Shortly after the end of the First English Civil War, Jeremy Taylor, the future bishop of Down and Connor, described the revolutionary events of the 1640s as a “great Storm which hath dasht the Vessel of the Church to pieces.”Footnote 1 And yet, while the ecclesiastical cataclysm lamented by Taylor may have brought low the state church as such, it most certainly did nothing to dampen English religiosity. Indeed, one of the most striking and often discussed aspects of English life during the early 1640s was the impressive creativity with which the various pieces of the “dasht” church were collected and reassembled in the shadow of the wreckage. As a menagerie of radical religious novelty appeared following the twin collapse of episcopal authority and effective print censorship, many contemporaries were predictably shocked by the strange ideas propounded “not onely in the Pulpit, but also from the Presse, to the great offence of godly minds, and the scandall of the Church.”Footnote 2 Yet for those championing such ideas, this same democratization of religious authority was not a “scandall” at all but instead a happy fulfilment of God's promise to “bring mighty things to passe by weak means” and use “foolish things to confound the wise.”Footnote 3 Practically, this meant that theological debates once relegated to the court or university were now open to anyone bold enough to participate. This new “inquiring age” was, as the baptistic separatist and lay theologian John Spilsbery characterized it, an “open market” in which “a spirit of errour” would be “as forward and ready to put off his ware . . . as the spirit of truth.”Footnote 4
As historians have sought to understand and catalogue this religious open market that emerged during the 1640s, questions of provenance have been notoriously tricky: from where, exactly, did all of these new theological wares originate? Many scholars have identified puritanism as their principal source. On this reading, the new theological notions advanced by radical religious groups during the period are regarded, in large part, as natural extensions of impulses native to puritanism more generally. John Coffee states, “The rise of sects and heresies owed much to the radical potentialities of Protestant Biblicism and puritan populism, as well as to the feverish atmosphere created by the civil war.”Footnote 5 Groups like Baptists, Quakers, antinomians, and others are frequently characterized as radical puritans—that is, puritans who have adopted positions that are extreme and outside the ordinary but who both assume and extend the basic logic of puritanism itself. Such was the interpretive stance of Geoffrey Nuttall, whose seminal reading of Quakerism placed George Fox and company among the “radical party . . . within Puritanism” and described a tendency among Quakers to so “repeat, extend and fuse . . . what is held by the radical, Separatist party within Puritanism, that they cannot be denied the name.”Footnote 6
Working within a similar basic paradigm, more recent historians doing genealogical spadework on the origins of radical religious ideas often locate their subjects almost exclusively within the discursive contexts of Calvinistic puritanism. When David Como, for example, writes about “radical puritanism” and “extreme variants of Puritan religiosity,” he explains that these descriptions refer to ideas and practices that “emerged organically as amplifications upon prior conventions of thought and practice that were current among English Puritans.”Footnote 7 Religious novelties represented “the unleashing of the radical potentialities that had, from the very outset, sat at the core of Puritan worship.”Footnote 8 In his more recent work, Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War, Como has likewise suggested that radical religious expressions “owed their existence to deep instabilities within the broader complex of puritan thought and practice,” and that “both antinomianism and anabaptism fed off of contradictions or implicit weaknesses in mainstream godly modes of divinity, pastoral counsel, and scriptural exegesis.”Footnote 9
By charting ways in which stock elements of puritan orthodoxy mutated over time into positions that were sometimes quite distant from or even opposed to their genealogical antecedents, the radical puritan model has proven supple enough to explain both novelties that clearly exaggerated aspects of puritan piety and those that explicitly repudiated key tenets of the same. Thus, even as Theodore Bozeman contends that the antinomianism of John Eaton “is not well conceived as a type of radical Puritanism” because its core tenets represented a “conscious effort . . . to obliterate” puritan orthodoxy, Bozeman's preferred terms “contra- and post-Puritan” still locate Eaton's radical theology within the developmental matrix of Calvinistic, puritan theology and explain Eaton's departure from that theology as stemming from tensions intrinsic to it.Footnote 10 As Como has put it, even when radicals embraced “modes of religiosity” that ran contrary to puritan orthodoxy, “this should not obscure the genealogical process through which these radically antiformalist modes of worship had sprung from Puritanism itself.”Footnote 11 Thus, whether positing the relationship between mainstream and radical religious thought as one of amplification and extension or of negation and repudiation, the generative context out of which the new ideas are imagined to have arisen is still decidedly that of Calvinistic, puritan orthodoxy.
Baptists in particular have been singled out by historians as an illustration of what happened when the “hotter sort of Protestant” let the temperature rise a bit too high. After commenting on English Baptists, Como states that “here, as in all other ways, separatists merely evinced tendencies or qualities—exaggerated and amplified, perhaps—that were embedded in the culture of English Puritanism.”Footnote 12 Likewise, in his work on English Baptists, T. L. Underwood categorizes these religious radicals as essentially an extreme expression of the puritan's biblicist impulse, indicating that the “emphasis on primitive Christianity in the Puritan and Nonconformist tradition was not only shared but extended and amplified by Baptists.”Footnote 13 Elsewhere, one reads variously that the “the inner logic of the leftward drift in radical Puritanism compelled” the earliest General Baptists “into Anabaptism,”Footnote 14 and that “the rise of the General Baptists was a leftward movement of Puritanism.”Footnote 15
The radical puritan model has proven so durable because surely it is often a sound and helpful way to think about the inception of theological innovations during the English revolution. And yet, the more one grapples with the sheer range and eclecticism of mid-seventeenth-century English radical religion, the clearer it becomes that the explanation is in itself incomplete. While the schema helpfully locates many—perhaps most—of the radical religious expressions emerging during the mid-seventeenth century, it cannot fully account for the ideological diversity and theological cross-pollination that characterized the period. More specifically, while this description of early modern baptistic separatists as emerging from the soil of English puritanism does aptly describe those Calvinistic baptistic separatists whom later historians have described as Particular Baptists,Footnote 16 it does not fit many of those Arminian-influenced baptistic separatists whom subsequent historians describe as General Baptists.
On examining the General Baptists, it is apparent that key aspects of their practice and belief during the mid-seventeenth century do not fit comfortably within the model of religious radical as extreme puritan.Footnote 17 Rather, key aspects of their doctrine and practice bear surprising resemblances to the Laudian style of divinity that arose under Charles I. In particular, these theological echoes can be heard most clearly when one considers the General Baptist practice of laying hands upon the newly baptized. As I demonstrate in this article, in key aspects of its theological meaning and liturgical function, the imposition of hands as practiced among General Baptists more directly parallels contemporary High Church sacramentalism than it does a radicalized puritan biblicism and antiformalism.Footnote 18
There is a risk, however, that such instances of intellectual confluence between religious radicals and Laudian divinity will be obscured if the largely helpful radical puritan explanatory paradigm is allowed to function as one's exclusive interpretive lens. By examining the imposition of hands as it developed among General Baptists, I consider a neglected example of a radical liturgical rite that does not fit the radical puritan hypothesis and in so doing I seek to expand understanding of just how eclectic religious innovation in mid-seventeenth-century England could be.
In pursuing these ends, I contribute to the body of scholarship that has highlighted ways in which the interpenetration of religious ideas during the period is perhaps more complicated than we often imagine. Historians such as Ariel Hessyaon, Michael Mendle, and Jason Peacey have drawn connections between radical thought and a diverse range of source material that extends well beyond the traditionally assumed boundaries.Footnote 19 Of particular note in this connection is the work of Nicholas McDowell. By highlighting “unexpected conjunctions” between radical and Laudian religious writers,Footnote 20 McDowell's work has teased out the degree to which many of the most important radical voices actually “possessed a considerable degree of formal education” and thus drew upon a rich store of cultural and literary resources.Footnote 21 While radicals were, indeed, often channeling radicalized puritan ideas, it is also true that sometimes “ideas associated with the evolution of Anglican modes of thought were also used to elaborate and bolster sectarian” positions.Footnote 22 I aim in a similar direction by considering how the Baptist imposition of hands illustrates the way in which radical religious appropriation blurred the boundaries between groups often assumed to be wholly disconnected from one another.
To that end, in what follows I examine parallels between the General Baptist practice of laying hands upon new converts and the Laudian interpretation of confirmation and reflect upon why these lines of evidence have not yet persuaded historians to connect the two. Along the way, I offer a new and revisionist reading of what is perhaps the most widely discussed incident relating to General Baptists and the laying on of hands and suggest points at which this rather specific case-study might contribute to the wider attempt to understand radical religion during mid-seventeenth century. For by better interpreting this seemingly obscure ritual, we can also see more clearly the way in which the proliferation of radical religious ideas during the English revolution functioned as a multifaceted and generative expression of theological alchemy and appropriation.
I
During the English revolution, Arminian-influenced baptistic separatists, or General Baptists, began to ritualistically lay hands upon newly baptized converts. As civil wars gave way to commonwealth and protectorate, the laying on of hands, or cheirotonia, as an initiatory rite became a critical boundary marker defining who was and was not included within the General Baptist fold. By the mid-1650s, acceptance of the practice had become a key litmus test of General Baptist self-identity, and those who objected found themselves increasingly excluded from full inclusion. As one such marginalized minister could “well remember,” there was a time “when laying on of Hands was not esteemed a Fundamental Doctrine” and “the practisers of it, for some time, kept their communion” with those who disagreed. But, gradually, as those advocating the new practice “made a party” and declared the imposition of hands to be “a Fundamental” tenet of the Christian faith, they rejected those who demurred as “too mean to keep company with.”Footnote 23
These basic facts have been widely noted by historians.Footnote 24 Their full significance, however, has not, as our understanding has been hampered by both a failure to adequately locate the rite within a broader historical and theological context and a cluster of interpretive errors that have stubbornly persisted throughout the literature. Moreover, these specific problems illustrate broader difficulties that attend the study of English radical religion more generally. For though the rituals and ideology of radical religious groups are typically understood as extreme examples of puritan biblicism and antiformalism, upon closer examination the General Baptist practice of laying hands upon newly baptized converts reveals surprising theological and liturgical affinities with the Church of England's practice of confirmation, and specifically with the distinctive understanding of confirmation championed by Laudian divines during the 1630s.
To appreciate this, one must first wrestle with the shifting interpretations of confirmation within the early modern English church. Confirmation was the liturgical rite through which someone already baptized was then admitted to the communion table, its primary outward manifestation involving a bishop laying hands upon the one being confirmed. Once confirmed, that individual was eligible, in theory, to receive communion. But though firmly established in the prayer book as a component of England's liturgical life, the rite fell into disuse within the Elizabethan and Jacobean church. When confirmation did take place, it was typically framed not in terms of any sacramental significance attached to the imposition of hands but rather as an opportunity to ascertain whether young would-be communicants knew the answers to basic catechism questions.Footnote 25 Regarding the theological meaning of confirmation, there was broad consensus within the Church of England at the beginning of the seventeenth century that it should not be seen as sacramentally communicating the Holy Spirit or in any way completing one's baptism through the transmission of additional grace. Such consensus was summarized during the Hampton Court Conference in 1603, when the archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, declared that it was “very untrue” to suggest that “the Church of England did hold or teach” that confirmation “did adde any thing to the virtue and strength” of baptism.Footnote 26
This consensus was challenged, however, during the reign of Charles I, as the ascendancy of William Laud and his allies marked a shift in theological direction for the church as a whole. As has been well documented by Anthony Milton, James Turrell, and others, “under Laudian influence, confirmation occupied an increasingly important place in the articles of the Caroline church.”Footnote 27 Contra the reigning majority report within the national church, Laudian divines stressed the imposition of hands in confirmation as an efficacious liturgical rite that was to be chiefly connected with the reception of the Holy Spirit. In doing so, Laudians developed a distinctive theology of confirmation that set them apart from both Puritans and the more moderate Anglican mainstream. Indeed, as Robert Cornwall has demonstrated, this Laudian Spirit-centered interpretation of confirmation continued to influence High Church Anglican divinity in subsequent centuries, ensuring that “the role the rite played in the conferral of the Holy Spirit” would be the chief fault line that “tended to distinguish [the confirmation theology of] High Church Anglicans from Low Church and Evangelical Anglicans.”Footnote 28
Caroline divines thus saw real sacramental value in the physical imposition of hands as the means by which the Holy Spirit was communicated, a spiritual transfer that was conceptually distinct from and more significant than any value that confirmation might have had as an occasion for testing an individual's doctrinal knowledge. Over and against an Elizabethan and Jacobean mainstream that “tended to frame confirmation in logocentric terms,”Footnote 29 Laudian clerics like John Cosin, Ambrose Fisher, Edward Boughen, and Jeremy Taylor stressed that confirmation was a rite through which the already baptized subject actually received the gift of the Holy Spirit and thus made their baptism complete. According to Boughen, confirmation was “a sign, or Ceremony, by which . . . God conveys his holy Spirit upon those that heretofore were baptized.”Footnote 30 When the future bishop of Durham, John Cosin (1594–1672), wished to contrast his own position with a Protestant theologian like John Calvin who approved confirmation as “nothing else but a public confession of faith,” the Laudian Cosin explained that “the proper effect of Confirmation is to give . . . the Holy Ghost.”Footnote 31 Similarly, in 1641, Herbert Thorndike (bap. 1597–1672), the eventual prebendary of Westminster whose writings would later influence the nineteenth-century Oxford Movement, described the laying on of hands at confirmation as “a Ceremony of benediction, imploring the overshadowing of the Holy Ghost which it representeth.”Footnote 32 In Thorndike's most significant work, An Epilogue to the Tragedy of the Church of England (1659), a treatise in which he pleaded for renewed ecumenical unity through the embrace of “primitive” liturgical forms, he would again describe the theological meaning of the imposition of hands at confirmation in strong, Holy Spirit–centered language, explaining “how ancient, how general the custome hath been in the Church, for Bishops to confirm the baptized, by praying for the effect of it, which is the Holy Ghost, with Imposition of hands.”Footnote 33
This high view of confirmation as the means through which the Holy Spirit was conveyed led to the corollary insistence that the laying on of hands was not optional but rather an essential liturgical rite without which baptism remained incomplete; as Jeremy Taylor put it in 1647, “This ministry of imposition of hands for confirmation of baptized people . . . is a fundamentall point of Christianity, an essential ingredient to its composition.”Footnote 34
Thus, the Laudian movement within the Church of England insisted, over and against the Anglican mainstream more generally and the puritan movement in particular, that confirmation through the imposition of hands was an essential liturgical rite through which God conferred the Holy Spirit upon individuals already baptized. And during the English revolution, General Baptists adopted a strikingly similar position as they set about laying hands upon newly baptized converts. General Baptists insisted, over and against puritan opposition—including the opposition of many other baptistic separatists—that the imposition of hands was an essential point of Christian faith and practice through which the gift of the Holy Spirit was transferred. In 1657 a group of General Baptist leaders in Kent declared, “We cannot own communion with any that do not believe and accordingly submit unto prayer with laying on of hands for the receiving of the Spirit as a principle doctrine of Christ.”Footnote 35 Such theology was formalized in a 1660 General Baptist confession of faith that insisted that it was “the duty of all such who are believers Baptized” to submit to “Prayer and Laying on of Hands, that they may receive the promise of the holy Spirit.”Footnote 36 In support of their conclusion that baptized persons would receive the Holy Spirit through the imposition of hands, General Baptists appealed consistently to Hebrews 6:1–2, a text that also figured prominently in many Laudian explanations of confirmation.Footnote 37 For example, the General Baptist William Rider, citing Hebrews 6:1–2, writes: “We may safely conclude, that laying on of hands upon believers, for the receiving of the Holy Spirit, may be here meant.”Footnote 38
One thus finds a basic theological overlap between the function of the liturgical imposition of hands within both General Baptist and Laudian circles. What makes this overlap so striking is that prior to the rise of the Caroline divines, this high sacramental view of the rite was virtually unknown within post-Reformation England. As James Turrell has demonstrated, Laudian divines gave confirmation a significance unprecedented within the English church, “explicitly insist[ing] upon [it] as required in and of itself, without reference to any instructional benefits that might be attached, reflecting a sacramentalist, rite-centered emphasis.”Footnote 39 Moreover, as we have seen, the Laudian sacramentalist approach was distinguished from both puritan and more mainstream Anglican divinity chiefly by the idea that the Holy Spirit was communicated to the one confirmed during the rite. Among many General Baptists, the same priority, logic, and Spirit-centered theological interpretation was attached to the laying on of hands after baptism.
One of the first General Baptist confessional statements to insist upon the practice was published in 1654 and explained the necessity of the rite using just such objective, spirit-centered, sacramental language: “God gives his Spirit to believers dipped through the prayer of faith and laying on of hands.”Footnote 40 This sense that the Holy Spirit is conveyed to believers through the instrumentality of the rite itself would have sat uncomfortably within a logocentric, antiformalist, puritan milieu. Other General Baptist treatises further developed this sense of sacramental instrumentality attached to the imposition of hands, indicating, at a minimum, the presence of theological influences foreign to the sort of puritan divinity inclined to interpret external signs as reflections of inward changes already effected through word and spirit. William Rider, for example, explained that hands are laid “upon Baptized believers as such, to the end they might receive the Spirit.”Footnote 41 Developing this line of thought, he wrote “that laying on of hands upon believers, as believers, is the foundation-principle, the beginning-Word of Christ, that which concerns every believing soul, which is food to it, and nourishment to it.”Footnote 42 Likewise, Thomas Grantham, who emerged as one of the General Baptists’ preeminent spokespersons during the turbulent post-Restoration period, stated explicitly that “Prayer with the Laying on of hands” was “the way of God for his people wherein to obtain” “the promise of the Holy Spirit which God hath made.”Footnote 43
In sum, General Baptists, contra both puritan and more mainstream Anglican opinion and in agreement with Laudian divinity, understood the laying on of hands as an essential or foundational component of ecclesiastical life that completed the sacrament of baptism, and, crucially, served as the efficacious instrument through which the Holy Spirit was communicated to the believer. Each component of a General Baptist interpretation of the laying on of hands thus mirrors the distinctive components of a Laudian theology of confirmation and sharply contradicts the word-centered piety of puritanism. If one considers General Baptists exclusively through the rubric of radical puritanism, then their interpretation of sacramental efficacy through the imposition of hands is difficult to explain. Moreover, the imposition of hands was both absent from the earliest General Baptist writings authored decades prior to the English revolution by John Smyth and Thomas Helwys, and it was continuously opposed by a sizable number of General Baptists throughout the Interregnum and Restoration.Footnote 44 When one thus considers that the imposition of hands was neither practiced by the earliest General Baptists nor consistently supported by baptistic separatists during the mid-seventeenth century, the rite begins to appear increasingly like something of a cuckoo in the nest.
This sense of confusion comes across, for example, in the writings of General Baptist Henry Danvers. When Danvers critiqued his own communion's widespread embrace of the imposition of hands in 1674, it was this objective, sacramental character and the insistence that the rite conveyed the Holy Spirit against which he argued most vigorously. Having explained how Francis Cornwell introduced the practice into General Baptist circles in 1646, Danvers insisted in prototypical puritan, antiformalist fashion that nothing could “more savour of Darkness and Error, than to make our Adoption and Communion with God to depend upon some External Act done.”Footnote 45 On Danvers's reading of scripture, salvation was tied only to faith in Christ, and yet he insisted that “this Doctrine asserts our New-Birth in another way, by the Laying on of Hands after Baptism . . . thereby confirming the Superstition of the Papists.”Footnote 46 Danvers identified “the end [that is, purpose] of this Rite” as used by Roman Catholics, High Church Anglicans, and many General Baptists alike as being “for the giving of the Spirit, and conferring of Grace, to perfect and confirm imperfect Baptism”—precisely the gloss that Laudian divines had long been giving to confirmation.Footnote 47
Danvers acknowledged that the liturgical imposition of hands was found in the New Testament, but he maintained that its usage was limited to very different contexts—ordination, for exampleFootnote 48—and that “such a laying on of hands upon all Baptized Believers, we find no where taught or Practised.”Footnote 49 For General Baptists to liturgically lay hands upon all baptized believers was, for Danvers, an inappropriate and unbiblical imitation of “those Popes, Councils and Fathers, that have enjoyned and imposed Infants Sprinkling for a Sacrament, or an Ordinance of Christ” and “have enjoyned this [that is, the imposition of hands] also as such.”Footnote 50 And whereas Thomas Grantham, the General Baptist champion of the practice, cited the Laudian bishop Jeremy Taylor's historical research in an attempt to show that the “Laying on of hands was firmly believed by all the Primitive Church, and . . . the Latine Church and the Greek,”Footnote 51 Danvers maintained that even if “the Practice of it should be granted to be as ancient as the keeping of Easter and Lent,” “without a Word of God to warrant it,” such genealogical exercises “can never justifie the Divine Authority of any Practice.”Footnote 52 Danvers and Grantham thus seem to have represented two distinct streams of influence within a General Baptist communion long assumed by scholars to have emerged exclusively from within the matrix of radical puritanism.
To the basic theological overlap between the Laudian and General Baptist use of the imposition of hands, one may also observe that the General Baptists who introduced the rite into Baptist churches and insisted upon its practice were largely former Church of England ministers who also embraced some form of Arminian soteriology. Francis Cornwell, Christopher Blackwood, and Samuel Fisher were all university-trained clerics who left their parish livings during the English revolution, and all three were early and impassioned advocates for the imposition of hands.Footnote 53 Blackwood graduated with a BA in 1625 from Pembroke College, Cambridge, a college with long-standing anti-puritan linkages that by the accession of Charles I was “increasingly becoming dominated by Laudian elements.”Footnote 54 Conversely, those among the General Baptists who vehemently decried the imposition of hands were all lay preachers in the classic radical-puritan mold, a group that included cheesemonger Jeremiah Ives, button-seller Edmund Chillenden, and weaver Samuel Oates.Footnote 55
We can better appreciate the convergence of these lines of argument by returning briefly to the life and ministry of the post-Restoration General Baptist theologian and polemicist Thomas Grantham (1634–1692). During the English revolution, Grantham was a royalist whose “Parents suffered much loss for the King,”Footnote 56 and he would later derisively describe the puritan ascendancy during the 1650s as “the time of Cromwell's usurpation.”Footnote 57 Grantham's writings ranged widely, and he took a particular and persistent interest in a high view of sacramental efficacy. Indeed, his sacramental theology was sufficiently high to prompt rumors among “some of the Protestant clergie” that he was, in fact, “a Roman Jesuit.”Footnote 58 When Grantham wrote in defense of the imposition of hands upon the newly baptized, he claimed to be defending a ritual that had been “quite lost among those that call themselves the Reformed Churches,” and he defined the practice explicitly in terms of that through which the Holy Spirit was conveyed: “That as God hath promised to give the holy Spirit to all that are called of the Lord, so he hath appointed a Solemn way, wherein his Servants and hand-maids are to wait upon him for the reception thereof, which way is . . . the laying on of hands . . . belonging to them in the minority of their Christian state.”Footnote 59
In locating the theological significance of the imposition of hands primarily in the “receiving [of] the holy Ghost,”Footnote 60 Grantham thus offered an interpretation of the rite that has long been regarded as the exclusive intellectual property and distinguishing mark of Laudian, High Church divinity. Furthermore, as has already been noted, in defending this view Grantham quoted favorably and at length from the Laudian bishop Jeremy Taylor, particularly his treatise A Discourse on Confirmation (1663).Footnote 61 That Grantham, the preeminent spokesperson for General Baptists during the post-Restoration period, would turn approvingly to Taylor, is startling and striking. By strongly emphasizing the reception of the Holy Spirit, Taylor's Laudian interpretation of confirmation cut sharply against a broad consensus within the established church, to say nothing of its puritan wing; indeed, as Philip Tovey has observed, Taylor's sacramental theology so “stresse[d] the receiving of the Holy Spirit at confirmation” that even many staunchly High Church Anglicans found it difficult to fully embrace.Footnote 62 Yet it was here, to Taylor, that Grantham looked to find support for and forceful expression of the position that had emerged among his Baptist coreligionists. The intellectual confluence of Grantham and Taylor on this point confutes any attempt to force all seventeenth-century Baptists into a radical puritan mold and should prompt us to question afresh the provenance of the General Baptist doctrine of laying hands upon the newly baptized.
In a polemical context unrelated to the imposition of hands, the General Baptist Samuel Fisher also drew heavily upon Taylor's work, a connection that has been documented by Nicholas McDowell and about which McDowell comments: “That a leading General Baptist based his defence . . . on arguments taken from a text by Jeremy Taylor should give us pause for thought.”Footnote 63 Indeed, it should, and so also should the fact that during the mid-seventeenth century the only groups promoting the imposition of hands as an initiatory rite through which the Holy Spirit was conveyed were Laudian clerics and some within the General Baptist movement, a curious overlap that raises the possibility that the sacramental theology of the former exerted more influence upon the latter than has heretofore been acknowledged.
II
Yet if this overlap is so clear, why have historians not already acknowledged it and, perhaps, other Laudian echoes reverberating among radical congregations? Some, of course, have made inquiries along these lines. As already mentioned, McDowell has examined ways in which “Post-Tridentine Catholic eloquence . . . provided linguistic resources” for both Laudian and radical writers alike, and, elsewhere, the “radical appropriation of Anglican texts . . . by mid-seventeenth-century figures linked to the Levellers and Quakers.”Footnote 64 In the main, however, those drawing such connections have been in the minority, and certainly among those studying Baptists, any possible connections between Baptist thought and a more sacramental, Laudian-influenced divinity have been neglected in favor of the model of Baptist as radical puritan.
For example, Clint Bass has offered one of the most recent and most extensive treatment of General Baptists and the imposition of hands. Bass warns against “making too many connections between the Baptist practice of laying on hands and confirmation in the Church of England,” insisting instead that “General Baptists were consciously doing something distinct from the Established Church.” In making this case, he stresses that the two practices cannot have had anything to do with one another, because the “subjects undergoing the rite were entirely different.” “In the Church of England,” Bass continues, “they were usually youths who had been baptized as infants,” but “among the Baptists they were of any age so long as they had undergone a conversion experience.”Footnote 65 Bass explains that when “Baptists began the practice of laying hands . . . this was an act performed directly after baptism, not on a separate occasion as in the Church of England.” Bass thus concludes that General Baptists were not taking inspiration from Laudian confirmation but rather “believed that they were restoring a practice of the New Testament church that had long been abandoned.”Footnote 66 This account thus interprets a novel practice among religious radicals as something developing organically from basic puritan first principles.
But this analysis is not persuasive. First, though General Baptists surely did imagine that they were “restoring” a neglected “practice of the New Testament church,” the reality is that this is also surely what Laudians imagined themselves to be doing when they promoted a sacramental, Spirit-centered account of confirmation within the early Stuart established church. Second, to argue that Baptists could not have derived their practice from the Church of England because Baptists laid hands shortly after baptism, whereas confirmation was separated from baptism by many years, is to misunderstand the logic of confirmation as practiced by English Protestants generally and Laudian divines specifically. For such clerics made explicitly clear that confirmation was essentially a component of baptism. In his influential work Synopsis Papismi, first published in 1592, the Calvinistic and anti-Catholic theologian Andrew Willet summarized the Protestant consensus by stating that “confirmation is but a part of baptism” and that the “externall rite [of laying hands] depended upon baptisme.”Footnote 67
As has already been discussed, a later generation of Laudian divines would stress the sacramental efficacy of confirmation and its power to confer the Holy Ghost, but along with quasi-puritans like Willet, Laudian divines retained this same insistence that baptism and confirmation were logically inseparable, together constituting two movements of a single initiatory sacrament. If anything, High Church theologians drew the connection between confirmation and baptism even more tightly, stressing not simply that confirmation depended upon baptism but that confirmation actually made baptism complete. The conformist polemicist Ambrose Fisher, for instance, explained that confirmation must always be logically ordered, even if not temporally ordered, “immediately after Baptisme, because it seemeth to bee a kinde of Baptisme it selfe: onely of a more excellent degree.”Footnote 68 The Laudian bishop Jeremy Taylor put it more concisely: “Confirmation . . . is properly the perfection of Baptism.”Footnote 69 Baptism and confirmation went together, and any temporal gap between the two was an accident necessitated by infant baptism and immaterial to the basic logic of the rite.
Indeed, when Church of England clergy discussed the baptism and confirmation of adult converts, the timing of their practice became identical to that of General Baptists. John Cosin expounded this very point in 1619 as part of a brief, unpublished treatise on confirmation: “The ancient custom of the Church of Christ was, after the persons were once baptized, to add unto their baptism imposition of hands.” As the church began baptizing more infants and fewer adult converts, confirmation was delayed, but, even as the temporal gap between baptism and confirmation widened, Cosin insisted that nothing essentially had changed: “Our warrant and trust for the good effect [of our imposition of hands], is the same which the patriarchs, the prophets, the apostles, and men of God have practised and set before us.” For by laying hands upon the one baptized in infancy, “what do we else but only bring to ripeness that very seed which was sown in us before?”Footnote 70 Likewise, when the 1662 revision to the Book of Common Prayer introduced a rubric for administering “baptism to such as are of riper years,” it noted that in such cases, “It is expedient that every Person thus Baptized should be confirmed by the Bishop so soon after his Baptism as conveniently may be.”Footnote 71 In other words, when ministers in the established church did happen to baptize adults, the timing of their practice was indistinguishable from that of General Baptists. So to suggest that General Baptists must have been doing something inherently different from the Church of England because Baptists imposed hands shortly after baptism rather than waiting many years is to misunderstand what the Church of England was actually doing.
Furthermore, in responding to Bass and others who have argued against any connection between the General Baptists’ imposition of hands and the Laudian doctrine of confirmation, it should be noted that no one is arguing that the two groups were actually somehow one group—no one is interested in defending the obviously indefensible position that General Baptists were avant-garde conformists in disguise. Rather, my more modest aim is to attend carefully to how the imposition of hands operated among General Baptists and to discern whether their use of the rite represented a radical mutation of puritan biblicism or a creative appropriation and redeployment of the Laudian tradition. And in the case of General Baptists laying hands on new converts, there is good reason to suppose the latter rather than the former.
III
Of course, the question persists: If all of this is as clear as the preceding paragraphs have suggested, why have historians not already drawn these conclusions? There are at least two significant reasons that they have not. First, the liturgical imposition of hands, whether practiced by the Church of England or General Baptists, has simply not been widely discussed by historians of the British early modern period. Despite giving significant attention to ecclesiastical rituals and their sociocultural significance more generally,Footnote 72 historians of seventeenth-century English religion have been relatively quiet about confirmation. The topic is virtually absent, for example, in David Cressy's rigorously researched study Birth, Marriage, and Death (1997).Footnote 73 Likewise, many otherwise excellent treatments of religious development during the period do not include confirmation in their indices.Footnote 74 This neglect may be explained in part by the degree to which some of the liveliest discussions of mid-seventeenth-century English religion have revolved not around Laudianism but rather around puritanism and the menagerie of spiritual eclecticism emerging during the 1640s. Because confirmation, in turn, has been associated with the elevated sacramentalism of Laudian divinity, those not interested in High Church liturgical forms may have assumed that confirmation rests safely outside of their scholarly remit.
Within the historiography of early English Baptists, many of the movement's early and very influential denominational historians displayed a reluctance to discuss the laying on of hands within their religious communion. In his popular four-volume, nineteenth-century work, A History of the English Baptists (1811–1830), Joseph Ivimey makes exactly one passing reference to the imposition of hands as practiced among early modern General Baptists.Footnote 75 And when these denominational Baptist historians did write about the laying on of hands, they sometimes did so with open embarrassment. For example, in his two-volume work, The History of the English General Baptists (1818), Adam Taylor treats the subject briefly, devoting to it a mere three pages, and admitting that he finds it “painful to hear some of the most pious and useful general baptists of the seventeenth century . . . plead[ing] for the necessity of this barrier between brethren.”Footnote 76 Eighteenth and nineteenth-century denominational historians like Taylor and Ivimey offered no pretense of objectivity; they were openly partisan and unashamed to write histories that would serve their own contemporary ecclesiastical ends. In light of their unabashedly present-centered perspective, it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that some of these denominational historians found the imposition of hands to be an overly sacramental embarrassment. Whatever their reasons for downplaying the issue, historians of Baptist movements, like early modern scholars more generally, have not given significant attention to the laying on of hands, and this relative neglect may in turn contribute to the historiography's reluctance to recognize any intellectual overlap between Laudian divinity and General Baptist practice.
The second reason for this reluctance is that any attempt to connect Laudian confirmation with the General Baptists’ imposition of hands will quickly collide with what one might call “the Edward Barber problem.” Edward Barber (d. 1663) is widely regarded as one of the first, if not the first, English Baptist to practice the laying of hands upon newly baptized converts.Footnote 77 Certainly among religious radicals in London, he is believed to have introduced this practice into the bloodstream of General Baptist life, and he is consistently described as “an ardent advocate of the practice of the laying on of hands on all who had been baptized.”Footnote 78 But this seemingly innocuous bit of biography impinges upon historians’ willingness to reimagine how General Baptists understood the imposition of hands, because Barber perfectly fits the profile of the radical, biblicist puritan who simply pushed the internal logic of puritanism to a more extreme position. Barber stands as a classic example of David Como's radical puritan: he was an extremely zealous lay-person, lacking any formal theological training; he was a tailor of the “middling sort”; he rejected paedobaptism because he could not find the practice explicitly articulated in his Bible; and he did not see his lack of university education as any reason to stop him from starting a separatist baptistic church during the 1640s. Barber was the archetypal “mechanik preacher”Footnote 79 against whom heresy hunters like Thomas Edwards and Robert Baillie were frantically warning.Footnote 80 Furthermore, Barber had no discernable connection to the established church, much less its Laudian wing. Thus, if Barber was responsible for introducing the imposition of hands into London Baptist churches, then the practice would seem to exemplify rather neatly a back-to-the-Bible radical puritanism.
Almost every historian who discusses the imposition of hands among General Baptists focuses significant attention on Edward Barber. This strong association between the ritual and the radical lay-puritan Barber surely has dissuaded many historians from imagining that the Baptist rite might have had anything to do with High Church Laudian divinity. Mark Bell, for example, highlights Barber's “insistence on going back to ancient biblical practices” and then writes, “it is easy to see how the same [biblicist] line of thinking that led Barber to defend believer's baptism . . . also led him to insist that the laying on of hands was necessary for church membership.”Footnote 81 And if indeed Barber, the prototypical radical puritan, was responsible for popularizing the imposition of hands among London General Baptists, this is all eminently sensible. I suggest, however, that when one reexamines the evidence more carefully, there is good reason to doubt that Barber ever actually practiced the rite.
The widespread assumption that Barber popularized the imposition of hands among London's General Baptists rests upon a single primary source: a passage from Thomas Edwards's notorious catalogue of mid-seventeenth century heresy, Gangraena (1646). This wide-ranging, gossipy chronicle of London's more colorful religious expressions enjoyed a brief but intense popularity during the English revolution, and in it is found the only extant information that might connect Barber with the imposition of hands. Edwards describes a gathering “in a great house in Bishopsgate-street,” London, on 12 November 1645. The meeting was attended by Barber and some “80 Anabaptists.” After prayer, “every one of the company kneeled down apart; and Barber, with another of their way, went to each one of them one after another, and laid both their hands upon every particular head, women as well as men, and either in a way of Prayer, prayed they might receive the Holy Ghost.”Footnote 82 This passage from Edwards is cited in almost every subsequent account of how the laying on of hands developed among General Baptists, and on an initial reading it certainly sounds like that is exactly what is being described. Yet, when we look closer, it becomes far less clear.Footnote 83
Putting aside the vexing question of Edwards's accuracy, let us assume for the sake of the argument that Gangraena provides a substantially true account of Barber's actions.Footnote 84 For even when one takes the report from Gangraena at face value, it becomes clear upon closer inspection that in this passage, Barber, contra previous analyses, is not actually practicing the imposition of hands. This conclusion rests upon at least three lines of argumentation. First, the men and women upon whom Barber laid hands were not the subjects one would expect to find on the receiving end of this liturgical rite. Edwards reported that in attendance there were “80 Anabaptists (many of them belonging to the Church of one Barber),” a number that included “five new members lately dipped.” And yet, when the laying on of hands takes place, it is performed upon “every one of the company,”Footnote 85 not just those who had been newly baptized. That does not square with what we know about the General Baptist practice—upon baptizing new converts, General Baptists would then proceed immediately or shortly thereafter to lay hands upon them. Indeed, recall Bass's argument that the reason why General Baptist practice should be regarded as distinct from that of the established church is because the latter would baptize and confirm on two separate occasions, whereas the former performed baptism and the imposition of hands on the one same occasion. So why, then, do we find Barber here laying hands upon the entire company rather than only upon those newly baptized?
This is peculiar, but it is not decisive. Perhaps the incident described here could represent the very first time that Barber practiced the laying on of hands, so no one present would have yet received this new liturgical rite. But there are other reasons to doubt the historiographical consensus. Consider a work published in 1674 by Henry Danvers, A Treatise of Laying on of Hands.Footnote 86 In it, Danvers, a radical Fifth-Monarchist and General Baptist, wrote against imposing hands on new converts, and in doing so provided a history of how the practice developed among what he called “the baptized churches.” Danvers believed that among General Baptists it was first practiced not in 1645 by Edward Barber but rather in 1646 by Francis Cornwell: “About the year 1646 . . . one Mr. Cornwell, heretofore a publick Preacher, then a Member and Minister of a Baptized Congregation in Kent, was a great Asserter of this Principle and Practice; who . . . did from Heb. 5.12, 13. & 6.1, 2. preach the necessity of Laying on of Hands; inferring from thence, those that were not under laying on of hands, were not Babes in Christ, had not God, nor Communion with God.”Footnote 87
Cornwell, as noted, was an ordained minister who served a parish church in Kent until he left it during the 1640s to lead a separatist baptistic congregation. Danvers indicated that it was Cornwell who introduced the imposition of hands to General Baptist churches in 1646, and nowhere in his narrative does he mention Edward Barber. Of course, it is certainly possible, as some historians have maintained, that Danvers simply got it wrong, and that Barber, the radical puritan, introduced the imposition of hands to the General Baptists a year before Cornwell, the Church of England minister.Footnote 88 But to believe that, one would also need to believe that Danvers was wholly unaware of the alleged liturgical innovation of Barber, a man who was both Danvers's contemporary and ostensibly a leader within the same General Baptist communion to which Danvers belonged. Additionally, to believe that Danvers was mistaken about who introduced the imposition of hands to General Baptists, one would also have to believe that Danvers was equally unaware of Thomas Edwards's account in Gangraena. Again, perhaps this is possible—Ann Hughes notes that though Gangraena was immensely popular when it was published, it “was not reprinted many times over many decades.”Footnote 89 Yet it still seems odd that Danvers, having determined to provide a definitive account of the development of the imposition of hands among General Baptists, would pay no heed either to Barber or Barber's appearance in Gangraena. It is odd, unless, of course, neither Danvers nor other contemporaries believed that Barber practiced the imposition of hands upon new converts.
The third and perhaps strongest piece of evidence against the traditional account of Barber as the popularizing force behind the laying on of hands among General Baptists is, namely, that existing scholarship does not quote Edwards in full. When the secondary literature recounts the Barber incident as related by Edwards, the following passage is inevitably cited: “Every one of the company kneeled down apart; and Barber, with another of their way, went to each one of them one after another, and laid both their hands upon every particular head, women as well as men, and either in a way of Prayer, prayed they might receive the Holy Ghost; or else barely to every one of them used these words, receive the Holy Ghost.”Footnote 90
The secondary sources citing Edwards stop there and conclude that this passage is describing Barber pioneering the General Baptist practice of laying hands upon new converts.Footnote 91 But the account from Gangraena does not end there. After this quotation, Edwards continues, describing how the meeting progressed, indicating that the assembled Anabaptists shared a meal together, “administered the Lords Supper,” and then enjoyed an evening of spirited debate over the extent and nature of Christ's atonement. But then Edwards returns to the laying on of hands ceremony, as follows:
The party who relates this was somewhat troubled at this new business of laying on of hands thus, as not well knowing the meaning of it; but upon enquiry, the party relates so far as could be learned upon asking some other of the Members; the meaning is this, That such persons who now after the laying on of these hands shall have gifts, must be sent to Preach into the countreys, yea, into the streets openly and publikely, yea, to the doors of the Parliament Houses; and the forenamed party said, The like had been done in another Church of the Anabaptists before; and added, They agreed to forbear a while from sending them into the streets publikely, and to the Parliament to Preach, till they should see how things would go.Footnote 92
This additional information casts the laying on of hands ceremony in a completely different light. When one considers the full description rather than just the initial snippet, it is clear that Barber was not introducing a novel, quasi-Laudian sacramental rite but was simply appropriating the far more widely accepted practice of laying on of hands as a way of commissioning individuals for ministry. Those upon whom Barber placed his hands were ordained or set apart to preach or teach: “Such persons who now after the laying on of these hands shall have gifts, must be sent to Preach into the countreys, yea, into the streets openly and publikely.” Indeed, immediately after this passage in Gangraena, Edwards proceeds to discuss some of the methods and mechanisms by which various “sectaries”Footnote 93 attempted to spread their ideas.
When we take this into account, all the other oddities previously considered begin to make more sense: the passage explains why all the assembled company received this blessing, not just the newly baptized; it explains why Henry Danvers did not record Barber as the originator of the rite in 1645. Furthermore, if Barber was laying on hands to encourage the laity to use their ministerial gifts, that would also explain why Barber in none of his writings advocated for or even mentioned the imposition of hands upon newly baptized converts. Barber published at least nine known works during the 1640s and 1650s, beginning with his 1641 Small Treatise of Baptisme or Dipping,Footnote 94 but nowhere does he mention laying hands upon new converts as a liturgical rite, even though this very controversy was then roiling General Baptist congregations. Throughout his published work, he enthusiastically commended his then-novel prescriptions for church life, writing often about “baptism, that glorious ordinance of Jesus Christ, by which believers are initiated into the Church of Christ,” but nowhere did he mention the imposition of hands as a necessary adjunct to baptism—strange indeed, if in fact that is what he is practicing in the passage from Gangraena.Footnote 95
As it happens, Barber does actually write about laying hands upon people, but when he does so, it is always with a view toward ordination and setting individuals apart for ministry. In his treatise A True Discovery of the Ministry of the Gospell (1645), while expounding the duties of Christian ministers, he insists that they have a responsibility to “take notice of their [people's] gifts and graces, exhorting them to improve them.” In support of this idea, he quotes 1 Timothy 4:14: “Neglect not the gift that is in thee, which was given thee by prophesie, with the laying on of hands of the Eldership.”Footnote 96 This passage was commonly employed by puritan authors and others to support the idea that church officers were to be ordained through the imposition of hands.Footnote 97 Barber then adds a radical egalitarian twist on this ordination idea by conjoining 1 Timothy 4:14 with 1 Corinthians 14:39: “For ye may all prophesie one by one that all may learn, and all may be comforted.”Footnote 98 When these two verses are taken together, the first prescribing that those ordained for ministry be set apart by the laying on of hands and the second suggesting that the whole congregation participate in preaching or prophesying, one is left with a ministry agenda that looks much like what Edwards described in Gangraena. What is not present in the text is any notion that the separatist, lay preacher, and radical puritan Edward Barber ever practiced a quasi-Laudian appropriation of confirmation.
And if we conclude that Barber, the prototypical lay puritan, was not the innovator who popularized the imposition of hands among General Baptists, we are then able to recognize more clearly those who were responsible for introducing this doctrine. Those baptistic separatists who did practice this quasi-Laudian confirmation adhered to an Arminian-influenced soteriology and hailed disproportionately from the ranks of disaffected former Church of England clergy. When they left the national church and took up separatist, baptistic pulpits, they brought with them thought patterns derived not from puritanism but from a particular segment of the Church of England—namely, an anti-Calvinist theology paired with a strong emphasis on the sacramental efficacy of liturgical rites like baptism and the imposition of hands. With the Edward Barber problem solved, these sacramental echoes reverberating among the General Baptists become far easier to hear.
IV
In considering a potential connection between baptistic separatists and Laudian divinity, I have not attempted to provide a detailed account of either. Rather, the preceding paragraphs have been deliberately suggestive and revisionary, an exercise in historiographical ground clearing intended to stimulate fresh thinking about the categories used to conceptualize early modern religious actors. For it is all too tempting for modern historians to allow our own analytical categories to determine rather than reflect our interpretation of the past. This temptation seems especially acute for scholars of religious history. As Peter Marshall has argued, “There are particular dangers in careless or unreflective use of religious and confessional labels.”Footnote 99 Many problems arise when the use of these descriptive labels for religious phenomena unwittingly “create teleological presumptions about patterns of development, sanitizing conditions of disorder or uncertainty, and obscuring pointers to paths not taken.”Footnote 100 By presumptively categorizing certain groups, individuals, and liturgical rites as belonging to an overly predetermined notion of what constitutes radical religion, one risks becoming desensitized and unable to hear the potentially much broader and more diverse range of theological timbres resonating within the distinctive religious practices of any specific communion.
To that end, the preceding case study suggests that religious radicals may indeed have drawn inspiration and ideology from a wider source base than is often assumed. As indicated previously, in making this argument, the present article complements work by McDowell, Peacey, Hessyaon, Mendle, and others, who have all in various ways suggested that the genealogies of radical ideas in mid-seventeenth-century England are more complicated than we have sometimes imagined. Such conclusions thus offer a course-correction to the previous work of historians such as Christopher Hill, Michael Watts, J. F. McGregor, and Barry Reay, all of whom have spent significant energy analyzing radical religion in aggregate as an historical category.Footnote 101
One of the most trenchant criticisms leveled against Hill and others has been that when one treats radical religion in toto as the object of study, one inevitably implies a coherence among the various groups to which the common label is applied.Footnote 102 Thus even as work on radical religion profiles and ostensibly individuates its Diggers, and Levellers, and Muggletonians, the overall effect often cuts in the opposite direction, as quite different subjects are presented as united amid their diversity by some essential sameness, a ribbon of continuity that can enwrap them all and justify their common inclusion under the heading “radical religion.” Such continuity among the various groups labeled radical might actually exist, of course, and the sort of “functionalist” approach to defining religious radicalism advocated by Hessayon and David Finnegan seems to be a sober and helpful response to the problem.Footnote 103 But the danger of allowing a predetermined label to precondition the interpretation of one's source material is ever present, and care must be taken to avoid it.
And it is for precisely these reasons that one must tread cautiously when seeking to understand radical religious theology and practice through the explanatory matrix of radical puritanism. Many of the novel positions espoused by Baptists, Quakers, antinomians, and others can indeed be best understood as attempts either to extend established puritan positions to their logical endpoints or to reconcile perceived contradictions within Calvinist orthodoxy. In such cases, the decision to interpret heterodox religious actors as “radical” or “extreme” puritans seems well justified. But this or any such interpretive framework must always acknowledge that the religious fecundity of the revolutionary period has thus far resisted historians’ best attempts to process its theological churn in terms of crisply delineated gridlines.
The General Baptists considered here represent such a case. Though often regarded as quintessential religious radicals embodying extreme antiformalist, back-to-the-Bible puritanism, closer examination of their associations and practices—in particular, their liturgical imposition of hands upon new converts as a sacramental means of conveying the Holy Spirit—reveals a group of theological innovators willing and able to draw upon a range of religious resources far more diverse and nuanced than has typically been acknowledged. Those baptistic separatists practicing a ritualistic, sacramental, quasi-Laudian laying on of hands seem to have drawn their ideas from a rather different intellectual stream than those who, like Edward Barber, emerged from a radical puritan mold and would have reflexively eschewed such sacramentally meaningful outward forms. Further inquiry into radical religious groups will surely be able to chart more fully the ways in which General Baptists and others ranged outside the prescribed territory of radical puritanism. One thinks, for example, of a General Baptist ecclesiology that was far more hierarchical than the congregational and egalitarian forms with which radical religion is commonly associated, or the several polemical contexts other than defending the imposition of hands in which a General Baptist leader like Thomas Grantham could draw upon the work of both a Jeremy Taylor and a range of patristic sources. By attending more carefully to these and similar instances of ideological cross-fertilization, one can hope to recover a better sense of both what motivated and informed groups like the General Baptists and the diversity and breadth of radical religion during the English revolution more broadly.
