Educate the Spiders, Maybe?

At the Supper: “Take, eat; this is my body. … Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins” (Matthew 26:26–28). Paul: “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?” (1 Corinthians 10:16). And a warning that only makes sense if something is there to be discerned: whoever eats unworthily “shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord,” eating “not discerning the Lord’s body” (11:27, 29).

Of baptism: “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins” (Acts 2:38). “Arise, and be baptized, and wash away thy sins” (22:16). “As many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ” (Galatians 3:27). “Baptism doth also now save us” (1 Peter 3:21).

In every one of these texts the sacrament gives something: communion with Christ’s body and blood, remission, being clothed with Christ. None calls it a symbol.

“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.”

Ignatius of Antioch, To the Smyrnaeans 7 (c. 107–110), on heretics who denied Christ had real flesh; tr. A. Roberts and J. Donaldson, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1.

“For not as common bread and common drink do we receive these; but … we have been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word … is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh.”

Justin Martyr, First Apology 66 (c. 155), explaining Christian worship to the emperor; ANF vol. 1.

“For as the bread, which is produced from the earth, when it receives the invocation of God, is no longer common bread, but the Eucharist, consisting of two realities, earthly and heavenly; so also our bodies, when they receive the Eucharist, are no longer corruptible.”

Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies 4.18.5 (c. 180); ANF vol. 1.

On baptism, Justin describes converts “brought by us where there is water,” where they “are regenerated in the same manner in which we were ourselves regenerated” (First Apology 61). Three writers, three regions (Syria, Rome, Gaul), within about seventy years of the apostles.

• 1050s–1079Berengar of ToursTeaches a largely figurative view of the Supper; condemned, and made to recant in 1059 and again in 1079. A forerunner, not a church.
• c. 1521–1524“Is” means “signifies”A letter by the Dutch lawyer Cornelius Hoen argues that in “this is my body,” est means significat. Zwingli adopts the reading.
• 1525Zwingli’s SupperAt Zurich the Mass is replaced by a memorial meal; Zwingli’s Commentary on True and False Religion sets out the view.
• 1–4 October 1529MarburgLuther and Zwingli meet. Luther chalks Hoc est corpus meum, “This is my body,” on the table. They agree on fourteen articles and part of the fifteenth, and part over the Supper.
• 1536–1559Calvin’s middle wayCalvin rejects Zwingli’s “bare signs”: believers truly feed on Christ by the Spirit (Institutes 4.17). Baptism is a seal of God’s promise, given to infants.
• 1689Even the “ordinance” confessionsThe Second London Baptist Confession calls baptism and the Supper “ordinances,” yet says worthy receivers “spiritually receive and feed upon Christ crucified” (30.7). “Mere symbol” is a later and thinner view still.

The strongest case for a symbolic or memorial view. Jesus said “this do in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19; 1 Corinthians 11:24–25): the Supper is a memorial. He also said “It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing” (John 6:63), Zwingli’s key text. He called himself a door and a vine, and nobody takes those literally. His risen body has ascended, and “the heaven must receive” him until the restoration of all things (Acts 3:21), so it cannot be on many tables at once.

The early writers also used the language of sign and figure. Tertullian wrote that Christ made the bread “His own body, by saying, ‘This is my body,’ that is, the figure of my body” (Against Marcion 4.40, c. 208). Augustine read the command to eat Christ’s flesh in John 6 as “a figure” (On Christian Doctrine 3.16.24, 397–426).

The page’s reading. The figure language is real, and it is why Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran and Reformed accounts of the Supper differ. But no early writer set “figure” against “reality” as Zwingli did; Tertullian says in the same sentence that Christ “made it His own body.” The Fathers treated the sign as the bearer of what it signifies. The view that the sacraments are only our act of remembrance or testimony, giving nothing, has no clear advocate in the first thousand years, and became the settled teaching of whole churches only in the 1520s. That is the history the member’s question asks about.

Peter’s first sermon: “Repent, and be baptized every one of you … For the promise is unto you, and to your children” (Acts 2:38–39). Whole households are baptised: Lydia “and her household” (16:15); the jailer “and all his, straightway” (16:33); “the household of Stephanas” (1 Corinthians 1:16). Paul calls baptism “the circumcision of Christ” (Colossians 2:11–12), and circumcision was given to infants. Jesus: “Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:14).

No New Testament text names an infant being baptised, and none forbids it or tells a household to leave its children out.

“For 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.”

Irenaeus, Against Heresies 2.22.4 (c. 180); ANF vol. 1. Debated: “born again to God” is baptismal language elsewhere in Irenaeus (3.17.1), but the passage is about Christ passing through every age.

“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.”

Apostolic Tradition 21, tr. B. S. Easton (1934). Traditionally c. 215 and attributed to Hippolytus; many scholars now date it as a composite of the third and fourth centuries.

“The Church received from the apostles the tradition of giving baptism even to infants.”

Origen, Commentary on Romans 5.9 (c. 246), surviving in the Latin of Rufinus (c. 406); English renderings vary slightly. Origen makes the same claim in his Homilies on Leviticus 8.3.

“This was our opinion in council, that by us no one ought to be hindered from baptism and from the grace of God … which we think is to be even more observed in respect of infants and newly-born persons.”

Cyprian of Carthage and sixty-six bishops, Letter 58 to Fidus (64 in some editions), c. 253; ANF vol. 5. Fidus wanted baptism delayed to the eighth day; the council said not to wait.

• Fourth centuryDelay, not rejectionMany in the fourth century put off their own baptism, and some prominent bishops were baptised as adults despite Christian parents. Gregory of Nazianzus advised waiting until about three unless a child was in danger (Oration 40.28, 381). No one called infant baptism invalid.
• c. 411–418Agreed by both sidesIn the Pelagian controversy, Augustine and his opponents disagreed about original sin, but both baptised infants.
• 17–18 January 1525Zurich disputes itAfter a public disputation, the Zurich council orders that infants be baptised.
• 21 January 1525The first rebaptismIn Felix Manz’s house, Conrad Grebel baptises George Blaurock, who then baptises the others present.
• 1527SchleitheimThe Anabaptists’ Schleitheim articles limit baptism to those “who have learned repentance,” and call infant baptism “the highest and chief abomination of the pope.”
• 1609English BaptistsIn Amsterdam, the English Separatist John Smyth baptises himself and his followers: the beginning of the Baptist churches in the English-speaking world.

The strongest case against infant baptism. Every baptism the New Testament describes follows hearing and believing: “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved” (Mark 16:16); “they were baptized, both men and women” (Acts 8:12). The jailer’s household “believed in God” and had heard the word spoken “to all that were in his house” (Acts 16:32, 34), so the household may have been old enough to hear. The household texts never mention infants. And the earliest explicit testimonies are from about 200, not from the apostles.

“And so, 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. … Let them ‘come,’ then, while they are growing up; let them ‘come’ while they are learning … let them become Christians when they have become able to know Christ.”

Tertullian, On Baptism 18 (c. 200); tr. S. Thelwall, ANF vol. 3.

His reasons: the sponsors who answer for a child bear a heavy risk if he falls away, and baptism is so weighty that sins after it are graver; he gives the same advice to the unmarried. The page’s reading. Tertullian is a real counter-voice, and the most important one. But he argues for delay, and his argument assumes that infants were already being baptised with sponsors. By the middle of the third century the practice is described as apostolic, and a council of sixty-six bishops argues only about how soon. Its rejection as invalid became church practice in 1525.

The word “Protestant” comes from a single document. At the Second Diet of Speyer, on 19 April 1529, the Catholic majority withdrew the toleration granted three years earlier. Six evangelical princes and fourteen imperial cities lodged a formal protestatio. Its best-remembered line is usually translated: in matters which concern God’s honour and the salvation of souls, everyone must stand before God and give account for himself.

The next year, at Augsburg, the same princes presented the confession that defined what they stood for. It is short, and on the subjects of the seven questions it is plain:

“Of Baptism they teach that it is necessary to salvation, and that through Baptism is offered the grace of God, and that children are to be baptized who, being offered to God through Baptism, are received into God’s grace. They condemn the Anabaptists, who reject the baptism of children.”

Augsburg Confession, Article IX (1530); tr. F. Bente, Concordia Triglotta (1921).

“Of the Supper of the Lord they teach that the Body and Blood of Christ are truly present, and are distributed to those who eat the Supper of the Lord; and they reject those that teach otherwise.”

Augsburg Confession, Article X (1530); Bente, as above.

Luther wrote the Small Catechism in 1529 for fathers to teach their households. Its answers are a single sentence each.

“What does Baptism give or profit? Answer: It works forgiveness of sins, delivers from death and the devil, and gives eternal salvation to all who believe this, as the words and promises of God declare.”

Luther, Small Catechism, Baptism, second part (1529); Bente, as above.

“What is the Sacrament of the Altar? It is the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, under the bread and wine, for us Christians to eat and to drink, instituted by Christ Himself.”

Luther, Small Catechism, the Sacrament of the Altar (1529); Bente, as above.

In the Large Catechism he defends infant baptism directly: that it “is pleasing to Christ is sufficiently proved from His own work, namely, that God sanctifies many of them who have been thus baptized, and has given them the Holy Ghost” (on infant baptism). On Scripture he held it to be the only rule that judges all teachers, and he kept the three ancient creeds as its faithful summary.

“Protestant” was never only Lutheran. Some of the cities that protested at Speyer later sided with Zwingli and the Swiss, and the Reformed churches have always counted themselves Protestant. So a church can be Protestant without following Luther. But the Reformed confessions agree with Luther against the Anabaptists on the points the questions raise:

• Heidelberg Catechism (1563), Q. 74: infants “as well as adults” are to be baptised.
• Belgic Confession (1561), Article 34: “we detest the error of the Anabaptists.” Article 35 says that in the Supper we receive “the proper and natural body and the proper blood of Christ,” by faith.
• Westminster Confession (1647), 28.4: “the infants of one or both believing parents are to be baptized.”

The Anabaptists were not counted Protestants at the time, and both Lutheran and Reformed authorities persecuted them. The same Diet of Speyer that gave Protestants their name passed an imperial mandate making rebaptism a capital crime, with the evangelical estates agreeing. That is history, recorded here; this page does not admire it, and Dossier 68 covers the Protestant killings of dissenters.

The strongest case for the church in question. Today “Protestant” is commonly used of every Western church that is neither Roman Catholic nor Orthodox; in that sense any free church is Protestant. Such churches share the Reformation’s great affirmations: Scripture as the final authority, salvation by grace through faith in Christ alone. Nobody is bound to agree with Luther on everything; he wrote things, such as his 1543 treatise on the Jews, that almost every Lutheran body has formally repudiated. And many Baptists trace their own descent from the English Separatists rather than from Wittenberg.

The page’s reading. All true, and the member’s question allows for it: the question is about agreeing with Luther “on anything major,” not on everything. A church may fairly use the name in its broad modern sense, but it should say so, and say which parts of the Reformation it keeps. Mocking Luther from the pulpit is a separate matter. It is hard to see how a church that owes its name, its open Bible and its freedom to preach to men who were outlawed for them can make them a joke.

“For I am the LORD, I change not” (Malachi 3:6). “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever” (Hebrews 13:8). “The Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning” (James 1:17). “God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent” (Numbers 23:19).

And the last word: “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:1–2). The faith was “once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 3).

“The Church, having received this preaching and this faith, although scattered throughout the whole world, yet, as if occupying but one house, carefully preserves it.”

Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.10.2 (c. 180); ANF vol. 1.

Irenaeus’s argument against the Gnostics was precisely that their teaching was new: it could not be found in the churches the apostles founded, whose bishops could be listed back to the apostles (3.3.1–3). Vincent’s distinction between progress and alteration (Part V) is the same principle, two and a half centuries later.

The member says “almost 1,800 years.” Checked against when each change entered the practice of whole churches, counting from Pentecost:

So the figure fits “born again” well, and is about three centuries too high for the sacraments. In a church whose own tradition changed later, through a nineteenth-century revival or a twentieth-century movement, the member may be counting from his own church’s history, which is fair.

The strongest counter-case. God did reveal new things over time. The Gentiles were included: “God hath shewed me that I should not call any man common or unclean” (Acts 10:28), a “mystery, which in other ages was not made known … as it is now revealed unto his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit” (Ephesians 3:5). The new covenant “hath made the first old” (Hebrews 8:13). Jesus declared all foods clean (Mark 7:19). Scripture even speaks of God “repenting” (Exodus 32:14; Jonah 3:10). And the Reformers themselves said the Church had erred for centuries.

The page’s reading. Three tests separate those changes from this one. They came through Christ and his apostles, the people Hebrews 1:2 and Ephesians 3:5 name. They came publicly, and were recorded in Scripture, which is how we know of them. And they came before the faith was “once delivered.” A change that arrives fifteen centuries later, through a modern teacher, and reverses what every church held, meets none of the three. The “repenting” texts describe God’s response to repentance, and 1 Samuel 15 puts “it repenteth me” (15:11) and “he is not a man, that he should repent” (15:29) in the same chapter. As for the Reformers, they claimed to be recovering, not reversing (Part V). So the question becomes: is it God who changed, or the teaching?

“He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). “For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord; and ourselves your servants for Jesus’ sake” (2 Corinthians 4:5). “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Galatians 2:20). “For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2).

When Paul states the gospel, its subject is Christ and its verbs are events: “that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day” (1 Corinthians 15:3–4).

The Nicene Creed has twenty-odd verbs about God and almost none about the believer. Christ “for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven … was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate.” The words “for us” are there, and they matter, but the one acting is Christ.

“Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.”

Augustine, Confessions 1.1 (c. 397–400); tr. E. B. Pusey (1838).

For Augustine, the self is made for God. The direction never runs the other way.

This question is covered in detail in three earlier dossiers, and this card does not repeat them.

The strongest counter-case. Christianity is personal. Paul says Christ “loved me, and gave himself for me” in the very verse quoted above (Galatians 2:20). “The LORD is my shepherd” (Psalm 23:1). Luther built his teaching on the Supper around two words, “for you,” which his Small Catechism says call for believing hearts. Preaching that speaks to people’s needs is simply meeting them where they are, as Paul became “all things to all men” (1 Corinthians 9:22).

The page’s reading. The difference is in the direction. In Paul and Luther, “for me” points the self outward to what Christ has done and given: the cross, the word, the Supper. The worry in the member’s question is about the reverse: Christ as the means to the self’s purpose, experience or success. A personal gospel and a gospel about the person are different things.

“Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. … Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God” (John 3:3, 5). The Greek word for “again,” anōthen, can also mean “from above.” Paul: God saved us “by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost” (Titus 3:5). Peter: “baptism doth also now save us” (1 Peter 3:21). Peter also says believers are “born again … by the word of God” (1 Peter 1:23), and John that “whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God” (1 John 5:1).

Water, Spirit, word and faith. No New Testament text ties the new birth to a moment the believer remembers and dates, apart from these.

“Then they are brought by us where there is water, and are regenerated in the same manner in which we were ourselves regenerated. … For Christ also said, Except ye be born again, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

Justin Martyr, First Apology 61 (c. 155); ANF vol. 1.

Justin, writing within about sixty years of John’s Gospel, quotes John 3 to explain baptism. The Creed of 381 confesses “one baptism for the remission of sins.” Luther’s Small Catechism, asked how water can do such great things, answers with Titus 3:5: it is “a washing of regeneration in the Holy Ghost.”

For about seventeen centuries, in East and West, before and after the Reformation, the ordinary answer to “When were you born again?” was the date of one’s baptism.

• 1737WhitefieldGeorge Whitefield’s sermon “The Nature and Necessity of our Regeneration or New-Birth in Christ Jesus” calls the baptised to inward conversion.
• 1760Wesley holds bothJohn Wesley’s sermon “The New Birth” says baptism “is not the new birth,” yet also that “our Church supposes that all who are baptized in their infancy are at the same time born again.” He presses adults who have sinned away that grace to be born again.
• 1830sThe anxious benchCharles Finney’s “new measures,” defended in his Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835), give conversion a place and a moment in the meeting.
• 1950s–1960sThe decisionDecision cards and the sinner’s prayer make the new birth a datable act of the believer; Bill Bright’s Campus Crusade adopts “born-again Christian” as a label.
• 1976The label goes publicJimmy Carter describes himself as “born again”; Chuck Colson’s memoir Born Again becomes a best-seller; Newsweek names 1976 “the year of the evangelical.”

The member’s second sentence is the sharper one: if words can be dramatically redefined, then why have the written word at all? Scripture itself anticipates the problem.

• “Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish ought from it” (Deuteronomy 4:2).
• Paul’s letters contain “some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction” (2 Peter 3:16).
• “If any man shall add unto these things … And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy” (Revelation 22:18–19).

A written word protects meaning only if its words keep the meaning they had for those who first received it. That is what the creeds, the early commentaries and the confessions are for: they are a record of what the words meant. A reader who sets that record aside has no check left except his own sense of what the words ought to mean. That is the definition of eisegesis, reading into the text. The member is not asking for a new definition of “born again.” He is asking why the old one was dropped.

The strongest counter-case. John Calvin, who baptised infants and held a high view of the sacraments, did not think John 3:5 was about baptism: he read “water and Spirit” as one thing, the Spirit who cleanses like water (Commentary on John, 1553). 1 Peter 1:23 ties the new birth to the word, and 1 John 5:1 to believing. In Acts, adults hear, believe and are then baptised. And the revival preachers had a real point: many who were baptised as infants lived as if they had never heard of Christ, and calling them to repentance and faith was right.

The page’s reading. All of this can be granted. The question is not whether faith matters, or whether the baptised need to repent; every historic church says they do. It is whether the new birth was moved from God’s act, in water and word, to the believer’s act, in a remembered decision, and given a new name. Even Wesley, at the head of the revival, did not say that.

“Though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed” (Galatians 1:8). “Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1). “To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them” (Isaiah 8:20).

Deuteronomy goes further. A prophet may give “a sign or a wonder, And the sign or the wonder come to pass,” and still be rejected if he leads the people after other gods: “Thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet” (13:1–3). A true sign does not make a false message true. What is tested is the message, against what God has already said.

And God’s last word is not a new prophet but his Son: “Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:2).

“Yet not every one that speaketh in the Spirit is a prophet, but only if he have the ways of the Lord.”

The Didache 11.8 (late first or early second century); tr. J. B. Lightfoot (1891).

“When, however, they are confuted from the Scriptures, they turn round and accuse these same Scriptures, as if they were not correct, nor of authority … and [assert] that the truth was not delivered by means of written documents, but vivâ voce.”

Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.2.1 (c. 180), on the Gnostics; ANF vol. 1.

In the 160s and 170s, the “New Prophecy” of Montanus claimed fresh revelations from the Spirit that went beyond what the apostles had taught. The churches of Asia examined it in synods and rejected it.

The claim to a private word that outranks the written one is not new. It recurs, and the Church has a long record of testing it.

• c. 157–177MontanusNew revelations, examined and rejected by synods in Asia Minor.
• 1521–1522The Zwickau prophetsMen claiming direct speech from God arrive at Wittenberg. Luther returns from hiding and tests them by Scripture.
• 1534–1535MünsterRevelations claimed by a self-proclaimed prophet-king end in siege and catastrophe; instructive, not typical.

The strongest counter-case. God has not stopped speaking. “Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy” (Acts 2:17). Agabus foretold a famine (Acts 11:28). Paul says “Despise not prophesyings” (1 Thessalonians 5:20), and “as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God” (Romans 8:14). A pastor who has been given a word for his church should speak it.

The page’s reading. This page does not decide whether God gives individual guidance today; Christians disagree about that in good faith. But notice what the pro-prophecy texts say next. “Despise not prophesyings” is followed at once by “Prove all things” (5:21). “Let the prophets speak two or three, and let the other judge” (1 Corinthians 14:29). Every prophecy in the New Testament church is subject to testing, and the test is the word already given. A revelation that overrides Scripture cannot be tested by Scripture, because it has removed the standard. By what standard, then, could it ever be found false? The member’s question has no answer that leaves the revelation above the Bible.