By DAVID LYTLE
Baptists are confessionally memorialists. The Baptist Faith and Message (2000) identifies the Lord’s Supper as “a symbolic act of obedience whereby members of the church… memorialize the death of the Redeemer and anticipate His second coming.”[1] Other Baptist confessions typically agree. The pervasive use of the term “ordinance” rather than “sacrament” among Baptists emphasizes the church's obedience in this Christ-ordained ceremony. This emphasis on the church’s obedience rather than divine activity in the Lord’s Supper illustrates Zwingli’s influence on the Baptist tradition.
Is mere memorialism the only Baptist contribution to a theology of the Supper? Recent Baptist scholars have retrieved seventeenth and eighteenth voices to propose a more robust view of the Supper. Michael Haykin has forcefully asserted that early Baptists were more influenced by John Calvin’s spiritual presence view than Zwingli’s memorialism.[2] Stanley K. Fowler and Curtis Freeman have advanced a view of historic Baptist identity that is both sacramental and catholic. In their arguments, General Baptist theologian Thomas Grantham has received appreciative attention.[3] Rather than being anti-traditional, sectarian, and memorialist, Grantham’s thought may help Baptists recover a rich sacramentalism that is now mostly absent from Baptist life. Advocates of Baptist catholicity have showcased Thomas Grantham's sacramentalism as a way forward in Baptist life that is not shackled by the chains of revivalism, fundamentalism, and modern evangelicalism.
Contrasting this interpretation, Clint Bass’s detailed research has argued that Grantham held a memorialist view of the ordinances and downplayed any sacramental tendencies in his theology.[4] According to Bass, Grantham’s sacramental-sounding statements should be understood in light of his more consistent memorialist assertions. He denied Christ's presence in the elements and focused on it as a “visible preaching of the word that called attention to the past events of the cross.”[5] The Table symbolizes the cross.
What is one to do with these opposing viewpoints? From my perspective, Bass’s historical grasp of Grantham’s theology is more accurate and less driven by desires to promulgate a theological agenda. At the same time, something can be learned from Grantham’s sacramental statements. The dichotomy between memorialism and sacramentalism does not fit easily with Grantham’s thought and does not need to constrain our own.
Grantham’s theology of the Lord’s Supper provides an example of robust memorialism among early General Baptists. While it was an ordinance done out of obedience to Christ and a symbol of his death for all, the Supper was also a tool in the hands of the Spirit, a ceremony by which the church celebrated and unified around the gospel. For Grantham, the efficacy of the Supper was akin to that of the preached Word. It was a chosen means for the church to focus on the center of their faith—the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. Because of this, he advanced the regular (even weekly) practice of the Supper.
Robust Memorialism
Grantham was primarily a memorialist who usually discussed the ordinances in terms of ecclesiology—the Church’s obedience to Christ’s commands. Ecclesiology dominates Grantham’s thought. His Christianismus Primitivusreveals the memorialist key in which he operated. When discussing the benefits of baptism Grantham feels compelled to add the caveat “Not that the water doth any thing in all this.”[6] He compares the waters of baptism and the elements of communion both physical symbols pointed to spiritual truth, saying: “Even as the Sanctified bread and wine in the Table of the Lord, is called the body and blood of the Lord, because of it's Divine use and signification, to set forth (in the Church of God) Christ and him crucified.”[7] Grantham’s view of the ordinances of baptism and communion is that they are established to teach or “set forth” the gospel to the church. In this assertion, Grantham rejects the immediate efficacy of the ordinances while emphasizing their symbolic and pedagogical nature.
At the same time, Grantham sought to elevate the significance of the Table. Reacting to Quakers who denied the need for physical ordinances, Grantham championed the benefits of the Lord’s table. He taught that this rite brings God’s people together under the Lordship of Christ. It promotes communion with one another, humility, love, and unity.[8] The Supper is the meal of Christ’s new covenant people. Grantham proclaimed:
The Table of the Lord rightly understood is of great validity to establish Christians in the true Faith, for when our Savior saith, This Cup is the new Testament in my blood, he shews the nature of this Ordinance is to assure the Saints (as by a pledge or token) that the New Testament is ratified and confirmed by the death of the Testator…for all the Offices of Christ do meet and set forth themselves in this Service.[9]
At the table, the Christian experiences Christ as his prophet, priest, and king. While Grantham rejected that this was a new sacrifice in the Anglican sense, the table is still where the Church experiences the glories of the new covenant.
Unlike Zwingli who only practiced communion yearly, Grantham maintained that the church should perform the ordinance of communion frequently. He notes, “The Primitive Christians were very frequent in the practice of this Ordinance.” To support this assertion he contends, “Augustine reproves such as come slowly to this Service. . . ‘If it be thy daily bread, why dost thou take it but yearly?’”[10] Thus, Grantham saw the Supper as spiritual nourishment that the church frequently needed.
Most importantly, Grantham saw the Lord’s Table as functioning the same way as preaching and prayer. The Church should regularly assemble to partake in these Christ-ordained activities. It is through these ordinances that God’s grace ordinarily comes to his people. It should be no different with the Lord’s Supper: “Preaching and prayer in publick Assemblies are left free to any time, because they are always useful, and the more frequent the better, if piously performed, and the same we conclude of the Lords Table.”[11] Viewing the Supper as a means of spiritual nourishment, Grantham encouraged frequent participation in its benefits.
Grantham said: “No Ordinance (no not preaching of the Word) is of greater use to establish God’s People in the Faith than this, for here we see with the eyes, and by it the Judgement is informed, as we hear with the ear, and so receive Instruction.”[12] For Grantham, the “visible sermon” of communion was to be the capstone of the church’s worship—the evangelical message upon which all ecclesiological activity rests.[13] Because of this, the Lord’s Supper can truly be said to be a means of grace.
Applications of Grantham’s Insights
Baptists need not abandon their current confessions of faith in retrieving profound theological insight from the General Baptist tradition. All Baptists can agree on the Supper as a memorial, but they should also, like Grantham, go even further and advance the benefits of the Lord’s Table. His robust memorialism insists on the church’s need for a physical representation of Christ’s spiritual work. This meal can also be employed to unify the new covenant community. Because it is so central to the worship and teaching of the church, Grantham insisted that Christians were to feast weekly at the Lord’s Table. Here, they would find the same power that transformed their life when they heard the preached Word. In Grantham’s view, the Supper is central to Christian worship. In it, the church is repeatedly called to remember the gospel story.
Baptists would do well to listen to Grantham’s wisdom on this topic. Historically, revivalism has so shaped Baptists that the altar call has replaced the Supper as the climactic event of corporate worship.[14] We need not discard the revivalism of our past and its emphasis on conversion. At the same time, Grantham’s theology would call us to corporate worship that is more aligned with the pattern of Scripture. Memorialists often only speak of the Supper in terms of what it does not accomplish. Instead, Grantham would have us proclaim the efficacy of the Table in the same way we extol the efficacy of the preached Word and prayer. In a New Testament church, the Spirit uses these means to transform lives.
[1] “The Baptist Faith and Message,” in William L. Lumpkin, Baptist Confessions of Faith, 2nd edition revised by Bill J. Leonard (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 2011), 516.
[2] Michael A. G. Haykin, Amidst Us Our Belovèd Stands: Recovering Sacrament in the Baptist Tradition (Bellingham WA: Lexham Press, 2022).
[3] Stanley K. Fowler, More Than a Symbol: The British Baptist Recovery of Baptismal Sacramentalism (Carlisle, UK: Paternoster Press, 2002), 28; Curtis W. Freeman, Contesting Catholicity: Theology for other Baptists (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014), 314.
[4] Clint C. Bass, Thomas Grantham (1633-1692) and General Baptist Theology (Oxford: Regent’s Park College, 2013), 79.
[5] Bass, Thomas Grantham, 100.
[6] Grantham, Christianismus Primitivus, Book II, Part 2, 23.
[7] Grantham, Christianismus Primitivus, Book II, Part 2, 23.
[8] Grantham, Christianismus Primitivus, Book II, Part 2, 87.
[9] Grantham, Christianismus Primitivus, Book II, Part 2, 89.
[10] Grantham, Christianismus Primitivus, Book II, Part 2, 95.
[11] Grantham, Christianismus Primitivus, Book II, Part 2, 95.
[12] Grantham, Christianismus Primitivus, Book II, Part 2, 90.
[13] Bass, Thomas Grantham, 96.
[14] Haykin, Amidst Us, 120.