§ 81. The Interpretation of the Articles (part 2 of 2)

The Anglican Church, then, as far as we may infer from her authoritative declarations, makes certain the salvation of all baptized infants dying in infancy, and leaves the possibility of salvation without baptism an open question, with a strong leaning towards the liberal view. The Roman Church makes infant salvation without baptism impossible; the Lutheran Church makes it at least improbable; the Calvinistic Churches make it certain in the case of all the elect, without regard to age, and decidedly incline to the charitable belief that all children dying in infancy belong to the number of the elect.

The doctrine of the absolute necessity of baptism for salvation has always been based upon two declarations of our Lord, Mark xvi. 16, and John iii. 5 (on the assumption that 'water' refers to baptism). But in the first passage our Lord, after declaring that faith followed by baptism saves, states the negative without adding, and is not baptized; intimating by this omission, that only the want of faith or the refusal of the gospel, not the want of baptism, condemns. In the discourse with Nicodemus he does not say that water baptism is regeneration, nor that every one that is born of water is also born of the Spirit (which was certainly not the case with Simon Magus, who, notwithstanding his baptism, remained 'in the gall of bitterness and the bond of iniquity'); he simply lays down two conditions for entering into the kingdom of God, and puts the emphasis on being born of the Spirit. This is evident from the fact that in that discourse 'water' is mentioned but once, but the Spirit four times. The most that can be inferred from the two passages is the ordinary necessity of baptism where it can be had—that is, within the limits of the Christian Church. We are bound to God's ordinances, but God's Spirit is free and 'bloweth where it listeth.' We should never forget that the same Lord was the special friend of children, and declared them to belong to the kingdom of heaven, without any reference to baptism or circumcision, adding these significant words, 'It is not the will of your Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish' (Matt. xviii. 14).

THE LORD'S SUPPER.

If the Articles on Predestination and Baptism leave room for different interpretations, there can be no reasonable doubt about the meaning of Art. XXVIII. on the Lord's Supper. It clearly teaches the Reformed doctrine of the spiritual presence and spiritual eating by faith only, in opposition both to transubstantiation and consubstantiation, which imply a corporal presence and an oral manducation by all communicants, both good and bad, although with opposite effects.

The wide departure from the Lutheran formularies, otherwise so freely consulted, may be seen from the following comparison:

Augsburg Confession. 1530. Art. X. Thirteen Articles. 1538. Art. VII. Thirty-nine Articles. 1563 and 1571. Art. XXVIII. De coena Domini docent, quod corpus et sanguis Christi vere adsint, et distribuantur vescentibus in cæna Domini; et improbant secus docentes. De Eucharistia constanter credimus et docemus, quod in sacramento corporis et sanguinis Domini vere, substantialiter,¹²³¹ et realiter adsint corpus et sanguis Christi sub speciebus panis et vini.¹²³² Et quod sub ejusdem speciebus vere et realiter exhibentur et distribuuntur illis qui sacramentum accipiunt, sive bonis sive malis. Corpus Christi datur, accipitur, et manducatur tantum coelesti et spirituali ratione (only after an heavenly and spiritual manner). Medium, autem quo Corpus Christi accipitur et manducatur in coena, fides est (and the mean whereby the body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper, is faith).

The clause here quoted from the Elizabethan revision was wanting in the Edwardine Articles, and was inserted on motion of Bishop Guest of Rochester.¹²³³ Both series contain the assertion that the bread which we break is a communion of the body of Christ 'to such as rightly, worthily, and with faith receive the same,' which was meant to exclude the oral manducation. Both strongly condemn transubstantiation. The Edwardine Articles protest also against the Lutheran hypothesis of the ubiquity of Christ's body.¹²³⁴ This same protest against ubiquity is found substantially in the Parker MS. of the Latin revision of 1563, but it was struck out in the Convocation.¹²³⁵ Instead of it a new Article was added in the English revision of 1571, denying that the unworthy partake of Christ in the communion.¹²³⁶

The Catechism likewise limits the reception of Christ's body and blood to the 'faithful,' and declares the benefit of the Lord's Supper to be 'the strengthening and refreshing of our souls.' The communion service does not rise above this view, and the distribution formula, inserted in the revision of 1552, expresses the commemorative theory. The rubric on kneeling, at the close of the service, which was inserted in the second Prayer-Book of Edward VI. (1552) by Cranmer, through the influence of Hooper and Knox (one of the royal chaplains),¹²³⁷ then omitted in Elizabeth's reign from regard to the Catholics, but which was again restored in the Reign of Charles II. (1662) to conciliate the Puritans, explains the kneeling at the communion not to mean an adoration of the sacramental bread and wine, or any corporal presence of Christ's natural flesh and blood. 'For the natural body and blood of Christ are in heaven, and not here; it being against the truth of Christ's natural body to be at one time in more places than one.' This is a plain declaration against consubstantiation and ubiquity.

Before the Articles were framed a public disputation on the eucharistic presence was held before the royal commissioners at the University of Oxford, May, 1549, in which Peter Martyr, then professor of theology, defended the figurative interpretation of the words, 'This is my body,' and the commemorative character of the ordinance. The acts of the disputation were published by Cranmer, with a preface and discourse of Peter Martyr.¹²³⁸ In June of the same year a disputation on the same subject, in which Bucer took part, was held in the University of Cambridge.¹²³⁹

Cranmer, after holding first to transubstantiation, then to consubstantiation, adopted at last the Calvinistic theory of a spiritual real presence and a spiritual reception by faith only, and embodied it in the Articles and the second revision of the Liturgy.¹²⁴⁰ He openly confessed this change at a public disputation held in London, Dec. 14, 1548, in the Parliament house, 'in the presence of almost all the nobility of England.'¹²⁴¹ He wrote an elaborate exposition and defense of his final view against the attacks of Gardiner.¹²⁴² He does not allude to Calvin's writings on the eucharist, although he can hardly have been ignorant of them, but quotes largely from Augustine, Tertullian, Origen, Theodoret, and other fathers who seem to favor a figurative interpretation, and approvingly mentions Bertram, Berengarius, and Wycliff among mediæval divines, and Bucer, Peter Martyr, Zwingli, OEcolampadius among the Reformers, as teaching substantially the same doctrine.¹²⁴³ He also expressed his unqualified approbation of Bullinger's 'Tract on the Sacraments,' which was by his desire republished in England (1551) by John à Lasco, to whom he remarked that 'nothing of Bullinger's required to be read and examined previously.'¹²⁴⁴ But he traced his change directly to Bishop Ridley,¹²⁴⁵ and Ridley derived his view not so much from Swiss sources as from Bertram (Ratramnus), who, in the middle of the ninth century, wrote with great ability against the magical transubstantiation theory of Paschasius Radbertus, and in favor of a spiritual and dynamic presence.¹²⁴⁶ Cranmer's last utterances on this subject, shortly before his condemnation and martyrdom, were made in the Oxford disputations with the Romanists to which he, with Ridley and Latimer, was summoned from prison, April (and again in September), 1555. He declared there that Christ's 'true body is truly present to them that truly receive him, but spiritually. And so it is taken after a spiritual sort. . . . If ye understand by this word "really," re ipsa, i.e., in very deed and effectually, so Christ, by the grace and efficacy of his passion, is in deed and truly present to all his true and holy members. But if ye understand by this word "really" corporaliter, i.e., corporally, so that by the body of Christ is understanded a natural body and organical, so the first proposition doth vary, not only from usual speech and phrase of Scripture, but also is clean contrary to the holy Word of God and Christian profession: when as both the Scripture doth testify by these words, and also the Catholic Church hath professed from the beginning, Christ to have left the world, and to sit at the right hand of the Father till he come unto judgment.'¹²⁴⁷

We add the last confessions of the other two English Reformers at their examination in Oxford.

Bishop Latimer declared 'that there is none other presence of Christ required than a spiritual presence; and this presence is sufficient for Christian man, as the presence by the which we both abide in Christ, and Christ in us to the obtaining of eternal life, if we persevere in his true gospel.'¹²⁴⁸

Bishop Ridley said: 'I worship Christ in the sacrament, but not because he is included in the sacrament: like as I worship Christ also in the Scriptures, not because he is really included in them. . . . The body of Christ is present in the sacrament, but yet sacramentally and spiritually (according to his grace) giving life, and in that respect really, that is, according to his benediction, giving life.The true Church of Christ doth acknowledge a presence of Christ's body in the Lord's Supper to be communicated to the godly by grace, and spiritually, as I have often showed, and by a sacramental signification, but not by the corporal presence of the body of his flesh.¹²⁴⁹

REVISION OF THE ARTICLES.

The Thirty-nine Articles have remained unchanged in England since the reign of Elizabeth. The objections of Nonconformists to some of the Articles (XXIV., XXV., the affirmative clause of XX., and a portion of XXVII) have been removed since 1688 by relaxation and exemption; and the difficulties arising from the development of theological schools with widely divergent tendencies, within the bosom of the Church of England itself, have been met by liberal decisions allowing a great latitude of interpretation.

During the reign of William III., in 1689, a thorough revision of the Book of Common Prayer was undertaken and actually made in the interest of an agreement with Protestant Dissenters, by an able royal commission of ten bishops and twenty divines, including the well-known names of Stillingfleet, Patrick, Tillotson, Sharp, Hall, Beveridge, and Tenison. But the revision has never been acted upon, and was superseded by the toleration granted to Dissenters. The alterations did not extend to the Articles directly, but embraced some doctrinal features in the liturgical services—namely, the change of the word Priest to 'Presbyter' or 'Minister;' Sunday to 'Lord's Day;' the omission of the Apocryphal Lessons in the calendar of Saints' days, for which chapters from Proverbs and Ecclesiastes were substituted, a concession to conscientious scruples against kneeling in receiving the sacrament, and an addition to the rubric before the Athanasian Creed, stating that 'the condemning clauses are to be understood as relating only to those who obstinately deny the substance of the Christian faith.¹²⁵⁰