By Jacob D. Gerber
Of the many changes that took place in the church during the English Reformation, the
evolution of the theology and practice of baptism was one of the more significant. Though not
so significant in shaping history as its sacramental cousin, the Lord's Supper, some of the
modifications to the institution of baptism were considered so radical that the innovative found
themselves persecuted. So, in an attempt to map our the changes that took place, this paper will
survey confessions of faith spanning from the dawn of the English Reformation to its dusk,
roughly 150 years later, examining King Henry VIII's 10 Articles (1536), the 39 Articles of the
Anglican Church (1571), the Westminster Confession of Faith of the Presbyterian Church (1646),
and the Second London Confession of the Particular Baptists (1689).1 By examining the different
modes and subjects of baptism, the theological understandings of the efficacy of baptism, and the
confessions serve as useful landmarks as we plot the changes that took place through the
On the first subject, concerning the proper modes and subjects for baptism, there is
surprising unanimity among most of our different denominations. From the 10 Articles,
Protestant churches have largely deferred to the traditional baptismal practice of Christianity,
“That the promise of grace and everlasting life (which promise is adjoined unto this sacrament of
baptism) pertaineth not only unto such as have the use of reason, but also to infants, innocents
and children.”2 The Anglicans commend the baptizing of young children, calling it “most
1 Creedal information taken from Gerald Bray, ed., Documents of the English Reformation (Cambridge, UK:
James Clarke & Co., 1994).
2 10 Articles, Article 2.3.
Gerber 2
agreeable with the institution of Christ.”3 Even the usually contentious Presbyterians follow suit,
stating explicitly that “Not only those that do actually profess faith in and obedience unto Christ,
but also the infants of one or both believing parents are to be baptized.”4 Without a trace of
That there is such agreement on this issue might be surprising, especially in light of the
sentiment expressed by David F. Wright: “There is no doubt in my mind that infant baptism was
the single most substantive constitutive element of the church that the Reformers perpetuated
from the Old Church without explicit biblical authorisation.”5 Nevertheless, the consensus of
Henry, the Anglicans, and the Presbyterians was not shared by everyone within England's
Protestant Christendom in the 16th and 17th centuries. During this time the Baptists arose,
founded mainly in opposition to this nearly-universal baptismal practice. Rather than baptizing
on the basis of the faith of a parent, Baptists insisted that baptism be limited only to those
capable of professing faith in Jesus Christ: “Those who do actually profess repentance towards
God, faith in and obedience to our Lord Jesus, are the only proper subjects of this ordinance.”6
baptized, but the further implication of this belief led Baptists to count their own infant baptisms
as void—that is, they did not believe that they had been baptized at all because they had not been
baptized properly. So, Baptists began (re-)baptizing believers who could now make a credible
profession of faith. Because of the Anabaptists, this practice was already widespread enough to
trouble Henry to the point that he included a specific statement in his 10 Articles mandating his
belief “That children or men once baptized can, nor ought ever to be baptized again.”7 The 39
Articles do not mention the issue, but the Westminster Confession sides with Henry, stating that
The Baptists, however, did not stop with fencing the font—they also had to make the font
a great deal larger because they proclaimed that immersion in water is the only valid method for
baptizing a believer: “Immersion, or dipping of the person in water, is necessary to the due
administration of this ordinance.”9 This innovations was based on Baptists' exegesis of the
biblical passages that discuss baptism as an identification with Christ by symbolizing death,
burial, and resurrection. Presbyterians, however, were not convinced by these arguments, and
they specifically addressed the issue in their confession: “Dipping of the person into the water is
not necessary; but baptism is rightly administered by pouring or sprinkling water upon the
person.”10 A. A. Hodge is helpful in interpreting the non-Baptist position on this issue: “The true
position maintained by other Christians is, that Baptism is a simple and single command to wash
with water, in order to symbolize the purification wrought by the Holy Ghost. Hence the mode
of washing has nothing to do with it.”11 Nevertheless, Baptists to this day practice baptism by
Next we come to the more substantive question concerning baptism within the English
Reformation: What exactly happens in baptism? The 10 Articles are a great place to start, since
they reflect the traditional belief within the church, that baptism “is offered unto all men, as well
infants as such as have the use of reason, that by baptism they shall have remission of sins, and
the grace and favour of God, according to the saying of Christ...; that is to say, Whosoever
thing necessary for the attaining of everlasting life, according to the saying of Christ,”13 For
infants, baptism is especially important “because they be born in original sin, which sin must
needs be remitted; which cannot be done but by the sacrament of baptism, whereby they receive
the Holy Ghost, which exerciseth his grace and efficacy in them, and cleanseth and purifieth
them from sin by his most secret virtue and operation.”14 Essentially, baptism is the only means
The development of this doctrine reflected in the 39 Articles is important, but subtle. The
Anglicans still understand baptism as the way by which God “doth work invisibly in us, and doth
not only quicken, but also strengthen and confirm our Faith in him,”15 but they insert a degree of
separation by using language that understands baptism as a “sign.”16 Because the Presbyterians
essentially carried the same baptismal theology into their own confession,17 I will rely on Hodge
to explain the significance of this new, Calvinistic understanding of the efficacy of baptism:
Every sacrament consists of two elements—(1.) An outward, sensible sign; and (2.)
an inward, spiritual grace, thereby signified. In Baptism the outward sensible sign
is—(1.) Water, and (2.) The water applied in the name of the Triune God to the
person of the subject baptized. The inward, spiritual grace, thereby signified is—
(1.) Primarily, spiritual purification by the immediate personal power of the Holy
Ghost in the soul; and hence, (2.) Secondarily, the indwelling of the Holy Ghost,
hence the union of the baptized with Christ, hence regeneration, justification,
sanctification, perseverance to the end, glorification, etc.—i.e., all the benefits of
This distinction between the outward sign and the inward grace that is signified is important
because the two are not necessarily linked. In other words, baptism by water does not always
save.
order to make it clear that baptism is a vital part of salvation, but that baptism in itself cannot
save:
The grace which is exhibited in or by the sacraments, rightly used, is not conferred
by any power in them; neither doth the efficacy of a sacrament depend upon the
piety or intention of him that doth administer it, but upon the work of the Spirit,
and the word of institution, which contains, together with a precept authorizing the
use thereof, a promise of benefit to worthy receivers.19
In this theology of baptism, the doctrine presented by the 10 Articles would be rejected because it
does not sufficiently distinguish between the sign and the grace signified, but rather conflates the
two so that there can be neither Holy Spirit baptism without water baptism, nor vice versa. This,
in effect, gives more power to the sacraments themselves than they are due. Hodge puts it this
way:
By delineating a distinction between the sign and the signified, Anglicans and Presbyterians took
a step—but only one step—away from the baptismal theology of the medieval church, which
understanding of baptism, the sign and the grace signified are indeed linked under the right
circumstances. That is, baptism as a sign is not always detached from the grace signified, just as
the two are not always attached. The Westminster Confession of Faith carefully states that
“There is in every sacrament a spiritual relation, or sacramental union, between the sign and the
thing signified; whence it comes to pass that the names and effects of the one are attributed to the
other.”21 So, Presbyterians may rightly attribute the baptism of the Holy Spirit to water baptism
(as long as they carefully explain that the two are not automatically linked), and they would be
wrong, by the standards laid out in the Westminster Confession, to suggest that water baptism
plays no part in the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Hodge is “explicit and emphatic” on this:
So, while a deed is not technically an estate, nor is a key technically a house, the former are signs
of the latter and make the latter accessible. In the same way, water baptism is not the baptism of
the Holy Spirit, but water baptism makes the baptism of the Holy Spirit accessible.
the matter afforded to them by the hundred years of reflection they had after the 39 Articles were
written; Anglicans may or may not agree with these statements, but the explicit doctrine is not
included in the official doctrine of the church. First, the Presbyterians note that “Although it be a
great sin to contemn or neglect this ordinance, yet grace and salvation are not so inseparably
annexed unto it as that no person can be regenerated or saved without it, or that all that are
distinguish between the sign and thing signified. “If,” someone might say, “the Holy Spirit
applies his inward grace by the means of the outward sign of water baptism, how would someone
gain the inward grace apart from the outward sign?” The Westminster Confession make clear
that that the Holy Spirit is sovereign over the sign, and not the other way around. So, while the
Spirit would normally use water baptism as the means of conveying saving grace, he is not
Second, Westminster includes this passage: “The efficacy of baptism is not tied to that
moment of time wherein it is administered; yet, notwithstanding, by the right use of this
ordinance, the grace promised is not only offered, but really exhibited and conferred by the Holy
Ghost, to such (whether of age or infants) as that grace belongeth unto, according to the counsel
of God's own will, in his appointed time.”24 The first phrase of this statement has enormous
pastoral implications. If someone who has been duly baptized in the church goes through a
period of rebellion against God, or if someone did not understand the meaning of the baptism
which he or she was receiving, that person would not need to agonize about whether they need to
be baptized again, as though the first baptism did not “take.” Instead, a Presbyterian pastor
would assure the believer that God's grace was not necessarily tied to the moment of baptism, so
that, if the person was not immediately transformed upon reception of baptism, that person need
not worry about being re-baptized; God, in the counsel of his own will, and in his appointed
time, will dispense his baptismal grace as he chooses. Evidence that a baptism did not
immediately take effect is not necessarily an indicator that the baptism was somehow faulty.
The second phrase of the statement speaks to the genuine nature of the promises that God
makes to a person in baptism. God does not withhold the fulfillment of these promises until he
sees some “good faith” effort from the person, as though baptism marked the beginning of a
probationary period. Rather, God genuinely offers, exhibits, and confers grace through his Holy
Spirit, in his appointed time. Taken as a whole, this article of the Westminster Confession
radically reorients baptism away from being a human-centered activity, where a good priest and
a good parishioner is all that is necessary to have an effective baptism—the Confession ties the
efficaciousness of the baptism to the grace of God, not the performance of human beings. Again,
God is sovereign over the sign, not vice versa. The normal way God uses baptism is not the only
way he might use it, and believers need to be sensitive to this fact if we are to regard baptism as
If the Anglicans and Presbyterians together took a single step away from the traditional
doctrine of baptism, Baptists took the next step, describing baptism in a new way: “Baptism is an
ordinance of the New Testament ordained by Jesus Christ to be unto the party baptized a sign of
his fellowship with him in his death and resurrection; of his being engrafted into him; of
remission of sins; and of his giving up unto God, through Jesus Christ, to live and walk in
newness of life.”25 Even a cursory examination of this statement reveals an important distinction
between Baptists and the rest of Christians on the doctrine of baptism: Baptists replace the word
“sacrament” with “ordinance.” Certainly, the Westminster Confession of Faith uses the word
“ordinance,” and both the 10 Articles and the 39 Articles describe baptism as being “ordained”
by Christ, but it is significant that only Baptists refuse to use the word “sacrament” in their
confession. So, all Christians believe that Christ ordained, or commanded, that his church
practice baptism, but Baptists do not officially believe that there is anything sacramental about
baptism. That is, the Second London Confession is implicitly denying that there is a unity
between the sign and the grace signified; instead, the grace comes through the Holy Spirit apart
from the sign, and the sign merely symbolizes what the Holy Spirit has done. Catholics and 10
Article Protestants believe that the sign and the grace signified are inseparably linked; Anglicans
and Presbyterians believe that the sign and the grace signified are often, but not always, linked
according to the sovereignty of God; Baptists, however, believe that there is no actual link
The effect of this verbiage change again reorients the nature of baptism, but in the
opposite direction than did the Westminster Confession of Faith—baptism becomes a human act
of obedience in faith rather than a divine act of grace that humans receive by faith. Stanley
Grenz explains:
Viewing the rites of the church as ordinances rather than sacraments leads many
Baptists, finally, to understand baptism and the Lord's supper as thoroughly human,
rather than divine, acts. Instead of acts in which God imparts grace to the
communicant, baptism and the Lord's supper are seen as occasions for participants
to bear testimony to the spiritual truths symbolized in these rites. In their
commitment to uphold in this manner the language of “ordinances,” Baptists
routinely claim that they are the true heirs to Luther's insistence on the necessity of
faith to the working of a sacrament.26
So, baptism becomes an opportunity for the believer to proclaim his or her faith rather than an
26 Stanley J. Grenz, “Baptism and the Lord's Supper as Community Acts: Toward a Sacramental Understanding of
the Ordinances,” in Baptist Sacramentalism, ed. Anthony R. Cross and Philip E. Thompson (Waynesboro, GA:
Paternoster, 2003), 81-82.
Gerber 10
opportunity for the believer to encounter God in a saving way. God does not convey grace
through baptism, because grace comes entirely through the personal faith of the believer. To be
baptized is not the normal means of salvation, but the fulfilling of a command.
Still, some Baptists today would indeed affirm the sacramental nature of baptism.
Stanley Grenz writes, “Baptists who champion the idea that the church's rites are simply the
divinely-given means whereby believers initially affirm and subsequently reaffirm their faith
typically prefer to speak of these two practices as 'ordinances'. Baptists who see God at work in
the rites of the church, in contrast, tend to be more willing to invoke the older language of
'sacrament'.”27 In fact, Grenz believes that the shift from baptism-as-sacrament to baptism-as-
Viewed from this perspective, we must admit that the preference for the
designation 'ordinance' has not been without ill effects in both theology and church
practice. Beginning in the Age of Reason in which the Baptist movement initially
flourished, many Baptists moved sharply in the direction of reducing baptism and
the Lord's Supper to being 'merely' ordinances, i.e., acts whose chief purposes are
to demonstrate personal obedience to Christ and to bear public witness to an
already completed inward working of God, and hence acts that have no direct
connection to divine grace....Today many Baptists, who share a denominational
name derived from the initiatory rite of the church, view this act as having no real
importance beyond serving as a personal statement of faith that fulfills one of
several requirements for entrance into the local congregation.28
Regardless of what the effects may or may not have been, the Second London Confession sought
to emphasize personal salvation through faith rather than over-reliance on the signs of salvation.
and theologies have on their respective ecclesiologies—that is, how does the way in which a
specific denomination baptizes its parishioners affect the structure, organization, and
27 Ibid., 76.
28 Ibid., 83.
Gerber 11
membership of the church? Before the Reformation, of course, the ecclesiology of the medieval
church was very simple: every person born in Christendom was baptized into the Church, thus
becoming a member of the Church for life, barring some sort of conviction of heresy. As noted
earlier, the medieval church placed a heavy emphasis on the efficacy of baptism, so that when a
person was baptized, that person's baptism actually regenerated them and made him or her into a
Christian—the sign of baptism was indistinguishable from the grace signified. When Henry
ordered the composition of the 10 Articles, this same basic sort of ecclesiology is apparent in the
confessional document. Interestingly, the document places its article on “The sacrament of
baptism” as the second article among the ten. The only article it follows is called “The principal
articles concerning our faith,” which includes only the most basic statements about Christianity,
so that the article on baptism in the 10 Articles is the first substantive article in the confession.
Justification, on the other hand, is the fifth article in the document. From this, I would infer that
the ecclesiology of the 10 Articles understands baptism as the most basic aspect of church
In the 39 Articles, the statement on baptism explicitly links baptism with induction into
the church: “Baptism is not only a sign of profession, and mark of difference, whereby Christian
men are discerned from others that be not christened, 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.”29 Notice that baptism is considered the instrument that grafts Christians into the
church. So, baptism is not merely the act of an individual (i.e., where that individual professes to
believe in Christ), but also the act of the church community, where it brings individuals into its
fold. In some ways, this is similar to the medieval understanding of the church, where those
baptized into Christianity were members of the state church for the rest of their lives, but we
should not forget the major differences between the Anglican understanding of baptism from the
medieval Catholic understanding of baptism mentioned earlier. Thus, entrance into the church is
not synonymous with salvation in the Anglican church, which instead comes through faith
alone.30
The Westminster Confession of Faith clarifies even more this distinction between
entrance into the church and salvation, describing baptism in this way: “Baptism is a sacrament
of the New Testament, ordained by Jesus Christ, not only for the solemn admission of the party
baptized into the visible Church, but also to be unto him a sign and seal of the covenant of grace,
or his ingrafting into Christ, of regeneration, of remission of sins, and of his giving up unto God,
through Jesus Christ, to walk in newness of life.”31 Notice that baptism does indeed mean
admission into the “visible Church,” but that it only serves as a sign and a seal of being ingrafted
into Christ. Again, the language of “sign” differentiates the sign from the thing signified, and the
seal really conveys the promises of the new covenant, but is not itself the new covenant. The
Presbyterian understanding of the “visible Church,” comes from their covenant theology and
relates to the people of Israel in the Old Testament. The Israelites were the covenant community
of God, but not all were actually saved. The same thing is true in the visible Church—it is made
up of the elect and the reprobate alike, but no one can know for certain who is who until the end
of the age when Christ returns to judge the world, when judgment will begin within the
household of God. This distinction plays an important role in the way they catechize, confirm,
and practice church discipline, but to go too deeply into those methods is beyond the scope of
this paper.
Baptist ecclesiology is, as would be expected, the most unique of the four denominations
we are addressing. Most importantly, baptism does not play a sacrament role in the Second
London Confession, as mentioned earlier, so there is no sense in which baptism plays any role in
saving a person. Rather, baptism is symbolic of something that has already happened. So, all
Baptists are Christians first as individuals, and only after they become free-agent Christians can
they become baptized and a part of a church. This is a completely different ecclesiology from
the other confessional documents, where baptism plays a role in conveying salvation and in
ingrafting Christians into the church, especially as the matters concern infants. Theoretically,
then, every baptized member of a Baptist church is a born-again Christian. Since they have no
room in their ecclesiology for unbelieving members (while the other denominations have some
wiggle room for this), Baptists have been very concerned with maintaining the purity of the
Church, and they have thus been more interested, in theory, in maintaining proper church
The early Baptists follow Luther and Calvin in regarding the word purely preached
and the sacraments duly administered as the two irreducible marks of the visible
church, although they, along with other in the Reformed tradition (cf. The Scots
Confession, 1560) expanded and formalized the notae-concept to include discipline
as an indicator of the true visible church. By thus elevating discipline as a
distinguishing mark of the church, the Baptists (along with other puritans and later
pietists) defined the true visible church as a covenanted company of gathered
saints, separated from the world in its organization and autonomy and separating
back to the world through congregational discipline those members whose lives
betrayed their profession.32
Since anyone baptized has already, by definition, professed belief in Christ, the church has the
authority and obligation to practice church discipline to maintain the purity of the church.
32 Timothy George, “The Sacramentality of the Church: An Evangelical Baptist Perspective,” in Baptist
Sacramentalism, ed. Anthony R. Cross and Philip E. Thompson (Waynesboro, GA: Paternoster, 2003), 26.
Gerber 14
and theology of churches in a little over 150 years. Changes arose in the proper modes and
subjects of baptism, in the theology of baptism, and in the implications of baptism upon the
church's ecclesiology. From a very traditional understanding of baptism in Henry VIII's Ten
Articles to a very radical understanding of baptism in the Second London Confession, the