"This Is My Body"

18 Signs, Seals, and Means of Grace

by Harrison Perkins

38 “Sorry I Could Not Travel Both”: Protestant Divergence on the Sacraments | by

Brannon Ellis

54 Preparation for the Lord’s Supper | by Jonathan

Baddley

64 One Bread, One Body? | by Eric Landry

May/June 2023

$9.00 per issue

“This Is My Body”

Partner with MR

THEOLOGY MATTERS

No other magazine brings together confessional Lutheran, Anglican, Reformed, and Baptist representatives to discuss the significant biblical and cultural issues of our day. We’re committed to helping you hone your theological thinking and share your insights effectively with others. Your support allows Modern Reformation to keep this conversation going strong.

05 FROM THE EDITOR

| by Brannon Ellis

POETRY

17 All Things New

| by Andrew Menkis

60 “Watchman! What of the Night?”| by Marco Barone

69 Holy Bread

|

RETRIEVE 08 REFORMATION RESOURCES | A Theological Dissertation on the Efficacy of Baptism

| by Abraham Rothe; translated by Joseph Tipton

14 REFORMATION OUTTAKES | Protestant Time

| by Zachary Purvis

18 ESSAY | Signs, Seals, and Means of Grace

| by Harrison Perkins

II.

CONVERSE 30 INTERVIEW | Four Confessions, One Supper: A White Horse Inn Roundtable

III.

PERSUADE 38 ESSAY | “Sorry I Could Not Travel Both”: Protestant Divergence on the Sacraments

| by Brannon Ellis

48 BIBLE STUDY | A Supper for Sufferers

| by J. D. “Skip” Dusenbury

54 ESSAY | Preparation for the Lord’s Supper: Comfort and Assurance from the Christian Past

| by Jonathan Baddley

IV. ENGAGE 64 ESSAY | One Bread, One Body? A Pastoral Reflection on Divisions in the Local Church

| by Eric Landry

70 REVIEW ESSAY | Reformed Conformity and the Shape of the English Second Reformation

| by Samuel Bostock

76 REVIEWS | Scribes and Scripture | by John D. Meade and Peter J. Gurry

Endsheet illustration by Raxenne Maniquiz

I.

AD AD

Call for Letters

JOIN THE CONVERSATION

Since Modern Reformation appreciates a full theological conversation, we’d like to hear your thoughts about what you’re reading in the magazine. So please write to us at letters@modernreformation.org. Due to limited space, please keep your letter under 400 words (letters may be edited for length and clarity). Letters will be published two issues later. We look forward to hearing from you!

HE MARBURG Colloquy (1529) may have been the best chance the Reformation ever had to reconcile the early German Lutheran and Swiss Reformed parties into a doctrinally unified Protestantism. Luther, Zwingli, and other leading voices on both sides were in attendance. As expected, the greatest point of contention at the conference was the Lord’s Supper. This made Luther’s performance during his opening argument all the more striking. After summarizing his convictions about the Supper, he pulled back the cloth on the table at which he and the other participants sat, wrote with a piece of chalk a few words in Latin, replaced the cloth, and resumed his seat.

Often during the ensuing debate, whenever Zwingli or another Swiss Reformed representative said something he didn’t agree with, Luther would repeat the Latin he had written under the tablecloth. At one point, when Zwingli pressed him particularly hard to give proof for his position, Luther threw back the cloth and read the words on the table aloud to Zwingli: Hoc est corpus meum, “This is my body,” which Jesus spoke over broken bread before distributing it to his disciples on the night he was betrayed.

The Marburg Colloquy ended without reconciliation.* Over the ensuing five centuries, the conference was endlessly relitigated among Protestants, seemingly without much real progress beyond where things had stood in 1529. Luther has been accused of being unreasonable at Marburg just as often as the Swiss have been accused of being too reasonable (in the sense of relying too much on human reason to plumb the depths of divine mystery). As with so many things, the

truth is likely somewhere in the middle. Luther was justified in doubling down on his confidence in the express word of God—“This is my body”— rather than human judgment. It was the Serpent, after all, who first sowed doubt in God’s promises by asking, “Did God really say?” (Gen. 3:1). For Luther, if God says it, that settles it. The Swiss Reformed were likewise justified in their frustration at Luther’s obstinate unwillingness to reason together (or, apparently, to give them any benefit of the doubt that they too could fully trust God’s word without fully agreeing with him).

Our theme for this issue is “This Is My Body.” We approach the Supper in particular, and the sacraments in general, from historical, theological, and pastoral angles. We also feature our own colloquy of sorts, with an excerpt of a classic White Horse Inn broadcast featuring Lutheran, Anglican, Reformed, and Baptist hosts sharing their perspectives on the nature and meaning of the Supper. Although they disagree with one another, I think you’ll concur that they show just the right amount of reasonableness in doing so.

Although the interconfessional conversations we host here in the pages of Modern Reformation may not be as momentous as Marburg, I dare say we’re making progress in mutual understanding and charity nonetheless.

Brannon Ellis Executive Editor

*For a full account of the colloquy more sympathetic with the Swiss, see Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 7 (repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), §108; and for a Lutheran take, see Herman Sasse, This Is My Body (Adelaide: Openbook, 1977).

A Theological Dissertation on the Efficacy of Baptism

by Abraham Rothe; translated by Joseph Tipton

Abraham Rothe (1666–1730) was a German Lutheran theologian and pastor from Żary in what is now western Poland. He defended his Dissertatio theologica de efficacia baptismi (1692), from which this excerpt is translated, in a public ceremony at the University of Leipzig presided over by the famous theologian and philosopher Valentin Alberti.

1. WE SHALL FOREGO discussing the word baptism since such discussions are ubiquitous, having been treated ad nauseam. Instead, we shall summarize our topic with a definition, and a very well-constructed one at that, which the great Johann Scherzer (now among the saints) once provided in his System of Theology: “In its proper sense, baptism is taken as a sacrament unique to the New Testament, an action instituted by God and Christ. Although he never performed baptism himself, Christ sent John to perform them. Under ordinary circumstances only ministers of the Church should administer it. In baptism, every person who is alive has been born, is an infant under our care or an adult believer (and hence offering no objection), is by ordained necessity submerged in or sprinkled with water in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the water being ordinary, yet united with the Spirit. This is done so that the person, now reborn and renewed by the water and the Spirit and having all his guilt removed, may in the future become a child of grace and glory. Exorcism is perhaps the best analogy for this power.”

2. In this definition, you have at one glance the talking-points concerning baptism. However, laying them out and looking closely at them is not our project. We are only concerned with what is relevant to our topic; namely, the fact that in this definition the efficacy that we too are inclined to attribute to baptism is put forward clearly and distinctly. It reads, “This is done so that the person, now reborn and renewed by the water and the Spirit and having all his guilt removed, may in the future become a child of grace and glory.” We must now speak more in depth concerning this efficacy.

3. Efficacy is a power that inheres in a thing so that it performs its function during the very act. The Germans call it eine Kraft . The Greeks call it δύναμις

and ἐνέργεια , although it is generally acknowledged that the former term denotes the primary act of efficacy, its power to effect, while the latter denotes the secondary act of efficacy, the effecting itself. However the matter may stand, we maintain that both are relevant to baptism when taken—one should note—in terms of its action and use. For baptism, together with the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, is distinct from the word of God in that the power and efficacy the latter possesses to produce the spiritual effects God has ordained it to produce are entirely anterior and external to its use. By contrast, the sacraments, and in particular baptism, do not have any power and cannot produce any spiritual effects in isolation from their use.

4. The power and efficacy we are attributing to baptism is instrumental; in other words, [it] serves as a means. God has determined to work effectually through the sacraments just as he has through the word. Consequently, whenever baptism is administered, it becomes in essence and by divine fiat a productive and effectual means of igniting faith and gaining salvation. It is, I repeat, an instrumental means, being supernatural in its essence, since it comprises both an earthly and a heavenly component. From its first appearance and institution, it possessed a sufficient, that is, a divine and extraordinary power and efficacy, needing no other special power to produce its spiritual effect.

5. When we say baptism’s efficacy is instrumental, we mean that (a) it is not physical. Its regenerative and faith-conferring power is not physically inherent in the baptismal water as though in its object. It does not reside in the water through any latent inherence. The grace of the Holy Spirit is not bound to it by any unbreakable bond. No supernatural power has been created in it that makes the water “fertile” and enables it to “pour forth grace.”

Nor do we mean that (b) it is moral. No divine power to produce the effect of grace is definitely and invariably present in baptism through the coordination and mediation of the symbol of water, and it does not reach its effect through the symbol. This, no less than the previous notion, is not only inconsistent with Holy Writ but with the nature of an instrument as well. Nor do we mean that (c) it is indirectly demonstrative or representative. The sacrament of baptism does not simply show and depict what God’s will, the path to eternal life or faith, rebirth, renewal, and eternal salvation are.

Nor, finally, do we mean that (d) it is miraculous—in the strict meaning of the word. While we grant that there is considerable similarity between baptism and a miracle, we cannot on that account say that they are the same thing. In the case of a miracle, the very nature of a thing is changed; in the case of baptism, only the way the thing is used is changed. In terms of quantity, the water in baptism remains the same water, although in its sacramental function it is not merely water or simply a physical entity devoid of heavenly treasure. On the contrary, it is a sacramental thing, a regenerative washing in the word. Being full of the Holy Spirit, it is united with the Holy Trinity in an inexpressible way, thereby making it

Abraham Rothe (1666–1730)

a means by which the Holy Spirit works. Hence, while its efficacy is instrumental, acting as a means, we assert that it is no less real and effectual.

6. We have already pointed out in the definition in Section 1 what the efficacy of baptism consists in; namely, “A person is reborn and renewed by the water and the Spirit and has all his guilt removed so that in the future he may become a child of grace and glory.” We assert and confess this on the authority of the Augsburg Confession, which states, “Through baptism grace is offered to a person who is also through baptism received into the grace of God” (Article IX). The words in the Augsburg Confession, which state that through baptism a person is received into grace, show that grace is offered through baptism not in a demonstrative or representative sense, but truly, really, and effectually. (Otherwise, the efficacy of baptism would be demonstrative—an idea we rejected in Section 5.) A person is received into grace when he is made regenerate through baptism; for in and through baptism, the Son of God is born in him; that is, he is granted faith in Christ, lays hold of his merit and has all his sins forgiven—which equally pertains to both guilt and punishment. Also through baptism, the righteousness of Christ is offered to him, being imputed to him in it. Thus he is adopted as a child of God and heir of heavenly blessings, whereas before he received baptism and as long as he was (ordinarily) without it, he was a child of wrath (Eph. 2:3). Hence, someone who has been baptized is also made anew through the same sacrament (after all, it is called in Titus 3:5, “the washing of regeneration”). His righteousness and holiness, which he lost in Adam’s fall, are restored to him once the Holy Spirit is poured out upon him, so that he can receive new strength, have the errors of his mind dispersed and emerge a new man, created according to God in true righteousness and holiness, his will now corrected, and his appetite restrained. A person who has been reborn and renewed through baptism in this way is indeed a child of grace and glory. And as a surety and guarantee of eternal life, the Holy Spirit bears witness in his heart, giving testimony that he is a child of God and enjoys in this life the blessedness of hope, bound for actual blessedness in the life to come (Rom. 8:16, 24). This is the efficacy that otherwise the Calvinists ascribe to the inward baptism of only the elect.

7. Regarding the cause (or origin) and the foundation of baptism’s efficacy, we maintain that its cause is the Triune God and his inexhaustible goodness and wisdom, while its foundation is the word and the gospel promise attached to the baptismal water. For it belongs to God to impart justifying grace and endow the sacraments with the power to confer that grace upon us. He is the one who instituted the sacraments as the means of salvation, imparting his grace through them properly and authoritatively, being their chief author.

There are three distinct persons in the Trinity. That is why Christ, when instituting baptism in person in his assumed humanity, commands his disciples to baptize in the name of the three persons of the Godhead (Matt. 28:19). However, as a description, it is not unfitting for the Holy Spirit to be called the author or

Grace is offered through baptism not in a demonstrative or representative sense, but truly, really, and effectually.

the generative, efficient cause of baptism’s efficacy, given that regeneration and renewal also originate with him, though not to the exclusion of the other persons. According to the will of this three-in-one God, baptism of water acquires by the power of the word of institution and the divine promise an efficacy to produce supernatural effects (namely, regeneration, renewal, salvation, etc.) that is so great as to serve as the instrument and vehicle by which God displays and applies to believers the gospel promise of the forgiveness of sins, righteousness, and eternal life. The water of baptism does not in and of itself or by its own natural power possess the efficacy to produce such spiritual effects without the operation and power of the Holy Spirit, but it does possess the ability to work inwardly, in a manner consistent with the nature of an instrument, possessing it in accordance with God its author’s effectual ordinance, Christ’s institution, and the Holy Spirit’s operation. For God is one who can work in ways that defy the mind, logic, the natural order, and all understanding (Eph. 3:20). It is consistent with his goodness, and he is supremely good, to multiply the means of salvation, providing and instituting the sacraments in addition to the word and the gift of the Holy Spirit, and in particular baptism, so that there might be ordinary means for infants to be saved as well. It is not his will that any of the little ones should perish (Matt. 18:14), nor does he wish that anyone perish (2 Pet. 3:9). Thus whatever baptism brings about, the language we must use is, “God brings it about through baptism.”

8. The efficacy of baptism is real, actual, and effectual; or, to put it more clearly, when applied legitimately and in conjunction with the word of God, with the Holy Spirit working through it, the baptismal water is sufficiently effectual. Be that as it may, in secondary actualization its ἐνέργεια or operative power cannot always exert itself as far as its effects are concerned. This is due to an obstacle the recipient presents. Now, in the case of infants, the efficacy of baptism always exerts itself, given that they are innocent of the vice of hypocrisy and do not present any obstacle to the Holy Spirit’s working. On the other hand, in adults the case is different. They can bolt the door, impeding the working of the Holy Spirit by actual unrepentance and hypocrisy. This can easily be demonstrated by the single example of Simon Magus (Acts 8:13, 21). In this case, of course, baptism cannot benefit them in any way ex opere operato, but rather turns out to be grounds for their judgment and condemnation. Now, while baptism does not—through their own fault—benefit such hypocrites, baptism’s efficacy nonetheless remains unimpaired. It is still the effectual instrument the Holy Spirit uses to offer, impart, and apply justifying grace to them, provided they do not resist and reject it.

9. Such is the power and efficacy of baptism that it does not only produce effects for the past and present; it also extends into the future as well. As far as the past and present are concerned, everyone agrees that baptism removes the stain of original sin—not completely, but considerably, at least as far as blame and guilt are concerned. In fact, in the case of guilt, it removes not only original sin but sins

Whatever baptism brings about, the language we must use is, “God brings it about through baptism.”

Such is the power and efficacy of baptism that it does not only produce effects for the past and present; it also extends into the future as well.

one actually committed beforehand as well, granting forgiveness for these sins. And so that candidates for baptism can lay hold of this forgiveness and apply it to themselves, baptism in the case of infants ignites faith, while in the case of adults it confirms and seals it. Removing all guilt in this way, it both cleanses one from all uncleanness and clothes him in the garments of Christ’s righteousness and salvation, effectually applying and sealing the benefits won through his death. In this way, it renders one who was by nature a child of wrath the child of God. Both of the blessed Luther’s catechisms assert all of this when they read, “Baptism effects the forgiveness of sins, frees one from death and the Devil and grants to everyone who believes on an individual basis eternal blessedness.”

10. Given that these tremendous blessings and gifts last forever and that baptism confers them on its recipients, we cannot but assert that the very power of baptism, once it has been received, causes them to last in perpetuity and be a profound benefit to baptized believers. To be specific, in the case of adults, or rather those who examine themselves to see if they are worthy to approach the holiness of the Lord’s Supper, it is absolutely true that their enjoyment of the heavenly blessings conferred upon them previously in baptism is confirmed in this sacrament of confirmation, and those blessings are once again sealed to them. Nor is there any doubt in the case of infants and young people in their minority. Indeed, we confidently affirm that for them baptism exerts its power as well. After all, they have likewise been rendered acceptable to God through baptism in Christ Jesus, his uniquely Beloved. This being the case, who would challenge the idea that the working of the Holy Spirit, whom they too received in baptism as a surety and guarantee of eternal life, is not operative—especially when they must at God’s behest succumb to the fate of all mortals? In fact, the Holy Spirit, who does not disdain to elicit praise and acclamation for Christ from their mouths (Ps. 8:3), is particularly at that time working as effectually as ever in them, kindling in them faith in Christ. Moreover, he does not disregard the prayers of godly parents. He is fully aware that they often remind their children of the baptism they received and encourage them with the same thought when they are lying on their sickbed. He knows how to use these godly declarations to strengthen and seal faith in these little ones.

11. There still remains one thing to discuss, which might called the efficacy of baptism, in a sense. As we said above, in and through baptism, a Christian is regenerated and made a child of God. The Holy Spirit himself is also given to him as surety, and thanks to him, the Christian is granted and awarded the ability to lead a godly life according to God’s commandments, though quite imperfectly, given our mortal weakness. If one who has been initiated through baptism contemplates this and further reflects on how in baptism he has renounced the devil and all his works and ways, has on the contrary pledged his allegiance to God and wishes to serve him as his Lord and Father who has received him as one of his sons; to repeat, if he reflects seriously on this, he will certainly leave behind his

filthy sins, running more desperately from them than from a mongrel or snake so as not to lose all over again the grace of God he received in baptism. He will walk before God in a way that befits the children of God, standing firm in the faith of Christ whom he put on in baptism and following his example. He will not grieve the Holy Spirit whose sanctuary he has become, but rather will follow his lead. And to do so, he will mortify the desires of the old man, conforming himself more and more each day to God’s standard, doing so with the greatest effort and striving. This is what Paul tells his Ephesian brothers, who had already been baptized, to do: “Take off the old man who lives according to your former way of life and is wasting away in corruption according to his misguided desires, and be renewed in the Spirit of your minds” (Eph. 4:22–24). Explaining in Romans 6:3–4 why they should do these things, Paul tells them that they should cultivate an entirely new life on account of the baptism they received, as though saying to them, “You of course know full well that everyone who has been baptized into Christ Jesus has been baptized into his death. Therefore, he is buried with him through baptism into death so that, once initiated in baptism, he can walk in newness of life in the same way that Christ was resurrected from the dead through the glory of the Father.”

And so, if the Holy Spirit and the power required for a spiritual life are conferred in baptism, what keeps us from saying that baptism plays a role in inspiring one with a desire for godliness? And if this is true, as it clearly and most certainly is, what keeps us from saying that baptism’s efficacy also extends into the future? Luther captured the power that baptism has to motivate one toward godliness when he offered a general description of baptism on the basis of its end and effect. He said that immersion in water “signifies that the old Adam that still remains in us ought to be by daily mortification and repentance submerged and snuffed out, while every day the new man emerges and rises again to life.”

12. Lastly, in light of the fact that the sacraments also serve as a mark of one’s professed religion among men, as the Augsburg Confession (Article 13) discusses, baptism also distinguishes believers from unbelievers, serving as a wholly reliable criterion of the two. However, beware of thinking like the Socinians that baptism was instituted only or primarily for this purpose.*

Joseph A. Tipton is a researcher in the field of early modern literature and teaches Greek and Latin at The Geneva School in Orlando, Florida. He has published on the German neo-Latin poets Petrus Lotichius and Simon Stenius and is currently working on Samuel Rutherford’s Dictates on the Doctrine of Scripture.

If the Holy Spirit and the power required for a spiritual life are conferred in baptism, what keeps us from saying that baptism plays a role in inspiring one with a desire for godliness?

*Rothe here states: “See the work written by our presider [Valentin Alberti], It Is Important For Religions.” Article VIII, pp. 380 ff. The reference is a shortened version of Alberti’s work, the longer title of which is Interessse praecipuarum religionum Christianarum ita in omnibus articulis deductum [ . . . ].

REFORMATION OUTTAKES

Protestant Time

by Zachary Purvis

ON JUNE 8, 1554 , John Calvin labored, as usual, in haste. “I have no time to write at the moment,” he told Guillaume Farel, “because it is nearly time for my theology lecture, and I have not yet had the opportunity to reflect on what I will say.”1 This concern is replicated in various forms across Calvin’s correspondence— so much so that friends and colleagues often framed their requests of the notoriously overworked Reformer with great delicacy. Pierre Viret observed:

I was expecting a letter from you complaining that I write to you too infrequently, but you are so busy that you do not even have enough time to utter reproaches. For my part, though I have much more time than you, I do not want to complain of your ongoing silence. On the contrary, I am amazed that you can still manage to send me a few words.2

Yet Calvin’s comment to Farel raises an intriguing question, beyond how he filled his diary, one so obvious perhaps as to escape notice: How did Calvin know that the lecture hour drew near?

The answer, alas, is not clear. There is no evidence to suggest that Calvin owned a wall clock. Philip Melanchthon, by contrast, who was obsessed with time and history as keys to scientific knowledge and providential reassurance, who loved to quote Gregory of Nazianzus quoting Paul to the effect that “God is the beginning and ending of all things,” owned a pocket watch.3 Theodore Beza also seems to have owned a watch.4 But Calvin—like most of society—did not. Since Calvin lived next door to Saint Pierre Cathedral, he no doubt heard the bells and perhaps the cathedral crier. He may have been a careful listener to his “inner clock.” We cannot know with certainty. In any case, we do know that Calvin regularly took note of temporal reference points, which reveal a remarkable fascination with time.5

Historians suggest that this was hardly peculiar: “For the guilty, secret obsession of early modern society was neither sex nor money, but the desperate desire to use time well and the pervasive fear that wasted time would waste those who abused it.”6 In fact, Protestants thought long and hard about time—what to do with it, how to measure it, how to order it. True, Augustine’s Confessions contained famous passages on time, patricians long followed set daily schedules, impressive

city clocks adorned medieval cathedrals and town halls in Strasbourg, Prague, and many other places, and both classical authors and Renaissance humanists abhorred idleness. But the Reformation apprehension of time carried with it both wide-ranging attention and deep-penetrating piety.

The “ordering of time” was a central tenet of the rigorous discipline of the Genevan Consistory and the Scottish kirk. The moral man must diligently and honorably fulfill his duties before God in each sphere of life as part of the well-ordered community. There were also more practical and experiential dimensions. The church calendar shifted its emphasis from feast days to the Lord’s Day. Beginning in the sixteenth century, moreover, Protestant churches began to feature an hourglass or sand-timer. In Saint Pierre Cathedral in Geneva, the hourglass could be seen by the pastor and the congregation. Calvin kept a close eye on it, as shown by the familiar refrain near the end of his sermons, “because there is not enough time to pursue this.” Not every preacher paid attention, however. In Zurich, Heinrich Bullinger apparently once confessed that he might have gone too far, absentmindedly turning over the hourglass several times in the course of a three-hour sermon. 7 Because the word of God—read, preached, sung—brought the only sure knowledge of God, serious time needed to be devoted to it, though without turning worship from a blessing to a burden.

In Reformed Scotland, therefore, the church fined excessively long-winded preachers. In 1587, Edinburgh Presbytery fined any member who continued to speak after the sand-timer ran its course. In 1622, the session of Elgin Parish Church ordered one preacher explicitly to turn the hourglass when he ascended the pulpit and to finish when the sand emptied, so that “the prayers, psalms, and preaching be all ended within the hour.”8 As sermon length crept forward, kirk sessions received countless petitions for permission to construct pews. The Mass had been easy to stand through, but Protestant sermons could be lengthy, because of the Protestant commitment to preaching as the power of God unto salvation.

Time in relation to eternity unsurprisingly occupied thick sections of theology books, as it often does now. Yet meditation on eternity also made the Reformers acutely conscious of time’s smallest units. Calvin’s second sermon series on Isaiah shows, for example, the richness of the Reformation’s pastoral concern for the shortness and briefness of life.9 “For what are our bodies?” Calvin asked from the pulpit in 1558. “They have a lifespan of a minute. All it needs is for one breath to fail, as it were, and we become wretched corpses.”10 Though creation is transient and cannot sustain itself, God’s presence remains permanent and vigilant over every passing moment. When Calvin preached on Isaiah 58:9–11, he described how God nourishes his people and how they are, in turn, to commit themselves to him:

If we own fields and meadows and vineyards, and if we are engaged in major trade ventures, with much money and important deals, in short, if we lack nothing, all this could still disappear in a minute. There are good reasons why we ask God for

“La Clemence” (“Mercy”), cast in 1407, is the largest of the bells of Saint Pierre Cathedral, weighing six tons.

our daily bread, for by this we proclaim that what we have in hand is only a result of his favor, and that even if we had goods piled up as high as mountains, we would not be able to benefit from them, for they would be as nothing without God’s blessing. On the contrary, when God is favorable to us and cares for us as his children, even if he feeds us fitfully and in small quantities, still we are fed and sustained by his goodness from day to day, month to month, and year to year, so much so that we will never be in want.11

The Reformer’s greatest concern for time was spiritual: how God sustains his people in Christ “minute by minute.” Ultimately, Calvin did not measure time by the passing of hours, but “by the presence or absence of God, mirrored by human faith or unbelief.”12

The last word—this time, at least—belongs to the French Huguenot Isaac Casaubon, a classics scholar, sometime professor at the Genevan Academy, and an obsessive personal timekeeper. References to time—saving it, investing it, using it well, reflecting on how it had been spent—cram every page of his extensive diary. Why? The answer is not because “time is money,” as Benjamin Franklin once quipped, nor because of some “Puritan capitalist spirit,” as Max Weber might have suggested. Rather, observed Casaubon on New Year’s Eve 1598, “not a single day, nor an hour, nor even a minute of time has passed by in which we have not received favor from God’s unspeakable goodness, in which the God of all mercy has not showered us with his innumerable precious gifts.”13 That is Protestant time.

1. John Calvin to Guillaume Farel, June 8, 1554, in Ioannis Calvini opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. G. Baum, E. Cunitz, and E. Reuss (Brunswick: Schwetschke, 1863–1900), 15:148 (hereafter CO).

2. Pierre Viret to John Calvin, Feb. 7, 1545, in CO 12:28.

3. See, e.g., Timothy J. Wengert, “Philip Melanchthon on Time and History in the Reformation,” Consensus 30, no. 2 (2005): 9–33.

4. Journal d’Esaie Colladon-Mémoires sur Genève 1600–1605, ed. Théophile Dufour (Geneva: Jullien, 1883), 4.

5. Max Engammare, On Time, Punctuality, and Discipline in Early Modern Calvinism, trans. Karin Maag (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 16–38.

6. Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 3.

7. Engammare, On Time, 70.

8. Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 48n95.

9. For a partial overview, see Max Engammare, “Le prophète Ésaïe perdu à Genève, retrouvé à Londres, édité à Neukirchen. La prédication quotidienne de Jean Calvin sur Ésaïe 52–66 (1558–1559),” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 156, no. 3 (2012): 1431–46.

10. Calvin, sermon on Isaiah 61:1–5, Oct. 7, 1558, quoted in Engammare, On Time, 33.

11. Calvin, sermon on Isaiah 58–9–11, Sept. 5, 1558, quoted in Engammare, On Time, 34 (emphasis added).

12. Olivier Fatio, “Remarques sur le temps et l’éternité chez Calvin,” Bulletin du centre protestant d’études 5–6 (1988): 26–38.

13. Isaac Casaubon, Ephemerides, ed. John Russel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1850), 1:116.

Zachary Purvis (DPhil, University of Oxford) teaches church history and theology at Edinburgh Theological Seminary.

All Things New

by Andrew Menkis

The warm, still air, gently lulls my senses

As I amble beneath the pale blue sky. The cattle roam the hills, free of fences And a distant low sounds like a gentle sigh.

A balmy breeze makes its way through the grass, The tall green blades murmur as they wake. Discontent, they await this age to pass; They groan at their fate and curse the damned snake.

I’m caught in their eager expectation. I listen and become strangely aware, It’s to me they whisper adulation And to heaven that they lift their prayer:

“Reveal the glory of the sons of man Make all things new, according to your plan.”

SIGNS, SEALS, AND Means of Grace

by HARRISON PERKINS

OD’S SHEEP ARE SAFEST when living in clearly fenced enclosures. There, they learn where food is given to them and where their shepherd enters and exits. Good fences keep out predators, deter thieves, and prevent the sheep themselves from wandering away. Within the Christian tradition, the areas of consensus across the ages are our clear theological fences, showing us where we are spiritually safest, turning away threats, and keeping us where we get the best care. We should have confidence about areas where the Christian tradition has shown strong consensus, knowing that God providentially maintained those fences for our good. On the other hand, controversy may reveal which issues are not central to our faith or suggest areas where some have departed from safe pastures. In other words, controversy may take place inside our theological enclosure about where the feeding trough is best placed, or it may represent breaks in the fence that need to be repaired. We should be reluctant to depart from consensus and measure carefully what it means to heed controversy. One way that historical theology helps the church today is by showing consensus and controversy on a given topic as Christians developed our doctrine over time. Those doctrines that have shown consistent continuity and consensus over the centuries provide a baseline for theology and practice for us today. For example, the doctrines of the Trinity and Christology have retained the same ecumenical guardrails and developed in the same traditional directions—with deviations noted and rejected—from the ancient church to the modern period. On the other hand, some issues have sparked serious controversy at various times and places. This essay explores how the sacraments were taught in seventeenth-century England, discovering areas of consensus and controversy among early modern Protestants. Our focus is specifically on comparing Protestant positions about the sacraments’ nature as visible signs of invisible grace. This comparison helps us not only to understand these issues better but to know how best to position ourselves in relation to this consensus and its controversies. As we see the stable theological fences that God has maintained in his church’s doctrine, we learn better where our safest pastures are to graze. ***

Sacraments As Visible Signs of Invisible Grace: The Consensus from Augustine to the Reformers

Although this essay aims its exploration at varying sacramental positions taught in seventeenth-century England, those views make the most sense when set against the background of the wider Christian tradition. This section looks at

For Augustine, sacraments are signs through which God accomplishes, or seals, the realities signified in them

the theological fences of consensus that the church built from the ancient period until the Reformation’s earlier phases concerning the sacrament’s nature.

In the church’s early centuries, Augustine (354–430) articulated an influential theory of signs and what they signified: “For a sign is a thing which, over and above the impression it makes on the senses, causes some thing else to come into the mind as a consequence of itself.” 1 Augustine’s theory that words are signs referring to realities signified by those signs means, for example, that the word pizza signifies a pie composed of bread, sauce, cheese, and toppings, so that this word causes us to engage the idea of a delicious entrée. Augustine’s paradigm for using this distinction for theology is Scripture, since God inspired human words that cause our participation in the divine realities of which they speak. With Scripture, God gives us these written signs to draw us into the divine realities they signify. The written accounts of God’s redemptive history pull us into his ongoing narrative of saving his people in Christ. Like the word pizza forces us to reckon with the reality of whether we crave cheesy goodness, Scripture’s words bring us to encounter God as Maker and Redeemer through the story of Christ.

In Augustinian thought, signs then play a key role in bringing us into contact with the realities they signify. Drawing lines to the Christian life, Augustine argued that catechesis means explaining how “the signs of divine realities are visible but the invisible realities themselves are granted in them.”2 Although Scripture’s written words occur within the visible realm of nature, God has given them as signs of our participation in supernatural realities of a relationship with him. Like a beach patrol posts a sign to mark a nest of turtle eggs that are hidden to our eyes, so God provides the words of Scripture to tell us about the realities of the God we cannot investigate directly with our senses.

Augustine’s use of the distinction between signs and things signified extends beyond words to the sacraments. Sacraments are signs through which God accomplishes, or seals, the realities signified in them. While bread and wine make up the Lord’s Supper, these creaturely instances of nourishment, when set apart by word and prayer, point beyond themselves to signify our participation in Christ’s body, blood, and all his benefits. Augustine’s categories became standard fare for subsequent Western theological discussion of the sacraments.

In the medieval period, the church continued to build this theological fence of consensus. Two major theological training manuals exemplify the medieval use of Augustine’s understanding of signs applied to the sacraments. Peter Lombard (1100–1160) flaunted his Augustinian pedigree in his magnum opus, The Sentences, by beginning it, “All teaching concerns things or signs.”3 Lombard then taught that a sacrament is “a sign of the grace of God and the form of invisible grace.”4 Later, Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) taught similarly that “a sacrament is a sign of some sacred thing pertaining to man.” 5 The Augustinian position on sacraments as outwardly exhibited signs of inwardly sealed grace became Western Christianity’s default.

During the Reformation era, the mainstream Reformers preserved this Augustinian paradigm for the sacraments, despite various disagreements about

its implications for doctrine and practice, highlighting how they sought church reform rather than overhaul. Among the Lutherans, the Augsburg Confession (1530) article XIII affirms that sacraments “were ordained . . . that they should be signs and testimonies of the will of God towards us,” entailing that “men must use Sacraments so as to join faith with them, which believes the promises that are offered and declared unto us by the Sacraments.” 6 On the Reformed side, John Calvin (1509–1564), explicitly appealing to Augustine, argued that a sacrament “is an outward sign by which the Lord seals on our consciences the promises of his good will toward us in order to sustain the weakness of our faith,” or more simply, “a testimony of divine grace toward us, confirmed by an outward sign, with mutual attestation of our piety toward him.”7 The Augustinian heritage of visible signs of invisible grace continued into the Reformation period among Protestants across various confessional boundaries. ***

Holy Signes and Seales: Continuity with the Augustinian Consensus across the Protestant Spectrum in England

Although the preceding historical sketch of how the church built theological fences of consensus relating Augustine’s paradigm of signs to the sacraments may be minimal, it’s enough to give us context for the state of sacramental consensus and controversy as we turn to the teaching of a representative sample of English Protestant theologians. We will focus our exploration on their published catechisms because those works were primarily intended for the instruction and edification of church members. Since the intricacies of doctrinal debate are not always carried into the pulpit or hashed out before the watching church, this approach helps us avoid getting lost in the details of academic debates and instead stress what these theologians wanted every Christian to understand. In other words, catechisms contain the kind of teaching that truly helps us see what fences were meant to guard the sheep most securely.

The reforming tradition in England included theologians with a variety of approaches to continuing that reform, primarily known as conformists and nonconformists. Conformists accepted the established church’s officially adopted traditions and ceremonies as matters “indifferent,” meaning that the Bible does not explicitly forbid or endorse them. Nonconformists resisted many of or all of these extrabiblical practices as unbiblical, often causing controversy as they pushed against the church’s canon law.8 Knowing that there were these principled differences about reform helps us understand which controversies took place inside the sheepfold and which represent breaks in the fence.

Let’s start with theologians who occupied the center of the spectrum of conformity and nonconformity. Cornelius Burges (1589–1665), who served as the second prolocutor of the Westminster Assembly, produced a small catechism to prepare his congregation for communicant membership. He began his catechism:

The Augustinian heritage of visible signs of invisible grace continued into the Reformation period among Protestants across various confessional boundaries.

What is a sacrament in generall? It is an holy Ordinance of God, wherein he doth by outward visible signes represent and exhibite some spirituall grace annexed by vertue of his institution, to confirme the hearts of his children touching their interest in Christ, and to bind them unto himselfe in sincere and stedfast obedience.9

God commissioned visible signs to serve as sacraments and “annexed” spiritual grace to them so that his word connects the divine reality to the sacramental sign. Sounding a lot like Burges, James Ussher (1581–1656), the archbishop over the Church of Ireland, wrote: “A Sacrament is a visible signe, ordained by God to be a seale for confirmation of the promises of the Gospell unto the due receivers thereof.”10 On the one hand, Burges was a moderate voice within one strand of nonconformity. On the other hand, Ussher represented the conformist tradition: unapologetically Reformed, while observing many of the prescriptions in the Book of Common Prayer and defending episcopacy. Although Burgess and Ussher were hardly hand-in-hand on church matters, they were in closer agreement in their sacramental theology. This consensus seems to hold even when we extend beyond these moderates to explore further left and right along the spectrum of conformity. John Owen (1616–1683) is well known for his articulation of issues like the extent of Christ’s satisfaction, but he is often overlooked for how emphatically nonconformist he was. 11 Still, he also cast the sacraments in Augustinian terms, asking, “What are the Sacraments, or seales of the new Covenant?,” and answering, “Visible seales of God’s spirituall promises, made unto us in the blood of Jesus Christ.” 12 He expanded this point, explaining that these seals were “instituted of Christ to bee visible seales and pledges, whereby God in him confirmeth the promises of the Covenant to all beleevers, restipulating of them, growth in Faith and obedience, Mark 16:16; John 3:5; Acts 2:38; 22:16; Rom. 4:11; 1 Cor. 10:2–4; 11:26–29.”

13 Owen’s uncompromising nonconformity nonetheless still left plenty of room for the usual Augustinian understanding of the sacraments.

Meanwhile, on the spectrum’s other end, Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667) was thoroughly conformist, siding with Archbishop William Laud during the controversies in the 1630s leading to the Westminster Assembly. Taylor defended the church calendar, was imprisoned during Oliver Cromwell’s interregnum, and rose to prominence as bishop of Down and Connor as well as vice-chancellor of Trinity College Dublin after the Restoration. Still, Taylor wrote in his catechism that a sacrament is “an outward Ceremony ordained by Christ, to be a sign and means of conveying his grace to us.” 14 The Augustinian center held among those who disagreed thoroughly about other issues of churchmanship.

Picking up Taylor’s explanation of a sacrament as a ceremony, the emphasis on the sacraments as ceremonies is a good indicator of how far toward the conformist side someone was. Henry Hammond (1605–1660), another thoroughgoing conformist even though he attended the Westminster Assembly, likewise favored ceremonial language in his catechism: “A sacrament in this place signifies a holy Rite, a sacred Ceremony used in the service of God.”15 The connection to

his conformism becomes clearer in his explanation concerning ceremonies:

Some ordained by Christ, some by the Apostles, some by the following Church of several ages, and now accordingly used among Christians, in obedience to Christ and the Apostles in what they ordained, and in imitation of the laudable Canons or practice of the primitive or ancient Church.16

Even with this distinct aspect to the conformist view of sacraments, Hammond still held the usual Augustinian points argued by other Reformed theologians:

The word Sacrament is set to signifie an outward visible sign, i.e. not onely a holy rite or ceremony, as before I told you, but that a significative, not empty, rite, a ceremony set to import and denote something visibly and discernably, and that something, an inward spiritual grace given unto us, i.e. some special favour and gift of God bestowed upon us.17

So, even when theologians from opposite positions along the Protestant spectrum in England’s established church set forth their unique emphases, their catechisms nonetheless displayed wide consensus on the sacraments as visible signs by which God works invisible grace. ***

Sacraments As Means of Grace: A Development of the Augustinian Tradition

The English Reformed catechetical tradition that is most familiar to us today— the Westminster Larger and Shorter Catechisms—draws on the language of visible signs and invisible grace (WLC 163; WSC 92). Nonetheless, the primary vocabulary that frames the issue of signs and what they signify is different: the sacraments are means of grace, specifically in the covenant of grace. Vitally, this difference is not a theological departure from the Augustinian consensus but a development within it, growing out of the Reformed emphasis on the covenantal character of God’s dealings with his people. The Reformed tradition’s developing emphasis on word and sacraments as means of grace aimed, in part, to explain how the sacraments were signs of invisible grace as God appointed them in his covenant to signify, seal, and confirm the benefits of this covenant. In other words, the Reformed combined Augustine’s theology of signs with their paradigm of means of grace to reinforce traditional theological boundaries—akin to putting lights on the fences to help guide the sheep more clearly.

An interesting example of this development is John Ball (1585–1640), who belonged to the nonconformist tradition and was famous for his catechetical works. In a one-page catechism for preparing young people to receive the Lord’s Supper, after summarizing the gospel, Ball contended that salvation is

The Reformed combined Augustine’s theology of signs with their paradigm of means of grace to reinforce traditional theological boundaries—akin to putting lights on the fences to help guide the sheep more clearly.

confirmed to us “by God’s Word and Sacraments.” Two questions later, he asked, “What is a Sacrament?,” answering, “A Seale of the Covenant of Grace, or an outward and visible signe of an inward and spirituall Grace.” 18 Here, like the Westminster Larger Catechism, Ball freely combined the Augustinian paradigm for the sacraments’ nature with a Reformed commitment to the sacraments as joined to God’s word as his covenantally ordained means of grace for his people. Because Ball’s catechism was so brief, his inclusion of any explanation of the sacraments’ nature and function shows how important these categories were in developing Reformed theology. Further, it exemplifies what Reformed theologians thought that everyday Christians, including younger disciples preparing to receive the Lord’s Supper for the first time, ought to understand and believe.

The Westminster Assembly codified this combination more famously in their catechisms. Concerning the sacraments generally, the Shorter Catechism states, “The outward and ordinary means, whereby Christ communicateth to us the benefits of Redemption, are his Ordinances, especially the Word, Sacraments and Prayer; all which are made effectual to the Elect, for Salvation.” 19 In order to get ahead of potential objections to ceremonialism, they also included the question and answer:

Q. How doe the Sacraments become effectuall means of Salvation?

A. The Sacraments become effectuall means of Salvation, not from any vertue in them, or in him that doth administer them; but onely by the blessing of Christ, and the working of his Spirit, in them that by faith receive them.20

Then, like Ball, they rounded out their description of the sacraments as means of grace by appealing to the standard Augustinian categories: “A sacrament is an holy Ordinance instituted by Christ, wherein, by sensible Signes, Christ and the benefits of the New Covenant are represented, sealed, and applied to Beleevers.” 21 In its preferred covenantal language of means of grace, the Westminster Assembly (which included theologians at all points along the spectrum of conformity and nonconformity) upheld and developed the Augustinian consensus. As means of grace, the sacraments are visible signs belonging to the covenant of grace, which seal to Christ’s people his invisible grace by the power of the Spirit through faith.

John Rogers Herbert, “Assertion of Liberty of Conscience by the Independents of the Westminster Assembly of Divines” (1847)

Signs but Not Seals? The Controversial Trajectory of English Baptist Catechisms

Catechisms belonging to the Particular Baptist tradition in England are a notable exception to the general rule of broad Augustinian consensus in sacramental language and theology. Arguably, while not all Baptist catechisms departed from the theological content of the consensus about sacramental efficacy, major examples of the catechetical tradition departed from at least the linguistic categories of the Christian tradition. The widely used work by William Collins (d. 1702), commonly called “the Baptist Catechism” since the Baptist assembly in 1693 requested its composition, is modeled straightforwardly on the Westminster Shorter Catechism, following the same order and often repeating its exact phrasing.22 Collins even included Westminster’s vocabulary for the sacraments as means of grace:

The outward and ordinary Means, whereby Christ communicateth to us the Benefits of Redemption, are his Ordinances, especially the Word, Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and Prayer; all which Means are made effectual to the Elect for Salvation.23

He also repeated the Shorter Catechism’s explanation of how the sacraments become “effectual Means of Salvation.”24 Still, despite following the Shorter Catechism’s paradigm for the sacraments’ efficacy as means of grace and even its exact order of questions, Collins omitted its question explaining what a sacrament is, so excluding the language of sign and seal.25

While English Baptists like Collins continued to draw on much of the theological heritage of the consensus, some of their works show clear evidence of severing the traditional Augustinian connection between signs (or means) and the grace that is not only signified but sealed through them. Benjamin Keach (1640–1704) wrote his catechism as a dialogue between a father and son, whose discussion moves from the signs of true faith to the means of God’s grace. The son answers his father’s question about the means that God uses to work regeneration:

The outward and more ordinary means whereby God doth this, is by preaching the Gospel. . . . The inward and more special means, is by the Powerful Working and Operation of the Holy Ghost, by which the Word Preached becomes effectual; for without this, the Word doth Profit none to Salvation, Ps. 19:7; 1 Thess. 1:6; 1 Cor. 3:7.26

Keach’s discussion is notable not for what he says about the efficacy of the Spirit-empowered word (a conviction shared by all), but for what he doesn’t say

The title page of an 1851 printing of Collins’s Baptist Catechism, showing how it has been commonly misattributed to Benjamin Keach, who published his catechism decades earlier.

about the sacraments’ efficacy. He uses the received language of signs and means, but only for the word and Spirit, never addressing the sacraments as visible signs or means sealing invisible realities.27 He did refer to baptism and the Supper as a preaching of the gospel “to the Sense of Seeing” whereas the word addresses the ears, but there is no sense in which the sacraments are instrumental in conveying divine grace in any other way than by offering opportunities for instruction. 28 This implicit decoupling of the sacraments from instrumentality—as signs of the grace they signify but do not seal—would become obvious in the 1677 London Baptist Confession of Faith (28.1–2, 29.1), which rejected the language of seals as applied to the sacraments.29 Augustinianism may have been slightly more apparent in the Baptist descriptions of the Lord’s Supper, but their confession’s signatories overtly stated their purpose to demur from the Reformed in regard to the sacrament of baptism.30 The mainstream of English Protestant theologians could agree with Keach and the London Baptist Confession so far as they go; they would go significantly further.

***

Conclusion

This guided tour through early modern Protestant catechisms reveals significant consensus among theologians, even from differing camps across the spectrum of those pursuing reform, concerning the sacraments as visible signs of invisible grace. The continuity from the ancient to the early modern period makes an important point: The mainstream Christian tradition has agreed that the sacraments are not bare signs but signs that God uses to draw us into the spiritual realities they signify; God has imbued the sacraments with a certain instrumentality, a certain kind of significatory and sealing efficacy.

This historical tour shows us a theological fence of consensus marking safe pasture concerning the sacraments. On the one hand, we should not overplay the sacraments’ efficacy by undermining their nature as signs. We cannot collapse invisible grace entirely into the sign, as happened in certain cases in the medieval period and remains so in Roman Catholic theology. The sacraments as signs are not themselves the invisible grace they signify. On the other hand, we should not reduce the sacraments’ efficacy so that they no longer play an instrumental role in drawing us into the realities that God appointed them to signify. The notable exception of some Baptist catechisms manifests a tendency to diminish the sacraments’ role—even when described as means of grace— limiting their efficacy to teaching. In other words, the sacraments’ role in sealing and granting spiritual participation in the signified divine reality was removed, so that they signify only by granting remembrance, insight, or confirmation, and not also, more profoundly, by sealing an invisible grace. The wider tradition, however, shows that we all find a safer pasture in the theological paradigm wherein the sacraments are visible signs through which God indeed seals his invisible grace by faith.

The mainstream Christian tradition has agreed that . . . God has imbued the sacraments with a certain instrumentality, a certain kind of significatory and sealing efficacy.

Both across the centuries and across the majority of the specific Protestant spectrum in England highlighted here, theologians not only maintained this consensus language but also found it a necessary part of catechizing their church members, even the very young. Though we still struggle with controversy over this issue, we can also learn more deeply to recognize and cherish the consensus. Let us celebrate with the Christian tradition how God has wisely ordained to work his unseen spiritual blessings through tangible, physical means, mysteriously signifying and sealing to us his divine favor through his word joined with simple water, bread, and wine. God has worked through his church to build theological fences around his sheep, and we should be excited for and confident in the safety they provide.

Harrison Perkins (PhD, Queen’s University Belfast) is pastor at Oakland Hills Community Church (OPC), online faculty in church history at Westminster Theological Seminary, visiting lecturer in systematic theology at Edinburgh Theological Seminary, and author of Catholicity and the Covenant of Works: James Ussher and the Reformed Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2020).

1. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 2.1, in Philip Schaff, ed., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series 1, 14 vols. (New York: Christian Literature, 1887), 2:535

2. Augustine, On Catechizing the Uninstructed, 50.26, in Jacques Paul Migne, ed., Patrologia Cursus Completus: Series Latina, 221 vols. (Paris, 1844–64), 40:344 (signacula quidem rerum divinarum esse visibilia, sed res ipsas invisibiles in eis honorari).

3. Peter Lombard, The Sentences: Book 1: The Mystery of the Trinity, trans. Giulio Silano (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2007), 1.1.1.

4. Peter Lombard, The Sentences: Book 4: On the Doctrine of Signs, trans. Giulio Silano (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2010), 1.4.2.

5. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 5 vols. (New York: Benziger Bros., 1948; repr., Notre Dame, IN: Christian Classics, 1981), 3.60.2.

6. Philip Schaff, ed., The Creeds of Christendom, 3 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1877), 2:15.

7. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 4.14.1.

8. Harrison Perkins, Catholicity and the Covenant of Works: James Ussher and the Reformed Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 13–16.

9. Cornelius Burges, A Most Compendious Direction to All that desire to be meete partakers of the Lords Supper (London, 1622).

10. James Ussher, The Principles of Christian Religion with A briefe Method of the Doctrine thereof (London, 1653), 38–39.

11. Crawford Gribben, John Owen and English Puritanism:

Experiences of Defeat (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

12. John Owen, The Principles of the Doctrine of Christ Unfolded in Two Short Catechisms (London, 1645), 6.

13. Owen, Principles, 54.

14. Jeremy Taylor, A Short Catechism for the Institution of Young Persons in the Christian Religion (London, 1652), 18.

15. Henry Hammond, A Practical Catechism, 7th ed. (London, 1662), 362.

16. Hammond, Practical Catechism, 362.

17. Hammond, Practical Catechism, 363.

18. John Ball, A Short Catechism to Prepare Ignorant Young People for the Sacrament (Oxford, 1657), 1.

19. The Humble Advice of the Assemblie of Divines [. . .] concerning A Shorter Catechism (London, 1647), 14.

20. Shorter Catechism, 15.

21. Shorter Catechism, 15.

22. James T. Dennison, Jr., ed., Reformed Confessions of the 16th and 17th Centuries in English Translation, 4 vols. (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage, 2008–14), 4:572.

23. William Collins, A Brief Instruction in the Principles of Christian Religion (London, 1695), 18.

24. Collins, Brief Instruction, 19.

25. Collins, Brief Instruction, 19.

26. Benjamin Keach, Instructions for Children, 9th ed. (London, 1710), 97–98.

27. Keach, Instructions, 98.

28. Keach, Instructions, 101.

29. Dennison, Reformed Confessions, 4:566.

30. Dennison, Ending Statement, Reformed Confessions, 4:570.

Converse II.

Exploring perspectives from the present

Four Confessions, One Supper: A White Horse Inn Roundtable

The following is transcribed from the White Horse Inn episode “Discussing Our Differences on the Lord’s Supper” (August 26, 2018). The roundtable participants are Michael Horton (Reformed), Justin Holcomb (Anglican), Steve Parks (Lutheran), and Jeremy Yong (Baptist). This excerpt is lightly edited for length and clarity. Be sure to listen to the whole episode at whitehorseinn.org/supper.

MH: First of all, let me start with Pope Leo XIII, who argued that at the eucharistic altar “all the laws of nature are suspended; the whole substance of the bread and wine are changed into the Body and the Blood” of Christ— including his physical organs, by the way. 1 This is the standard view you find quoted in the recent Catholic Catechism on the doctrine of transubstantiation.2 The bread and the wine actually are “transubstantiated”: the substances changed into the body and blood of Christ. So, it looks like bread, tastes like bread; looks like wine, tastes like wine. But it really is Christ’s body and blood. That is the view that all of us reject. But now let’s start, Steve, with you. What would you say are the distinctives of the Lutheran position?

SP: Let me just quickly read here from Luther’s Small Catechism, and then I can compare and contrast it to the Roman Catholic view. To his question “What is the Sacrament of the Altar?”3 he answers:

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.

Where is this written?

The holy Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and St. Paul, write thus: Our Lord Jesus Christ, the same night in which He was betrayed, took bread: and when He had given thanks, He brake it, and gave it to His disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is My body, which is given for you. This do in remembrance of Me. After the same manner also He took the cup, when He had supped, gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Take, drink ye all of it. This cup is the new testament in My

blood, which is shed for you for the remission of sins. This do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of Me.

Then Luther asks, “What is the benefit of such eating and drinking?” He answers,

That is shown us in 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.

Finally, he asks, “How can bodily eating and drinking do such great things?” And his response is very important here:

It is not the eating and drinking, indeed, that does them, but the words which stand here, namely: Given, and shed for you, for the remission of sins . Which words are, beside the bodily eating and drinking, as the chief thing in the Sacrament; and he that believes these words has what they say and express, namely, the forgiveness of sins.

So for Luther, the idea isn’t so much that the bread and the wine become or are transformed into the body and blood of Christ (including the organs) in the way you just quoted from Roman Catholic sources. For Luther, the idea is that Christ is present along with the bread. So when we receive the bread, we receive what Jesus says it is: bread. But we also receive what Jesus is pointing us to as being most important, which is his body. And in the same way, when we receive the wine and drink the wine, we truly do drink wine. It’s real wine. But at the same time, Jesus is giving to us his real blood shed for us for the forgiveness of sins. So along with the bread, we receive the true body of Christ, and along with the wine, we receive the true blood of Christ. It’s there that Jesus gives himself to us personally and individually, along with all of his saving benefits. So again, the primary emphasis here is that this is an activity of God to the sinner, and not the other way around. It’s definitely a sacrament and not a sacrifice. It’s not something we’re offering to God, but something that God decidedly does for us in his mercy.

MH: Everything you said there, the Reformed confessions say as well. So what would you say is the major distinctive? What is the greatest difference between the Lutherans and the Reformed confessionally on this question?

SP: I think there are two we can zero in on. The first is the question of what we receive with our physical mouths in the Lord’s Supper. As I understand it, in the Reformed tradition, we receive with our physical mouths bread and wine. With Lutheranism, the idea is that when Jesus says, “Take, eat, take, drink,” he’s focusing on the physical mouth. And what does he say we’re eating and drinking? His body and his blood. So, Lutherans are going to argue that we receive the body of

For Luther, . . . when we receive the bread, we receive what Jesus says it is: bread. But we also receive what Jesus is pointing us to as being most important, which is his body.

It is a real and true feeding on the body and blood of Christ. But it is only through faith that we receive the true body and true blood of Christ. We don’t receive Christ bodily, orally.

Christ orally and we receive the blood of Christ orally. Not in exactly the same way that we receive the bread and wine, but in a mysterious way, in a miraculous way, and in a supernatural way. Nevertheless, we are eating the body of Christ with our mouths, and we are drinking the blood of Christ with our mouths. I think that is the primary difference. Somewhat related to that, the second one is the question of who receives what in the sacrament. For Lutherans, everybody who partakes of the sacrament is eating what Luther says here, the true body of Christ, and drinking the true blood of Christ. Whereas I think in the Reformed tradition, the idea is a bit different. Only those who actually believe are partaking of Christ in the sacrament.

MH : To summarize the Reformed position on this: it grew. Because it starts, of course, with Zwingli and that fateful meeting he had with Luther where they agreed on twelve out of thirteen points. 4 The thirteenth point was the Lord’s Supper. It came out in their discussion that Zwingli didn’t just have a different view of the Lord’s Supper, but he had a different view of Christ. He believed only that the divine nature saves us, not the human nature. Martin Bucer, who was at that meeting, said that Zwingli did not represent their view at all. After this, Zwingli was marginalized, and Bucer and others signed the Wittenberg Concord with Luther, basically saying that they agreed with him. 5 This infuriated Zwingli of course. Then Calvin came along, and Peter Martyr Vermigli did a lot of the labor here. Together, this next generation fleshed out the confessional Reformed view, which is summarized fairly well, I think, in the Heidelberg Catechism:

How does the Lord’s Supper signify and seal to you that you share in Christ’s one sacrifice on the cross and in all His gifts? 6

In this way: Christ has commanded me and all believers to eat of this broken bread and drink of this cup in remembrance of Him. With this command He gave these promises: First, as surely as I see with my eyes the bread of the Lord broken for me and the cup given to me, so surely was His body offered for me and His blood poured out for me on the cross. Second, as surely as I receive from the hand of the minister and taste with my mouth the bread and the cup of the Lord as sure signs of Christ’s body and blood, so surely does He Himself nourish and refresh my soul to everlasting life with His crucified body and shed blood.

What does it mean to eat the crucified body of Christ and to drink His shed blood?

First, to accept with a believing heart all the suffering and the death of Christ, and so receive forgiveness of sins and life eternal. Second, to be united more and more to His sacred body through the Holy Spirit, who lives both in Christ and in us. Therefore, although Christ is in heaven and we are on earth, yet we are flesh of His flesh and bone of His bones.

Very different from Zwingli! “And we forever live and are governed by one Spirit, as the members of our body are by one soul.” It’s not a figure of speech. It’s not in the imagination. It is a real and true feeding on the body and blood of Christ. But it is only through faith that we receive the true body and true blood of Christ. We don’t receive Christ bodily, orally. Justin, do you want to chime in here on the Anglican view?

JH: Historically, Thomas Cranmer was on a journey. He started out with more of a Lutheran understanding, and then he moved toward what some have called a Reformed understanding of sacraments. This is seen in Article XXVIII of the Thirty-Nine Articles on the Lord’s Supper.7 Normally, the Anglicans aren’t known as the prickly ones, but they’re going strong here where the article states that the idea of transubstantiation “is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament, and hath given occasion to many superstitions.” The Anglican understanding is that it’s not only a sign of love that Christians should have for one other, but it’s also a sacrament of our redemption by Christ’s death. In the third paragraph, the article states: “The Body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten, in the Supper, only after an heavenly and spiritual manner. . . . And the means whereby the Body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper, is Faith.” So, we eat in faith. This plays out in the words of distribution when people are being served: “This is the body of our Lord Jesus Christ given for you. Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for you and feed on him in your hearts by faith and with thanksgiving.”8 The Anglican and the Episcopal Church put those together in that way.

MH: Jeremy, as a Baptist, how do you weigh in on this question of the nature of the Lord’s Supper?

JY: The Baptists want to emphasize Christ’s sacrifice once and for all, distancing themselves from the Roman Catholic doctrine. Distinct to the Baptist confessions is the highlight of this memorial aspect. So when we read, “This is my body, this is my blood,” we believe it’s just figurative.

MH: When Jesus speaks of remembering—we “do this in remembrance of” him— how important is it for us to come to this with the biblical categories of remembrance, such as at Passover? I think we tend to come to it as Gentiles thinking that it’s remembering somebody who’s absent or gone or dead. But in the actual Passover liturgy, we’re told in Exodus, “When your son asks you, Why do we do this? Tell him, we passed through the sword of death. And God led us out with a strong hand.”9 Scripture says “us.” We were there. We participated. We’re sharing in this. That’s different from remembering as simply recollecting, right?

JH : I believe so. I believe when the Bible talks about remembering that this is what it’s bringing into it. It’s like an American Fourth of July parade that

The Anglican understanding is that it’s not only a sign of love that Christians should have for one other, but it’s also a sacrament of our redemption by Christ’s death.

celebrates our independence from Britain over two hundred years ago. Likewise, in the Bible, a ceremony or celebration brings a past event to the present in such a vivid way that it’s almost as if the original event were taking place in the present. It’s remembering that what happened is also present right now. Especially with special meals: in Exodus, we have the meal of remembrance with the Passover of Exodus 12. You have a meal of participation, the bread of life of Exodus 16, but then a meal of anticipation of Exodus 24. When you’re remembering, you’re bringing the past into the present with an eye also toward the future.

MH: In 1 Corinthians 10:16–17, Paul affirms this idea of a “meal of participation”: “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.” It looks like the Lord’s Supper is not a symbol of our unity in Christ. It actually takes us as particles and mashes us into one loaf, bakes us into one loaf with Christ as our head. This is real participation kind of language here. From the Baptist perspective, Jeremy, how would you interpret a passage like that?

JY: Great question. I would say that it is a symbol but it’s not merely a symbol, which I think makes all the difference there. Looking at the 1689 London Baptist Confession, there is language of “feeding on Christ,” which is participation.10 As I mentioned previously, it is an entering deeper into this wonderful idea that we are under the blood and all of the benefits of Jesus Christ and all that is conveyed to us by faith in Jesus Christ. So when I see the word participation, I think of “entering into a deeper union with my Savior.”

MH: That happens specifically through the Lord’s Supper?

JY: That does happen specifically through the Lord’s Supper as one of the ordinances Christ commanded his church to do. In that sense, it is very special. So, we’re thinking of the corporate gathering of the local church. If the church is not doing these things, if they’ve neglected to do it or neglect to do it in a proper way, then that certainly is sin. But I also must say that there are a lot of Baptists I know who treat it as just a memorial.

JH: More than just Baptists, by the way.

ALL: Yeah. [Laughter]

JY: This idea of remembrance is so thin. It’s almost like the equivalent of someone who says that they do their daily devotion remembers Jesus at that time. This type of remembering is very individual.

For Baptists, the Supper is a symbol but it’s not merely a symbol.

MH: Why do I need to come to church for preaching and baptism, the Lord’s Supper, all these things, when I can be at home and remember Jesus there?

SP: Right. Why do I need bread and wine to remember Jesus at all?

JY : Exactly. It’s really just an expression of one’s own personal faith, like how baptism unfortunately is to too many. I’d love to see a fuller recovery of Calvin’s description of the Supper—what is it he says?—that the Lord descends and we ascend (beautiful language), all through the Spirit—thinking about the Supper as a means of grace. This is what happens when the church participates or takes the Lord’s Supper: we participate in all the blessings that Jesus has given us.

MH: I think that Lewis Sperry Chafer, the founder of Dallas Theological Seminary, speaks for a lot of evangelicals I grew up with when he writes, “The Scriptures seem to support the memorial view, and rather than the elements containing or symbolizing the presence of Christ”—not even symbolizing? This is far from Zwingli!— “they are instead a recognition of his absence.” 11 That’s all it is. It’s a recognition of his absence. But Zwingli did think that what we’re doing here is our work: we’re remembering; we’re uniting ourselves to Christ and to everyone else in the congregation. Again, the focus is on what we’re doing in the meal. We’re basically imagining Christ. Against Zwingli’s comparison of the Eucharist as looking at a picture of a friend, Peter Martyr Vermigli said,

A friend, being grasped by thinking and kept in mind, does not change the thinker or nourish the mind, nor does he restore his flesh to become capable of resurrection. And what one has in a mirror is the faintest shadow, which should not be compared to that union which we have with Christ.

I think this is such a robust statement: We have to be united to Christ’s humanity to be raised on the Last Day. It’s not just his divinity that saves. We have to be united to his humanity, and he uses human creaturely means to unite humans to his humanity.

1. See Leo XIII’s encyclical Mirae Caritatis, 7, which can be accessed online at https://www.vatican.va.

2. Catechism of the Catholic Church, part 2, section 2, chapter 1, article 3.5, which can be accessed online at https://www.vatican.va.

3. The chapter on “The Sacrament of the Altar” quoted here can be found online at www.bookofconcord.org.

4. Horton is referring to the Marburg Colloquy (1529), whose articles can be found in a translation by Ellen Yutzy Glebe, accessible online at https://ghdi.ghi-dc.org.

5. The Wittenberg Concord (1536) affirms the real, substantial presence of Christ in the Supper and even that the unworthy partake (although only to their own judgment).

6. The translation of questions 75 and 76 quoted here can be found online at https://students.wts.edu/resources/creeds/

Heidelberg.

7. The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion can be accessed online at http://anglicansonline.org.

8. Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, Article XXVIII.

9. Paraphrasing Exodus 12:26–27 and 13:14–15.

10. See London Baptist Confession of Faith 30.7: “Worthy receivers, outwardly partaking of the visible elements in this ordinance, do then also inwardly by faith, really and indeed, yet not carnally and corporally, but spiritually receive, and feed upon Christ crucified, and all the benefits of his death.”

11. Lewis Sperry Chafer, Major Bible Themes: 52 Vital Doctrines of the Scripture Simplified and Explained, revised by John F. Walvoord (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1974), 271–72.

We have to be united to Christ’s humanity to be raised on the Last Day. It’s not just his divinity that saves.

Persuade III.

Thinking theologically about all things

“Sorry I Could Not Travel Both”: PROTESTANT Divergence ON THE Sacraments

by BRANNON ELLIS

PANISH AND PORTUGUESE are close siblings. Both descended from Latin and developed alongside one another on the Iberian Peninsula in relative isolation from their closest European neighbors. Spanish and Portuguese thus have what linguists call a “high degree of mutual intelligibility.” 1 If a person from Spain is speaking to a person from Portugal, much of the conversation will be intelligible for both. But there will be surprises. The Spaniard, downcast, may lament a situation in which his sister, Maria, was embarrassed or ashamed (embarazada), while the Portuguese might joyfully respond to the news that Maria is pregnant (embaraçada). The Portuguese might express his delight at spotting an octopus (polvo), and the Spaniard may wonder why his friend is so fascinated by dust (also polvo). The Spaniard should certainly take care in extending an invitation to a party to which his friend should feel free to bring (traer) his wife—it will sound an awful lot like an invitation to betray (trair) her! These linguistic land mines are called “false friends.”2

Sometimes this is exactly how I feel when I talk with a fellow Christian from a different confessional tradition. I can’t remember how many times I’ve been discussing baptism or the Lord’s Supper with a friend and felt like we were tossing the same terms or Bible verses back and forth, while the words we caught were nothing like what was thrown. Why is it that when we discuss the sacraments with brothers and sisters in Christ from other traditions (close siblings indeed!), we feel like we understand each other one moment and then speak completely different languages the next? Why do our fellow Christians—not just their words—sometimes feel like “false friends”?

In this article, I want to bring attention to a root source not only of surface misunderstanding but of real disagreement among classic Protestants, one I’ve found to underlie many other misunderstandings and disagreements. Being attentive to this divergence at the very root of our theology of the sacraments will, I hope, help us as we work through our differences over its branches, limbs, and leaves. This underlying cause of disagreement—the reason why so much of our conversation about the sacraments is lost in translation—is our answer to the question: What do sacraments accomplish, and who’s the primary performer?

“And That Has Made All the Difference”

Most Christians I know have never asked about what sacraments accomplish, at least not explicitly. We’ve asked what the Bible teaches about how many sacraments there are, whether we should call them sacraments or ordinances, how baptism should be administered and who should receive it, how often the Supper

The sacraments primarily function as means of God’s grace or as means of our gratitude In the work of the sacraments, the primary performer is either God or the believer.

should be celebrated and who is authorized to offer or withhold it. But if we have any convictions at all about these other questions, we also have an implicit answer to the question of what a sacrament does. That answer affects everything else. It colors how we hear and respond to one another whenever we disagree. It influences how we interpret what the Bible says in the first place.

When we as Protestants ask what a sacrament accomplishes, and by whom, our answer should be what we believe is the Bible’s answer. But our pursuit of biblical answers never happens in a vacuum. We have great clouds of witnesses in our Baptist, Anglican, Lutheran, and Reformed traditions. Our respective confessional standards and liturgies summarize clear convictions and the rationale behind them. Those forms, more than individual representative thinkers, will guide my exploration here.

All the reformational traditions agree that the sacraments don’t accomplish anything by the mere fact of being performed or impart grace apart from faith.3 The point I’m getting at in asking what the sacraments accomplish is to uncover implicit assumptions about their function . What primary role do the sacraments perform in the life of the church and in the lives of Christians? Most importantly, who is the main performer? Whether tacitly or openly, Protestants have answered in one of two ways: the sacraments primarily function as means of God’s grace or as means of our gratitude. In the work of the sacraments, the primary performer is either God or the believer. In this article, I’m using the labels of “first-road” and “second-road” Protestantism as theological shorthand to describe these alternative sacramental paradigms.4

Robert Frost famously mused on the choice between opposite, though not equally mysterious, paths: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood . . . ” Sacramental disagreements among Protestants rarely feel like such a clear-cut choice between the road of grace and the road of gratitude. Still, at the trailhead, we can discern two diverging paths of priority and emphasis leading from our convictions about what a sacrament does. As Frost admits with sorrow, he “could not travel both / And be one traveler.” We all veer one direction or another. Some of us focus on what God is doing in the sacraments while others focus on what we are doing. Some of us find the significance of baptism and the Lord’s Supper in God’s gracious action; others find it in our faithful obedience. These diverging lines of spiritual emphasis are as different as gospel and law. And while this divergence by itself may not make “all the difference,” it deeply influences the rest of our differences. ***

The First Road: God’s Means of Grace

Here is my functional description of the role of the sacraments as God’s means of grace. This won’t make every Anglican, Lutheran, or Reformed adherent among us happy (precious few things do), but I hope it’s inclusive enough to be useful:

The sacraments are divinely chosen means through which God creates or strengthens faith and deepens faithfulness in his people as he, through them, joins us to Christ for the forgiveness of sins and new life.

The main work of the sacraments is the work of the gospel. Through them, God grants his Spirit, forgives sins, brings new life, strengthens assurance, and encourages us in our Christian walk. As far as root convictions go, this is the first road diverging in the theological wood. It represents sacramental practice and teaching through most of church history and is the path maintained by most reformational confessional and liturgical documents:

Of Baptism they teach that it is necessary to salvation, and that through Baptism is offered the grace of God, and that children are to be baptized who, being offered to God through Baptism are received into God’s grace. . . . Of the Supper of the Lord they teach that the Body and Blood of Christ are truly present, and are distributed to those who eat the Supper of the Lord; and they reject those that teach otherwise. (Augsburg Confession, X and XI)

Sacraments ordained of Christ be not only badges or tokens of Christian men’s profession, but rather they be certain sure witnesses, and effectual signs of grace, and God’s good will towards us, by the which he doth work invisibly in us, and doth not only quicken, but also strengthen and confirm our Faith in him. (Thirty-Nine Articles, XXV)

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. (Westminster Larger Catechism, A. 161)

Exactly how God works to bring all these blessings to us through the sacraments is a topic of endless debate among first-road Protestants. The point I want to make is that these confessional traditions all share the conviction that sacraments function as instruments of God’s gracious action received by faith. Despite being hotly debated and variously interpreted, this is the majority view in church history. For much of North American Protestantism, however, it’s the road less traveled.

***

The Second Road: Our Means of Gratitude

First-road Protestants see the sacraments as instruments God uses to accomplish gospel work. But second-road Protestants—like historic Baptists as well as most contemporary broadly evangelical Protestants in North America and elsewhere— tend to see the sacraments as instruments we use to accomplish law work. By

First-road confessional traditions all share the conviction that sacraments function as instruments of God’s gracious action received by faith.

saying the sacraments primarily do law work for second-road Protestants, I’m assigning them to the third (or Christian) use of the law for grateful obedience. In the Baptist tradition, according to Stanley Grenz, baptism and the Lord’s Supper “are basically human, and not divine acts. . . . The ordinances, therefore, are signs of obedience.”5 The sacraments function as an expression of the godly way we’re called to walk with grace-enabled gratitude within the community of those who follow in the steps of Jesus.

Here is my functional description of the role of the sacraments as our means of gratitude, which, again, won’t thrill every Baptist:

Sacraments are divinely established means through which we, individually and as God’s people in Christ who are indwelled by his Spirit, respond in faithful obedience to Christ’s command to observe these ordinances as occasions for reminding ourselves of the gospel, confessing or reaffirming our faith, and expressing our gratitude to our gracious God.

In this paradigm, the main function of the sacraments is the work of gratitude. They’re means by which we confess and praise, remember and recommit. For Baptists, this is especially apparent in baptism. Here’s how the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith describes the function of baptism:

Baptism is an ordinance of the New Testament, ordained by Jesus Christ, to be unto the party baptized, a sign of his fellowship with him, in his death and resurrection; of his being engrafted into him; of remission of sins; and of giving up into God, through Jesus Christ, to live and walk in newness of life. (29.1)

Notice that baptism points to these blessings of salvation as a sign for the believer, but baptism doesn’t seal these blessings to the believer. This language isn’t accidental; “sign and seal” are the twin terms the Westminster Confession used a generation earlier in its description of the function of the sacraments. 6 The London signatories unpacked the point in an appendix:

If our brethren do suppose baptism to be the seal of the Covenant which God makes with every believer (of which the Scriptures are altogether silent) it is not our concern to contend with them herein; yet we conceive the seal of that Covenant is the indwelling of the Spirit of Christ in the particular and individual persons in whom he resides, and nothing else.

In other words, the seal of Christ’s blessings for the believer is the indwelling Holy Spirit rather than baptism. Baptism isn’t the way God brings the forgiveness of sins, unites us to Christ, gives us his Spirit, and works faith and new life. Baptism is a response to those blessings of salvation. Baptism is a testimony by the believer and a reminder to the believer that union and forgiveness and new birth have already been given through the preaching of the gospel as well as the

For second-road Protestants, the main function of the sacraments is the work of gratitude.

hidden work of the Spirit in the believer’s life before and independent of the act of baptism. For second-road Protestants, forgiveness through Christ and new life in the Spirit are the saving work of God to which the sacraments powerfully testify. But forgiveness and life aren’t something God brings us through the sacraments. The work of a sacrament is not so much God’s work as ours—a “symbolic act of obedience,” as the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 has it.7 This is the perspective on the sacraments we have when walking the second road, which until relatively recently in history was the road less traveled.

Not So Fast: The Irreducible Complexity of Reality

I don’t want to push the either/or of the two roads too far. I’ve been careful to state that different Protestant confessional traditions approach the sacraments as primarily either grace or gratitude. I do this because many of us will want to affirm both functions—both roads—as true of the sacraments.

First-road Protestants usually acknowledge the second road in some form or another. Luther claimed baptism brings forgiveness and regeneration for all who receive God’s promises in it with faith. But he also said baptism “indicates that the Old Adam in us should by daily contrition and repentance be drowned and die with all sins and evil desires, and that a new man should daily emerge and arise to live before God in righteousness and purity forever.”8 Calvin defined a sacrament as first “an outward sign by which the Lord seals on our consciences the promises of his good will toward us in order to sustain the weakness of our faith; and we in turn attest our piety toward him in the presence of the Lord and of his angels and before men.”9 Our response is never the sacraments’ primary function and shouldn’t be the focus of our faith; but the first road allows us to affirm the second. After all, gratitude flows from grace.

Likewise, many second-road Protestants acknowledge deep spiritual truth in the first road, especially when it comes to the grace of God experienced in the Supper. This is especially true of many Reformed Baptists. While the London Baptist Confession clearly emphasizes the sacraments’ function as means of gratitude in a general sense, it still claims that in the Supper we receive God’s grace as we’re spiritually nourished by Christ’s body and blood through faith:

Worthy receivers, outwardly partaking of the visible elements in this ordinance, do then also inwardly by faith, really and indeed, yet not carnally and corporally, but spiritually receive, and feed upon Christ crucified, and all the benefits of his death; the body and blood of Christ being then not corporally or carnally, but spiritually present to the faith of believers in that ordinance, as the elements themselves are to their outward senses. (30.7)

This isn’t everything most first-road Protestants would want to say, but it’s also more than the mere memorialism of someone like Grenz. Indeed, many

Different Protestant confessional traditions approach the sacraments as primarily either grace or gratitude . . . . Many of us will want to affirm both functions—both roads.

Protestant believers or congregations whose confessional statements follow one path nevertheless hold convictions closer to the other path. American Reformed and Presbyterian believers, for example, often favor the second road even while their confessions and liturgies favor the first.

Despite this complexity, I want to be clear that I don’t believe the choice between the two roads is a false one. When we’re asking fundamentally about primacy, only one thing can hold pride of place. When we read what the Bible says about baptism and the Supper, does it place the primary emphasis on God’s activity or ours? Does grace or obedience hold sacramental priority?

Shedding Light on Twig and Branch Conflicts: How Should Baptism Be Administered?

From the vantage point afforded by either road, and even from a mixed perspective, the sacraments are a good and blessed gift ordained by God for building up his church. But our root assumptions about whether they’re primarily occasions for gospel or gratitude spread outward into conflicting conclusions about all the other important aspects of their meaning and use. I’ll touch on just one issue illustrating my point: the mode of baptism. My goal in raising this question isn’t to provide a satisfying answer but to whet your appetite to use this two-roads paradigm as a tool for discerning underlying assumptions in future discussions of this and related questions farther out among the twigs and branches.

In the Great Commission, Christ commanded his church to make disciples through baptizing and teaching. He didn’t specify the precise actions required for baptism, beyond invoking the Triune name, any more than he specified the precise actions required to teach beyond making sure we stick to what he commanded (Matt. 28:19–20). Scholars debate whether the New Testament word for baptize —a common verb meaning everything from plunge to bathe to dip to wash—suggests or even requires a particular mode. Church history reflects a variety of practices: full immersion, partial immersion with pouring, or pouring or sprinkling alone, all performed one time or three times. The common denominator is the name of the Trinity and the use of pure water. So, what informs our convictions about the mode of applying the water? What fuels our disagreements?

Let’s start with a second-road perspective. If sacraments are means of expressing gratitude to God, then baptism’s main function is the public profession, confirmation, and renewal of a Christian’s faith. In baptism, I’m committing myself to Christ and to the believing community in response to God’s saving initiative toward me. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that expressing my faith commitment in the most scripturally obedient and symbolically fitting way is crucial to the proper function of baptism in my life as a believer and in the life of the community I’m joining.

When we’re asking fundamentally about primacy, only one thing can hold pride of place.

Second-road Protestant emphasis on symbolism is all the more fitting when paired with the biblical and historical evidence for immersion. While it may be overreaching to speak of a scholarly consensus, many scholars agree that immerse is the typical meaning of the Greek verb and was the preferred mode of administration for most of church history in the West (and remains so in the East). The evidence is weaker, it must be said, for full immersion or submersion as Baptists practice it today—except, ironically, in the case of infants, who were often fully immersed. From what we can tell from ancient writings as well as architecture and depictions, it seems that in adult baptism being “immersed” might mean the convert stood or knelt in water while the officiant poured water over that person’s head or whole body.10 In any case, using a significant quantity of water in the administration of the rite is symbolically suited to New Testament accounts of baptism and some of its key imagery: burial with Christ (Rom. 6:1–4; Col. 2:12), passing through the Red Sea (1 Cor. 10:1–4), and whole-person cleansing (Acts 22:16; Eph. 5:26; Heb. 10:22).11

First-road Protestants may disagree when second-road Protestants insist on the necessity of baptism by total immersion, but they shouldn’t be surprised. Obedience is gratitude put into action. This suggests the mode of administration is vital—even essential—to whether my baptism is true or valid. Misrepresentation or inadequate representation of the biblical symbolism for baptism is a misrepresentation not only of my faith, but of the word of the Lord whom I profess to believe.

From a first-road perspective on the sacraments as God’s means of grace, however, we find comparatively little exegetical or historical emphasis on any single baptismal mode as always best—and certainly no rejection of unpreferred modes as invalid. The ancient guidance of the Didache captures the range of modes already in practice soon after the time of the apostles:

And concerning baptism, baptize in this way: having reviewed all of these [teachings], baptize in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, in running water. But if you do not have access to running water, baptize in other water. And if you are not able to baptize with cold water, then baptize with warm water. But if you possess neither, pour water on the head three times, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.12

The author of the Didache is clearly interested in baptism’s mode and has convictions about what actions are symbolically fitting to its administration—even down to the details of running, cold water being better than still, warm water. Then why such flexibility? The underlying rationale, it seems clear, is a commitment to the objective significance of the sacrament. Christians may have convictions about whether one mode or another is more fitting or more venerable, but neither our grasp of the water’s symbolic significance nor the mode of applying it makes our baptism valid. God’s word makes it valid. When we emphasize

Fresco in the catacombs of Saints Marcellinus and Peter, Via Labicana, Rome.

Christians may have convictions about whether one mode or another is more fitting or more venerable, but neither our grasp of the water’s symbolic significance nor the mode of applying it makes our baptism valid. God’s word makes it valid.

baptism’s objectivity as God’s work according to his word, we put less emphasis on the symbolic power of the action and more emphasis on the certainty of the promise being enacted. Here, Calvin makes the Didache’s point more sharply:

Whether the person being baptized should be wholly immersed, and whether thrice or once, whether he should only be sprinkled with poured water—these details are of no importance, but ought to be optional to churches according to the diversity of countries. Yet the word “baptize” means to immerse, and it is clear that the rite of immersion was observed in the ancient church.13

For first-road Protestants, when baptism is administered with water by a representative of the church in the name of the Trinity and received by faith, it’s reckoned as if it and everything it promises are performed by God himself. Baptism isn’t our way of symbolically being buried and raised with Christ—baptism is God’s way of joining us to the crucified and risen Christ by faith. Baptism doesn’t just represent being cleansed from sin—in it, God makes us clean through faith. The sacrament serves this function whether a particular first-road confession has understood God’s promised performance to be tied to the time and place of the sacrament’s administration (as in the Book of Concord) or dependent on the Holy Spirit’s timing (as in the Westminster Standards).14 Rather than something we do for God in faithfulness, baptism is something we receive from God by faith. If, therefore, you’re convinced that the mode of administering baptism doesn’t determine whether that baptism is effectual or legitimate, you’re probably a first-road Protestant. You’re reasoning consistently with your underlying conviction that God is the one at work, accomplishing salvation by his word through the water and faith. But if you’re convinced that certain modes of administering baptism, because more symbolically fitting or exegetically defensible, are thereby rendered valid, then you’re probably a second-road Protestant. You’re reasoning consistently with a different underlying conviction: Baptism is primarily an expression of grateful obedience to God symbolizing that a believer has already been joined to Christ and to his church by faith. ***

The Road Not Taken

All classic Protestants should wrestle with the question of whether the sacraments are fundamentally gospel or fundamentally law. Do we ask: What has God promised to do? Or do we ask: What has God commanded us to do? The true answer to where the emphasis should lie, of course, must be wherever the Bible places it. Our presuppositions often hold sway in our reasoning; this diagnostic question about the sacraments’ function can only ultimately be answered not by our personal convictions but by the testimony of the Scriptures.

I’ve written this article to offer to you what has been a useful tool for me in practicing the art and craft of theological thinking about the sacraments. I hope

I’ve shown that my simple two-roads schema can be a useful tool for theological thinking, though I know it can’t presume to harness all the complexity of actual reality. This approach has also helped me to see the perspective of fellow Christians who walk the other road. Your road may not be the same one I’ve taken, but—to quote Frost once more—recognizing the root differences allows me in some way to look “down one as far as I could” even as I travel the other. In fact, I hope you’re motivated to try applying this paradigm to other important sacramental disagreements among fellow Protestants to see whether it helps you understand where you and they might be coming from. What about infant baptism? What about the frequency of the Lord’s Supper?

For all the potential land mines planted by false friends between languages like Spanish and Portuguese, the key biblical and theological terms we’ve been reflecting on—grace, faith, baptism, and so on—are quite carefully chosen and well established in most of these languages. That’s not because languages are similar everywhere, but because Christians are. Indeed, Christian sacramental traditions share a high degree of mutual intelligibility because we share one baptism through one faith and are fed on one bread by one Lord. Although we still misunderstand and disagree, our unity in the Spirit enables us to appreciate and to love across divergent paths of conviction. May our Lord continue to lead us into all truth, refusing to travel our roads in such a way as to drift apart but committing to walk with him, side by side. That will make all the difference.

All classic Protestants should wrestle with the question of whether the sacraments are fundamentally gospel or fundamentally law.

1. See, for example, the ongoing “Morpho-syntax of mutual intelligibility in the Turkic languages of Central Asia” project of the Surry Morphology Group, a linguistics research center at the University of Surrey. Here’s how they frame their research: “Despite being perceived as unique, self-contained systems, the languages of the world exist within linguistic continua, and most linguistic varieties, to a higher or lower degree, are mutually intelligible with other related varieties.”

2. Interestingly, this phenomenon occurs within languages too, when the meaning of a word changes over time or shifts from one dialect or region to another. On the prevalence of false friends when contemporary English readers use early modern English Bible translations, for example, see Ward, Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible (Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2018), ch. 3.

3. Protestants rejected this Roman Catholic view endorsed in the seventh session of the Council of Trent in 1547: “If anyone shall say that by the said sacraments of the New Law, grace is not conferred from the work which has been worked [ex opere operato], but that faith alone in the divine promise suffices to obtain grace: let him be anathema.” See Denzinger, The Sources of Catholic Dogma (St. Louis, MO: Herder, 1957), DS 851 canon 8. Contrast this with the Augsburg Confession, XII, and Westminster Confession of Faith, 27.3.

4. I’m not implying first-class and second-class citizens; I’m recognizing that the first road has been much more prevalent in the history of the church.

5. Grenz, Theology for the Community of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 644, 670, as quoted in Horton, The Christian Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011), 770.

6. See, for example, Westminster Confession of Faith, 27.1.

7. Baptist Faith and Message 2000, VII.

8. Small Catechism with Explanations (St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 2006), 214.

9. Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, ed. John T. McNeill (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1960), 4.14.1.

10. The degree to which New Testament baptism reflected rabbinic Jewish purification baths, for which total submersion was explicitly required to be valid, is also contested. For an overview of the textual debates and archaeological evidence, see the entry on baptizo in Liddell and Scott, An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon (New York: Harper, 1889), available online at archive.org; Ferguson, Baptism in the Early Church: History, Theology, and Liturgy in the First Five Centuries (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009); La Sor, “Discovering What Jewish Miqva’ot Can Tell Us about Christian Baptism,” in Biblical Archaeology Review 13:1 (1987).

11. There are other similar images for new life in Christ not symbolically tied to (full or partial) immersion, of course, such as cleansing through sprinkling (Heb. 9:13, 12:24, with Ps. 51:7), the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, anointing for priestly or kingly office, incorporation into the church, and becoming sons or daughters through participating in Christ’s sonship (Mark 1:9–11).

12. Didache 7.1–3, in Brannan, The Apostolic Fathers (Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2017), 135.

13. Institutes, 4.15.19.

14. See, for example, Defense of the Augsburg Confession, IX, and Westminster Confession of Faith, 28.6.

Brannon Ellis is the executive editor of Modern Reformation

A Supper for Sufferers

by J. D. “Skip” Dusenbury

And when the hour came, he reclined at table, and the apostles with him. And he said to them, “I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.”—Luke 22:14–15

GOOGLE “LAST MEALS” and you’ll discover an online fascination with what people chose to eat when they knew it would be the last time they got to do so. You’ll get descriptions and analysis of the final feasts of everyone from Ted Bundy to Cleopatra. (Cleopatra washed down figs with asp venom to commit suicide. Bundy ordered steak and eggs before his execution but didn’t eat a single bite.) But the most significant last meal in history, still celebrated by hundreds of millions around the globe, is referenced in Luke’s text above. Yet many celebrants of the Lord’s Supper fail to approach it with the same fascination—not a morbid curiosity, but a holy wonder. Here I want to help us savor the Supper by looking at one key ingredient: that it was instituted by a sufferer for sufferers, and that it therefore can minister to sufferers in a unique way. ***

The Lord’s Supper Was Instituted in the Context of Suffering

We tend to think of Jesus’ suffering as beginning in the Garden of Gethsemane. But as Thomas à Kempis said in The Imitation of Christ , “The whole life of Christ was a cross and martyrdom.” Sin’s constant offense to his holy soul, Satan’s special hostility and temptations, unbelieving family and neighbors, the religious leaders’ hostility and slander, the defection of many disciples (John 6:66), and his remaining disciples’ persistent dullness. Jesus suffered much and long before his final Passover meal. Even then, it was far from over: Judas’ betrayal, Gethsemane’s agonies, his disciples’ abandonment, Peter’s denials, Jewish and Roman judicial injustice, beatings, mocking, flogging, and scourging—and added to all this, the unfathomable agonies of the cross, all loomed large in Jesus’ mind as he came to that table. Jesus knew his sufferings were fast approaching their terrible climax, and his history and prospect of suffering give special poignancy to his words of institution: “Before I suffer. . . . This is my body . . . given for you.

. This cup . . . poured out for you is . . . my blood” (Luke 22:15, 19–20).

And the Man of Sorrows was not the only sufferer present that night. The disciples were dismayed by Jesus’ predictions that one of them would soon betray him (Luke 22:3–6, 21–22), that they would all abandon him (Mark 14:27, 50), and that Peter would shortly deny him three times (Luke 22:31–34). Jesus’ “Farewell Sermon,” or “Upper Room Discourse,” as John 14–16 is often called, was meant to assuage their distress concerning his imminent departure and their inability to go with him. As Acts and church history would record, the Upper Room was just the beginning of the disciples’ sufferings. So, the Lord’s Supper was instituted in the context of its founder’s and its participants’ profound suffering.

The Lord’s Supper Commemorates and Celebrates Christ’s Sufferings and Communicates Their Benefits to Believers

The Synoptic Gospels all include Christ’s sacramental connection between the bread and wine and his body and blood (Matt. 26:26–29; Mark 14:22–25; Luke 22:14–20), but only Luke includes his command to “do this in remembrance of me” after he distributes the bread (22:19). In the New Testament’s fullest passage on the Lord’s Supper, however, Paul cites Christ’s call to celebrate the Supper in remembrance of him after the bread and after the wine, emphasizing the Supper’s commemorative function (1 Cor. 11:24–25). Paul reinforces this in verse 26: “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death.”

While the Supper’s rich symbolism commemorates and celebrates Jesus’ suffering, this meal from the sufferer for sufferers does even more: it also communicates his suffering’s benefits to believers. Paul speaks suggestively of that reality in 1 Corinthians 10:16: “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” Christians have disagreed about the exact nature of this participation, as discussed elsewhere in this issue. For my part, I’m convinced that the Westminster Standards handle this matter with admirable accuracy and brevity (WCF chapters 27–29; WLC 161–77; WSC 91–97).

The most concise Westminster statements on this subject are from the Shorter Catechism, especially question 96. I’ll highlight the phrases especially relevant (and encouraging) for our explorations here:

What is the Lord’s Supper?

The Lord’s supper is a sacrament, wherein, by giving and receiving bread and wine, according to Christ’s appointment, his death is showed forth; and the worthy receivers are, not after a corporal and carnal manner, but by faith, made partakers of his body and blood, with all his benefits, to their spiritual nourishment, and growth in grace.

The Lord’s Supper was instituted in the context of its founder’s and its participants’ profound suffering.

While Jesus intends this sacrament to bless every believer, there are some respects in which he ministers to suffering Christians in a special way, as the Bread of Life feeding broken people with his broken body at his humble table.

The Confession of Faith stresses that all this is the work of the Holy Spirit (27.3). The main point I want to draw out is that “worthy receivers”—that is, those who commune “by faith”—participate in the benefits of Christ’s suffering in such a way that the Supper provides “spiritual nourishment and growth in grace.” Along with the commemorative “showing forth” of Christ’s death, we cannot miss that this remembrance serves as an occasion for Jesus to accomplish the work of growing us in grace. Fellow sufferer, what do you need more than grace? At the Lord’s Table, believing sufferers are fed by the One who suffered for our sakes.

The Lord’s Supper Is, Therefore, an Especially Rich Means of God’s Grace to Suffering Christians

Given this good news on display in the Supper, every one of us should make coming to the table a high priority. We should seek to be “worthy” receivers who trust in Christ’s righteousness rather than our own (see WSC 97). And as a result, we should expect to receive from him “spiritual nourishment and growth in grace.”

Even if you aren’t suffering in a particularly keen way in this season of your life, I encourage you to take comfort and encouragement in the fruits of Jesus’ sufferings. Your sin debt is paid in full. Through your faith in him, you are reconciled to God, justified, and adopted into his family—fully accepted and beloved, now and forever! So, come to the table and find soul refreshment and strength as you feed by faith on the true Passover Lamb.

But while Jesus intends this sacrament to bless every believer, there are some respects in which he ministers to suffering Christians in a special way, as the Bread of Life feeding broken people with his broken body at his humble table.

For one thing, the Supper is a caution or reminder not to be surprised or embittered by our sufferings. As followers of the “Suffering Servant,” we shouldn’t expect our lives to be pain free. Jesus himself labored to help his disciples grasp the true nature of his messianic ministry (they expected him to obtain his kingly crown the old-fashioned way, through power and politics). So immediately after Peter’s confession of Christ as Lord, Jesus began to teach them what victory would look like for him: to “go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised” (Matt. 16:21). Of course, Peter neither liked nor grasped this teaching, and Jesus’ disciples have struggled with it ever since. But every time we come to the table, we confess and believe that for our Lord the cross preceded the crown—and the order will be the same for us as we follow him.

Besides strengthening us against shirking or being surprised by our suffering, the Supper also comforts suffering believers by reminding us that we are not alone. First and foremost, it says to us, “You have a great High Priest who can sympathize with your weaknesses,” and “because he has suffered and been tempted, he

is able and willing to help you when you suffer” (Heb. 4:15; 2:14). Having suffered to redeem us, Jesus now has all authority in heaven and on earth. How does he exercise that authority? He prays for us in glory; he is ruling and overruling all things for our ultimate good; he sends his Spirit to be our comforter and helper especially in our “weakness” (Rom. 8:26); he has given us his word filled with precious and magnificent promises to comfort us. And he exercises his authority by nourishing his church week in and week out at his table. This table also bears witness to the “communion of the saints” (1 Cor. 10:17), telling us in our suffering (which so often feels like loneliness) that we’re surrounded by a host of fellow sufferers in our own congregation and beyond who can also (after the example of our Lord) sympathize with us, pray for us, encourage us, share Scripture with us, and help us in various other tangible ways.

The Lord’s Supper also encourages suffering Christians to persevere when we’re tempted to give up or when we despair of our suffering ever coming to an end. Jesus’ suffering lasted for thirty-three years, the worst for six hours (or maybe three), and then it ended. It was the worst suffering imaginable, far worse than we can comprehend, yet it did come to an end. Praise God, “It is finished.” Now Jesus has been enjoying incomprehensible glory at the Father’s right hand for more than two thousand years. You can see why the author of Hebrews said that Jesus endured the suffering of the cross “for the joy set before him” (Heb. 12:1–2). The apostles, the martyrs, and all other believers who have gone before you have trod the same path through temporary suffering to eternal glory. No matter how intense and terrible their sufferings may have been for a time, in the grand scheme of things, they were “momentary, light afflictions” and are over now. Sooner or later, in God’s timing, yours will be too, and you will know the joy of endurance. For now, continue to draw the nourishment you need for assurance and perseverance from the Lord’s Supper. Furthermore, the Supper reminds us that our suffering is not meaningless . Jesus’ sufferings, especially on the cross but earlier too, brimmed with significance. They carried the wise and wonderful purpose of God in atoning for our sins once and for all, preparing Jesus to be our sympathetic and merciful high priest. The sufferings of Christ’s saints are likewise meaningful in him. They’re necessary to build the church, to deepen our knowledge of God and likeness to him, and to testify to the world of our faith in the gospel of God’s all-sufficient grace and power. God is leading you through suffering for many wise and wonderful purposes that you may not see, now or ever—until you get to heaven. But you will certainly discover that Romans 8:28 is true.

The Lord’s Supper also says, “Here are nourishment and strength to carry on.” Suffering, especially when protracted, is physically, spiritually, and emotionally exhausting. And suffering so as to please and glorify God, to grow in grace, and to minister to others can be especially draining. So like Elijah fleeing from Jezebel (1 Kings 19), godly sufferers often face exhaustion and the temptation to quit. Just as in the Passover, bread, wine, and lamb nourished and strengthened Israel for their journey out of Egypt, so the Bread of Life, the True Vine, the Lamb of

The apostles, the martyrs, and all other believers who have gone before you have trod the same path through temporary suffering to eternal glory.

God nourishes and strengthens those who feed upon him in the Supper on their journey to new Jerusalem. At his table, Christ says to his hard-pressed disciples, “Come, feed upon me, and find refreshment and renewal for your souls.” This is an important way in which he makes good his promise, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9).

Finally, not only are your sufferings temporary and purposeful, but you will be rewarded for them. Christ’s exaltation and the church’s salvation are his suffering’s reward (Eph. 1:15–23; Phil. 2:9–11; Rev. 1, 5; etc.). The glorified saints have only begun to enjoy the rewards they will eventually receive, rewards out of all proportion to their sufferings: “The sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Rom. 8:18). “For this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Cor. 4:17). So let this be another sweet word to you from Christ in the Supper: As you trust in him and persevere to the end, you will not be disappointed but more than compensated.

Thus while the Supper imparts blessing to every believing participant, it can minister in special ways to those who commune in the midst of suffering. ***

Until He Comes

The book of Esther describes a feast hosted by Ahasuerus, the Persian king who reigned over 127 provinces from India to Ethiopia. It lasted six months, and its guests were nobles, governors, and military commanders; the setting was lavish and lovely; the place settings and utensils were costly and beautiful; and the food and drink were abundant and delicious.

It’s sometimes disappointing to get a little bit of bread or cracker and barely more than a sip of wine or juice. But compared to this feast that Jesus instituted

and still hosts for his people, Ahasuerus’s feast was dust and crumbs. Our host is infinitely more glorious. Our feast has lasted for over two thousand years. Its guests have been far more numerous and nobler in character. The fare is richer, though only a foretaste, and that small taste confers more abundant blessings than Ahasuerus’s bounty ever could.

Yet glorious as it is, our present feast is nothing to the one to which Paul alludes at the end of 1 Corinthians 11:26: “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” The book of Revelation gives us a window into what the feasting will look like when he comes: “Hallelujah! . . . Rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready. . . . Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb” (Rev. 19:6–9).

Our host will be the same, but we will see him in all the fullness of his glory. Although bread and wine are delicious now, they will be far richer then, when we eat and drink with Jesus not because we need sustenance but for no other goal than enjoying him with one another. Guests will be saints from every nation— no longer groaning fellow sufferers but glorified former sufferers! “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away” (Rev. 21:4). Until then, every time we suffering saints see the minister break the bread, we must trust and rejoice that it is our Lord himself, once broken but now glorified, who is feeding us.

Although bread and wine are delicious now, they will be far richer then, when we eat and drink with Jesus not because we need sustenance but for no other goal than enjoying him with one another.

J. D. “Skip” Dusenbury (DMin, Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia) is a retired pastor who continues serving the Lord and his church through preaching, teaching, interim pastoring, and writing.

Preparation FOR THE LORD’S SUPPER: Comfort and Assurance

FROM THE CHRISTIAN PAST

by JONATHAN BADDLEY

HOEVER . . . EATS THE BREAD or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself. That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died.

W(1 Cor. 11:27–30 ESV)

What does it mean to examine oneself before participating in the Lord’s Supper? While it may not be top of mind in evangelical circles today, the apostle Paul’s exhortation in 1 Corinthians 11 has weighed heavily on Christian consciences over the course of the last two millennia. From the writings of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, Gabriel of Qatar, and Thomas Aquinas before 1500, to Martin Luther, John Calvin, and the Puritans thereafter, church history is replete with examples of Christians committed to intentionally and intensively preparing to receive the elements.1 This preparation served to ensure that those coming to the Lord’s Table were not doing so unworthily, thereby making themselves “guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord” to their own judgment.

For early Protestants emerging from the shadows of the medieval Mass, which in the words of the nascent English evangelical George Joye did “daily . . . crucify and offer [Christ] up again” for sins, the Lord’s Supper instead was to be a joyful celebration of salvation accomplished and applied by Christ’s “once for ever” sacrifice for sin.2 Preparation, then, was meant to arouse and nurture in believers the comfort and delight found at the root of the ordinance.

At the same time, preparing for the Communion meal was serious business. It was both a privilege and a duty, and it served as a sobering acknowledgment of the gravity of the sacrament. Though they took on a variety of forms, these processes of preparation were all concerned with instilling in the hearts of believers sufficient knowledge of—and trust in—Christ and his saving work, repentance from sin, thanksgiving to God for his grace, and love toward one another. This uniformity of attention to right preparation is underscored quite clearly in the fact that, despite the confessional rancor of the early modern period, these practices transcended confessional boundaries. Protestants of all stripes displayed an earnest commitment to being appropriately prepared for the Lord’s Supper.

From the mid-sixteenth century on, following the efforts of the early Reformers on the Continent, the English Reformed—conformists, nonconformists, and independents alike—published their own preparation manuals for a broad readership. All this ultimately came to form a distinct, but still underexplored, subgenre of the famous English “practical divinity.” Paired with the steady diet of preparation sermons that were often preached in the lead-up to

Worthy partakers derive actual spiritual benefit from the meal, because in it the “soul of the worthy receiver is fed and refreshed, washed, purified, and cleansed from sin by the body and blood of Christ received therein.”

the celebration of the meal, Puritan preparation manuals helped edify believers by training their attention on the beauty of Christ’s death and resurrection for sinners, and the transcendent splendor of being united to him through conversion. The Puritan treatment of preparation, like its parallels in other Christian contexts across church history, fostered hope, unity, and comfort for Christians as they gathered in their local churches throughout England.

A 1609 preparation manual from moderate Puritan William Bradshaw is a helpful model for what preparation meant in early modern England. Bradshaw divides his treatise into two parts: the first half offers a detailed explanation of the dangers of “unworthily” coming to the Lord’s Supper, and the second half provides clear instruction on how to prepare oneself for “worthy” reception of the sacramental elements. The key ingredient in all this is the self-examination mentioned by Paul in 1 Corinthians 11:28—a process in which, according to Bradshaw, a “most careful and diligent search and inquisition” is to be made “within our own souls and consciences, whether there be in us, those gifts and graces that are necessary to the worthy and reverent receiving of this sacrament.”3 Ultimately, the foundational grace one must discern in these examinations is “a true and lively faith in Jesus,” accompanied by biblical spiritual fruits like repentance, love toward others (but above all toward fellow believers), kindness, and obedience to God.4 For those who find it, this faith means they are “true believers,” or “those which rely and depend upon Christ Jesus only for the pardon of their sins, and for the everlasting salvation of their souls.”5 Christ instituted this sacramental meal “to be a seal of the covenant of grace,” which offers to those so sealed “further certainty and assurance of salvation by the death of Christ.” 6 Since only believers make up those found within the covenant of grace, they alone are the appropriate objects of Christ’s sacramental seal. As such, these worthy partakers derive actual spiritual benefit from the meal, because in it the “soul of the worthy receiver is fed and refreshed, washed, purified, and cleansed from sin by the body and blood of Christ received therein.”7

Sounding a more somber note, Bradshaw explains that the souls of those who receive the elements unworthily, or without that “true and lively faith” of the true believer, are “polluted and defiled, and made accursed and miserable thereby.”8 In fact, “the oftener” they communicate as those outside of the covenant of grace, “the more abominable” they are “in the sight of God and man.”9 Framed another way, the Lord’s Supper is a sign of Jesus “and his merits,” or that eternal salvation promised to all who believe in his sacrificial death for sin, and subsequent resurrection.10 Only those who “hath already received the thing signified”—i.e., Christ and, through him, salvation—“hath a privilege and interest to receive the sign.”11

If this preparatory regime strikes modern sensibilities as an anxiety-inducing way to sow seeds of doubt in overly scrupulous Christian minds, it could have had the same unintended effect for early moderns as well. Given its emphasis on both an intensive and extensive practice of self-examination, Christians suffering a spiritual dry spell could often despair of their salvation under this probing investigation. Anne Venn, a Puritan diarist, records that in preparation for a particular

administration of the Lord’s Supper around the year 1645, she endeavored “in a serious and solemn manner” to seek the Lord and to examine her “own heart both touching my duties and graces,” praying that God would not give her over “to a deceived heart.”12 It was “with some small hopes, yet mixed with a great deal of fear” that she went to the Lord’s Table, and almost immediately upon partaking of the elements, she felt that Satan began “to suggest to me that I had now eaten and drank my own damnation, in receiving that whereto I had no right.”13

Puritan preparation was, however, meant not as a source of despair but as an exercise in assurance. The searching self-examination at the heart of this pre-Communion process was intended as a means of comfort for believers, given the way in which it led them to identify their sin and to trust all the more in the sacrificial body and blood of Christ for their pardon. William Bradshaw’s manual makes clear that it was quite truly “the worthiest Christians” that tended to “judge themselves of all others the most unworthy; and are many times most dejected with the sense and feeling of their own defects and wants.”14 Those who sincerely despair of their sin have assurance, in Christ, that they are forgiven. Many of the early modern English preparation manuals follow Bradshaw and the Puritans, attempting to stave off despair and doubt by emphasizing that sincere self-examination will always discover the faith requisite to be a worthy receiver, and then in the Lord’s Supper, believers will be certain to “receive the assurance of that grace and mercy” that the meal represents.15 Indeed, as Bradshaw explains, “we have such a hope and firm promise, that if we search with a desire to find, we shall be sure to find it,” and “with it, and in it, a sealed pardon of the forgiveness of all our sins . . . a firm title to the kingdom of heaven.”16

The writers of these manuals also took great pains to assure their readers that worthy reception did not require a perfect faith. Thus Bradshaw makes clear that regarding faith, “they that have but the least degree thereof, are true Christians, though but weak and imperfect . . . and have an interest in Christ and his merits, & therein a right into this Sacrament.”17 The notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, a lay Puritan craftsman in London, offer a colorful glimpse at how this translated into Christian practice. As Wallington records in the lead-up to the Lord’s Supper celebration in his local church on January 3, 1641, “I did in some poor measure prepare myself for it begging of the Lord that still I might find the benefit and fruit of this his holy ordinance.” 18 In triumph, Wallington goes on to note that “the Lord did hear me his name be praised” and that at this particular Communion meal, he found his “heart much stirred up to much thankfulness” for the spiritual fruits that God had granted him in it.19

Such reassurances of the gracious aim of preparation brought no small measure of comfort to those like Anne Venn, who yearned to come worthily to the Communion meal. Despite her early trepidations, later in life she contemplated how she “had endeavored to do my duty according to my knowledge and power, in examining my own heart, what my ends, aims, desires, and wants were, and according to my ability desired the Lord to make it a strengthening and sealing ordinance to me.”20 Venn’s subsequent reflections about her self-examinations

The searching self-examination at the heart of this pre-Communion process was intended as a means of comfort for believers, given the way in which it led them to identify their sin and to trust all the more in the sacrificial body and blood of Christ for their pardon.

show her trusting in God’s readiness to forgive her discovered sins and accepting her inability to make herself worthy. In this way, she drew comfort from her time of preparation, resolving that sinners like her “cannot say I have sins and guilt, but can find no pardon, no, Christ bids you” eat the sacrament and “eat as long as you live, yea until his coming again.”21

Past preparatory regimes, especially those formalized and developed among the Puritans in early modern England, offer a wealth of devotional material for modern Christians. These practices were propagated amid the social, political, and ecclesiological instabilities that marked sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. They were thus meant to accommodate the various local church contexts in which the faithful would find themselves in this era of tumult. Some pastors led their congregants in weekly celebrations of the Lord’s Supper, while others could do so only infrequently in the wake of the collapse of the national church and internecine war in the 1640s. Regardless of the frequency of administration, due preparation for the Lord’s Supper was inculcated among the godly as an ongoing process tied intimately to their status as redeemed, blood-bought members of the body of Christ. The Puritans were concerned less with the process of preparation as such and more with its end: worthy reception of the Lord’s Supper. This prize was an achievement of God’s grace alone, through faith in Christ.

Central to this whole vision was the glory of God, best promoted by the participation of all true believers (and only true believers, as was the hope) in a powerful means of grace that spiritually nourished Christ’s bride. Preparation then served as a spiritual exercise intended to offer believers both assurance of their salvation—and therefore admission to the Lord’s Table—and a special mode of thanksgiving to God for his gift of righteousness and the remission

1. See St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Lectures on the Christian Sacraments: The Procatechesis and the Five Mystagogical Catecheses Ascribed to St. Cyril of Jerusalem, trans. Maxwell E. Johnson (Yonkers: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2017); see Sebastian P. Brock, “Gabriel of Qatar’s Commentary on the Liturgy,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 6, no. 2 (2009): 197–248; see, e.g., Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 3.83.4.

2. George Joye, The Souper of the Lorde (published in Nornburg [perhaps Antwerp or London] by Niclas Twonson [perhaps

N. Hill], 1533), A5r–A6v.

3. William Bradshaw, A Direction for the weaker sort of Christians, shewing in what manner they ought to fit and prepare themselves to the worthy receiving of the Sacrament of the body and blood of Christ (London: W. Hall, 1609), 71.

4. Bradshaw, A Direction for the weaker sort of Christians, 77.

5. Bradshaw, A Direction for the weaker sort of Christians, 136.

6. Bradshaw, A Direction for the weaker sort of Christians, 139.

7. Bradshaw, A Direction for the weaker sort of Christians, 66.

of sins. Preparation was meant to encourage a perpetual heart comportment in Christians, one that necessarily hit an inflection point as each local church approached the celebration of the Lord’s Supper.

With the decline of clearly defined processes of self-examination and reflection on the significance of the sacramental meal, many modern evangelicals are missing out on a comforting practice meant to both protect and fortify their souls. Self-examination in preparation for the Lord’s Supper serves to keep the unworthy (in Paul’s language) from wrongly deriving assurance of their right standing before God in this sacramental meal, while also confirming and strengthening the saving faith of believers to their comfort and joy. As with the example set by many of the Puritans, preparation as a devotional activity inspires a continual rhythm of reflection, pardon, assurance, and worship in the lives of believers committed to worthy reception.

Rather than lay an additional burden on Christians, this rich history should encourage us to explore how we might fruitfully engage with past church practice for the benefit of our souls and the edification of our local congregations. Personal self-examination according to the Lord’s command offers believers an important occasion to identify sin and unbelief in our lives, repent of it, trust Christ, and glorify a gracious God who grants such pardon and comfort to sinners.

Jonathan Baddley is an (incoming) PhD student in history at the University of Cambridge. He previously earned an MA in history from Vanderbilt and an MTS in the history of Christianity from Harvard. His dissertation focuses on Puritan “practical divinity” and preparation for the Lord’s Supper in early modern England.

Rather than lay an additional burden on Christians, this rich history should encourage us to explore how we might fruitfully engage with past church practice for the benefit of our souls and the edification of our local congregations.

8. Bradshaw, A Direction for the weaker sort of Christians, 66.

9. Bradshaw, A Direction for the weaker sort of Christians, 66.

10. Bradshaw, A Direction for the weaker sort of Christians, 76.

11. Bradshaw, A Direction for the weaker sort of Christians, 76.

12. Anne Venn, A Wise Virgins Lamp Burning; Or, Gods sweet incomes of Love to a gracious soul waiting for him (London: E. Cole, 1658), 11–12.

13. Venn, A Wise Virgins Lamp Burning, 12.

14. Bradshaw, A Direction for the weaker sort of Christians, 129.

15. Bradshaw, A Direction for the weaker sort of Christians, 132.

16. Bradshaw, A Direction for the weaker sort of Christians, 111.

17. Bradshaw, A Direction for the weaker sort of Christians, 78.

18. David Booy, ed., The Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, 1618–1654: A Selection (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 147.

19. Booy, ed., The Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, 147.

20. Venn, A Wise Virgins Lamp Burning, 12.

21. Venn, A Wise Virgins Lamp Burning, 110.

“Watchman! What of the Night?”

by Marco Barone

“Watchman! Watchman! What of the night? Watchman! What of the night?” The morning comes, always comes But comes through the darkest night! Awful, oppressive night . . .

“Watchman! Watchman! What of God’s world? Watchman! What of God’s world?” It is embraced in the reconciling Word But it is pierced by a poisonous sword Terrible, poisonous sword . . .

“Watchman! Watchman! What of mankind? Watchman! What of mankind?” Unspeakable misery, empathy’ll consume you Look at the Man of sorrows for strength Your little, fragile strength . . .

“Watchman! Watchman! There is a power! Watchman! The fallen power!”

He was the brightest, now the Darkest Building a tower again that will fall From which he’ll forever fall, and fall . . .

“Watchman! Watchman! The Crucified! The power flees at the sight!”

He is the Brightest, became the darkest From a cross to the Father Giver of Life That Holy, Holy, Holy Life . . .

“Watchman! Watchman! The tears of the Bride? Watchman! The tears of the Bride?” For sin afflicts her outside and inside But unity’ll come at the end of the night Deadly, quickening end of the night . . .

“Watchman! Watchman! What of the fight? Watchman! What of the fight?” The victory comes, always comes But comes through the bloodiest fight! Dreadful, brutal fight . . .

“Watchman! Watchman! What of my cries? Watchman! My many cries?” Not one of them is lost in His eyes Now rest with this thought in your mind Your tired, weak, broken mind . . .

“Watchman! Watchman! I fear the night!” Come up and sleep right here at my side And see the morning that comes, always comes But comes through the darkest night! Awful, oppressive night . . .

Engage IV.

Connecting with our time and place

One Bread, One Body?

A PASTORAL Reflection on DIVISIONS IN THE Local Church

by ERIC LANDRY

THE LORD’S

is a sign and seal of our mystical union with Jesus Christ. It is also a means by which Jesus unites the different members of his church into one body. Our “coming together” (1 Cor. 11:17) at the Table of the Lord isn’t just a moment on our calendar—the Supper constitutes the church as the body of Christ.

So, what happens when the Supper divides the church rather than unites the church? I’m not focusing on how the heirs of the Reformation have not been able to bridge the differences that first appeared at the Colloquy of Marburg when Luther and Zwingli tangled. I’m focusing on how differences on the Supper sometimes divide the local church at the very point we should find the most intimate unity with our brothers and sisters in Christ every Lord’s Day.

In this essay, I’m reflecting on and lamenting a painful experience in the life of my church to illustrate this point. The real people who were involved are good and honorable, and I remain friendly with many of them. My intention in telling the story isn’t to call them into question or rehash the decisions our elders made. It is simply to lament the divisions in the church—locally and globally—and to help other churches and pastors who may be facing similar difficulties.

The Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) congregation in which I serve as a pastor regularly solicits elder and deacon nominations from our members. The nominees are trained and examined by the current elders to ascertain their fitness for ministry. Those who are found qualified are put forward to the church for a vote. Over the years, our elders have occasionally disqualified men for a variety of reasons: an insufficient grasp of theology, biblical or doctrinal issues, personal issues, or otherwise. Recently, we disqualified two men because of their commitment to paedocommunion.

Adherents of paedocommunion reject the traditional practice of admitting children of believers to the Table only after making a profession of faith to the elders. Some churches set a minimum age for such an interview, while others require children to attend a communicants’ class or participate in a confirmation class. Although my church admits young children to the table, our elders interview every child and evaluate their age-appropriate profession of faith before admitting them to the Supper.

Our two candidates asked to make an exception to those portions of the Westminster Confession of Faith and Larger and Shorter Catechisms that speak to this aspect of our doctrine of the sacraments and Communion. Specifically, they objected to the language of the Larger Catechism, question 177:

Wherein do the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper differ?

The sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper differ, in that Baptism is to

Adherents of paedocommunion reject the traditional practice of admitting children of believers to the table only after making a profession of faith to the elders.

SUPPER

be administered but once, with water, to be a sign and seal of our regeneration and ingrafting into Christ, and that even to infants; whereas the Lord’s Supper is to be administered often, in the elements of bread and wine, to represent and exhibit Christ as spiritual nourishment to the soul, and to confirm our continuance and growth in him, and that only to such as are of years and ability to examine themselves.

The biblical text for this catechism question is 1 Corinthians 11:28. Our candidates did not believe the Westminster Divines properly interpreted or applied that passage in using it to support the restriction of covenant children from the Supper. Our elders could respond in one of three ways:

1. We could judge that their stated exception was merely semantic. That is, the candidates believed the same thing our confessional standards express, but they used different language to state their beliefs.

2. We could judge that their exceptions were more than semantic but not out of accord with anything fundamental to our system of doctrine. That is, we could judge that there was a real and important difference, but that it didn’t compromise their ability to honestly share our core confession.

3. We could judge that their exceptions were out of accord, hostile to the system of doctrine, or striking at the vitals of religion, which would mean these candidates would not be able to serve as elders.

As we discussed these candidates and their exceptions, several things complicated our already difficult decision. We believed both men to be godly, gifted men who could otherwise govern well. There was some confusion as well over whether similar exceptions had been granted to officers of our church in the past. We also knew that exceptions for paedocommunion had been granted by some churches in our denomination. Finally, since our church already allows very young believers to come to the Table, we wrestled with whether it would make much difference if we allowed this exception.

Ultimately, however, our elders determined that the exception was indeed out of accord and hostile to the system of doctrine expressed by the Westminster Standards. We had several reasons. I want to enumerate them here so that others working through this issue (personally or as a church community) can benefit from our experience.

First, the elders of our church have a confessional duty to welcome only “worthy receivers” to the Lord’s Supper. This means we can’t admit “the ignorant or ungodly.” This isn’t an issue addressed in one question of the Larger Catechism, but throughout our confessional standards.* At the very least, one must have faith to be a worthy receiver, which means the elders need to hear a credible profession of faith before admitting someone to the Supper.

Second, with explicit proof-texts, the language of the standards includes a series of subjective acts that recipients are called to exercise:

• To remember Christ’s sacrifice (Westminster Confession of Faith 29.1).

• “Engagement in and to all duties” that Christians owe to Christ and a “pledge of their communion with Him, and with each other” (Westminster Confession of Faith 29.1).

• To “testify and renew their thankfulness, and engagement to God, and their mutual love and fellowship each with the other” (Westminster Larger Catechism 168).

• “Thankful remembrance” that the body of Christ was broken and his blood shed (Westminster Larger Catechism 169).

• “Examining themselves,” along with “serious meditation, and fervent prayer” (Westminster Larger Catechism 171).

Our elders don’t believe infants are able to actively exercise these things in preparation for or during participation in the Supper.

Third, we concluded that adherents to paedocommunion don’t share the same theological assumptions as our standards regarding the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. The classic Reformed view of the sacrament is that a subjective reception by faith is required for the effective accomplishment and beneficial enjoyment of the sacrament. The view of paedocommunion advocates, however, is that the benefit of the sacrament can be conveyed without any active subjective reception by the recipient. In other words, the receiver can be “worthy” (as a baptized child of the covenant) and yet be “ignorant” of the sacrament’s meaning. Our elders reasoned that this different theology of the sacrament itself would make it impossible for an officer of the church to uphold and protect the confessional standards from which they depart on this vital issue.

For these reasons, our elders determined that these candidates weren’t qualified to hold office in our church. Just as we don’t allow Baptist brothers to hold office because of our differences over the sacraments, we shouldn’t allow someone who sincerely holds to paedocommunion to be an officer in a church whose theology and practice of the Supper is different from our own.

Although I believe our elders made the right decision, it came at a steep cost. Within eight months of denying the exception, we were informed that members of our church were in talks with the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC) to start a new congregation in our area. This new congregation would allow the practice of paedocommunion. Ultimately, nearly sixty people left our church to join the new church (including an officer, several staff, and many dedicated volunteers). These were friends with whom we had

The classic Reformed view of the sacrament is that a subjective reception by faith is required for the effective accomplishment and beneficial enjoyment of the sacrament.

shared our joys and sorrows, good food and drink, and prayer and worship. It was hard to see them go.

Having had some time to reflect on the situation, I am convinced that we made the right decision even though it meant losing more than 10 percent of our membership as we were still climbing out of the hole COVID-19 had created. Those who lead the church and are responsible to guard its worship and doctrine must believe, teach, and defend the shared system of doctrine of the church; otherwise, a church’s confessional unity will die the death of a thousand qualifications.

This experience has also encouraged me to press new members of our church to study their own doctrinal differences with our church. Although we want the door to membership in the church to be as wide as possible, people who join us need to know that we’re serious about our doctrines and practices. I want them to wrestle with the differences to see if they can come into conformity with the church they are joining, especially as aspiring officers. In the meantime, though our churches are disrupted by division over the very things that should give us unity, it is our call and duty to continue to pursue purity and peace, “until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13).

Eric Landry is the chief content officer of Sola Media and former executive editor of Modern Reformation. He also serves as the senior pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas.

*Westminster Confession of Faith, 29.8. For the language of “worthy receivers,” see also 27.3, 29.7, Westminster Larger Catechism 168, and Westminster Shorter Catechism 96 and 97. Additionally, according to our denomination’s Book of Church Order, pastors have a duty to fence the table, which includes inviting to the Lord’s Supper only “those who profess the true religion” (58.4).

Holy Bread

by Lucas Admiraal

I took and handled holy bread And hoped that it would be my food At evening bell they found me dead.

God bid me welcome and He spread A feast of all He saw was good I took and handled holy bread

To me He offered, me he fed And willingly I bit and chewed At evening bell they found me dead.

No holy book that I had read Could save me when I misconstrued The purpose of the holy bread

And as I left I felt no dread But (turn around!) I was pursued And that same night they found me dead.

Consider well the ground you tread For when I ate with soul subdued I took and handled holy bread At evening bell they found me dead.

REFORMED Conformity AND THE SHAPE

OF THE ENGLISH

Second Reformation

by SAMUEL BOSTOCK

N CHRISTMAS DAY 1653 , a few weeks after Oliver Cromwell had been sworn in as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, a minister named John Boatman insisted on conducting a festive Communion service at his church in Norwich. Seven years after Parliament had banned the celebration of Christmas, this was a provocative act. Not only so, but Boatman offered the sacrament to all, attacking the policy of refusing to admit ignorant or scandalous persons to the Lord’s Table (a policy maintained by his neighboring minister John Collinges, who also refused to celebrate Christmas). It would be tempting to see in this event a stereotypical example of the debates that divided England in the middle decades of the seventeenth century, with Collinges as a typical Puritan and Boatman as a traditional Anglican resisting the Puritan revolution. But that would be a mistake: John Boatman was an ex-Presbyterian elected directly by his Norwich congregation, who did not feel the need to provide evidence that he had been ordained, and an outspoken critic of the authorities. In other words, he had many Puritan characteristics. John Collinges, on the other hand, justified what appears to be a Puritan-like policy toward Communion and Christmas on the rather Anglican basis that he was conforming both to the presently established church authority (banning Christmas), as well as the old Book of Common Prayer and canons of the Church of England (for fencing the Table).

For many, the story of these pivotal years in English church history is one of Calvinistic Puritan revolt against the intolerant and Arminianizing high church Anglicanism of Archbishop William Laud. In 1646, when Cromwell’s New Model Army enabled the Puritans to triumph, the Church of England went underground, surviving through private services of the Book of Common Prayer until it—along with the monarchy—was restored in 1660 by a grateful populace weary of the Puritan yoke. Faithful Puritans were ejected from the church, leaving the Church of England to follow a decidedly moderate path over the coming centuries.

The previously mentioned dispute between the two Johns in Norwich, however, illustrates that to understand how church polities such as Anglicanism, Presbyterianism, and Congregationalism emerged from the seventeenth century, it is vital to pay attention to the interplay of both Reformed theology and ecclesiastical conformity. These two studies from Milton and Hampton show how these ingredients could mix in often confusing ways.

It is a truism that history is written by the winners. In the case of the Church of England, history has usually been written by those who were nurtured in the polarized communions born out of the seventeenth-century tumult. With few exceptions, seventeenth-century Anglicans tend to be viewed by both friend and

England’s Second Reformation: The Battle for the Church of England, 1625–1662

by Anthony Milton

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS | 2021 | 450 PAGES (HARDCOVER) | $44.99

Grace and Conformity: The Reformed Conformist Tradition and the Early Stuart Church of England

by Stephen Hampton

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS | 2021 | 424 PAGES (HARDCOVER) | $95.00

foe as moderate or Arminianizing in theology, and Reformed theologians are assumed to have been all or nearly all Presbyterian or Congregationalist in polity. In different ways, both Milton and Hampton significantly complicate this narrative. Hampton’s study returns to the Church of England prior to the Puritan revolution and focuses on a group of ten bishops and theologians whom Hampton helpfully labels “Reformed conformists,” such as John Prideaux, professor of divinity at Oxford, and John Davenant, a representative of the Church of England at the Synod of Dort (1618–1619) and then bishop of Salisbury. This group of Reformed orthodox Anglican divines vigorously resisted both the Arminianizing theology of Laud’s allies and Puritan arguments against the rule of bishops and the imposition of extrabiblical ceremonies like kneeling at Communion and feast days like Christmas. Hampton gives this distinctive “style of divinity” the sustained and sympathetic theological attention it merits (which it largely lacked until now).

While these books overlap significantly—both authors acknowledge their indebtedness to the other—Milton’s more purely historical work casts a much wider net, retelling the story of the many efforts to reform the Church of England from Charles I’s accession in 1625 until the restoration of the monarchy in England under Charles II. Time and again, Milton shows that a stereotypical Puritan/Anglican dichotomy utterly fails to do justice to the historical debates. On one hand, Milton’s much richer picture shows how the Westminster Assembly of Divines’ reformation of the English church was rooted in earlier mainstream attempts to reform the Church of England. On the other hand, Milton rejects the idea of a pristine Anglican tradition handed down by the first English Reformers. He argues that England’s long “second reformation” during these years was just as decisive for the formation of what became the Anglican settlement as was the original Reformation under Henry VIII. ***

Reformed Conformity and the Laudian Reformation

Both Hampton and Milton demonstrate that the Anglican settlement received from Elizabeth I and continued under James I was essentially Reformed in theology. In the early Stuart Church, representatives of the Church of England contributed constructively to the Canons of the Synod of Dort. They defended uncompromisingly Reformed positions on predestination and justification in disputations and lectures at Oxford and Cambridge. Hampton argues that conformity to the doctrine and worship of the Church of England positively encouraged such contributions, even if his “Reformed conformist” divines consistently took a moderate theological line, rejecting supralapsarianism and maintaining that in a proper sense Christ died for all humanity.

Milton, for his part, discerns many more tensions in the early Stuart Church, including confusion over the church’s official doctrinal standards and ambiguity in its teaching. On one hand, this meant that the personal authority of scholars

such as Prideaux and Davenant was especially important in transmitting Reformed orthodoxy. On the other hand, such ambiguities meant that from 1625 on—with a less cautious King Charles I on the throne—Laud and his allies were able to exploit the doctrinal minimalism of the Thirty-Nine Articles to argue that whatever was not forbidden should be permitted, even if it cut against the international Reformed consensus. Appealing selectively to the inherited settlement, Laudians erected altars in the place of Communion tables and rejected the Synod of Dort, framing the Reformed conformists who rejected these developments as closet Puritans.

In the early stages of the “Laudian Reformation,” resistance commonly took the form of appeal to the church’s authorized homilies, prayer book, and canons. Significantly, however, Hampton shows how such Reformed conformist arguments relied on debatable readings of the church’s constitutional documents. In contrast, Laudians saw conformity less as a constitutional position and more as a living tradition, embodied most authoritatively in the cathedrals and the king’s chapel royal (where altars and Arminian theology were in vogue). This was not a stable ecclesial situation, and it is no surprise to find an increasingly wide recognition that the English church required a new confession of faith if the Reformed orthodoxy of the Anglican settlement was to be maintained against unsympathetic reforms.

Reformed Conformity and the Puritan Reformation

In 1637, the Scots revolted from Charles’s absentee, yet religiously interventionist, rule. One result was that between 1640 and 1642, Charles was under increasing pressure in England to agree to a set of reforms of the church proposed by what became the Long Parliament. Contrary to popular perceptions, Milton shows that the two sides were not yet on an unavoidable collision course, at least religiously speaking, and that there was plenty of room for compromise. At this time, even Puritans were thinking more in terms of restoring the church to its Elizabethan purity than of separating from it. This was an ideal stage for the Reformed conformists, and they did indeed come to the fore with seven of Hampton’s ten divines serving on a House of Lords theological subcommittee chaired by Bishop John Williams. This committee clarified the status of disputed Church of England formularies in a Reformed direction, denounced the Laudian view that the Lord’s Supper was a sacrifice properly speaking, and proposed a scheme for reduced episcopacy, in which bishops would exercise their rule only with some level of approval from their presbyters. Despite this promising opportunity, no compromise was reached, and the Reformed conformists failed to satisfy Puritan demands. This failure illustrates where the true dividing lines fell between Puritans and conformists, at least as of 1641. The main obstacles to compromise were in two areas: church government and worship.

The Reformed conformists did not see their commitment to conformity in worship as opposed to the Reformed doctrine of salvation by grace alone. Rather, they understood God’s grace to work through church-instituted ceremonies.

On government, the Reformed conformists were unsurprisingly strong proponents of episcopacy. The strength of the Reformed conformist commitment to episcopacy was demonstrated at Dort when the Church of England delegates, led by Bishop George Carleton, declared their “utter dissent” to the doctrines of ministerial parity and lay eldership. Yet as Hampton’s chapter on the topic shows, they were surprisingly tolerant of the presbyterian polity popular among their Reformed brethren. Carleton, Davenant, and their fellow Dort delegate Samuel Ward recognized that the weight of medieval scholastic opinion held that bishops and presbyters are not different ministerial orders but only differ in degree. Accordingly, the conformists allowed that in cases of necessity—such as those experienced by the continental Reformed churches—presbyters might be allowed to ordain other presbyters. Ward held that bishops and presbyters are essentially the same, but he saw in the common Reformed practice of permanent moderators or superintendents the functional equivalent to bishops. While Reformed conformists insisted that full Christian unity required the reintroduction of bishops, it seems that in practice they were willing to live with something less than that. One reason such concessions were not successful in 1641 is that the Scots’ experience spoke powerfully against them. Reduced episcopacy in Scotland had turned back into something resembling monarchical episcopacy, where the bishop ruled his diocese alone. (A decade or so of ecclesial and social division later, English Presbyterians were more open to episcopacy on the Reformed conformist model. Richard Baxter once told a hardline Episcopalian that the Reformed conformists were “twenty fold nearer me in Judgement, then they are to you.”1 ) While debate over worship in the mid-seventeenth century was less in the spotlight than episcopacy, at first sight there was even more room for compromise. The Puritans did not demand the abolition of all fixed liturgy, for example, and Reformed conformists encouraged ministers to offer extemporary prayer before their sermons. But as Hampton says, despite offering various concessions the Williams theological subcommittee mentioned earlier was “not prepared to consider abolishing choral music in English cathedrals, the surplice, kneeling at communion, the wedding ring, the structure of the liturgical year, or the special service for the beginning of Lent.”2 Hampton stresses that the Reformed conformists did not see their commitment to conformity in worship as opposed to the Reformed doctrine of salvation by grace alone. Rather, they understood God’s grace to work through church-instituted ceremonies. At the same time, Hampton shows that the Reformed conformists were conscious that the value they placed on such extrabiblical ceremonies set them apart from the rest of the Reformed family, on the continent as well as in Britain. *** Conclusion

Both of these books are magnificently well organized and edited. Both are superb models of contemporary historical writing attuned both to the integrity of theo-

logical thinking on its own terms and the relevance of historical circumstance. At the same time, they pull in slightly different directions. While Hampton finds Reformed conformity incompatible with Puritanism, Milton’s approach reveals blurred boundaries between the “old Puritans” and the “old Orthodox Protestant Bishops,” highlighting shifting patterns of religious alignment through the century and the relative fluidity of the established church.

The works also have opposite strengths. Milton could not be accused of leaving any stone unturned, offering the reader a scarcely credible amount of primary source engagement. Although his arguments are easy to follow, readers who lack a general view of the narrative background, such as the Aldermanbury Accord or Pride’s Purge, may find themselves getting bogged down. Hampton’s narrower focus allows him to guide the reader more gently into subtle theological discussions.

In the end, the Puritan revolution—even in its most conformist version—was undone by an alliance between Laudians and independents that produced a combination of doctrinal minimalism, restored monarchical episcopacy, and (eventually) widespread religious toleration. These studies show just how avoidable this result was and how undesirable from the standpoint of those committed to a Reformed articulation of the gospel, conformist or not. After reading Hampton and Milton, one is left feeling that, for all their undeniable differences, the Reformed conformists and the more conformist-minded Presbyterians had much more in common than the more strident groups that eventually outflanked them on both sides. If only they had been able to agree about Christmas.

For all their undeniable differences, the Reformed conformists and the more conformist-minded Presbyterians had much more in common than the more strident groups that eventually outflanked them on both sides.

Sam Bostock is a PhD candidate at Union Theological College, Belfast, and a licentiate in the Presbyterian Church in Ireland.

1. Milton, England’s Second Reformation, 373.

2. Hampton, Grace and Conformity, 307.

Book Review

Scribes and Scripture: The Amazing Story of How We Got the Bible

by John D. Meade and Peter J. Gurry

CROSSWAY | 2022 | 272 PAGES (PAPERBACK) | $19.99

FOR THE FIRST DECADE OF MY LIFE , I worshiped in an independent Baptist church in Smyrna, Georgia. I owe much to that church. It is, after all, where I came to profess Christ as my Savior and was baptized. But its doctrine of Scripture sowed the seed for many a spiritual crisis later in life. This doctrine centered on the Authorized King James Version, their only approved English Bible. I recall a panel from a “Chick tract” (evangelical gospel tracts first produced by Jack Chick in the 1960s), which the church kept stocked by the exit, depicting the pope, a textual critic, and Satan presenting a copy of the NIV and saying in unison: “We hope you like our Bible!” Clearly, anyone who read a Bible other than the KJV was under demonic, Catholic, and (the horror!) academic influence!

While my experience was somewhat unusual, misconceptions about the Bible and its history abound. John D. Meade and Peter J. Gurry’s Scribes and Scripture: The Amazing Story of How We Got the Bible corrects many of these by presenting a surprisingly comprehensive but readable introduction to the history of the Bible with strong academic grounding and a pastoral heart.

GOD’S PROVIDENCE AND THE BIBLE

For years, I tensed when I read about the abundance of scribal errors in manuscript traditions or typos in print editions (such as the infamous “Wicked” Bible, a 1631 printing of the KJV, which left out the “not” in Exodus 20:14, “Thou shalt not commit adultery”—the printer was fined £300, or the equivalent of $90,000 today [202–3]). I realized the root of my uneasiness was a misguided biblicism: I had taken the doctrine of divine inspiration (which I still profess, but now in a more traditional sense) to mean that a set of texts had been imbued with the divine attribute of immutability. Thus human errors as inevitable as typos undermined the Bible’s status as God’s inspired word. This notion would have earned me a polite smile from any early church father, who would have understood that alterations, though bothersome, were an unavoidable byproduct of copying and thus of a book’s survival.1

It’s impossible to speak of the preservation of the Bible’s textual integrity over the centuries without reference to divine providence. In Scribes and Scripture, Meade and Gurry do just this: They employ a Reformed historiography. This rejects a double account of history that attempts to trace where God’s work ends and our human work begins. Rather, God works within history; his love and will are suffused throughout. Meade and Gurry write,

If God’s providence is over all, couldn’t he work through the formation of alphabets, the writings of canon lists, and even the work of sleepy scribes and the inconsistencies of Bible translators? Of course he could. There is no reason to let human activity preclude the divine. There is every reason not to. Providence is not a zero-sum game. (227)

This historiography is not intended to naturalize the reality of divine revelation, as though there were no distinction between God’s acts and

those of his creatures. Meade and Gurry are clear that revelation is a discrete event and that God takes the initiative. The Holy Spirit inspired a few men to write (or, as more often happened, to dictate to a scribe), but the dissemination, copying, revision, criticism, and translation of that text unfolds as would be expected of any text. The Bible, as a book, is not magical. It is never absolutely safe from destruction, loss, error, or corruption. Its survival is not a given; only when we recognize this can we appreciate the doctrine of providence.

Perhaps it is most useful to think of the Bible as a divine charge. Its centrality in Christian worship, thought, and devotion called for enormous ingenuity, expense, sacrifice, and tedium (and often luck!) to stave off the forces of war, flood, fire, persecution, mold, insects, and mice. Even regular everyday use eventually destroys a manuscript. (Which is why some behemoths like the Codex Amiatinus survive: they simply were too large to be handled frequently.) The church holds the Scriptures in trust as divine deposits it is expected to preserve for future generations of believers. Their survival is a credit to the faithfulness of countless Christians, and the church must never rest from this toil.

WHICH BIBLE?

Starting with the title, a clarification is already in order: What is “the Bible” that is the subject of “the amazing story”? In the end, Meade and Gurry mean the Bible most familiar to their readers: the Protestant English Bible, an anthology of sixty-six authoritative books. This Bible is both recent and ancient. Recent, because while it has been available in English for over seven centuries—even longer if you count Old English versions (189–90)—it has been printed with exclusively sixty-six books for about two. (An 1885 revision of the Authorized Version was the first to exclude the Apocrypha, which had been included in prior editions as an appendix.) Ancient, be -

cause it traces its roots, as all modern Christian Bibles do, to the apostolic preaching of the earliest Christian centuries. The book is organized in three sections: Text, Canon, and Translation. Three chapters comprise each section.

THE TEXT

The first section opens with the development of early scribal publishing technologies and practices, including a brief account of Christianity’s favoritism for the codex (i.e., a manuscript book) at the time it was beginning to compete with the scroll. The codex permitted scribal-critical innovations the scroll could not. The premier example is Origen’s Hexapla, a comparative edition of the Bible that included five different translations side-by-side in six columns: the Hebrew, a transliteration of the Hebrew with Greek letters, the Septuagint, and three other Greek versions (i.e., Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion) in circulation at the time among the churches. Origen found that comparing manuscripts helped identify and resolve scribal errors and spurious interpolations. It also helped establish which readings had a stronger consensus among the churches. Such a grand polyglot Bible would not have been possible with the scroll.

The remainder of the section discusses the actual copying of the Old and New Testaments in antiquity. Here, Meade and Gurry argue for the need for textual criticism, which they define as “a discipline that seeks to recover the original wording of an ancient book by examining the remaining ancient copies of that book” (50). If that means establishing the precise shape of the texts of the New Testament writings as they appeared exactly from the hands of their authors and scribes before any copies were made, then the story of the past century of scholarship is one of failure. But if it means relying on the tools of textual criticism to help us establish even earlier and even more reliable forms of the biblical text, then it has been a tremendous success in bolstering our confidence

in the trustworthiness of God’s word. While we will always need to rely on the received traditions of the church, textual criticism remains useful and, if we consider scholars like Origen and Jerome, nothing new for the church to practice. Meade and Gurry supply an excellent introduction to the basics of textual criticism, including introducing key terms (e.g., “textual witness”) and some of the counterintuitive facts of the discipline (e.g., a manuscript with the earliest date may not reflect the earliest version of a text; sometimes, later manuscripts or translations are better witnesses).2

THE CANON

The second section, “Canon,” covers a lot of old ground but in an organized and readable way. It sets out to clarify common misconceptions of the development of the canon as those popularized by Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. Namely, the canon was not decided by imperial fiat by Constantine at the Council of Nicaea in 325. Nor was it an item ever addressed by an early ecclesial council. Rather, the formation of the canon was gradual and involved the whole body of churches in concert. Some books were widely recognized as authoritative at an early point, such as the Gospels, and the “Gospel canon” was just as quickly closed to exclude all but the four: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Acts and the Pauline Epistles were soon to follow, so a core New Testament canon was settled before the late second century. The Old Testament as well was mostly settled by the first century. Thus the church always had an authoritative canon of some form. But other books took longer to be canonized, some of which floated in and out of favor for centuries. In fact, it wasn’t until the Reformation era that the church was compelled to decide exactly the borders of the canon (131). The concept of a “closed canon,” therefore, has a late appearance in church history. Yet, as Meade and Gurry take pains to make clear, no single scholar, theologian, priest, mystic,

or teacher took it upon themselves to decide this: “No one person or personality—not even Luther!—could determine the canon’s boundaries. The canon of Scripture has always been a matter related to the great majority of churches having recognized the books in which God spoke through his prophets and apostles” (163). In a word, the canon is a “catholic” enterprise.

THE TRANSLATION

The bulk of this section is dedicated to the history of the English Bible—from Wycliffe to Tyndale, Coverdale, the Geneva edition, the KJV, and beyond—and the contributions each translation made to the final shape of the modern Bibles in our pews. It concludes with a wonderfully helpful chapter accounting for the abundance of translations available and the benefits each offers. This final chapter is necessary reading for anyone wondering which translation to own. It depends, of course, why you want to read it.

Though Meade and Gurry do not give this point great attention, another key takeaway in this section is that translation work has featured in the history of the Bible since its beginning. English just happens to be a latecomer to the history of Bible translation: Bibles were already available in other vernacular languages like German, Italian, and French by the time Wycliffe put pen to paper. Part of the resistance was that the English language at this time was underdeveloped. It had produced no great works of philosophy, poetry, science, or theology like other vernaculars had done. A common argument was that English simply didn’t have a vocabulary expansive enough to convey the Bible’s teachings. So, when John Wycliffe set out to translate the Latin Vulgate into English for the first time, he relied on neologism. He coined many new words, “including anathema, godly, unbeliever, and zealous” (192) to make up for English’s deficiency. Thus Bible translation work enriches the language in which it happens.

CONCLUSION

In the KJV-only tradition of my youth, divine providence was often invoked to bypass consideration of the historical dynamics that shaped the Bible. Meade and Gurry, however, are almost pastoral in their history writing. Readers will come away with an appreciation of the historical, social, cultural, technological, and theological factors that shaped the Bible. They will find it harder to believe that the sixty-six-book English Bible was inevitable. Some histories of the Bible treat the result of historical processes as though it should have been the obvious result all along. Thus the sixty-six-book English Bible, or a version of it, is treated as the ideal form, and every “other” Bible before this (or existing alongside it) was mere preamble or an early draft, not the living and active word of God in its own right.

Yet, the reader will also say, this contemporary English Bible is good and has important reasons for being the shape it happens to be. It is a boon to the church, the central witness of the earliest apostolic preaching for the English-speaking world, and sufficient for all faith and growth in godliness. Meade and Gurry do the important work of showing that we should not take our modern Bibles for granted. They are gifts given by God and preserved by the saints of the church. Recognizing this yields gratitude and praise, and we will all hold our Bibles a little more dearly.

Blake Adams (MA, Wheaton College) is an editor, a writer, and a trained historian. His research interests include early Christian history, ascetical theology, and exegesis. He serves as lead sacristan at Church of the Resurrection in Wheaton, Illinois. Follow him on Substack at https://readreligiously.substack. com/ or Twitter @BlaketheObscure.

1. Origen of Alexandria (third century) believed it was a pastoral duty (as well as a spiritual discipline) to learn to recognize and correct scribal errors with care: “If something out of Scripture is held up as a contradiction, we must not assume a contradiction, knowing that either we do not understand or that a scribal mistake has occurred. . . . Thus the devil plots even in the Scripture, but we must not on that account be bold and move precipitously to emendation. That is the sort of thing that happened to Marcion; assuming that the Scriptures had been

tampered with and had come to be interpolated by the devil, he undertook to emend the Scripture” (Hom. Ps. 77.1.1).

2. The Septuagint, for example, is a third-century Greek translation from the Hebrew, but the Hebrew on which it is based is often older than the Hebrew on which most modern English translations are based: the medieval Masoretic text. So, strangely, the Greek is sometimes a better textual witness to the original Hebrew than the extant Hebrew!

Liturgical Prayers before the Baptism (or Presentation) of Infants

ANGLICAN

Heavenly Father, we thank you that by water and the Holy Spirit you have bestowed upon these your servants the forgiveness of sin, and have raised them to the new life of grace. Sustain them, O Lord, in your Holy Spirit. Give them an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere, a spirit to know and to love you, and the gift of joy and wonder in all your works. Amen.1

REFORMED

Almighty, eternal God, long ago You severely punished an unbelieving and unrepentant world in holy judgment by sending a flood. But in Your great mercy, You saved and protected believing Noah and his family. You also drowned the obstinate Pharaoh and his whole army in the Red Sea, and You brought Your people Israel through the sea on dry ground. In these acts, You revealed the meaning of baptism and the mercies of Your covenant in saving Your people, who of themselves deserved Your condemnation. We therefore pray that in Your infinite mercy, You will graciously look upon this, Your child, and bring him/her into union with Your Son, Jesus Christ, through Your Holy Spirit. May he/she be buried with Christ into death and be raised with Him to walk in newness of life. We pray that he/she may follow Christ day by day, may joyfully bear his/her cross, and may cling to Him in true faith, firm hope, and ardent love.2

LUTHERAN

Almighty and most merciful God and Father, we thank and praise You that You graciously preserve and enlarge Your family and have granted name(s) the new birth in Holy Baptism and made him/her/them a member/members of Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, and an heir/heirs of Your heavenly kingdom. We humbly implore You that, as he/she/they has/have now become Your child/children, You would keep him/her/them in his/her/their baptismal grace, that according to Your good pleasure he/she/they may faithfully grow to lead a godly life to the praise and honor of Your holy name and finally, with all Your saints, obtain the promised inheritance in heaven; through Jesus Christ, our Lord.3

BAPTIST

Faithful God, in faith and hope we entrust to you this child’s future life as it stretches out before her/him . Protect her/him in moments of danger. Reassure her/him in moments of doubt. Strengthen her/him as she/he passes from childhood to youth and from youth to the life of an adult. Surround her/him with your love expressed in people who will care for her/him, and give her/ him those with whom that love can be shared. And grant that when understanding comes she/ he may confess you as Lord and saviour in the waters of baptism. Amen.4

1. Prayer after baptism in “Holy Baptism,” The Book of Common Prayer (New York: Seabury Press, 1979).

2. Excerpt from prayer before baptism in “Baptism of Infants—Form 1,” United Reformed Churches in North America, available at https://formsandprayers.com.

3. Prayer after baptism in “Holy Baptism,” Lutheran Service Book (St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 2005).

4. Prayer after “presenting and blessing,” Gathering for Worship: Patterns and Prayers for the Community of Disciples (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2005).

What Is Secularism?

HAS THE AGE OF FAITH GIVEN WAY TO THE AGE OF REASON?

Although that’s a popular story of the way the world works, the actual evidence says something different: the world is becoming more religious, not less. In this important new booklet, Michael Horton helps us understand the world around us while also pointing forward to the firm hope we have in the ultimate victory of Christ and his church. And with your gift of $50 or more, we'll send you a copy of this exclusive resource as our thank-you for supporting the work of Sola Media.