Violin, Cricket, Chess and Christ

What this page is asking

The author of this site heard a sermon and wrote down what troubled him about it. As he reports it, the preacher warned parents not to let violin, cricket, chess, karate and similar activities crowd out their children’s “time alone with God,” because those activities cannot give them “a relationship with Jesus.” The preacher is not named here, and nothing on this page depends on who he was. The warning is a common one, and most people who give it mean well.

The author’s objection is not to prayer or to Bible reading. It is to what the warning takes for granted: that private devotional time is the channel through which a relationship with Jesus is made and grows, so that whatever uses up the time puts the relationship at risk. He set down a thesis to be tested, and put it like this: “The New Testament presents union with Christ as a gift received through Baptism, Word, Supper, and faith, not as a ‘relationship with Jesus’ built up through private devotional time.” In his view union is where the Christian life starts. It is not a goal reached by adding up minutes.

He also set the question in a form that can be checked: “Where does the New Testament locate the Christian’s relationship or union with Christ: private devotional experience, faith, Baptism, Eucharist, incorporation into Christ’s body, or some combination? How do Lutheran, Anglican, Catholic, and evangelical categories compare?”

That is the question this page works through. It does so by reading the passages, counting the words, and quoting each tradition from its own catechism or confession. It does not ask whether children should pray. They should. It asks what their praying is, and what they already have before they begin.

Two positions, labelled so they can be told apart

Two accounts are compared all the way through. They are given letters so that the page can refer to them without repeating a paragraph each time.

Position B is stated here in its plain pulpit form. Part VII gives it in its best form, in the words of one of its ablest writers, and Part IX shows that it is not the official teaching of any of the five traditions compared on this page.

What both positions agree on

So the disagreement is narrower than it sounds. It is about direction. Does the time alone produce the union, or does the union produce the time alone?

What the page concludes, stated up front

The prompt behind this page

Everything below was produced by giving the following brief to a frontier language model with web search, which assembled and checked the sources. It is published so you can run it yourself, change it, sharpen it, or reverse it and see what comes back. Three experiments are worth more than reading this page. First, reverse it: ask for the strongest case that the New Testament makes personal, private communion with God the heart of the Christian life, that sacramental language in Paul is figurative, and that the historic churches produced generations of baptised people who never knew Christ. Second, narrow it: ask only for every place in the Gospels where Jesus prays alone, with what happens immediately before and after each, and draw your own conclusion. Third, make it a test: paste in your own church’s statement of faith, or the notes of a sermon on “spending time with God,” with the names removed, and ask where it says a person’s union with Christ comes from.

Write a detailed, source-first, interactive article, in British
English, for a general reader who is willing to work. Quote Scripture
from the Authorised Version. Date and attribute every other quotation:
give the work, the edition or translation, and the section. Verify
every quotation against a reliable published source; where a
quotation cannot be verified, cut it. Do not invent quotes. Do not
take verses out of context: where a text is being applied beyond what
it first addressed, say so.

  TITLE. Violin, Cricket, Chess and Christ

  THESIS TO TEST. The New Testament presents union with Christ as a
  gift received through Baptism, Word, Supper, and faith, not as a
  "relationship with Jesus" built up through private devotional time.

  OCCASION. A recent sermon warned parents not to let violin, cricket,
  chess, karate, and similar activities crowd out their children's
  "time alone with God," because those activities cannot give them "a
  relationship with Jesus." The assumption is that private devotional
  time is the conduit through which the relationship is formed and
  grows. The New Testament uses different language: being "in
  Christ," united with him, members of his body. It locates that
  union in God's gifts. In this view union is where the Christian
  life starts, not a goal reached by accumulating time. Retell the
  sermon without naming or identifying anyone.

  QUESTION. Where does the New Testament locate the Christian's
  relationship or union with Christ: private devotional experience,
  faith, Baptism, Eucharist, incorporation into Christ's body, or some
  combination? How do Lutheran, Anglican, Catholic, and evangelical
  categories compare?

  TWO POSITIONS, labelled and used consistently.
   G, THE GIVEN (held): union is given by God in Baptism, Word and
      Supper and received by faith; private prayer and reading are
      what a person in Christ does.
   B, THE BUILT (under test): the relationship is formed and
      maintained chiefly by time alone with God; whatever takes the
      time weakens it.

  POINTS TO TEST.
   1. The vocabulary. "Personal relationship with Jesus" is not in
      Scripture. The New Testament speaks of being "in Christ",
      abiding (John 15:4-7), members of his body (1 Cor 12:27),
      adoption (Gal 4:4-7), fellowship or communion, koinonia
      (1 Cor 1:9). Say what each term adds and what the modern phrase
      may leave out, and what the modern phrase gets right. Count the
      words in the Authorised Version.
   2. Whether the union is stated as a fact before it is commanded.
   3. Baptism: Rom 6:3-5; Gal 3:27; 1 Cor 12:13; Col 2:12.
   4. The Supper: 1 Cor 10:16-17; John 6:56. Say honestly how each
      tradition reads John 6.
   5. Faith and the Word: Eph 3:17; Gal 2:20; John 15:7; Col 3:16
      (addressed to a congregation singing together). Private
      reading of Scripture as one way of receiving the Word, not the
      place where the relationship is created.
   6. The strongest case for private devotion: Jesus praying alone,
      Matt 6:6, the Psalms, Daniel. What every tradition teaches
      about daily prayer.
   7. Ordinary life: Col 3:17; 1 Cor 10:31; 1 Tim 4:4-8. Mary at
      the Lord's feet (Luke 10:39). Whether the sermon sets up a
      false competition, and where its concern is justified.
   8. The traditions, each from its own documents: Lutheran (Small
      and Large Catechism, Formula of Concord), Anglican (the Prayer
      Book catechism, the Articles), Catholic (the Catechism, 1213,
      1324 and its section on prayer), Reformed (Heidelberg,
      Westminster, Calvin), and evangelical (the older Baptist
      confessions and catechisms, and twentieth-century devotional
      writing). Do not adjudicate between them. Let readers compare.
   9. Where the newer account came from, and when the phrase
      "personal relationship with Jesus" became common.
  10. The pastoral question: is a child better served by "you must
      build a relationship" or by "you belong to Christ; keep coming
      to where he gives himself"? Link to the earlier dossiers on
      Baptism and assurance.

COUNTER-CASE. No separate section. In each Part state the objection
at full strength and answer it - including that the Spirit, not
water, baptizes into Christ; that Simon Magus was baptized and Israel
ate and drank and fell; that the baptised are often unbelievers; that
a relationship with any person takes time; that Jesus himself rose
early to pray alone; and that "bodily exercise profiteth little."
Where the evidence corrects the brief, say so in a marked box.

NAMING. No living individual named. A modern denomination or
organisation named only when quoted verbatim from its own published
statement. Deceased writers quoted only from dated published works.
Living scholars named only as authors of published research. Every
remark attributed to a parent, child or pulpit is composed for
illustration and labelled as composed.

EXCLUDED. Arguing against daily prayer or Bible reading. Deciding
between the traditions on what the sacraments are. Who should be
baptised, and how. Which activities a child should do. Ground covered
by earlier dossiers (the quiet time as a test, vocation, assurance,
the two-tier relationship, the self as subject) is kept brief and
linked.

INTERACTIVES. A priors quiz. A sort of things said to children by
which position is speaking. A sort of phrases by whether they are in
the Bible. A sort of verses by statement or command. A sort of verses
by what is given and what is warned. A sort of quotations by century.
A sort of verses by where each locates the union. A guess-the-source
quiz on daily prayer. A calculator for a child's week and a sort of
cases by what is crowded out. A tradition-by-tradition comparison and
a guess-the-tradition quiz. An objection drill the reader answers in
his own words first. A sort of catechisms by what their first
question hands a child. A diagnostic for the reader's own household.

OUTPUT: a single self-contained interactive HTML page, professional
and readable, light theme by default with a dark switch, stating the
question at the top, publishing this prompt in full, repeating the
key points in prominent boxes for readers who skim, explaining every
technical term in a box where it is used, and giving the reader
something to do in every major section. Also produce a plain-English
quick version of about fifteen minutes with three short exercises,
and a Simple English version with no exercises.

The page you are reading is the output of that brief after the sources were checked. Where a quotation could not be verified against a published source, it was cut. Five things qualified the brief. John 6:56 could not carry the weight it was given. Luther’s own tradition reads that chapter as being about faith first, and says so in its confession. The case for the Supper rests on 1 Corinthians 10. “Evangelical” turned out to be at least two things. The Baptist confessions and catechisms of the seventeenth century name the same means as everyone else. Position B belongs to the twentieth. The phrase the brief objects to appears in the Catholic Catechism, which calls prayer “a vital and personal relationship with the living and true God” and then says that this is possible “because, through Baptism, we have already been united with Christ.” So the phrase is not the trouble. What it is built on is. Every tradition quoted here commands private prayer, and the Westminster divines said that all sorts of people are “bound” to read Scripture “apart by themselves.” The page could not treat private devotion as an evangelical peculiarity. And the sermon had a text. “Bodily exercise profiteth little” is in the Bible, and Part VIII has to deal with it.

What do you currently think?

Ten questions. Each has a determinate answer, and you can check every one yourself in Part XIV. Answer them before reading and lock them in. They come back in Part XIII with the sources beside them.

What follows

Two sentences about a child

Start with the sermon’s warning and take it apart. It contains three separate claims.

Nobody disputes the second. So everything turns on the first, and the first is a claim about where a person’s tie to Christ comes from. That can be tested against the New Testament, and it is what the rest of this page does.

What the sermon gets right

It should be said before the testing begins that the preacher’s concern has good texts behind it. Moses told Israel’s parents that the words of God “shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up” (Deuteronomy 6:6–7). Jesus said, “seek ye first the kingdom of God” (Matthew 6:33). In his parable of the sower some seed is “choked with cares and riches and pleasures of this life” (Luke 8:14). And when Martha complained that her sister was not helping in the kitchen, Jesus answered that Mary, who “sat at Jesus’ feet, and heard his word,” had “chosen that good part” (Luke 10:39, 42).

So there are things that matter more than cricket, and a family can lose them through sheer busyness. The page agrees. Its question is which things they are, and whether a child who has them is still waiting to have Christ.

The same child, described twice

Here is how the two positions sound when they are spoken to a nine-year-old. Both speakers love the child and want the same thing for her.

Both end with the child praying. They differ in what they tell her she is while she does it. In the first she is an outsider working her way in, and her progress is measured in minutes. In the second she is a daughter of the house, and prayer is how a daughter talks at home.

Try it: which position is speaking?

Eight things an adult might say to a child. All are composed by this page. Sort each by which account of the child it assumes. Two could be said by either.

0 of 8 sorted

The words the New Testament uses

The sermon’s phrase was “a relationship with Jesus.” It is fair to begin by asking whether the New Testament talks that way.

These counts were made for this page from the text of the Authorised Version, and any reader with a concordance can repeat them. In 1892 the German scholar Adolf Deissmann counted the Greek phrase and its equivalents in Paul and reached 164. However it is counted, “in Christ” is Paul’s ordinary way of saying what a Christian is. He addresses his letters to “the saints in Christ Jesus which are at Philippi” (Philippians 1:1) and “them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus” at Corinth (1 Corinthians 1:2). It is an address before it is an achievement.

The absence of a word proves little by itself. “Trinity” is not in the Bible either. Dossier 50 made the point about the modern phrase and then said, rightly, that it “can express something genuinely Christian.” The useful question is what the Bible’s own words say that the modern one does not.

What each of the Bible’s words adds

What the modern word gets right

The New Testament is not describing a legal arrangement between strangers. Paul writes of “the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord” and says his aim is “that I may know him” (Philippians 3:8, 10). Jesus says, “I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine” (John 10:14), and, “I have called you friends” (John 15:15). He defines eternal life as knowing God (John 17:3). Paul can say “the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20). If “a relationship with Jesus” means that a Christian knows and is known, loves and is loved, by a living person, it says something true, and Position G says it too.

What the modern word can leave out

In ordinary speech a relationship is something two people make between them. It is as strong as what they put into it. Friends who stop meeting drift apart, and nobody is to blame; the friendship simply was the time they spent. When that picture is carried over to Christ, four things in the Bible’s own words tend to fall away.

Dossier 33 argued from these same pictures that the union is given to every Christian and comes in one grade only. This page asks the next question: given how, and through what?

Try it: is it in the Bible?

Twelve phrases heard in church. For each, say whether it is in the Authorised Version in those words.

0 of 12 sorted

Before you are told to do anything

Position B is a claim about order: first the time, then the relationship. So the next thing to look at is the order in which the New Testament itself puts things.

Statements first

Paul’s letter to the Ephesians opens with a single sentence that runs, in Greek, for twelve verses. In the Authorised Version it contains “in Christ,” “in him,” “in whom” or “in the beloved” eight times. In its opening verses the subject of every verb is God: he “hath blessed us,” “hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world,” predestinated us “unto the adoption of children,” and “hath made us accepted in the beloved” (Ephesians 1:3–6). The readers appear only as the people it was done to. Then, in the next chapter:

Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;) And hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.

Ephesians 2:5–6. Three verbs, all with God as subject, all in the past tense, and all with “together.”

The same order appears wherever the subject comes up. To Corinth, a church he is about to rebuke for almost everything: “But of him are ye in Christ Jesus” (1 Corinthians 1:30). “Of him” means “from God.” It is God’s doing that they are in Christ. To Colossae: “ye are complete in him” (Colossians 2:10), and “your life is hid with Christ in God” (3:3). None of these is advice. They are descriptions of people who had been Christians for a few years at most, in churches full of faults.

Then commands, of a particular kind

The commands are real, and there are plenty of them. But look at what they tell people to do.

Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me.

John 15:3–4. The statement comes first: “Now ye are clean.” The command follows.

The other commands have the same shape. “As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in him” (Colossians 2:6): the receiving is done, and the walking is how to live in it. “Grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord” (2 Peter 3:18): grow in it, as a child grows in a family he was born into. “Keep yourselves in the love of God” (Jude 21): keep yourselves where you have been put.

One pair of verses shows the pattern exactly. To the Galatians Paul writes, “as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ” (3:27). To the Romans he writes, “put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ” (13:14). It is the same clothing. In the first verse it is a fact about them. In the second it is something to do every morning. He can command the second because the first is true.

Union, and the enjoyment of it

The older Protestant writers had two words for this, and the distinction is worth having. The Westminster Larger Catechism of 1648 says that Christians “enjoy union and communion with him” (Question 65). Union is the joining: it “is done in their effectual calling” (Question 66), once. Communion is the life that flows from it, and that has more and less. A Christian’s enjoyment of Christ rises and falls. His prayers are warm one month and dry the next. He grows, or he neglects what he has been given and grows thin.

This is where Position B has hold of something true. Everything it says about neglect, coldness and the need for discipline is true of communion. Its mistake, on Position G’s account, is to say it of union: to tell a person whose prayers have gone cold that he may have no relationship with Jesus at all, when the New Testament would tell him that he is a branch and should stop behaving like a stick.

The objection: branches are cut off

The same chapter of John contains a warning, and it must not be softened. “Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away” (15:2). “If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered” (15:6). Paul says the same to Gentile Christians: “toward thee, goodness, if thou continue in his goodness: otherwise thou also shalt be cut off” (Romans 11:22). So staying matters, and it is possible not to stay.

That is a serious warning, and Part XII comes back to it. But notice what it assumes. The branch that is taken away was “in me.” It is cut off from somewhere it was. The warning does not say that the branch was never attached because it had not spent enough time attaching itself. It says that a branch which is attached can be lost. That is Position G’s account of the danger, and it is a graver one than B’s. A child who has been given something can throw it away. A child who has been given nothing has nothing to lose.

Try it: fact or command?

Ten sentences from the New Testament about being in Christ. Sort each. Is it telling the readers what is already true of them, telling them to do something, or both in one breath?

0 of 10 sorted

“Baptized into Christ”

If the New Testament says people are in Christ, the next question is how it says they got there. On four occasions, writing to four different churches, Paul gives the same answer.

Five things to notice

He expects them to know it already. “Know ye not …?” Paul had never been to Rome. He is writing to Christians he did not teach, and he assumes that their baptism, and what it did, is common ground. He does not argue for it. He argues from it.

The verbs are passive. They “were baptized,” “are buried,” “have been planted together.” Nobody baptises himself. Whatever happened in the water was done to them.

It is said of all of them. “So many of us as.” “As many of you as.” “We all.” These are not the keen members. In Corinth they included people Paul was rebuking for lawsuits, drunkenness at the Lord’s table and worse.

He builds conduct on it. The question in Romans 6 is whether Christians may go on sinning. Paul’s answer is to remind them what was done to them, and then to say: “Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord” (6:11). “Reckon” means count it as true. The command rests on the fact.

Faith is in the same breath. “By faith in Christ Jesus” stands in the verse before “baptized into Christ.” “Through the faith of the operation of God” stands in the same sentence as “buried with him in baptism.” Paul sees no competition between the two. Part VI takes this up.

Pentecost, and the children

The first Christian sermon ends with an instruction and a promise. “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. For the promise is unto you, and to your children” (Acts 2:38–39). Then Luke reports the result: “they that gladly received his word were baptized: and the same day there were added unto them about three thousand souls” (2:41). “Added” is another passive. And the next verse says what those who had been added then did, which is where Part V begins.

The churches of the first centuries heard Paul in the plain sense. Tertullian, in North Africa about the year 200, opened the first Latin book on the subject with a picture that uses John’s own verb: “we, little fishes, after the example of our ἸΧΘΥΣ Jesus Christ, are born in water, nor have we safety in any other way than by permanently abiding in water” (On Baptism 1; trans. S. Thelwall, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3, 1885). The Greek word is “fish,” an early Christian sign for Christ. Dossier 01 sets out the evidence century by century.

The objection: “it is the Spirit who joins us to Christ, not water”

This is the reading of a large part of evangelical Christianity, and it deserves to be stated in its own words. The Baptist Faith and Message, the confession of the largest Protestant body in the United States, says that baptism is “an act of obedience symbolizing the believer’s faith in a crucified, buried, and risen Saviour” (2000, Article VII). On this view the real joining to Christ happens when a person believes, by the work of the Spirit, and Paul’s “baptized into Christ” either refers to that inward work or names the outward sign in place of the thing it signifies. The text offered in support is one of the four above: “by one Spirit are we all baptized.”

This page does not decide that question. Dossier 27 and Dossier 21 go into it. Two observations are enough here.

The first is that the New Testament does not usually set water and Spirit against each other. Peter’s sermon joins them. Paul speaks of “the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost” (Titus 3:5) and of Christ cleansing the church “with the washing of water by the word” (Ephesians 5:26). In 1 Corinthians 12:13 the Spirit is the one who acts and baptism is the act.

The second matters more for this page. The dispute between the sacramental reading and the symbolic reading is not the dispute between Position G and Position B. Take the symbolic reading at full strength. What does baptism symbolise? The Second London Confession, the classic Baptist statement of 1677, answers that it is “a sign of his fellowship with him, in his death, and resurrection; of his being engrafted into him” (chapter 29). Engrafting is something done once, to a branch, by someone else. A Baptist who holds that confession believes that a person is joined to Christ by God, through faith, at a point in time, and that baptism shows it. He does not believe that the joining is built up out of devotional hours. He disagrees with a Lutheran about what the water does. He agrees with the Lutheran against Position B.

The objection: “Simon Magus was baptised”

The sharper objection is that baptism plainly does not join everyone to Christ. Simon the sorcerer “believed also: and when he was baptized, he continued with Philip” (Acts 8:13), and eight verses later Peter tells him, “Thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter: for thy heart is not right in the sight of God” (8:21). Paul himself points out that all Israel “were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea; And did all eat the same spiritual meat … But with many of them God was not well pleased: for they were overthrown in the wilderness” (1 Corinthians 10:2–5). And everyone knows baptised people who give no sign of faith at all.

All of this is true, and every tradition that reads Paul sacramentally says so in its own documents.

So the choice is not between “baptism works whatever you believe” and “baptism is nothing.” Luther’s sentence gives the third possibility. A gift can be really given and not received. An inheritance is no less real for being left unclaimed, and the heir who never claims it dies poor. Look again at why Paul tells the Corinthians about Israel. He is warning baptised people who come to the Lord’s table. The warning only has force if they have been given something they could lose.

That also answers the worry that Position G makes for careless Christians. It does the opposite. It tells the baptised that they have been handed something of great value and will answer for what they do with it. Dossier 23 and Dossier 17 look at what happens to assurance, in adults and in children, when it is moved from the gift to the inner life.

Try it: the gift, or the warning?

Eight sentences from the New Testament. For each, decide whether it states what is given, gives a warning, or does both at once.

0 of 8 sorted

One bread, one body

Luke says what the three thousand did once they had been added. “They continued stedfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers” (Acts 2:42). There are four things in that list, and all four are done together. Two are the subject of this Part and the next. The second word in the list is koinōnia.

The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ? For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread.

1 Corinthians 10:16–17. “Communion” is koinōnia, the word translated “fellowship” in 1:9.

It is the same word. At the start of the letter Paul said that God had called the Corinthians “unto the fellowship of his Son.” Here he says where that fellowship can be found when the church meets: in a cup and a loaf. He does not say the cup reminds them of a fellowship they have elsewhere. He says it is one.

He argues from it. “Is it not …?” expects the answer yes. His real subject in this chapter is whether Christians may eat at feasts in pagan temples, and his argument is that eating at a table joins a person to whoever’s table it is. The argument fails unless the Lord’s table really joins people to the Lord.

It makes the many one. Verse 17 draws a consequence that a private devotion could never have. Because there is one loaf, those who share it are one body. The union with Christ and the union with one another are the same union. That is why Paul calls the meal something that happens “when ye come together” (11:20, 33), and why Luke records that “upon the first day of the week … the disciples came together to break bread” (Acts 20:7).

How the first centuries spoke of it

Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, wrote to the church at Ephesus about the year 110 on his way to execution. He told them, “Take heed, then, often to come together to give thanks to God,” and described them as “breaking one and the same bread, which is the medicine of immortality, and the antidote to prevent us from dying, but which causes that we should live for ever in Jesus Christ” (To the Ephesians 13 and 20; trans. Roberts and Donaldson, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, 1885).

About 350 a bishop in Jerusalem, instructing people who had been baptised a few days before, explained what the Supper was for:

… that you by partaking of the Body and Blood of Christ, may be made of the same body and the same blood with Him. For thus we come to bear Christ in us, because His Body and Blood are distributed through our members.

Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lecture 22, section 3 (c. 350). Trans. E. H. Gifford, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 7 (1894). Some scholars assign these last five lectures to Cyril’s successor, John.

John Chrysostom, preaching through 1 Corinthians at Antioch about 390, stopped at Paul’s word and asked why he had chosen it:

Wherefore said he not, the participation? Because he intended to express something more and to point out how close was the union: in that we communicate not only by participating and partaking, but also by being united. For as that body is united to Christ, so also are we united to him by this bread.

John Chrysostom, Homilies on First Corinthians, Homily 24 (c. 390). Trans. T. W. Chambers, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 12 (1889).

A little later in the same sermon he says what verse 17 means: “For what is the bread? The Body of Christ. And what do they become who partake of it? The Body of Christ: not many bodies, but one body.” Dossier 36 quotes Justin Martyr’s account of an ordinary Sunday in Rome about 155, with readings, a sermon, prayers and the bread and cup, and a portion sent to those who were absent.

The objection: “it is a memorial”

Many evangelical churches hold that the Supper is a remembrance and nothing more. The Baptist Faith and Message calls it “a symbolic act of obedience whereby members of the church, through partaking of the bread and the fruit of the vine, memorialize the death of the Redeemer and anticipate His second coming.” Dossier 14 examines that view against 1 Corinthians 11, and this page does not repeat the argument.

Two things can be said without settling it. The older Baptist confession says more than its modern descendant. In 1677 the Supper was given for the “spiritual nourishment, and growth” of believers in Christ, “and to be a bond and pledge of their communion with him, and with each other” (Second London Confession, chapter 30). And even on the barest memorial view the Supper is something Christ commanded (“this do”), that a church does together, that nobody can do alone at a desk. If it is only a sign, it is a sign of belonging to a body. It is not a sign of a private friendship.

Nor does any tradition treat it as automatic. Paul warns that a person may eat and drink “unworthily … not discerning the Lord’s body” (1 Corinthians 11:29). Augustine, in the passage just quoted, says that the man in whom Christ does not dwell “doubtless neither eats His flesh” in the sense that counts, whatever he does with his teeth. Faith receives here as it does in Baptism.

Where the child is when the church gathers

The traditions differ about the age at which a child first receives the bread and cup, and this page leaves that alone. They do not differ about where the child should be. He belongs with the body when it comes together. A child who is there whenever the church gathers is being shown, before he can explain it, that being a Christian means being one of these people around this table. That is taught by where he is taken. It cannot be taught by a devotional book in his bedroom, however good the book.

Try it: which century?

Eight sentences about what the Lord’s Supper does. Place each in its period.

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By faith, through the Word

The brief lists four things: Baptism, Word, Supper and faith. The first three are places where something is given. The fourth is different in kind, and seeing how it differs removes most of the apparent conflict between the traditions.

Faith is the hand

Paul prays for the Ephesians “that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith” (3:17). He says of himself, “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20). John writes that “as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name” (John 1:12). Receiving and believing are the same act.

The Reformers of every school put this at the centre. Luther, in 1520:

The third incomparable grace of faith is this: that it unites the soul to Christ, as the wife to the husband, by which mystery, as the Apostle teaches, Christ and the soul are made one flesh.

Martin Luther, Concerning Christian Liberty (1520). Trans. R. S. Grignon, in Wace and Buchheim, First Principles of the Reformation (1883).

Calvin, beginning the third book of his Institutes in 1559: “as long as there is a separation between Christ and us, all that he suffered and performed for the salvation of mankind is useless and unavailing to us … whatever he possesses is nothing to us, till we are united to him. But though it be true that we obtain this by faith …” (III.1.1; trans. John Allen, 1813). And the Heidelberg Catechism of 1563, asked who is saved: “Only those are saved who by a true faith are grafted into Christ and accept all His benefits” (Question 20).

So faith is not a fourth place beside the font, the pulpit and the table. It is what takes hold in all three. Luther’s phrase about Baptism in Part IV says it exactly: faith does not make the gift, it receives it. That is why Paul can write “by faith” and “baptized into Christ” in consecutive verses without feeling any strain.

And faith comes by hearing

If faith is the hand, where does the hand come from? Position B would be strongest if the answer were “from within,” because then everything would depend on the believer’s own inner life. Paul’s answer is that it comes from outside. “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” Something is said, and faith is the result of its being said. He adds in another place that faith is “not of yourselves: it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8).

The confessions follow him. The Heidelberg Catechism asks where faith comes from and answers: “From the Holy Spirit, who works it in our hearts by the preaching of the gospel, and strengthens it by the use of the sacraments” (Question 65). The Augsburg Confession of 1530 says that “through the Word and Sacraments, as through instruments, the Holy Ghost is given, who works faith; where and when it pleases God, in them that hear the Gospel” (Article V).

The Word, heard

In John 15, before the command to abide, Jesus says: “Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you” (15:3). And he explains what abiding consists of: “If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you” (15:7). His words stay in them. That is how they stay in him.

Paul’s version is the verse the brief singled out:

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.

Colossians 3:16. “You” is plural. The rest of the sentence says how the word dwells in them: they teach one another and sing.

The word of Christ dwells in a church when it is read out, preached, taught and sung. That was the only way most Christians met it for fifteen centuries. Paul tells Timothy to “give attendance to reading” (1 Timothy 4:13), meaning reading aloud in the assembly. Dossier 09 gives the history. If the union were made by private Bible reading, nearly all the Christians who lived before printing would have had none, since they owned no Bible and most could not have read one.

Mary at the Lord’s feet

The sermon’s concern is best supported by the story of Martha and Mary, so it is worth reading closely. Mary “sat at Jesus’ feet, and heard his word” (Luke 10:39). To sit at a teacher’s feet is to be his pupil. What Mary is doing is listening to Christ teach. She is not alone; the house is full of guests, which is why Martha is “cumbered about much serving.” And what Jesus defends is her hearing: “one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.”

So the story does say that something must not be crowded out, and it says what. It is the hearing of Christ’s word. Martha’s serving was good work, and Jesus still would not let it pull Mary away. On this the sermon and Position G are entirely agreed. The story does not say that the good part is solitude.

Private reading, in its place

The author’s brief says that private reading of Scripture is “one way of receiving the Word.” The sources bear him out on both halves of that sentence: it is a real way, and it is one way.

Timothy is the New Testament’s example of a child brought up on Scripture. “From a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus” (2 Timothy 3:15). Paul also says how they reached him: he speaks of “the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice” (1:5), and tells him to remember “of whom thou hast learned them” (3:14). The Scriptures came to the boy through two women who taught him.

The earliest surviving instruction on a Christian’s morning comes from a church order usually dated to Rome about 215 and traditionally linked with Hippolytus, though both the date and the name are disputed. It tells every believer to pray on rising, and then ranks two ways of meeting God’s word:

Let all the faithful, whether men or women, when early in the morning they rise from their sleep and before they undertake any tasks, wash their hands and pray to God; and so they may go to their duties. But if any instruction in God’s word is held [that day], everyone ought to attend it willingly … therefore let everyone be zealous to go to the church, the place where the Holy Spirit abounds. But if on any day there is no instruction, let everyone at home take the Bible and read sufficiently in passages that he finds profitable.

The Apostolic Tradition, sections 35–36. Trans. Burton Scott Easton (Cambridge, 1934). The words in square brackets are the translator’s.

Private prayer every morning. The gathered church first, where there is one. The Bible at home on the days when there is not. Fourteen centuries later the Westminster divines said that “all sorts of people are bound to read it apart by themselves, and with their families” (Larger Catechism, Question 156), and the Lutheran Formula of Concord, in the passage quoted in Part V, says that faith feeds on Christ “in the preaching and meditation of the Gospel.” Meditation is what a person does alone.

So a child who reads a Gospel in her room is meeting the same Christ who is preached in church, by the same word. It is good for her and the church has always said so. What the sources do not say is that this is the place where she is joined to him, or that the font, the pulpit and the table only count if she has done it.

Try it: where does this verse put it?

Ten verses about how Christ and his people are joined. For each, choose what the verse itself names.

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Alone with God

Six Parts have argued that the union is given. This one sets out, at full strength, the evidence that the sermon had on its side. It is considerable.

Jesus prayed alone, and said that we should

“And in the morning, rising up a great while before day, he went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed” (Mark 1:35). “And he withdrew himself into the wilderness, and prayed” (Luke 5:16). Before choosing the twelve “he went out into a mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to God” (Luke 6:12). After feeding the five thousand “he went up into a mountain apart to pray: and when the evening was come, he was there alone” (Matthew 14:23). And he gave a command, in the singular, to each disciple: “enter into thy closet.”

The Old Testament is full of the same thing. “My voice shalt thou hear in the morning, O Lord; in the morning will I direct my prayer unto thee, and will look up” (Psalm 5:3). “O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee” (Psalm 63:1). Daniel “kneeled upon his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his God, as he did aforetime” (Daniel 6:10).

So praying alone is not an evangelical invention, and a Christian who never does it is disobeying Christ. Position G says so without reserve. If the sermon had said, “teach your children to pray every day, and do not let the week get so full that they never do,” there would have been nothing to test.

What these passages do and do not say

Jesus is the Son before he prays. In Mark’s Gospel the voice from heaven says “Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” at his baptism (1:11). The first report of his praying alone comes twenty-four verses later. Luke adds that he was praying as he was baptised (3:21). He does not go up the mountain to become the Son. He goes because he is.

The command assumes a Father. “Pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee.” The disciple has a Father before he shuts the door. The reason Jesus gives for the closet is in the verse before: the hypocrites “love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men” (6:5). The point is to pray where nobody is impressed. It is a command against display.

His other habits were public. “As his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the sabbath day, and stood up for to read” (Luke 4:16). The only scene the Gospels give from his boyhood finds him, at twelve, “in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions” (Luke 2:46). His parents had lost him. He was where the word of God was being taught.

Nobody is told that the praying makes the bond. There is no verse in which solitary prayer is said to create, form or establish a person’s tie to God. It is always the act of someone who already has one.

Every tradition on this page teaches it

The second thing to be said for the sermon is that the historic churches agree with it about daily prayer. None of them leaves a child’s praying to the church service.

Luther’s Small Catechism of 1529 has a section of daily prayers for the head of a family to teach his household. It begins like this:

In the morning, when you rise, you shall bless yourself with the holy cross and say: In the name of God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen. Then, kneeling or standing, repeat the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer.

Martin Luther, Small Catechism (1529), Morning Prayer. Trans. F. Bente and W. H. T. Dau, Triglot Concordia (1921). A short prayer follows, and then: “Then go to your work with joy, singing a hymn, as the Ten Commandments, or what your devotion may suggest.”

Three things about it are worth noticing. The child’s first words of the day are the name he was baptised in (Matthew 28:19). The whole thing takes about three minutes. And it ends by sending him to his work “with joy.” In 1535 Luther wrote a longer guide for his barber, who had asked him how to pray. “It is a good thing to let prayer be the first business of the morning and the last at night,” he says, and he warns against the thought, “Wait a little while. I will pray in an hour; first I must attend to this or that.” He also says where he goes when prayer has gone cold: “I take my little Psalter, hurry to my room, or, if it be the day and hour for it, to the church where a congregation is assembled” (A Simple Way to Pray; trans. Carl J. Schindler, Luther’s Works, vol. 43, 1968). For Luther the bedroom and the church were two doors into the same room.

Every one of these lists private prayer. Every one of them lists it beside the congregation, the Scriptures heard and the Supper, as one of several things. None of them puts it first or makes the others depend on it.

So where is the difference?

It is not about whether a child should pray alone. It is about what she is doing when she does.

Position B at its best

It would be unfair to judge Position B by a hurried sentence in a sermon. Its finest statement in English is a short book written in 1948 by A. W. Tozer, a pastor in Chicago. He was not an enemy of doctrine. He wrote because he saw churches full of people with “right opinions” and no apparent knowledge of God, where worship had been replaced by “that strange and foreign thing called the ‘program.’” His remedy was this:

We have almost forgotten that God is a Person and, as such, can be cultivated as any person can. It is inherent in personality to be able to know other personalities, but full knowledge of one personality by another cannot be achieved in one encounter. It is only after long and loving mental intercourse that the full possibilities of both can be explored.

A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God (Harrisburg, Pa.: Christian Publications, 1948), chapter 1, “Following Hard after God.”

A good deal of that is simply true. God is to be known, and Jesus says that knowing him is eternal life (John 17:3). One encounter is not the end of it. Paul, near the end of his life, was still saying “that I may know him.” And Tozer is careful about the order. He says that the new birth, which is God’s act, “is, however, not an end but an inception, for now begins the glorious pursuit.” The pursuit comes after the gift. In the terms of Part III, he is writing about communion, and he takes union for granted.

But a few lines later he says something the New Testament does not:

It is personal: that is, it does not come through the body of believers, as such, but is known to the individual, and to the body through the individuals which compose it. And it is conscious: that is, it does not stay below the threshold of consciousness and work there unknown to the soul (as, for instance, infant baptism is thought by some to do), but comes within the field of awareness …

A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God (1948), chapter 1.

Here the two positions part. Tozer says that communion with God does not come through the body of believers. Paul says that the body “by joints and bands having nourishment ministered, and knit together, increaseth with the increase of God” (Colossians 2:19), and that it grows “by that which every joint supplieth” (Ephesians 4:16). Nourishment reaches each member through the others. And Tozer sets what is consciously felt against what is given in a sacrament, as if only the first were real. Position G replies that a child is no less her father’s daughter while she is asleep.

A second famous statement is a sermon first published as a booklet in 1954 by Robert Boyd Munger, an American Presbyterian minister who died in 2001. It pictures the Christian’s heart as a house into which Christ has moved. They agree to meet in the living room each morning. The man grows busy and begins to miss the meetings. One day, hurrying out, he sees Christ sitting by the fire, where he has been waiting every morning. Christ says: “The trouble with you is this: You have been thinking of the quiet time, of the Bible study and prayer time, as a factor in your own spiritual progress, but you have forgotten that this hour means something to me also.”

It is a moving piece of writing and has sent many people back to their prayers. Its best insight is that prayer is a meeting with someone, and that God wants it. Notice, though, that in Munger’s own story Christ already lives in the house. He moved in on the first page, at the man’s invitation, and he does not move out when the man is busy. Munger too is writing about communion. It is only when the picture is repeated in a pulpit, to children, without its first page, that it becomes Position B: Jesus is waiting for you, alone, and whether you have a relationship with him depends on whether you come down.

Try it: who said it, and when?

Eight instructions about daily prayer, all real, all quoted on this page or in Dossier 09. Place each.

Cricket and the name of the Lord Jesus

The brief asks the page to “explore whether the sermon sets up a false competition.” The sermon placed violin, cricket, chess and karate on one side and a relationship with Jesus on the other, as two claims on the same hours. The question is whether the New Testament sees them that way.

The verse after Colossians 3:16

Part VI quoted Paul on the word of Christ dwelling in a singing congregation. The sentence continues:

And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by him.

Colossians 3:17. The next verses apply it to wives, husbands, children, fathers and servants, and repeat it: “And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men” (3:23).

“Whatsoever” is as wide a word as there is. Paul does not divide the week into time with God and time without him. He divides it into what is done in church, which he has just described, and everything else, and he says that everything else is to be done in the same name. To the Corinthians he says it about meals: “Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31).

This follows from the word “in.” If a child is in Christ, she is in Christ at the crease and at the music stand. It is not a room she leaves when she picks up a bat. A branch is attached to the vine all day.

Play, skill and growing up

The Bible is not embarrassed by any of the four things the sermon named. When Zechariah wants to show what a city looks like with God in it, he puts old people sitting in the streets and children playing in them. Luke sums up eighteen years of Jesus’ own life in a sentence: he “increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man” (Luke 2:52). Stature is bodily growth. The boy who was brought to Saul’s court was “cunning in playing, and a mighty valiant man … and the Lord is with him” (1 Samuel 16:18); he had learnt the harp well enough to be sent for. The Psalms say, “play skilfully” (33:3). Paul takes his pictures of the Christian life from the running track and the boxing ring, and notes with approval that an athlete “is temperate in all things” (1 Corinthians 9:25).

Dossier 12 sets out the Reformation’s account of why this is so: God works through the ordinary stations of life, and they are not a lower grade of holiness than religious activity. A child’s stations are being a son or daughter, a pupil, a team-mate and a friend.

The objection: “bodily exercise profiteth little”

The sermon could have quoted Paul. “Exercise thyself rather unto godliness. For bodily exercise profiteth little: but godliness is profitable unto all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come” (1 Timothy 4:7–8). That is a real ranking, and it has to be respected. Godliness outlasts fitness.

Three things about the passage should be noticed. First, Paul says exercise profits a little. He does not say it harms. Second, “godliness” in these letters is not a daily devotional period. It is a whole way of living before God, and Paul’s next use of the word family is about looking after elderly parents: children are to “learn first to shew piety at home” (5:4). Third, look at who Paul is opposing in this chapter. Five verses earlier he describes teachers who go about “forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving.” His answer to them is one of the most sweeping sentences in the New Testament: “For every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving: For it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer” (4:4–5). The error he is correcting is the one that treats God’s ordinary gifts as competitors with God.

Where the sermon is right

None of this makes the preacher’s worry foolish. Time is limited. Good things do push out better ones. In the parable of the sower the seed among thorns is “choked with cares and riches and pleasures of this life” (Luke 8:14). In the parable of the great supper the guests who stay away all have respectable reasons: a field, five yoke of oxen, a new wife (Luke 14:18–20). Nothing they were doing was wrong. They missed the supper.

The question is what the New Testament says is being missed. In the first parable it is the word that was heard. In the second it is a meal to which they had been invited. The letter to the Hebrews names it outright: “Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is” (10:25). Put together with Acts 2:42 and Deuteronomy 6:7, the list of things that must not be crowded out looks like this.

The first Christians met on the first day of the week, and most churches still do. But the point does not depend on the day or the hour. Churches gather at different times, and what matters is being there, above all for the Lord’s Supper, which can be received nowhere else.

The sermon named the third and said nothing about the first. It is worth asking which of the three a child’s sport and music are most likely to displace.

So the competition the sermon described is a false one, and there is a true one beside it that the sermon missed. Cricket does not compete with Christ. A fixture that keeps a family from the service competes with church, and with the Lord’s Supper most of all.

Try it: the arithmetic of a child’s week

A week has 168 hours. Enter a child’s week below. The figures already there are only a starting point. Nothing you type is stored or sent anywhere.

Change the figures as you like, and the same thing appears. On Position B the relationship with Jesus is being built in the first row. With the figures as first set, that row is about one hour in a hundred. Everything else in the week is, at best, neutral. On Position G the child is in Christ in every row. The first three are where she is fed, and the rest are where she lives on what she has been given. The activities row is small beside school and sleep, and nobody warns parents that sleep is crowding out their children’s relationship with Jesus.

Try it: what is being crowded out?

Eight situations, all composed by this page. For each, decide whether the activity pushes aside something the New Testament says Christ gives.

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Five traditions in their own words

The brief asks how “Lutheran, Anglican, Catholic, and evangelical categories compare,” and adds: “Let readers compare.” So this Part quotes and does not judge. Each tradition is asked the same five questions, and every answer is taken from a document that tradition has published as its own teaching.

There are five columns where the brief had four, because “evangelical” covers at least two families that answer differently. The Reformed churches (Presbyterian and Continental Reformed) have confessions from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Baptist and free-church family has confessions of the same age and also a large body of twentieth-century devotional writing, and the two do not always say the same thing.

Try it: ask each tradition the same question

Choose a question. The five answers appear side by side, each in the tradition’s own words.

What all five say

Where they divide

On what Baptism does. For Lutherans, Anglicans and Catholics it is the instrument by which a person is joined to Christ. For the Reformed it is the sign and seal of an engrafting that the Spirit works through faith, and is really a means of grace to those who believe. For Baptists it is a sign of a union already given at conversion.

On what the Supper is. The range runs from the Catholic and Lutheran confession that Christ’s body and blood are truly present and received, through the Reformed teaching of a real feeding by faith, to the modern Baptist description of a symbolic memorial.

On when a child is counted in. Those who baptise infants speak to children as members from the start. Those who baptise believers only wait for a child’s own profession.

These are large disagreements, and other dossiers on this site take positions on some of them. The author’s thesis sides with the first three columns on Baptism. But none of the three disagreements is the one this page is about. On the question the sermon raised, the five stand together.

Try it: which tradition said it?

Ten sentences from the documents above. Assign each to its tradition. Several are harder than they look.

Where the newer sentence came from

If no confession teaches Position B, how did it come to be said from pulpits as though it were obvious? The answer is a history in five steps. Each step was taken by serious Christians answering a real problem. Earlier dossiers have covered most of them, so they are given here in outline.

When the phrase arrived

The phrase the sermon used has been studied. In 2017 Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter published an article in the journal Zygon on the use of “personal relationship with Jesus.” He found scattered examples from the later nineteenth century. He judged that the rise in its use came with the work of Billy Graham and other public evangelists from about the late 1940s, growing through the following decades, and that by the 1970s it had become an “identity marker for evangelical Protestants.” From the 1980s it was taken up by Catholics as well. He adds a caution that this page repeats: “in-depth field and archival research is needed to determine a definitive history.”

The dates fit the rest of the table. A church that had located the beginning of the Christian life in a personal decision, and its continuance in a personal quiet time, needed a word for what the Christian then had. “Relationship” was the word. It is a good word for the communion Part III described. The trouble came when it was asked to do the work of the Bible’s other words as well, and the things they say about who began it, who else is in it and where it is given dropped out of sight.

What the older churches had done to deserve it

It would be dishonest to tell this story as a decline from a golden age. Every step was provoked. The Pietists were looking at parishes where people were baptised, confirmed, married and buried by the church and showed no sign of knowing Christ in between. Tozer was looking at congregations with correct doctrine and no prayer. They were right about what they saw. Jesus described it first: a branch in the vine that bears no fruit.

The older catechisms had an answer to that condition, and it was not Position B. It was to send the person back to what he had been given. The Westminster divines called it “the needful but much neglected duty of improving our Baptism,” to be done “all our life long, especially in the time of temptation,” by “drawing strength from the death and resurrection of Christ, into whom we are baptized” (Larger Catechism, Question 167). The answer to a baptised person who does not pray is “you are baptised, so pray.” Position B’s answer is “you do not pray, so perhaps you have nothing.” The first calls a son home. The second tells him he may not be a son.

Try it: older or newer?

Seven phrases from this page. Place each in the period when it was written or came into common use.

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What to tell a child

The brief ends with a practical question: “is a child better served by being told ‘you must build a relationship’ or ‘you belong to Christ; keep coming to where he gives himself’?”

How the New Testament speaks to children

The children in Mark’s story had done nothing. They were carried. Jesus was “much displeased” with the disciples who thought they were in the way, took them in his arms and blessed them. Nothing is said about their devotional lives.

When Paul writes to Ephesus he addresses the letter “to the saints which are at Ephesus, and to the faithful in Christ Jesus” (1:1). In chapter 6 he turns to some of those saints by name: “Children, obey your parents in the Lord” (6:1). The children are in the room when the letter is read. He speaks to them directly, as members of the church, and “in the Lord” is where he assumes they stand. He does the same in Colossians 3:20. A psalmist looking back on his own childhood says, “thou didst make me hope when I was upon my mother’s breasts … thou art my God from my mother’s belly” (Psalm 22:9–10). And at Pentecost Peter says that the promise is “unto you, and to your children.”

Churches that baptise only believers read some of these texts differently, and this page has not argued that question. But notice that they do not teach their children Position B either. A Baptist child is told that Christ died for sinners and is called to believe it. The Second London Confession does not tell him to build a relationship. It tells him that those who believe are engrafted into Christ.

The same child on five ordinary days

The two sentences can be compared by following one child through a few ordinary situations. What follows is the page’s own reasoning, offered as illustration. It is not a report of research. Dossier 17 argues the larger case, with sources.

What the catechisms put in a child’s mouth

The historic churches wrote catechisms for children to learn by heart, and it is instructive to see where each one starts. The Prayer Book Catechism of 1662 begins with the child’s name and goes straight to his baptism:

Question. What is your Name?
Answer. N. or M.
Question. Who gave you this Name?
Answer. My Godfathers and Godmothers in my Baptism; wherein I was made a member of Christ, the child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven.

The Book of Common Prayer (1662), A Catechism. “N. or M.” stands for the child’s own name.

The same answer stood in the first English Prayer Book of 1549, so that for some four hundred years this was the first thing an English child was taught to say about himself. It is in the past tense and the passive voice: “I was made.” The Heidelberg Catechism, written in the Palatinate in 1563 and used ever since for teaching the young, opens with a question about comfort and answers with a statement of ownership: “That I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ.” Luther gave his readers a sentence for the day when conscience accuses them:

Thus we must regard Baptism and make it profitable to ourselves, that when our sins and conscience oppress us, we strengthen ourselves and take comfort and say: Nevertheless I am baptized; but if I am baptized, it is promised me that I shall be saved and have eternal life, both in soul and body.

Martin Luther, Large Catechism (1529), Part IV. Trans. Bente and Dau, Triglot Concordia (1921).

Each of these hands the child something that is true before he does anything, and then builds his duties on it.

Try it: what does the first question hand the child?

Seven openings. Five are from catechisms. Two are composed by this page in the manner of a modern youth talk. Sort each by what it gives the child to hold.

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“Keep coming” is half the sentence

Position G is sometimes heard as permission to coast: you are baptised, so relax. None of its sources says that. The same Prayer Book Catechism that begins “I was made a member of Christ” goes on to tell the child that he cannot keep God’s commandments without grace, “which thou must learn at all times to call for by diligent prayer.” The Catholic Catechism says that “faith must grow after Baptism.” Luther, having said that faith receives Baptism, says what a baptised life is: “a truly Christian life is nothing else than a daily baptism, once begun and ever to be continued,” and “let every one esteem his Baptism as a daily dress in which he is to walk constantly.”

So Position G gives a child at least as much to do as Position B. He is to pray daily, to be faithful in church and at the Lord’s table, to learn the faith, and to fight sin for the rest of his life. The difference is that all of it rests on something already done. He works from what he has been given. He does not work towards it.

A week, examined

The page has argued that a child who belongs to Christ is not put outside him by cricket. It has also quoted Jesus on branches that are taken away, and Hebrews says that “we are made partakers of Christ, if we hold the beginning of our confidence stedfast unto the end” (3:14). So a household does need to look at its week. The question is what to look for.

What the sources would build a week around

Ten statements about your own household

Answer honestly. Nothing is stored or sent anywhere, and the result is a prompt for thought and nothing more. If you have no children at home, answer for the household you grew up in.

If the week is too full

Suppose the answers show a week in which the things of God really are being squeezed. Three things follow from this page’s argument about what to do, and they are not quite what the sermon said.

Protect the church’s gathering before you protect anything else. Ask which activity takes the family out of church, and away from the Lord’s Supper, and for how many weeks of the year. That one costs most, whatever its merits. An activity that never clashes with the service costs nothing that Christ gives.

Make the prayers shorter and fixed. A household that cannot find fifteen quiet minutes can find one at breakfast and one at bedtime. The catechisms never asked for more than that from a child.

Change what you say before you change the timetable. If a child has picked up the idea that Jesus is disappointed in her schedule, the first thing to mend is the idea. Tell her what she is. Then ask her to come.

Your answers, revisited

Here are the ten questions you answered before reading, with what the sources say. If you skipped them, go back to the quiz, lock in your answers, and return.

Check it yourself

Twenty-two items. Nearly everything here is free and online. If you read only three, read the first three. If you do only one thing, do the last.

1. 1. John 15:1–17; Ephesians 1:1–14 and 2:1–10; Colossians 2:6–3:17. Read this first. Twenty minutes. Mark every “in Christ,” “in him” and “in whom.” Note which sentences are statements and which are commands.
2. 2. Romans 6:1–14; Galatians 3:23–4:7; 1 Corinthians 10:1–17 and 12:12–27. Read this first. Twenty minutes. The texts behind Parts IV and V, with their warnings.
3. 3. Matthew 6:1–15; Mark 1:9–39; Luke 2:41–52, 4:16 and 10:38–42. Read this first. Fifteen minutes. Jesus on praying in secret, Jesus praying alone, Jesus at twelve, and Mary at his feet.
4. 4. Acts 2:37–47 and 20:7; Hebrews 3:12–14 and 10:19–25; Deuteronomy 6:4–9; Ephesians 6:1–4; 2 Timothy 1:5 and 3:14–17. Fifteen minutes. What the first Christians continued in, and how a child was taught.
5. 5. 1 Timothy 4:1–10 and 5:4; Zechariah 8:1–8; Luke 8:4–15 and 14:15–24; 1 Corinthians 9:24–27 and 10:31. Fifteen minutes. The sermon’s best text, read in its chapter, and the passages about what gets crowded out.
6. 6. Martin Luther, Small Catechism (1529): Baptism, the Sacrament of the Altar, and the Daily Prayers. Large Catechism (1529): Part IV, including the section on infant baptism, and Part V. Trans. F. Bente and W. H. T. Dau, Triglot Concordia (1921); free at bookofconcord.org. Forty minutes.
7. 7. The Augsburg Confession (1530), Articles V, IX and XIII; the Formula of Concord (1577), Solid Declaration VII, paragraphs 59–66. Free at bookofconcord.org. Fifteen minutes. The second is the Lutheran reading of John 6.
8. 8. Martin Luther, Concerning Christian Liberty (1520), trans. R. S. Grignon (1883), free at Project Gutenberg; A Simple Way to Pray (1535), trans. Carl J. Schindler, Luther’s Works, vol. 43 (Fortress Press, 1968), pp. 193–211. The first is free; the second is a library book, with extracts widely reprinted.
9. 9. The Book of Common Prayer (1662): A Catechism; the Publick Baptism of Infants; the Holy Communion (the third Exhortation, the Prayer of Humble Access, and the second prayer after Communion). The Thirty-nine Articles (1571), XXV to XXIX. Free at churchofengland.org. Thirty minutes.
10. 10. Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992; second edition 1997), paragraphs 787–796, 1213–1274, 1322–1405, 2558–2565 and 2685. Free at vatican.va. Forty minutes. Read 2558 and 2565 together.
11. 11. The Heidelberg Catechism (1563), Questions 1, 20–21, 53–55 and 65–82. The Westminster Shorter Catechism (1647), Questions 29–31 and 88–98; Larger Catechism (1648), Questions 65–69 and 153–177; Confession (1647), chapters 21 and 26–29. All free online. The Heidelberg is quoted here in a modern English version used by Reformed churches; older versions differ slightly in wording.
12. 12. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), III.1.1 and III.11.10. Quoted from John Allen’s translation (1813), free at Project Gutenberg. Henry Beveridge’s (1845) and F. L. Battles’s (1960) are also in wide use. Ten minutes.
13. 13. The Second London Baptist Confession (1677, reissued 1689), chapters 28–30; the Baptist Catechism (London, 1695), the questions on the outward means, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper; C. H. Spurgeon, A Puritan Catechism (1855), Questions 71–75; The Baptist Faith and Message (2000), Article VII (bfm.sbc.net). Twenty minutes. Read the oldest and the newest side by side.
14. 14. Ignatius, To the Ephesians 13 and 20; Tertullian, On Baptism 1; Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lecture 22; John Chrysostom, Homilies on First Corinthians 24; Augustine, Tractates on John 26. Ante-Nicene Fathers and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers; free at New Advent. Forty minutes.
15. 15. The Apostolic Tradition, sections 35–36, trans. Burton Scott Easton (Cambridge University Press, 1934), free at Project Gutenberg; the Didache, chapter 8. Ten minutes. The earliest instructions on a Christian’s daily prayers. The date and authorship of the first are debated.
16. 16. John Wesley, Sermon 16, “The Means of Grace” (1746). Free online. Twenty minutes. An evangelical founder on why private prayer, Scripture and the Supper belong on one list.
17. 17. A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God (Christian Publications, 1948), chapter 1. Free at Project Gutenberg. Twenty minutes. Read him in his own words before accepting this page’s account of him. He is better than his imitators.
18. 18. Robert Boyd Munger, My Heart — Christ’s Home (InterVarsity Press, 1954 and later editions). Ten minutes. Read the first page as carefully as the living room. The tract quoted in Part X is Bill Bright, Have You Heard of the Four Spiritual Laws? (Campus Crusade for Christ, 1965); its current wording is at cru.org.
19. 19. Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter, “Use of the Phrase ‘Personal Relationship with Jesus’: Toward a Comprehensive Interdisciplinary Explanation,” Zygon 52, no. 3 (September 2017), pp. 663–689. The one academic study of the phrase this page found. Its author says more research is needed.
20. 20. For the scholarship on “in Christ”: Adolf Deissmann, Die neutestamentliche Formel “in Christo Jesu” (1892), for the count; Constantine R. Campbell, Paul and Union with Christ (2012), and J. Todd Billings, Union with Christ (2011), for modern treatments from within evangelical and Reformed scholarship. Library books. This page did not rely on the last two for any claim.
21. 21. Earlier dossiers on this site: 01 and 21 on Baptism; 23 and 17 on assurance, in adults and in children; 09 on the quiet time as a test; 12 on ordinary work; 14 on the Supper; 33 and 50 on the word “relationship.”
22. 22. Your own week, and your own church’s teaching. Do this one. Write down, for one ordinary week, when your household is in church, when it prays, and when it is at practice. Then find what your church officially teaches that Baptism and the Lord’s Supper give, and read it beside Part IX.

No living individual is named on this page as an example of anything; the sermon that prompted it is retold without identifying its preacher or his church, and no criticism of any person is intended. Modern denominations and organisations are named only where they are quoted word for word from their own published statements. Apart from the authors of published research and translations, every individual quoted is deceased, or biblical, and is quoted from a dated, published source. Every remark attributed to a parent, a child or a pulpit, and every family described, is composed by this page for illustration and does not describe any real person or household.