Amidst Us Our Beloved Stands: Recovering Sacrament in the Baptist Tradition

By Michael A. G. Haykin

Baptists are sacramental

When it comes to baptism and the Lord's Supper, many Baptists reject the language of sacrament. As a people of the book, the logic goes, Baptists must not let tradition supersede the Bible. So Baptists tend to view baptism and Communion as ordinances and symbols, not sacraments.

But the history of Baptists and sacramentalism is complicated. In Amidst Us Our Beloved Stands, Michael A. G. Haykin argues that many Baptists, such as Charles Spurgeon and other Particular Baptists, stood closer to Reformed sacramental thought than most Baptists today. More than mere memorials, baptism and Communion have spiritual implications that were celebrated by Baptists of the past in sermons and hymnody. Haykin calls for a renewal of sacramental life in churches today—Baptists can and should be sacramental.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lexham Press
• Release date: Apr 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781683595861

Michael A. G. Haykin

Michael A. G. Haykin (ThD, University of Toronto) is professor of church history and biblical spirituality at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and director of The Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies. He has authored or edited more than twenty-five books, including Rediscovering the Church Fathers: Who They Were and How They Shaped the Church.

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Amidst Us Our Belovèd Stands

Recovering Sacrament in the Baptist Tradition

Michael A. G. Haykin

Copyright

Amidst Us Our Belovèd Stands: Recovering Sacrament in the Baptist Tradition

Copyright 2022 Michael A. G. Haykin

Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225

LexhamPress.com

You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission. Email us at [e-mail].

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are the author’s own translation or are from the King James Version. Public domain.

Scripture quotations marked (CSB) are from The Christian Standard Bible, copyright © 2017 by Holman Bible Publishers. Used by permission. Christian Standard Bible® and CSB® are federally registered trademarks of Holman Bible Publishers, all rights reserved.

Portions of chapter 2 appear in Michael A. G. Haykin, One Heart and One Soul: John Sutcliff of Olney, His Friends and His Times (Darlington, UK: Evangelical Press, 1994), 294–300. Used with permission.

Portions of chapter 3 appear in Michael A. G. Haykin, Baptists, the Lord’s Supper, and the Christian Tradition, in Baptists and the Christian Tradition, 205–27. Used with permission.

Print ISBN 9781683595854

Digital ISBN 9781683595861

Library of Congress Control Number 2021941980

Lexham Editorial: Todd Hains, Amy Elliot, Danielle Thevenaz, Jessi Strong

Cover Design: Lydia Dahl, Brittany Schrock

To Roy Paul,

my coworker for the kingdom of God

(Colossians 4:11),

a valued friend and colleague

CONTENTS

PREFACE

IBLESSED FOOD

Baptism as a means of grace in the Particular Baptist movement

IITHIS SWEET REPAST

The Lord’s Supper in Baptist life and thought during the long eighteenth century

IIITHE RIGHT WAY OF WORSHIP

Baptist controversy over open and closed Communion

IVTHE NEAREST APPROACH TO HIS GLORIOUS SELF

The eucharistic piety of Joseph Stennett, Anne Dutton, and Thomas Steevens

VSIX THESES

On Baptism and the Lord’s Supper in the Baptist Tradition

PRAYERS

GLOSSARY OF NAMES

PREFACE

In 1866, C. H. Spurgeon (1834–1892), well on his way to becoming something of a Dissenting icon, published a hymnal for his growing congregation in south London. Entitled Our Own Hymn-book. A Collection of Psalms and Hymns for Public, Social, and Private Worship, it contained a cornucopia of Evangelical hymnody, including a few of Spurgeon’s own creation.¹ Among the latter is what has proven to be Spurgeon’s most enduring hymn, a Communion piece titled Jesu’s Presence Delightful:

Amidst us our Belovèd stands,

And bids us view His piercèd hands;

Points to His wounded feet and side,

Blest emblems of the Crucified.

What food luxurious loads the board,

When at His table sits the Lord!

The wine how rich, the bread how sweet,

When Jesus deigns the guests to meet!

If now with eyes defiled and dim,

We see the signs, but see not Him,

O may his love the scales displace,

And bid us see Him face to face!

Our former transports we recount,

When with Him in the holy mount,

These cause our souls to thirst anew,

His marr’d but lovely face to view.

Thou glorious Bridegroom of our hearts,

Thy present smile a heaven imparts:

Oh lift the veil, if veil there be,

Let every saint Thy beauties see.²

This hymn’s emphasis on the spiritual presence of Christ at the Table is quite remarkable for a late nineteenth-century Baptist author, for the vast majority of Baptist leaders in that era held that the Supper was a time of remembrance, nothing more.³ But Spurgeon had long nourished his heart and mind on seventeenth-century Puritan and eighteenth-century Baptist authors, for whom the Lord’s Table was above all a place where God’s people had sweet fellowship with their Savior who was spiritually present with them.

Two of the four essays in this book, chapters 2 and 4, detail this Baptist eucharistic piety that nourished Spurgeon’s soul. The third essay, chapter 3, deals with another aspect of the Lord’s Table, namely, the question of who might properly partake of the Table in a Baptist church. The answer to this question turned out to be extremely controversial, as can be seen from the pamphlet debate between William Kiffen (1616–1701)⁴ and John Bunyan (1628–1688). The controversy flared up again at the close of the long eighteenth century and was a major issue on and off throughout the nineteenth century. But the way that two early participants, namely Andrew Fuller (1754–1815) and John Ryland Jr. (1753–1825), handled their disagreement over this issue is deeply instructive.⁵ These three essays have as their immediate origin the lectures that were presented at The William R. Rice Lecture Series at Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary, on March 20, 2020. The circumstances of their delivery were somewhat unique in that the coronavirus pandemic prevented them being given in person. I was thus thankful for the Zoom technology that enabled me to give them. I am extremely grateful to Pastor Ben Edwards, dean of Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary, for the invitation to deliver these lectures. It was a distinct privilege. I am also indebted to Ryan Meyer, administrative assistant at Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary, for his help in the delivery of the lectures.

The initial essay, chapter 1, was crafted much earlier and parts of it have appeared in a number of places, most notably my Kiffen, Knollys, and Keach: Rediscovering our English Baptist Heritage.⁶ In this essay I set the scene for the discussion of Particular Baptist eucharistic thought. The earliest Particular Baptist churches were baptismal communities in the truest sense of this term: the baptism of believers by immersion was at the heart of their self-understanding. The emphasis on the proper subjects of baptism was a product of their Congregationalist matrix, while the stress on immersion as being essential is tied to the Particular Baptist understanding of the meaning of baptism as identification with Christ in his death, burial, and resurrection. It was this twin concern that undergirded the Particular Baptist approach to the relationship between baptism and the Lord’s Supper: given the vital importance of the act of believer’s baptism, it is only proper to require it as a prerequisite to the Lord’s Supper. Of course, this only deepened the opinion of many that, as the American Particular Baptist Isaac Backus (1724–1806) once put it, the Baptists were the most rigid of all sects.⁷

In keeping with a number of other essays and monographs that I have written, these essays constitute an exercise in historical ressourcement. It is readily apparent to many within the Baptist tradition that our practice of the Lord’s Supper, and to a somewhat lesser extent, of baptism, is not truly central to our experience of being Baptist.⁸ Indeed, beginning in the early nineteenth century many within this tradition have proudly rejected any hint of these ordinances being a means of grace or, to put it another way, sacramental events in which God is acting in the life of the believer. Ironically, throughout the twentieth century to the present day many of these very same churches, at least in North America, have been ardent about the practice of the altar call, which effectively usurps the roles assigned to baptism and the Table in classical Baptist ecclesiology. Truly natura abhorret vacuum! As the essays in this book will patently show, however, a different mentality prevailed in the Baptist tradition in its seventeenth-century origins and throughout most of the long eighteenth century. While the term sacrament was not usually employed, these Baptists were nonetheless deeply sacramental in their approach to doing church.⁹ And it is this author’s hope that this earlier tradition will be revived in our needy and trying times.

I have dedicated this small work to Dr. Roy Paul, my research assistant at the Canadian office of the Andrew Fuller Center. I have deeply appreciated Roy’s assiduity in his work and ministry at the Fuller Center, part of which has recently involved reading over the initial draft of these lectures.

DUNDAS, ONTARIO

JULY 27, 2020

on my daughter Victoria’s birthday

Preached this afternoon on the dimensions of the love of Christ.

Great delight at the Lord’s Supper.

Oh, to know more of and live upon Christ!

He must be our daily bread. Sweet pleasure tonight.

ANDREW FULLER

JOURNAL ENTRY FOR OCTOBER 31, 1784

I

BLESSED FOOD

Baptism as a means of grace in the Particular Baptist movement

Spirituality lies at the very core of English Puritanism, that late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century movement that sought to reform the Church of England and, failing to do so, mainly splintered into a trio of denominations—Presbyterian, Independent or Congregationalist, and Particular (i.e., Calvinistic) Baptist.¹ Whatever else these Puritans may have been—social, political, and ecclesiastical reformers—they were primarily men and women intensely passionate about piety and Christian experience. By and large united in their Calvinism, Puritans believed that every aspect of their spiritual lives came from the work of the Holy Spirit. They had, in fact, inherited from the continental Reformers of the sixteenth century, and from John Calvin (1506–1564) in particular, a constant and even distinctive concern with the person and work of the Holy Spirit.² Benjamin B. Warfield (1851–1921), the distinguished American Presbyterian theologian, can actually speak of Calvin as preeminently the theologian of the Holy Spirit.³ And of his Puritan heirs and their interest in the Spirit Warfield had this to say:

The formulation of the doctrine of the work of the Spirit waited for the Reformation and for Calvin, and … the further working out of the details of this doctrine and its enrichment by the profound study of Christian minds and meditation of Christian hearts has come down from Calvin only to the Puritans. [I]t is only the truth to say that Puritan thought was almost entirely occupied with loving study of the work of the Holy Spirit, and found its highest expression in dogmatico-practical expositions of the several aspects of it.⁴

Alongside this emphasis on the Spirit, however, the Puritans were also assured that, as the Elizabethan Puritan Richard Greenham (1540–1594) once put it, we drawe neere to God by meanes.⁵ By this Greenham, speaking for his fellow Puritans, meant that there are various godly activities or spiritual disciplines that the Holy Spirit employs to help Christians grow to maturity in Christ. On one occasion Greenham identified three vital spiritual disciplines: The first meanes [of grace] is prayer.… The second meanes is hearing of his word.… The third meane whereby we draw neere, is by the Sacraments.⁶ A later Puritan author, John Preston (1587–1628), recognized other key disciplines such as meditation, conference, the communion of saints, particular resolutions to [do] good.⁷ Given the prominence of the Spirit in their thinking, the Puritans never for a moment believed that these means of grace or spiritual disciplines were sufficient in and of themselves to nourish the soul of the believer or sustain the inner life of a congregation. Only the Holy Spirit was sufficient for that. Yet, the Puritans were also certain that to seek the Spirit’s strength apart from such means was both unbiblical and foolish. Benjamin Keach (1640–1704), the most significant Particular Baptist theologian of the late seventeenth century, put it this way in 1681 when, in a direct allusion to the Quakers, who dispensed with the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, he declared:

Many are confident they have the Spirit, Light, and Power, when ’tis all meer Delusion.… Some Men boast of the Spirit, and conclude they have the Spirit, and none but they, and yet at the same time cry down and villify his blessed Ordinances and Institutions, which he hath left in his Word, carefully to be observed and kept, till he comes the second time without Sin unto Salvation.… The Spirit hath its proper Bounds, and always runs in its spiritual Chanel, viz. The Word and Ordinances, God’s publick and private Worship.⁸

Keach’s fellow Particular Baptist Hercules Collins (1646/7–1702) similarly asserted that if God have a Church in all Ages, he must have Ordinances there, because no Church of Christ can be constituted without them.⁹

Other Puritans who were Presbyterians or Independents would have wholeheartedly agreed with this coupling of ordinance and Spirit, though their preferred term was sacrament instead of ordinance. Neither of