Perkins has no use for confirmation! Even if he did, it would become a spanner in the works of the outward/inward view of baptism that he propounds so comprehensively in A Golden Chain and the Commentary on Galatians. Confirmation is nothing but the confirmation of the believers as they grow up in the Christian faith and mature in holiness and newness of life. Perkins’ approach to baptism, moreover, is strongly pastoral and linked to the dying and rising of Christ (Rom. 6:3 ff.). If there is a weak New Testament ingredient, it is the Holy Spirit. In taking such a line, Perkins follows Luther and Calvin, and English Puritans such as Cartwright and many others. As we shall see, the necessity of confirmation was considerably debated.
What are we to make of Perkins’ theology of baptism? Were he alive today, he would probably be saying exactly the same things. Baptism is an external rite which is about inward renewal. For the conscious believer, profession of faith must be made at the font, but the believing parents of infants can make that profession on behalf of their children. The rite is stripped down in its essentials to the water: going in, staying there, and arising from it. There is no blessing of the water, nor signing with the cross. The celebration must be before the public assembly, who will profit by it, as they witness the baptism of new Christians and are confronted by their own baptism. Confirmation by the Bishop is not necessary. Receiving the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is confirmation in itself for the conscious believer.
The strength of this position lies in its attention to faithful reception. But its weakness is to be seen in that ambiguous relationship between sacrament and human experience that we saw both in A Golden Chain and in the Commentary in Galatians. Perkins is sure that sacraments are necessary. But because baptism is a sacrament of growth, and he allows it to children, and human beings are sinful and fall away, he cannot quite bring himself to say that it actually does something objective. This is the dilemma of a sacramental theology which starts with human experience and draws the tradition exclusively into that orbit.
In his Art of Prophesying (1592),27 Perkins shows yet again his love for simplicity and clarity, and his suspicion of contrived complexity. ‘Artis etiam celare artem: it is also a point of art to conceal art.’28 One of his rare gifts was to make complex things seem simple, clear, and related.
Liturgically, we can only guess at Perkins’ preferred or actual practice. He would have dispensed with godparents, and their promises, as well as the sign of the cross and the blessing of the water. He would have simplified the rite in other respects and he would have ensured a fully public rite, with a proper sermon, and a liturgy suitably adapted for those of ‘riper years’. He would also have admitted to communion on the basis of growing faith, and no more. All these changes would serve to stress faithful reception and appropriation of the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist, and collectively would play down their objective character.
How, then, does he affect our twentieth-century debate about the inward and outward baptism? He is understated, to the point of being weak, on the role of the Holy Spirit. Sacraments are a prop to faith, secondary to the covenant of grace itself. Provided that faith is seen as the gift of God and located in a living way through the Christian community down the ages, then the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s table are secure. But once that faith migrates into the individual choice of the believer, the sacraments become visual aids and little more. The lasting legacy of Perkins is that he wanted to hold the outward and inward baptism together. The way he did it may not be entirely convincing, but when he says in his commentary on Galatians that ‘the best commentary to a man’s own self is his own baptism’, that inward baptism is challenging and vibrant beyond all words – and experiences.
4
Sharing in the Life of God
Richard Hooker (1554–1600)
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,
