that Christ’s body is in the Supper. Then they say that they are willing to be “humbly instructed” if the point can be proved from Scripture. Luther says that this is a sneaky way to argue, offering another example of how such reasoning might be used: MAY/JUNE 1997

to see that if there was any way these words could be taken literally, then they must be taken literally. Luther offered some other interesting arguments. One was like an early version of Pascal’s wager. If you are uncertain of the biblical position, which error would you rather make, taking Christ’s words too literally, or too loosely? If you take them too loosely, there will be no good explanation. If you take them too literally, you can at least tell him: “Sorry, Lord. I thought that when you said ‘This is my body’ you meant it literally. I didn’t want to tamper with your last will and testament.” Luther also foresaw a time when people would question his retention of certain Catholic teachings on the ground that he hadn’t gotten around to examining them biblically. He said:

This is certainly an extraordinary situation! It is just as if I denied that God had created the heavens and the earth, and asserted with Aristotle and Pliny and other heathen that the world existed from eternity, but someone came and held Moses under my nose, Genesis 1 [:11] “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”; I would try to make the text read: “God” now should mean the same as “cuckoo,” “created” the same as “ate,” and “the heavens and the earth” the same as “the hedge sparrow, feathers and all.” The word of Moses thus would read according to Luther’s text, “In the beginning the cuckoo ate the hedge sparrow, feathers and all,” and could not possibly mean, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” What a marvelous art this would be—one with which rascals are quite familiar! Or, if I denied that the Son of God had become man, and someone confronted me with John 1 [:14], “The word became flesh,” suppose I were to say: Let “Word” mean “a gambrel” and “flesh” “a mallet,” and thus the text must now read, “The gambrel became a mallet.” And if my conscience tried to reproach me, saying, “You take a good deal of liberty with your interpretation, Sir Martin, but—but—” etc., I would press until I became red in the face, and say, “Keep quiet, you traitor with your ‘but,’ I don’t want the people to notice that I have such a bad conscience!” Then I would boast and clap my hands, saying, “The Christians have no Scripture which proves that God’s Word became flesh.” But I would also turn around and, bowing low in humility, offer gladly to be instructed, if they would show me with the Scripture that I have just finished twisting around. Ah, what a rumpus I would stir up among Jews and Christians, in the New and the Old Testaments, if such brazenness were allowed me!2

Notice this! Luther offers his treatment of the Sacrament of the Altar as the prime example of careful biblical dealing with a disputed doctrine. It is possible for the Catholics to be correct and Protestants wrong in a given controversy. In the case of the Lord’s Supper, Luther did have problems with Roman teaching, but these had to do with the view that the Supper was a resacrifice of Christ. The sacrifice of the Mass was the key point of dispute, not the Real Presence. Transubstantiation was a bad philosophical explanation of the Real Presence, but the Real Presence itself was a biblical teaching.

I was not Lutheran when I first read this passage. It was certainly one of the most humorous passages in theology that I had ever read—and still is. It is far removed from the passionless academic style we have come to expect. Yet I find it strangely convincing. The quote made me stand back and ask whether this was what I had really done with the Words of Institution. I wondered what the words, “This is my body,” meant, and I wanted to find the answer in another passage. I thought that this was the proper way to approach a problem passage. I had been told to interpret unclear passages in the light of clear passages. But was the passage unclear, or merely difficult? It is not the words that are so hard to understand, but the reality behind them. I slowly came

The Present Mediator Doing further reading, I found that the Lutheran teaching on Communion was grounded in the doctrine of the Two Natures in Christ. For Christ to be really God Incarnate, his divine nature could not be separated from his human nature by an interval of space. In the book of Colossians we are told that “In Christ, all the fullness of the deity dwells bodily.” If this is true, there is no deity apart from the humanity. Luther said that if we could find a location in creation where the divine nature existed apart from the human nature, we would have discovered a part of the divine nature that was not incarnate, and had never been incarnate. He said that he did not want anyone to try such a God on him! The

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If anyone after my death should say: If Dr. Luther were living now, he would teach and hold this or that article differently, for he did not sufficiently consider it, against this I say now as then, and then as now, that, by God’s grace, I have most diligently compared all these articles with the Scriptures time and again, and have gone over them, and would defend them as confidently as I have now defended the Sacrament of the Altar.3

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point was that Christ as the God-Man is our Mediator. To meet God apart from the Mediator was to confront a consuming fire. While this teaching is incomprehensible and leads to some paradoxes, the opposing teaching leads to deeper problems. My pastor once demonstrated this by diagramming the Lutheran view and the Reformed view side-by-side. In Lutheranism, the humanity of Christ is placed between us and his deity. In the Reformed view, the humanity of Christ is absent from us, residing in a particular location in a spatial heaven. Here the deity is placed between us and his humanity. This presents an upside-down incarnation.

Salvation by grace! … I believe that the real fear is that things cannot be so easy. This teaching is too involved to do justice to as a section of an article. I merely wish to present my own prog ress in thinking on the subject. There are objections to my view which I have not raised, and answers to those objections which I do not have room to explain. An interested reader can consult Martin Chemnitz’s book, The Two Natures in Christ, for a detailed treatment. The Plausibility Factor Sometimes even when an argument is convincing intellectually, we can have a difficult time accepting its conclusions because our past experience makes the opposing view more plausible. This was the case with me regarding the Lutheran teaching on the Lord’s Supper. The arguments were convincing, and from the Bible the subject seemed important, yet I had never seen it treated as a vital part of the Christian life. It required being in a congregation that practiced Communion weekly to see how vital the doctrine really was, not just in theory, but in practice. Experiencing the Lord’s Supper clothed in the language and music of a beautiful liturgy was helpful to me as well. While the true importance of the Lord’s Supper does not rest in whether the wine is a vintage wine served in a gold cup,

or whether the service is chanted, these things may be helps. If past practice made the act seem trivial in comparison to other things, when our minds become convinced of its importance, it might help to have a crutch for our emotions. I am arguing for my readers to allow their minds to convince them that feeding their feelings might be a good thing. Are You in the Will of God? It is a common question asked among evangelicals whether or not they are in the will of God. The Lutherans can answer that question from another angle. “Yes, you are in the will of God,” we can confidently say. “You are in his last will and testament. Knowing that he was going to die, God decided to have you written into his will. The legacy he left was his body and blood, along with all of the honors, rights and privileges appertaining.” If we were to say this to someone, he or she might first think that we were guilty of a trick. We speak narrowly of a last will. Yet if God does not change, was not this his will all along? We have not skirted the question, but answered the deeper question that lay beneath it. We cannot place ourselves in the will of God through perfect obedience, for we are imperfect. To the extent that we fail, we must not trick ourselves into believing that this is mostly a matter of ignorance—that if we only knew the will of God we would do it. No, the matter is out of our hands. But God has placed us in his will, so that unworthy heirs though we are, we might receive life and salvation through the body and blood of his Son. Not only so. We know where to receive this gift: at an altar of a church that confesses that it has come together to receive the body and blood of Christ for the forgiveness of sins.

Rick Ritchie, ACE staff writer and a contributing author to Christ the Lord: The Reformation and Lordship Salvation, is a graduate of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts. He attends Holy Trinity Church (LCMS).

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WE CONFESS

The following are excerpts from the confessional standards of our three traditions, selected to provide a representative rather than exhaustive summary. THE LUTHERANS It is taught among us that baptism is necessary and that grace is offered through it. Children, too, should be baptized, for in baptism they are committed to God and become acceptable to him. On this account the Anabaptists, who teach that infant baptism is not right, are rejected. It is taught among us that the true body and blood of Christ are really present in the supper of our Lord under the form of bread and wine and are there distributed and received. The contrary doctrine is therefore rejected…. It is taught among us that the sacraments were instituted not only to be signs by which people might be identified outwardly as Christians, but that they are signs and testimonies of God’s will toward us for the purpose of awakening and strengthening our faith. For this reason they require faith, and they are rightly used when they are received in faith and for the purpose of strengthening faith. It is taught among us that nobody should publicly teach or preach or administer the sacraments in the church without a regular call. —The Augsburg Confession, Articles 9-10, 13-14 Q. What is Baptism? A. Baptism is not simple water only, but it is the water comprehended in God’s command and connected with God’s word... Q. What does Baptism give or profit? A. It works forgiveness of sins, delivers from death and the devil, and gives eternal salvation to all who believe this, as the words and promises of God declare. Q. Which are such words and promises of God? A. Christ, our Lord, says in the last chapter of Mark: He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned. Q. How can water do such great things? A. It is not the water indeed that does them, but the word of God which is in and with the water, and faith, which trusts such word of God in the water. For without the word of God the water is simple water and no Baptism. But with the word of God it is a Baptism, that is, a gracious water of life and a washing of regeneration in the Holy Ghost, as St. Paul says, Titus, chapter third…. Q. What is the Sacrament of the Altar? A. It is the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ under the bread and wine, for us Christians to eat and to drink, instituted by Christ Himself… Q. What is the benefit of such eating and drinking? A. That is shown us by these words, “Given and shed for you for the remission of sins”; namely, that in the Sacrament forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation are given us through these words. For where there is forgiveness of sins, there is also life and salvation. Q. How can bodily eating and drinking do such great things? A. It is not the eating and drinking indeed that does them, but the words here written, “Given and shed for you for the remission of sins”; which words, besides the bodily eating and drinking, are the chief thing in the Sacrament; and he that believes these words has what they say and express, namely, the forgiveness of sins…. —The Sacraments of Holy Baptism and the Altar, as the Head of the Family should teach [them] in a simple way to his household, Luther’s Small Catechism

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THE REFORMED But the principal thing which God promises in all sacraments and to which all the godly in all ages direct their attention (some call it the substance and matter of the sacraments) is Christ the Savior—that only sacrifice, and that Lamb of God slain from the foundation of the world; that rock, also, from which all our fathers drank, by whom all the elect are circumcised without hands through the Holy Spirit, and are washed from all their sins, and are nourished with the very body and blood of Christ unto eternal life… For as the Word of God remains the true Word of God, in which, when it is preached, not only bare words are repeated, but at the same time the things signified or announced in words are offered by God, even if the ungodly and unbelievers hear and understand the words yet do not enjoy the things signified, because they do not receive them by true faith; so the sacraments, which by the Word consist of signs and the things signified, remain true and inviolable sacraments, signifying not only sacred things, but, by God offering, the things signified, even if unbelievers do not receive the things offered. This is not the fault of God who gives and offers them, but the fault of men who receive them without faith and illegitimately; but whose unbelief does not invalidate the faithfulness of God (Rom. 3:3 f )…. Now to be baptized in the name of Christ is to be enrolled, entered, and received into the covenant and family, and so into the inheritance of the sons of God; yes, and in this life to be called after the name of God; that is to say, to be called a son of God; to be cleansed also from filthiness of sins, and to be granted the manifold grace of God, in order to lead a new and innocent life...We condemn the Anabaptists, who deny that newborn infants of the faithful are to be baptized…Why should those who belong to God and are in his Church not be initiated by holy baptism? We condemn the Anabaptists in the rest of their peculiar doctrines which they hold contrary to the Word of God. We therefore are not Anabaptists and have nothing in common with them… For the flesh and blood of Christ is the true food and drink unto life eternal; and Christ himself, since he was given for us and is our Savior, is the principal thing in the Supper, and we do not permit anything else to be substituted in his place” —The Second Helvetic Confession, Chapters 19-21 We believe that our good God, mindful of our crudeness and weakness, has ordained sacraments for us to seal his promises in us, to pledge his good will and grace toward us, and also to nourish and sustain our faith. He has added these to the Word of the gospel to represent better to our external senses both what he enables us to understand by his Word and what he does inwardly in our hearts, confirming in us the salvation he imparts to us. For they are visible signs and seals of something internal and invisible, by means of which God works in us through the power of the Holy Spirit. So they are not empty and hollow signs to fool and deceive us, for their truth is Jesus Christ, without whom they would be nothing. Moreover, we are satisfied with the number of sacraments that Christ our Master has ordained for us. There are only two: the sacrament of baptism and the Holy Supper of Jesus Christ. —The Belgic Confession, Article 33 Q. Where has Christ promised that we are as certainly washed with his blood and Spirit as with the water of baptism? A. In the institution of Baptism which runs thus: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” “He who believes and is baptized will be saved: but he who does not believe will be condemned.” This promise is also repeated where the Scriptures call baptism ‘the water of rebirth’ and the washing away of sins. —The Heidelberg Catechism, Question 71 The sacraments become effectual means of salvation, not by any power in themselves or any virtue derived from the piety or intention of him by whom they are administered; but only by the working of the Holy Ghost, and the blessing of Christ by whom they are instituted… The efficacy of Baptism is not tied to that moment of time wherein it is administered; yet, notwithstanding, by the right use of this ordinance the grace promised is not only offered, but really exhibited and conferred by the Holy Ghost, to such (whether of age or infants) as that grace belongeth unto, according to the counsel of God’s own will, in his appointed time…. —The Westminster Confession, Chapter 28, 30, and The Larger Catechism, Question 161 THE BAPTISTS Baptism and the Lord’s supper are ordinances of positive and sovereign institution, appointed by the Lord Jesus, the only lawgiver, to be continued in His Church to the end of the world. These holy appointments are to be administered by those only who are qualified, and thereunto called, according to the commission of Christ.

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Believers’ Baptism: MORE THAN AMERICAN INDIVIDUALISM TIMOTHY GEORGE n January 5, 1527, at 3 o’clock Saturday afternoon, Felix Manz was drowned to death in the icy waters of the Limmat River by order of the Zurich City Council. He had been identified as “one of the real beginners and chief promoters” of the Anabaptist movement. By his own admission he had (re)baptized a woman in Embrach and declared that, if released, he would do the same kind of thing again.1

A month after Manz’s execution, a group of Anabaptists issued the Schleitheim Confession in which they declared that Baptism should be administered only to those “who have been taught repentance and a change of life and in truth believe their sins to have been blotted out through Christ.”2 In 1529, the imperial diet at Speyer revived the ancient Code of Justinian which specified the death penalty for the practice of rebaptism. It is important to recognize that the Reformation tradition of believers’ Baptism was forged in the context of persecution and martyrdom. Something was decisively at stake for those who were willing to accept the loss of livelihood, the forfeiture of home, land, and family, even torture and death “for the testimony of God and their conscience,” as Menno Simons put it. Their courage, of course, does not automatically validate their convictions: that can be done only by direct appeal to the touchstone of Holy Scripture. However, it should certainly cause one to ponder why Baptism was once deemed so important that some Christians were willing to die for it, and others to kill over it. In contemporary American culture, Baptism seldom involves personal sacrifice or hardship. Karl Barth once characterized Infant Baptism in Europe’s state churches as “a part of the landscape...mightier than the wall of Berlin and the cathedral of Cologne or whatever you please.”3 In many of our churches, both paedo- and credobaptist, Baptism is as American as the Statue of Liberty or Sunday afternoon football. By becoming safely routinized

as a part of the ecclesiastical landscape, Baptism tends to lose its basic New Testament meaning as the decisive transition from an old way of human life to a new way; as an act of radical obedience in which a specific renunciation is made and a specific promise is given. One of the most telling arguments against believers’ Baptism is that it is the liturgical enactment of modern rugged individualism. James Daane has put the case this way: We Americans have been brought up on the tradition of individualism. In business, in politics, in morals, even in religion, we have been taught that it is “every man for himself.”...The largest part of the American church has been MAY/JUNE 1997

invaded by the spirit of individualism.... This unbiblical individualism has led to a denial of infant Baptism, to the belief that a child cannot be a member of the church by birth, but only by individual choice.4 More recently, William H. Willimon, in his superb Peculiar Speech: Preaching to the Baptized, has restated the same objection. “Those who baptize only adults sometimes say that they wait to baptize until a person ‘knows what it means.’ This rationale owes more to the rationalism of the Enlightenment than to anything biblical.”5 It must be conceded that these arrows hit their target as a critique of contemporary baptismal practice in many Churches. When the Church degenerates from the communion of saints into an aggregate of likeminded individuals, or worse, into an “amorphous mass of Pelagian good will,” then believers’ Baptism indeed becomes a pro forma initiation into a holy club, a meritorious act to be performed, rather than a thankful and obedient response to what God has done. However, over against the attenuated meaning of Baptism in many modern churches stands the doctrine of believers’ Baptism advocated in this article. Rooted in both the historic Baptist tradition and the leading principles of Reformation theology, this doctrine affirms both the sovereignty of God in salvation and the corporate character of the Christian community. It also makes full allowance for the genuinely free and responsible role of repentance and faith as constitutive for the act of Baptism. Early Baptist Developments Modern historians agree that the modern Baptist movement rose from John Smyth who, in the winter of 1609, took water from a basin and poured it over his head in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. After rebaptizing himself, he then rebaptized his entire congregation of English Separatist refugees at Amsterdam. In 1612, a splinter group from Smyth’s congregation returned to London and founded what has rightly been called the first Baptist church on English soil. Out of this small sect emerged the General Baptists, so called because of their belief in the universal scope of Christ’s atoning work. Another stream of English Baptists arose later, and independently, of these early General Baptists. They emerged out of an independent congregation founded at London in 1616 by Henry Jacob, a radical Puritan Congregationalist. In time, this congregation also split in a number of different directions, some members questioning the validity of Infant Baptism, and beginning to form congregations around the principle of believers’ Baptism. Richard Blunt, one of the 42

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movement’s leaders, thought that Baptism “ought to be by dipping the body into the water, resembling burial and rising again.” 6 Within a few years, immersion became the universal mode of Baptism among both the General Baptists, with their Arminian theology, and the Particular Baptists, as they came to be called, because of their idea that Christ had died only for the elect. In 1644, the Particular Baptists published one of the first Baptist confessions of faith in England, the London Confession, in which the following statement on Baptism is given: The way and manner of the dispensing of this Ordinance the Scripture holds out to be dipping or plunging the whole body under water: it being a signe, must answer the thing signified, which are these: first, the washing the whole soule in the bloud of Christ; secondly, that interest the Saints have in the death, buriall, and resur rection; thirdly, together with a confirmation of our faith, that as certainly as the body is buried under water, and riseth againe, so certainly shall the bodies of the Saints be raised by the power of Christ, in the day of the resurrection, to reigne with Christ.7 This was a radical act in England in the 1640s. Thomas Edwards, Presbyterian polemicist, was greatly shocked at this practice of believers’ Baptism by immersion. In one of his writings he issued the following: “Whosoever rebaptized any that had been formerly baptized should be immediately cast into the water and drowned.”8 As a matter of fact, few if any English Baptists were drowned in the seventeenth century, unlike the Anabaptists on the continent in an earlier period. However, since their meetings were illegal, many of them spent time in prison and some died there during the years of persecution prior to the Act of Toleration of 1689. By the early eighteenth century the General Baptists had largely lapsed into Unitarianism. The Baptist apologetic was carried forward by the Particulars who remained staunchly Calvinistic in theology. In 1689, they published the Second London Confession (originally drafted in 1677) which was modeled on the Westminster Confession of 1649. With minor adaptations, the Second London Confession was adopted by the Philadelphia Baptist Association, which secured the services of Benjamin Franklin to republish it in 1743. It quickly became the dominant confessional standard for Baptists in America. The difference between General and Particular Baptists is seen in the way they handled the question of salvation for babies who die in infancy. Both parties, of course, refused to consign such little ones to perdition MODERN REFORMATION

for lack of Baptism. The Generals, however, argued from the innocence of infant nature, while the Particulars stressed the effectual calling of God which extends even to “elect infants...and all other elect persons who are uncapable of being outwardly called by the Ministry of the Word.”9 Baptism, though, should be reserved for those who have been quickened and renewed by the Holy Spirit, and are thus “enabled to answer this call and to embrace the grace offered and conveyed in it.” However, repentance and faith, which are the content of such an “embrace,” are not so much human products as gifts of a gracious God whose overcoming mercy (a better term than “irresistible grace”) is announced and celebrated in the act of believers’ Baptism.

Where Westminster sees the covenant dispensed through Baptism which may be administered not only to those who personally profess faith in Christ but also to infants, the Baptists restrict Baptism to “those who do actually profess repentance towards God, faith in, and obedience to our Lord Jesus.” In the preface to the Second London Confession, the Baptists of 1689 acknowledged the close similarity between their document and other or thodox confessions, even to the point of common wording “in all the fundamental articles of the Christian religion.” Claiming that they “have no itch to clog religion with new words,” they asserted solidarity with other believers “in that wholesome Protestant doctrine” which had occupied the great reformers of the sixteenth century.10 The framers of the Second London Confession

followed the Westminster divines in describing God’s salvific acts in terms of a covenantal relationship. Through a covenant of grace, God freely offers salvation to sinners, requiring faith in Jesus Christ and promising the Holy Spirit “to make them willing and able to believe.” However, where Westminster sees the covenant dispensed through Baptism which may be administered not only to those who personally profess faith in Christ but also to infants, the Baptists restrict Baptism to “those who do actually profess repentance towards God, faith in, and obedience to our Lord Jesus.”11 The ferocity of the Baptism debate can still be felt in the titles of polemical tracts volleyed from one side to the other: Daniel Featly’s The Dipper Dipt (1644); Samuel Fisher’s Baby-baptism meer baptism (1653); Richard Carpenter’s The Anabaptist washt and washt, and shrunk in the washing (1653); William Russell’s Infant baptism is willworship (1700), and so on. Out of this controversy emerged a distinctively Calvinistic understanding of believers’ Baptism, a tradition which held together the twin Reformation emphases of sola gratia and sola fide. One of the earliest exponents of this perspective was Thomas Patient who argued against paedobaptism on the basis of Calvinistic soteriology in his The Doctrine of Baptism and the Distinction of the Covenants (1654). Others who took up this line of defense included John Bunyan, Benjamin Keach, John Gill, Abraham Booth, Alexander Carson, and Charles H. Spurgeon. In recent years a contemporary statement of this view has been set forth in two important works: David Kingdon, Children of Abraham (1973), and Paul K. Jewett, Infant Baptism and the Covenant of Grace (1978).12 To these must be added Karl Barth’s significant treatment of Baptism in the final part volume of his Church Dogmatics (IV/4). In elaborating the theological significance of believers’ Baptism on Reformed presuppositions, these writers were forced to deal with a complex of issues which first surfaced during the Reformation itself and have remained central in all subsequent discussions. Baptism and Faith In reviewing the baptismal debates of the Reformation, Karl Barth issued the following challenge: “The one great dogmatic problem with every theory of infant Baptism...is that of the relationship between the event of baptism, on the one hand, and the faith of the one baptized on the other.”13 This problem is inherent in the fact that those New Testament passages which provide some of the clearest insights into the meaning of Baptism (e.g., Gal. 3:26-27, Rom. 6:1-11, I Pet. 3:21, Col. 2:11-12) invariably conjoin Baptism with repentance/faith as integral aspects of the same reality. Significantly, this point was conceded by the Lima Report on Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry in a delicate MAY/JUNE 1997

statement of ecumenical compromise: “While the possibility that infant baptism was practiced in the apostolic age cannot be excluded, baptism upon personal profession of faith is the most clearly attested pattern in the New Testament documents.” 14 The most recent investigation of the origins of Infant Baptism, which builds upon the classic exchange between Kurt Aland and Joachim Jeremias a generation ago, indicates that the earliest baptismal rites were designed for those who could personally declare their own faith. Only gradually, and somewhat awkwardly, were such liturgies accommodated to small children and infants.15 Reformed Baptists have pointed out that the very definitions of Baptism set forth in the confessions of the Reformation presuppose an inextricable linkage between Baptism and faith. For example, the Anglican Catechism puts the question, “What is required of persons to be baptized?” and answers, “Repentance, whereby they forsake sin, and faith, whereby they steadfastly believe the promises of God made to them in that sacrament.” 16 Similarly, the First Helvetic Confession declares, “We therefore by being baptized do confess our faith.”17 Such language merely reflects the New Testament portrayal of Baptism; indeed, that is why the Reformers, good biblical theologians that they were, included it in their doctrinal standards! Invariably, though, when the subject of Infant Baptism is introduced, there is a backing away from such clear affirmations and, one can only say, an abnormal resorting to qualifying adversatives: but, nevertheless, although, yet, not only, etc.18 The clear impression is that the evangelical understanding of faith is being accommodated, rather unnaturally, to the prevailing practice of paedobaptism. Of all the mainline Reformers none saw the inviolable nexus between Baptism and faith more clearly than Martin Luther. From his early treatise on The Holy and Blessed Sacrament of Baptism (1519) onwards, Luther challenged the ex opere operatum of medieval sacramentalism with the opposing nullum sacramentum sine fide, “without faith there is no sacrament.”19 The principle is specifically applied to Baptism in the Small Catechism (1529): Water does nothing, but “the Word of God connected with the water, and our faith which relies upon the Word of God connected with the water.”20 In the face of the Anabaptist challenge, Luther did not shrink from a full-blown doctrine of infant faith. Rather than trying to peep into people’s hearts to see whether or not they believe, we should trust that in Baptism the infant is changed, cleansed, and renewed by “inpoured faith” (fides infusa). The fact that the intellective processes of the infant are in abeyance is no hindrance to the impartation of faith; if anything, it is easier for an infant to receive faith since “whorish” 44

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reason is not as likely to get in the way!21 Against this defense of paedobaptism, the following arguments have been set forth: (1) It compromises Luther’s own doctrine of justification by faith alone. What is the difference between fides infusa (infused faith) and the various schemes of gratia infusa (infused grace) against which Luther inveighed so forcefully? Can we speak of faith “clinging to the water” and of God himself “intermingled” with the baptismal water without relapsing into a medieval, magical way of thought?22 (2) It violates the consistent New Testament sequence of preaching—faith—Baptism. This is true not only for the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20) where the clearly intended order is evangelize—baptize—catechize, but also in the several “household” Baptisms (Acts 16:33, 18:8; 1 Cor. 1:16) where proclamation and response invariably preceded Baptism. (3) It trivializes the decisive role of repentance. In the sphere of the New Testament, Baptism signifies a life-transforming transition from decay and death into the newness of life in Jesus Christ. This requires not only the positive response of faith but also a renunciation, a deliberate turning away from one’s former pattern of life. The early baptismal liturgies recognized this as part of Christian initiation by requiring the baptized to spit in the direction of darkness, i.e., in the face of Satan.23 It was repenters’ baptism as well as believers’ baptism. But, if infant faith is barely conceivable, does infant repentance make any sense at all? To Luther’s retort that we are Christians even when we slumber, it should be recalled that no one in the New Testament was ever baptized while asleep! What has been called the “uneasy conscience” of this apology for paedobaptism is reflected in the practice of sponsors who confess faith on behalf of the infant during the baptismal rite. According to this tradition, common to Anglican and Lutheran liturgies, the minister asks the infant about to be baptized a series of questions: “Do you believe in the God the Father Almighty, etc.”; “Do you wish to be baptized in this faith?”; “Will you obey God’s commandments all the days of your life?” In the First Prayer Book of Edward VI, the minister also asks, “Doest thou forsake the devil and all his workes?…Doest thou forsake the carnal degrees of the flesh?” To each query the sponsors reply, “I will.” Then the minister baptizes not the sponsors, of course, but the baby for whom they have answered. Concerning this practice Jewett has asked: “If the child can renounce his sin, confess his faith, and promise to obey God vicariously, why can he not be baptized vicariously? If it is unthinkable that the sponsors should kneel and have the water of sacred baptism...applied to their heads in the infant’s stead, how may we be sure that it is God’s will that they make to him the most solemn promises ever to move mortal lips MODERN REFORMATION

in the infant’s stead?”24 Despite strong objections to paedobaptism based on fides infantilis (infant faith) or fides vicaria (vicarious faith), these views at least maintain (however inadequately) the biblical connection between faith and Baptism. With respect to this one crucial point, then, those who practice believers’ Baptism stand closer to the Lutheran and Anglican traditions than to their Reformed cousins. Covenantal Continuity For the most part, advocates of believers’ Baptism have been content to rest their case on the basis of Scriptural evidence alone. While they would hardly have regarded Jacques Bossuet as an ally, Baptist apologists would have agreed with the French Catholic bishop’s appraisal of Protestant paedobaptism: As touching infants, the so-called reformed say that their baptism is grounded on the authority of Scripture, but they bring us no place out of it, expressly affirming it, and what consequences they draw of the same, they are very far-fetched, not to say very doubtful, and too deceitful.25 Bossuet, of course, believed in infant Baptism, but he thought that it could only be supported by appealing to church tradition. However, within the first generation of Reformed theologians, a powerful argument for infant Baptism was set forth on the basis of the covenantal unity of the Old and New Testaments. Huldrych Zwingli, the chief architect of this construct, understood that he was plowing new ground. Whereas Luther could rejoice that Baptism was the one Sacrament which had remained “untouched and untainted” by human corruption, Zwingli concluded that all the teachers of the church since the days of the apostles had been in error on Baptism. “We shall have to tread a different path,” he noted.26 Early on, Zwingli had agreed with the Anabaptist premise that Baptism should not be administered to children prior to the age of discretion.27 In June 1523, he wrote to Thomas Wyttenbach: “You can wash an unbeliever a thousand times in the water of baptism, but unless he believes, it is in vain.”28 Nor did Zwingli have any sympathy for the idea of an infant faith. His fear of idolatry prompted him to reject any for m of sacramental objectivism which connected spiritual reality too closely to material signs. Water baptism could only be a rite of initiation whereby those who received it were dedicated or pledged to the Lord. Just like the white cross sewn onto the uniform of a Swiss confederate, Baptism publicly marked one off as a member of Christ’s army, the militia Christi. It is, he said, our “visible (sichtbarlich) entry and sealing into Christ.”29

But how could such a sign be applied to infants? Zwingli’s answer, elaborated by Bullinger and Calvin, derived from the analogy between Circumcision and Baptism: Just as the children of God’s people were circumcised in the Old Testament as a sign of the covenant, so the children of believers in the New Testament should be baptized as a sign of their ingrafting into the Christian Church. Jesus himself, it was said, submitted both to Circumcision and to the Baptism of John, thereby joining the rites of the two dispensations and signifying that they were of equal value.30

With respect to the connection between faith and Baptism, those who practice believers’ Baptism stand closer to the Lutheran and Anglican traditions than to their Reformed cousins. Some proponents of believers’ Baptism have responded to this argument by denying outright the analogy between Circumcision and Baptism. According to this view, Circumcision was a pre-messianic sign given to the covenant people in order to mark them off from other nations until the advent of Christ. Newborn male members of the nation of Israel received the sign of Circumcision as a distinguishing mark of their role in propagating the chosen people. The meaning of Circumcision was exhausted with the birth of Jesus. Baptists, however, have tended to interpret Circumcision in a broader, more positive light. First of all, even in the Old Testament, Circumcision was a symbol of an inward cleansing and renewal of the heart (Deut. 10:16; Jer. 4:4; Ezek. 44:7). This symbolic significance of Circumcision is carried forward into the New Testament as well. Thus Paul can refer to Gentile Christians as “the true circumcision” who worship God in the Spirit (Phil. 3:3). MAY/JUNE 1997

The key text for this thesis is Colossians 2:11-12, the one New Testament passage where Circumcision and Baptism are brought into parallel position. Here Paul says that in Christ we have received a “circumcision made without hands.” This has happened through a “putting off ” (cf. the “putting on” of Christ in Baptism in Gal. 3:27) of the old life in the “circumcision of Christ,” a reference either to the cross of Christ or to the forgiveness and inner transformation wrought thereby (cf. Col. 2:13). Having experienced the grace of God in this way, Paul continues, you were buried with Christ in Baptism and also raised with him—through faith. Thus regeneration, the inward Circumcision not made with hands, is the New Testament antitype for which literal Circumcision in the Old Testament was the type.31 The effort to identify Circumcision with Infant Baptism breaks down with the discontinuity between heredity and faith. As G. Ernest Wright once put it, “In the Old Testament the prophets pointed to the one Israel within the nation, whereas in the New Testament by a logical extension Israel became the ‘seed of Abraham’ by faith rather than heredity.”32 Clearly this is Paul’s argument in Galatians 3:23-29. Had Circumcision been displaced with Infant Baptism in the economy of the Christian dispensation, Paul would have had a ready-made argument to use against the “foolish Galatians” who were tempted to “make a good showing in the flesh” (Gal. 6:12). He could have simply said to them: “Circumcision is a thing of the past. Have your children baptized rather than circumcized.” Instead he proceeds on a different basis by relativizing Circumcision in light of its true New Testament fulfillment: not Baptism, but the new birth, regeneration. “For neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation” (Gal. 6:15). If the Reformed doctrine of believers’ Baptism shares with Luther a fir m commitment to the coinherence of Baptism and faith, it resonates equally strongly with Zwingli and Calvin on the unity of God’s people through the ages. The theology of grace which undergirds Reformed soteriology presupposes that there is one way of salvation, one Mediator between God and humankind, and one destiny for all the saints, that Heavenly City which hath foundations, the new Jerusalem. However, Baptism in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit points not only to the sovereignty of God in salvation, manifested in the one covenant of grace, but also to the eschatological fulfillment of that covenant in the incarnate Christ and the calling forth of his body, the Church. True, the people of God are one, “but the difference between the two ‘administrations’ is cataclysmic, for they are separated by a gulf and an unscalable height, the death of the Christ and the glory of his Easter, with the age of the Spirit ensuing.”33 To 46

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fail to recognize the diversity as well as the unity of the old and new dispensations is to succumb to a flattened, truncated view of redemptive history. Historically, the doctrine of believers’ Baptism has implied a gathered church, a community of intentional disciples marked off from the world by their commitment to Christ and to one another. Baptism is the liturgical enactment of the priesthood of all believers, not the priesthood of “the believer,” a lonely, isolated seeker of truth, but rather of a band of faithful believers united in a common confession as a local, visible congregatio sanctorum (holy congregation). In the waters of Baptism we confess the priority of God’s grace in bringing us to repentance and faith. In the midst of the baptized community we stand before God and intercede for one another. We proclaim God’s Word and celebrate God’s presence among us in worship, praise, and fellowship. As a part of the baptizing community we declare the overflowing mercy of God to all peoples everywhere, “showing forth the wonderful deeds of him who has called [us] out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Pet. 2:9). Pastoral Concerns The recovery of a robust doctrine of believers’ Baptism can serve as an antidote to the theological minimalism and atomistic individualism which prevail in many credobaptist churches in our culture. Baptism is not only the solemn profession of a redeemed sinner, our “appeal to God for a clear conscience,” as the New Testament puts it (1 Pet. 3:21); it is also a sacred and serious act of incorporation into the visible community of faith. Such an understanding of Baptism calls for the reform of our baptismal practice at several critical points. First, Baptism should be restored to its rightful place as a central liturgical act of Christian worship. Too often it is tagged on to the beginning or end of the service as an appendage to the “main event.” Many early Baptists, both in England and America, practiced the laying on of hands following Baptism. This consecration or setting apart recalls the baptismal rites of the early church in which confirmation, enacted through anointing with oil or the laying on of hands, was seen as an integral part of Baptism itself and not as a separate Sacrament. The service of Baptism should also be related to the reverent and frequent celebration of the Lord’s Supper, understood not as a “mere symbol” performed in remembrance of an absent Savior, but rather as real communion with a risen Lord who invites and meets His redeemed people at this spiritual banquet. Along with prayer and the reading of Scripture, the baptismal liturgy should include the personal confession of the one being baptized, preferably spoken from the baptismal waters, as well as the renewal of baptismal vows MODERN REFORMATION

by the participating congregation. The tradition of an outdoor ceremony performed in a creek, river, or lake has much to commend it. The trauma of death and resurrection, which Baptism symbolizes, is hardly conveyed when things are too neat and convenient. Such is the case with a new-fangled baptistry in which the minister does not even enter the water but, standing behind a plastic shield, simply reaches over and submerges the baptismal candidate who is seated on a reclining chair! Secondly, Baptism should be related directly to the discipline and covenantal commitments of the congregation. The role of catechesis in the process of baptismal preparation is also crucial if we are to avoid trivializing the meaning of Baptism. As James F. White has pointed out, “No system is immune from indiscriminate baptism.”34 As credobaptists have evolved from small sectarian beginnings to what might be called the catholic phase of our history, both the covenantal and disciplinary features of our Church life have become marginal to our identity. We have reacted against the harshness and legalism which has sometimes characterized this dimension of our tradition. Yet the faith we confess in Baptism requires us to deal with these issues. What are the standards of holiness which ought to distinguish a man or woman of God? What are the ethical implications of our corporate decisions? Can we recover a structure of accountability in our congregational life without relapsing into narrow judgmentalism? Finally, believers’ Baptism must be practiced alongside a proper theology of children. While there is no hereditary right to salvation or church membership inherent in the circumstances of one’s birth, children of believing parents do stand in a special providential relationship to the people and promises of God. John Tombes, a seventeenth-century Reformed Baptist, spoke of the privileged status of such children who are “born in the bosom of the church, of godly parents, who by prayers, instruction, example, will undoubtedly educate them in the true faith of Christ.”35 Jesus took a special interest in children, received them into his arms, and blessed them. He did not baptize them. It is right that the children of Christian parents be set aside in a service of infant consecration in which the parents, along with the congregation, pledge to bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. We should always be sensitive to the evidences of God’s grace in their tender years and encourage their early interest in prayer, the reading of Holy Scripture, and the life of the Church. However, because biological childhood can never be transformed into spiritual childhood, we do not say to our children, “Be a good Christian child,” but rather “Repent and believe the

gospel.” The spiritual awakening and discernment of children, even within the same family, do not proceed at a uniform pace. Thus Christian parents and ministers of the Church must ever be vigilant in the nurture and counsel they offer. The salvation of children, like that of adults, is the gift of God. This divine self-giving is celebrated in a baptismal hymn written by Robert T. Daniel: Lord, in humble, sweet submission, Here we meet to follow thee: Trusting in thy great salvation, Which alone can make us free. Nought have we to claim as merit; All the duties we can do Can no crown of life inherit: All the praise to thee is due. Yet we come in Christian duty, Down beneath the wave to go; O the bliss! the heavenly beauty! Christ the Lord was buried so.

Timothy George is founding dean of Beeson Divinity School, Samford University and senior editor at Christianity Today. An earlier version of this article appeared in Interpretation 47 (1993), 242-254. He is ordained by the Southern Baptist Church.

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Calvin on the Eucharist W. ROBERT GODFREY

oth Luther and Zwingli had crucial points to make in the debate over the Lord’s Supper, but in my judgement, it was John Calvin who best resolved the question. Calvin began by agreeing with both sides on certain matters. He agreed with Zwingli that Christ is ascended and that his body is in heaven. He agreed with Zwingli that faith must be central in any adequate doctrine of the Lord’s Supper; it is only by faith that we can receive a blessing. But Calvin’s heart was really much closer to Luther because Calvin believed deeply and passionately that the Lord’s Supper is God’s gift to us. It is primarily God who acts in the Lord’s Supper. God is the giver; we receive that gift. With great passion Calvin agreed with Luther that we must seek our redemption in the body and blood of Christ and in his sacrificial death. We are united to Christ in his body and blood by the Holy Spirit. But that union is so intense, so real that we can rightly say we are “bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh” (Institutes III, 1, 3, cf. Gen. 2:23). Calvin said that we are embodied in Christ, as Ephesians 5:30 declares: “We are members of his body.” That is where our redemption comes from, Calvin insisted. Salvation is that union with Christ.

Calvin’s view, however, was not just that of a compromiser, taking bits and pieces from different people and fitting them together. He had his own distinct, important, and, I think, clear statement of what the Sacrament was about. First, he insisted that the Word is crucial. The preached Word makes the Sacrament intelligible, he said. It is only in union with the Word that we know the Lord’s blessing. It is only by the Spirit working through the Word that the blessing is ministered to us and sealed upon us. Yet—and this is the second point—the blessing is represented and presented to us in the bread 48

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and the wine. What are bread and wine? They are food, nourishment. So, says Calvin, that is what they represent spiritually; spiritual food. As by the mouth we receive bread and wine to the nourishment of our bodies, so by faith (which is the mouth of the soul) we receive the body and blood of Christ unto everlasting life. That food is Jesus Christ himself. We will only find life in Christ when we seek the substance of Christ in his flesh. For as soon as we depart from the sacrifice of his death we encounter nothing but death. In Christ’s flesh was accomplished man’s redemption. In it a sacrifice was offered to atone for sin in an obedience yielded to God to reconcile him to us. That flesh of Christ is our food, Calvin insists. We are to feed upon the Word, to be sure. But Calvin would say we must feed upon Christ too—on Jesus himself, who offers himself and all his benefits to us in the Supper—because it is only by being in and with Jesus that we can find redemption. That is why the MODERN REFORMATION

Supper is so important to us, so central in our life. It draws us back to the center and heart of the gospel. It is, you see, a visible Word; and the visible Word declares to us that there is salvation only in the body and blood of Christ. That body and blood are not just once and for all offered on the cross as a past and finished thing, but that body and blood, that real Christ, continue to be the life-giving spirit among us. It is our present union with Christ that builds us up and strengthens us. It is only as we seek union with the true Christ that we can be built up in that way. Moreover, as Calvin says, that promise of communion with Christ is offered in the Sacrament to everyone. He says, “Truly he offers and shows the reality there signified to all who sit at that spiritual banquet, although it is received with benefit by believers alone, who accept such great generosity with true gratefulness of heart” (Institutes, IV, 17, 10). He says that the Sacrament is like rain from heaven. It comes down as the offer and promise of God of new life in Christ. But, like rain, it falls on different kinds of ground. When it hits ground prepared by faith it comes as blessing, nourishment, and a source of growth. When it hits the hard rock of unbelief, it is still the same offer and promise, but it flows away with no profit to the soul (see Institutes, IV, 17, 33). Faith remains crucial to Calvin’s doctrine. It is only the faithful who know Christ. But when the faithful come to the table, they meet Christ himself. What Christ represents in the bread and wine he presents to faith as life-giving nourishment. Frequency of Observance On this basis, Calvin reflected on how often we ought to receive the Sacrament. Zwingli was in favor of administering the Sacrament once a year; and, of course, if you are having a memorial service, once a year is probably adequate. It is like Christmas. Christmas is delightful once a year, but it would be a bit much once a week. It is good once a year to spend some special time thinking about the birth of our Lord. But to do that every week would be impossible. Calvin, on the other hand, said that the Sacrament is much more than just a memorial. It is not just a time when we sit and think good thoughts. It is a time in which we are fed, nourished. We meet the risen Christ. Therefore, it should be frequent. How often should you pray? Once a year? No, we should pray and feed upon the Word frequently. So, said Calvin, we should feed upon Christ himself frequently. In the Institutes he says twice, “The Lord’s Supper should be administered at least once a week” (IV, 17, 44, and 46). Many Refor med Christians today administer communion only four times a year. We do that for a

“good” reason. Geneva’s city council refused to let Calvin administer the Sacrament once a week and would only let him offer it four times a year. So we follow the spiritual wisdom of those wise men, the city councilmen of Geneva, and ignore Calvin himself. For those of you who are more influenced by things British, it is interesting to note that in the 1644 Directory of Public Worship drawn up by the Westminster Assembly of Divines, it is said that the administration of communion should be frequent. Still, most Presbyterians have also followed something close to the wisdom of the Geneva councilmen. The frequency of administration may say something about what we expect to find at that table (or, maybe I should say, whom we expect to find at that table) and what the blessing of meeting Jesus Christ there really is. Calvin himself was the first to admit that the ins and outs of that blessing were a mystery. In fact, Calvin, who so often is represented as sort of a grim logician, reveals quite a mystical streak at this point. He says, “It is a mystery of Christ’s secret union with the devout which is by nature incomprehensible. If anybody should ask me how this communion takes place, I am not ashamed to confess that that is a secret too lofty for either my mind to comprehend or my words to declare. And to speak more plainly, I rather experience than understand it” (Institutes, IV, 17, 32). There is a shock! Good Presbyterians do not experience anything. We are God’s frozen people. But Calvin found such a meeting with Christ in the Lord’s Supper and such great blessings attached to it that his heart was filled by the Spirit. He found Christ and all his benefits. He found joy. He was gladdened by meeting his Lord, gladdened that he could come to the table and have his faith strengthened by that sure promise of God represented there. Indeed, Calvin becomes so mystical that he speaks of the believer, as he receives the bread and wine actually being lifted up to heaven. Christ does not descend into the bread, but by the Holy Spirit the believer ascends into heaven, there to commune with the glorified Christ and all the blessings of his crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension (Institutes, IV, 17, 32, cf. Eph. 2:5-6). Here again we can see Calvin’s use of the idea of God ministering to our weakness in the Sacrament. We come to the table with nothing to offer God, but we come to be blessed by the Lord. We come “to offer our vileness and our unworthiness to him so that his mercy may make us worthy of him: we come to despair in ourselves so that we may be comforted in him; to abase ourselves so that we may be lifted up by him; to accuse ourselves so that we may be MAY/JUNE 1997

justified by him; moreover, we come to aspire to that unity which he commends to us in his Supper; and as he makes all of us one in himself to desire one soul, one heart, one tongue for us all” (Institutes, IV, 17, 42).

can be nothing magical here. There are Churches that have the Lord’s Supper every week and have no blessing from it. But when we come to the Lord’s table properly, we will experience that communion with Christ by faith. Calvin commented most eloquently on this when he said:

Calvin felt the pull of unity in the Sacrament, and he labored all his life to see that this unity was expressed. It grieved him deeply to see Protestant warring with Protestant over the Supper.

Let us carefully observe then, when we wish to use the sacraments as God has ordained, that they should be like ladders, for raising us on high. For we are heavy and cumbersome, held down by earthly things. Thus, because we are unable to fly high enough to draw near to God, he has ordained sacraments for us like ladders. If a man wishes to leap on high, he will break his neck in the attempt; but if he has steps, he is able to proceed with confidence. So also if we are to reach our God. Let’s use the means which he has instituted for us, since he knows what is suitable for us (cited in Marcel, 179-180).

God’s Help and Media Sacraments, as Calvin put it, are “God’s help and media.” When I ran across that quotation it set my mind to whirring. “Media” is just an untranslated word from the Latin; it should be “means.” The Sacraments are God’s means. But I thought that in our day of emphasis upon media that it is rather nice perhaps to leave it in the Latin. God gave his Church media, visible statements of his promise. And those visible statements are a way in which we can receive the blessing of the Lord. Luther, in reflecting on this, once said, “For ‘we must have something new.’ [Luther always sounds so contemporary, does he not?] Christ’s death and resurrection, faith and love, are old and just ordinary things; that is why they must count for nothing, and so we weigh ourselves down with big piles of new teaching” (“On Councils and the Church,” Works, Vol. 41, 127-128). That is just what has happened and will continue to happen. How easy it is for us to develop twitching ears that love to hear new things on the periphery of our faith or perhaps beyond the periphery of our faith— fascinating things that pique the interest. How we have a tendency to say, “Jesus’ death and resurrection, faith and love. That’s all sort of ‘ho hum.’ We’ve heard all that before. We know all about that stuff. We’ve got to get on to bigger and better things.” The Reformers call us back to the center and say that there is nothing bigger and better. There is nothing more important. There is nothing more central. There is nothing more necessary at every point in our Christian life than to go back to this: our redemption is in the body and blood of Christ. I sometimes wonder how it might affect preachers if every sermon had to end in the Lord’s Supper. Would it give a healthy new dimension to the way our sermons develop and conclude? Would it force us back to the central things of the gospel? I ask in one of my classes: Is it possible that to some extent the development of the altar call in evangelicalism is a response to the felt inadequacy of our services when they do not end in the heart of the gospel? Is it perhaps an unspoken desire to have that central message made in the Sacrament that God has instituted? Might not our Church life be strengthened by frequent communion? To be sure, there 50

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Christian g rowth is a g radual process. The Sacraments are one key element in that process when rightly used. They are like ladders that we may go up one rung at a time, coming ever to deeper fellowship with our Lord, to deeper knowledge of his redemption, to deeper gladness and strength in what he has promised. We never outgrow the Sacraments. On the contrary, as we climb we come more and more to appreciate the ladder just as firemen do as they go up and up. We come more and more to be glad that the ladder on which we stand is stable, sure, and firm. I hope as time goes on and you participate in the Sacraments—observe (and recall your) baptism, receive the Lord’s Supper—that you will think on these things and realize what a great blessing the Lord has given to us in them. The Sacraments, like the Word, present and offer Christ and when received in faith give us Christ and all his blessings.

Dr. W. Robert Godfrey, a member of the Council of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, is President and Professor at Westminster Theological Seminary in California.

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BACK ISSUE ORDER FORM NOV/DEC 1994 The Word Became Flesh God created us in his own image, and he is the Great Artist. However, we often confuse an important biblical distinction between creation and redemption. When we do this, we are confusing heaven and earth, the sacred and the secular, worship and entertainment, ministry and business. In this magazine learn how to clearly distinguish between creation and redemption. Contributors include: Eric Casteel, Rick Ritchie, D.G. Hart, Gene Veith. Code# MR-11/94 MAY/JUNE 1995 Evangelism Missions. Evangelism. The greatest privilege of any Christian is to share the Gospel with an unbeliever, but those two words easily haunt many churchgoers. Why is that? Is there a biblical, Reformational way of bringing the Gospel to the world? Read this issue to find out. Contributors include: Carl Henry, Russell Matthews, Rick Ritchie, Shane Rosenthal. Code # MR-05/95 MARCH/APRIL 1996 Saved from God by God. In our day, Jesus is offered as therapy. In other words, he is “there for you” or “ready to make you whole” or “the fulfillment of all your needs”. In this issue we see why there is not only no other answer than Christ, but why there is no other ultimate crisis than the wrath of a holy God. Contributors include: Lee Irons, Kim Riddlebarger, Rick Ritchie, R.C. Sproul. Code # MR-03/96 MAY/JUNE 1996 Scripture Holy Scripture is not built into our hardware. In fact, when it comes to the Gospel, Scripture actually runs contrary to our nature. Delving deeply into the sacred text can therefore be a challenge. In this issue, contributors focus on the Bible’s purpose: Why was it given to us, what should we be looking for, what does it tell us about history and what general rules should we be following to interpret it? Contributors include: S.M. Baugh, D.A. Carson, Ronald Gleason, Carl Henry, V. Philips Long, S. Rosenthal, Rachel Stahle. Code # MR-05/96 JULY/AUG 1996 When the Salt Loses Its Savor “You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its savor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing, but to be cast out and trampled underfoot by men,” (Matt. 5:13). This warning about the

salt losing its savor is a problem that many evangelical leaders are concerned about today. This edition of Modern Reformation highlights many of the concerns outlined by the newly formed Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. Contributors include: James Boice, Robert Godfrey, R.C. Sproul, Mark Thompson, David Wells. Code # MR-07/96 SEPT/OCT 1996 Polemics: A Defense of Defending Most evangelical Christians agree with the necessity of polemics (the practice of defending a doctrine or set of doctrines in opposition to others). The problem lies not in the idea but in the practice. In this issue, contributors defend the business of defending the truth within the church itself. Contributors include: R. Scott Clark, Gary L. W. Johnson, J. Gresham Machen, Rick Ritchie. Code # MR-09/96 NOV/DEC 1996 Pilgrim’s Progress What do you think about when you come across that verb “to sanctify” or the noun “holy”? Especially in our day, images of a prude come to mind. That caricature is not only superficial, it’s the opposite of the biblical portrait. In this magazine, contributors dispel misconceptions about the important topic of sanctification. Contributors include: John D. Hannah, Harold L. Senkbeil, Zacharias Ursinus. Code # MR-11/96 JAN/FEB 1997 The Whirlpool: The Effects of Popular Culture on Religion. A time when “whirl” - the fascination with the novel, eccentric, eclectic and “exciting” - is king, our age is dominated by an obsession with mass popular culture. But, how do we get the Christian message out without marketing it in some sense? Are we perhaps making more out of the dangers of “pop-culture” than we should? Contributors include: Ken Myers, Leonard R. Payton, Rick Ritchie, Gene Veith. Code # MR-01/97 MARCH/APR 1997 Finding the Keys: Liberating the Ministry from Trivial Pursuits What should we think about organizations, businesses, entertainment media, and other groups that call themselves “ministries”? What is the relationship of today’s minister to the prophets and apostles? Contributors to this issue of Modern Reformation explore the possibility that our whole contemporary notion of the ministry is out of step with Scripture. Contributors include: D.G. Hart, Lawrence R. Rast, Jr., Rick Ritchie. Code # MR-03/97

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MYSTERIES OF GOD AND MEANS OF GRACE— Michael S. Horton 1 Melody Schilling, “Supper for One,” Discipleship Journal (#96, 1996), pp. 34-38 FEEDING THE WORLD: THE LORD’S SUPPER IN LUKE’S GOSPEL—Arthur A. Just, Jr. 1 A. Kavanagh, Elements of Rite (New York: Pueblo Publishing Company, 1982) 45-46. 2 This thesis was first suggested by Robert Karris in Luke: Artist and Theologian (New York: Paulist Press, 1985) 4778. In his chapter “The Theme of Food” he 47 states: “My major point in this chapter is that in Luke’s Gospel Jesus got himself crucified by the way he ate.” 3 Cf. G. Feeley-Harnik, The Lord’s Table: Eucharist and Passover in Early Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981) 167: “Jesus repeatedly emphasizes the difficulty of explaining his gospel in words, and indeed, most of the time his disciples do not understand what he is saying until he finally speaks to them in food.” 4 Both R. Karris, Luke: Artist and Theologian, 71-72 n. 7 and J. Neyrey, The Passion According to Luke (New York: Paulist Press, 1985) 11 quote from anthropologist FeeleyHarnik’s seminal study on food and teaching in the OT and NT. Neyrey synthesizes Feeley-Harnik’s observations into his analysis of Luke 22:14-38 on p. 11: “These statements rest on the basic principle: as God gives food to the covenant people, so God gives Torah-instruction to them. Bread/food are a clear and unmistakable symbol of Torah-instruction … Food and instruction are interchangeable symbols, replicating each other. In other words, a meal is a perfect setting for teaching, as Wisdom in the Old Testament or symposia in Greek literature indicate.” 5 R. Karris, Luke: Artist and Theologian, 80. 6 The essential Lukan meals are the following: Luke 5:27-38—The Feast with Levi the Tax Collector; Luke 7:18-35—The Bridegroom and the Ascetic; Luke 7:3650—The Anointing of the Feet of Jesus and the Forgiveness of a Sinful Woman; Luke 9:10-17—The Feeding of the Crowd; Luke 14:1-24—Sabbath Healing, Meal Etiquette, and the Banquet; Luke 15:12,11-32—Meals with Sinners and the Prodigal Son; Luke 19:1-10—The Meal with Zacchaeus; Luke 22:1438—The Last Supper; Luke 24:13-35—The Emmaus Meal; and Luke 24:36-43—The Eating of Fish. 7 Sections of this article were adapted from A. A. Just Jr., Concordia Commentary: A Theological Exposition of Sacred Scripture, Luke 1:1-9:50 (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1996), and The Ongoing Feast: Table Fellowship and Eschatology at Emmaus (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1993). A PRESBYTERIAN ON THE WITTENBERG TRAIL— Rick Ritchie 1 Martin Chemnitz, The Lord’s Supper trans. by J.A.O. Preus (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1979), 25. 2 Martin Luther, Luther’s Works American Edition, vol. 37 ed. by Robert H. Fischer (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1961), 30-31. 3 Martin Luther, Luther’s Works American Edition, vol. 37 ed. by Robert H. Fischer (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1961), 360. BAPTISTS AND THE ORDINANCES—Tom J. Nettles 1 For a discussion of the Blasphemy Ordinance, see W. K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England, 3 vols. (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1965), 3: 11-117; see also, Leonard W. Levy, Treason Against God: A History

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of the Offense of Blasphemy (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), 208-213. The statute is found in C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait, Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 16421660, 3 vols. (London, 1911), 1: 1133-6. 2 Benjamin Keach, The Everlasting Covenant (London, 1693), 42. 3 William Lumpkin, Baptist Confessions of Faith (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1969), 245. This is the preface to the Second London Confession of the Particular Baptists. 4 Hercules Collins, An Orthodox Catechism (London: np, 1680), preface (unnumbered). 5 Joseph Ivimey, A History of the English Baptists, 4 vols. (London, 1811-1830), 4:182. 6 John Gill, “The Scriptures the Only Guide in Matters of Religion,” in A Collection of Sermons and Tracts, 2 vols. (London: printed for George Keith, 1773), 2:487. 7 Ulrich Zwingli “An Exposition of the Faith” in Zwingli and Bullinger, in Volume 24 of The Library of Christian Classics, trans. and ed. G. W. Bromiley (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1953), 254-255. 8 Ibid., 259. 9 Gill, 2:490. 10 Marcel, 198. 11 Ibid, 134. 12 Owen, “Infant Baptism,” 259. BELIEVERS’ BAPTISM: MORE THAN AMERICAN INDIVIDUALSIM—Timothy George 1 John Allen Moore, Anabaptist Portraits (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1984), 65-66. 2 Hans J. Hillerbrand, ed., The Protestant Reformation (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 131. 3 “Gespräch mit Karl Barth,” Stimme, December 15, 1963, 253. 4 Quoted, Paul K. Jewett, Infant Baptism and the Covenant of Grace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), 222. 5 William H. Willimon, Peculiar Speech: Preaching to the Baptized (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 61. 6 Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), 66. 7 Article 40 of the London Confession in John H. Leith, ed., Creeds of the Churches (Atlanta; John Knox Press, 1982), 719. 8 Thomas Edwards, Gangraena (London, 1646), Pt. 1, 204. 9 Ibid., 265. 10 W. L. Lumpkin, ed., Baptist Confessions of Faith (Valley Forge, Pa.: Judson Press, 1959), 245. 11 Ibid., 291. 12 David Kingdon, Children of Abraham: A Reformed Baptist View of Baptism, the Covenant, and Children (Haywards Heath, Sussex: Carey Publications, 1973). 13 CD IV/4, 204. 14 Faith and Order Paper No. 111 (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1982), 4 (11). The adult pattern of initiation was also normative for John Wesley. See Henry H. Knight, III, “The Significance of Baptism for the Christian Life: Wesley’s Pattern of Christian Initiation,” Worship 63 (1989), 133-142. Cf. also Aidan Kavanagh’s claim that adult initiation is what the “Roman Catholic norm of baptism is henceforth to be.” Made, Not Born (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976), 118. 15 David F. Wright, “The Origins of Infant Baptism— Child Believers’ Baptism?” Scottish Journal of Theology 40 (1990), 1-23. Wright cites the example of Gregory Nazianzen who as late as 381 recommended that baptism should be given to children no earlier than age three when they could at least verbalize an answer to the baptismal queries for themselves and perhaps take in

something of its meaning despite their tender years. Philip Schaff, ed., Creeds of Christendom (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1877), 3:521. 17 Ibid., 211. 18 Cf. Jewett, Infant Baptism, 163. 19 LW 36, 47. Cf. Robert Latham, “Baptism in the Writings of the Reformers,” The Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology, 7 (1989), 21-44. 20 Theodore G. Tappert, ed., The Book of Concord (Philadelphia: Fortress Press), 349. 21 LW 36, 73. 22 This is the charge made against Luther by D. J. Gottschick, Die Lehre der Reformation von der Taufe (Tübingen, 1906), 14. Cf. also Adolf von Harnack’s view: “In the doctrine of the sacraments Luther abandoned his position as a reformer, and was guided by views that brought confusion into his own system of faith.” History of Dogma, tr. Neil Buchanan (New York: Dover, 1961), 248. Karl Barth is even more explicit in his critique of Luther’s Wassertheologie: “To believe in Jesus Christ and in water consecrated by his presence is a dangerous thing and is not confirmed by any necessary relationship between the two.” The Teaching of the Christian Church Regarding Baptism, tr. E. A. Payne (London: SCM Press, 1948), 23. 23 E. C. Whitaker, Documents of the Baptismal Liturgy (London: SPCK, 1960), 69-71. Cf. D. T. Williams, “The Baptism of Repentance: A Further Factor in the Infant Baptism Debate,” Theologia Evangelica 20 (1987), 37-49. 24 Jewett, Infant Baptism, 181; The First and Second Prayer Books of Edward VI (London: Dent, 1968), 240. 25 Bossuet, “On the Holy Supper,” quoted in T. E. Watson, Should Infants Be Baptized? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976), 96. 26 Zwingli and Bullinger, ed. G. W. Bromiley (Philadelphia: Westminster Press), 130. 27 Ibid., 139. 28 Huldreich Zwinglis Sämtliche Werke, ed. E. Egli et al. (Leipzig, Zurich, 1905), 8, 85. 29 Ibid., 4, 218. 30 Cf. David C. Steinmetz, “The Baptism of John and the Baptism of Jesus in Huldrych Zwingli, Balthasar Hubmaier and Late Medieval Theology,” in Continuity and Discontinuity in Church History: Essays Presented to George Huntston Williams, eds. F. F. Church and Timothy George (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1979), 169-81. 31 Kingdon, Children of Abraham, 34. J. P. T. Hunt has shown that the interpretation suggested here is supported by early patristic exegesis. Col. 2:11-12 was not used as an argument for infant baptism until after the practice had arisen on other grounds. “Colossians 2:11-12, the Circumcision/Baptism Analogy, and Infant Baptism,” Tyndale Bulletin 91 (1990), 227-44. 32 G. Ernest Wright, The Biblical Doctrine of Man in Society (London: SCM, 1954), 79. Cf. Karl Barth: “The Christian life cannot be inherited as blood, gifts, characteristics and inclinations are inherited. No Christian environment, however genuine or sincere, can transfer this life to those who are in this environment. For these, too, the Christian life will and can begin only on the basis of their own liberation by God, their own decision.” CD IV/4, 184. 33 George R. Beasley-Murray, Baptism in the New Testament (London: Macmillan, 1963), 338. 34 James F. White, Sacraments as God’s Self-Giving (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1983), 46. 35 John Tombes, Examen of the Sermon of Mr. Stephen Marshall About Infant Baptism (London, 1645), 33; quoted in Kingdon, Children of Abraham, op. cit., 99. 16

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