Becoming Christian

Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance

Dennis Austin Britton

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780823257140
• eBook ISBN: 9780823257164
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Becoming Christian argues that romance narratives of Jews and Muslims converting to Christianity register theological formations of race in post-Reformation England. The medieval motif of infidel conversion came under scrutiny as Protestant theology radically reconfigured how individuals acquire religious identities.Whereas Catholicism had asserted that Christian identity begins with baptism, numerous theologians in the Church of England denied the necessity of baptism and instead treated Christian identity as a racial characteristic passed from parents to their children. The church thereby developed a theology that both transformed a nation into a Christian race and created skepticism about the possibility of conversion. Race became a matter of salvation and damnation.Britton intervenes in critical debates about the intersections of race and religion, as well as in discussions of the social implications of romance. Examining English translations of Calvin, treatises on the sacraments, catechisms, and sermons alongside works by Edmund Spenser, John Harrington, William Shakespeare, John Fletcher, and Phillip Massinger, Becoming Christian demonstrates how a theology of race altered a nation's imagination and literary landscape.

1. “The Baptiz’d Race”

… 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 swervet...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Not Turning the Ethiope White
• 1. “The Baptiz’d Race”
• 2. Ovidian Baptism in Book 2 of The Faerie Queene
• 3. Infidel Texts and Errant Sexuality: Translation, Reading, and Conversion in Harington’s Orlando Furioso
• 4. Transformative and Restorative Romance: Re-“turning” Othello and the Location of Christian Identity
• 5. Reproducing Christians: Salvation, Race, and Gender on the Early Modern English Stage
• Afterword: A Political Afterlife of a Theology of Race and Conversion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index