Amidst Us Our Beloved Stands E-Book

Michael A. G. Haykin

• Herausgeber: Lexham Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 212

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Baptists are sacramental When it comes to baptism and the Lord's Supper, many Baptists reject the language of sacrament. As a people of the book, the logic goes, Baptists must not let tradition supersede the Bible. So Baptists tend to view baptism and Communion as ordinances and symbols, not sacraments.  But the history of Baptists and sacramentalism is complicated. In  Amidst Us Our Beloved Stands , Michael A. G. Haykin argues that many Baptists, such as Charles Spurgeon and other Particular Baptists, stood closer to Reformed sacramental thought than most Baptists today. More than mere memorials, baptism and Communion have spiritual implications that were celebrated by Baptists of the past in sermons and hymnody. Haykin calls for a renewal of sacramental life in churches today—Baptists can and should be sacramental. 

Leseprobe

Amidst Us Our Belovèd Stands

Recovering Sacrament in the Baptist Tradition

Michael A. G. Haykin

Amidst Us Our Belovèd Stands: Recovering Sacrament in the Baptist Tradition

Copyright 2022 Michael A. G. Haykin

Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225

LexhamPress.com

You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission. Email us at [email protected].

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are the author’s own translation or are from the King James Version. Public domain.

Scripture quotations marked (CSB) are from The Christian Standard Bible, copyright © 2017 by Holman Bible Publishers. Used by permission. Christian Standard Bible® and CSB® are federally registered trademarks of Holman Bible Publishers, all rights reserved.

Portions of chapter 2 appear in Michael A. G. Haykin, One Heart and One Soul: John Sutcliff of Olney, His Friends and His Times (Darlington, UK: Evangelical Press, 1994), 294–300. Used with permission.

Portions of chapter 3 appear in Michael A. G. Haykin, “Baptists, the Lord’s Supper, and the Christian Tradition,” in Baptists and the Christian Tradition, 205–27. Used with permission.

Print ISBN 9781683595854

Digital ISBN 9781683595861

Library of Congress Control Number 2021941980

Lexham Editorial: Todd Hains, Amy Elliot, Danielle Thevenaz, Jessi Strong

Cover Design: Lydia Dahl, Brittany Schrock

To Roy Paul,

“my coworker for the kingdom of God”

(Colossians 4:11),

a valued friend and colleague

CONTENTS

PREFACE

IBLESSED FOOD

Baptism as a means of grace in the Particular Baptist movement

IITHIS SWEET REPAST

The Lord’s Supper in Baptist life and thought during the long eighteenth century

IIITHE RIGHT WAY OF WORSHIP

Baptist controversy over open and closed Communion

IVTHE NEAREST APPROACH TO HIS GLORIOUS SELF

The eucharistic piety of Joseph Stennett, Anne Dutton, and Thomas Steevens

VSIX THESES

On Baptism and the Lord’s Supper in the Baptist Tradition

PRAYERS

GLOSSARY OF NAMES

PREFACE

In 1866, C. H. Spurgeon (1834–1892), well on his way to becoming something of a Dissenting icon, published a hymnal for his growing congregation in south London. Entitled Our Own Hymn-book. A Collection of Psalms and Hymns for Public, Social, and Private Worship, it contained a cornucopia of Evangelical hymnody, including a few of Spurgeon’s own creation.1 Among the latter is what has proven to be Spurgeon’s most enduring hymn, a Communion piece titled “Jesu’s Presence Delightful”:

Amidst us our Belovèd stands,

And bids us view His piercèd hands;

Points to His wounded feet and side,

Blest emblems of the Crucified.

What food luxurious loads the board,

When at His table sits the Lord!

The wine how rich, the bread how sweet,

When Jesus deigns the guests to meet!

If now with eyes defiled and dim,

We see the signs, but see not Him,

O may his love the scales displace,

And bid us see Him face to face!

Our former transports we recount,

When with Him in the holy mount,

These cause our souls to thirst anew,

His marr’d but lovely face to view.

Thou glorious Bridegroom of our hearts,

Thy present smile a heaven imparts:

Oh lift the veil, if veil there be,

Let every saint Thy beauties see.2

This hymn’s emphasis on the spiritual presence of Christ at the Table is quite remarkable for a late nineteenth-century Baptist author, for the vast majority of Baptist leaders in that era held that the Supper was a time of remembrance, nothing more.3 But Spurgeon had long nourished his heart and mind on seventeenth-century Puritan and eighteenth-century Baptist authors, for whom the Lord’s Table was above all a place where God’s people had sweet fellowship with their Savior who was spiritually present with them.

Two of the four essays in this book, chapters 2 and 4, detail this Baptist eucharistic piety that nourished Spurgeon’s soul. The third essay, chapter 3, deals with another aspect of the Lord’s Table, namely, the question of who might properly partake of the Table in a Baptist church. The answer to this question turned out to be extremely controversial, as can be seen from the pamphlet debate between William Kiffen (1616–1701)4 and John Bunyan (1628–1688). The controversy flared up again at the close of the long eighteenth century and was a major issue on and off throughout the nineteenth century. But the way that two early participants, namely Andrew Fuller (1754–1815) and John Ryland Jr. (1753–1825), handled their disagreement over this issue is deeply instructive.5 These three essays have as their immediate origin the lectures that were presented at The William R. Rice Lecture Series at Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary, on March 20, 2020. The circumstances of their delivery were somewhat unique in that the coronavirus pandemic prevented them being given in person. I was thus thankful for the Zoom technology that enabled me to give them. I am extremely grateful to Pastor Ben Edwards, dean of Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary, for the invitation to deliver these lectures. It was a distinct privilege. I am also indebted to Ryan Meyer, administrative assistant at Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary, for his help in the delivery of the lectures.

The initial essay, chapter 1, was crafted much earlier and parts of it have appeared in a number of places, most notably my Kiffen, Knollys, and Keach: Rediscovering our English Baptist Heritage.6 In this essay I set the scene for the discussion of Particular Baptist eucharistic thought. The earliest Particular Baptist churches were baptismal communities in the truest sense of this term: the baptism of believers by immersion was at the heart of their self-understanding. The emphasis on the proper subjects of baptism was a product of their Congregationalist matrix, while the stress on immersion as being essential is tied to the Particular Baptist understanding of the meaning of baptism as identification with Christ in his death, burial, and resurrection. It was this twin concern that undergirded the Particular Baptist approach to the relationship between baptism and the Lord’s Supper: given the vital importance of the act of believer’s baptism, it is only proper to require it as a prerequisite to the Lord’s Supper. Of course, this only deepened the opinion of many that, as the American Particular Baptist Isaac Backus (1724–1806) once put it, the Baptists were “the most rigid of all sects.”7

In keeping with a number of other essays and monographs that I have written, these essays constitute an exercise in historical ressourcement. It is readily apparent to many within the Baptist tradition that our practice of the Lord’s Supper, and to a somewhat lesser extent, of baptism, is not truly central to our experience of being Baptist.8 Indeed, beginning in the early nineteenth century many within this tradition have proudly rejected any hint of these ordinances being a means of grace or, to put it another way, sacramental events in which God is acting in the life of the believer. Ironically, throughout the twentieth century to the present day many of these very same churches, at least in North America, have been ardent about the practice of the altar call, which effectively usurps the roles assigned to baptism and the Table in classical Baptist ecclesiology. Truly natura abhorret vacuum! As the essays in this book will patently show, however, a different mentality prevailed in the Baptist tradition in its seventeenth-century origins and throughout most of the long eighteenth century. While the term “sacrament” was not usually employed, these Baptists were nonetheless deeply sacramental in their approach to doing church.9 And it is this author’s hope that this earlier tradition will be revived in our needy and trying times.

I have dedicated this small work to Dr. Roy Paul, my research assistant at the Canadian office of the Andrew Fuller Center. I have deeply appreciated Roy’s assiduity in his work and ministry at the Fuller Center, part of which has recently involved reading over the initial draft of these lectures.

DUNDAS, ONTARIO

JULY 27, 2020

on my daughter Victoria’s birthday

Preached this afternoon on the dimensions of the love of Christ.

Great delight at the Lord’s Supper.

Oh, to know more of and live upon Christ!

He must be our daily bread. Sweet pleasure tonight.

ANDREW FULLER

JOURNAL ENTRY FOR OCTOBER 31, 1784

I

BLESSED FOOD

Baptism as a means of grace in the Particular Baptist movement

Spirituality lies at the very core of English Puritanism, that late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century movement that sought to reform the Church of England and, failing to do so, mainly splintered into a trio of denominations—Presbyterian, Independent or Congregationalist, and Particular (i.e., Calvinistic) Baptist.1 Whatever else these Puritans may have been—social, political, and ecclesiastical reformers—they were primarily men and women intensely passionate about piety and Christian experience. By and large united in their Calvinism, Puritans believed that every aspect of their spiritual lives came from the work of the Holy Spirit. They had, in fact, inherited from the continental Reformers of the sixteenth century, and from John Calvin (1506–1564) in particular, “a constant and even distinctive concern” with the person and work of the Holy Spirit.2 Benjamin B. Warfield (1851–1921), the distinguished American Presbyterian theologian, can actually speak of Calvin as “preeminently the theologian of the Holy Spirit.”3 And of his Puritan heirs and their interest in the Spirit Warfield had this to say:

The formulation of the doctrine of the work of the Spirit waited for the Reformation and for Calvin, and … the further working out of the details of this doctrine and its enrichment by the profound study of Christian minds and meditation of Christian hearts has come down from Calvin only to the Puritans. [I]t is only the truth to say that Puritan thought was almost entirely occupied with loving study of the work of the Holy Spirit, and found its highest expression in dogmatico-practical expositions of the several aspects of it.4

Alongside this emphasis on the Spirit, however, the Puritans were also assured that, as the Elizabethan Puritan Richard Greenham (1540–1594) once put it, “we drawe neere to God by meanes.”5 By this Greenham, speaking for his fellow Puritans, meant that there are various godly activities or spiritual disciplines that the Holy Spirit employs to help Christians grow to maturity in Christ. On one occasion Greenham identified three vital spiritual disciplines: “The first meanes [of grace] is prayer.… The second meanes is hearing of his word.… The third meane whereby we draw neere, is by the Sacraments.”6 A later Puritan author, John Preston (1587–1628), recognized other key disciplines such as “meditation, conference, the communion of saints, particular resolutions to [do] good.”7 Given the prominence of the Spirit in their thinking, the Puritans never for a moment believed that these means of grace or spiritual disciplines were sufficient in and of themselves to nourish the soul of the believer or sustain the inner life of a congregation. Only the Holy Spirit was sufficient for that. Yet, the Puritans were also certain that to seek the Spirit’s strength apart from such means was both unbiblical and foolish. Benjamin Keach (1640–1704), the most significant Particular Baptist theologian of the late seventeenth century, put it this way in 1681 when, in a direct allusion to the Quakers, who dispensed with the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, he declared:

Many are confident they have the Spirit, Light, and Power, when ’tis all meer Delusion.… Some Men boast of the Spirit, and conclude they have the Spirit, and none but they, and yet at the same time cry down and villify his blessed Ordinances and Institutions, which he hath left in his Word, carefully to be observed and kept, till he comes the second time without Sin unto Salvation.… The Spirit hath its proper Bounds, and always runs in its spiritual Chanel, viz. The Word and Ordinances, God’s publick and private Worship.8

Keach’s fellow Particular Baptist Hercules Collins (1646/7–1702) similarly asserted that “if God have a Church in all Ages, he must have Ordinances there, because no Church of Christ can be constituted without them.”9

Other Puritans who were Presbyterians or Independents would have wholeheartedly agreed with this coupling of ordinance and Spirit, though their preferred term was “sacrament” instead of “ordinance.” Neither of the two most important Particular Baptist confessions of the seventeenth century, the First London Confession of Faith (1644/1646) and the Second London Confession of Faith (1677/1688), use the term “sacrament,” although signatories of these confessions occasionally used this noun from time to time and did so unapologetically. William Kiffen (1616–1701), who signed both of these confessions and can be rightly regarded as the father of the Particular Baptist community,10 described baptism on one occasion as “the Sacrament of the Spiritual Birth.”11 Keach, quoting the Arminian theologian Daniel Tilenus (1563–1633), stated without qualification that “baptism is the first Sacrament of the New Testament … in which there is an exact analogy between the Sign and the thing signified.”12 And in his Baptistic adaptation of the Heidelberg Catechism, Hercules Collins used this term a number of times in the section “Of the Sacraments.”13 For instance, Collins stated that

the Sacraments … are sacred Signs, and Seals, set before our Eyes, and ordained of God for this cause, that he may declare and seal by them the Promise of his Gospel unto us … that he giveth freely Remission of Sins, and Life everlasting, not only to his all in general, but to every one in particular that believeth, for that only Sacrifice of Christ which he accomplished upon the Cross.14

Of course, out of all these communities that came from Puritanism, only the Baptists baptized believers, and they uniformly baptized by immersion. As Timothy George has noted, this difference initiated a ferocious debate about baptism that lasted for the rest of the seventeenth century. This debate can be seen in the titles of the numerous tracts each side lobbed at each other, for example, Daniel Featley’s (1582–1645) Katabaptistai Kataptustoi. The Dippers dipt. Or, The Anabaptists duck’d and Plunged Over Head and Eares, at a Disputation in Southwark (1645), or Hercules Collins’s Believers-Baptism from Heaven, and of Divine Institution. Infants-Baptism from Earth, and Human Invention (1691).15 This Baptist tenacity in promoting their convictions earned them the reputation of being “sowers of division.”16 They were also charged with being immoral—in particular, with “doing acts unseemly in the dispensing the Ordinance of Baptism, not to be named amongst Christians.”17 Featley, for one, insisted that the Baptists were in the habit of stripping “stark naked, not onely when they flocke in great multitudes, men and women together, to their Jordans to be dipt; but also upon other occasions, when the season permits”!18

One of the earliest responses to charges like this and others that identified the Particular Baptists with the continental Anabaptists of the sixteenth century was a small thirteen-page booklet, The Confession of Faith, of those Churches which are commonly (though falsly) called Anabaptists, later known as the First London Confession of Faith.19 Neither the publisher nor the author (s) of this confession were named in the text, although, at the close of the introductory preface there did appear fifteen names—it was the pastoral leadership of the seven Particular Baptist churches then in existence, all of them located in London. As to which of these elders were the actual authors of the confession, it appears that John Spilsbury (c. 1593–c. 1662/1668), William Kiffen, and Samuel Richardson (fl. 1642–1658) drew up this confessional text in September of 1644.20 The confession went through at least two printings that year, and in January of 1646, it was reissued in a second edition. Although the confession seems to have failed to defuse the criticism of many of their fellow Puritans,21 it became the doctrinal standard for the first period of Particular Baptist advance, which ended in 1660 with the restoration of Charles II (1630–1685).22

A COMPANY OF VISIBLE SAINTS

The 1644 edition of the confession consisted of fifty-three articles. The first twenty articles dealt with the nature and attributes of God, the doctrine of the Trinity, divine election, the fall and sinfulness of all humanity, and the person and work of Christ in his offices of prophet, priest, and king. Articles XXI to XXXII covered the work of salvation and unequivocally revealed the confession’s Calvinism.23 For instance, Article XXII, discussing saving faith, stated that “faith is the gift of God wrought in the hearts of the elect by the Spirit of God.”24 And as the gift of God, this faith cannot be lost, as Article XXIII declared: “Those that have this pretious faith wrought in them by the Spirit, can never finally nor totally fall away.”25 Moreover, such saving faith is possessed only by the elect of God. In the words of Article XXI: “Christ Jesus by his death did bring forth salvation and reconciliation onely for the elect, which were those which God the Father gave him.”26 Yet, as Robert W. Oliver has noted, this “belief in Particular Redemption did not inhibit evangelism.” In the same article which committed those who signed this confession to particular redemption, it also stated that “the Gospel … is to be preached to all men.”27 The final five articles of the confession contain a response to the charge that the Particular Baptists held sentiments similar to those of the continental Anabaptists by emphasizing that the civil power is ordained by God and that this power is not only to be obeyed but also defended in all civil matters.28 In the second edition of 1646 a further article was added which stated that it was perfectly legitimate for “a Christian to be a Magistrate or Civill Officer” and “to take an Oath,” both of which the sixteenth-century Anabaptists had disputed.29

The fifteen articles that lay between those discussing God’s work in the salvation of sinners and those detailing the relationship of local churches to the state contained a thorough discussion of the nature of the church and its life. The local church, Article XXXIII affirmed, “is a company of visible Saints, called & separated from the world, by the word and the Spirit of God, to the visible profession of the faith of the Gospel, being baptized into that faith, and joyned to the Lord, and each other, by mutuall agreement.”30 In other words, the local church should consist only of those who have professed faith in Christ and have borne visible witness to that faith by being baptized. As Benjamin Keach put it, an essential part of a local church’s “Beauty and Glory” is the fact that it is built with “all precious Stones, lively Stones; all regenerated Persons.”31 This vision of the church clearly ran counter to a major aspect of the mentality of seventeenth-century Anglicans, Presbyterians, and New England Congregationalists, namely the idea of an ecclesio-political establishment, where religious uniformity was maintained by the arm of the state and infant baptism was all but required for citizenship. The Particular Baptists were convinced that the church is ultimately a fellowship of those who have personally embraced the salvation freely offered in Christ, not an army of conscripted men and women who have no choice in the matter.

The description of the local church as “a company of visible Saints, called & separated from the world, by the word and the Spirit of God” bespeaks the theology of the radical wing of Puritanism that began to separate from the state church and set up independent congregations in the final two decades of the sixteenth century. The major matrix for the seven Particular Baptist churches that drafted this confession was, in fact, a radical Puritan congregation that had been founded in 1616 and is known to history as the Jacob-Lathrop-Jessey Church, so-called after the surnames of its first three pastors: Henry Jacob (1562–1624), John Lathrop (1584–1653), and Henry Jessey (1601–1663). It was during the pastoral leadership of Jessey in the 1630s especially that a significant number of this congregation came to Baptist convictions and went on to form the nucleus of the London Particular Baptist community.32

BLESSED FOOD

The nature of entry into the local church was also clearly articulated by Article XXXIII: it was by “the visible profession of the faith of the Gospel, being baptized into that faith.” Puritan Congregationalism had required a confession of conversion for membership. The baptismal communities of the Particular Baptists went one step further as they mandated an indissoluble yoke between this confession and baptism. And what that baptism entailed was made explicit in two later paragraphs, Articles XXXIX and XL.33 In the first of these two articles, it was stated that only those who have professed faith or who are “Disciples, or taught upon a profession of faith, ought to be baptized.”34 Article XL then went on to describe the proper mode and meaning of baptism. It was to be by immersion, or by “dipping or plunging the whole body under water.” As to its meaning, the authors of the confession noted three significations of baptism. First, it bore witness to the inner washing of the believer by the blood of Christ. In later editions of the confession this meaning was omitted. Second, it signified the believer’s “death, buriall, and resurrection” with Christ. This would become the major meaning assigned to baptism in the Particular Baptist tradition. Finally, it helped to give the believer assurance that, just as he or she is raised up from the waters of baptism, “so certainly shall the bodies of the Saints be raised by the power of Christ, in the day of the resurrection.”

The Baptist tradition has been focused more on the proper subjects and correct mode of baptism than its meaning. When this tradition has discussed the significance of baptism,35 it has been the second of the above meanings that has been the dominant one. For instance, in the summer of 1655, when seven Particular Baptist churches in the Midlands formed what would be known as the Midland Association, they confessed one thing about the meaning of the ordinance of baptism: it is the “dipping” of those who profess faith in Christ “in the water, representing the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ.”36 Again, after the conversion of Hannah Hurst (d. 1720) in the Church of England during the 1670s or 1680s, she became convinced that she needed to be baptized by immersion. In a conversation with the well-known Evangelical Anglican Anthony Horneck (1641–1697) who sought to persuade her otherwise, she told him that since baptism is “a Burial with Christ” according to Colossians 2:12, it could only be done by “Putting the Body under the Water.”37 In what turned out to be the most popular of seventeenth-century defenses of believer’s baptism, John Norcott’s Baptism Discovered Plainly & Faithfully, According to the Word of God (1672), the Baptist pastor stressed that “if there be not a burial under water to shew Christ’s burial, the great end of the ordinance is lost.”38 Due to the fact that baptism signifies burial with Christ—Norcott cited Romans 6:4 and Colossians 2:12 as proof—the proper mode has to be immersion, since “we do not reckon a man buried, when a little earth is sprinkled on his face; but he is buried when covered.”39 Not surprisingly, a leading spokesperson for the Particular Baptist movement like Keach was assured that the immersion of believers was “blessed Food” for the soul, since it spoke of the way of salvation to not only those who were baptized, but also to those who witnessed such baptisms.40

In the margin alongside Article XL there was also a pointed refutation of the charge that the Baptists, in their administration of the ordinance of baptism, engaged in acts of immorality. The baptism of believers was carried out, it said, with “convenient garments both upon the administrator and subject, with all modestie.”41 Later in the seventeenth century James Owen (1654–1706), a well-respected and learned Welsh Nonconformist, leveled charges similar to those of Featley.42 On this occasion, Benjamin Keach answered Owen directly: “We provide comely cloathes for the administrer, both from head to foot; and our men also that are baptized have cloathes provided for them; and for the women, gowns and petty-coats are made on purpose, and they go into the water dressed more decently perhaps, than many women came into Christian assemblies.”43

Another accusation that put Baptists outside the pale was that they had recourse to baptism as a means of murdering people. William Burkitt (1650–1713), the Anglican rector of Milden, Suffolk, argued that immersion entailed a breach of the sixth commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” for “How many thousand persons strong and weak, old and young, would this plunging over head and ears in northern countries, and in the winter season infallibly destroy and make an end of?”44 The Presbyterian theologian Richard Baxter (1615–1691), an intrepid controversialist, also argued that believer’s baptism was a breach of the sixth commandment. As he elaborated: