A Calvinist friend once asked me what writing projects in history currently occupied my attention. I hesitated to answer as I was certain he would find my present historical focus quite outré. But answer I did (and I was not wrong about the initial response).

I told him that I was writing a variety of essays on the theology of color — not the question of race, I was quick to add, but actual colors. By that point, I had written essays on the colors white, red, and pink, and was hard at work on the color green in the literary corpus of Jonathan Edwards, who believed that green was God’s favorite color. My friend looked at me with some amazement, and I could sense from his face that he thought my interests quite odd.

This small exchange made me realize that for far too many, being a Calvinist was mainly about soteriological matters and not the glory of God in the entirety of life.

Studying in the Spirit

My conversion took place in the mid-1970s in a North American evangelical world convulsed by what has come to be called the Charismatic Movement. I encountered the movement early in my Christian life, and it gave me an abiding interest in the person and work of the Holy Spirit. It should not be surprising, then, that when it came to my doctoral dissertation (written at Wycliffe College and the University of Toronto), I could think to study only something in the realm of the Spirit (pneumatology).

Ultimately, my thesis dealt with what some might regard as an arcane topic: the Pneumatomachian controversy in the fourth century, which was centered on debates about the deity of the Holy Spirit. Specifically, I examined how Scripture shaped the way that two fourth-century Greek theologians, Athanasius of Alexandria (c.299–373) and Basil of Caesarea (c.330–379), thought and wrote about the Spirit’s godhead.

When I graduated from the University of Toronto with my doctorate in 1982, I was extremely blessed to be hired to teach church history at Central Baptist Seminary in Toronto.

What Five Points?

Ted Barton, the academic dean responsible for hiring me, was a tremendous mentor in the first few years of my teaching. When he interviewed me, he asked me, among other topics, what I thought of the “five points of Calvinism.” Amazingly, despite the fact I had earned a doctorate in church history, I had no particular knowledge of these doctrines.

I told Ted that if he let me know what they were, I would be able to answer his question. He said that was fine and quickly passed on to another question without giving me any particulars about these doctrines. The school had been having some problems with Calvinism, and in Ted’s mind, it must have been a good thing that I had no idea what these doctrines were! Within a few years, though, the doctrines had become a very familiar part of my Christian world.

During the 1980s, as I read Puritan authors like John Owen (1616–1683) and Banner of Truth books like The Grace of God in the Gospel, I came to a careful consideration of Reformed truth. Most significantly, at some point in the academic year 1985–1986, I encountered the Calvinistic writings of the Particular Baptist Andrew Fuller (1754–1815).

Fuller not only deepened my understanding of Calvinistic truths about salvation, but he also deepened my commitments as a Baptist (some who become Calvinists gravitate to paedobaptism). He did this by showing me, first of all, that Baptists had a rich heritage: his literary corpus is a robust collection of spirituality, rich in Christ-centeredness and crucicentric, ardent about holiness and the importance of the affections, and aflood with love for the lost, family, and friends.

I had questioned why on earth God had saved me among Canadian evangelical Baptists whose heritage seemed to be limited to an embattled and fissiparous Fundamentalism. Fuller, whose thought drew from the minds of men like John Owen and Jonathan Edwards, showed me that Baptists had a far deeper lineage than the twentieth century.

Ideas in Stone and Color

Most importantly, though, Fuller’s overriding passion to live his life full-out for the glory of God has been central to my own spiritual formation as a Christian and as a historian. For me, that passion for the glory of God in all of life has involved a keen interest in art and architecture.

Now, while Fuller helped me understand that all of life must be lived for the glory of God, he himself could be quite dismissive of various fields of human endeavor. For instance, on one occasion, a friend — probably James Hinton (1761–1823), the Baptist minister of Oxford — was taking Fuller around Oxford University and showing him some of its architectural features. After a while, Fuller apparently turned to his friend and suggested that they return to Hinton’s dwelling to discuss justification by faith, which was far more interesting to the Baptist pastor-theologian.

Well, I think Fuller was wrong to be so dismissive of architecture, which has rightly been described as ideas in stone. As a Reformed church historian, my interests, research, and writing need to take in all of life and not just theology proper, for the simple fact that the entire universe and its various elements are of deep concern to their Creator. He made them and moment by moment sustains them. A growing philosophical interest in the subject of aesthetics helped to make me aware that, in addition to questions of truth and goodness (on which Reformed thinkers and theologians have spent so much time and effort), we who confess divine sovereignty in every sphere of life need to spend energy and time reflecting on the impress of divine beauty on our world.

And here, Jonathan Edwards, the theological mentor to Andrew Fuller, has been enormously helpful. His linkage of the Holy Spirit to divine beauty brought together my interest in things pneumatological with this fascination with created beauty and color — even if I dissent from his estimation of God’s favorite color!

And as to God’s favorite color, that glorious refraction of white light called the rainbow might well offer a clue.

Baptists were birthed in the matrix of Puritanism, that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century movement of reform and renewal. The genesis of Puritanism between the 1560s and the 1580s was deeply intertwined with questions of worship and polity. In fact, Puritanism, in its various ecclesial manifestations, was confident that there was a blueprint for polity and worship in the New Testament. As we will see, these concerns were bequeathed to their Baptist offspring.

‘Apostolic Primitive Purity’

Baptists began their existence in the first half of the seventeenth century — the General (Arminian) Baptists emerging in the 1610s and the Particular (Calvinistic) Baptists appearing some 25 years later — with a passion for going back to the apostolic model that they believed was taught in the Scriptures.

One of the major architects of the Particular Baptist cause, William Kiffen (1616–1701), explained in 1681 why he became a Baptist in the late 1630s/early 1640s:

[I] concluded that the safest way [for me spiritually] was to follow the footsteps of the flock (namely that order laid down by Christ and his Apostles, and practised by the primitive Christians in their times) which I found to be that after conversion they were baptised, added to the church, and continued in the apostles’ doctrine, fellowship, breaking of bread, and prayer; according to which I thought myself bound to be conformable.1

In other words, Kiffen became a Baptist because he was convinced that believer’s baptism and congregational church governance were indisputably part of the blueprint of New Testament polity.

Ten years later, Hercules Collins (d. 1702), a key Baptist leader in London, made the exact same point in a polemical piece on baptism when he stated that his intent was “to display this sacrament in its Apostolic primitive purity, free from the adulterations of men.”2 In fact, he asserted, it would violate his conscience were he to baptize an infant.3

The Believer’s ‘Great Pattern’

Given the uniqueness of believer’s baptism on the ecclesial scene of Stuart England — of the various church groups, only the Baptists restricted baptism to believers — it is not surprising that they had to defend the biblical legitimacy of their position time and again in this era. One scholar reckons the number of tracts and treatises written on this subject during the seventeenth century to be more than a hundred.4

“In being baptized as believers, Christians are following the example of Christ, their ‘great pattern.’”

One of the most popular of these tracts was John Norcott’s (d. 1676) Baptism Discovered Plainly & Faithfully, According to the Word of God (1672). In the relatively small compass of 56 pages, Norcott’s tract sets forth the standard seventeenth-century Baptist positions on the proper subjects of baptism (believers), the correct mode (immersion), and the meaning of baptism (primarily identification with Christ in his death, burial, and resurrection).5 Among his arguments in favor of believer’s baptism is his emphasis that in being baptized as believers, Christians are following the example of Christ, their “great pattern.”6

Hercules Collins maintained the same. He argued that “Christ was baptized about thirty years of age, as our example.”7 And at the close of the Stuart era, the Seventh-Day Baptist leader Joseph Stennett I (1663–1713) made the same argument in the following extract from one of his baptismal hymns:

Lord, thy own precept we obey,     In thy own footsteps tread,We die, are bury’d, rise with Thee     From regions of the dead.8

For Baptists, Christ’s baptism was the pattern that the believer, in being baptized, was following in obedience.

‘Forced Worship Stinks’

Believer’s baptism also became tied to religious liberty. In infant baptism, the child had no choice over what was transpiring. Some saw this as a symbol of an oppressive state church. Thus, its counterpart, the baptism of believers, became a symbol of religious freedom.

“The baptism of believers became a symbol of religious freedom.”

Consider the testimony of Roger Williams (1603/4–83), who became a Puritan during his studies for the Anglican ministry at Cambridge and who, in 1630, sailed to Massachusetts. During the long voyage, Williams had time to do an intensive study of New Testament church polity and its relationship to governing authorities. He came to the conviction that the magistrate may not punish any sort of breach of the first table of the Ten Commandments, such as idolatry, Sabbath-breaking, false worship, and blasphemy. Moreover, he was certain that every individual should be free to follow his own convictions in religious matters, for, in his words, “forced worship stinks in the nostrils of God.”9

During the 1630s, Williams came into conflict with the Massachusetts authorities regarding his perspective on religious liberty. Within a couple of years, Williams and some like-minded friends were driven out of Massachusetts and founded the colony of Rhode Island. And though there is no indication that their disagreement with the Massachusetts authorities concerned believer’s baptism, they had adopted Baptist views, and the church they founded in Rhode Island became First Baptist Church in America. Believer’s baptism thus became tied to affirming religious liberty.

Recovering a Lost Pattern

Becoming Baptist in the seventeenth century was thus a radical act politically. Not that those who did become Baptist would necessarily have thought of the act primarily in those terms. For them, it was a step of obedience to Christ and a way of recovering a lost pattern of discipleship. Over the next century, Baptist commitment to this ordinance in its original design continued to distinguish the Baptists from other evangelical bodies in the British Isles. In fact, it was not until the twentieth century that one finds other Christian communities embracing the baptism of believers by immersion.

Those who underwent this rite in the decades following the era addressed in this small essay displayed a willingness to be marginalized in British society. In fact, pick up most recent studies of eighteenth-century British society, and there is nary a mention of the Baptists. Such studies convey the impression that the existence of this Christian community was little more than a blip on the radar of eighteenth-century history.

As the biblical record of divine activity in antiquity bears witness, however, such has often been the case. The God of our Baptist forebears delights in using those considered small and insignificant by the intellectual elites and in employing means, like the immersion of believers, regarded with utter disdain by the surrounding culture.

The question of the origins of the Christian tradition called Baptist has been, and to some extent still is, a much-debated issue. For example, when W.H. Whitsitt (1841–1911), the third president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, argued in the late 1890s that the earliest Baptists in both England and America did not practice immersion, he set in motion a controversy within the Southern Baptist Convention that eventuated in his dismissal as president.

Whitsitt’s leading opponents held to a position known as Landmarkism, of which a cardinal tenet was the assertion that there had been an unbroken line of baptisms by immersion (sometimes colloquially called “The Trail of Blood”) that went back to Christ and that were necessary for the existence of true churches. In other words, there have always been Baptists, it was alleged — though they might have used different nomenclature, such as Anabaptist in the sixteenth century or Waldensian in the late medieval era.

Whitsitt lost his presidency over this issue of Baptist origins, but his argument against Landmarkism was sound. In the past century or so, few historians have found Landmarkism to be a credible explanation of Baptist origins. The two major explanations today link modern-day Baptists to the continental Anabaptists of the Reformation era or the Puritan renewal movement within the Church of England.

Anabaptist or Puritan?

There are certainly similarities between the Baptists and the Anabaptists: both emphasize believers’ churches and credobaptism, and both are critical of church-state unions. But there are also significant differences. Some of the Anabaptist communities were fundamentally unorthodox on some basic issues like the Trinity and the person of Christ. The mainstream Anabaptist movement — that is, the Mennonites and the Hutterites — is strongly committed to pacifism, a perspective that has never been a significant part of the Baptist tradition. The Sabbatarian ethos of the Baptist movement is largely absent from Anabaptism. Finally, there are next to no major organic historical links between the continental Anabaptists of the sixteenth century and the English Baptists of the seventeenth century.

On the other hand, the ties between Puritanism — which emerged in the 1560s as a renewal movement within the Anglican state church — and the Baptists — who arose as General (i.e., Arminian) Baptists in the mid-1610s and as Particular (i.e., Calvinistic) Baptists in the late 1630s — are patent and multiple. All the leading Baptists of this era — men like John Smyth (d. 1612) and William Kiffen (1616–1701) — began their careers as Puritans. Like the Puritans, most of the Baptists of this era were convinced that the Lord’s Day is the Sabbath of the new covenant. And Baptists, like their Puritan contemporaries, wholeheartedly believed that a political life could be a Christian’s vocation. Finally, most of the Baptists of this era firmly rejected any connection to the continental Anabaptists.

Calvinistic Seedbed

The forebears of most modern-day Anglophone Baptists are the Particular Baptists, who emerged from the womb of English Puritanism in the 1630s. For me personally, these Puritan origins of the Baptist movement offer the best historical explanation of where the tradition of my spiritual forebears came from. I do not assert this because I, like those seventeenth-century Particular Baptists, am a Calvinist. I affirm it because the historical data leads me to this conclusion.

“The forebears of most modern-day Anglophone Baptists are the Particular Baptists.”

With the rise of interest in Reformed theology among evangelicals since the 1960s, it is not surprising to find similar interest in Baptist circles. In the last sixty years, there has developed a distinct movement of Reformed Baptist churches (though the term “Reformed Baptist” is a one that was rarely, if ever, used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) as well as similar-minded congregations within such Baptist bodies as the Southern Baptist Convention and the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches in Canada. Prior to this rise of interest in and commitment to Reformed thinking among these North American Baptist communities, the regnant theology in many of them was a mixture of revivalism, non-Calvinistic dispensationalism, and pragmatism.

When these Reformed or Calvinistic Baptists began to ask about the origins of the Baptist movement, they were excited to find Calvinism and Reformed theology as a seedbed of the Baptist tradition. But some Baptists, who sought to retain what had become traditional Baptist practice and thinking during the twentieth century, reacted to this new stress on Calvinist origins by asserting the non-Calvinistic Anabaptist link. And thus, the discussion of historic Baptist origins became shaped by modern-day concerns, a good example of what historians have come to call presentism — namely, the use of the past to validate present-day positions. But as noted already, the investigation of the origin of the Baptist movement must be directed by the evidence from the seventeenth century. And to this historian, that evidence is patent: the English-speaking Baptist movement has its origins in Puritanism. (See, for example, B.R. White’s The English Baptists of the Seventeenth Century.)

Why Does It Matter?

What, though, is the importance of this assertion about Puritan origins? Does it make any difference to modern-day Baptist life and thought? For some, this determination of genesis means that as it was in the beginning, so it should be now. For this way of thinking, the theological position hammered out by the seventeenth-century Particular Baptists — usually taken to be epitomized in the Second London Confession — is the gold standard by which all present-day Baptist thought must be judged.

“To this historian, that evidence is patent: the English-speaking Baptist movement has its origins in Puritanism.”

Now, this idea of going back to the past for modern orientation was a key element in the Reformation. The watch cry of ad fontes, “back to the sources,” was an important principle that directed the efforts of the Reformers. Yet as the heirs of the Reformation discovered, this principle did not mean that one tradition could claim to be the true representation and repristination of the apostolic era. Was the purest form of the church to be found among the Scottish Presbyterians or the French Huguenots or the Calvinist state church of Hungary? The quintessential Puritan Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) was forced to recognize this truth when he found his New Model Army facing the Scottish Presbyterian military on the battlefield. As he asked the Scottish Calvinists, “Is all religion wrapped up in . . . any one form?”

Personally, I think the heirs of the seventeenth-century Particular Baptists — the Baptist men and women of the long eighteenth century, figures like Anne Steele (1717–1778), Caleb Evans (1737–1791), Andrew Fuller (1754–1815), and Maria de Fleury (fl. 1770s–1790s) — are extremely helpful here. While they clearly treasured the confessional legacy that came from the lives and thought of their seventeenth-century forebears, they certainly did not believe themselves to be restricted solely to repeating the arguments and formulations of a bygone era. They lived in challenging times of revolution — intellectual, political, industrial, and even sexual — and they needed to address these matters in ways that spoke to the men and women of their day. In other words, present-day discussion of Baptist origins must reckon with the fact that we do not live in the times of our spiritual ancestors. Some of their battles are no longer our battles, and some of our battles could never have been envisioned by the men and women of those days.

Our investigation, then, of Baptist origins cannot be driven by antiquarianism — that is, a misguided attempt to live in the past. Rather, as with any study of the past, we seek to understand historical questions — in this case, what gave rise to the Baptist movement — that we might better understand some of the forces shaping Baptist identity over the centuries (for good and for ill), and also that our study of the past might help us to live as more faithful Christian disciples in the present.

So, for example, Baptists in the seventeenth century found themselves having to differentiate themselves from their Anglican paedobaptist neighbors, and sometimes they did so with a degree of vim and vigour that frankly went beyond the pale. While we can learn from this battle against an oppressive Anglican regime and state-church union, that battle is not ours to wage. Rather, we thank God for Bible-believing, faithful Anglicans.

A few years ago, while I was leading a group of Christians touring various Reformation sites along the Rhine in Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands, our tour group took a day trip to Marburger Schloss, or Marburg Castle, to see the famous site of the encounter between the two titanic Reformers Martin Luther (1483–1546) and Huldreich Zwingli (1484–1531).

To reach the castle was a stiff climb through medieval streets dotted with houses that dated from the very time when the two German Reformers also passed through the town on their way to the castle. Both men were remarkable Christians whom God had used in spectacular ways to bring genuine reform to their respective lands of Saxony and Switzerland. Yet they were also both men, with the failings common to their kind.

When we think of the issues debated during the German Reformation, we think of matters such as justification and the authority of the Scriptures. But as contentious as these primary issues were, the nature of the Lord’s Supper was also heavily debated. Is Christ present at the Table? And if so, how? That’s what Luther and Zwingli came to debate.

How Is Christ Present?

The medieval Church had defined the nature of Christ’s presence with regard to the elements of the bread and wine in 1215 through the dogma of transubstantiation. According to this doctrine, at a certain moment in the church’s celebration of the Table, when the priest prayed for the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the bread and the wine, they were transformed into the very body and very blood of Christ. They ceased to be bread and wine, even though to all of one’s human senses that is what they seemed to be.

Not surprisingly, this dogma led to all kinds of superstitions, such as the worship of the elements themselves and deep anxiety about the reception of the Table. What was meant to be a place of comfort and a means of grace — both strengthening the believer and giving assurance of salvation — became an entanglement of ignorance and fear.

All of the Reformers clearly rejected the medieval dogma of transubstantiation, but they were deeply divided over the answer to the question “How then is Christ present at the Table?”

Protestant Dispute

In the view of Luther, Christ’s body and blood are present “in, with, and under” the bread and the wine. Just as when an iron poker becomes red-hot if left in the fire long enough, so the bread and the wine actually contain Christ’s body after the prayer of consecration. Contrary to the Roman dogma of transubstantiation, the bread remains bread and the wine remains wine. But they now contain the body and blood of Christ. How this takes place, Luther was quite content to leave in the realm of what we today call mystery.

For Zwingli, participation in the Lord’s Supper was a community event in which the people of God came together to be nourished by Christ through his Spirit. In fact, to Zwingli’s way of thinking, the Lord’s Supper is “no true meal if Christ is not present.” The bread and the wine are “the means by which an almost mystical union with Christ is achieved.”1 It is indeed ironic that Zwingli would have ardently repudiated what has come to be called the “Zwinglian” position on the presence of Christ at his Table — namely, that the Lord’s Supper is simply a memorial. Yet Zwingli rejected Luther’s idea of the presence of Christ in the elements since he could not agree with Luther’s conviction that Christ’s human body was ubiquitous (that is, able to be present everywhere).

Meeting at Marburg

The German ruler Philip of Hesse (1504–1567), who had embraced the convictions of the Reformation, was deeply concerned that division among the Reformers would jeopardize the political future of the Reformation. He was concerned that Roman Catholic princes would seek to exploit this division to politically roll back the advance of the reform.

Philip thus arranged for a colloquy to take place at his castle in Marburg in the fall of 1529, which he hoped would heal the division between the two Reformation giants. Luther, it needs to be noted, went unwillingly to the meeting, though Zwingli was eager to end their disagreement. Along with Luther and Zwingli, other key figures were invited, including the irenic Martin Bucer (1491–1551), Luther’s trusted coworker Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560), and the Basel Reformer Johann Oecolampadius (1482–1531).

On the first day of the conference, October 1, Philip arranged for Melanchthon to meet with Zwingli, and for Oecolampadius to confer with Luther. He rightly gauged that having the two principal figures meet immediately after their respective journeys — including that hard trudge up to Marburger Schloss — might not be wise. The following day, however, Zwingli and Luther met. It was an explosive meeting that failed to unite the two Christian leaders.

Accord and Discord

Luther insisted that “This is my body” means simply that: the word is needs to be taken literally — the bread is the body of Christ. Zwingli, convinced that the risen body of Christ had ascended to heaven and could not be literally present in every locale where the Lord’s Supper was being celebrated, insisted as vehemently that the elements must therefore be vehicles through which God met with those who came to the Table with faith.

As in every theological disagreement, however, more than theology divided them. The fact that Luther’s Saxon dialect was virtually incomprehensible to a speaker of Swiss German like Zwingli has been seen by Bruce Gordon as a parable of their mutual inability to understand one another and their differing visions of the Christian life. In sum, their “views of God and humanity, their differences as Swiss and German” — though both men were uncompromising — and “their self-understandings as prophets rendered agreement impossible.”2

And yet, they were able to draft a statement about the Eucharist. The following article, article 15, comes after fourteen points about which there was full agreement between the two German Reformers:

Fifteenth, we all believe and hold concerning the Supper of our dear Lord Jesus Christ that both kinds [bread and wine] should be used according to the institution by Christ; also that the Sacrament of the Altar is a sacrament of the true body and blood of Jesus Christ and that the spiritual partaking of the same body and blood is especially necessary for every Christian. Similarly, that the use of the sacrament, like the word, has been given and ordained by God Almighty in order that weak consciences may thereby be excited to faith by the Holy Spirit. And although at this time, we have not reached an agreement as to whether the true body and blood of Christ are bodily present in the bread and wine, nevertheless, each side should show Christian love to the other side insofar as conscience will permit and both sides should diligently pray to Almighty God that through his Spirit he might confirm us in the right understanding.3

Here we see Zwingli, as well as Luther, affirming that the Lord’s Supper is vital for the Christian life, for it is a means by which the Holy Spirit strengthens believers’ faith. Sadly, the final remark regarding the demonstration of Christian love failed to materialize.

Legacy of Division

Ultimately, Luther refused to recognize the Swiss Reformer as a genuine Christian, and thus their division remained unhealed. After the colloquy, Luther concluded that Zwingli was a “perverted” man who had no part of Christ and was “seven times worse than when he was a papist”!4

As Philip of Hesse feared, Roman Catholic princes took advantage of this division. Two years later, in October of 1531, some seven thousand Roman Catholic soldiers attacked the canton of Zurich. Zwingli marched out to meet them at Kappel, where he and around five hundred other Protestants were slain on the battlefield. The Roman Catholic troops had been confident that the German Lutheran princes would not support Zwingli, and thus the boldness of their attack on Zurich. When Luther heard of Zwingli’s end, he was his blunt self: Zwingli had died “in great sin and blasphemy.”5

The division between these two German-speaking men of God and its sad legacy is a sobering reminder of the danger of dividing over issues that cannot be biblically demonstrated as being primary. When facing Christian division — and our day is equally filled with vitriol and misunderstanding between believers — we all still need to pray the prayer that Zwingli uttered before the beginning of that famous colloquy at Marburger Schloss:

Fill us, O Lord and Father of us all, we beseech Thee, with thy gentle Spirit, and dispel on both sides all the clouds of misunderstanding and passion.

“May these precious seasons make me fruitful.” These words, found in the diary of a certain Isaac Staveley, who worked as a clerk for coal merchants in London during the 1770s, were written after he had celebrated the Lord’s Supper with his church, Eagle Street Baptist Church, in 1771.

In the rest of this diary, Staveley makes it evident that the celebration of the death of the Christ at the Table was a highlight of his Christian life. In the evening of March 3, he recorded that he and fellow members “came around the table of our dear dying Lord to feast on the sacrifice of his offered body, show his death afresh, to claim and recognise our interest therein, to feast on the sacrifice of his offered body as happy members of the same family of faith and love.” How many today view the Table this way?

Packed into these few words, Staveley reveals his conviction that the Lord’s Supper was a place of communion — communion with Christ and with his people. It was a place of spiritual nurture and of witness. And it was a place of rededication, both to Christ and to his church family.1

Unprized Means of Grace

I suspect that Staveley’s words sound strange to the ears of many modern evangelicals, who might think they are reading the diary of a Roman Catholic or High Anglican, not that of a fellow Reformed evangelical from the eighteenth century. Indeed, the oddity of Staveley’s words to the ears of evangelicals today reveals how much we have lost over the last two centuries. We are out of touch with a tradition that highly prized the ordinances as vehicles of spiritual grace.

“We are out of touch with a tradition that highly prized the ordinances as vehicles of spiritual grace.”

It is not simply that we have come to use mainly the word ordinance for the Lord’s Supper and baptism, rather than the word sacrament, whereas many Baptists like Staveley would have been quite comfortable with the latter term in the eighteenth century. Rather, under the impress of the rationalistic mindset of Western culture, we have lost a sense of mystery about the dynamics of the Table.

John Calvin (1509–1564), who stands at the fountainhead of the tradition of which Staveley was a part, was quite content to leave it as a mystery as to how the emblems of bread and wine are employed by the Holy Spirit to make Christ present at the celebration of his Supper. And roughly down until the opening of the nineteenth century, anglophone evangelicals followed in his stead, treasuring the presence of Christ at the Table without feeling pressured to explain exactly how this worked.

Diluting the Wine

How did this understanding of the Lord’s Supper lose its way?

During the nineteenth century, church services became primarily places of evangelism. But the Lord’s Table was not a converting ordinance, and thus great evangelistic preachers like Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) — though not C.H. Spurgeon (1834–1892), it needs to be noted — came to regard the Table as a rite of little import in the Christian life. The emergence of the Oxford Movement in the Anglican Church — with men like John Henry Newman (1801–1890) and John Keble (1792–1866), who revived the doctrine of transubstantiation — also served to push evangelicals toward downplaying the importance of the Lord’s Supper.

Finally, the revivalist nature of much of evangelical life in the nineteenth century, shaped as it was by altar-call preachers like Charles Finney (1792–1875), Phoebe Palmer (1807–1874) and D.L. Moody (1837–1899), served as another key factor that led to the loss of a richer view of the Lord’s Supper. Indeed, for some, the altar call became an alternate ordinance/sacrament (in fact, Finney posited it as such, as part of his so-called “new measures”). Rather than the Table being the place where sinners met with God and heard reassuring words about the saving work of Christ that dealt definitively with their sins (making the Table a place of rededication), it was the altar call that came to function as such.

Retrieving the Old Tradition

These events in the nineteenth century reveal how we came to the point where the Table is no longer a significant part of the spiritual life of many evangelical churches. Yet how desperately we need to confess our sins together with God’s people and hear afresh, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). In the busyness of Western culture, and even church life, do we not long for an oasis of quiet, where we can commune with Christ by his Spirit with our brothers and sisters? Indeed, I would say, with Calvin and Spurgeon, that this needs to happen on a weekly basis (but be that as it may).

“Do we not long for an oasis of quiet, where we can commune with Christ by his Spirit with our brothers and sisters?”

One of the richest texts from our past as evangelicals is the Second London Confession of Faith (1677/1688), which was drawn up by the English and Welsh Particular Baptist community and was based on the Presbyterian Westminster Confession (1646) and the Congregationalist Savoy Declaration (1659). This confession not only served as the main confessional text of the Particular Baptists in England, Wales, and Ireland into the nineteenth century, but it was also adopted by the oldest Baptist associations in America, where it became known as the Philadelphia Confession (in the north) and the Charleston Confession (in the south). Indeed, it was the Charleston Confession that was used to draw up the confession of faith — the Abstract of Principles — of the seminary where I serve, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville.

In Chapter 30.1 of this Baptist confession, it is stated,

The Supper of the Lord Jesus was instituted by him the same night wherein he was betrayed, to be observed in his churches unto the end of the world, for the perpetual remembrance, and shewing forth the sacrifice of himself in his death, confirmation of the faith of believers in all the benefits thereof, their spiritual nourishment, and growth in him, their further engagement in, and to all duties which they owe unto him; and to be a bond and pledge of their communion with him, and with each other.

Christ instituted the Lord’s Supper for five reasons, according to this paragraph. The Supper serves as a vivid reminder of and witness to the sacrificial death of Christ. Then, participation in the Lord’s Supper enables believers to grasp more firmly all that Christ has done for them through his death on the cross. In this way, the Lord’s Supper is a means of spiritual nourishment and growth. Fourth, the Lord’s Supper serves as a time when believers recommit themselves to Christ. Finally, the Lord’s Supper affirms the indissoluble union that exists, on the one hand, between Christ and believers, and, on the other, between individual believers.

Rich Means of Grace

One cannot come away from reading these paragraphs on the Lord’s Supper without the conviction that those who issued this confession were deeply conscious of the importance of the Lord’s Supper for the Christian life.

The London Baptist preacher Benjamin Keach (1640–1704), who signed this confession, speaks for his fellow Baptists when he states, probably with reference to the Quakers, who had discarded the observance of both baptism and the Lord’s Supper,

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 vilify his blessed ordinances and institutions, which he hath left in his Word, carefully to be observed and kept. . . . The Spirit hath its bounds, and always run[s] in its spiritual channel, namely the Word and ordinances.2

In other words, the Spirit uses the Scriptures, the word of God, and baptism and the Lord’s Supper to strengthen his people on their spiritual pilgrimage in this world.

In this hearty appreciation of the Lord’s Supper, these early Baptists were firmly in the mainstream of Puritan thought. The Puritans generally regarded the Supper as a vehicle that the Spirit employed as an efficacious means of grace for the believer. The seventeenth-century Baptists and their heirs in the eighteenth century, like Isaac Staveley, would have judged the memorial view of the Lord’s Supper — the dominant view among today’s evangelicals — as far too mean a perspective on what was for them such a rich means of grace.

Indeed, in seeking to articulate a richer and more biblical view of the Lord’s Table, contemporary evangelicals may do no better than to listen afresh to what is written in chapter 30 of the Second London Confession.

Of the multitude of feasts celebrated in the popular culture of medieval Europe — wherein lie some of the key roots of the modern West — only two remain in popular North American culture today: Saint Patrick’s Day (March 17) and Saint Valentine’s Day (February 14). With Saint Patrick, we have two important texts by Patrick himself that reveal the true man. But who was Saint Valentine?

The name was a popular one in the Roman world, for the adjective valens expressed the idea of being vigorous and robust. In fact, we know of about a dozen early Christians who bore this name. Our Saint Valentine was an Italian bishop who was martyred on February 14, 269, after a trial before the Roman emperor Claudius Gothicus (reign 268–270). According to the meager accounts that we have, Valentine’s body was hastily buried, but a few nights later some of his associates retrieved it and returned it to his home town of Terni in central Italy. Other accounts list him as an elder in Rome. One embellishment has him writing a letter before his death and signing it, “your Valentine.”

“Saint Valentine was a martyr — yes, a lover, but one who loved the Lord Jesus to the point of giving his life.”

What seems clear, though, from all that we can determine, is that Saint Valentine was a martyr — yes, a lover, but one who loved the Lord Jesus to the point of giving his life for his commitment to Christ. For Christians to adequately remember Saint Valentine, then, we would do well to consider what it meant to be a martyr in the early church.

Witnesses and Martyrs

Our word martyr is derived from the Greek martys, originally a juridical term that was used of a witness in a court of law. Such a person was one “who has direct knowledge or experience of certain persons, events or circumstances and is therefore in a position to speak out and does so.”1 In the New Testament, the term and its cognates are frequently applied to Christians, who bear witness to Christ, often in real courts of law, when his claims are disputed and their fidelity is tested by persecution.

The transition of this word within the early Christian communities from witness to what the English term martyr” entails serves as an excellent gauge of what was happening to Christians as they bore witness to Christ. In Acts 1:8, Jesus tells the apostles that they are to be his “witnesses” (martyres) in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the end of the earth. At this point, the word does not have the association of death, although in Acts 22:20 we do read of the “blood of Stephen,” the Lord’s “witness” (Greek martyros), being shed. But it is really not until the end of the writing of the New Testament canon that the term martys acquires the association with death.2

At the very close of the apostolic era, the risen Christ in Revelation 2 commends his servant Antipas, his “faithful witness,” who was slain for his faith at Pergamum, “where Satan dwells” (Revelation 2:12–13). Pergamum, it should be noted, was a key center of emperor worship in Asia Minor, and the first town in that area to build a temple to a Roman emperor, Augustus Caesar. It may well have been Antipas’s refusal to confess Caesar as Lord and worship him that led to his martyrdom.3 It has been estimated that by the mid-first century, eighty or so cities in Asia Minor had erected temples devoted to the cult of the emperor.4

The word martys seems thus to have acquired its future meaning first in the Christian communities in Asia Minor, where the violent encounter between church and empire was particularly intense.5 In this regard, it was certainly not fortuitous that Asia Minor was “unusually fond” of the violent entertainment of the gladiatorial shows. There was, in fact, a training school for gladiators at Pergamum. Along with fascination with such violence, there would have been a demand for victims over and above the requisite gladiators. Thus, recourse was had to Christians, among others.6

And so, the word martys became restricted in its usage to a single signification: bearing witness to the person and work of Christ to the point of death. Stephen and Antipas were the first of many such martyrs in the Roman Empire.

Neronian Persecution

One of the most memorable clashes between church and empire was what has come to be called the Neronian persecution. In mid-July 64, a fire began in the heart of Rome that raged out of control for nearly a week and gutted most of the city. After it had been extinguished, it was rumored that the emperor Nero (reign 54–68) himself had started it, for it was common knowledge that Nero wanted to level the capital of the empire in order to rebuild the city in a style in keeping with his conception of his own greatness. Conscious that he had to allay suspicions against him, Nero fixed the blame on the Christians.

The fullest description that we have of this violence against the church is from the Roman historian Tacitus (about 55–117), who describes the execution of these Christians as follows:

To scotch the rumour [that he had started the fire], Nero substituted as culprits, and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians. Christus, from whom they got their name, had been executed by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate when Tiberius was emperor; and the pernicious superstition was checked for a short time, only to break out afresh, not only in Judaea, the home of the plague, but in Rome itself, where all the horrible and shameful things in the world collect and find a home.

First of all, those who confessed were arrested; then, on their information, a huge multitude was convicted, not so much on the ground of incendiarism as for hatred of the human race. Their execution was made a matter of sport: some were sewn up in the skins of wild beasts and savaged to death by dogs; others were fastened to crosses as living torches, to serve as lights when daylight failed. Nero made his gardens available for the show and held games in the Circus, mingling with the crowd or standing in his chariot in charioteer’s uniform. Hence, although the victims were criminals deserving the severest punishment, pity began to be felt for them because it seemed that they were being sacrificed to gratify one man’s lust for cruelty rather than for the public weal.7

A number of Christians — including the apostle Peter, according to an early Christian tradition that seems to be genuine8 — were arrested and executed. Their crime was ostensibly arson. Tacitus seems to doubt the reality of this accusation, though he does believe that Christians are rightly “loathed for their vices.” Tacitus’s text mentions only one vice explicitly: “hatred of the human race.” Why would Christians, who preached a message of divine love and who were commanded to love even their enemies, be accused of such a vice?

Well, if one looks at it through the eyes of Roman paganism, the logic seems irrefutable. It was, after all, the Roman gods who kept the empire secure. But the Christians refused to worship these gods — thus the charge of “atheism” that was sometimes leveled at them.9 Therefore, many of their pagan neighbors reasoned, they cannot love the emperor or the empire’s inhabitants. Christians thus were viewed as fundamentally anti-Roman and so a positive danger to the empire.10

‘Blood of Christians Is Seed’

This attack on the church was a turning-point in the relationship between the church and the Roman state in these early years. It set an important precedent. Christianity was now considered illegal, and over the next 140 years the Roman state had recourse to sporadic persecution of the church. It is noteworthy, though, that no emperor initiated an empire-wide persecution until the beginning of the third century, and that with Septimius Severus (reign 193–211).11 Nonetheless, martyrdom was a reality that believers had to constantly bear in mind during this period of the ancient church.

“Instead of stamping out Christianity, persecution often caused it to flourish.”

But persecution did not always have the effect the Romans hoped for. Instead of stamping out Christianity, persecution often caused it to flourish. As Tertullian (born about 155), the first Christian theologian to write in Latin, put it, “The more you mow us down, the more we grow: the blood of Christians is seed.”12 And as he said on another occasion: “whoever beholds such noble endurance [of the martyrs] will first, as though struck by some kind of uneasiness, be driven to enquire what is the matter in question, and, then, when he knows the truth, immediately follow the same way.”13

Surpassing All Earthly Loves

It was during the Middle Ages that the various stories of Saint Valentine circulated and were embellished, solidifying the remembrance of him as a martyr. But it was a medieval writer, Geoffrey Chaucer (1340s–1400), who explicitly linked romantic love to Saint Valentine in a poem entitled “Parliament of Fowls” that described the gathering of a group of birds on “seynt valentynes day” to choose their mates.

To what degree Chaucer influenced the later link between Saint Valentine’s Day and lovers is not exactly clear, but as early as the fifteenth century lovers were sending each other love notes on Saint Valentine’s Day. Of course, with the rise of the commercial cultures of the West in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this practice was commodified and became an important part of the commercial world we see today. There is nothing inherently wrong with modern commercial traditions, but Saint Valentine’s Day is a good day to also remember that there is a love that surpasses all earthly loves: our love for our great God and our Savior, his dear divine Son, Jesus.