Читать книгу The Mystery of Baptism in the Anglican Tradition - Kenneth Stevenson - Страница 7

I once attended an ecumenical conference at theological college at which one of the speakers was Bishop Alan Clark, who was the first Roman Catholic Co-Chairman of the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission. The ‘Agreed Statement’ on the Eucharist had just been first issued.¹ He was about to address us on that seemingly intractable problem, eucharistie dialogue between Anglicans and Roman Catholics.

Earlier that morning he had walked across from the theological college into Salisbury Cathedral to say his prayers. He sat still for a while and looked around and wondered at the beauty and the sense of continuity and discontinuity in the building. The medieval Gothic architecture remained. But there were important changes, which expressed the way in which the Church of England had absorbed aspects of the Reformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There had been change and development since then as well. And he could enjoy the way in which the two sister Churches, Roman and Anglican, were drawing closer together. We were being encouraged by a new atmosphere of dialogue and cooperation. In company with other Churches also we were responding to what the Spirit was saying to the Churches in our own age.

One particular expression in his talk to us stuck in my mind. He referred to the Reformation as ‘an explosion of ideas’. Explosion indeed it was. And for many people, a necessary explosion. It was an explosion that for many sought to change the outward face of the Western Church without losing its inner heart.

Among the issues debated was the place of baptism. After all, how we understand this sacrament of entry into the Church – and how we perform it liturgically – are bound to be questions that affect the kind of Christian community that we are. A particular Anglican characteristic has tended to explore the relationship between sacraments as they are experienced in human lives and as they are celebrated as objective actions of the Church. This has often nowadays been called ‘thick description’ by anthropologists.

At the Reformation, these issues were indeed hotly debated all over Europe. They were debated not only for what they were said to teach – theology – but also for the way in which they were done – in worship. Thus, they adjusted the theology and liturgy of baptism. It was quite an operation to work out criteria for doing so. Calvin in France and Switzerland and Luther in Germany, followed by others elsewhere, including Thomas Cranmer in England, stripped the liturgy down. The pouring of water over the head of the child was to be central. Confirmation was abolished, though where it survived – initially only in England – the emphasis came to be focused as much on the candidates’ profession of the Christian faith, as on their blessing and strengthening in the power of the Holy Spirit by the Church.

Of course, the scene was far more complicated than that. For neither Calvin nor Luther was the journey straightforward.² But they and their colleagues, together with Thomas Cranmer in the first two English Prayer Books, inherited the medieval pattern of Christian initiation that persisted in all its fragmentation down to recent times. Baptism was primarily for those in infancy, and parents were expected to have their children baptized. Catechesis and first communion followed as the child got older and was able to understand more. The first two Prayer Books of 1549 and 1552 presuppose that scheme, adding a form of private baptism for when the child is dangerously ill, and a simple form of confirmation by the bishop. The form of baptism for those ‘of riper years’ was the main addition to the Prayer Book in 1662; it was added probably for two reasons, the Church’s mission in North America, and the numbers of people who were not baptized as infants during the time of the Commonwealth when the Prayer Book was proscribed and the influence of those wanting to delay baptism into adulthood was in some places strong.³ The other significant addition was the active profession of faith by the candidates at confirmation – all grist to the mill of those who wanted Christian commitment expressed in the liturgy.

Catholic ceremonies, like anointing with oil and elaborate ways of blessing the baptismal water, were abolished – although Cranmer did retain a blessing of the water, another indication of conservatism in England. Luther retained the sign of the cross before baptism, whereas Calvin got rid of it. Luther retained godparents, whereas Calvin got rid of them also, and required the parents of the child to make the promises at baptism. Already a varying picture is emerging. The Reformation did not proceed in a uniform manner at all. When, after the death of Edward VI in 1553, Mary Tudor reigned as a Catholic monarch again, it was inevitable that those budding churchmen who took the chance to escape to mainland Europe should encounter a more distinct style of Reformed Christianity in centres like Geneva and Zürich than they had known back home in England. When they returned at the beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I from 1558 onwards, many of them became valuable allies of the new monarch in her opening years. Together they faced the Catholic inheritance, and one of the results is that English Christianity became a matter of debate and controversy.

All these changes were not solely in the interests of simplifying the liturgy. They were about theology as well. Medieval Catholic teaching about baptism was to the effect that baptism is for the washing away of original sin. The Reformers challenged this, but in different ways: what about the centrality of the work of Christ on the cross? What about sins committed after baptism, which would not be dealt with automatically in the confessional? Baptismal theology therefore shifted in the same way as teaching about the Eucharist, towards views that tried to hold in some kind of tension the action of the Church in faithful obedience to the Lord’s command (on the one hand), and faithful reception on the part of the believer (on the other). Insofar as there is any discernible theological scheme, it concentrates on the way the symbol of water functions in relation to the gift of salvation.

In his work on Calvin’s eucharistic theology, Brian Gerrish suggests three models. We shall return to them later on, when we come to assessing the work of our nine writers. They approximate to three views of what sacraments do.⁴

The first is symbolic memorialism. This can be identified most immediately with the radical Swiss Reformer, Ulrich Zwingli. Sacraments are pledges of God’s goodwill to us. Baptism becomes an action that is a memorial of what Christ has already done for us. This is an exaggerated view, which suspects the language of sacramental efficacy. Faithful reception is the dominant part of the equation.

Then there is symbolic parallelism, a view that can be identified with Zwingli’s successor at Zürich, Heinrich Bullinger. A careful distinction is made between outward and inward baptism. As Bryan Spinks has suggested, ‘they are not identical, but neither are they totally unconnected. They are simultaneous and parallel.’

Thirdly, there is symbolic instrumentalism, a view which Gerrish identifies with John Calvin himself, and it can also be found in the writings of Martin Luther. The sacraments are ‘visible words’ (to use Augustine’s well-known tag); they are not bare signs, but consist of the sign and what is signified together. The water of baptism conveys the gift of salvation in the sacrament itself; faithful reception begins from that point. As we shall see, Anglican teaching tends strongly towards this third view, because it is faithful to tradition and at the same time allows ample scope for the basic Reformation emphasis on human appropriation.

The principal way in which debate and controversy in England operated – and still does today in world-wide Anglicanism – is the almost endemic manner in which this particular style of Reformed Christianity is determined to face both ways. The Church of England is Catholic, but it is not Roman Catholic. It is Reformed, but it is not like the Reformed Churches of the Continent. From some of the writings which will be discussed later, it is apparent that there were elements in this English Church that also found an increasing amount of inspiration in the Greek Fathers and the Eastern Christian traditions. In this connection, one name stands out particularly strong, that of Lancelot Andrewes. The extraordinary characteristic of this Church of England is that traces of this endemic tendency to be both Catholic and Reformed are to be found in virtually every service of The Book of Common Prayer. As far as baptism and confirmation are concerned, a good example is in the following prayer, which first appears in 1549 and survives thereafter:

Almighty and immortal God,

The aid of all that need, the helper of all that flee to thee for succour, the life of them that believe, and the resurrection of the dead:

We call upon thee for this infant that he, coming to thy holy baptism, may receive remission of his sins by spiritual Regeneration.

Receive him, O Lord as thou hast promised by thy well beloved son, saying, ask, and ye shall receive; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you:

So give now unto us that ask; let us that seek find; open the gate unto us that knock; that this infant may enjoy the everlasting benediction of thy heavenly washing, and may come to the eternal kingdom which thou hast promised by Christ our Lord. Amen.⁵

This prayer has a curious origin. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer will have known it from his Catholic days as the prayer used in the baptism rite when putting salt in the candidate’s mouth. Much earlier, Augustine uses the image of knocking on the door when exhorting candidates to come forward for baptism. This probably inspired the composition of the prayer in the first place, for when it was originally written, probably in the sixth century (if not earlier), the ceremony of the giving of salt took place some time before the baptism, and was part of the rites associated with the final part of the catechumenate – the group of people preparing for baptism. If they were mainly adults, or if a high proportion of them were adults, then it made a great deal of sense to ‘ritualize’ the last stages in preparation for baptism.

The prayer in its original form is marked by two main features. One is that it was originally a prayer in the singular, uttered by the priest almost as a personal petition over the candidate. This Cranmer changed to the more normal plural ‘we’. Secondly, the prayer has at its heart the teaching of Jesus about asking, seeking, and knocking (Matt. 7:7–8; Luke 11:9–10). In other words, the prayer as adapted by Cranmer places the candidate – and the congregation identifying with the candidate – on the threshold of the Christian life.

This is probably why the prayer was a winner with Cranmer, and to a lesser extent with Luther, who abbreviated it for his baptismal rite. All those rich periods near the start – ‘the aid of all that need, the helper of all that flee to thee for succour, the life of them that believe, and the resurrection of the dead’ – express the sheer dependence upon God that is at the heart of the deepest classical traditions of Christian prayer. After the quotation from Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount about asking, seeking, and knocking, and turning those into petitions on behalf of the whole congregation, the prayer ends by asking for ‘the everlasting benediction of thy heavenly washing’ and ‘the eternal kingdom which thou hast promised’. Cranmer, like the other Reformers, took to prayers that quoted the Bible. And he also liked prayers that had a strongly devotional flavour to them. In retrospect, therefore, it seems hardly a surprise that it should find itself near the start of Cranmer’s baptism rite.

Another aspect of Reformed liturgies in which the Prayer Book shares is the use of scripture. In the later Middle Ages, the passage about Jesus blessing the children was introduced as a kind of warrant for infant baptism (Matt. 19:13–15). Cranmer, however, followed Luther and changed the reading to the corresponding one in Mark’s Gospel (Mark 10:13–16). He seems to have been interested in the passage as a basis for baptism as far back as about 1537.⁶ The version in Mark is more forceful. In Mark, where Jesus shows his displeasure to the disciples when they try to stop the children coming to him, he adds the extra teaching about receiving the Kingdom of God as a little child, and he takes the children up in his arms before he blesses them. At a time when the more radical reformers were questioning infant baptism, it was important for the liturgy to be seen to be defending it. It is interesting to note that when the form of baptism for those of ‘riper years’ was framed for the 1662 Prayer Book, the corresponding scripture passage was Nicodemus before Jesus, with the telling command from Jesus that those who were to enter the Kingdom of Heaven must be born again of water and the spirit (John 3:5), a passage much used by many Reformers (and others before them) to defend the necessity of baptism.

It is easy with the benefit of hindsight to underestimate the sheer impact of these prayers written for the first time in a language understood by most people, and using scripture passages from vernacular translations of the Bible. Both those factors were bound to make the activity of creating fresh liturgies and reforming old ones an exciting venture both on the part of those drafting the prayers as well as for those on the receiving end among the church congregations. In both the prayer discussed earlier and in the use of a scriptural warrant for baptism, the English Church was showing its desire to look in both those directions, namely to stand for continuity with its Catholic inheritance, and for discontinuity in the face of Reformation developments.

The debates and controversies built up their own head of steam. Two are of particular importance and both date from the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. The first was occasioned by John Jewel (1522–71) and concerned the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church. Jewel was probably one of the most brilliant men of his time. A convinced Protestant, he was ordained in 1550 or 1551 and did much to forward the cause at Oxford. He hoped to survive under Queen Mary Tudor but soon realized that his life was in danger. He fled Oxford in March 1555 and spent the next four years in Frankfurt, Strasbourg, and finally Zürich. Such personal contacts as he made there, which included John Knox at Frankfurt and Peter Martyr at Strasbourg, led him to think carefully and clearly about his own theological position. In January 1560, soon after his return to England, he was consecrated Bishop of Salisbury. He is probably one of the most famous occupants of that See. High on the agenda of the Church of England as it settled down to a new monarch and another phase of life as a Reformed Catholic Church was the need to state with clarity and erudition that it was indeed a true part of the Catholic Church.

In 1562, Jewel published his Apology of the Church of England, which was a lengthy defence against the Roman Catholic Church. It was written in Latin and an English translation by Lady Ann Bacon, wife of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, appeared in 1564. When you defend yourself against someone else, you must expect a rejoinder. This came in the form of An Answer to M. Jewel’s Challenge, which was written by Richard Harding and published also in 1564. Harding had been a Canon of Salisbury during the reign of Mary Tudor and had been deprived of his post for his Catholic position in 1559. He therefore had little reason to love the new Bishop, and his description of him as Mr. Jewel was an eloquent enough admission of his own view that the man was not really ordained at all. Jewel fought back in the following year with his Reply to Harding’s Answer, and each wrote a subsequent set of rejoinders. Each work is longer than its predecessor.⁷

In the Apology Jewel states that baptism is a sacrament, and it is to do with the remission of sins and the redemption through the work of Christ. He insists that no-one should be prevented from being baptized, because they are fallen and in need of God’s forgiveness.

Harding accuses Jewel of demoting sacrament to be ‘no more but a token or sign’. And he goes further into the attack by saying that baptism does not depend on the faith of the giver or receiver but on the power and virtue of the sacrament in God’s promise. Jewel counters this in his Reply by agreeing on the sacramental nature of baptism, but emphasizes the need for godparents when babies or young children are being baptized, and he laces his discussion with references to the Fathers, including Augustine and Jerome. It is clear, for example, that Jewel agrees with Augustine (and many of the Fathers) when he identifies the water of baptism as being in the place of the blood of Christ.

We say that baptism is a sacrament of the remission of sins, and of that washing which we have in the blood of Christ; and that no person which will profess Christ’s name ought to be restrained or kept back therefrom, no, not the very babes of Christians, forsomuch as they be borne in sin, and do pertain unto the people of God.⁸

The second controversy, by contrast, concerned the Church of England and those who wanted to take her in a more Reformed direction. It will be noted that Calvin abolished such patristic practices as godparents and the sign of the cross. These, however, were retained in the 1552 Prayer Book, and not abolished when, with some small alterations, that book was re-issued in 1559 at the start of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. The signing of the cross at baptism was the only example left of many more signs of the cross from the medieval rites, and it was accompanied by a formula which expressed Christian discipleship in terms of combat: ‘we receive this child into the congregation of Christ’s flock, and do sign him with the sign of the cross, in token that hereafter he shall not be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified, and manfully to fight under his banner against sin, the world, and the devil, and to continue Christ’s faithful soldier, and servant unto his life’s end.’⁹ Cranmer was retaining a traditional custom which went back to the earliest time and was underscoring its significance: baptism is baptism into the cross of Christ, it is about discipleship, it is about witness to him in newness of life. As for godparents, although in 1552. they no longer had to lay their hands on the head of the child after baptism, they were still an integral part of the service. In 1549, the questions at baptism were addressed directly to the child for the godparents to answer, following medieval practice, whereas in 1552, the questions were addressed direct to the godparents, which served to highlight the role of godparents in a stronger way than previously.

There were, however, many for whom Cranmer’s liturgical arrangements had not gone far enough. Baptism by midwives survived from the pre-Reformation era in an age of infant mortality, but many railed against it as archaic and meaningless. The signing of the cross, along with the position of the font, remained contentious. As early as 1562, there was an unsuccessful attempt in Convocation to make the sign of the cross optional.¹⁰

In 1572, an ‘Admonition to Parliament’, by John Field and Thomas Wilcox, called for the abolition of the blessing of the water, promises by the godparents, and the signing of the cross; and it recommended that there should be a proper sermon at baptism, and that parents should present the child and make confession of the faith on its behalf. The Second Admonition called for the abolition of confirmation altogether.¹¹

Things could not be left to rest like this. John Whitgift was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Vice-Chancellor of the University. He had already forced the leading Puritan, Thomas Cartwright, who was wholeheartedly behind the Admonitions, out of his Cambridge Fellowship and Professorship. He wrote at once an Answer to the Admonition (1572), and Cartwright wrote a Reply (1573–4); Whitgift wrote a Defence of the Answer (1574), whereupon Cartwright wrote a Second Reply (1575–7). The two of them fought hammer and tongs, Whitgift defending with ever greater fervour the Prayer Book practices, and Cartwright criticizing them with ever increasing conviction. As John New has observed, two different view of the Church and sacraments were at loggerheads. Whitgift, loyal Protestant though he was, believed in an inclusive Church, where sacraments are effective signs of nature transformed by grace, whereas Cartwright believed in a gathered Church, founded by God, whose prevenient grace was so strong that sacraments had less impact.¹² Defence of the issues these two fought over was to carry on for the next ninety years – and beyond.

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

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

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

To these we must now turn.