Arthur Margoschis:
Would He Recognise
the Gospel Today?

What this is about

Nazareth is a small town in the Thoothukudi district of Tamil Nadu, named by the Christians who settled it in the early 1800s. It has a cathedral, a hospital, several schools and a college, and most of them exist because of one Englishman who arrived in December 1876 and died there in April 1908 — unmarried, asthmatic, and fifty-five.

In the same district now, a different Christianity is widely preached. It promises wealth. It stages healing from a platform. It treats Baptism and the Lord’s Supper as symbols. And in some churches it baptises again people whose great-grandparents were baptised by his mission.

Anyone is free to change their mind about theology. But a particular claim often travels with the change — that this is a restoration, a recovery of what the missionaries really had. That is a claim about the past, and claims about the past can be checked.

What he built, with dates

He arrived at twenty-four with unfinished medical training and no money of his own. Here is the record.

Every one of those things outlived him. Several are open this morning.

The awkward quotation, put first

If you want to use Margoschis against preachers who ask congregations for money, there is a problem, and here it is. In 1893 he wrote:

Natives of India do not believe in a religion which costs them nothing… When Hindoos become Christians there is no reason why they should think it the duty of the Mission to support them.

Arthur Margoschis, “Christianity and Caste,” Indian Church Quarterly Review, October 1893.

That is a missionary saying Christianity ought to cost the convert money. It was a standard position at the time — churches should fund themselves rather than depend on London forever — but it is not a comfortable sentence for this page, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

What it shows is that he thought Christians should pay for their own church. What it does not show is anything about the other direction. “Pay for your church” and “give to me and God will make you rich” are different sentences, and the second does not follow from the first. On the record, the money at Nazareth ended in a burial fund, a widows’ fund, schools and a hospital that charged a penny. The man died unmarried at fifty-five in the town he worked in.

He believed God heals. He also built a hospital.

Do not make the mistake of thinking the difference is about whether God heals. Margoschis prayed for the sick constantly — his Prayer Book has a whole service for it — and he would have found a Christianity that did not ask God for healing far stranger than one that did.

The difference is what a person who believes that does next. He had incomplete medical training and was the only person for many miles who had any. So he opened a dispensary and ran it for the rest of his life, and dedicated the hospital to Luke, the physician. Prayer and medicine were not rivals. The hospital was the ministry.

And there is a second difference. In the older pattern, healing is a mercy to a sick person. In the newer one it also has a second job: it proves the preacher’s authority. Those pull opposite ways. A mercy is best done cheaply, quietly and for people who cannot repay it. A demonstration needs an audience.

It is worth reading what the New Testament actually tells a sick Christian to do:

Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord.

James 5:14, Authorised Version.

The sick person does not travel. There is no audience. It is elders, plural, not one gifted man. There is no collection. Every practical detail of that verse points away from a stage.

Asking God, and telling God

There is a real difference between these two sentences, and it is not a matter of style.

Look at how the Bible’s own great moments of power are worded. Elijah on Mount Carmel, with fire about to fall in front of thousands, asks: “Hear me, O LORD, hear me.” The three men before the furnace say God is able to deliver them — and then, before they know, say “but if not.” Jesus in the garden says “nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.”

None of this means Christians never speak in the imperative. Peter tells the lame man to rise up and walk. But read what he says first — “silver and gold have I none” — and what he spends the next ten verses insisting on: that the power was not his.

The part that is not guesswork

Most of what anyone says about how a man who died in 1908 would react to television is guessing. This part is not guessing, because he left documents — not a diary, but something better. He was an Anglican priest. To be ordained he signed up to the Articles of Religion. To baptise he read the Book of Common Prayer. Both are short and free.

Baptism is not only a sign of profession, and mark of difference… but it is also a sign of Regeneration or new Birth, whereby, as by an instrument, they that receive Baptism rightly are grafted into the Church.

Article XXVII, Of Baptism, Articles of Religion.

Read the first six words. Not only a sign of profession. The Article names the position that Baptism is a person’s public declaration — and rejects it as insufficient. Then it says what Baptism is instead: an instrument, something God works through.

And this is what he said out loud over the infants of that town, immediately after the water, in the past tense:

Seeing now, dearly beloved brethren, that this Child is regenerate and grafted into the body of Christ’s Church…

We yield thee hearty thanks, most merciful Father, that it hath pleased thee to regenerate this Infant with thy Holy Spirit, to receive him for thine own Child by adoption, and to incorporate him into thy holy Church.

The Ministration of Publick Baptism of Infants, Book of Common Prayer, 1662.

He does not say the water pictures something that happened before. He does not say it will count later if the child turns out sincere. He says is, and hath pleased thee — because the claim is about something God has done.

One Baptism

Every Sunday at Communion, Margoschis said the Nicene Creed. It contains this line:

I acknowledge one Baptism for the remission of sins.

The Nicene Creed, Book of Common Prayer, 1662; the clause dates from 381.

That is not an Anglican peculiarity. Catholics, Orthodox, Lutherans, Anglicans and most Reformed churches say it, and it has meant for sixteen centuries that a valid baptism is not repeated — like a birth. The argument was settled in the fourth century, when Augustine answered a movement that re-baptised converts by saying that Baptism belongs to Christ, not to the minister who performs it and not to the state of the person receiving it. Luther, who overturned a great deal, would not touch this. He wrote a whole treatise about it in 1528, and it is blunt: “It was a correct baptism in itself, regardless of whether it was received rightly… Whoever allows himself to be baptized on the strength of his faith, is not only uncertain, but also an idolator who denies Christ. For he trusts in and builds on something of his own.” If my baptism depends on whether my faith was good enough at the time, my assurance rests on the one thing I can never trust.

The other side, fairly stated

Christians who baptise only believers are not being careless about the Creed, and it is worth understanding their actual argument. On their view, what happens when a person baptised as an infant is baptised as an adult is not a second baptism. It is the first one, because baptism by definition is the immersion of a believer, so the infant ceremony was never baptism at all. They have real texts behind them — every clear baptism in Acts follows a profession of faith — and this page is not arguing that they are wrong about the New Testament.

It is arguing about something narrower: they cannot say that this is what Margoschis believed. He said the Creed and he read the baptismal office, hundreds of times.

What re-baptism says about a family

Take someone in that district whose family has been Christian for five generations because of the mission. Now suppose they are told they were never really baptised, and are baptised again. In the framework the mission worked in, four things have just been asserted at once:

Nobody has to be acting in bad faith for that to be what the practice means. Most people who re-baptise someone believe they are doing them a kindness, and the kindness is real. But the entailment runs in one direction: the inherited Christianity of a community is declared inadequate, and the authority to declare it, and to fix it, sits with the newer ministry.

Where are your fruits?

Eight things a ministry might produce in twenty years. For each, decide whether a stranger could check it next Tuesday without taking anyone’s word for it. Not whether it matters — some of the uncheckable ones matter most.

Check it yourself

Three things. Ninety minutes in total, all free, and between them they settle most of this without any help from this page.

1. 1. Articles of Religion XXV to XXVIII. Ten minutes, four paragraphs. churchsociety.org. Watch for “not only… but rather.”
2. 2. The 1662 service for the baptism of infants, read to the end: Church of England. Twenty minutes. This is the service he used.
3. 3. The Lausanne statement on the prosperity gospel (2008–2009): lausanne.org. Four pages, written by evangelicals, largely from the global South, and blunter than this page is.
4. 4. Martin Luther, Concerning Rebaptism (1528), quoted and discussed at lutheranreformation.org. Short, and the source of the sentences above.
5. 5. And if you want the other side properly: the Second London Baptist Confession of 1689, chapters 28 and 29. Freely available. If you have read items 1 and 2 and not this one, you have read half the argument.