Article  XXVII

OF BAPTISM^[1]

Baptism is not only a sign of profession, and mark of difference, whereby Christian men are discerned from others that be not christened, but it is also a sign of Regeneration or New Birth, whereby, as by an instrument, they that receive Baptism rightly are grafted into the Church; the promises of the forgiveness of sins, and of our adoption to be the sons of God by the Holy Ghost, are visibly signed and sealed; Faith is confirmed, and Grace increased by virtue of prayer unto God.  The Baptism of young Children is in any wise to be retained in the Church, as most agreeable with the institution of Christ.

Baptism is a subject which presents difficulties to many and has caused much controversy and discord amongst Christians.  For the modern mind, where Baptism is not ‘only a sign of profession, and mark of difference’ but an effective means of grace, the problem is principally that of relating the form of the Sacrament to its results; the use of water seems to some people an inadequate ‘instrument’ of spiritual regeneration or New Birth.  But in order to see Baptism in its true perspective, it must be considered in relation to the Church into which we are ‘grafted’ by it.  God has in Christ entered into a new relationship with mankind; He has inaugurated a New Covenant, and the Church is the people of this New Covenant, or the New Israel.  By sharing in this new relationship believers are ‘begotten again’;^[2] they are a new creation.^[3]  As the ‘instrument’ of initiation into this new kind of existence, Baptism is the means whereby God performs a divine creative act; it is the ‘washing of regeneration’;^[4] and precisely for this reason the bearing of the form of the Sacrament on its effects is likely to elude our understanding.

There is an interesting analogy here between religion and science.  We have already noticed that the distinctive Christian conception of God, the Trinity, is the interpretation of spiritual experience within the Church; similarly scientific theories and laws explain in mathematical terms man’s experience of the physical world.  Taking a given set of conditions in the course of Nature, the scientist’s aim is to trace physical equivalence between it and the one which immediately follows.  But when he is led to think of conditions outside the process itself, like the state of matter in space before the world‑process began, he has reached a point beyond which scientific method cannot take him.  If the question is put: how did this pre‑cosmic existence come to be, and how did it give rise to the new condition of the world process, the physicist is not in a position to affirm or deny anything; he can only assume these things, he cannot explain them.  It is religious faith which penetrates behind phenomena, and declares its assurance of the dependence of all things on the divine will: ‘God said, Let there be... and it was so’; ‘He spake and it was done; he commanded and they were created’; ‘by faith we understand that the worlds have been framed by the word of God’.^[5]

It should not be deemed utterly improbable, therefore, that the manner of our entrance into God’s new spiritual creation in Christ, the life of the Church, would equally baffle natural reason.  Baptism has no rationale either of form or meaning; it is a pure origin, in face of which it can only be said: ‘This is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes.’^[6]  From the beginning Baptism had a universal observance, which only the Lord’s command could have secured for it; it was the indispensable form of admission to the Church.^[7]