By Mark E. Dever
[This is the second article in the four-part series “A Puritan Vision of the Church,” delivered as the W. H. Griffith Thomas Lectures at Dallas Theological Seminary, February 4-7, 2014.
Mark E. Dever is Senior Pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church, Washington, DC, and President of 9Marks.]
The Reformers held that two essential marks of the church were the right preaching of the Word and the right administration of the sacraments. On this there was unity between them and the generations of reformational Christians that were to follow, while inside this unity there was great diversity about how these marks were to be fleshed out. Having considered Richard Sibbes and his vision of the Evangelical Church,[1] we look now at John Bunyan’s vision of the Spiritual Church.
In a work first published four years after his death, toward the conclusion of his application of Psalm 130:7, Bunyan used an arresting image of the heart as an unreliable container for truth. He observed, “He that will keep water in a seive, must use more than ordinary diligence.”[2] What Bunyan said of water in a seive and truth in the heart is also true about the difficulty of keeping such biblically conscientious Christians as Bunyan and his fellow nonconformists together in churches. It will be this strange tension between Bunyan’s dogged devotion to Scripture, which led to his own nonconformity, and yet his denial of what were to become important denominational boundaries that we will consider. Was Bunyan a nonconformist, a dissenter, a separatist? Or was he, to use an old Texas phrase, “a uniter, not a divider”?
John Bunyan had a rather uncommon notion of the relation of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. As Bunyan looked around, the Orthodox and Roman positions were clearly echoed in everything from antiquity to architecture. From the writings of the church fathers to the placement of the lavers of regeneration near the door of the church, it was clear that baptism was viewed as the initial vehicle of God’s grace in a person’s life, without which they would not be saved. Martin Luther’s understanding of justification fundamentally altered this teaching—at least among his followers—removing baptism from its central place and replacing it with faith alone in Christ alone. Baptism was still, however, understood to be the entering sacrament for those coming into the church. Zwingli and Calvin forged new understandings of the covenantal and promissory nature of baptism, but again left its position practically unchanged. Cranmer seems to have adopted much of Calvin and Bucer’s position in his understanding of baptism. It was left to the continental anabaptists and the English Baptists (somewhat later) to re-understand baptism as the parallel not of physical circumcision but of spiritual circumcision, that is, as something to accompany not physical birth, but spiritual birth.
Bunyan, faithful member of the church of England, came to this during the tumultuous 1650’s, under the influence of John Gifford, pastor of St. John’s Church in Bedford. Gifford seems to have been an early Baptist, but in coming to his understanding of baptism, he went further than most others who took such positions. Most of the Baptists (as reflected in the second edition of the First London Confession, 1646) understood baptism to be the entering ordinance into the church, as Christians had for centuries. Article 39 of the First London Confession (1646) read, “Baptism is an ordinance of the New Testament, given by Christ, to be dispensed upon persons professing faith, or that are made disciples; who upon profession of faith, ought to be baptized, and after to partake of the Lord’s Supper” (italics added).
So Baptists, like all other professing Christians historically understood baptism to be a prerequisite to the privileges of membership in the church (notably communion), and yet the Baptists, like the other Protestants, did not understand baptism to be saving ex opere operato, in and of itself effectively working. The doctrinal change they advocated went in the direction of making the church more pure, more visible, more approximate to the invisible church. As such, it was often attacked as a kind of donatism—or hyper-puritanism. This was the way that Sibbes, for example, opposed the separatists of his day, suggesting that those tempted with it read Augustine’s anti-Donatist writings. Such an understanding of baptism as being for believers only was certainly the deathknell of an established church, as the church no longer was understood to be co-extensive with society (and much more could be said about that), but it was not the final subjectivising of baptism that its opponents often made it out to be, at least no more so than the Reformed subjectivised reception of the Lord’s Supper.
The ultimate in subjectivising the Christian faith, making it all centered on the internal, were undoubtedly the Quakers. The Quakers renounced all outward formalities and drove home a version of the Christian gospel that majored in ethics and integrity in keeping with what one knows for oneself to be true.
Bunyan had entered writing controversies against Quakers and other such sectaries, attacking them bitterly, as was the custom of the day. But in 1673 he took up the pen against another group, one much closer to his own views—the Baptists.
This may be surprising, because Bunyan is often thought of as a Baptist. And he did reject infant baptism. But he also rejected the position that many of the emerging Baptists of his own day espoused—that there can be no church communion with, and therefore, no church membership for those who have not been baptized as believers. He was therefore what Richard Greaves called “an open membership Baptist.” Bunyan himself was convinced that infant baptism was a nullity; and therefore he himself had been baptized as a believer; but he was not prepared to limit church membership to only those who agreed with him on such “externals.” Bunyan had a more spiritual vision of the church.
In one of his works, Bunyan poses this challenge: “Notwithstanding all that you have said, water baptism ought to go before church-membership; shew me one in all the New Testament, that was received into fellowship without it.”[3]
Bunyan began his answer by saying, “That water baptism hath formerly gone first is granted: but that it ought of necessity so to do, I never saw proof.”[4] This kind of simple reasoning typified Bunyan’s approach. His opponents’ arguments would be frankly and simply stated and then frankly and simply refuted. In various ways, Bunyan kept asserting the inconsistency of accepting someone as a Christian, but not as a member of the church. He wrote, “I am therefore for holding communion thus, because the edification of souls in the faith and holiness of the gospel, is of greater concernment than an agreement in outward things; I say, it is of greater concernment with us, and of far more profit to our brother; than our agreeing in, or contesting for the business of water baptism” (II.611). And again, “I am for holding communion thus, because love, which above all things we are commanded to put on, is of much more worth than to break about baptism” (II.612).
“But to conclude this, when we attempt to force our brother beyond his light, or to break his heart with grief; to thrust him beyond his faith, or to bar him from his privilege: how can we say, I love? What shall I say? . . . . Strange! take two Christians equal in all points but this, nay, let one go beyond the other far, for grace and holiness; yet this circumstance of water shall drown and sweep away all his excellencies, not counting him worthy of that reception, that with hand and heart shall be given to a novice in religion, because he consents to water” (II.613).
One of John Bunyan’s first pieces to write and publish after he got out of jail was his Differences in Judgment about Water-Baptism, No Bar to Communion (1673). This was a brief book, of slightly more than 30,000 words. In it, he answered a book by Thomas Paul and William Kiffin that had asserted what we have come to know as the standard Baptist position. Bunyan wrote to clarify further his contention “that the church of Christ hath not warrant to keep out of their communion the Christian that is discovered to be a visible saint by the word, the Christian that walk-eth according to his light with God” (II.617).
He explained to the reader (especially Mssrs. Paul and Kiffin), “I will give you a touch of the reason of my publishing that part thereof which you so hotly oppose. It was because of those continual assaults that the rigid brethren of your way, made, not only upon this congregation, to rend it; but also upon many others about us. If peradventure they might break us in pieces, and draw from us disciples after them. Assaults, I say, upon this congregation by times, for no less than these sixteen or eighteen years. Yea, myself they have sent for, and endeavoured to persuade me to break communion with my brethren; also with many others they have often tampered, if haply their seeds of division might take. . . . Now, Sir, to settle the brethren, the brethren of our community, and to prevent such disorders among others, was the cause of my publishing my papers” (II.618).
In this work, Bunyan repeated the arguments he had made before—that baptism pertains to the individual’s obedience, and not to the church as a church—as he followed along answering Paul and Kiffin’s responses to his arguments. The arguments were muddied by his concern to answer what he felt were the misrepresentations and false conclusions of his calumniators. It seems a clear example of more heat not producing more light.
In the second half of the work, Bunyan addressed the arguments and questions put by Paul and Kiffin. Reading this as a Baptist was, for me, a bit like reading Harry Emerson Fosdick’s thoroughly wrong-headed and very stirring sermon “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” It is a powerful bit of rhetoric that is, nevertheless, finally unconvincing. But if you are here as a Baptist minister and you want to see if you’re really convinced, you might want to take up this second half of Bunyan’s Differences in Judgment about Water-Baptism, No Bar to Communion, and learn whether you can refute each one of Bunyan’s answers to Paul and Kiffin. Alternatively, if you are a non-Baptist here and you would like to convert, or merely sharpen, one of your Baptist brethren on this point, here is your arsenal for your theological jousting.
Upon his death, John Bunyan had twelve works largely prepared for the press that were unpublished. At least part of the reason for this must have been the hostility of the government to works from authors such as Bunyan who were openly critical of the religious establishment. In April of 1688 an indulgence was issued that greatly relaxed requirements for works printed. In the four months between that relaxation and Bunyan’s death in August, he got five books printed.
A book that came out posthumously was a fairly small piece called Peaceable Principles and True, and it answered D’Anvers’s and Paul’s replies to his Differences in Judgment about Water-Baptism, No Bar to Communion. He again restates his positions, though with somewhat more concision. “I have denied” writes Bunyan, “that baptism was ever ordained of God to be a wall of division between the holy and the holy; the holy that are, and the holy that are not, so baptized with water as we” (II.648).
This book, as much as the other, was marked by plain speech. For example, he writes, “Your first five pages are spent to prove me either proud or a liar. . . . You ask me next, ‘How long is it since I was a Baptist?’ . . . Since you would know by what name I would be distinguished from others; I tell you, I would be, and hope I am, a CHRISTIAN; and choose, if God should count me worthy, to be called a Christian, a Believer, or other such name which is approved by the Holy Ghost. As for those factious titles of Anabaptists, Independents, Presbyterians, or the like, I conclude, that they came neither from Jerusalem, nor Antioch, but rather from hell and Babylon; for they naturally tend to divisions, ‘you may know them by their fruits’ ” (II.648-649).
Bunyan concludes with a prayer, “God banish bitterness out of the churches, and pardon them that are the maintainers of schisms and divisions among the godly!” (II.657).
Bunyan, of course, was no such divider. He was an English heir of the Protestant reformation. And he sought for that reformation to continue. Ecclesia Reformata, semper reformanda secundum verbum dei. “The church reformed, always to be reformed according to the Word of God.” Bunyan attempted to do this, in part, by attempting to compose brethren who were alienated from each other over less than essential matters.
In the closing remarks to his 1673 treatise Differences in Judgment about Water-Baptism, No Bar to Communion, Bunyan sums up what we might call his “baptism project” well: “I strive not for mastery, nor to shew myself singular; but, if it might be, for union and communion among the godly” (II.642).
So what does all this mean for us? D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones’s last address at the Westminster Conference (given in 1978) was on this, and he ended with a passionate plea to follow Bunyan’s position here. In reflecting on this, let me begin by saying that I am powerfully attracted to Bunyan’s position. As a Baptist pastor, few things pain me more than turning away visible saints who are paedobaptists but who desire membership in our church. I would love to follow Bunyan’s lead and treat this as a “weaker brother” situation. Richard Greaves has summarized Bunyan’s position vis-à-vis the other Baptists by saying that “in the end the whole argument could be reduced to a question of whether or not love would triumph over ecclesiasticism, and Bunyan harboured no doubts about his preference for the former alternative.”[5]
There seem to be a few matters that are not theologically essential to being Christian, yet that are essential to have agreement upon in order for a church to function. It seems that since the Reformation, for the overwhelming majority of Protestants, some questions of agenda can become, practically, as important as questions of credenda. Questions of what is to be done are not only more quickly obvious to the layperson than questions of what is to be believed, they are also often viewed as more important. So, a certain preacher may or may not believe that errors are tucked away in the Bible somewhere, but I can sure tell if the preacher is a man or a woman. A certain preacher may or may not believe in the foreknowledge of God of all future events, but I can easily tell if the preacher baptizes infants. And a certain preacher may or may not believe in the death of Christ as a penal substitute for my sinful self, but if I keep attending, I’ll be able to tell if the bishop, the congregation, the denomination’s general assembly, or the preacher has the last say in the church!
Now any of these issues of polity and practice we may declare to be matters indifferent. We may allow freedom in our congregations on these matters. We may be united despite our differences. And on and on I could go in presenting positively and charitably such a uniting church. But at the end of the day, we must do something; and we will do the one and not the other. We will recognize women as elders, have bishops or national assemblies or congregations as our final earthly authority, and hold infants as viable subjects of baptism or we will not. Finally, you could say, Bunyan took a nearly Quaker position on baptism—that it was not essential for communion, for church membership, so it would be left to a matter of individual judgment. Sure, at Bunyan’s meeting house in Bedford, one pastor may teach infant baptism, and the next may not, but neither one’s teaching would fundamentally effect the church. Does that really create unity in the Spirit? Does it create an understanding that baptism is in the eye of the beholder? Does it make obedience altogether too subjective a matter? Is disobedience to a command of Christ a mere lack of light to be borne with, as Bunyan maintained, or is it a disciplinable offense, a sin?
Let me ask you a question, those of you who are parents—do we teach our children to mean well, or to act, to do well? Do we teach them that they must not hit their brother, or that there must be no malice in their heart when they do?
Did you know that the Bible teaches that there are such things as unintentional sins? Leviticus 4 and 5, Numbers 15, Ezekiel 45, and elsewhere recognize such sins. “But it’s what’s in the heart that counts,” someone may say. But is that what we want to teach people from God’s Word?
Don’t misunderstand me—the intentions of the heart are hugely important. So Moses taught that intentional sins should receive worse punishment, and the Lord Jesus taught that intentions themselves were sins and were in some ways the very heart of sin. But he never taught that intentions were all there was to sin. We all know from the Bible that one of the effects of sins is to stupefy us and darken us. So those dwelling in sin are said to dwell in darkness, but that in no way finally ameliorates our guilt.
Jesus in Matthew 25 presents the judgment of God in the passage about the sheep and the goats. After inviting the sheep into eternal blessedness, the Almighty then turns to the goats and says to them, “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink. I was a stranger and you did not invite me in. I needed clothes and you did not clothe me. I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me” (vv. 41-43).
And do you remember what the goats pled? They pled their motives, their intentions, their ignorance as an excuse. “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?” (v. 44).
And did that exculpate them? “He will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’ Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life” (vv. 45-46).
The best of motives notwithstanding, obedience to God is not in the eye of the beholder, unless the beholder is God himself. And how do we know what he considers obedience or not? By his own self-revelation. We have no other sure and certain guide. Not even the church? No, my Roman Catholic friend, in the New Testament we see churches erring in Revelation 2-3 and in most of the churches that the epistles are addressed to; we see from 2 Timothy 4 that teachers will err; we know from Acts and Galatians that even Peter erred. So then do we know what God considers obedience by our own conscience, our own inner light? No, my modern individualistic, subjectivistic friend. In the New Testament, we see Paul writing to the Corinthians, “My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me” (1 Cor. 4:4). The acquittal we need is not finally from our church or from ourselves; it is from God. The psalmist realized this when he prayed to God, “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight” (Ps. 51:4).
Sin is an objective reality based upon our thoughts and deeds, or our lack of them, over against how God would have us live as the creatures uniquely made in his image. It is not finally determined by us or by our intentions, but by God as the judge of our thoughts and lives. He is indescribably holy. And he has revealed himself to us in his Word.
John Bunyan believed and taught all of that. His heart for the unity of the church well-reflected our Lord’s prayer in John 17:20-21: “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” Amen. But if you ask the question how they were to be so united, Jesus had just prayed in 17:17 that God would “sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth.”
Notes
- Mark E. Dever, “The Evangelical Church: Richard Sibbes and the Sufficiency of the Gospel,” Bibliotheca Sacra 172 (January–March 2015): 3-11.
- “Israel’s Hope Encouraged,” Works, I.619. Quotations of Bunyan come from The Whole Works of John Bunyan, vols. I and II, ed. George Offor (London: Blackie and Sons, 1875).
- John Bunyan, “A Reason of My Practice in Worship,” Bunyan’s Works, II:608.
- Ibid., 608-09.
- Richard L. Greaves, John Bunyan (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1969), 139.
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