The grace we receive

In the previous essay, I argued that Anglican theology is characteristically prayed: Scripture, doctrine, and the Church’s response to God are joined in a common pattern of worship. But Christian worship does not end with words. Common prayer brings us to water, bread, and wine, where the gospel is not only proclaimed or prayed, but received.

The Church did not invent these signs. The risen Christ commanded his apostles to make disciples, “baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19). On the night before he died, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it, and gave it to his disciples: “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me”. He likewise gave them the cup as “the new covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:19–20). Baptism and Holy Communion are gifts and commands of Christ before they are marks of Anglican identity. The distinctively Anglican claim is not that we discovered a sacramental life peculiar to ourselves, but that we seek to receive and continue the sacramental life found in Scripture and handed on through the historic Church.

This is why the Anglican formularies call them the Sacraments of the Gospel. Article XXV of the Thirty-Nine Articles describes them as “effectual signs of grace” ordained by Christ. To Be a Christian: An Anglican Catechism restates this inheritance in familiar Augustinian terms: a sacrament is “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace”. God gives the sign as a means by which we receive the grace and as a tangible assurance of his gift (questions 121–123). The elements possess no spiritual power in themselves; their efficacy rests on Christ’s institution and promise.

Sacraments are therefore more than illustrations of the gospel or testimonies to something that happened elsewhere. They signify, proclaim, and assure. Baptism bears public witness to the gospel, and Holy Communion is a remembrance of Christ’s death. In both, God is doing more than helping us think about grace: by his promise, he joins us to Christ and sustains us in him.

Sacramental reception is not mechanical. Paul’s warning against unworthy reception and his command to examine ourselves show that reception can contradict the gift (1 Corinthians 11:27–32). Article XXV likewise insists upon worthy reception and faith. Faith does not supply grace or make the sacrament effective by the force of our conviction. It receives what Christ gives. Repentance, thanksgiving, and obedience are not payments offered in return, but the fitting posture and continuing fruit of lives opened to his mercy.

St Paul gives Baptism its fundamental shape in Romans 6. Christians have been “baptized into Christ Jesus” and therefore “baptized into his death” (Romans 6:3). Buried with Christ, we are raised with him to walk in newness of life. The sacrament does not merely illustrate death and resurrection; Paul describes participation in Christ’s paschal life, calling the baptized to become dead to sin and alive to God (Romans 6:4–13).

Christ’s command in Matthew 28 places this new life within discipleship. The baptized receive the triune Name and are taught to obey everything Christ commanded. Baptism also places them within a people: “in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body” (1 Corinthians 12:13). It is the public act by which Christ joins us to a Body whose life we do not define for ourselves. The assurance that I belong to Christ comes within this shared belonging, not apart from it.

Anglican baptismal teaching follows this biblical pattern. The 2019 Prayer Book rite gives it liturgical form when the Church thanks the Father for forgiveness, adoption, membership, and new life bestowed by water and the Holy Spirit. Article XXVII of the Thirty-Nine Articles describes Baptism as a sign of regeneration through which those who receive it rightly are grafted into the Church. In this way, Anglican worship and doctrine confess the life in Christ that Paul describes.

This priority of divine promise helps explain the Anglican practice of baptizing infants. At Pentecost, St Peter declares, “For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away” (Acts 2:39). Without settling every question, the verse reflects Scripture’s wider covenantal pattern: God’s promise precedes mature response and gathers a people within which faith is taught and confessed. An infant cannot offer a mature profession of faith. The Church receives the child within the covenant community, while parents, sponsors, and congregation promise to raise the child in the knowledge and fear of the Lord. The faith confessed around the font does not substitute for personal faith; it surrounds the child and calls them toward that profession. Infant Baptism is not an exemption from discipleship, but its beginning within the household of faith.

Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams draws out what this baptismal identity asks of us. To be baptized, he suggests, is to be where Jesus is: near the Father and near the suffering world Christ entered to redeem. Baptism is not a religious status separating us from ordinary human need. It joins us to Christ where he has joined himself to sinners and sufferers, calling the baptized near those places where human life is most wounded or at risk (Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer). The grace that makes us God’s children also draws us into the Son’s self-giving life.

The life begun at the font is sustained at the Table. St Paul tells the Corinthians that he received from the Lord what he handed on to them: on the night when he was betrayed, Jesus took bread and the cup and commanded his disciples to do this in remembrance of him (1 Corinthians 11:23–26). The Supper proclaims the Lord’s death until he comes. It turns the Church back continually to the sacrifice by which she lives and forward to its promised completion.

Remembrance here does not mean that Christ is absent while the Church thinks about him. In the previous chapter, Paul asks, “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ?” (1 Corinthians 10:16). The word translated “sharing” can also be rendered “participation” or “communion”. The bread and cup do more than prompt memory: in them the Church shares in Christ and receives the benefits of his death.

Article XXVIII receives Paul’s language directly. The Lord’s Supper is not only a sign of Christian love, but “a Sacrament of our Redemption by Christ’s death”. The bread we break is a partaking of Christ’s Body, and the cup of blessing a partaking of his Blood. Here a distinctively Anglican sacramental pattern comes into view: confidence, grounded in Scripture, that Christ gives what he promises; faithful reception within the Church’s common prayer; and restraint about explanations Scripture does not require.

Richard Hooker gives this conviction particular force in Book V of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. He refuses to treat Baptism and the Eucharist as “bare resemblances or memorials of things absent”. In Holy Communion, he says, we truly and really participate in Christ, who imparts himself to the faithful as their mystical Head. Hooker is not evasive about Christ’s gift; he is deliberately modest about its mechanism. Our participation depends on Christ’s power and promise, not on our ability to locate or explain him within the elements.

This participation is personal, but never private. Paul draws the ecclesial conclusion directly: “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Corinthians 10:17). In Sermon 272, St Augustine tells the baptized that it is their own mystery they receive at the Table: “Be what you see; receive what you are”. We receive the Body of Christ so that, in union with him, we may more fully become the Body of Christ.

Williams approaches the same truth through the language of hospitality. At Holy Communion, we learn that Christ wants our company and has made us guests at his Table. The person beside me is there for the same reason: Christ desires their company as well. The welcome I receive is therefore a welcome to share; it frees me to welcome those whom Christ has received (Being Christian). I have explored this ecclesial dimension more fully in “The common cup and common life”. For the present argument, the essential point is that communion with Christ creates communion with his people. The grace of the Supper is contradicted when we seek Christ’s presence while refusing the neighbors he has joined to himself.

Baptism and Holy Communion therefore belong together as the sacramental shape of one Christian life. Hooker writes that “We receive Christ Jesus in Baptism once, as the first beginner; in the Eucharist often, as being by continual degrees the finisher of our Life”. Baptism is not repeated: it gives us an identity to inhabit through daily repentance and faith. Holy Communion returns us again and again to the death and life of Christ, strengthening the life begun in us and repairing our communion with him and one another.

There is something fitting in the ordinariness of the signs. Water washes and gives life. Bread and wine nourish, gladden, and gather people at a table. Christianity does not teach us to escape the created order in order to find grace. The eternal Word took flesh, and the risen Christ continues to meet his people through the material gifts he appointed. Their familiarity does not make the sacraments insignificant, as though spiritual realities required more impressive substances. It displays God’s freedom to make ordinary creatures serve his extraordinary mercy.

The grace given through ordinary things reaches into ordinary life. The baptized are called to walk in newness of life, near the places where Christ is present to human need. Those fed at his Table are called to repentance, hospitality, reconciliation, and self-giving love. Sacramental grace forms a people whose bodies, relationships, work, and common life are offered to God. What we receive is meant to bear fruit in what we become and what we give.

These gifts are entrusted to the Church Christ gathers by his Word and sends into the world. Anglicanism receives them as gifts to Christ’s whole Church and claims no authority to alter what he instituted or redefine the grace he promised. Its sacramental life is an effort to receive them within common prayer: water joined to his promise, bread and wine joined to his self-offering, and a people joined to his death and risen life. The grace we receive at the font and Table becomes, by God’s mercy, a life given in holiness, hospitality, and love.