50 Abraham Booth

Abraham Booth’s Apology for the Baptists (1778)

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is the standard Baptist defense of close/strict communion.

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In section one, Booth argues that strict Baptists do not lay undue stress on baptism.

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Rather than claiming that baptism is a saving

ordinance, Booth maintains that both the subject and mode of baptism are essential to the ordinance.

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Before providing arguments for strict communion, Booth contends for the Scripture’s regulative role over Christians and their worship as the ground of strict communion.

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The regulative rule of Scripture is Booth’s primary defense against the claim that those who lack light in baptism should be admitted to communion on grounds

the Passover, yet might not any partake of it before they were circumcised without sin: so also in the New Testament, baptism is the first ordinance to be administered by the direction and appointment of God, without which, the Supper of the Lord may not be received without sin” (158-59). From this explanation, one could fairly ask wherein lies the difference between circumcision giving a right to Passover and the requirement that one be circumcised first.

131 Abraham Booth was born to Anglican parents and raised in Nottinghamshire. However, he was converted and baptized as a General Baptist by age 21 and later became a convinced Particular Baptist.

Booth served as pastor of the Prescot-Street Baptist Church in London for thirty-seven years. He was well educated and influential in the founding of Regent’s Park College. In his writings, Booth defended orthodoxy against Socinianism, argued against antinomianism, vied for penal substitutionary atonement as a means of particular redemption, and held to a Baptist covenantal theology in line with the Second London Confession (1689). As a Baptist apologist, Booth offered Paedobaptism Examined (1784) as a defense of believer’s baptism before writing his defense of close communion, An Apology for the Baptists (1778), that is surveyed in this section. Garrett Jr., Baptist Theology, 189–93. For more on Booth’s contribution to Baptist theology, see Himbury, “Baptismal Controversies, 1640-1900,” 297–98; Naylor, Calvinism, Communion, and the Baptists.

132 Oliver, History of the English Calvinistic Baptists, 70. Throughout the work, Booth references and critiques Bunyan, Candidus, and Pacificus, the latter two being his most recent stimulus for writing.

133 Booth, Apology, 5–6. Of this work, Oliver writes, it “was the most detailed work to appear on either side of the communion controversy since the seventeenth century. [Booth] took a broad view of the question, not limiting himself to answering contemporaries. . . . Although he did not allow any previous writer to mold his approach, he displayed a much greater sense of history than any previous eighteenth- century writer on this subject. . . . He wrote with sympathy and respect for paedobaptists, even though he could not receive them to the communion table.” Oliver, History of the English Calvinistic Baptists, 71–72.

134 Booth, Apology, 21–22. Fowler argues that it is incongruous for Booth “to take such a low view of the meaning of baptism and at the same time exclude from communion persons who are baptized by a defective mode.” Fowler, More Than a Symbol, 46. Fowler concludes, “Whatever may be the coherence, or lack thereof, of such a position, what is clear is that Booth and other Baptists like him held tenaciously to a high view of church order but a low view of the efficacy of the ordinances of the church.”

135 Booth, Apology, 29.

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of ignorance or misjudgment.

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From this formative principle, Booth proceeds to his arguments.

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In Scripture, Christ commands both of the ordinances, yet they cannot be done at the same time. Therefore, churches should follow the scriptural precedent of baptism occurring first,

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because churches should receive the precedent of Acts as the mind of Christ. Booth recognizes that Acts 2:41 is the only place to give explicit

precedent for the order of belief, baptism, and communion. However, when one considers the matter of immediate baptisms throughout Acts, it requires that baptisms in those cases preceded communion as an implied pattern.

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The New Testament presumes that all Christians should be or have been baptized.

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Given Christ’s commands to baptize and participate in the Lord’s Supper, those who lay aside baptism, go against Christ.

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Booth also appeals to the order of institution of the ordinances and their meaning. Given that Christ was baptized by John before the Last Supper, Christ “must intend” this same order to continue and “tacitly prohibits every unbaptized person having communion at his table.”

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The meaning of the ordinances is also instructive—baptism is initiatory and communion demonstrates continuing fellowship.

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Hermeneutically,

136 Booth is very clear in his application of Scripture’s regulative function as he continues. He writes, “It is not the measure of a believers knowledge, nor the evidence of his integrity; nor is it the charitable opinion we from about his acceptance with God that is the rule of his admission to the sacred Supper; but the precepts of Jesus Christ, and the practice of the apostolic churches.” See Booth, Apology, 77.

137 For a similar take on Booth’s arguments, see Naylor, Calvinism, Communion, and the Baptists, 121–23.

138 Booth, Apology, 33–34. Booth cites Matt 28 and the practice of baptism soon after profession of faith in Acts as evidence (42-43).

139 Booth, Apology, 46.

140 He cites Acts 19 and Paul’s presumption that the disciples of Jesus would have been baptized. Booth,Apology, 88.

141 Booth, Apology, 41.

142 Booth, Apology, 43.

143 Booth, Apology, 48.

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Booth believes his case is strong. He writes, “If these declarations and facts, and precedents, be not sufficient to determine the point in our favor; it will be exceedingly hard, if not impossible to conclude with certainty, in what order any two institutions that God ever appointed were to be administered.”

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Next, Booth points to a methodological error in his opponents’ position related to covenant signs. The open position, he claims does not derive from Scripture but from inference and analogy.

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Consistency in the open position would require that open communion advocates “must allow” that those who were not circumcised could have participated in Passover.

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Booth argues that baptism did not come “in the place of circumcision, as many of our Paedobaptist brethren suppose.”

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However, baptism is

“equally necessary to communion . . . under the Christian economy, as [circumcision]

was to every male, in order to partake of the paschal feast.”

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As similar as this argument is to the thesis of this dissertation, Booth provides no argumentation for why it is true, as this dissertation seeks to do.

144 Booth, Apology, 49.

145 Booth, Apology, 50.

146 Booth, Apology, 51. Booth’s point here is interesting in the history of this debate. Years earlier, Bunyan conceded the charge. However, neither Robert Hall Jr. nor Samuel Worcester, the Congregationalist who debated Thomas Baldwin, would concede it. Hall and Worcester simply claimed that the OT law was clear, but no such law is given in the NT. This point is the primary issue of this dissertation.

147 Booth, Apology, 82. The only similarity that Booth draws to that of this dissertation is the continuity and analogous role of both circumcision and baptism as entry signs into the people of God.

Booth presents a long and amusing parable at this point in which circumcision’s definition is confused. He argues that the open communionists’ reasoning would require that the incorrect circumcision be accepted (83-86). Later, he considers another view of the way that circumcision and baptism’s relationship are sometimes utilized by open communionists. He writes, “And must we indeed consider the administration and neglect of baptism as on a perfect level with being circumcised or uncircumcised, in the Apostolic Times! Must an ordinance of the New Testament, submission to which the Lord requires of all his disciples, be placed on the same footing with an obsolete rite of the Jewish church! How kind it is of our brethren who possess this knowledge, and are so well acquainted with Christian liberty, relating to baptism that they are willing to inform us of its true extent. . . . I may however venture an appeal to the intelligent reader, whether this way of arguing does not much better become the pen of . . . any Baptist? Because, as Hornbeck remarks, . . .’it is very absurd to explain the design, the command, and the obligation of baptism by the abrogation and abuse of circumcision.” See Booth, Apology, 140-41.

148 Booth, Apology, 82.

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Response to objections. Regarding the texts that Booth’s opponents misuse (e.g., Rom 14:1; 15:7; Acts 15:8-9; 1 Cor 9:19-23), Booth charges,

Unless our opponents can make it appear, that they obtain the grant of a dispersion power to gospel ministers and churches . . . [that] authorizes the ministers of Christ to set aside an ordinance of his, or to invert the order of its administration as they may think it proper; they are far from answering the exigencies of their case, or serving the purpose for which they are cited.

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To the argument that baptism may be laid aside to promote edification and unity around the Lord’s Supper, Booth claims that one ordinance should not be pitted against another.

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To Pacificus’ and Candidus’ claim that the Jewish Christians in the New Testament could have refused to commune with Gentile Christians due to the Gentile’s lack of circumcision, Booth notes the supposition that “baptism was no more commanded of believers now than circumcision was of Gentile converts in the apostolic age.”

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In response to Bunyan’s argument that the Israelites celebrated Passover in the wilderness without being circumcised, Booth replies that this action was called the reproach of Egypt in Joshua 5:9.

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To Bunyan’s claim that the participation of

uncircumcised men in the Passover under Hezekiah legitimates open communion (2 Chr 30), Booth retorts that Hezekiah’s request for forgiveness after the act suggests their culpability (v. 19).

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In short, Booth finds each of his opponents’ arguments from Scripture lacking.

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149 Booth, Apology, 93.

150 Booth, Apology, 117. Although he acknowledges that positive commands may on rare occasions be set aside due to natural necessity (e.g., David eating the shew bread) or a moral consideration, Scripture nowhere supports pitting one positive institution against another.

151 Booth, Apology, 139. Booth finds Candidus and Pacificus’ argument to be contradictory to what he cites Candidus (Daniel Turner) as writing elsewhere. In another work, Turner affirmed baptism’s role for incorporating a believer into the visible church. For this discussion, see Booth, Apology, 160-61.

152 Booth, Apology, 118.

153 Booth, Apology, 119.

154 Booth concludes by presenting his designation for the two sides of the debate. The free communionists are “latitudinarian,” meaning “the term Baptist when applied to them, is to be understood in such a latitude of signification, as will comport with receiving persons into communion who, in their

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