… by baptisme we enter into the kyngdome of God.
—Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, Catechismus (1548)
Betwixt the baptiz’d race / And the circumcised Turban’d Turkes …
—James VI and I, Lepanto (1603)
The above epigraphs sit uncomfortably with each other.1 Archbishop Cranmer’s statement draws from a traditional, indeed universally accepted, understanding of baptism. No Roman Catholic would have disagreed with this statement; baptism has long been understood as the sacrament of Christian initiation.2 Disagreement emerges only when we ask how “by baptisme we enter into the kyngdome of God.” Answers to this question varied greatly among Protestant reformers: Martin Luther asserted the importance of the sacrament for salvation; Ulrich Zwingli argued the opposite; John Calvin’s position was in the middle.3 English Protestant beliefs about baptism were influenced by continental reformers and hence equally conflicted.4 Whereas Cranmer’s seemingly ecumenical statement offers a glimpse of the wide-ranging contestations that underlay baptismal theology in the mid-sixteenth century, James’s statement intimates the incipient role of race in this heated theological controversy, implying a racial criterion for legitimate baptism. Yet the king’s sense of what the term “race” means in this context is anything but transparent. Is he referring to a religious group demarcated by the sacrament of baptism, thereby differentiating baptized Christians from circumcised and turbaned Muslims? Or does “baptiz’d race” imply not only sacramental ties but also genealogical kinship? If so, how does that kinship group “enter into the kyngdome of God,” especially if “baptiz’d” is not merely a religious category but also a racial one that presupposes invidious distinctions among kinds of people?
These questions surface not only from a juxtaposition of the passages from Cranmer and James; they also arose within reformed English baptismal theology. In this chapter I argue that the concept of race that emerged from the Church of England’s baptismal theology became a powerful tool for clarifying theological arguments about salvation and the origins of Christian identity. When I use the word “race” in this chapter, I intend the early modern meaning, which denotes genealogy and lineage.5 In this vein, race functions in two ways in the Church of England’s baptismal theology: one, in arguments against English Anabaptists, because the Church of England asserted that the children of Christians should be baptized just as the children of Jews were circumcised; and two, in arguments asserting that the children of Christians who died before being baptized were nevertheless saved because God is also the Father of Christian “seed.” John Calvin was the most influential source of these arguments, but I focus on English writings to show how widespread was the connection between race and salvation in the Church of England’s theology.6
English theologians, drawing as they did from the work of Calvin, deemphasized the importance of baptism by asserting that the children of Christians were themselves Christians, even before they were born. This doctrine is contrary to Catholic theology, in which all humans are born as infidels and consequently need to be converted through the sacrament of baptism. It is also contrary to Tertullian’s famous maxim, “Christians are made, not born.”7 English theologians repeatedly asserted that Christians are in fact born, a theological position that is also incompatible with Paul’s assertion in Romans 9:7 and 8, “Nether are thei all children because thei are the seed of Abraham.… they which are the children of the flesh, are not the children of God,” which was used to construct Jews as children of the flesh rather than of the spirit. Protestants condemned Judaism for what they saw as its genealogical understanding of election while turning a blind eye to their own racialization of salvation. The Church of England’s baptismal theology reified concepts of racial difference by suggesting that conversion to Christianity was only for those not born into the baptized race; the need to convert thus marked the convert as racially different from Christians.8 By questioning the role baptism played in the work of salvation, the English Church’s baptismal theology fundamentally altered how individuals were believed to acquire religious identities. Moreover, just as this theology implied a racial difference between infidels and Christians, it both drew from a tradition in which infidels—especially Jews and Turks—were used to figure religious alterity and also transformed those figures into real spiritual subjects who might become Christians.
Understanding Baptism: Sacraments and the Stories They Tell
Reformed baptism arose from reformed sacramental theology. William Tyndale was among the first in sixteenth-century England to articulate a reformed sacramental theology in his A briefe declaration of the sacraments (1548).9 Tyndale writes that he desires to help his readers “understand the pith of the sacraments, how they came up, and the very meaning of them” (347). He argues “that our sacraments are bodies of stories only; and that there is none other virtue in them, than to testify, and exhibit to the senses and understanding, the covenants and promises made in Christ’s blood. And here ye see that where the sacraments, or ceremonies, are not rightly understood, there they be clean unprofitable” (358).10 The “virtue in the sacraments” was a point of contention among Protestant theologians, but for Tyndale the efficacy of sacraments comes from the right understanding of the stories, covenants, and promises made through Christ’s crucifixion—and “understanding” is so important for Tyndale that here he uses some form of this word twice.11 As “bodies of stories,” then, Tyndale’s sacraments arise from traditional Christian typology (in which Jewish ceremonial rites prefigure Christian sacraments) and gain power from the participants’ understanding of them. Tyndale’s sacraments, then, are metonyms that point toward multiple narratives; they give the laity a variety of ways of grasping how sacraments work and what they do.
The Church of England’s baptismal service, too, emphasized the metonymic quality of sacraments—although Tyndale found fault with the English Church’s statement about the sanctification of the water. The various stories that baptism tells were repeatedly announced to congregations in the opening prayer (indeed, the prayer would have been heard every time a child was born and baptized) to the baptismal service of the “Black Rubric” in the 1552 Prayer Book:
Let us praye. Almightie and euerlasting God, which of thy great merce diddest saue Noe and his familie in the Arke from perishing by water: and also dyddest safely leade the chyldren of Israel, thy people throughe the redde Sea: figuring thereby thy holy Baptisme and by the Baptisme of thy welbeloued sonne Jesus Christe, dyddest sanctifye the floud Jordane, and al other waters, to the mistical washing away of sinne: We beseche thee for thy infinite mercies, that thou wylt mercyfully loke upon these chyldren, sanctifie them and washe them with thy holy ghoste, that they, beyng deliuered from thy wrath, may be receued into the Arke of Christes Church, and beyng stedfast in fayth, joyeful through hope, and rooted in charitie, may so passe the waues of this troublesome world, that finally they maye come to the lande of euerlasting lyfe, there to reygne wyth thee, worlde without ende, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.12
The Church of England’s service is remarkably different from the Latin Sarum Rite, the most commonly used order of service in pre-Reformation England.13 The first prayer of the baptismal service, now said in English, is structured to mirror the interrelationship between understanding and sacramental efficacy. The actual beseeching, marked with the “We beseche thee,” occurs only after the congregation has been reminded of instances in which God saves his chosen ones through and from water. God is beseeched to sanctify and wash the child only after the congregation has been reminded of God’s saving power. Here the efficacy of the sacrament is implicitly linked to the theological concept of fides aliena, in which the understanding and faith of the believers make the sacrament effective for the infant.14 Additionally, the work of baptism is explicitly linked to the narratives mentioned in the first part of the prayer, when the minister asks God to receive the child “into the Arke of Christes Church” so that the children “may so passe the waves of this troublesome world, that finally they maye come to the lande of everlasting lyfe.” In the service the story of Noah provides the dominant metaphors through which the congregation understands what baptism does and how it works upon the child.15
One of the other stories baptism tells is that of the covenant God sealed with Abraham through the rite of circumcision. According to Tyndale, “instead of circumcision came our baptism; whereby we be received into the religion of Christ” (350). English reformers often followed medieval scholastic interpretations of the promises God made to Abraham and his decedents in the Hebrew Bible; English theologians, however, differed from medieval scholastics in their understandings of the effectiveness of the sacrament in relation to and apart from faith.16 Nevertheless, in order to understand baptism, theologians like Tyndale explained the sacrament in relation to the covenant of circumcision. Tyndale first explains the origins of circumcision and the nature of God’s covenant with Abraham as accounted in Genesis 17: “I wil establish my covenant betwene me and thee, and thy sede after thee in their generacions, for an everlasting covenant, to be God unto thee and to thy sede after thee.… This is my covenant, which ye shal kepe betwene me and you, and thy sede after thee. Let everie man childe among you be circumcised” (7 and 11). Tyndale’s explanation of circumcision closely follows the covenant made in Genesis: Circumcision is the “covenant God caused to be written in the flesh of Abraham, and in the males of his posterity … circumcision was the seal and obligation of the said covenant” (349). Circumcision becomes for Tyndale a primary example of how God works: God engages in covenants with humans and seals them with rituals.17 But to understand baptism in particular, Tyndale asserts that believers must first understand circumcision.
Neither Protestant reformers nor their medieval predecessors invented the circumcision/baptism analogy, which has its origins in the writings of St. Paul. Paul’s analogy lends itself to a view of Jews as Christians’ spiritual ancestors; within the logic of Christian typology, Jews become types of Christians. Drawing from postwar reconsiderations of Paul that seek to recover the connection between his theology and his Jewish identity, Julia Reinhard Lupton argues that, chiefly because of Paul, Christianity is significantly loaded with “Jewish tropes, ideas, and commitments, even when they function under the sign of disavowal.”18 Because understanding circumcision became crucial to understanding the sacrament of Christian initiation, baptism carried with it resonances of genealogical election—albeit with anxiety because Christianity finds it impossible to forget its Jewish heritage even as it distinguishes itself from it.
Justifying Pedobaptism: Circumcision and English Election
Although they departed from Catholic teachings concerning the sacramental efficacy of baptism, Tyndale and the Church of England after him maintained that the infants of Christians should be baptized. They do so, first, by drawing from traditional Christian typology that suggests baptism is analogous to the Jewish rite of circumcision, and second by arguing that just as the infants of Jews were circumcised so too should the infants of Christians be baptized. But comparing the baptism of Christians to the circumcision of Jews did more than just help English Protestants justify baptizing their infants; it also significantly shaped the Church of England’s conceptualization of Christian identity. In the English Church’s baptismal theology, then, English Protestants often identified themselves with Jews. As Achsah Guibbory has shown, Jews were not always figures of alterity in Reformation England:
English people spoke about England and her reformed Church in language that figured her as the true Israel and recalled the history of biblical Israel. We see, indeed, a slippage between the idea that England was ‘an’ elect nation, part of the universal church of God, and ‘the’ elect nation. Both the New Testament and the Protestant emphasis on election revised but did not dismiss the idea of chosenness and ‘chosen people,’ as described in the Hebrew Bible.19
The circumcision/baptism analogy provides but one example of how English Protestants used Jewish history and religion to imagine their own election. Just as baptism was understood as a retelling of the story of the circumcision covenant God made with Jews as both a race and a nation, so in Reformation England baptism tells a story that allowed English Protestants to see themselves as an elect race and nation, and maybe even elect because of their race.
Advocates of pedobaptism often used the circumcision/baptism analogy to confront arguments made by sixteenth-century Anabaptists.20 To be sure, the Church of England was careful to define its baptismal and sacramental theology in opposition to that of the Catholic Church. Yet theologians in the Church of England also went to great lengths to refute Anabaptist baptismal theology.21 This doctrinal stance is quite clear in the work of Thomas Becon, a prolific writer and prominent theologian of the Church of England. In Becon’s A New Catechisme (1564), which takes the form of a dialogue between a son and his father, the son turns from his vehement attack on Catholic theology toward his belief that the Anabaptists misinterpret Mark 16:16 (“He that shal beleve & be baptized, shal be saved”) to mean that belief must precede baptism.22 According to Anabaptists, infants should not be baptized because they are not yet able to believe. The son uses the circumcision/baptism analogy to confront Anabaptist belief:
For as the infants of the Hebrews were not secluded and put away from the circumcision, which was also a sacrament or sign of God’s grace, mercy, and favour to the Jews, even as baptism is now to the Christians, although [infants] cannot profess their faith commanded by God notwithstanding to be circumcised … even so in like manner ought the infants of the Christians to be admitted into the sacrament and sign of grace, (I mean baptism) … forasmuch as God is now no less the God of the Christians and of their children, than he was in times past the God of the Jews and their children. (208)
Becon was not the only Englishman to use the circumcision/baptism analogy to defend infant baptism. Thomas Cranmer argued, “Infants in the old law were circumcised; ergo, in the new law they ought to be baptized. Again: infants pertain to God, as it is said to Abraham, ‘I will be thy God and the God of thy seed after thee.’ ”23 Alexander Nowell, Dean of St. Paul’s from 1560 until his death in 1602, also defended infant baptism by comparing baptism to circumcision in A Catechisme (1570): “Seeing God, which never swerveth from the truth, nor in anything strayeth from what is right, did not exclude infants that were in the Jewish church from circumcision, neither ought our infants to be put back from baptism.”24
Temporality is important in these arguments. Although circumcision and baptism are analogous, illustrating the unchanging nature of God and how he works through covenants and ritual acts, baptism and Christianity are figured as the fulfillments and perfections of circumcision and Jewish identity.25 The very verbs used in the argument of Becon’s son illustrate this point: Circumcision “was,” baptism “is now,” and “God is now no less the God of the Christians and of their children, than he was in times past the God of the Jews and their children” (my emphasis). The manner in which God bestows favor, through covenants made between Himself and a chosen people, is characterized as immutable; the object of that favor, however, has changed from Jews to Christians. Although this belief that baptism supersedes circumcision was not new within Christianity, what is new is the use of God’s covenant with Abraham to confront Anabaptist arguments and to think about Christian posterity. Christian supersessionism takes on a new racial logic. Before the Reformation, and even in Tyndale, the Church used the circumcision/baptism analogy mainly to understand more fully how sacraments tie God to man. In Becon and Nowell we see, by contrast, an interest in making sure that the children of Christians are included in God’s covenant, which the Anabaptist insistence on the believer’s baptism could never assure.
Just as English theologians like Becon and Nowell introduced the circumcision/baptism analogy into their justifications of infant baptism, so they introduced in England the view that Christians constitute an elect nation and race. As Becon argues that the children of Christians should be baptized, he goes beyond the traditional circumcision/baptism analogy—seen, for example, in Tyndale’s discussion of the sacraments—in order to articulate the notion that Christians are a race. Like Tyndale, the son in Becon’s catechism turns again and again to what becomes the key scriptural text, Genesis 17:7, to support his argument. The biblical examples Tyndale used to argue that God’s covenants extend to the children of the faithful are later employed by Becon to assert that the children of Christians should be baptized because the children of Jews were circumcised.
Protestant uses of the Genesis 17 covenant to justify baptizing their infants suggest that Protestants of the time viewed the Jewish “chosen-race” theme as a model for their own self-understanding of “chosenness.” Early moderns did indeed understand “Jew” as a racial category of identity, a point that scholars like Janet Adelman and James Shapiro have argued at length.26 Moreover, the racialization of Jews, Sharon Achinstein suggests in her study of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, was not separate from theological concerns: “Reforming Protestantism supplied the explicit ideological framework through which such social antipathy towards the cultural or racial other could be expressed,” and Foxe’s “textual incarnations of Jews reflect the emergence and intersection of both theological and racialist discourses on Jews.”27 In his sermon on the conversion of a Jew, Foxe refers to Jews as the “circumcised Race.”28 Although we need not read the word “race” in Foxe in “scientific” Enlightenment terms, his usage nevertheless betrays a belief that Jewish lineage marked Jews as different from European Christians. Moreover, as Adelman suggests, “Insofar as Jews constituted both a lineage and a people, perhaps they were ideally situated to mediate between the older and the newer senses of ‘race’ and hence to be early victims of racism.”29
If Jews were viewed as a race, then, the Church of England’s theology—which explained baptism by comparing it to the covenant God made with not only Abraham but also an entire race of people—provided a theological foundation for the construction of a Christian racial identity: As an elect race, Christians have the right to baptize their infants.30 Protestants of that era thus laid claim to a racially elect identity analogous to that of the ancient Jews even as they denigrated Jews as a race.
The circumcision/baptism analogy and the emphasis on the covenantal right to baptize the children of Christians eventually led the son in Becon’s A New Catechism to entangle race and lineage with notions of faith. Becon’s attack on Anabaptist arguments requires a step beyond simply appropriating the Genesis 17 covenant; he further contends that infants have faith: “Infants and speechless children have faith,” the son says, “therefore they also ought to be baptized” (211). This view aims squarely at Anabaptist arguments and their interpretation of Mark 16:16. The son speaks of “this sentence of our Saviour Christ, which the ungodly Anabaptists wrest and wring for the condemnation of the baptism of infants, making nothing of them, but rather stablisheth the baptism of your children against them and against their most devilish doctrine” (211). Indeed, both Anglicans and Anabaptists see faith as crucial for salvation; this is not where they disagree. The son thus challenges the Anabaptist assumption that the children of Christians do not have faith in Christ. The son’s statement is a radical one, conflicting not only with Anabaptism but also with defenders of infant baptism like Calvin and Heinrich Bullinger.31 As influential as the continental theologies of Calvin and Bullinger might have been in England, Becon argues that even faith itself, not just Christian identity, was a function of race.32
The key question is how infants get faith. The father rightly asks, “How do they obtain faith?” The son replies, “By the Holy Ghost” (212). The answer is convenient, but the son then seeks to demonstrate that individuals can be filled with the Holy Ghost in their mother’s wombs. He quotes and comments upon Jeremiah 1:5: “ ‘Before I fashioned thee in thy mother’s womb, I did know thee.’ (That is to say, I favored and loved thee.) ‘And or [sic] ever thou wast born, I sanctified thee’ ” (212). The son then provides the example of John the Baptist, about whom the angel said, “He shall be filled with the Holy Ghost, even from his mother’s womb” (212). The son’s argument implies that Jeremiah and John the Baptist are examples of God’s treatment of all Christian children.
Becon asserts that God does not fill all infants with faith, and the emergence of race in discussions of baptism and salvation becomes clearer when Becon notes the limits of God’s conferment of faith on infants. After the father asks, “What sayest thou though of the heathen and unbelieving,” the son responds,
Foreasmuch as they belong not to the household of faith, neither are contained in this covenant, “I will be thy God, and the God of thy seed;” again, “I will pour out my Spirit upon thy seed, and my blessings upon thy buds;” therefore leave them to the judgment of God, to whom they either stand or fall. With the children of the faithful God hath made a sure and everlasting covenant. (214)
Here, Genesis 17 is coupled with a passage from Isaiah 44:3. The use of this passage from Isaiah is itself significant, for the two verses preceding this one reaffirm the election of the nation of Israel: “Yet now heare, ô Iaakób, my servant, and Israél, whome I have chosen. Thus saith the Lord, that made thee, and formed thee from the wõbe: he wil helpe thee. Fear not, ô Iaacób, my servant, and thou righteous, whome I have chosen” (Isaiah 44:1–2). Becon uses God’s promise to pour his spirit on the children of Israel—even from the womb—to support the idea that, inasmuch as God’s promises now pertain to Christians, the spirit of God is now poured on the children of Christians, even before their birth. The elect status of the children of Christians is further emphasized by the exclusion of the children of unbelievers from this promise. Although the son does not explicitly say that faith is coupled to lineage, this conclusion follows inescapably from the position that the children of heathens do not have faith and the children of Christians do. The son does not go so far as to say that the children of heathens are damned; nevertheless, they are excluded from the assurance of salvation that is granted to the chosen “seed.”33
This belief that the children of Christians are born into the Christian faith was pervasive and enduring in the Church of England, and both Anabaptists and Catholics, despite their radical differences, understood this belief as linking Christian identity to race and linage. Although both groups focused on the Church of England’s views concerning the salvation of infants, Anabaptists criticized its justifications for pedobaptism, and Catholics criticized its deeming infants as Christians without baptism. In The character of the beast: or The false constitution of the church … concerning true Christian baptisme of new creatures, or new borne babes in Christ: and false baptisme of infants borne after the flesh (1609), for example, the English Anabaptist John Smyth seeks to demonstrate that the Church of England’s theology linked salvation to race. Smyth advances various arguments against the practice of baptizing infants, including the fact that Christ, bridegroom of the Church, “wil not contract in marriage with a bride or spowse that is vnder age.”34 But what is particularly relevant here is his critique of the Church of England’s uses of the circumcision/baptism analogy to justify pedobaptism:
You are to know … that all the old Testament was carnal taken from the Elementes of the World, thereby to type out & teach them heavenly things: & therefore their Church was carnal to type to us in the New Testament a Spiritual Church: The matter of their Church was a carnall Israelite: the matter of the Church of the New Testament is a true Israelite in whom there is no guile: The forme of their Church was a carnall circumcision a carnall seale.… The forme of the Church of the New Testament is the circumcision of the hart.… Their carnall Church in the matter & forme came by carnall Genealogie … our Spirituall Church in matter & forme is in the Genealogie of the Fayth of Abraham the Father of vs all vnder the Spirituall New Testament.… Thus if you would compare the Type and the Truth together, you should easily discerne the sandy foundation of your false Church ruinated & you false baptisme quite abandoned: who continue a Church by succession of a carnall line.35
Smyth’s refutation of the Church of England’s baptism employs longstanding figurative readings of Jews as carnal and Christians as spiritual, but here these readings come into conflict with each other. Both Anabaptists and the Church of England understood Judaism as prefiguring Christianity, but Smyth’s Anabaptist reading entails a greater rupture between the old and new covenants in its assertion that God ceased to work in and through human genealogy. His accusation that the Church of England “continue[s] a Church by succession of a carnall line” demonstrates that its baptismal theology made Christianity a matter of race.
Although Anabaptists rejected the English Church’s racial baptismal theology because it slighted faith, Catholics condemned its assertion that baptism was not the only way to become a Christian, seemingly rendering race more important than baptism.36 This belief clashed so sharply with Catholic teaching that Thomas Harding, an English Catholic exile in Louvain, felt the need to respond to the notion that children were born into the Christian faith precisely because it undermined the importance of baptism. In A confutation of a booke intituled An apologie of the Church of England (1565), itself a response to the Bishop of Salisbury John Jewel’s Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1562), Harding condemns Jewel’s theology of baptism. In one instance, Harding attacks Jewel’s use of Calvin, whom Harding criticizes for denying the necessity of baptism and saying that the children of Christians are born holy: “He seemeth to derogate much of the necessity of baptism of Christian men’s children; where he saith that by reason of God’s promise ‘the issue which cometh of faithful parents is born holy, and is a holy progeny, and that the children of such, being yet inclosed in the womb, before they draw breath of life, be nevertheless chosen into the convent of life everlasting.’ ”37 Jewel does not deny Harding’s accusation. Rather, he responds by clarifying his position concerning the “holy progeny” and defending Calvin’s theology:
Whereas you charge M. Calvin for saying “the children of the faithful are born holy,” ye should rather herewith have charged St. Paul. For thus he saith. Nunc liberi vestri sancti sunt: “Now are your children holy.” Ye should have remembered, M. Harding, that these be St. Paul’s words, and not M. Calvin’s. His meaning is, that the children of the faithful, notwithstanding by nature they be the children of anger, yet by God’s free election they be pure and holy.38
Harding’s response to Jewel demonstrates that the Church of England’s theological position was indeed viewed as a radical and potentially dangerous departure from Catholic teaching. Harding’s main concern is that the doctrine of “holy progeny” and what Becon labeled “Christian infants” seem to render baptism unnecessary; he believes that if this is the case, Christians will no longer esteem the sacraments, and thus they may “easily be induced either to receive Mahomet’s religion, or some other.”39 According to Harding, the belief in the sacredness of sacraments is what separates Christianity from Islam and other religions; it is hardly surprising, then, that sacraments became such a point of theological contention, and that baptism became such a concern in controversies over Christian-Muslim contact. Consistent with Protestant teaching, Jewel defends himself against Harding’s attack by contending that although outward signs should not be conflated with spiritual grace (a position that reformers attributed to Catholics), sacraments are necessary. Harding’s critique, nonetheless, illustrates the implications of what became a significant aspect of English baptismal theology. Harding contends that Jewel and Calvin believe that baptism is not necessary because holiness is passed down from parents to children. While Jewel rejects Harding’s claim he views baptism as unnecessary, Jewel does not deny the point that the children of Christians are holy; instead, he uses the authority of St. Paul to defend his position.
Harding was correct that the notion of a “holy progeny” has its origins in Calvin’s baptismal theology. Denying the necessity of emergency baptism by the laity (and especially by women), Calvin asserts in Institutes of Christian Religion (1536) that the children of Christians who die without being baptized are still included in God’s covenant.40 Calvin also argues in the Institutes that the children of Christians are baptized not in order to be saved but rather to reaffirm their chosenness: “The children of believers are not baptized, in order that though formerly aliens from the Church, they may then, for the first time, become children of God, but rather are received into the Church by a formal sign, because, in virtue of the promise, they previously belong to the body of Christ.”41 It must be acknowledged, as John Wheelan Riggs argues, that this justification of infant baptism needs to be read in isolation from Calvin’s later theologies of predestination; Calvin does not develop his doctrine of predestination until after 1539.42 But in Institutes, baptism does not inaugurate spiritual, Christian identity; rather, it marks the child’s induction into the church as an earthly community of the elect, an induction that is itself predicated upon the belief that the child is already among the elect. Becon’s and Jewel’s assertions that lineage could assure election certainly echo Calvin; for them genealogical differences have spiritual significance, and English theologians used Calvin’s arguments to support their belief that race, not baptism, was the key to salvation.
Nevertheless, the basic tenets of Christianity mandate that Becon, Jewel, and Calvin acknowledge that all humanity is fallen. The English racialization of salvation drew from the theology of Calvin, who attempted to reconcile this understanding of election through lineage with the Christian belief that all humanity is damned without Christ’s death and resurrection: “For those who imagine that some sort of seed of election was sown in them from birth itself, and that by birth itself, and that by its power they have always been inclined to piety and the fear of God, are not supported by Scriptural authority and are refuted by experience itself.”43 Calvin’s statement seems to coexist uneasily with his earlier assertion; he argues here that Christians should take assurance in Christ’s sacrifice rather than in a “seed of election”—though we may see in this a gesturing toward a theory of invisible “second election” that Calvin developed later in his doctrine of predestination.44 The all-too-human behavior of the elect, here understood to be inherently depraved, is used as evidence that even those who are elect are only saved through Christ.
Race became a more explicit part of this argument in Calvin’s sermon on the second chapter of Galatians:
Now then he sayeth that the Iewes are indeede separated after a sort from the Gentiles, not that the Iewes are of more worthinesse, or that they haue any righteousnesse in themsleues: but because God of his own goodnesse voutsafed to choose them: like as at this day the children that are borne of beeuing parents, are not better than the children that are born of Paynims & Turks, if a man consider them both in their owne nature. For we all be a corrupted and cursed lump.… But yet neuerthelesse, S. Paul sheweth that they be sanctified, and that they be not vncleane, as those are which are borne of vnbeleeuers or Heathen folke.45
Although Calvin makes it clear the elect are not racially superior, he does not challenge the belief that Christians and heathens are different races, and that racial difference has spiritual consequences; he maintains that the children of the elect are born holy and that the children of Paynims and Turks are not. Calvin’s point is not so much to deny that election comes through lineage as it is to remind the elect that they are so only because of God’s promise to them.
Saved by Race: Salvation Without Baptism
The Church of England’s vigorous defense of pedobaptism did not entail a belief that baptism was necessary for salvation. A sacramental theology that insisted that sacraments are metonyms, narratives, and signs of grace rather than vehicles that bestow grace would not allow English Protestants to view them as prerequisites of salvation. The Catholic Church had argued just the opposite, that no one could be saved who does not receive baptism. Thomas Aquinas articulates this position quite clearly in Summa Theologica: “Three sacraments are necessary for salvation. Two of them are necessary to the individual; Baptism, simply and absolutely, and Penance, in the case of mortal sin after baptism” (91).46 Aquinas’s phrase “simply and absolutely” underscores baptism as a necessary condition of salvation. This theology justified infant baptism in Catholicism, for only baptism could erase the original sin that all humanity inherited from Adam. In Roman Catholicism, consequently, infants who died without the sacrament were believed to die outside of God’s grace and thus denied entrance into heaven. Such a belief led to lay baptisms—often performed by midwives—in cases where an infant was likely to die before a priest could arrive.47 And the unofficial Catholic belief in Limbo provided partial solace to parents who grieved the deaths of their nonbaptized children.
With the dismissal of what they would have considered the superstitious belief in Limbo, Protestant parents surely must have wondered what happened to their children if they died before being baptized. While English Protestants like Tyndale, Nowell, and Becon maintained that infants should be baptized, their assumptions about and arguments for pedobaptism did not imply that nonbaptized children of Christians were damned—although surely the vehemence with which these theologians defended infant baptism may have resulted from latent and unacknowledged fears about the fates of nonbaptized infants.48 English Protestants thus yoked their interpretations of Genesis 17 to their understanding of sacraments as signs of grace rather than as instruments that bestow it, thus arguing that the children of Christians who die without baptism are still saved. As it attempted to save nonbaptized children from hell’s flames, English Protestant theology denied that baptism was necessary and asserted instead that race and lineage could save the nonbaptized children of Christians.
Despite the scriptural mandate to circumcise male children, Tyndale’s sacramental theology does not allow him to esteem circumcision—or baptism for that matter—as efficacious in and of itself. Following St. Paul’s argument in Romans 2, he asserts, “males, having the flesh circumcised, yet not believing nor loving God, whereunto the outward circumcision bound them, were uncircumcised unto God, and God not bound to them.… so that neither circumcision, or to be uncircumcised, is aught worth (as St Paul saith, Rom. ii.) save for the keeping of the law” (349). We should not be surprised that Tyndale stresses the importance of belief. Accordingly, circumcision has no efficacy without accompanying belief—and we can see here how this reading of circumcision via Paul informs a Protestant view of the sacraments of the Lord’s Supper and baptism. Performing and receiving circumcision, as well as Christian sacraments, are necessary because God requires them. Obedience is important, not the act itself. Because obedience and belief rather than the act provide surety of the covenant (and one has no need to be obedient if, as Tyndale puts it, one is “not believing or loving God”), Tyndale can assert that male Jewish children are born into the covenant of Genesis 17, and that the covenant pertains to them even before they are circumcised: “The covenant, made between God and Abraham saved the man-child as soon as it was born, yea, as soon as it had life in the mother’s womb” (350). This assertion is the logical extension of the promise of Genesis 17: that God is the God of the seed even while it is in the mother’s womb.
Tyndale’s assertion that uncircumcised male children of Jews were covered by the covenant may reflect his wish to confront the unhappy consequences of the Protestant rejection of Limbo. To do so, Tyndale simply applies to baptism arguments made about circumcision. Because “instead of circumcision came our baptism,” he asserts,
then it followed, that the infants that die unbaptized, of us Christians, that would baptize them at due time and teach them to believe in Christ, are in as good case as these that die baptized: for as the covenant made to the faith of Abraham went over his seed as soon as it had life, and before the sign was put on them: even so must need the covenant, made to all that believe in Christ’s blood, go over that seed as soon as it hath life in the mother’s womb, before the sign be put on it. For it is the covenant only, not the sign, that saveth us. (350)
More important than baptism is the intent of Christian parents to baptize their children and teach them to believe in Christ; intent seems to be enough to fulfill the human part of the covenant. Moreover, Tyndale’s need to specify that the covenant only applies to the nonbaptized children “of us Christians” not only points to the ways in which the promises of God were believed to be inheritable through lineage but also defines genealogical and racial limitations on which children can be saved without baptism and which cannot.
Tyndale’s emphasis on the importance of parental intent also responds to the occasional practice of baptizing Jewish or Muslim children against the will of their parents. Thomas Aquinas’s criticism of this practice in Summa Theologica indicates that such baptisms were performed in the Medieval Church.49 Notwithstanding his criticism, Aquinas does not deny the efficacy of such baptisms; rather, he suggests only that children who are baptized against the will of their parents may lose the benefits of that baptism: “for they may be liable to lapse into unbelief, by reason of the natural affection for their parents” (161). Before this statement, moreover, Aquinas asserts strongly that the unbelief of a child’s parents does not negate the efficacy of the baptism: “Nor is it a hindrance to their salvation if the parents be unbelievers.… And the unbelief of their own parents, even if after Baptism these strive to infect them with the worship of demons, hurts not the child.… But the faith of one, indeed the whole church, profits the child through the operation of the Holy Ghost” (158–9).50 This was not solely a Catholic belief. Martin Luther argued a similar point. Anticipating future arguments made by Anabaptists, he writes in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520),
some might cite the baptism of infants who do not comprehend the promise of God and cannot have the faith of baptism; so that therefore either faith is not necessary or else infant baptism is without effect. Here I say what all say: Infants are aided by the faith of others, namely, those who bring them for baptism.… Nor should I doubt that even a godless adult can be changed, in any of the sacraments, if the same church prayed for and presented him.51
For both Aquinas and Luther, baptism acquires power from the prayers of the Church and its belief in the efficacy of the sacrament—and for Luther, sacraments accompanied by the prayers of the Church even have power to change an unbeliever. Unlike Aquinas and Luther, for whom baptism and the faith of the Church itself have power to change the ungodly into the godly, Tyndale’s emphasis on parental intent establishes an intimate connection between spiritual transformation and familial relations.
Tyndale’s argument about parental intent, then, as well as arguments advanced by later English theologians who defend infant baptism, departs from both Roman Catholic and Lutheran understandings of baptism’s power. This theological departure was reiterated by later English theologians as they rejected the emergency baptisms performed by midwives and attempted to assure grieving parents that their infants who died without baptism were still saved. Like Tyndale, the son in Becon’s A New Catechism asserts, “Hereof then may we truly conclude, that, forasmuch as the outward baptism, which is done by water, neither giveth the Holy Ghost, nor the grace of God, but only is a sign and token thereof; if any of the Christian infants, prevented by death, depart without baptism (necessity so compelling), they are not damned, but be saved by grace” (217).
The ordering of the arguments in A New Catechism is revealing. Becon asserts that “Christian infants” who die without baptism are saved only after his argument establishes that such infants have faith. Faith, that all-important element in Protestant notions of salvation, becomes the primary means through which infants are saved. The category “Christian infants” is itself noteworthy. Not only is it a phrase that appears throughout discussions of infant baptism in A New Catechism, but it also suggests that a child is born with an established religious identity that is independent of the sacrament. If one is born a Christian, baptism and conversion seem unnecessary.
So important was the belief that the children of Christians are holy at their birth and thus saved without baptism that William Hubbock devoted a whole sermon to the topic, An apologie of infants in a sermon, prouing, by the reuealed will of God, that children preuented by death of their baptisme, by Gods election, may be saued (1594). The sermon poses the question, “and is [God’s] compassion shut up from the seed of Christians” and answers it emphatically by demonizing the Catholic position: “O pitifull & cruell sentence, whose ears will not tingle at it? Infants who cannot speak, think, or do ill, the child whose flesh is scarce curded in the wombe: whose bondes scarce grislted out of the wombe: from the darkeness of the wombe passe to the vtter darkness for euer. Thus speaketh the dragon all gorged with blood.”52
As commonplace as this theological position became in early modern England, there were dissenting voices. During his tenure as bishop of London, Richard Bancroft was less certain about nonbaptized infants: “the state of the infant, dying unbaptized, being unknown, and to God only known.’ ”53 David Cressy argues that Bancroft’s view reveals that “the Church of England had no consistent or satisfactory answer to the problem of the ‘infant which die unbaptized.’ ”54 This, however, is a bit of an overstatement, for despite uncertain voices like Bancroft’s, numerous English theologians used race to assure a salvation outside of baptism.
The Nonbaptized Infidel: Figure of Difference and Religious Subject
English theologians both transformed Christians into a race and argued that salvation could be assured by race, yet these thinkers never asserted that infidels could not become Christians. Race, however, remained an issue as Protestants considered the process by which Jews, Turks, or Moors could convert to Christianity. In fact, English Protestants often used the presumed racial otherness of infidels to clarify their arguments about baptism. Nowhere do the issues of infant baptism and the racialization of infidels conjoin more closely—indeed in the same sentence—than in this passage from A Brief and Clear Confession of the Christian Faith, by the Bishop of Gloucester, John Hooper (1581):
I believe that this baptism with water is not so necessary to salvation, that one may not be saved without it in case of necessity … even as in time past under the law the little children dying without circumcision were saved by the faith of their parents. But this only I do understand of the children of the faithful, unto who the promises of God do appertain, and not of the infidels and reprobate.55
In Hooper we see the rearticulation of many of the arguments that were made earlier by Tyndale, Becon, and others: Baptism is not necessary for salvation; baptism is analogous to circumcision; the promises of God pertain to the children of the faithful; and the children of infidels are excluded from the promise of salvation. Hooper makes a sharp distinction between the children of Christians and the children of infidels; only the children of Christians can be saved without baptism. This theology raised the following question: Could an infidel be saved without baptism? In what follows I consider how the infidel—as both a figure of alterity and a religious subject to be saved or damned—was used to clarify reformed views of baptism in England.
Tyndale and Becon argue that an infidel, too, can be saved without baptism. Tyndale writes, “And as the circumcised in the heart, and not in the flesh, had part in God’s promises; even so a Turk unbaptized (because he either knoweth not, that he ought to have it, or cannot because of tyranny,) if he believe in Christ, and love as Christ did and taught, then hath he his part in Christ’s blood” (351). Tyndale’s emphasis on the efficacy of belief over that of the sacraments is hardly surprising. What is surprising is the entrance of the infidel into this theological discussion; the Turk, both as a figure of alterity and as a real person who might be saved, helps to illustrate the view of baptism as no more than a sign. His assertion that salvation is available “even so a Turk” who dies without baptism yet believes in Christ is a logical conclusion to his arguments about baptism. The son in Becon’s catechism concurs: “and it is not to be doubted that, even among the Turks and the other heathen, there are many spiritually baptized, and so are saved, although their bodies want the water of baptism” (221). Although these statements affirm that belief rather than baptism has the power to transform the Turk from an infidel into a Christian, the contexts of their statements illustrate that Tyndale and Becon are not so much concerned with the salvation of actual Turks as with the following three points: one, vehemently attacking Catholic doctrines on baptism; two, asserting that Christians are now God’s chosen; and, three, saving the children of Christians from hell’s flames. For both men the Turk is above all a rhetorical figure of alterity, one that serves to strengthen the assertion that baptism is not necessary for salvation. The logic of their arguments requires, however, that this figure of alterity also be appreciated as a real Turk who can be saved; Tyndale and Becon thus transform the Turk from figure to real religious subject.
In Tyndale and Becon we also see a rhetorical shift from Jew to Turk: from using Jewish lineage as an analogy to the emerging concept of Christian lineage to introducing the Turk as a figure of alterity. Concepts of Jewish lineage proved most helpful for understanding how Christians might be understood as a baptized race, but Jews are absent from discussions of baptism where a figure of racial alterity is needed to prove a theological point. Jews were demonized in many theological treatises, but not in discussions of baptism where the sacrament was compared to circumcision or in discussions of baptism that proposed analogies between Christians and Jews. For this reason, I suggest, the Turk entered discussion of baptism; the Turk became the figure of alterity that could prove that baptism is not necessarily for salvation.
We gain a better understanding of the rhetorical power of Tyndale’s and Becon’s respective “even so a Turk” and “even among the Turks” when we consider how the Turk functioned figuratively in religious polemics. The Turk, as Matthew Dimmock has shown, held a special place in theological debates and in the religious practices of the Church of England.56 Turks were the proverbial enemy of the Christian “West,” most especially because of their conquests of lands once considered to be part of Christendom (the conquests of Constantinople in 1453 and of Cypress in 1571, for instance). But the Turk was seen not only as a proverbial enemy but also a real one, so much so that the Church of England devised both prayers of petition and thanksgiving concerning their imperial actions. Following the defeat of the Turks at Malta, for example, the Church of England issued A short forme of thankesgeuing for the delyuerie of the isle of Malta from the inuasion and long siege thereof by the great armie of the Turkes both by sea and lande, and for sundry other victories lately obteined by the Christians against the said Turkes, to be vsed in the common prayer within the prouince of Canturburie on Sondayes, Wednesdaies, and Fridaies, for the space of syx weekes (1565), a prayer that makes it difficult to distinguish religious and spiritual concerns from imperial ones. Additionally, the Turk was a frequent presence in Christian worship through The homilie against disobedience and wylfull rebellion (1570). Lamenting the fall of Christian lands into the hands of Turks, the homily states,
So manie goodly Cities, Countreys, Dominions, and Kingdomes, some time possessed by Christians in Asia, Africa, Europa: the miserable fall of the Empyre and Church of Greece, sometime the most flourishing parte of Christendome, into the handes of the Turkes: the lamentable diminishing, decaye, and ruine of christian religion: the dreadfull increase of Paganitie, and power of the Infidels and miscreantes.57
The Turks’ presence in the homily suggests that an English man or woman could hardly think of them without considering their supposed antipathy to the Christian faith.
As different as the Turk was in the minds of early modern English readers, not all Protestant writers represent the Turk as the absolute evil. In Tyndale’s early writings, the “Turk” is as a figure of racial and religious difference, a kind of placeholder against which the reader can fathom the more radical alterity of Catholics. For example, the figure of the Turk is ubiquitous in Answer to Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue (1531), Tyndale’s response to Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue Concerning Heresies (1529). There is hardly a discussion in Tyndale’s Answer that does not use the figure of the Turk to help readers understand the evils of Catholics; in contrast to Catholics, Turks emerge in a favorable light. Tyndale asserts that in contrast to Catholics, “The Turks … believe many things of God.” (Doctrinal Treatises, 53); he further contends that the “pope’s life and doctrine are more wicked than the Turks and all the heathen that ever lived” (Doctrinal Treatises, 145). It is important to remember, however, that Tyndale is less concerned with actual Turks than he is with Catholics; in his anti-Catholic polemic, the Turk cannot represent the greatest of all evils.
Nevertheless, Tyndale’s argument exploits his readers’ likely assumption that Turks are an absolute spiritual evil, especially within an early Reformation print culture in which Protestant and Catholic authors wrote books responding to the books of their religious opponents. In Responsio ad Lutherum (1523), for example, Thomas More devotes the entire thirteenth chapter (“Lepide refellit insulem Lutheri Lemma impugnantis diuturntiatem fidei catholicae, illata partier diuturnitate superstitionis iudaicae Turcharum et gentilium” [“He wittily refutes Luther’s silly premise attacking the long duration of the catholic faith by referring to the equally long duration of superstitions of the Jews, Turks, and heathens”]) to criticizing Luther’s comparison of Catholics to Jews, Turks and other “heathens.”58 Luther, as More summarizes his argument, suggests that the “public faith of the Turks lasting through several ages and of the heathens lasting through several thousand years is erroneous …; therefore, the public faith of the catholic church, maintained through however many ages, can be erroneous.”59 Putting Luther’s logic aside (or the lack thereof according to More), what is significant here and throughout the chapter is the triangulation of Protestant, Catholic and Turk. Reformation debates seem to need this third, outside figure (like the Turk or the Jew [in other theological contexts]) to prove the deficiency and error of the primary opponent—of course, More will turn the table and align Luther with the Turk.60 In Reformation debates, then, the Turk is often less evil than the Catholic in the eyes of some Protestants—or less evil than a Protestant in the eyes of some Catholics. Moreover, arguments suggesting that Catholics are less godly than Turks gained their power from readers’ likely previous assumptions that there is nothing more evil than a Turk.
Consequently, Protestant-Catholic polemics do not allow Tyndale or Becon to view Turks as unredeemable, and thus the Turk’s status as figure of evil gives way to the Turk as a spiritual subject who might receive Christian salvation. In Tyndale’s theology, to view Turks as beyond salvation is to have a reprobate mind. At the beginning of Answer, speaking very generally of an individual who does not have the Holy Ghost to teach him, Tyndale writes, “He believeth that he loveth God, because he is ready to kill a Turk for his sake, that believeth more in God than he; whom God also commandeth us to love, and to leave nothing unsought to win him unto the knowledge of the truth” (7–8). As illustrated in his mentioning of the Turk in A brief declaration, here, too, Turks can be redeemed, and indeed should be loved so that they might convert to Christianity.
The main function of the Turk in Tyndale’s and Becon’s writings is to serve as a foil to Catholic sacramental theology and to clarify their Protestant views. The construction of the Turk within Protestant discourse, however, begs the question: If a Turk, as different as he may be, can become a Christian without the sacrament of baptism, what real good does baptism do the Christian progeny? Tyndale answers this question by asserting that they ought to be baptized because it reminds the congregation of their covenant with God: “Neither our salvation so greatly standeth in [baptism] or any other sacrament, that we may not be saved without them, by preaching the word only. Nevertheless God hath written his will, to have his benefits kept in memory” (359). Salvation comes from two other means: faith, which comes from preaching and through which Turks and indeed everyone can be saved; and through God’s covenant that he established first with Jews and later with the baptized race, Christians and their posterity. Although both infidels and the children of Christians can be saved without being baptized, it is important that they are saved through different means. While nonbaptized infidels can be saved through faith and belief, the children of Christians are saved through the covenant. Infidels can be saved in spite of their race, while the children of Christians are saved because of their race.
Despite its use of race to ensure salvation and to prove the inefficacy of baptism, the Church of England never went so far as to say that Turks, Moors, Jews, or any other infidels could not become Christians. The English Church nevertheless created a Christianity defined mainly by race and lineage, in which the customary route to salvation was birth into the Christian faith. Tyndale’s and Becon’s belief that even Turks could be saved without baptism thus remains in communion with the inclusive claims of Christianity to embrace all who believe; what is true for Christians and their seed is also true for Turks who believe in Christ. But in contrast to Tyndale’s and Becon’s views, the reformed sacramental theology that denied the miraculous power of baptism also provided theological justification for questioning the salvation of Jews, Turks, and Moors who underwent the rituals of Christian conversion. In the following chapters I will consider how the theology that stripped baptism of its miraculous power, as well as racial constructions of both Christian and infidel identities, mandated purposeful and self-conscious engagements with romance’s infidel-conversion motif, one which could embody Christianity’s claim to embrace individuals of every nation and race.