How Institutionalization Changed the Church
Christ's Headship, Church History and the Recovery of Baptism
The history of the Church is not primarily the history of Christian institutions. It is the history of Christ preserving a people for Himself.
The Church is the redeemed people of God. In its New Covenant form it was manifested at Pentecost, when Christ's people were baptized by the Holy Spirit and gathered under Christ as their Head. The Church therefore cannot finally be identified with any denomination, hierarchy, council, bishopric, nation or succession of institutions. Christ alone is its Head.
Jesus expressed this principle plainly:
"But be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren... Neither be ye called masters: for one is your Master, even Christ." (Matthew 23:8)
The distinction is fundamental. Christ is not merely the highest member of a spiritual hierarchy. Christ is the Head; beneath Him, "all ye are brethren."
A pastor may teach. An elder may shepherd. A Christian may correct another Christian. A man may speak with great wisdom and therefore speak authoritatively in the ordinary meaning of the word. But no man's person, office, succession or institution becomes an independent source of spiritual truth. His words are true only insofar as they agree with Christ.
This principle provides the key to understanding both church history and the history of baptism.
The Early Church and Baptism
The surviving record of the first centuries is extremely incomplete. Christianity spread rapidly across the Roman world, yet only a small proportion of its congregations left writings that survive. The great bishops, controversies and urban churches naturally dominate the historical record. Thousands of ordinary believers are largely invisible.
Church history therefore cannot tell us everything that Christians believed or practised. God promised to preserve His Word and His Church. He did not promise to preserve a complete documentary record of every congregation.
Nevertheless, the earliest surviving descriptions of baptism are striking.
The Didache associates baptism with prior instruction and preparation. Justin Martyr, writing in the second century, describes those being baptized as people who had been persuaded of Christian teaching, believed it, undertaken to live accordingly, prayed and fasted, and were then brought to water.
This corresponds naturally to the New Testament order: the Gospel is preached, sinners repent and believe, and believers are baptized.
By around AD 200, however, Tertullian was arguing that the baptism of little children should be delayed. His argument shows that the baptism of children had already appeared, although it was evidently not beyond dispute.
The point is therefore not that every Christian everywhere maintained believers' baptism until Constantine. History cannot sustain such a claim.
The point is that the apostolic sign was progressively being changed.
What Baptism Signifies
Water baptism is not an arbitrary ceremony.
It portrays the spiritual reality of salvation.
The believer goes down into the water in the likeness of death and burial and rises again in the likeness of resurrection. It declares death to Adam and the old man, and newness of life in Christ.
It therefore corresponds beautifully to the baptism of the Holy Spirit. The person who was spiritually dead has been made alive. The old life has passed away and a new life has begun under Christ.
This is why repentance belongs naturally before baptism. The person baptized professes that the reality signified by the ordinance has taken place.
Christ, in His baptism, showed His own death to sin, albeit not his own, and His resurection in righteousness.
And here baptism connects directly with the question of spiritual authority.
The old order is the order of fallen man - man ruling man, man looking to man, man placing confidence in flesh.
The New Covenant brings the believer directly under Christ. The Spirit of God dwells within His people. Christ's sheep hear His voice. They are brethren under one Master.
Baptism visibly proclaims that transfer: death to the old and life under Christ.
The Institutionalization of Christianity
During the first centuries, increasingly powerful bishops and regional structures had already begun to develop. The change under Constantine therefore did not create hierarchy from nothing. It dramatically strengthened a process already underway.
In AD 313, Constantine and Licinius granted Christianity legal toleration. Constantine subsequently patronized the Church and in AD 325 summoned the Council of Nicaea. Christianity was increasingly connected with the power of man, and by AD 380 Nicene Christianity had received official status.
The change was profound.
The persecuted congregation increasingly became an institution. Bishops became important public figures. Councils defined doctrines for vast populations. Emperors involved themselves in ecclesiastical controversies. Eventually whole nations were regarded as Christian.
This altered the practical meaning of church membership.
Instead of a gathered people called out of the world through repentance and faith, Christianity increasingly became something inherited through family, society and nation.
Infant baptism fitted that system naturally.
And this is where the spiritual meaning of the history becomes clear.
God withdrew from the institutionalized church the apostolic sign in its proper form: baptism by immersion upon repentance and faith.
The outward use of water continued. Immersion itself did not disappear everywhere. But the complete sign - a repentant believer buried with Christ and raised again to newness of life - became increasingly obscured.
This was fitting.
A church that increasingly taught Christians to look upward through layers of human spiritual authority could not clearly display an ordinance whose very meaning proclaimed death to the old order and life immediately under Christ.
The loss of baptism therefore reflected something deeper than a change in ceremony.
It reflected a change in the understanding of the Church.
The Reformation Was Incomplete
The Protestant Reformation recovered great truths. Scripture was restored to prominence. Justification by faith was proclaimed afresh. The doctrines of grace were recovered with enormous clarity.
But Luther, Calvin and the other Magisterial Reformers did not entirely leave the institutional system behind.
Their churches remained closely connected with civil government. Infant baptism remained. Ecclesiastical structures continued to exercise authority over geographical populations.
The Reformation had protested against Rome, but it had not yet completely returned to the principle:
"One is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren."
The more radical break came among those who separated not merely from Roman Catholicism but from the concept of an established church itself.
The English Baptists emerged from Separatist Christianity.
Among the Particular Baptists the connection became explicit. The First London Baptist Confession of 1644 declared that baptism belonged only to those professing faith and that its proper manner was "dipping or plunging the whole body under water." It also insisted that the ordinance was not tied to some extraordinary ecclesiastical person or succession.
This was not the discovery of a new ordinance.
It was the recovery of an old one.
Baptism Restored Outside the Institution
The recovery of baptism therefore did not require an unbroken chain of Baptist churches stretching visibly through every century.
That would make the validity of baptism depend once again upon institutional succession.
The opposite principle is true.
Christ possesses the ordinance.
Where Christians came out from systems of compulsory religion, rejected infant membership of the Church, refused the spiritual supremacy of bishops, princes and national churches, and returned directly to the Word of Christ, baptism appeared again in its apostolic form.
The historical connection is remarkable.
The institutional church largely lost baptism upon repentance.
The separated church recovered it.
That does not mean every group practising believers' baptism is doctrinally sound. God may permit even profoundly mistaken groups to retain the outward ordinance. Baptism is not a certificate guaranteeing the orthodoxy of the person administering it.
Rather, this demonstrates that no ecclesiastical institution owns baptism.
It belongs to Christ.
The Meaning of Church History
Church history must therefore be distinguished from institutional history.
Popes, patriarchs, archbishops, councils, denominations and national churches form part of the history of Christianity, but they do not define the boundaries of Christ's Church.
The Church consists of those whom Christ has redeemed. Its unity is in Him. Its authority is His Word. Its Teacher is Christ. Its members are brethren.
Seen from this perspective, the disappearance and recovery of believers' baptism is not an embarrassing gap in Baptist history. It is itself part of the spiritual meaning of that history.
As Christianity moved from a gathered people under Christ toward a religious institution governed through human hierarchy, the apostolic sign was obscured.
As believers came out from that institutional order and returned to Christ as their sole spiritual Head, the sign returned.
Baptism therefore tells the history in miniature.
Death to the old.
Burial with Christ.
Resurrection to newness of life.
The rule of man gives way to the rule of Christ.
And over all the changing institutions, councils, kingdoms, denominations and centuries stands the promise that has never depended upon any of them:
Christ will build His Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
If you would like to speak to us about anything we believe, we would be happy to listen to you and attempt to answer any questions.
