M. F. Sadler on baptismal regeneration; part 2

  Having considered Sadler’s views on “the effects of  baptismal grace”, we turn now  to “the practical results of holding the truth respecting baptismal grace”, which topic concludes chapter 18 of The Second Adam and the New Birth.

 In Sadler’s schema, the practical results follow quite naturally from the effects: “We have already, in the former parts of this treatise, necessarily anticipated much which will come under the head of practical application.”  Indeed, the practicality of baptismal regeneration is so immense, that Sadler asserts the doctrine can be deduced merely “from the application to heart and life”  found in the leading New Testament passages.

Application is paramount. It is one thing to be a recipient of baptismal grace; but say a man comes to the laver of regeneration, receives its life-diffusing grace, and, thanks to “defective religious teaching”, fails to comprehend that he has gained “an interest in Christ ?” What if a pious Christian brings his infant child to the font, believing that the child will be subjected to an edifying rite of initiation, and, then, receives him back from the arms of the priest “in positive unbelief of any benefit having been conferred?” As Sadler writes in an earlier chapter:

I believe that in thousands of parishes there is the most destructive unbelief in any spiritual grace whatsoever conveyed, under any circumstances, in the Sacrament of Baptism. There is a vague idea among the professing members of the Church that it is right and proper that a child should be baptized; but they have no notion whatsoever (at least that they can express) of any grace or responsibility connected with it…I have met with multitudes who allowed themselves to remain in a state of impenitence, on the plea that they never had had sufficeint grace, if any at all given them; that conversion is entirely the work of God, and that they themselves can do nothing to forward it, and that they must wait His time. I say that this is the master-delusion among the unconverted poor. In a whole district which I could name, comprising many counties, saturated with what is called “Gospel preaching” the answer given to earnest exhortations to repentance is, “When God wants me, He will call me.” Of course, all idea of the holiness of the human body is out of the question. I don’t see how any preacher who has ever had the the doctrine of Baptism revealed to him by God’s Spirit, can possibly ignore the reception of Baptismal grace in those professing Christians to whom he is preaching conversion and repentance.

The “Gospel preaching” Sadler alludes to erred in conflating  baptismal regeneration with conversion. Far from being synonymous, the two, in fact, are “the natural complements to one another in the scheme of divine grace;”  for the churchman “can never broach the time of conversion as that of the first reception of grace.” Otherwise, he would “cut away the ground from under him.”

If any preacher would enforce such texts as, “Put off the old man,” “Be renewed with the spirit of your minds,” “Put on the new man,” he will find that he can only do so on the assumption that they are addressed to members of Christ’s body…How can a man look at the spiritual and moral state of the baptized, believe them to be in very deed dedicated to God, believe also that God has in very deed ratified that dedication by a real gift of grace, and yet not call upon them to turn to God and flee to the cross? If the wrath of God be in store for any, it is in store for the “sinners in Zion“, for those who “grieve”, “vex” and “quench” the Spirit.

Preaching conversion to the baptized, as if they had no “interest in Christ”, turns “the scheme of Divine grace” on its head. And, thus, Sadler is willing to risk repeating himself for the sake of demonstrating the practical application “furnished by the Baptismal doctrine” for “trust in God and holiness of life .”

 Of pivotal importance is the fact that only with a sincere belief in “what God has revealed respecting the Sacrament” can the Christian know with certainty that “all precepts of Scripture are addressed to him.”  The Bible, he writes, ” is not addressed to, nor intended for the heathen. The first part of it was inspired for the circumcised Jew; the whole for the baptized Christian.” In both cases, “God first gathers out a family, and then he gives this family His word to be their guide.” 

 God took one nation in Abraham as His family; then, from the first, He gave them Circumcision that they (individually) might know that they were in His family; then he gave them His word, addressed to them as a circumcised nation.

But this same pattern undergirds the expansion and perfection of Abraham’s family in the New Covenant:

He enlarged this family; He gathered together into it His children scattered abroad; and when He did this, He added to His word, for He gave the New Testament with its far deeper principles to His Church. He has taken care to give another covenant intial rite, whereby they who had these higher precepts might know that they were addressed to them, and that they had received grace-the grace of the New covenant-to fulfill them. The precepts of the New Testament are universally addressed to those who are in some degree partakers of Christ the Second Adam. It is taken for granted that they have all been made so in Baptism. He, then, who realizes this, will, in reading the Bible, take everything as said to himself.”

But is this not true of the Christian who takes baptism as a non-regenerative sign? Sadler does not dismiss the possibility; he acknowledges that there have been men of devout character “who have lived in the faithful recognition of much evangelical and moral truth.” But for all that, the trajectory of Evangelicalism towards the non-tangible and ahistorical, its visible/invisible ecclesiology and tendency to overemphasize the Divine decrees, left them hamstrung. Lacking that assurance which comes with recognition of “effectual signs of  grace, and God’s good will towards us”, these same men, some “almost to the end of their Christian career”, doubted they had “an interest in Christ.”

But if  baptism is indeed what “St. Paul asserts it to be, one of the first principles of the doctrine of Christ… the true belief in the one Baptism…must have the effect of at once of doing away with all these doubts, so destructive of a Christian’s peace, as to whether he has an interest in Christ.” 

When, for instance, in the Book of Proverbs, he reads “My son, give me thy heart ” he will not hesitate, and put such words from him, and say, “This does not yet belong to me; I must have more evidence that I am God’s child.” He will rather reverently say to God, “Take my heart; make my heart right with thee. Thou hast given to me the adoption; give me the love and holiness which mark thy true sons.”

And again, when he reads in the Prophets all the promises of God to His people-all the demonstrations of God’s wrath against the backslidings of His people-all the precepts or threatenings to Israel, to Judah, to Zion, to God’s elect, His chosen, he will realize that all those belong, in a far deeper and more extended sense, to the visible Church of Jesus Christ. He will be assured that circumcision had enrolled the Jew into a company of men, of whom, and to whom, such things could be said. Baptism (unless God’s purposes of grace are narrower than they were) has brought him into a body to which pertain benefits of which the Jewish were but a shadow…And if such will be his personal application to himself of the Old, how much more of the New Testament?  Whenever, then, he reads that Christians are, as members of Christ’s body, to be holy, to keep their bodies under subjection, to yield themselves unto God as those that are alive from the dead, to bear one another’s burdens, to be at peace with one another, as called in one body; whenever, I say, the man who realizes the grace of the Christian covenant finds such precepts as these, he will take them as said directly to himself, because that in Baptism he was brought into this fellowship.

But, more than this, Sadler wishes to impress upon his readers a “most important instruction” from God’s word; a motive for the pursuit of integrity and holiness of living with profound sacramental and ecclesiological implications, since their effective application to human hearts and consciences is achievable only in those who affirm “the baptismal engrafting into Christ of all in the Church.”

He begins by calling the reader’s attention to “certain holy dispositions inculcated upon all Christians” in the New Testament. They are bid to “cultivate certain graces”; they are commanded “to crucify and abhor certain sins”. In his letters to the Christians of Rome and Corinth, for example, we find the Apostle Paul urging the cultivation of humility and sympathy and placing the ban on sins of sexual impurity:

In Romans 12: 3-5, we have the Apostle exhorting the Roman Christians to humility. “I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you (let the reader remark how he addresses all) not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith”…Again; in I Corinthians 12, we find the Apostle bidding the Corinthians to cultivate tender sympathy with one another, to be kind and considerate, to condescend to one another’s infirmities, and to honour those inferior to them even in spiritual attainments…But again (and I would invite the reader’s most earnest attention to this last instance that I shall give), the Holy Spirit urges upon Christians purity of body and soul by reminding them their very bodies are the members of Christ. “Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ” Shall I then take the members of Christ, and make them the members of an harlot? God forbid.

“On what ground”, asks Sadler, does the Apostle urge these graces? Does he command humility and sympathy because of “their intrinsic beauty and worth”, or for “the eternal honour and glory” which follows them? What of sexual sins? Are men bidden to abhor every instance of sexual impropriety, merely because it is a blot on Christian character?

Men are bid to cultivate certain graces…not because of the intrinsic beauty and worth of this first Christian virtue (humility), nor because of the eternal honour and glory which will follow it…though these would certainly be legitimate grounds on which to urge men to cultivate it, and in other places these grounds are urged; but the reason he assigns is, that they to whom he wrote were “one body in Christ.” For as we have many members in one body and all members have not the same office; so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another.”

Again in I Corinthians 12, we find the apostle bidding the Corinthians to cultivate tender sympathy with one another…on the one ground that all to whom he wrote were members of Christ; for he begins his exhortation with “By one Spirit are we all baptized into one body.” He illustrates it by the mutual sympathy of the members of the human frame; and he concludes it with the words “Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular.”

Again, men are to crucify and abhor certain sins…Let it be observed that the Apostle does not say here that sins of impurity are to be avoided because of their inconsistency with a profession of Christianity. Neither does he bid men shun such sins because of the degradation into which they sink both body and soul, and the wrath of God…But the Holy Spirit would have have Christians abhor sins of impurity and lust because they have been grafted into Christ’s body (I Cor. 6) “Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and join them to a harlot? God forbid…”

It appears to me utterly impossible for any one who does not believe that all the baptized have at their Baptism been really grafted into Christ to urge this scripture motive to holiness.”

Lest we misunderstand Sadler’s point, he is not suggesting that these commands are beyond the abilities of the sacramentarian: “I do not doubt but that the love of his Saviour constrains many a Christian to exercise them, who, through defective religious teaching or prejudice, does not realize the doctrine of the Church being the body of Christ.”  But the fact that the Holy Ghost directed St. Paul to pinpoint one motive, “over and above any other” cannot be gainsaid; moreover, it is impossible to believe that Divine inspiration would lead the Apostle to urge “any one motive to any virtue or grace whatsoever”, which may be “safely dispensed with because others in the eye of man seem more effacacious.”

 Sadler’s concern is for the baptized layman, and the struggle to resist  the world, the flesh and the devil. His eternal frustration with Evangelical piety was its ruinous policy of erecting a wall between regeneration and baptism and a reluctance to preach repentance to a nominal or back-slidden individual:

If he had never been ( in the view of his instructor) regenerated, such an appeal would be dangerous: for it would lead him to imagine that he had once been grafted into Christ when he never had been…they are fearful lest baptized men should deem themselves members of Christ when they are not. Had St. Paul any such fear? His fear is not that men should think that they are members of Christ when they are not, but lest they should fail to realize it when they all are.

For Sadler, these were catastrophic errors which left back-sliding souls in a state of desperation and peril:

Supposing a young person’s Baptism to have been what St. Paul presumes it to be in all cases, a real engrafting into Christ’s body, what an awful responsibility upon those who do not warn him against sins so fearfully prevalent by bringing before him the full iniquity of such sins…When one thinks of the devastation which these forms of iniquity are working among baptized Christians, how can ministers of Christ be free from men’s blood, if such warnings do not form a part of their public teaching to their baptized flocks? And how can parents answer for their children’s souls, unless they teach them (as the Church directs them in her Catechism) that they are members of Christ, and so that their very bodies are to be reverenced and held sacred as in union with His?

Sadler concludes chapter 18 with this exhortation, written, it would seem, for Christians of Evangelical sensibilities:

Reader, does it seem too great a thing that men on earth should partake of a gift so awful? Consider, I beseech you, that Christian dispensation in which you are now living, how it began, how it is carried on, how it will terminate. It began with no less a miracle than the Incarnation: “the Word was made flesh”; it is carried on by One in your nature on the throne of the heaven of heavens; and at its close all men will rise again with their bodies.

You hold these things and you believe in original sin and the mystery of its transmission from the first Adam. You know not, then, what part of your probation it may be to submit your whole inner man to the doctrine of the second Adam, and of the means which He has consecrated for making His brethren one with himself. In such a dispensation of grace, it is not for you to ask, “How can these things be?” Far other words befit a creature redeemed by God incarnate. Say you rather, “Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.” “Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief.”