Читать книгу The Mystery of Baptism in the Anglican Tradition - Kenneth Stevenson - Страница 9

Boston Parish Church is one of the largest churches in Britain. It was built in the fourteenth century and the tower is 270 feet high. It is an unmistakable feature of the skyline and because of the flat countryside of fenland Lincolnshire, it can be seen for miles around. As the visitor enters the church the first sight to be seen is a large font, set on a series of steps, designed by the famous Victorian architect, Augustus Pugin, and given to the church in 1853.

The font has been put to all different kinds of uses. It has been used for dramatic moments in Christmas Carol services, at the Easter Vigil, and for occasions during special services when the choir gathers round to sing from it. There is so much space that the font makes its own impact. At Christmas, the crib has often been placed there, so making the point that the rebirth of the human race began – in a sense – with the birth of Jesus as the Christ in Bethlehem.

I have celebrated many baptisms there. At first, it felt rather strange, standing up so high, and I do remember one occasion when I almost slipped as I came down the steps with a young baby immediately after baptizing him. I have heard many criticisms of this particular font. Some have said it is too large. Others have said it is out of date, presumably because the architect was Pugin. Others again have said that it is ugly. But no-one can doubt its sheer impressiveness, surrounded as it is by such an open Perpendicular Gothic interior.

Not to put too fine a point on it, one simply cannot avoid this font. It gets in the way. And one of the reasons why it has aroused comment over the years is that it poses in its own way the question, what are we to do with our fonts? Is the font a kind of expression of God? God either gets in the way or he has moved around his church-buildings to suit passing fashions, like a kind of convenience food. These are questions that have a bearing on what we do with church interiors today and they were questions that were alive in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well.

If the font is a silent expression of God in our midst, then perhaps the question needs to be asked, how do we share in the life of God in the first place? If we come to be washed at the font, and go on to feed at the altar, and if we keep going back to that font every time we witness a baptism, then the font’s very ‘God-likeness’ becomes its own question.

There are three answers that are supplied by the New Testament, and in each case they have baptismal overtones. First of all, there is the image of being part of the Body of Christ. ‘Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it’ (I Cor. 12:27).

To be part of the Body of Christ is not just to be part of a club of like-minded people – and very often they are not like-minded at all! – but it is to share at the deepest level in the common humanity of other people, and to do this in Christ. For the deeper that one enters into a relationship with someone else, the more fully we are tested, and faced with our own humanity. That is what it means to be part of Christ’s Body. Christ identifies himself with us so fully that we are able to identify ourselves with him. Moreover, this ‘Body of Christ’ exists in history, but in a way that is far deeper than the mere historical manifestation of that Body in a particular place and at a particular time. Whenever I presided at a service of baptism when I served as a priest in Boston in the late 1970s, I was forcefully reminded of this truth simply by facing in any direction away from the font as I stood there. My voice echoed hither and thither in that vast nave. I couldn’t fail to get a strong sense of a Body of Christ that reached down through history, not only back into the past but forward into the future.

The second image takes us away from sharing to the more allusive one of abiding. We come across this word no fewer than seven times at a particular stage in the Fourth Gospel, when Christ describes himself as ‘the true vine’. Shortly after he describes himself as the true vine, he says, ‘Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me’ (John 15:4). Just as there is mutuality in the image of sharing, so there is with abiding. To abide is to remain, to rest, and it has resonances of permanence rather than activity. It is as if Christ were saying to his followers, I am the source of your life, and I am ready to stay with you forever. Every time I stood at that font, I had, too, a strong sense of that abiding presence, not just because of the size and proportions of Pugin’s design, but because of the sanctity of the building and its atmosphere. Visitors would come and go, individual members of the Body of Christ vary from one generation to another, but this church building would go on and on – or at least for as long as we could keep it up!

The third image is repentance – ‘repent, and believe in the gospel’ (Mark 1:15). For many people, repentance is a big word that might mean saying sorry. But it means much more than that. At so many baptism services down the ages, the candidate or the sponsors have been asked, ‘Do you repent of your sins?’ The word ‘repent’ was often accompanied by a dramatic physical gesture which symbolized exactly what the word originally meant. In ancient times, candidates for baptism would often face west and renounce the deeds of darkness, and then turn through 180 degrees to the east to profess their faith in Christ. To repent is to undergo a change of mind – not in the intellectual sense, but in the sense of the whole person going through that turning round, that realignment, that re-focusing, that renewal, which is itself a work of God, not our own. So many times when I stood at that font, I looked west through the huge space under the tower, and imagined the wealthy Hanseatic merchants who built the place and the kind of world they inhabited. Then I turned east, and looked up through the even vaster spaces of the nave towards the altar, and had in my mind’s eye the Lord Christ, accepting that repentance, daily, weekly, yearly, by the century.

Right at the end of the life-time of the New Testament, one of the writers expresses all these truths in the rich theological expression – ‘partakers of the divine nature’ (2 Pet.1:4). And of all the writers in the seventeenth century, this approach to sacraments in general and baptism in particular is most strongly exemplified by Richard Hooker.¹

From a literary and theological point of view, the contrast between Perkins and Hooker could not be greater. Perkins’ prose is plain and ordinary, whereas Hooker’s is more literary in style, and less easily accessible. Perkins’ career was primarily as a preacher, whereas Hooker forsook the Temple Church in London, where he was locked in controversy with his Puritan colleague Walter Travers,² in order to become a country parish priest, where he could write.

Hooker was an Elizabethan in every sense of the word. He was born just four years before the accession of Elizabeth and died on 2 November 1600, just a few years before her death. Before his time at the Temple Church in London, he had been an aspiring scholar at Oxford, where he befriended Edwin Sandys, son of the Bishop of London, and George Cranmer, nephew of the former Archbishop. It was John Whitgift, now Archbishop of Canterbury, who ensured his appointment as Master of the Temple in 1585, and it is likely that Hooker had been identified as a rising star. But he soon tired of being centre-stage in London, with a colleague like Walter Travers who was so different in every way. The last two posts he held were as Sub-Dean of Salisbury and Rector of Boscombe in 1591, and from there he moved only four years later to Bishopsbourne in Kent in the Canterbury diocese. His great work The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity flowed from his pen during these last years. The first four books appeared in 1593, while he was still at Salisbury, and the fifth, by far the longest, was published in 1597. (The remaining books appeared much later: the sixth and eighth in 1648, and the seventh in 1661. While it is clear that they represented Hooker’s completed thought, they may have been prepared for publication from a semi-completed text.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 63: the profession of Christian faith at baptism.

Chapter 64: the questions to godparents.

Chapter 65: the sign of the cross.

Chapter 66: confirmation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . . baptism is a sacrament which God hath instituted in his church, to the end that they which receive the same may thereby be incorporated into Christ, and so through his most precious merit obtain as well that saving grace of imputation which taketh away all former guiltiness, as also that infused divine virtue of the Holy Ghost, which giveth to the powers of the soul their first disposition towards future newness of life.¹⁴

The inward and outward meet in the sacrament, but the element of human response is not denied at all. The work of Christ imputes righteousness to the faithful believer, but there is also an infused righteousness which enables human beings to stand before God as redeemed, and therefore able to worship and serve him.¹⁵ Hooker’s understanding of grace is more traditional than the more severe view of the Puritans. It is all of a piece with participating in the life of God.

Hooker does not believe that infants who die unbaptized are damned, because ‘grace is not absolutely tied unto the sacraments’.¹⁶ On the other hand, he is against the Church ‘through her superfluous scrupulosity’ placing ‘lets and impediments of less regard’ in the way of those who want to be baptized; ‘baptism therefore even in the meaning of the law of Christ belongeth unto infants capable thereof from the very instant of the birth’.¹⁷

Chapter 61 concerns set times and places for baptism. Hooker finds no New Testament evidence for either but he knows that in the Patristic period Easter and Pentecost were often set aside for this. He does find evidence for private baptism, and in so doing clearly has in mind those who are prepared to turn people away from baptism in order to assert the public character of the celebration. Hooker’s tone at this point is less than sublime: ‘Oh Sir, you that would spurn thus at such as in case of so dreadful an extremity should lie prostrate before your feet, you that would turn away your face from them at the hour of their most need . . .’¹⁸ Many Puritans would not approve of what would be called emergency baptism.

Chapter 62 tackles the thorny issue of baptism by women, midwives. This leads on logically from private baptism, particularly in an age that knew high infant mortality. Many of the Puritans regarded baptism by a midwife as no sacrament at all but an ordinary washing, which meant that the infant should be baptized again. Hooker, to the contrary, finds ancient evidence for such baptisms, and he goes on to assert that ‘they that iterate baptism are driven under some pretence or other to make the former baptism void’.¹⁹ This enables Hooker to emphasize yet again the objective nature of baptism: ‘baptism is an action in part moral, and in part ecclesiastical, and in part mystical; moral, as being a duty which men perform towards God; ecclesiastical, in that it belongeth to God’s church as a public duty; finally mystical, if we respect what God thereby intend to work.’²⁰ Hooker’s overall approach to theology is apparent here. Baptism is moral: it is about lifestyle. Baptism is ecclesiastical: it takes the form of a church liturgy. Baptism is mystical: it brings us into the life of God himself. These three aspects are not separate: they are inextricably bound together, as nature becomes the sacramental vehicle of God’s grace in the lives of Christ’s disciples.

This discussion leads him to distinguish between those who are old enough to answer for themselves, and infants. Here he uses for the first time the covenant language which Perkins used more fundamentally, and which we shall meet later on in the writings of Baxter, Taylor, Patrick and Thorndike. ‘The fruit of baptism dependeth only upon the covenant which God hath made; that God by covenant requireth in the elder sort faith in baptism, in children the sacrament of baptism alone . . . that infants therefore, which have received baptism complete as touching the mystical perfection thereof are by virtue of his own covenant and promise cleansed from all sin . . .’²¹ He sums this up in a glorious nugget: ‘the grace of baptism cometh by donation of God alone.’²²

Chapter 63 deals with a corollary of infant baptism, the profession of Christian faith by godparents. Here, Hooker is firmly traditional. ‘The first thing required of him that standeth for admission into Christ’s family is belief. Which belief consisteth not so much in knowledge as in acknowledgement of all things that heavenly wisdom revealeth; the affection of faith is above her reach, her love to Godward above the comprehension of God.’²³ He expresses the nature of this profession by quoting the sixth-century writer Isidore of Seville, who spells out in covenant terms the renunciation of evil and profession of Christian faith. ‘Two covenants there are which Christian men do make in baptism, the one concerning relinquishment of Satan, the other touching obedience to the faith of God.’ (Covenant imagery was known among the Fathers, and was not just a biblical motif that lay dormant until the Reformation.) And he goes on to say, ‘neither do I think it a matter easy for any man to prove, that ever baptism did use to be administered without interrogatories of these two kinds.’²⁴

Chapter 64 concerns the use of godparents themselves. Many Puritans probably ignored this ingredient in the baptism service altogether, and asked the parents to make the profession of faith on behalf of their own child. But as if to secure common ground, Hooker states at the outset, ‘they with whom we contend are no enemies to the baptism of infants’.²⁵ Once again he uses covenant language. As we have already seen, Hooker knew that it was used by Isidore of Seville. But he would also have been fully aware of its popularity among the new Puritans. We may conclude that this was part of his intention, to try to get them on his side.

. . . baptism implieth a covenant or league between God and man, wherein as God and man, wherein as God doth bestow presently remission of sins and the Holy Ghost, binding all to himself to add in process of time what grace soever shall be further necessary for the attainment of everlasting life . . .

and:

The law of Christ requiring therefore faith and newness of life in all men by virtue of the covenant which they make in baptism, is it toyish that the church in baptism exacteth at every man’s hands an express profession of faith and an irrevocable promise of obedience by way of solemn stipulation?

and:

That infants may contract and covenant with God, the law is plain.²⁶

(‘Toyish’ was used in the First Admonition to Parliament