I sat as a visitor in a Baptist church recently and observed their administration of the Lord’s Supper. There were some sweet aspects of the service—perhaps most palpable was the congregation’s friendliness toward my family and evident love for one another. But when one of the pastors described the spiritual significance of what was happening in the Supper, he was emphatic that it was not a “means of grace.” It was strictly to be a time of remembrance of Christ’s work on the cross. While I have read of Baptist churches with such convictions, I had never heard it articulated quite so starkly in person. The pastor indicated briefly to the congregation that the notions of “sacrament” and “means of grace” were Roman Catholic concepts that this church rejected.
As anyone who knows me can attest, I’m as opposed to the papist theology of the mass as a Protestant can be, but this sincere and well-intended pastor had dug up a delicious fruit tree along with the weeds of popery. Sadly, this is not uncommon in Baptist life today, but it was not always so. That’s what Michael Haykin shows in his superb book, Amidst Us Our Belovèd Stands. He explains how the early Baptists were consistent with their Reformed and Puritan fathers in receiving both baptism and the Lord’s Supper as “means of grace,” or as “sacraments.”
The book is short and accessible to lay-readers, and Haykin writes with his typical clarity and infectious love for the source material. Be prepared—what he writes about will make you want to read further. Thankfully, he provides great footnotes for further study, especially in the primary sources.
There are five main chapters, followed by a collection of prayers and a helpful glossary of names. Chapter 1 surveys how early Particular Baptists viewed baptism as a “means of grace,” rather than “a time of remembrance, nothing more” (xiv). He notes that while the First (1644) and Second (1677/1689) London Baptist Confessions used the term “ordinance” rather than “sacrament,” the architects and signatories of these confessions regarded the terms as synonymous and did not reject a sacramental view of either baptism or the Lord’s Supper. He also relates how Baptist convictions on what we might term today “regenerate church membership” influenced not just how they practiced believer’s baptism, but also formed their theology of what baptism is. Haykin rightly identifies that the debates through the centuries are often so bogged down in the proper mode or subject of baptism that we miss the important question about the proper meaning of the rite. He surveys early Baptist polemical tracts, sermons, and hymnody to express the theology that undergirded their theology of baptism.
As an interesting concluding note to the chapter, he laments that contemporary Baptists do not sing about baptism the way our fathers once did. Perhaps some modern Asaph will take it as a challenge to write a fresh, rich congregational hymn that reflects our Baptist convictions about our namesake ordinance.
Chapter 2 treats the early Particular Baptists’ sacramental view of the Lord’s Supper. He concedes that a broad analysis of our history may reveal no consensus view of the Supper. However, he argues that if you zoom in on the first era of the Baptist movement, there is much more unanimity, and it’s a sacramental one. He places these Baptists in the stream of Calvin, believing that “the bread and wine are signs and guarantees of a present reality,” and that “there is conveyed what they [the elements] symbolize, namely Christ” through the channel of the Holy Spirit (30).
After comparing and contrasting the Second London Confession with the Westminster Confession and Savoy Declaration, he concludes that the differences are minimal, and all three confess a Calvinian view of Christ’s spiritual presence at the Table (34). He defends this reading by appealing again to the writings of the major writing theologians and hymnists of this era in Baptist life—men like Hercules Collins, William Kiffen, Benjamin Keach, Joseph Stennett, and Benjamin Beddome—who he argues “stood squarely in the mainstream of Puritan thought” (37).
Haykin ends the chapter by recognizing that a shift occurred in the last quarter of the eighteenth century away from a “richer” Calvinian view toward a “leaner” memorial view that played a relatively minimal role in Chritian piety (51). But why did this shift take place? Haykin suggests that perhaps it was the anticatholic sentiment of the day, or perhaps the creeping in of rationalist ideas, but he lands more solidly on the rise of the global missions movement as a major contributing factor. In other words, robust ecclesiology took a backseat to missiology and evangelism in this period. While we rightly celebrate (and continue) the outward impulse that William Carey and his friends spearheaded, it seems to be undeniable that churches on the frontier placed little emphasis on a ceremony that was deliberately and exclusively for orderly believers.
Chapter 3 addresses the controversy experienced by several waves of Baptists over the question of whether unbaptized people (e.g. those sprinkled as infants) may join in communion in Baptist churches. The first wave of this debate emerged in the 1670s between John Bunyan and William Kiffen. Haykin speaks as a true subject-matter expert when he writes that Bunyan’s “strong commitment to open Communion and open membership put him out of step with most seventeenth-century Baptists, who favored closed Communion and closed membership” (60). Bunyan believed and practiced believer’s baptism, but he held it to be a non-issue for matters of church membership. Haykin surveys Bunyan’s reasons for his minority view, before affirming and defending the majority position articulated by Kiffen. His summary of Kiffen’s Sober Discourse is compelling and, in my opinion, should persuade any reader of the necessity of biblical baptism prior to church membership and the right partaking of the Supper. Haykin notes that the Second London Confession is silent on the matter, though it is addressed in an appendix to the 1688 edition of the document.
The communion controversy revived in the 1770s when John Collett Ryland and Daniel Turner circulated a pseudonymous tract that espoused views similar to Bunyan’s. Abraham Booth responded in a substantive book, An Apology for the Baptists, which, like Kiffen’s work before him, was a decisive shut-down of this minority open-communion view. But this did not deter Robert Hall Jr. from writing in favor of open-communion, to which Joseph Kinghorn penned a thorough response. Haykin concludes the chapter by mentioning another minor dispute about who should administer the Supper, noting that Hercules Collins’s conviction that an ordained elder was the proper administrator was the view that most came to hold, a view later supported by Andrew Fuller (88).
The fourth chapter surveys “the eucharistic piety” of Joseph Stennett, Anne Dutton, and Thomas Steevens. Stennett and Steevens wrote hymns that celebrated the effect of the Supper in the Christian life. Haykin exegetes several choice stanzas from their hymns to show how their doctrinal convictions found artful expression in public and private worship. He also highlights Dutton’s treatise on the Lord’s Supper, which ably expresses the “spiritual intensity” of the Calvinian view in Baptist life (107).
Before the collection of prayers (which make for edifying reading in their own right) and a glossary of key names, Haykin summarizes “Six Theses on Baptism and the Lord’s Supper in the Baptist Tradition,” which helpfully distills the lessons learned from this study (117). In contrast to Bunyan’s undermining of Baptist ecclesiology, he commends the approach of Andrew Fuller who affirmed “unashamedly classical Particular Baptist ecclesial convictions, while at the same time maintaining the warmest of relations with those who disagreed with him on this issue” (119). In this way, Haykin models what faithful historical retrieval can do, as it identifies exemplars of piety, men and women whose steps and missteps have much to teach today’s generation of Baptists.
In conclusion, this book offers excellent chapters on the various issues of Baptist sacramentology, but it’s truly only an introduction to the subject. Interested readers will crave more, especially from the primary sources. In our conflicted technological moment, one blessing is that we are able to access many of these primary sources online in digital form, and some publishers are producing reprints of these valuable works (consider the work of Hanover Press, Particular Baptist Heritage Books, Particular Baptist Press, H&E, and Broken Wharf, to name a few). On your way to reading the primary sources, Haykin’s brief volume is the perfect place to start. Tolle lege.
