Dimensions of Baptism Biblical and Theological Studies

ELLIS The Baptism of Disciples 349

ted to a practice ignored or rejected by the majority of Christians. Indeed,

the General Baptist Orthodox Creed of 1679 uses both ordinance and

sacrament, and sacramental interpretations of baptism are evident at the

turn of the nineteenth century. Andrew Fuller, for example, in the circular

letter of the Northamptonshire Association of 1802 was able to write,

Sin is washed away in baptism in the same sense as Christ's flesh is eaten,

and his blood drank, in the Lord's Supper: the sign, when rightly used,

leads to the thing signified.^40

But reaction against the sacerdotalism and sacramentarianism of the

Oxford Movement led to many Baptists using the word ordinance as a

term which was believed to be in stark contrast to sacrament. As the

nineteenth century progressed, baptism and the Lord's Supper were increas-

ingly explained in such a way as to diminish the activity of divine grace

and to emphasize the aspect of human response. Accordingly, Christians

are to be baptized because they are commanded to do so and because they

are invited to follow the example of Christ. In this view, baptism is

presented as a witness to the faith of the believer and an opportunity to

challenge others to respond to the gospel. The fact that twentieth-century

Baptist writers have attempted to redress the balance and present baptism

as a place of encounter with God^41 is evidence of this Victorian inheri-

tance. Personal faith was remodeled on the anvil of individualism in an

age when corporate categories of understanding were suspect.

However, through all this we see the same theme recurring, namely, the

centrality of personal faith both for the Christian life and for an under-

standing of the Christian Church. With these themes in view we shall

40. A. Fuller, The Practical Uses of Christian Baptism, The Circular letter from the
    Ministers and Messengers of the several Baptist Churches of the Northamptonshire
    Association, assembled at Northampton, June, 1802 (Clipstone: J.W. Morris, 1802),
    p. 3. For a detailed study of Baptist baptismal sacramentalism from the seventeenth to
    nineteenth centuries, see Fowler, More Than a Symbol, pp. 10-88..


41. See George R. Beasley-Murray, Baptism in the New Testament (London:
    Macmillan, 1962). For example, in responding to that defence of infant baptism which
    presents the sacrament as a conditional promise to be fulfilled when the recipient
    responds, he comments by affirming the conferral of grace in baptism: 'In the baptism of
    the New Testament we have no offer for tomorrow but gift for today—a gift taken in the
    very act of receiving the rite', p. 376. See also Christopher J. Ellis, 'Believer's Baptism
    and the Sacramental Freedom of God', in Paul S. Fiddes (ed.), Reflections on the Water:
    Understanding God and the World through the Baptism of Believers (RSG, 4; Oxford:
    Regents Park College Park; Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 1996), pp. 23-45.