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52 bodies · 3 marks · 15 clusters · every cell quoted from the body’s own document

Where Does Your Church Land?

Three questions, asked of every modern body that calls itself Christian. Are infants baptized? Is baptism for the remission of sins? Are the bread and the cup Christ’s body and blood? Each answer is taken from a catechism, confession, article of religion or published statement of faith — the body’s own words, cited, never an outsider’s characterisation. What comes out is not a spectrum. It is fifteen clusters, and the largest of them holds eighteen bodies that agree on almost nothing else.

The question

What this page is asking

Three claims were held, in some form, by every church in the world for a very long time. That infants are baptized. That baptism is for the remission of sins. That the bread and the cup are the body and blood of Christ. A great many bodies that call themselves Christian today hold none of the three, and a great many hold one or two. Nobody publishes the list.

So this page publishes it. Fifty-two bodies, one row each, three columns, one value per cell from a fixed vocabulary, and a verbatim quotation from that body’s own published doctrinal document behind every value. Then the bodies are grouped by which exact combination of three values they hold — not by family, not by how they feel about one another, not by anything this page decided. The clusters are arithmetic.

This is not a thesis. It is a tabulation, published so that you can check it, disagree with a cell, and work out where you yourself stand.

Why do it this way

Because denominational labels have stopped predicting doctrine. Two congregations with the same word over the door can hold opposite positions on all three marks, and two congregations that regard each other as barely Christian can hold identical positions on all three. A table sorted by what is actually confessed shows this immediately; a table sorted by denomination hides it.

Because the three marks are the ones most people never see compared. Everybody knows the Reformation happened. Rather fewer have read the Second London Baptist Confession on the Lord’s Supper, or the Church of the Nazarene on infant baptism, or what the Church of God in Christ says the communicant receives, and found that the answers do not go where the label points.

Because you can check every cell in an evening. Almost every document quoted here is free, online and short. If a cell is wrong, the source is named and you can prove it wrong, which is the only kind of claim worth publishing.

What the tabulation found

Set out before you read any of it, so that you can decide how much of it you already expected.

  1. Fifteen clusters, not a spectrum. Fifty-two bodies produce fifteen distinct combinations of the three values. They are not spread evenly; they are lumpy, and the lumps do not line up with the family names.
  2. The largest cluster holds eighteen bodies. Rejected, symbol only, memorial only. It contains Mennonites and Southern Baptists, Adventists and Pentecostals, the Amish and a multi-site church with a smoke machine. These bodies agree about almost nothing else in the world.
  3. The three marks do not travel together. Four bodies reject infant baptism and hold baptism for the remission of sins. Two reject infant baptism and hold a real presence in the Supper. One body holds the second mark in the same sentence in which it denies it.
  4. The middle of the score range is nearly empty. Nothing at all scores four, five or six out of ten. Bodies cluster at the top, at seven to eight, at three, and at zero. There is a gap where the gradual middle ought to be.
  5. Four communions that anathematised one another are in the same cell. Rome, Constantinople, the churches that left in 451 and the church that left in 431 hold identical values on all three marks. Whatever the three marks are, they are older than those divisions.
Where this page standsThe table is fact and can be checked. The score is opinion. It is my own judgement of how closely each body resembles the church of the first five centuries on these three marks and on nothing else — not on church government, not on the papacy, not on Christology, not on anything that would make a Catholic, an Orthodox and a Lutheran score differently from one another, as they do not here. I have published the rubric in Part III and the sub-scores in every row precisely so that you can throw out one of the three and keep the other two. My own reading of the sources is that the second mark is the one the early evidence states most plainly and the one the modern field has departed from most completely, and that the departure was argued for rather than stumbled into — which is why this page quotes the arguing rather than characterising it. Whether that departure was right is a different question, and it is not asked here.

What this page cannot settle

It does not establish that any of the three positions is true. It contains no defence and no refutation of any of them; where you want the argument, Dossier 26 makes the providence and history case, Dossier 01 and 04 the baptismal one, 14 the Supper, 21 re-baptism, and 22 what statements of faith leave out. It does not touch the mode of baptism — immersion, pouring, sprinkling — which is a different question and not one of the marks. It does not adjudicate who counts as Christian: the non-Trinitarian bodies are entered because they self-identify as Christian, their documented positions are recorded, their differing baptismal formulas are noted, and nothing further is concluded. It records confessions, not congregations: a body’s official document and the average Sunday in its buildings can differ sharply, and where the page knows they do it says so in the row. And it cannot make a table of three columns do the work of a library — two bodies that share a cell here may be very far apart on everything the table does not measure.

A note on naming and method. Denominations and organisations are named here only where they are quoted verbatim from their own published doctrinal statements, which is the rule used in Dossier 24. No living individual is named anywhere on this page. Where a body publishes no binding confession — which is most of the non-denominational field, the Churches of Christ, and the independent charismatic stream — representative published statements are quoted verbatim and identified generically, without naming the congregation, on the rule used in Dossier 22: the empirical claim needs real text, and naming a congregation inside a comparison would turn a description into an accusation this page is not making. Everyday examples are composed by the page and labelled as composed. Where a document’s date, authorship or reading is disputed by scholars, the page says so at the point of use. The score is labelled opinion and rests on facts disclosed on the page.

Reproducibility

The prompt behind this page

Everything below was produced by giving the following brief to a frontier language model with web search, which assembled the documents and filled the cells. It is published so that you can run it yourself, change it, or turn it against this page. Three experiments are worth more than reading the table. First, add a fourth column — confession and absolution, say, or the laying on of hands, or anointing the sick — and see whether the clusters survive it. Second, change the era: score against the fourteenth century instead of the fifth, or against 1600, and see which bodies move. Third, give it your own congregation’s statement of faith and ask it to fill the three cells from that document alone, with the quotations, and then check whether you would have predicted the answer.

Write a detailed, source-first tabulation of the following question, 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 document, the article or section number, and the
edition where possible. Where a date, authorship or reading is disputed
by scholars, say so at the point of use.

  TITLE. Where Does Your Church Land?

  WHAT THIS IS. Not a thesis. A research project to satisfy my curiosity,
  published as a tabulation. Do not defend any of the three positions and
  do not argue the providence/historical case - that is Dossier 26 ("Does
  God Play Dice?"), which this page links to and does not repeat. Where a
  reader wants the argument, send him there. Same for Dossiers 04, 14, 21,
  22 and 27.

  THE QUESTION. Which modern Christian denominations and sects do not hold
  one or more of the following, and how do they cluster?

    * That infants are baptized
    * That baptism is for the remission of sins
    * That the bread and cup are Christ's body and blood

  SCOPE. Every modern body that self-identifies as Christian, including
  those holding all three. Target 40 to 50 entries. Cover at minimum:
  Catholic; Eastern Orthodox; Oriental Orthodox; Assyrian Church of the
  East; Lutheran (LCMS, WELS, ELCA); Anglican/Episcopal; Methodist and
  Wesleyan; Presbyterian and Reformed (PCA, PCUSA, URC); Congregational;
  Anabaptist (Mennonite, Amish, Brethren); Baptist (SBC, ABC, Reformed
  Baptist, Free Will, Primitive, Landmark); Churches of Christ and
  Christian Church/Disciples; Pentecostal (Assemblies of God, Church of
  God Cleveland, Foursquare, COGIC); Oneness Pentecostal (UPCI);
  charismatic and word-of-faith streams; Adventist; Jehovah's Witnesses;
  Latter-day Saints; Christian Science; Unitarian Universalist; Quaker;
  Salvation Army; Vineyard and Calvary Chapel; Messianic congregations;
  and entries for the common non-denominational positions rather than
  treating "non-denominational" as one row.

  TABLE COLUMNS. One row per body. Each of the first three columns takes
  one value from a fixed vocabulary, plus a one-sentence explanation:

    * Infant baptism: normative | permitted, not normative | rejected |
      no water baptism at all
    * What baptism does: conveys remission | instrumental, with faith |
      sign and seal only | symbol only | other (specify)
    * The Supper: transubstantiation | sacramental union | spiritual real
      presence | memorial only | other (specify)

  Use "other" sparingly and only where the outliers genuinely don't fit
  (Latter-day Saints, Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Science, Quakers,
  Salvation Army). Where a body permits internal variety, record the
  position of its official confession and note the variance in the
  explanation.

  SOURCING. Every cell quotes the body's own published doctrinal document,
  not an outsider's characterisation - catechisms, confessions, articles
  of religion, statements of faith, official doctrinal commissions. Cite
  document and article number. Where no confession exists (much of the
  non-denominational field), quote representative published statements of
  faith verbatim and identify them generically rather than by
  congregation name, as in Dossier 22.

  CLUSTERING. A cluster column giving each unique combination of the three
  values a label, listing every other body sharing that exact combination.
  Clusters must fall out of the vocabulary mechanically, never be
  asserted.

  SCORE. Similarity to the early church, defined as the first 500 years,
  scored only on these three marks and on nothing else - not church
  government, not the papacy, not Christology. Publish the rubric on the
  page:

    * 3 = matches what that era's sources attest
    * 2 = holds the substance in different vocabulary, or makes it
          permitted rather than normative
    * 1 = partial or internally divided
    * 0 = contradicts it, or the practice is absent

  Sum the three, scale to 10, round. Show the three sub-scores alongside
  the total so a reader can disagree with one without discarding the
  whole. One paragraph per body explaining the rating. State plainly in
  the rubric that the era's evidence is scored on what the church taught
  baptism to be and do, and note openly that deferred baptism was widely
  practised in the fourth century and that Tertullian argued for delaying
  the baptism of children.

  INTERACTIVES. A priors quiz up front. A predict-then-reveal on three or
  four denominations the reader thinks he knows. A cluster explorer
  filtering by belief. A "where does my church land" self-placement ending
  in the other bodies sharing that exact cluster. Table must be sortable,
  filterable and usable on a phone.

  PAGE FURNITURE. House pattern: masthead, Full/Quick swap bar, hero, the
  question stated at the top, the full prompt published verbatim for
  re-running, contents, the table and Parts, "your answers revisited", and
  a "check it yourself" source list. The score is labelled opinion in a
  "Where this page stands" box. Publish in two versions: the full page and
  -simple.html, each linking to the other, index card added to the
  Full/Quick toggle. Short links /d31 and /d31q, redirect stubs plus
  _redirects. Light theme default with the dark switch, thinkask-theme in
  localStorage.

  NAMING. Dossier 24 variant: denominations and organisations named only
  where quoted verbatim from their own published doctrinal statements. No
  living individuals named. Everyday examples composed and labelled as
  composed.

  EXCLUDED. Any defence or refutation of the three positions. The mode of
  baptism. Whether the non-Trinitarian bodies are Christian - record their
  documented positions and note where their baptismal formula differs,
  without adjudicating.

The prompt is reproduced as given, including its instructions about naming and about which arguments not to make. Where the research contradicted the brief, the page follows the research and says so at the point of use — the clearest instance being the Latter-day Saints, whom the brief suggested marking as an outlier and whose three values in fact fit the fixed vocabulary exactly. The brief asked for forty to fifty entries; the table has fifty-two, because the non-denominational field needed four rows rather than one and the Reformed family needed five to show that the cluster is decided by the confession rather than by the denomination.


Before you begin

What do you currently think?

Ten questions, every one of them settled by a document you can open in a browser tab. Answer them before you look at the table. They come back at the end with what the documents say, and the gap between the two is the most useful thing this page can give you. Nothing is stored or sent anywhere.

0 of 10 answered

Contents

What follows


Part I

The three marks, and the words used for them

A table is only as good as its vocabulary. If the words are loose, every cell becomes a judgement call and the clusters are whatever the compiler wanted them to be. So the vocabulary here is fixed in advance, each column takes exactly one value from a short closed list, and the same value means the same thing in every row.

Four notes on the vocabulary, before you use it

On transubstantiation. The word is Latin and scholastic and is later than the fifth century. It is used here as the label for any body whose documents teach that the elements become the body and blood such that the substance of bread and wine no longer remains. The Eastern and Oriental churches mostly prefer the older word change and decline the Aristotelian machinery the Latin term carries; the seventeenth-century Confession of Dositheus does use the Greek equivalent. That is a real dispute about explanation and it is not what this column measures.
On sacramental union. The Lutheran position: the body and blood are truly present and distributed, and the bread remains bread. It is given its own value rather than being folded into either neighbour, because Lutherans and Reformed have spent five centuries insisting it belongs to neither.
On sign and seal only against symbol only. These are not the same and the difference is the whole of the Reformed–Baptist argument about the sacraments. A sign and seal is held to convey and confirm what it signifies to the one who receives it in faith; a symbol pictures something that happened elsewhere and conveys nothing. Westminster is the first; the Baptist Faith and Message is the second. Nineteen rows in this table turn on that distinction.
On other. Used four times, and only where the value genuinely does not fit: Christian Science and the Salvation Army and the unprogrammed Friends, which have no rite to classify, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Memorial, where the anomaly is not what the emblems are but that almost nobody present may eat them. The brief that produced this page also proposed the Latter-day Saints as an outlier; the research found their three values fit the vocabulary exactly, and the page has followed the research.

Part II

What the first five centuries attest

The score in the last column measures resemblance to the church of the first five hundred years. That baseline has to be published or the score is worthless. Here it is: the sources, dated, with the awkward ones included rather than left out. The page is not arguing from them — that is Dossier 26’s work — only stating what they say, so that you can see what the rubric is measuring against and dispute it if you think it has been read wrongly.

One clarification first, because it decides how several rows are scored. The era is scored on what the church taught baptism to be and to do, not on when a given person happened to receive it. Those are different questions and the evidence answers them differently, which is the subject of the honest complication set out below.

The sources

Ignatius of Antiochc. 107the Supper

They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins, and which the Father, of His goodness, raised up again.Letter to the Smyrnæans 7.1. Written on the road to martyrdom, within living memory of the apostles. The refusal to confess the identification is what marks the group off as heretical.

Justin Martyrc. 155what baptism doesthe Supper

… they are brought by us where there is water… in order that we may obtain in the water the remission of sins formerly committed.First Apology 61. And in 66: “For not as common bread and common drink do we receive these… the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word… is both the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh.” Addressed to a pagan emperor, which is to say written to explain the practice to outsiders rather than to settle a dispute among insiders.

Irenaeus of Lyonsc. 180infantsthe Supper

He came to save all through means of Himself — all, I say, who through Him are born again to God — infants, and children, and boys, and youths, and old men.Against Heresies II.22.4. “Born again” is his standing term for baptism. And IV.18.5: the bread “is no longer common bread, but the Eucharist, consisting of two realities, earthly and heavenly”.

Tertullianc. 200against infant baptism

According to the circumstances and disposition, and even age, of each individual, the delay of baptism is preferable; principally, however, in the case of little children.On Baptism 18. The earliest surviving argument against baptising children, and it is included here rather than buried. Note what it concedes: an argument for delaying a practice is evidence that the practice existed and was usual enough to argue about.

The Apostolic Tradition, attributed to Hippolytusc. 215, disputedinfants

And they shall baptize the little children first. And if they can answer for themselves, let them answer. But if they cannot, let their parents answer, or someone from their family.Chapter 21. The attribution and the date are seriously disputed. A body of recent scholarship treats the text as a composite assembled over the third and fourth centuries rather than a single early third-century Roman document. The page flags the dispute and does not rest the rubric on this source alone.

Origenc. 244infants

The Church received from the apostles the tradition of giving baptism even to infants.Commentary on Romans 5.9; and similarly in Homilies on Leviticus 8.3 and Homilies on Luke 14. Surviving chiefly in Rufinus’s Latin translation, which is a known complication and is noted here.

Cyprian of Carthage and a council of sixty-six bishops253infantswhat baptism does

… no one ought to be hindered from baptism and from the grace of God… and this rule, which regards all, we think ought to be observed even more in respect of infants and newly-born persons.Epistle 64, to Fidus. The question put to the council was not whether infants should be baptized but whether one had to wait until the eighth day, on the analogy of circumcision. The council said no. The question the modern argument turns on was not the question they were asked.

Cyril of Jerusalemc. 350the Supper

Since then He Himself declared and said of the Bread, This is My Body, who shall dare to doubt any longer? And since He has affirmed and said, This is My Blood, who shall ever hesitate, saying, that it is not His blood?Mystagogical Catechesis IV.1–6, delivered to the newly baptized in Jerusalem. The authorship is sometimes assigned to his successor John; the date and the content are not in dispute.

The Council of Constantinople381what baptism does

I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins.The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, still recited by Catholics, Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Assyrians, Lutherans, Anglicans, Methodists, Presbyterians and a great many of the bodies in this table that hold the second mark in no other document they publish.

Ambrose of Milanc. 390the Supper

… before the blessing of the heavenly words another species is named, after the consecration the Body is signified.On the Mysteries 9.50–52. The most explicit fourth-century statement of a change in the elements, and the one on which the later Western vocabulary is built.

The Council of Carthage418infantswhat baptism does

… that infants newly from their mothers’ wombs are to be baptized… and that in them there is nothing of original sin which needs to be washed away — let him be anathema.Canon 2, against the Pelagians. The first and second marks joined in one sentence, and the point at which denying them became a conciliar matter rather than an eccentricity.

The honest complication, stated plainly

Deferred baptism was widely practised, and one early writer argued for it

This page would be dishonest if it left this out. Tertullian, around the year 200, argued for delaying baptism, and named little children as the principal case. His reason was that the sins of adolescence were better met by a baptism received after them than before. He did not argue that infant baptism was invalid; he argued that it was imprudent.

And through much of the fourth century deferral was extremely common among adults, for the same reason: baptism forgave sins, and post-baptismal sin was a serious matter, so a great many people waited. Constantine was baptized on his deathbed in 337. Ambrose was an unbaptized provincial governor when he was elected bishop of Milan in 374 and had to be baptized in order to take office. Augustine’s mother, a devout Christian, did not have him baptized as an infant. Gregory of Nazianzus, preaching in 381, advises waiting until a child is about three, so that the child can hear and answer something of what is being done.

Here is why that does not do the work it is sometimes asked to do. Every one of those deferrals is a deferral because of the second mark, not in spite of it. Constantine waited because he believed baptism washed away sins and he wanted it to wash away as many as possible. That is an argument about timing conducted entirely inside the doctrine this table scores. It is evidence that the fourth century held baptism to be powerful, not evidence that it held baptism to be a symbol. The modern position that scores zero on the second mark is not the position of the men who deferred; it is the opposite of their reason for deferring. This page scores the era on what it taught baptism to be and do, and states the deferral evidence openly so that you can weigh it differently if you judge that it bears on the first mark. It does bear on the first mark, and that is exactly why bodies that permit infant baptism without requiring it score two rather than zero.

What the era does not settle. The sources above say very little that is decisive about the mode of baptism, which is why the mode is not one of the marks. They do not use the later vocabulary of substance and accident. And they are patchy: the second century leaves us a handful of documents, and a good deal of what is inferred about ordinary practice is inferred from silence, from tomb inscriptions, and from arguments about something else.

Part III

The rubric, published

Each of the three marks is scored from nought to three against the sources in Part II. The three are added and the sum of nine is scaled to ten and rounded. Every row shows its three sub-scores beside the total, so that you can reject one of them and keep the other two, which is the only sensible thing to do with a number somebody else has assigned.

ScoreMeansWorked example
3Matches what that era’s sources attest. The body holds the thing the sources describe, in substance and without material qualification.Luther’s Small Catechism says baptism “works forgiveness of sins”. The 381 creed says “one baptism for the remission of sins”. Same claim.
2Holds the substance in different vocabulary, or makes it permitted rather than normative. The thing is there; the framing is later, or the requirement has become a permission.Article XXVII calls baptism an “instrument” of regeneration rather than saying it remits sin. Or: the Nazarene Manual permits infant baptism on request rather than commanding it.
1Partial, or internally divided. The document grants part of the claim and withholds part, or says two things that pull against each other.Westminster calls baptism a sign and seal of remission and then says salvation is not so annexed to it that none can be saved without it. Or: a document that calls baptism necessary on John 3:5 and an outward demonstration in the next sentence.
0Contradicts it, or the practice is absent. The document denies the claim, or there is no rite to compare.“A symbolic act of obedience… memorialize the death of the Redeemer.” Or: a body that observes neither rite at all.

What the rubric assumes, said out loud

The era is scored on doctrine, not on timing. What the first five centuries taught baptism to be and to do is the standard. When a given individual received it is a separate matter, treated in Part II, and the fourth century’s widespread deferral of adult baptism is stated there openly along with Tertullian’s argument for delaying the baptism of children.

Three marks, and nothing else. No credit and no penalty for church government, the papacy, Christology, the canon, the calendar, the ministry, or anything else. This is why Rome, Constantinople, Wittenberg and the Assyrian Church of the East all land on ten, which will strike some readers as absurd and is the honest consequence of the rule.

The official confession governs, and variance is noted. Where a body’s document says one thing and its congregations commonly do another, the cell records the document and the row says what the practice is. That choice favours bodies with strong confessions and disadvantages bodies that have quietly drifted, and you may reasonably think it should have been done the other way.

The score is opinionThe table is fact; every cell can be checked against a named document in an evening. The number in the last column is my judgement, and three readers applying this rubric honestly would produce three slightly different tables. The places I expect disagreement are named in Part VIII, and the sub-scores are published precisely so that you can take the table and throw the number away.

Part IV

The table

Fifty-two bodies. Sort any column by clicking its heading; filter with the three menus; search by name. Tap or click any row to open it — the row expands to show the verbatim quotation behind each of the three cells, with its document and article, and a paragraph explaining the score. Where a body’s congregations commonly hold something other than its confession, that is stated in the row as well.

On a narrow screen the table scrolls sideways and the name column stays put. The three value columns are abbreviated; the full wording is in Part I and in the opened row.

Read this before the last column

“Score” answers one question and one only: how closely does this body, on these three marks, resemble the church of the first five hundred years?

0Least affinitywith the early church on these three marks 10Greatest affinitywith the early church on these three marks
0246810

The scale runs low to high. A body scoring 0 holds none of the three as the first five centuries held them; a body scoring 10 holds all three. Everything between is a mixture, and the sub-scores show which parts.

It is not a score for whether a body is faithful, biblical, orthodox, well governed or right. It says nothing about the papacy, church government, Christology, the canon or the calendar, and nothing whatever about anyone who belongs to any of these bodies. Three questions, and nothing else.

How the number is arrived at

Each of the three marks is scored 0 to 3 against the dated sources in Part II, and the three are then added and scaled to ten:

3Matches what that era’s sources attest.
2Holds the substance in different vocabulary, or permits rather than requires it.
1Partial, or internally divided — the document grants part and withholds part.
0Contradicts it, or the practice is absent altogether.

The three are added and the sum of nine is scaled to ten. The smaller grey figures under each score in the table are the three sub-scores in column order — infant baptism, what baptism does, the Supper — published so that you can reject one of them and keep the other two.

The score is opinion; the three cells beside it are fact. Every cell can be checked against a named document in an evening. The number cannot, because it depends on the rubric, and three readers applying that rubric honestly would produce three slightly different columns. Part III publishes it in full and Part VIII names the five places this page thinks it is most likely to be wrong.

Body ↕ Infant baptism ↕ What baptism does ↕ The Supper ↕ Cluster ↕ Score ↕

Part V

Four you think you know

Before you go any further into the table, four bodies whose position on one of the three marks is commonly predicted wrongly — by their own members as often as by anybody else. Commit to an answer, then see the document. There is no trick in any of them; in each case the body says plainly what it holds, in a confession anyone may read, and the answer is simply not where the label points.


Part VI

The clusters, derived

A cluster here is nothing more than a unique combination of the three values. Four choices for the first column, five for the second, five for the third: eighty combinations are possible and fifty-two bodies occupy fifteen of them. No cluster on this page was named first and populated afterwards; each one exists because at least one body sits in it, and each one’s membership is whatever shares its exact triple. If you change a cell, the clusters change with it.

Every cluster, largest first

The distribution is the finding. It is not a gentle gradient from one end of the field to the other; it is one very large lump, two medium ones, and a scatter of cells containing a single body each.


Part VII

Where does your church land?

Three questions about the church you actually attend. Answer from what is taught there, not from what the denomination’s head office publishes — if the two differ, that difference is worth knowing and this instrument will surface it. At the end you are given the cluster your answers put you in, the other bodies that share it, and the score the rubric would assign. Nothing you enter is stored or sent anywhere.

If you do not know the answer to one of these, that is itself worth noticing, and the question in the last item of Part X is the cheapest way to find out.


Part VIII

What the table shows

Eight things fall out of the data rather than being argued into it. Every number below is computed from the table on this page, and every one of them changes if you change a cell.

The distribution of scores

Read this before anything else in the table, because it is the shape of the whole field and it is not the shape most people expect. There is no gradual slope.

Where this table is most likely to be wrong

Five places where a careful reader should push back, named so that the pushing is easier.

The Anglican middle cellArticle XXVII calls baptism an instrument of regeneration and the 1662 office has the priest declare the baptized infant regenerate, which is a strong case for three rather than two. The page scored two because the Article’s own governing phrase is signing and sealing. A reader who scores it three moves the Anglican, Methodist and AME rows from eight to nine.
The Reformed middle cellWestminster XXVIII.6 says the grace promised is “really exhibited and conferred by the Holy Ghost” in the right use of the ordinance, which is more than signing. The page scored one because XXVIII.5 withdraws the necessity in the previous paragraph. Score it two and seven rows move from seven to eight.
Bodies with no binding confessionThe United Church of Christ, American Baptist Churches USA, the Churches of Christ, Calvary Chapel and the four non-denominational rows have no document that binds anybody. Their cells record the document most used or the position most published, which is a weaker kind of evidence than a canon of Trent, and the rows say so.
Confession against practiceThe gap is widest in the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ, the Church of the Nazarene and the Evangelical Free Church of America, all of which permit or command something their congregations increasingly do not do. The table scores the document. Score the practice and four rows fall.
The vocabulary itselfFive values for the second column and five for the third is a coarse instrument. “Sign and seal only” is doing an enormous amount of work across nine rows that are not all in the same place, and a reader who split it in two would get a different set of clusters. The whole method is a choice about resolution.

Part IX

Your answers, revisited

Here are the ten questions you answered before reading, with what the documents say. If you skipped the quiz, this section will be empty. Go back to the top, answer them, and return.

Answer the questions at the top of the page and lock them in; your results appear here.


Part X

Check it yourself

Fourteen items. Nearly everything this page relies on is free, online and short: the confessions are published by the bodies themselves and the patristic texts are in the public-domain Ante-Nicene and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series. If you read only three, read the first three — together they take about half an hour and they let you check the most surprising rows in the table without any help from this page. If you do only one thing, do the last.

  1. 1. The Second London Baptist Confession (1689), chapters 29 and 30 — especially 30.7. Read this first. Ten minutes, free. Then read Westminster XXIX.7 beside it and see how much of it was kept. This single comparison settles the most surprising row in the table.
  2. 2. Your own church’s statement of faith, in full, with these three questions in hand. Read this first. Fifteen minutes. Ask of each of the three marks: does this document affirm it, deny it, or decline to say? The third answer is the most common and the most interesting.
  3. 3. Irenaeus, Against Heresies II.22.4, and Tertullian, On Baptism 18. Read this first. Ten minutes, free. The earliest evidence for the practice and the earliest argument against it, back to back. Notice what Tertullian’s argument concedes.
  4. 4. The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (381), the clause on baptism. Thirty seconds. Then ask whether your congregation says it, and if so whether it holds what it says.
  5. 5. Augsburg Confession IX and X (1530), beside the Baptist Faith and Message (2000) Article VII. Ten minutes, both free. Two Protestant documents, four centuries apart, on the same two rites. They have almost no sentence in common.
  6. 6. Heidelberg Catechism, Questions 72 to 79. Fifteen minutes, free. Question 72 asks flatly whether the water washes sin away and answers flatly that it does not; Question 76 describes a real feeding on Christ. Both in the same catechism.
  7. 7. Thirty-Nine Articles XXV, XXVII and XXVIII (1571). Ten minutes, free. Three short articles that between them produce the most argued-over cells in this table.
  8. 8. Cyprian, Epistle 64 to Fidus (253). Ten minutes, free (ANF vol. 5). Read it for the question the council was actually asked, which is not the question the modern argument is about.
  9. 9. The Confession of Dositheus (Synod of Jerusalem, 1672), Decrees 16 and 17. Fifteen minutes, free. Then read the Common Statement on Sacramental Life (2017) signed by the Assyrian Church of the East. Two bodies out of communion with Rome and with each other since 431 and 1054, saying the same three things.
  10. 10. The Dordrecht Confession (1632), Articles VII and X. Ten minutes, free. The Anabaptist position stated in 1632 and unrevised since, by people who were killed for it. Read it before dismissing the cluster it sits in as thoughtless.
  11. 11. Robert Barclay, Apology, Propositions XII and XIII (1678). Twenty minutes, free. Proposition XIII affirms the communion of the body and blood in strong terms and denies only that it happens with bread and wine. It is not the memorialist position and is usually filed with it.
  12. 12. Any published statement of faith of a large non-denominational congregation. Ten minutes. Look for the two phrases this page found again and again in bodies with no organisational connection: “an outward sign of an inward work” and “a symbolic remembrance”. Then ask where a phrase that universal came from, since no council wrote it.
  13. 13. The eleven Doctrines of The Salvation Army. Five minutes, free. Read them looking for baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and notice that the absence is deliberate and argued rather than accidental.
  14. 14. One question, asked out loud. Do this one. Ask, privately and courteously, of whoever teaches where you worship: what do we hold that baptism does, and what do we hold the bread and the cup to be? Not as a test. As a question. Whatever the answer, you will know something this afternoon that you did not know this morning — and if the answer is that the question has never come up, that is an answer too, and it puts you in the largest cluster on this page.

Denominations and organisations are named on this page only where they are quoted verbatim from their own published doctrinal statements. No living individual is named. Where a body publishes no binding confession, representative published statements are quoted verbatim and identified generically without naming the congregation. Every modern example not drawn from a quoted document is composed by this page and labelled as composed. Where a text’s date, authorship or reading is disputed the page says so at the point of use: the Apostolic Tradition’s attribution and date, the Latin transmission of Origen, the authorship of the Mystagogical Catecheses, and the standing of the Confession of Dositheus. The three cells in each row are fact and can be checked against the named document; the score is labelled opinion and rests on the rubric published in Part III. This page takes no position on the truth of any of the three marks, on the mode of baptism, or on whether any body listed is Christian.

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There is a plain-English version of this dossier with the same table in a simpler form, the same three questions, and two short exercises. No citations in the body and no rubric.

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