80 Buell Kazee

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different theology of baptism than Baptists.

²⁷⁶

For Kazee, Paul’s question in Acts 19:3,

“into what were you baptized,” demonstrates the authority of the churches to determine the validity of baptism for those desiring fellowship with them.

²⁷⁷

Kazee’s aim is not sectarian. Instead, he looks forward to the day when all Christians will be united in heaven. Yet, because “error can be subtle and fatal,” separation is necessary “wherever we cannot agree on the vital interpretation of how our experience took place” (e.g., the interpretation of baptism).

²⁷⁸

Therefore, he claims,

The candidate for baptism and church membership does not submit to the ordinance for any other reason than to receive the symbolic expression of what that church teaches on the matter of salvation . . . We see, then, that baptism is not something which the candidate for membership brings to the church, that is, something of his own or origination, but rather something he receives from the church, the

recognition which the church gives to one who makes a confession in accord with that church’s belief.

²⁷⁹

Clearly then,

To accept a baptism or a Lord's Supper which declares that we have been saved some other way [sacramental views] or that is administered by those who teach that our salvation is experienced or declared otherwise [e.g., baptismal regeneration], is, indeed, to break fellowship with those whose administration of the ordinances do correctly declare the gospel of a full salvation.

²⁸⁰

All of this leads Kazee to conclude that only those churches that agree on a theology of the ordinances are true churches. Thus, no one baptized in any church other than a Baptist church may be received as a member or join in communion.

Although the validity of the church matters for who may take the Lord’s Supper, Kazee also argues the need for scriptural baptism in order to participate.

Immersion of a professing believer by a Baptist church, such that the act is viewed in

276 Kazee, The Church and the Ordinances, 97, 118.

277 Kazee, The Church and the Ordinances, 112.

278 Kazee, The Church and the Ordinances, 113.

279 Kazee, The Church and the Ordinances.

280 Kazee, The Church and the Ordinances, 126.

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“purely symbolic” terms constitutes scriptural baptism.

²⁸¹

Baptism is the “sign of . . . public recognition and identification” as a child of God, as circumcision was for the Israelites.

²⁸²

According to Colossians 2:11-13, “circumcision and baptism are directly related in meaning.” This is because they both symbolize “death to the flesh and

cleansing to the life.”

²⁸³

So, not only does the validity of the church depend in part on the church’s understanding of baptism, the nature of the baptism considered in itself renders a Christian qualified to receive the Lord’s Supper.

Kazee’s third argument for closed communion is that the Lord’s Supper functions as a “fellowship ordinance,” such that its participants declare themselves to be in fellowship with each other.

²⁸⁴

He explains,

[The Lord’s Supper] declares that you are in fellowship with the church of which you are a member, otherwise you would have no right to partake of the Supper with even that church. How then can you logically go to another Baptist church where you have no recognition and which has no supervision over your fellowship and participate in the ordinance as if you were a member? Are you not [with your words denying] in such cases that there's a real functioning universal-invisible church as far as baptism is concerned, but recognizing that there is a universal-Baptist Church where all Baptist who are denominationally reputable may join in the Lord’s Supper [by your actions]? Are you not making baptism a local church ordinance, while at the same time you are making the Lord's Supper and ecumenical ordinance?

²⁸⁵

Kazee is clearly writing to an audience that he believes follows his theology in denying the existence of the universal-invisible church. Earlier in the book, he claims that the universal-invisible church cannot exist because, among other reasons, it does not meet, has no officers, and cannot function as a body.

²⁸⁶

Nonetheless, his point is clear. If a

281 Kazee, The Church and the Ordinances, 109, 122.

282 Kazee, The Church and the Ordinances, 114. Relevant for this dissertation is Kazee’s comment “Not all Israelites were saved people, but they were all types of saved people. Circumcision was associated with Israel in an institutional sense.”

283 Kazee, The Church and the Ordinances, 113.

284 Kazee, The Church and the Ordinances, 124.

285 Kazee, The Church and the Ordinances.

286 Kazee, The Church and the Ordinances, 5–30.

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church cannot exercise discipline toward every person that receives its communion, that church cannot credibly declare the fellowship of each participant.

²⁸⁷

He writes,

Let us say it another way. When we accept baptism from a church, we belong to that church. We are under its guidance and care. Not only is [his] approval for baptism give him by that church, but the approval also of our daily walk is its responsibility.

If we are out of fellowship with our church, we have no right to participate in the Lord's Supper with it until our fellowship has been restored. The only church which could be in a position to know our spiritual status is the one to which we belong.

Logically we could not go to another church and expect it to decide whether or not we are eligible to take the Lord's Supper. While our fraternal relationship [extends to] all Baptists, yay, even to all children of God, our covenant relationship in the gospel Proclamation is with the church of which we are members.

²⁸⁸

For Kazee, only closed communion makes sense.

²⁸⁹

Summary of Strongest Arguments

Among closed communion advocates, the connection between the Lord’s Supper and church discipline appears most consistently.

²⁹⁰

If a church is to lead the congregation to participate worthily and to discern the body of Christ rightly, while at the same time exercising its responsibility for purity through church discipline, closed

communion advocates claim these requirements necessitate closed communion. The tight

287 Kazee, The Church and the Ordinances, 122.

288 Kazee, The Church and the Ordinances, 125. The timing of Kazee’s plea for tighter communion restrictions among Southern Baptist is interesting, given the dramatic growth of Southern Baptists during the 1950s and 1960s. His knowledge of this fact appears as he ends the book. He writes,

“Do we not have the greatest number we have ever had? Are not our organizations admired by much of the religious world? Is not efficiency and training our trademark? In spite of all this, do we have to admit worldliness and weakness? If we moved the test of fellowship back to the ordinances where it belongs, we might decimate our numbers, but we might also become purer and stronger.”

289 Kazee, The Church and the Ordinances, 123. Given these distinctions though, Kazee distinguishes between what he describes as closed communion, meaning denominational communion, and close communion, meaning local church only. While he switches the terms from that utilized in this dissertation his position fits with that of J. R. graves above, who, it was noted, also described himself as a proponent of close communion.

290 For a brief, contemporary defense this view, see Jeffrey T. Riddle, “Piper’s Baptism and Membership Proposal: A Neo-Landmark Response,” in Evangelical Theological Society (Eastern Regional Meeting, Westminster Theological Seminary, Glenside, PA, 2006). Despite calling the paper a “Neo- Landmark Response,” Riddle disagrees with the Landmark movement that “non-Baptist churches are only religious societies and not true churches.” Furthermore, he never actually defends the local church only view of the Lord’s Supper. I cite him here due to his self-assigned title.

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connection between the church’s responsibility to seek its own purity through church discipline and the limitations on a local church to guard the purity of the table when non- members participate serves as the strongest argument for closed communion.

²⁹¹

Indeed, the tight connection between church discipline and the Lord’s Supper is the primary distinction between closed communion and close communion. Secondarily, the closed communionists’ insistence that the Lord’s Supper was given by Christ to the local church specifically serves to highlight the proper administrators of the meal and proper context in which it is to be enjoyed.

Arguments for Ecumenical Communion

For the purposes of this dissertation, ecumenical communion normally refers to the view that all Christians should be received at communion in any given local Baptist church on the basis of a common process of initiation that includes a profession of faith, baptism (by affusion, sprinkling, or immersion on a subject that may be an infant, a child, or an adult),

²⁹²

and sometimes confirmation in some unspecified order. While this

affirmation is the baseline for ecumenical communion, for the purposes of this

dissertation the label also serves as a catch-all for those views that allow an even broader group to participate in communion in a Baptist church.

²⁹³

For instance, this section

291 Commenting on J. R. Graves’ view, Thomas White describes this point by stating,

“Close[d] communion can all but ensure the integrity of the Lord’s Supper because only members of that local church are allowed to participate. This understanding has the easiest time adhering to Paul’s warnings in 1 Cor concerning the oneness of the body and not eating with a person such as the man mentioned in 1 Cor 5.” White, “A Baptist’s Theology of the Lord’s Supper,” 159.

292 One distinction between ecumenical communion and open communion lies in the willingness of ecumenical communion advocates to affirm the validity of a mode and subject of baptism besides the immersion of a professing believer when that “baptism” is considered part of the larger process of initiation. As Curtis Freeman points out, open communion advocates such as Bunyan and Spurgeon did not believe that paedobaptism was truly baptism. Instead, they were willing to hold communion with those they viewed as unbaptized according to the New Testament’s definition of baptism. Ecumenical

communionists do not open the Table to those they would describe as “unbaptized.” Rather, they open the table to those whose initiation process happens to be different than their own. While the open communion advocates ground unity in a common faith or work of the Spirit without baptism, ecumenical communion advocates ground unity in a common initiation that includes some form of baptism. Freeman, Contesting Catholicity, 379.

293 The description above draws from the helpful distinctions made by Brian Haymes, Ruth

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includes those who view participation in the Lord’s Supper as a converting ordinance.

This section demonstrates that adherents of ecumenical communion generally ground their view, at least in part, on some form of sacramental theology.

Paul Fiddes

In Paul Fiddes’ work Tracks and Traces: Baptist Identity in Church and Theology (2006) he seeks to show that the concept of covenant is essential for a proper understanding of the church.

²⁹⁵

Because he later grounds his arguments for ecumenical communion in the idea of covenant, this section surveys Fiddes’ teaching on covenant before moving to his arguments for ecumenical communion.

²⁹⁶

Gouldbourne, and Anthony R. Cross, On Being the Church: Revisioning Baptist Identity, Studies in Baptist History and Thought, vol. 21 (Milton Keynes, England: Paternoster Press, 2008), 85–86. The authors seem to recognize a difference between open communion an ecumenical communion by distinguishing those churches that have followed John Bunyan’s lead from those that additionally have aligned with the World Council of Churches and/or Great Britain’s Baptist Union with its efforts and proposals related to

promoting “Churches Together in England” (CTE). Interestingly, the authors claim that one difficulty in affirming unity based on a common baptism centers on whether paedobaptists view conversion baptism as re-baptism or not. Finally, the authors’ solution to these debates requires accepting one another despite real issues of conscience in such a way that “differences of interpretation and practice of baptism should not be an excuse for division in the church” (87). Similarly, Freeman shows how the Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (BEM) document, which was developed by the World Council of Churches (WCC), does not go far enough in locating unity in a “common baptism” based on Eph 4:5. Instead, the Baptist World Alliance has clarified this proposal to speak of a “whole journey of initiation.” If baptism is merely shorthand for the whole conversion process, then the whole conversion process, which may include paedobaptism or

credobaptism, should be recognized as legitimate. Freeman, Contesting Catholicity, 376. Emir Caner uses the term “Laissez-faire Communion” to refer to the same view that this dissertation calls ecumenical communion. Caner, “Fencing the Table,” 173. Caner cites Covenant Church in Houston, TX as an example of this view.

295 A four-time graduate of Oxford University, Fiddes served at Regent’s Park College as a fellow and tutor in theology from 1972 to 1989. At that time, he became principal of the college, a post he held until 2007. Born in 1947 in Upminster, England, Fiddes identifies as a Baptist theologian, who intentionally engages with the wider Christian community through his writings and ecumenical leadership.

His writings include a rejection of the doctrine of the impassibility of God (The Creative Suffering of God, 1988) and a centrality of participation in God through a critical appropriation of process theology

(Participating in God, 2000). Garrett Jr., Baptist Theology, 680–81. See also the preface to Fiddes’ Tracks and Traces and the discussion by Steven R Harmon, “Trinitarian Koinōnia and Ecclesial Oikoumenē: Paul Fiddes as Ecumenical Theologian,” Perspectives in Religious Studies 44, no. 1 (2017): 20–22. For further admission of Fiddes’ method and way of relating covenant and participation, see Paul S. Fiddes, “Covenant and Participation: A Personal Review of the Essays,” Perspectives in Religious Studies 44, no. 1 (2017):

119–37.

296 For a brief look at Fiddes’ contributions to ecumenical theology, see Harmon, “Trinitarian Koinōnia and Ecclesial Oikoumenē,” 19–22.

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When a local church covenants together to walk together in following the Lord, Fiddes claims that God is at work through that human action.

²⁹⁷

Fiddes does not believe it is an accident that the term “covenant” is flexible enough to be employed both in terms of an eternal covenant of grace, whereby the triune God covenants to save sinners through Christ, and in terms of a local church covenant.

²⁹⁸

The dual usage of covenant is important for Fiddes because he argues that “the relation between the local covenant bond and the eternal covenant offered to all humankind will be analogous to the relation between a particular local congregation and ‘the invisible company of God’s elect.’”

²⁹⁹

By putting the divine covenant and human covenants together in this way, Fiddes argues that the priority of the covenant of grace logically precedes the formation of local church covenants. Similarly, in terms of the covenant of grace, the universal church “pre-exists any local manifestation of it.”

³⁰⁰

Therefore, whenever a local church covenants together, in the words of B. R. White, the action “actualize[s] in history” the eternal covenant, and, for Fiddes, serves as the formal entry into the pre-existing universal church.

³⁰¹

Fiddes summarizes the theological pay off for putting these pieces together, stating, “a theology of covenant is thus of strategic importance in identifying the mission of God and sharing in it. This is also why the Baptist doctrine of the local church should lead it to be thoroughly ecumenical.”

³⁰²

Before considering how Fiddes works out his ecumenical vision, two factors on the relationship of the ordinances to the concept of covenant deserve mention. First,

297 Paul S. Fiddes, Tracks and Traces: Baptist Identity in Church and Theology, Studies in Baptist History and Thought, vol. 13 (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2006), 18.

298 Fiddes, Tracks and Traces, 24–31.

299 Fiddes, Tracks and Traces, 32.

300 Fiddes, Tracks and Traces.

301 Fiddes, Tracks and Traces.

302 Fiddes, Tracks and Traces, 33.

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by virtue of its covenanting together, a local church officially “comes under the direct rule of Christ and so has been given the ‘seals of the covenant’—that is, the power to elect its own ministry, to celebrate the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and to administer discipline (the authority to bind and loose).”

³⁰³

Second, the ontological and logical priority of the covenant to the sacraments requires that a believer is not baptized into church membership, but must rather, as a distinct act, covenant together with the church to enter its membership.

³⁰⁴

With these theological connections in mind, Fiddes offers three positive arguments for ecumenical communion: (1) the need for different ways of belonging to the church; (2) the sacramental nature of the ordinances and church;

and (3) the need to recognize different processes of Christian initiation. These arguments require further explanation.

First, Fiddes acknowledges the ways that believer’s baptism often excludes persons from full inclusion into the community, and the Lord’s Supper specifically. Those often excluded are believing children, paedobaptists, those who are on their way to faith (“half-believers”), and people with disabilities or mental illness.

³⁰⁵

In order to address the infants, Fiddes encourages the practice of infant blessing. While not unlike child

dedication services, Fiddes views infant blessing as a moment of divine activity when the church and parents pray for the prevenient grace of God for the child.

³⁰⁶

While these infants “are not yet members of the body of Christ . . . we might say . . . that they belong in the sense that they are embraced by the body, like a child enfolded in its mother’s

303 Fiddes, Tracks and Traces, 33.

304 Throughout this section of Fiddes' book, he interacts heavily with historic Baptist figures and sources. Nevertheless, the position outlined above appears as that which he affirms and not merely what he reports. Fiddes, Tracks and Traces, 30.

305 Fiddes, Tracks and Traces, 126.

306 Fiddes, Tracks and Traces, 131.

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arms.”

³⁰⁷

In this broader, more open framework of church membership, churches can receive those who are not yet baptized believers as people who rightly belong to “the community which is called ‘the body of Christ.’”

³⁰⁸

That reception “declare[s]” a

“promise for the child, to be fulfilled in due time.”

³⁰⁹

With those children (and those with disabilities), assuming they are exercising a “childlike faith” and “on the journey of being formed as a member,” Fiddes argues “they cannot be excluded from the table which identifies members.

³¹⁰

In sum, “The boundary of baptism . . . creates a space in which many different people can live. It excludes none from fellowship, while it does mean that people will belong to the Christian community in different ways; not all will belong as disciples through baptism, but may belong as those who are ‘on the way towards faith’

and who are embraced by the body.”

³¹¹

Fiddes’ second argument for ecumenical communion stems from his sacramental understanding of the ordinances and church.

³¹²

Baptism, he explains, provides a link between grace and nature in the sense that it “actually communicates the presence of the transcendent God. . . . [The water] provides places and opportunities for a transforming encounter.”

³¹³

Further, the sacrament of baptism “focuses the presence of

307 Fiddes, Tracks and Traces, 133.

308 Fiddes, Tracks and Traces, 151.

309 Fiddes, Tracks and Traces, 152.

310 Fiddes, Tracks and Traces, 184. He further counsels, “Only those believing children who have previously been received [by infant blessing] should be received at the Table, and they should be enrolled in a group preparing for baptism later as a believer, namely the ‘catechumenate’” (185).

311 Fiddes, Tracks and Traces, 155.

312 For a brief treatment of the relationship between Fiddes’ ecumenism and sacramental ecclesiology, see Harmon, “Trinitarian Koinōnia and Ecclesial Oikoumenē,” 22–27.

313 Fiddes’ descriptive language is striking. He writes, “all this means that if the drama of baptism is properly arranged, the contact with the element of water should arouse a range of experiences in the person baptized and in the community which shares in the act. Immersion into water, with both its shocking and pleasurable sensations can evoke a sense of descent into the womb, or washing away of what is unclean, and encounter with a hostile force, a passing through a boundary marker, and reinvigoration. In all these aspects, water is a place in the material world that can become a rendezvous with the crucified and risen Christ.” Fiddes, Tracks and Traces, 117. Fiddes connects his understanding of metaphysics to the relationship between nature and grace. He explains, “In Jesus Christ, God is committed to the utmost extent