It is usually said that the marks of a true church are the preaching of God’s word and the sacraments properly administered. The Church of England’s 39 articles puts it this way:
The visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men, in which the pure Word of [1]God is preached, and the Sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ’s ordinance, in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same. As the Church of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch, have erred, so also the Church of Rome hath erred, not only in their living and manner of Ceremonies, but also in matters of Faith.”
Other post reformation confessions use similar language. This is one reason why a lot of baptistic evangelicals tend to be cautious about refusing to recognise the baptism of other churches and so will sometimes include an exception clause for membership where baptism is required except where the person has been baptised as an infant in another church and sincerely considers that to be their effective baptism. In fact, this is the line I’ve tended to take over the years because we don’t want to start disregarding the baptism or come to that, communion of other churches and start pronouncing them to not be churches do we?
However, it is worth noting that the Church of England were themselves unambiguously and unapologetically making that move in their founding documents. First, they insisted that the sacraments had to not only be present but be properly administers “according to Christ’s ordinance”. There is not a free for all on this. Secondly they insist that other churches have “erred” in other words there is a move towards not recognising the sacraments of specific churches which surely has implications for how you view those churches. Of course, that was the point. The Church of England was not presenting itself as an alternative among many but the true church in England.
Now I expect that when they insisted that the sacraments were to be in line with Christ’s instructions, given his silence on mode and timing that how much water and when baptism happened were not in view. Indeed, there was no difference with Rome on that. The difference was on what baptism did and did not do.
This is important because when I engage with paedobaptists from Anglican and other backgrounds on the matter, there is an increasing demonstration of confusion about who baptism is for and what it does. This was demonstrated in the conversation I mentioned in this article and the resulting feedback I received. As I said then, some of the ways of describing what baptism is and does mangle the meaning of faith and belief. Is the person baptised because they have faith, may one day have faith or does it confer faith? What is the basis for that faith? Is it their own faith or is it something that their parents offer on their behalf?
There is such a mess here that the ordinance cannot function properly or effectively and that means that it cannot be relied upon as a mark of the church. That leaves us with a few questions I guess about where it leaves us!
It is worth noting that these “marks” are not infallible, cut and dry indicators about whether each individual church is pure, they are more descriptors of what the whole church is meant to look like. I think it is also possible to look at how the mars function together so that it may be that a church is weak in one area but other aspects strengthen it. So, I wouldn’t say that because a church is lacking in one area that it is not a church. However, I think we can observe the following:
- It does mean that we are under no obligation to recognise the baptism of paedobaptist churches, especially when the doctrine behind it is confused and even misleading as valid baptism.
- It cannot function as an effective and helpful mark for those churches who use it because it simply does not do the job it is meant to as a means of grace because it doesn’t provide an effective means for experiencing that grace.
- We must look at how things build up together so that where a church as a whole has defective doctrine so that God’s Word is not taught as it should be, the sacraments are not observed as they should be and there is not effective church discipline then we must ask serious questions about whether or not those churches continue to function as churches at all.
[1] Article 19.
Faithroots 