What this study is: a weighing of the whole field of church practice by one rule — the Scripture. It sets out first what Christ Himself appointed for His church: two ordinances, baptism and the Lord's Supper, given to be kept until He comes. Then it takes up, one by one, the traditions men have added across twenty centuries — infant baptism, sprinkling, confirmation, Lent, Ash Wednesday, penance, the mass, and more — and for each one asks the same three questions: what is it, where did it come from, and what does the Bible say? The answer matters, because the Lord who gave the church her ordinances also warned her about the traditions of men.

How to read it: every Scripture quotation in this study is from the King James Version and has been checked word-for-word against the verified KJV text. History is told honestly in this study, including where the history is inconvenient to our own side — a tradition is not refuted by caricature but by Scripture. Traditions are weighed here; people are not mocked. Many who practice the things examined in Part Four are sincere, and some of them are our brethren. The rule of this study is the rule of the Bereans: search the Scriptures, and keep only what is found there.

PART ONE — WHAT AN ORDINANCE IS

Appointed by Christ, Kept by His Church

An ordinance is an outward practice that Christ Himself appointed for His church to observe — appointed by His own command, delivered to the church, and kept by her because He said to keep it. The word itself tells the story: an ordinance is something ordained, ordered by authority. The church did not invent her ordinances at a council table, and she may not retire them at one. She received them from her Lord, on the night of His betrayal and on the mountain of His ascension, and she keeps them still for one reason: He commanded them.

The commission that sent the church into all the world carries the ordinances inside it. Baptizing stands in the very center of the Great Commission, and the teaching that follows it is defined by the Lord Himself as teaching men to observe what He commanded — not what the church devised.

Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen.

— Matthew 28:19–20

Paul uses the word itself when he commends the Corinthians for holding what he had handed down. Notice his language: the things were delivered to him, and delivered by him, and the church's part was to keep them — not to improve them, extend them, or exchange them.

Now I praise you, brethren, that ye remember me in all things, and keep the ordinances, as I delivered them to you.

— 1 Corinthians 11:2

That is the whole doctrine of the ordinances in one verse. An ordinance has three marks. First, it was instituted by Christ — not by the apostles' invention, not by the church's wisdom, but by the Lord's own appointment. Second, it was delivered to the church — to the whole body of believers, not to a priestly caste to own and dispense. Third, it is kept as an act of obedience and remembrance — the church observes it because her Lord commanded it, looking backward to what He did and forward to His coming. Whatever cannot show these marks may be many things — old, beautiful, sincere, useful — but it is not an ordinance of Christ's church, and it must never be given an ordinance's authority.

Ordinance, Not Sacrament

Most of Christendom calls baptism and the Supper sacraments, and the difference between the two words is not a quibble — it is a difference of doctrine, and it decides what a man thinks is happening at the font and at the table. The Latin word behind sacrament, sacramentum, was the oath a Roman soldier swore to his commander; Latin writers borrowed it for the church's rites, and over the centuries the word gathered a meaning the New Testament never gives it: that the rite itself, performed correctly, confers the grace it signifies — that the water washes the soul, that the bread becomes the sacrifice. In that system the ordinance is a channel, and grace flows through the ceremony into the passive receiver.

The Baptist confession — and, we are persuaded, the New Testament — says otherwise. The ordinances are signs and seals of a grace already received by faith. Paul's own pattern for this is Abraham and circumcision: Abraham was counted righteous when he believed, before the sign was ever given, and the sign came after as a seal of a righteousness he already had by faith.

And he received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had yet being uncircumcised: that he might be the father of all them that believe, though they be not circumcised; that righteousness might be imputed unto them also:

— Romans 4:11

So it is with baptism and the Supper. The believer is not washed in his soul by the water; he was washed when he believed, and he goes into the water to show it — buried with Christ, raised with Him, in a living picture. The communicant does not receive Christ by the bread; he feeds on Christ by faith, and he takes the bread to remember and proclaim the death that saved him. Grace is not in the elements. Grace is in Christ, received by faith, and the ordinances are the church's appointed way of confessing, picturing, and remembering that grace — obedience, not machinery.

This is why the word ordinance is the better word, and why we keep it. It keeps the emphasis where the Scripture keeps it: on the command of Christ, and on the faith of the one who obeys it. A sacrament, in the developed sense, works on a passive man; an ordinance is obeyed by a believing man. The one makes the ceremony the giver; the other keeps Christ the giver and the ceremony His gift of a command. And it guards the gospel itself, which knows no channel of saving grace but faith in the finished work of Christ:

For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.

— Ephesians 2:8–9

Two ordinances, then — baptism and the Lord's Supper. Not seven, not seventy. Two, because Christ appointed two. Part Two sets them out from their institution texts, briefly and in order, because they are the measure by which everything in Part Four is weighed. Their full treatment belongs to the companion course on baptism and the Lord's Supper; here they stand as the standard.

PART TWO — THE TWO ORDINANCES

Baptism: The Believer in the Water

Baptism is the first obedience of a new believer: the immersion of a professed believer in water, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, picturing his death to sin and resurrection to new life in Christ. Every part of that definition is in the texts.

At Pentecost, baptism stood at the end of conviction and repentance, and it was offered to hearers who could repent:

Then Peter said unto them, Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.

— Acts 2:38

And it was received by people who could receive — gladly — the word that was preached:

Then they that gladly received his word were baptized: and the same day there were added unto them about three thousand souls.

— Acts 2:41

The Ethiopian eunuch gives the pattern its most personal form: the gospel preached, the hearer believing with all his heart, the confession made, and then the water. Philip's condition is the New Testament's condition, and the eunuch's answer is the New Testament's confession:

And as they went on their way, they came unto a certain water: and the eunuch said, See, here is water; what doth hinder me to be baptized? And Philip said, If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest. And he answered and said, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. And he commanded the chariot to stand still: and they went down both into the water, both Philip and the eunuch; and he baptized him.

— Acts 8:36–38

And the meaning of the act is declared by Paul, in the passage that fixes forever what baptism says. It is a burial and a resurrection in picture: the old life gone under, the new life coming up — which is why the act requires a burial's worth of water, a point Part Four will weigh against later practice.

Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection:

— Romans 6:3–5

Such is baptism: Christ's ordinance, for believers, by immersion, as the doorway of obedience — not the instrument of regeneration, as Part Four will also weigh, but the answer and confession of a soul already washed by faith in the blood of Christ, who "washed us from our sins in his own blood".

And let the position of this university be stated in plain terms, for it governs everything this study says about the water. Baptism is for any believer, after he has been born again, by immersion only — any believer, in any place, who has trusted Christ: the ordinance is the Lord's gift to the believer, not the property of a denomination. A believer so baptized does not need to be baptized again when he leaves one church and joins another — his baptism was into Christ, not into a brand, and it does not expire at a church door. Baptism is for the believer; it is not part of denominationalism. Churches administer it as stewards, and a church that treats the water as its own fence has forgotten whose ordinance it is.

The Lord's Supper: The Church at His Table

The second ordinance was given on the night the Lord was betrayed, at the Passover table, and given in words that fix its meaning beyond honest dispute: this do in remembrance of me.

And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me. Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.

— Luke 22:19–20

Paul, who received the account by revelation of the Lord, delivers it to the church in the same terms — a memorial meal, a proclamation of the Lord's death, and an appointment with an expiry date that is also a promise: till he come.

For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, That the Lord Jesus the same night in which he was betrayed took bread: And when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me. After the same manner also he took the cup, when he had supped, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me. For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord’s death till he come.

— 1 Corinthians 11:23–26

The early church kept it as the center of its common life, alongside the teaching, the fellowship, and the prayers:

And they continued stedfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers.

— Acts 2:42

They kept it when they gathered — Paul waited at Troas for the first day of the week, "when the disciples came together to break bread" — and they kept it as communion: a sharing together in the blood and body of Christ by faith, many members at one table, one loaf picturing one body. And because it is the Lord's table, Paul fences it with a solemn warning — not a fence of priestly permission, but of self-examination, every man judging himself before God:

Wherefore whosoever shall eat this bread, and drink this cup of the Lord, unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup. For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body.

— 1 Corinthians 11:27–29

The table is a memorial, not an altar; a communion, not a sacrifice; a proclamation, not a re-offering. Within those bounds it is one of the two great appointments of the church, kept with bread and the cup, by the gathered believers, until the Lord returns. Part Four will weigh what became of it in the hands of tradition — transubstantiation, the mass as sacrifice, and the adoration of the elements — against these institution texts, which are the measure.

PART THREE — ORDINANCES AND TRADITIONS

The Word Tradition Cuts Both Ways

The Bible uses the word tradition in two opposite senses, and the whole question of this study stands in knowing which is which. The Greek word means a thing handed down — and a thing handed down may be the truth of God or the invention of men.

There is a tradition to be held. Paul commands the Thessalonians to stand fast in what had been handed down from the apostles themselves, by their preaching and by their letters — that is, the apostolic teaching which we now have written in the New Testament:

Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle.

— 2 Thessalonians 2:15

And he commands withdrawal from the brother who walks out of step with that received apostolic pattern:

Now we command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye withdraw yourselves from every brother that walketh disorderly, and not after the tradition which he received of us.

— 2 Thessalonians 3:6

This is tradition in its good sense: the faith once delivered, passed hand to hand, guarded. But there is a tradition to be refused — the handing-down of men's commandments in the place of God's. The Lord's charge against the Pharisees is the sharpest word in the New Testament on this subject, and it is aimed not at pagans but at the most religious men of His day, men whose traditions had grown so thick that the commandment of God could no longer be seen through them:

Howbeit in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. For laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the tradition of men, as the washing of pots and cups: and many other such like things ye do. And he said unto them, Full well ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your own tradition.

— Mark 7:7–9

And the verdict on such tradition is total: it does not merely add to God's word — it empties it.

Making the word of God of none effect through your tradition, which ye have delivered: and many such like things do ye.

— Mark 7:13

Paul carries the same warning to the church, and names the thing by its nature — the tradition of men, built on the rudiments of the world, not after Christ:

Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.

— Colossians 2:8

Between these two senses lies the rule of this study. Apostolic tradition — the teaching of Christ and His apostles, now inscripturated in the New Testament — binds the church absolutely. Human tradition binds the church not at all. It may be retained as a custom where it is harmless and helpful, as a servant; the moment it is enforced as a law, or credited with grace, or set above the written word, it has become the thing the Lord condemned in Mark 7, whatever its age and whatever its vestments.

The Rule of the Weighing

So every practice that claims a place in the church is weighed by three questions, and Part Four applies them in order.

First: did Christ or His apostles appoint it? If it stands in the New Testament as an appointment — commanded, exemplified by the apostolic church, given to be kept — it is an ordinance or an apostolic practice, and we keep it. Second: does it agree with the Scripture? A practice that contradicts the written word — that gives to a rite what the word gives to faith, or binds where the word looses, or looses where the word binds — is void on its face, however ancient. Third: if Scripture is silent, it is a custom at best — it may serve the church where it edifies, but it may never be made a term of communion, a condition of grace, or a law on any man's conscience.

The Bereans are the standing model of the weighing itself. They received preaching with all readiness — and then checked the preacher against the book, daily:

These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.

— Acts 17:11

And the sufficiency of the book for exactly this work is Paul's own testimony — the Scripture equips the man of God completely, throughly furnished, lacking nothing that a tradition would need to supply:

All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.

— 2 Timothy 3:16–17

With the ordinances as the standard (Part Two) and this rule as the scales, we come to the weighing itself.

PART FOUR — THE TRADITIONS WEIGHED

What follows takes up the principal traditions that have attached themselves to the church's practice across the centuries. Each is treated the same way: what it is, where it came from — honestly, from the record — and what the Scripture says. The reader will notice that most of them fasten themselves to one of the two ordinances: to baptism, to the Supper, or to the way the church deals with sin. That is no accident. The enemy of the church has always worked by addition at the points of her greatest blessing.

Infant Baptism

What it is. The baptism of newborn infants — on the faith of their parents or sponsors, who answer for them — practiced by the Roman, Orthodox, and the historic Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, and Methodist churches, and defended as the infant's entrance into the covenant and, in many of those systems, the washing away of Adam's guilt.

What Scripture says. The New Testament knows no baptism that does not follow hearing and believing. In Samaria, the order is stated in a sentence:

But when they believed Philip preaching the things concerning the kingdom of God, and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women.

— Acts 8:12

The jailer at Philippi is the strongest case the practice can claim — a whole house baptized in one night — and read whole, it answers itself. Paul and Silas "spake unto him the word of the Lord, and to all that were in his house" — the word was preached to every soul in that house — and the summary of the night is the jailer's joy that he had believed, with all his house:

And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house. And they spake unto him the word of the Lord, and to all that were in his house. And he took them the same hour of the night, and washed their stripes; and was baptized, he and all his, straightway. And when he had brought them into his house, he set meat before them, and rejoiced, believing in God with all his house.

— Acts 16:31–34

The other household baptisms run the same way. Lydia's household was baptized after her heart was opened by the word she heard. Crispus "believed on the Lord with all his house; and many of the Corinthians hearing believed, and were baptized" — hearing, believing, baptism, in that order, every time. The household of Stephanas, baptized by Paul, is later described by him as people who "have addicted themselves to the ministry of the saints" — workers, not infants. And the Lord's own summary joins faith and baptism as the two sides of one response:

He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.

— Mark 16:16

No infant in the New Testament is said to be baptized; no command to baptize infants exists; no apostle explains how the ordinance that pictures a personal burial and resurrection, and that follows a personal confession — "If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest" — could be administered to a child who can neither believe nor confess. The absence is total, and on a matter this great, absence is evidence.

Where it came from. The practice has no first-century footprint. The first writer to address the baptizing of little children is Tertullian, about A.D. 200, and he addresses it to argue against its haste: let them come, he wrote, while they are growing up and learning; let them become Christians when they are able to know Christ. The practice evidently existed in his day — he is pushing back on something — but it was new enough, and unanchored enough, to be argued with. In A.D. 253 a council of bishops at Carthage in the days of Cyprian ruled that newborns need not even wait for the eighth day, and the practice spread through the third and fourth centuries. It received its enduring theological engine in the early fifth century from Augustine, who taught that every infant is born under the guilt of Adam's sin and that baptism washes that guilt away — a doctrine that made infant baptism not merely permitted but urgent, a matter of the child's eternal safety. From that day the practice ruled the Western church, and the Reformers, who broke with Rome on the mass and on justification, largely kept it.

The verdict. A practice that arose two centuries after the apostles, against the earliest explicit testimony we have, carried into dominance by a doctrine of infant guilt that the Scripture does not teach in that form, and contradicting the invariable New Testament order of faith, then baptism — cannot stand as an ordinance of Christ. Baptism belongs to believers. The children of believers are to be taught, prayed for, and brought to Christ — and when they believe with all their hearts, the water is ready.

Sprinkling and Pouring — or Immersion?

What it is. The question of the mode: whether baptism is the immersion of the whole person in water, as the word and the pictures declare, or whether sprinkling or pouring water on the head suffices.

What Scripture says. The Greek word the Holy Ghost chose, baptizō, means to dip, to plunge, to immerse — it is the word for a ship sinking and a cloth being dyed, for going under the water, not for water being sprinkled on a surface. And every narrative detail in the New Testament agrees with the word. John baptized at Aenon "because there was much water there" — a strange requirement for a sprinkling. The Lord's own baptism ended with His coming up out of the water:

And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water: and, lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him: And lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.

— Matthew 3:16–17

Philip and the eunuch went down into the water and came up out of it:

And he commanded the chariot to stand still: and they went down both into the water, both Philip and the eunuch; and he baptized him. And when they were come up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord caught away Philip, that the eunuch saw him no more: and he went on his way rejoicing.

— Acts 8:38–39

And the ordinance's God-given picture settles what the word and the scenes suggest: baptism is a burial. A burial is not performed with a handful of earth scattered on the coffin lid; the dead are put under.

Buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised him from the dead.

— Colossians 2:12

Where it came from. The honest record here is more interesting than either side's slogans. The Didache, a church manual from the turn of the second century, directs baptism in running water — and then, if running water cannot be had, in other water; and only if a man has neither, to pour water three times on the head. Pouring enters the record as the exception for scarcity, in a document that assumes the water is normally enough to baptize in. Sickbed baptisms by pouring followed — Novatian was baptized by pouring on a bed of sickness in 251, and even then his baptism was gossiped about as irregular. For a thousand years immersion remained the ordinary practice of East and West alike; the great baptisteries of the old churches, and the deep fonts of medieval English parish churches, still stand as its stone witnesses. The change came slowly in the West, as the exception was extended: Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century still bears honest witness against the tide — immersion, he writes, is the safer way and the more ordinary fashion, and it represents Christ's burial more clearly than the alternatives — though he allowed sprinkling and pouring as valid in necessity. A permission for emergencies, repeated for centuries, became in much of the West the rule, and immersion survived chiefly among the churches that went back to the book.

The verdict. Immersion is the biblical mode: commanded by the word's meaning, shown in every narrative, and required by the ordinance's own picture of burial and resurrection. Sprinkling and pouring are human accommodations — born as scarcity exceptions, spread by convenience — and a church that returns to Scripture returns to the water.

Baptismal Regeneration

What it is. The doctrine that baptism itself regenerates — that the water, rightly administered, washes away sin and imparts new life to the soul: to the infant at the font, or to the adult at his baptism, so that a man is born again in the act of baptism rather than before it.

What Scripture says. The doctrine stands or falls by the order of the New Testament, and the order is unbroken: the word is preached, the sinner believes, the soul is washed, and baptism follows as the confession and picture of what faith has already received. Its proof-texts, weighed in the open, turn in the hand. Acts 2:38 joins baptism to "the remission of sins" — and Acts 10 explains how the remission and the water actually relate, in a house where God interrupted the sermon to make the order unmistakable:

While Peter yet spake these words, the Holy Ghost fell on all them which heard the word. And they of the circumcision which believed were astonished, as many as came with Peter, because that on the Gentiles also was poured out the gift of the Holy Ghost. For they heard them speak with tongues, and magnify God. Then answered Peter, Can any man forbid water, that these should not be baptized, which have received the Holy Ghost as well as we? And he commanded them to be baptized in the name of the Lord. Then prayed they him to tarry certain days.

— Acts 10:44–48

Cornelius and his house received the Holy Ghost, and spoke with tongues, while Peter yet spake — before a drop of water touched them. Peter's conclusion was not that the water would now regenerate them, but that water could not be withheld from people God had already received. And Peter, years later, guards the point himself, in the very verse most often quoted for the doctrine — baptism saves, he writes, and then defines the sense: not the washing of the flesh, but the conscience's answer toward God:

The like figure whereunto even baptism doth also now save us (not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God,) by the resurrection of Jesus Christ:

— 1 Peter 3:21

Ananias's word to Paul — "arise, and be baptized, and wash away thy sins, calling on the name of the Lord" — ties the washing to the calling, as Romans 10 ties salvation to the same cry of faith; the participle carries the instrument. The thief on the cross entered paradise on the strength of faith alone, with no water at all — promised by the Lord's own mouth, "To day shalt thou be with me in paradise". And the summary text of the whole question refuses the doctrine in advance: God saved us — "Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost" — and the washing of regeneration there is the Spirit's work, shed on us through Jesus Christ, not the font's. As for the Lord's word to Nicodemus about being "born of water and of the Spirit", the next verse defines His terms: "That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit" — and the cleansing He promises is the one Ezekiel foretold and Paul names: "the washing of water by the word".

Where it came from. The language of the second and third centuries about baptism is often high and sacramental-sounding, and it hardened, as the church grew institutional and infant baptism spread, into the doctrine that the rite itself effects the grace. Once baptism was given to unconscious infants, the grace had to be in the water, for it could not be in the child's faith; the doctrine and the practice hold each other up.

The verdict. Baptism does not regenerate. It declares regeneration, pictures it, and seals the believer's confession of it — and the man who trusts the water instead of the Christ the water pictures has mistaken the sign for the Saviour. We baptize gladly, and we baptize believers; but we preach that a man is washed when he believes on the Lord Jesus Christ, whose blood — not the baptistery — "washed us from our sins in his own blood".

Confirmation

What it is. A rite, administered years after infant baptism — usually by a bishop, with laying on of hands and anointing with oil — said to complete baptism, confer the Holy Spirit in fuller measure, and strengthen the young person to confess the faith. In the Roman system it stands as one of the seven sacraments; in Anglican and Lutheran practice it survives as the young person's public ratification of infant baptism.

What Scripture says. The Holy Ghost is not given in instalments — not a portion at the font and the rest at the bishop's visit. He is given when a sinner believes the gospel:

In whom ye also trusted, after that ye heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation: in whom also after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that holy Spirit of promise, Which is the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession, unto the praise of his glory.

— Ephesians 1:13–14

Paul's question to the Galatians makes the channel and the moment unmistakable: "Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?" — by the hearing of faith, at the hearing. The one passage pressed into service for the rite, the Samaritans of Acts 8, must be carried honestly, and carried whole:

Now when the apostles which were at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent unto them Peter and John: Who, when they were come down, prayed for them, that they might receive the Holy Ghost: (For as yet he was fallen upon none of them: only they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.) Then laid they their hands on them, and they received the Holy Ghost.

— Acts 8:14–17

Samaria had received the word and been baptized, and the apostles came down, prayed, and laid hands, and the Spirit was given. But notice what the passage is and is not. It is the first entrance of the gospel into Samaria — a people long divided from the Jews now joined to the one church — and God, as at Pentecost for the Jews and in Acts 10 for the Gentiles, marked the joining with a visible giving of the Spirit at the hands of the apostles, in the church's foundational generation. It is not a repeatable ceremony: no bishop succeeds to it in the text, no anointing oil appears, Simon's attempt to buy the power is cursed in the same chapter, and never again in the New Testament is a baptized believer sent to wait for a second, completing rite. The gift was God's answer to apostolic prayer in a transitional hour, not a grace stored in an office.

Where it came from. In the earliest practice, baptism itself included prayer, anointing, and the laying on of hands in one continuous act, administered by whoever baptized. In the West, as the church spread and presbyters baptized in the bishop's absence — infants above all — the bishop's own part, the anointing and hand-laying, was reserved for his later visit, and in time the separated fragment became a separate sacrament in its own right, performed years after the baptism it was said to complete. Peter Lombard's Sentences, in the twelfth century, first set it in the famous list of seven sacraments; the Council of Florence in 1439 gave the list formal conciliar form. The rite, in short, is the fossil of an administrative problem: what began as the bishop's absence became, across a thousand years, a doctrine of the Spirit's delay.

The verdict. There is no ordinance of confirmation. The Spirit is the believer's from the moment of believing; a young person's public confession of Christ is a joyful and biblical thing — at his baptism, where the Scripture puts it. What the Scripture does not know is a second, completing grace doled out by a bishop's hand to a child who was told his first grace was incomplete.

Lent and the Church Calendar

What it is. Lent: the forty-day season of fasting and penitence before Easter, kept by the Roman, Orthodox, Anglican, and many other churches, with its own days, foods forbidden, and duties imposed. With it stands the whole church calendar — the round of feasts, fasts, and seasons by which the traditional churches order the year, and which many keep as binding religious obligation.

What Scripture says. Fasting is a Bible practice; a fasting calendar is not. The Lord assumes His disciples will fast, and His only legislation on the subject concerns the spirit of it — privately, before the Father, not by public appointment:

Moreover when ye fast, be not, as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance: for they disfigure their faces, that they may appear unto men to fast. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But thou, when thou fastest, anoint thine head, and wash thy face; That thou appear not unto men to fast, but unto thy Father which is in secret: and thy Father, which seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly.

— Matthew 6:16–18

The fasts God Himself appointed belonged to Israel's calendar in Leviticus 23 — the church has a study of those feasts and their fulfilment in the Messiah, and they stand as shadows that found their substance in Christ. What the New Testament never does is appoint the church a replacement calendar of fasts and feasts and bind her to keep it — and it speaks with surprising sharpness to the temper that does:

But now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage? Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years. I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labour in vain.

— Galatians 4:9–11

Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days: Which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ.

— Colossians 2:16–17

Days may be observed as liberty — "One man esteemeth one day above another: another esteemeth every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind" — but the moment a season is imposed as religion, with merit in the keeping and guilt in the breaking, it has crossed from custom into the tradition Paul feared for the Galatians about.

Where it came from. The record, told honestly, is one of slow growth. A fast before Easter existed very early, but Irenaeus, writing in the second century, remembers it as a fast of a day or two, and notes that the churches of his time did not even agree on its length. The forty-day season took shape across the fourth century — the Council of Nicaea's fifth canon, in 325, is its first conciliar mention, spoken of as a known marker of the year — and uniformity in the West came later still. The season grew, as customs do, out of the preparation of baptismal candidates for Easter and the penitential discipline of the early church; it was centuries in the making, and it was made by men.

The verdict. Fast when the Lord lays it on your heart, in secret, as He taught. Keep a day, or a season, as a free custom if it helps you seek Him. But no calendar binds the conscience where God has not bound it, and no forty days of appointed abstinence earns what Christ's one offering has already bought. The church's year is not holy by appointment; her Lord is holy, and every day is His.

Ash Wednesday

What it is. The rite that opens Lent: ashes — traditionally from the burned palms of the previous year — imposed on the forehead in the sign of the cross, with the words of Genesis 3:19, "dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return", as the mark and mood of the penitent season.

What Scripture says. Ashes are thoroughly biblical — as the spontaneous dress of a broken heart. Job repents "in dust and ashes". The king of Nineveh, hearing Jonah's preaching, rose from his throne, laid his robe from him, and covered himself with sackcloth and ashes — no priest imposed them; conviction did:

So the people of Nineveh believed God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even to the least of them. For word came unto the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, and he laid his robe from him, and covered him with sackcloth, and sat in ashes.

— Jonah 3:5–6

Daniel sought God "with fasting, and sackcloth, and ashes" — his own act, in his own grief for his people's sin. In every Scripture instance, ashes are what a convicted man does to himself, unbidden and uncalendared, when the word of God strikes him. The rite reverses every element of that: the ashes are imposed by another, on a fixed day, as a public sign at the start of an appointed season — precisely the public, visible fasting the Lord forbad in the passage already quoted from Matthew 6: appear not unto men to fast. A sign of humility that is scheduled, administered, and worn out of the church door onto the street has become the thing it was meant to rebuke.

Where it came from. In the ancient church, ashes belonged to the order of public penitents — notorious sinners under discipline, who began their Lent marked and separated, and were restored before Easter. Through the later tenth century the custom spread from the penitents to all the faithful, and in 1091 Pope Urban II, at the Council of Benevento, directed the rite generally. Ælfric of Eynsham describes it in England around the year 1000, in words that give the game's history away: ashes at the beginning of our Lent — a season and a rite already joined, already a custom of the church rather than a command of the Lord.

The verdict. If a man's heart breaks before God and he reaches for sackcloth, Scripture honors the grief. But a priest-imposed, calendar-fixed ashes rite, bound to a penitential season Scripture never appointed, is tradition built on tradition — and the church keeps her forehead, and her fasts, for the Lord's appointments only.

Penance and Confession to a Priest

What it is. The sacrament of penance: the private confession of all one's grave sins, in kind and number, to a priest; the priest's formal absolution; and the satisfaction imposed — prayers, fasts, alms — by which the penitent makes amends for the temporal punishment of sins already forgiven. With it stands its necessary companion, confession to the priest as the channel through which forgiveness is applied.

What Scripture says. Confession is commanded — to God. David's pattern is the sinner's pattern in every age:

I acknowledge my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid. I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the LORD; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin. Selah.

— Psalms 32:5

John's promise is addressed to believers and attaches forgiveness to the confession itself, offered to God, on the ground of Christ's advocacy:

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

— 1 John 1:9

And the door stands open to every sinner directly, because the Mediator is one:

For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus; Who gave himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time.

— 1 Timothy 2:5–6

The apostle James does command a confession among men — and its terms refute the confessional that claims his authority. It is faults, confessed one to another, by brethren to brethren, joined to praying one for another — mutual, horizontal, and medicine for the soul and body alike:

Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.

— James 5:16

The converts at Ephesus "came, and confessed, and shewed their deeds" — voluntarily, openly, with no priest hearing and no satisfaction imposed. The one text remaining, the Lord's word on the resurrection evening — "Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained" — was spoken to the apostles as the charter of the gospel's declaration: the church remits and retains as she preaches the terms on which God remits and retains, receiving the penitent believer and warning the impenitent — the same binding and loosing given with the keys and the gospel. In the whole Acts of the Apostles, no apostle ever hears a private confession, assigns a satisfaction, or sits as a priest between a sinner and God; they point sinners to the one High Priest, before whose throne of grace every believer is bid to come: "Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need".

Where it came from. The early church knew public penance — the grave sinner confessed before the congregation and was restored after discipline — an honest ancestor, but a congregational one. Private, repeated confession to a priest grew up through the penitential handbooks of the Irish monks in the sixth and seventh centuries, which tariffed satisfactions sin by sin. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 made the system law for the West: by its twenty-first canon, Omnis utriusque sexus, every believer of either sex must confess all his sins to his own priest at least once a year, perform the penance imposed, and receive the Eucharist at Easter — under penalty of exclusion from the church and denial of Christian burial. Trent later anathematized denial of the sacrament. A practice of monastic counsel had become, by conciliar decree, a compulsory priestly jurisdiction over every conscience.

The verdict. Repent daily; confess to God directly, and be forgiven for Christ's sake; confess your faults to the brother you have wronged, and pray for one another. But no priest stands between the sinner and the Saviour with absolutions to grant and satisfactions to levy — that office was filled once, by the Lord Jesus, and He fills it still.

The Mass as Sacrifice, and the Adoration of the Host

What it is. The mass: the Roman rite of the Supper, in which — by the doctrine of transubstantiation — the bread and wine are held to become the very body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ, and to be offered by the priest as a true and propitiatory sacrifice for the sins of the living and the dead. From that doctrine flows the adoration of the host: the consecrated wafer elevated for the people's worship, reserved in the tabernacle, carried in procession, and adored as Christ Himself.

What Scripture says. Everything turns on one word in the book of Hebrews: once. The high priests of the old order offered daily and yearly, because their offerings could never finish anything. Christ offered once, because His did:

By the which will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. And every priest standeth daily ministering and offering oftentimes the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins: But this man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right hand of God; From henceforth expecting till his enemies be made his footstool. For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified.

— Hebrews 10:10–14

The apostle's conclusion is a sentence with no room left in it for a continuing sacrifice: "Now where remission of these is, there is no more offering for sin." The sacrifice of Christ is not repeated, continued, or re-presented as an offering, because it is finished — offered when He "once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself", and was "once offered to bear the sins of many" — and the Supper Christ appointed in its place is named by its Author a remembrance and by Paul a proclamation, never an offering. The discourse of John 6, pressed into service for the doctrine, was spoken a full year before the Supper existed, and the Lord interprets His own figures inside the discourse itself:

It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.

— John 6:63

And in Paul's own account of the ordinance, the elements remain what he calls them after the giving of thanks: "this bread", "the cup" — the church eats bread and drinks the cup, and in so doing shews the Lord's death. Communion, yes — a real communion of the body and blood by faith, at a real table. A sacrifice re-offered by a priest, and elements transubstantiated into an object of adoration, the New Testament does not contain. To adore the host is to worship where Christ has not appointed worship to be given — and the second commandment's shadow falls across it, however gold the monstrance.

Where it came from. The language of sacrifice gathered around the Supper slowly, as the church's meal became the clergy’s rite. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 set the word transubstantiated into its first canon; the elevation of the host for the congregation's adoration arose in the same era, as the people, who now seldom received, were taught to worship with their eyes; the feast of Corpus Christi, with its processions, followed in 1264. The Council of Trent, in its twenty-second session (1562), meeting the Reformation head-on, defined the mass as a truly propitiatory sacrifice offered for the living and the dead, and anathematized the denial. What the apostles kept as a memorial supper of the gathered church had become, across fifteen centuries of accretion, an altar sacrifice performed by a priesthood — each step a tradition, each tradition made law by the next.

The verdict. The sacrifice is finished; the table is a memorial; the elements are bread and the cup, honored as Christ's appointed signs and never adored as Christ. The church gathers at the table to remember, proclaim, commune, and examine herself — and she leaves the altar empty, because the Lamb was slain once, and it is finished.

Foot Washing

What it is. The washing of the saints' feet, practiced as a church rite — in some bodies as a third ordinance alongside baptism and the Supper, in others as an occasional service of humility, most often joined to a communion service.

What Scripture says. This tradition stands closer to the text than most in this part, and it must be carried at full strength. In the upper room, on the same night the Supper was given, the Lord girded Himself with a towel and washed His disciples' feet — over Peter's protest, "If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me" — and then sat down and interpreted His own act:

So after he had washed their feet, and had taken his garments, and was set down again, he said unto them, Know ye what I have done to you? Ye call me Master and Lord: and ye say well; for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you. Verily, verily, I say unto you, The servant is not greater than his lord; neither he that is sent greater than he that sent him. If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them.

— John 13:12–17

And Paul, listing the marks of a godly widow, counts it among her good works: "if she have washed the saints’ feet" — there, in the company of bringing up children, lodging strangers, and relieving the afflicted: the works of a hospitable, serving life, in a world of dusty roads where washing a guest's feet was kindness itself.

Where it came from. Foot washing was practiced in the early centuries as part of hospitality and, in some places, joined to baptism; it survived in monastic guest-keeping and in the Maundy Thursday rites of kings and bishops. At the Reformation most churches let it fall. It was taken up again, and kept to this day, by churches determined to lose nothing the Lord exemplified — many Primitive Baptists, a number of Free Will Baptists, and other bodies practice it as an ordinance, in sincere obedience to the Lord's word, "ye also ought".

The verdict. The Lord's word about the act is an example word, and He states its meaning Himself: not that greatness stoops once for the record, but that the servant is not greater than his lord, and that blessedness lies in doing the lowly things. The binding substance of John 13 is humble service of the brethren — real service, of real feet, when feet are dusty and hearts are proud. Churches that keep the ceremony in that spirit are brethren, not targets; this study does not mock a towel. But the Lord instituted the Supper with the words "this do", and baptism with a commission to the world, and foot washing with an example to the heart — and we keep the distinction He made: the towel is a lesson to be lived daily, not a third ordinance to be added to the two He appointed.

Anointing with Oil

What it is. Two different things wear this name, and the weighing consists largely in telling them apart. The first is the apostolic practice of James 5: the elders of the church praying over the sick, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. The second is the sacrament built over it — extreme unction, the anointing of the dying, held to confer grace for the soul's departure and the remission of sins.

What Scripture says. James's direction is plain, and it is aimed at recovery:

Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him. Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.

— James 5:14–16

Note where the power is lodged: not in the oil, but in "the prayer of faith" — and James underlines it a verse later with the study's own motto for the subject, "The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much." The oil is the appointed accompaniment, as it was when the Twelve "anointed with oil many that were sick, and healed them" — a sign of the Spirit's ministry and of tender care, in the hands of praying men. And note the aim: "the Lord shall raise him up". This is a rite for the sick who may live, not a sacrament for the dying who cannot; where forgiveness appears in the passage, it is attached to the sick man's faith and the elders' prayer — and, in the very next breath, to the mutual confession of verse 16, already weighed above.

Where it came from. The simple practice is apostolic and was never lost. The sacrament is medieval: by the twelfth century Peter Lombard lists the anointing of the sick among his seven, the Council of Florence in 1439 describes extreme unction as the fifth sacrament, and Trent defines it against the Reformers. Along the way the passage's centre of gravity was moved — from the sickbed of a believer expecting to rise, to the deathbed of a soul being sped on its way, with the oil promoted from accompaniment of prayer to channel of departing grace.

The verdict. Obey James 5 as it is written: when a believer is sick, let him call for the elders; let them pray over him in faith, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord; and let the church expect the Lord to do what the passage says. Refuse only the medieval addition — oil as a sacrament for the dying, dispensing a grace the text never mentions.

Head Coverings

What it is. The covering of a woman's head in the assembly, and the uncovering of a man's — Paul's direction to the church at Corinth, kept to this day by some churches in an actual covering, and read by others as the first-century sign of a principle they keep in other dress.

What Scripture says. The text must be carried plainly, in its own words, before anything is said about it:

But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God. Every man praying or prophesying, having his head covered, dishonoureth his head. But every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered dishonoureth her head: for that is even all one as if she were shaven. For if the woman be not covered, let her also be shorn: but if it be a shame for a woman to be shorn or shaven, let her be covered.

— 1 Corinthians 11:3–6

Judge in yourselves: is it comely that a woman pray unto God uncovered? Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him? But if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her: for her hair is given her for a covering. But if any man seem to be contentious, we have no such custom, neither the churches of God.

— 1 Corinthians 11:13–16

This is what the passage says. It teaches a God-appointed order — the head of the woman is the man, the head of the man is Christ, the head of Christ is God. It directs, in that order, the man to pray and prophesy uncovered and the woman covered, and it grounds the direction in creation, in the angels — "For this cause ought the woman to have power on her head because of the angels" — and in nature's own lesson about hair, which is given the woman "for a covering". And it closes, remarkably, with an appeal to custom: if any man seems contentious, "we have no such custom, neither the churches of God".

Where the churches differ. Two readings are held by sound men, and this study will state both fairly, for the text deserves honesty more than it deserves a victor. Some hold that the covering is the standing, appointed sign of the headship Paul teaches, and is to be kept as written in every age — the argument from creation and the angels being, in their judgment, as permanent as the order itself. Others hold that the covering was Corinth's recognized sign of that headship, and that the abiding command is the thing signified — godly order, difference honored, modesty in worship — while the sign itself belonged to the custom of that world, as Paul's own closing appeal to the churches' custom suggests. Churches of the first reading are not legalists for keeping cloth, and churches of the second are not rebels for laying it aside; both are answering the same apostle, and the passage has room for their charity if it has room for their difference.

The verdict. What no honest church may do is the thing both readings forbid: erase the passage, mock it, or preach against the headship it plainly teaches. The order of verse 3 is doctrine, not custom, and it stands in GTU's teaching without apology. The sign we leave where Paul leaves the contention — to instructed conscience within the churches, in the spirit of Romans 14 — while we insist on the substance for every assembly: worship ordered by God's appointments, men and women praying as those under authority, and under Christ.

Kneelers, Altars, and Altar Calls

What it is. The furniture and the methods: kneeling benches and prayer rails; the platform or table called, in many churches, the altar; and the altar call itself — the public invitation, at a sermon's end, to come forward to that place for prayer, counsel, or decision.

What Scripture says. Kneeling is a Bible posture — Paul "kneeled down, and prayed with them all" at Miletus, and bows his knees unto the Father in his letter to Ephesus — and a bench that helps a man to his knees needs no defense beyond its usefulness. An altar, though, is a word with a doctrine in it, and the New Testament uses it of the church exactly once, in a sentence that relocates it forever:

We have an altar, whereof they have no right to eat which serve the tabernacle. For the bodies of those beasts, whose blood is brought into the sanctuary by the high priest for sin, are burned without the camp. Wherefore Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people with his own blood, suffered without the gate.

— Hebrews 13:10–12

The church's altar is not furniture; it is bound up with Christ's once-offered sacrifice outside the gate, and the only sacrifices she now offers are "the sacrifice of praise to God continually, that is, the fruit of our lips giving thanks to his name" — and the doing of good. To name a platform an altar is therefore more than a loose word: it teaches, silently and weekly, that sacrifice still happens at a place in the building, and generations formed by that word grow up half-expecting it to. The invitation itself, meanwhile, is a method of the nineteenth-century revivals — the anxious bench of the 1820s and 1830s, refined into the altar call — and methods are weighed differently from doctrines: by their truthfulness and their fruit. A call to come forward and be prayed for, counselled, and dealt with plainly is an honest servant of the gospel, and many a real conversion has been helped at a mourner's bench. It becomes a tradition of men only at the point where men are taught that the walking saves — that a place, a rail, or a form of words at the front does what only faith in Christ can do — or where the call is counted a third ordinance beside baptism and the Supper.

The verdict. Keep the kneelers, if they help men pray; call the furniture by honest names; preach Christ, and invite men to Him with both hands — and let no one leave the building believing that God was waiting at the front of it rather than on the cross. Customs are servants: the decent and orderly service of the truth is their whole charter, for "Let all things be done decently and in order".

The Weighing at a Glance

PART FIVE — KEEP WHAT CHRIST APPOINTED

Nothing Added, Nothing Taken Away

The church's marching orders on this whole subject were given to Israel at the edge of the promised land, about the worship of God, and they have never been repealed:

What thing soever I command you, observe to do it: thou shalt not add thereto, nor diminish from it.

— Deuteronomy 12:32

Nothing added, nothing diminished. That is the sum of this study. Christ gave His church two ordinances — the believer immersed on his confession, the church at the table of remembrance — and He gave them in a form as plain as the gospel itself: subjects who believe, water that buries, bread that is broken, a cup that is blessed, and a promise that the appointment runs "till he come". Around those two appointments the centuries have hung their additions like ornaments on a tree — some harmless, some heavy, some that hide the tree altogether. The work of every generation of the church is the work of this study: to weigh every addition by the Book, to burnish nothing, to fear no antiquity, and to hand down the ordinances as they were delivered — to "observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you", and to "earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints".

For the traditions themselves, the last word is charity with a spine. Behind nearly every practice weighed in Part Four stand people — many of them sincere, some of them our brethren in the Lord, all of them souls Christ died for. We answer their traditions because the truth matters and because the ordinances are the Lord's, not ours to dilute. We do not answer them with contempt. The street, the door, and the table all belong to the same Saviour, and He is honored as much by the manner of our contending as by its matter: "the servant of the Lord must not strive; but be gentle unto all men, apt to teach, patient".

So the church keeps what Christ appointed, in the way He appointed it — two ordinances, whole and unadorned — and she keeps them gladly, until the supper is swallowed up in the marriage supper of the Lamb, and the ordinance gives way to the appearing of the One it has pictured all along. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.