Shades of the Gorham controversy! You remember that. No? Great jumping dust bunnies: must Google do everything for you? In 1850 a secular court reversed an ecclesiastical court’s finding that one George Cornelius Gorham was unfit for a post in the Church of England because he denied baptismal regeneration. Not only did the state interfere in church matters (which should not have been thought all that strange given that the British monarch is the de facto head of the church in England), but it permitted a broadening of interpretation of what baptism meant. Evangelicals and Calvinists were delighted, as Gorham’s opinion apparently mirrored their own. High-Church types, who saw the CofE as a branch of the One Holy, Catholic and Apostolic church, not so much, as baptismal regeneration had been the traditional understanding of what the sacrament in fact did—conferred the Spirit, washed away sins, and made you a child of God and a servant of Christ. Henry Manning and other members of the Oxford Movement threw up their hands, donned their water wings, and swam the Tiber, where baptism was one thing only and not a matter of mere opinion.
Fast forward. Really fast. More. More. Stop. (Oh, you went too far. Why don’t you listen?) Reports are that a movement is afoot to abridge and amend the baptismal language currently found in the Book of Common Prayer. Whether this would be a matter of employing colloquial language; dumbing down the theology, with its supposedly antiquated talk of sin, death, and the devil; or leaving Christ out of it altogether, offering a “spiritual but not religious” initiation into the glories of Erastianism, remains unclear. But given that the CofE has only one thing that holds together, however tenuously, its various factions and wings, namely the Book of Common Prayer, messing with its initiatory sacrament will be seen by many as just one more hammer in the already overstuffed coffin that is organized religion in England.
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