The Water and the Wine

For Christians who take an interest in the paedocommunion debate, this should be a useful resource:

http://www.latimertrust.org/index.php/publications/studies/60-ls61

Beckwith is nearly always informative and insightful. Of course, paedobaptism is a necessary presupposition. Baptists reject the premise, of which paedocommunion is an extension.

Burial service for suicides

An early article by Roger Beckwith on a sensitive pastoral issue:

http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/churchman/076-04_233.pdf

My Take on the Reformation in England: Owen, Packer, Hooker, Puritans, Anglicans, and Worship

Over on Facebook, in response to my recent blog article on John Owen, “Political Defeat was the Condition of Cultural Achievement”, an old [conservative Anglican] friend of mine commented:

the reformed Anglican judgment is that Puritanism (especially its more radical expression) constituted a perversion of the English Reformation, not its teleos. There were Calvinists among the supporters of High Church Anglicanism (e.g., Whitgift). They were the heirs of Cranmer et al., not the Puritans, whose radicalism contained the seeds of its own destruction.

I responded:

I don’t know that “seeds of its own destruction” was an entirely fair characterization. I’ve been looking at this period a bit (the theological aspects which were called “Reformed Orthodoxy”). This period was characterized by “precise theological formulations”, among other things.

While it’s true that “Reformed Orthodoxy” seemingly came to an abrupt halt at one point, there were a lot of things that went into it:

Proselyte baptism

As an Anglican, Roger Beckwith naturally supports infant baptism. However, he raises some interesting questions regarding the extent of infant baptism in the early church. If Christian baptism is a modification of John's baptism, which is, in turn, a modification of proselyte baptism, and Christians originally followed that paradigm, then paedobaptism may not have been a universal practice at first. The practice of postponing baptism was another drag factor. 

There are potential strategies for blocking his inferences, but Beckwith's argument is interesting because it concedes certain restrictions on the traditional scope of infant baptism even if you grant the apostolicity of infant baptism. 

The point of contact between the two pairs of ceremonies is that John's baptism, like proselyte baptism, is an initiation rite, performed once only, at the time of conversion. John reinterpreted proselyte baptism as a washing away of sin, and therefore applied it to Jews as much as Gentiles, but likewise in an initiatory fashion.  

Jeremias makes much of the fact of proselyte baptism, and also of Jewish household baptism, in establishing his case, since these present close parallels to the missionary methods used by the apostles. Peter's actions on the Day of Pentecost established a precedent, for it is clear that the apostles and their fellow-evangelists had their converts baptized (Acts 8:12-16,36-39; 19:5; Rom 6:3; 1 Cor 12:13; Gal 3:27; Col 2:12) and that they often baptized them by households. Some of these converts were Jews, some were Gentiles, and some were that middle-category of God-fearers or God-worshippers–Gentiles who attended the synagogue but had not submitted to circumcision. They are mentioned a good number of times in the NT (Acts 10:2,22,35; 13:16,26,50; 16:14; 17:4,17; 18:7).  

The NT contains five individual examples of converts whose households or families were baptized with themselves. The first of these is apparently the God-fearer Cornelius at Caesarea (Acts 10:1f.,46-8; 11:14). Then there are various instances in Macedonia and Greece: the God-fearer Lydia (Acts 16:14f.), the Philippian jailor (Acts 16:33), the Jew Crispus (Acts 18:8) and Stephanas (1 Cor 1:16). It is hard to think that, in the case of Jews and God-fearers, when their households were baptized, this would not have included any children they had, in accordance with Jewish practice. In the cases of Gentiles converts, there might be more room for doubt, but in these cases too, the apostles supervising their baptism were of course Jews, even though they themselves were Gentiles. It is sometimes suggested that none of these five households need have included children, but if it was the practice of the apostles to baptize households, as it evidently was, many such households would have been bound to include children.  

We have more or less explicit evidence that circumcision and proselyte baptism were given to infants as well as adults. In the case of John's baptism and Christian baptism, the NT evidence is not explicit and we are dependent upon inference. But if John's baptism was an adaptation of proselyte baptism, one may assume that he too would probably have admitted the infant children of his converts, and the more so as he was baptizing in immediate expectation of divine judgment on those who did not respond to his message (Mt 3:7-12; Lk 3:7-17). A similar inference could be made in the case of Christian baptism, and here we have more to go on, because there are the records of household baptisms, at which we have just been looking, and which strongly imply baptism of infants as well as adults. 

There is one interesting difference between circumcision and proselyte baptism which may have affected early Christian practice. Circumcision was given in every generation. Proselyte baptism, however, was given only in the first generation, after which the proselyte and his family would observe the laws of ceremonial cleanness, and so would not need to repeat it. On this model, a Christian family might be baptized in every generation or only in the first generation, and it is possible that there was for a time a variety of practice, even among Jewish Christians.  

But though we may have confidence that infant baptism began in the apostolic age, we cannot be sure that it was at first universal. We have noted the possibility that in some Jewish families it was not practised except in the first generation, and in Gentile families there may have been less readiness for it than in Jewish. If this is so, there was probably a variety of practice until agreement was reached that every Christian needed to be baptized. This would still leave open the question, at what age he needed to be baptized. Infant baptism was, before very long, widely practiced, as the evidence from Irenaeus, Tertullian and Hippolytus (from the late second and early third centuries) indicates, but the numerous converts from paganism were still baptized as adults, which made it possible for Tertullian to raise the question of whether this was not a better age for baptism. He did not claim that infant baptism was a novelty, but he argued that the forgiveness of sins was less needed in infancy: it was more suitable at an age when there were actual sins to be repented of and washed away (On Baptism 18). Others thought similarly, to judge from 3C inscriptions which show baptism sometimes delayed until there was a danger of death. And after the conversion of the Empire in the fourth century, such delay became for a time, though only for a time, common. For as long as a delay was being practiced, a fruitless desire to avoid postbaptismal sin seems to have been the reason. 

At the conversion of the Empire there was naturally a flood of adult converts, but it was not long before almost all adults were at least nominal Christians, and were baptized as such, and the only remaining candidates for baptism were the children who might be born to them, in that or succeeding generations. As long as the practice of delaying baptism still existed, this did not make infant baptism universal, but it was largely a matter of time before it did. Only in missionary work in new lands or among new peoples would the situation be any different. R. Beckwith, Calendar, Chronology and Worship (Brill 2005), 220-225.

The Essenes on Daniel

We now possess, in some Essene writings, works emanating from apocalyptic circles in Palestine at about the middle of the second century BC–the very setting in which Daniel is widely believed to have been composed. It is therefore noteworthy that, had the 70-Weeks prophecy been regarded in these circles as a prophecy after the event, relating to the murder of Onias III, they could by the use of their chronological scheme have provided it with a much more accurate date than 483-490 years after the Exile; but in point of fact they did not regard it as a fulfilled prophecy but as one yet to be fulfilled and did not relate it to Onias III but to the Davidic Messiah (See Table I on p257 and also pp232-234). R. Beckwith, Calendar and Chronology, Jewish and Christian (E. J. Brill 1996), 274-75. 

"The Office of Woman in the Church, to the Present Day"

http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/churchman/083-03_170.pdf

Ut Unum Sint

http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/churchman/111-02_102.pdf

Biblical angelology

http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/churchman/124-01_037.pdf

Christ did not say to the earliest church, “I give you my authority”

Following up with my recent comments about Larry Hurtado’s work and in the context of what he’s called “earliest Christianity” (basically the first 100 years of Christianity), I want to mention a comment by K Doran, who provided the first comment in Andrew Preslar’s response to R. Scott Clark and Robert Godfrey had on “the Lure of Rome”. Doran is wrong in this comment:

One additional point is that the data of antiquity is sparse — it is almost certain that the vast majority of what was written has been lost, and that much of what was lived and believed was never written in the first place. In light of this sparseness, arguments that the data do not contain sufficiently explicit references to the precise definitions of transubstantiation, the papacy, etc before, say the late 300s, are completely useless arguments from silence. They tell us nothing either one way or another. Give me the same sample size from 30 A.D. to 330 A.D. that we have from 330AD through 630AD, and then we can talk clearly about development on subtle issues from the very early church to the church of late antiquity. But, with the data as it stands, all we can say is: (1) as soon as the data set gets rich in the late 300s, it looks quite obviously non-protestant even on subtle issues; (2) no one during that time complained that the obviously “Catholic” teachings were corruptions; (3) many people at the time did explicitly and implicitly state that these “Catholic” teachings had always been taught; and (4) the sparse data from the first 300 years do not by any means contradict what was so clearly taught in the late 300s and beyond (unless, again, one is to abuse the statistically impossible argument from silence in that sparse data).

                                                 

In light of the above, the protestant approach to the data of antiquity is very inadequate in comparison to the Catholic one. There is a deep sense in which the majority of the data is Catholic. There is a deeper sense in which the Catholic church has had the confidence to be intellectually honest about the sparse data, applying arguments from silence when and where the data itself permits it, and ignoring silly arguments from silence where the data itself do not. I think this intellectual maturity is what many converts notice, even if they can’t explain it in words; to compare the Catholic embrace of the “mean” of history with the Protestant attempt to find a tiny niche in antiquity to call its own, is an eye-opening experience.

Rather, the New Testament provides for us an embarrassment of riches with respect to our knowledge of the earliest Church and antiquity. Roman Catholics like K Doran make a fundamental mistake in holding on to what Hurtado refers to the darkened pre-Constantinian centuries.

What’s really happening is that, in the first 100 years of church history, we see a picture of Christ-worship and an authority structure in the earliest church that is totally turned on its head, not by “subtle issues” as Doran says, but with true violence. Not all of it was intentional, but some of the Rome-ward and Pagan-ward drift was quite intentional.

There is no need for Protestants to make “arguments from silence” with respect either to “authority” or to what “the church that Christ founded” was really like. The Roman story – and even the Anglican story on “the episcopacy” has changed in recent years to reflect what’s now known about what he calls “the historical phenomenon” of both “Christ devotion” and the earliest church.

Both are now subtly fudging their account of how the episcopal structure came into being. It's important to note just how this fudge is being produced. 

Roman Catholics are fond of saying that the Roman Church is “The sole Church of Christ” that is, [the Church] which our Savior, after his Resurrection, entrusted to Peter’s pastoral care, commissioning him and the other apostles to extend and rule it. . . . This Church, constituted and organized as a society in the present world, subsists in (subsistit in) the Catholic Church, which is governed by the successor of Peter and by the bishops in communion with him…”

But as I noted last week, that’s a bait and switch. So too is the Anglican conception of “orders”. Some time ago, I cited Roger Beckwith in his work, “Elders in Every City: The Origin and Role of the Ordained Ministry” (Carlisle, UK: Paternoster Press ©2003). Beckwith [an Anglican] noted what he called “fuzzy language” in the preface to the Ordinal in the Book of Common Prayer to describe the existence of “Bishops, Priests, and Deacons” in the church:

“It is evident unto all men diligently reading holy Scripture and the ancient Authors, that from the Apostles’ time there have been these Orders of Ministers in Christ’s Church” Bishops, Priests, and Deacons.”

Of this statement, Beckwith says:

This is a very carefully phrased statement which, through loose interpretation, has been misrepresented both by its defenders and by its critics.

For, in the first place, it does not say that this is evident to those “diligently reading holy Scripture and ancient Authors’; in other words, it is evident from Scripture and the Fathers taken together, but not necessarily from one of the two taken singly. If we have difficulty finding the threefold ministry in the New Testament taken by itself, the preface does not say that we should be able to find it there.

In the second place, the preface does not say that “by the Apostles’ decision there have been those Orders of Ministers in Christ’s Church” but from the Apostles time there have been these Orders of Ministers in Christ’s Church”; in other words, from the period before the last of the apostles died there have been three orders of ordained ministers; and the last of the apostles, St John, is stated by Irenaeus (Against Heresies 3:3;4) to have lived until the reign of Trajan, who did not become emperor till AD 98. Since the threefold ministry was [evident] when Ignatius of Antioch was writing his letters, about AD 110, it can hardly have arisen later than the beginning Trajan’s reign, in other words, later than the end of the apostolic age. So the preface to the Ordinal is stating the simple truth in saying that it dates from the apostle’s time. But how far the apostles were responsible for the development which took place is left an open question (Beckwith pgs 9-10).

Francis Sullivan, evidently in agreement with Beckwith and Kilmartin [whom I’ve cited earlier] and a raft of other modern scholarship on this topic of “authority in the earliest church”, concludes his work “From Apostles to Bishops: The Development of the Episcopacy in the Early Church” (New York, Mahwah, NJ: The Newman Press, © 2001 by The Society of Jesus of New England [Jesuits]):

While most Catholic scholars agree that the episcopate is the fruit of a post-New Testament development, they maintain that this development was so evidently guided by the Holy Spirit that it must be recognized as corresponding to God’s plan for the structure of his Church (230).

On the contrary, the earliest history of the church shows a completely different “structure”, put into place by the Apostles and the earliest disciples. It was this “structure” that was cast aside in favor of an Episcopal structure that has its roots not in the authority structure that Christ left with his apostles, but rather, with the pagan and Roman world around them. As such, it is not a “divine institution” in any way, and the Reformers were clearly in the right to cast off the accretions.

Christ did not say to the earliest church, “I give you my authority”. He said, “go, and I will be with you”. There’s a big difference. 

Sacrifice and Priesthood

From Roger Beckwith (PDF).

"Of God, and of the Holy Trinity"

Paul Helm responds to Roger Beckwith (PDF).