How, then, does he affect our twentieth-century debate about the inward and outward baptism? He is understated, to the point of being weak, on the role of the Holy Spirit. Sacraments are a prop to faith, secondary to the covenant of grace itself. Provided that faith is seen as the gift of God and located in a living way through the Christian community down the ages, then the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s table are secure. But once that faith migrates into the individual choice of the believer, the sacraments become visual aids and little more. The lasting legacy of Perkins is that he wanted to hold the outward and inward baptism together. The way he did it may not be entirely convincing, but when he says in his commentary on Galatians that ‘the best commentary to a man’s own self is his own baptism’, that inward baptism is challenging and vibrant beyond all words – and experiences.
4
Sharing in the Life of God
Richard Hooker (1554–1600)
Boston Parish Church is one of the largest churches in Britain. It was built in the fourteenth century and the tower is 270 feet high. It is an unmistakable feature of the skyline and because of the flat countryside of fenland Lincolnshire, it can be seen for miles around. As the visitor enters the church the first sight to be seen is a large font, set on a series of steps, designed by the famous Victorian architect, Augustus Pugin, and given to the church in 1853.
The font has been put to all different kinds of uses. It has been used for dramatic moments in Christmas Carol services, at the Easter Vigil, and for occasions during special services when the choir gathers round to sing from it. There is so much space that the font makes its own impact. At Christmas, the crib has often been placed there, so making the point that the rebirth of the human race began – in a sense – with the birth of Jesus as the Christ in Bethlehem.
I have celebrated many baptisms there. At first, it felt rather strange, standing up so high, and I do remember one occasion when I almost slipped as I came down the steps with a young baby immediately after baptizing him. I have heard many criticisms of this particular font. Some have said it is too large. Others have said it is out of date, presumably because the architect was Pugin. Others again have said that it is ugly. But no-one can doubt its sheer impressiveness, surrounded as it is by such an open Perpendicular Gothic interior.
Not to put too fine a point on it, one simply cannot avoid this font. It gets in the way. And one of the reasons why it has aroused comment over the years is that it poses in its own way the question, what are we to do with our fonts? Is the font a kind of expression of God? God either gets in the way or he has moved around his church-buildings to suit passing fashions, like a kind of convenience food. These are questions that have a bearing on what we do with church interiors today and they were questions that were alive in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well.
If the font is a silent expression of God in our midst, then perhaps the question needs to be asked, how do we share in the life of God in the first place? If we come to be washed at the font, and go on to feed at the altar, and if we keep going back to that font every time we witness a baptism, then the font’s very ‘God-likeness’ becomes its own question.
There are three answers that are supplied by the New Testament, and in each case they have baptismal overtones. First of all, there is the image of being part of the Body of Christ. ‘Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it’ (I Cor. 12:27).
To be part of the Body of Christ is not just to be part of a club of like-minded people – and very often they are not like-minded at all! – but it is to share at the deepest level in the common humanity of other people, and to do this in Christ. For the deeper that one enters into a relationship with someone else, the more fully we are tested, and faced with our own humanity. That is what it means to be part of Christ’s Body. Christ identifies himself with us so fully that we are able to identify ourselves with him. Moreover, this ‘Body of Christ’ exists in history, but in a way that is far deeper than the mere historical manifestation of that Body in a particular place and at a particular time. Whenever I presided at a service of baptism when I served as a priest in Boston in the late 1970s, I was forcefully reminded of this truth simply by facing in any direction away from the font as I stood there. My voice echoed hither and thither in that vast nave. I couldn’t fail to get a strong sense of a Body of Christ that reached down through history, not only back into the past but forward into the future.
The second image takes us away from sharing to the more allusive one of abiding. We come across this word no fewer than seven times at a particular stage in the Fourth Gospel, when Christ describes himself as ‘the true vine’. Shortly after he describes himself as the true vine, he says, ‘Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me’ (John 15:4). Just as there is mutuality in the image of sharing, so there is with abiding. To abide is to remain, to rest, and it has resonances of permanence rather than activity. It is as if Christ were saying to his followers, I am the source of your life, and I am ready to stay with you forever. Every time I stood at that font, I had, too, a strong sense of that abiding presence, not just because of the size and proportions of Pugin’s design, but because of the sanctity of the building and its atmosphere. Visitors would come and go, individual members of the Body of Christ vary from one generation to another, but this church building would go on and on – or at least for as long as we could keep it up!
The third image is repentance – ‘repent, and believe in the gospel’ (Mark 1:15). For many people, repentance is a big word that might mean saying sorry. But it means much more than that. At so many baptism services down the ages, the candidate or the sponsors have been asked, ‘Do you repent of your sins?’ The word ‘repent’ was often accompanied by a dramatic physical gesture which symbolized exactly what the word originally meant. In ancient times, candidates for baptism would often face west and renounce the deeds of darkness, and then turn through 180 degrees to the east to profess their faith in Christ. To repent is to undergo a change of mind – not in the intellectual sense, but in the sense of the whole person going through that turning round, that realignment, that re-focusing, that renewal, which is itself a work of God, not our own. So many times when I stood at that font, I looked west through the huge space under the tower, and imagined the wealthy Hanseatic merchants who built the place and the kind of world they inhabited. Then I turned east, and looked up through the even vaster spaces of the nave towards the altar, and had in my mind’s eye the Lord Christ, accepting that repentance, daily, weekly, yearly, by the century.
Right at the end of the life-time of the New Testament, one of the writers expresses all these truths in the rich theological expression – ‘partakers of the divine nature’ (2 Pet.1:4). And of all the writers in the seventeenth century, this approach to sacraments in general and baptism in particular is most strongly exemplified by Richard Hooker.1
From a literary and theological point of view, the contrast between Perkins and Hooker could not be greater. Perkins’ prose is plain and ordinary, whereas Hooker’s is more literary in style, and less easily accessible. Perkins’ career was primarily as a preacher, whereas Hooker forsook the Temple Church in London, where he was locked in controversy with his Puritan colleague Walter Travers,2 in order to become a country parish priest, where he could write.
Hooker was an Elizabethan in every sense of the word. He was born just four years before the accession of Elizabeth and died on 2 November 1600, just a few years before her death. Before his time at the Temple Church in London, he had been an aspiring scholar at Oxford, where he befriended Edwin Sandys, son of the Bishop of London, and George Cranmer, nephew of the former Archbishop. It was John Whitgift, now Archbishop of Canterbury, who ensured his appointment as Master of the Temple in 1585, and it is likely that Hooker had been identified as a rising star. But he soon tired of being centre-stage in London, with a colleague like Walter Travers who was so different in every way. The last two posts he held were as Sub-Dean of Salisbury and Rector of Boscombe in 1591, and from there he moved only four years later to Bishopsbourne in Kent in the Canterbury diocese. His great work The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity flowed from his pen during these