In an age like the present, when the good will to establish a reasonable order of international life on earth is beset at every turning by impediment and frustration, there exists a temptation, if not to think of history as irredeemable, at least to moderate considerably our confidence in the relevance of Christianity to mundane affairs. We should not be surprised to find an increased tendency to mysticism, or if the hold of external reality over the mind is too strong to permit such with-drawal of the soul into itself, a lapse may set in towards an apocalyptic judgment on history with a hardened sense of the opposition of God to the world. In evangelism the effect may be to give preference to the Home Mission task of the Church over its Foreign Mission and ecumenical commitments. Certainly a change has come over the face of things and over our own temperaments since the Edinburgh Missionary Conference of 1910. There has been a screwing down of the lights. There has been a retractation of many hopes. In 1910 the Christian Churches stood on the tip-toe of missionary enthusiasm. The doors were swinging open in all lands to the entrance of the Christian Gospel. The day of the Son of Man was believed to have come near. Optimism with relation to history was of the order of the day. Today the world-scene has grown clouded and ambiguous.

The description ‘making Christians by sacraments’2 which has sometimes been employed by leading Baptist circles in Sweden has indeed almost become a catchword, intended to be used against the larger churches and to set the stamp of low worth upon them. Above all it is meant as a rebuke because of the way in which they receive their members. The term is undeniably most fitting and, in more than one respect, significant. The churches have always gone on the presupposition, and with more or less insistence stressed the fact, that their members become Christians by means of a sacrament, i.e. baptism. They are confirmed in the Church's fellowship by means of another, i.e. the Lord's Supper. The churches cannot defend themselves against the accusation that the term ‘making Christians by sacraments’ implies by trying to explain away or lessen the significance of the sacraments nor have they any wish to do so. Such a defence would involve nothing less than a denial of the facts. Without the least embarrassment, however, the churches can defend themselves by maintaining that the practice described as ‘making Christians by sacraments’ is the only one which corresponds to the attitude of Jesus and the Early Church towards the nature of the Christian fellowship and that only where it is practised can the real nature of the Christian Gospel be fully indicated.

In a service of the right kind God speaks to the congregation, and the Holy Spirit opens the hearts and lips of the congregation to reply. The means by which the inscrutable God comes out of the ‘Light unapproachable’ is His ‘Word’. It has been the will of God to limit His self-revelation to mediation through the ‘Word’. This self-revealing ‘Word’ makes itself known in two ways:

Firstly, God became man in Christ. He has thus entered our field of vision. From Christ's words and acts and from His character discernible behind them, the Father's nature, heart and will towards us are discerned, so far as such discernment is given to man. Christ is that aspect of God which is turned towards us. He reflects the rays of God, so far as human eyes can bear their light. As making known God's heart and will, Christ is therefore in a special sense ‘God's Word’. To describe Christ as the Word of God is to give a fully adequate picture. It is as the Eternal Word of God that the Risen Lord is in the midst of His faithful.

The second of the seven sacraments of the medieval church, confirmation, consisted of anointing with oil and signing with the sign of the cross, and was restricted to the episcopacy. The Reformers rejected this sacramental confirmation, on the grounds that in this form there was no scriptural warrant for it, nor was there any gospel promise attached to it. Likewise they were opposed to a rite that by its restriction to the episcopacy had come to be known as ‘the bishoping’.

Baptizo and baptisma are words whose lexicographical history either originates in, or has been radically altered by, Christian usage. In the LXX the former, in addition to an instance of its common classical meaning, to overwhelm or to sink, occurs in a quite untechnical sense in a few religious contexts. It is employed to describe Naaman dipping in the Jordan (4 Reg. 5.14), Judith performing purificatory ablutions during her sojourn with the unclean Gentiles, and ritual washing after contact with a dead body (Judith 7.7; Sirach 31, 34.30). Here the word retains its original sense of dip. It is only with the Evangelists' account of John that it takes on a technical significance and denotes a particular religious rite.

Early in 1632 we find Samuel Rutherford writing in these words to his friend Lady Kenmure:

It is the crooked love of some harlots, that they love bracelets earrings and rings better than the lover that sendeth them; God will not be so loved; for that were to behave as harlots and not as the chaste spouse, to abate from our love when these things are pulled away. Our love to Him should begin on earth as it shall be in heaven; for the bride taketh not by a thousand degrees so much delight in her wedding garment, as she doth in her bridegroom; so we in the life to come, howbeit clothed with glory as with a robe, shall not be so much affected with the glory that goeth about us, as with the bridegroom's joyful face and presence.