'The primary and secondary meaning of regeneration': an 1826 visitation charge and the Gorham Controversy

In a recent post, I highlighted how Charles Inglis, in a 1768 work, referred to how the Sacrament of Baptism bestows a regeneration which brings us into the covenant of Jesus Christ, but not that grace which renovates, or regenerates, the heart. He described the former as "relative and federal" regeneration, the latter "internal and moral". This is the understanding that Inglis sees in the Restoration divine William Falker (d.1682), in his Libertas Ecclesiastica (1674).

In the very closing years of the 'long 18th century', in his 1826 primary visitation charge, Thomas Burgess, Bishop of Salisbury, we see this understanding of Holy Baptism again set forth. Burgess states that he desires "to remove some of the difficulties, in which the important subject of regeneration is involved by its opposite disputants":

one party being charged with making baptism alone sufficient for our salvation, the other, with reducing it to a formal and almost unnecessary rite. Of the two extremes the latter is much the more common. By some a question has been raised, whether regeneration be inseparable from Baptism, which could never be made a question, if the subject be determined by his words who first proposed it. Regeneration, or the new birth, as explained by our Saviour, is being born of water and the Spirit, not of the Spirit only, but of water and the Spirit, which takes place only and always at Baptism. 

Burgess, in other words, begins by robustly affirming, following the Book of Common Prayer, that regeneration does occur at Baptism. He goes on, however, after the manner of Falker and Inglis, to define such regeneration:

Regeneration, in this primary sense, is an acquittal from the guilt of original sin, is applicable to infants as well as to adults, and is inseparable from Baptism. 

It is, then, incorporation into the New Covenant, as children of God:

The baptized person is placed in a new state or condition by the remission of original and actual sin; he is no longer what he was by his natural birth, a child of wrath, but is regenerated, and become a child of grace, of favor and adoption.

This is the meaning of regeneration in a "primary sense". This term, of course, means that there is also a secondary sense:

Regeneration, in its secondary sense, is a spiritual change, or conversion, from actual sin, after baptism, by the grace of God. The converted person is then born of the Spirit, but not now of water and the Spirit. The term in this sense is applicable only to adults or other persons subsequently to infancy. 

This "spiritual change" - what Inglis calls "internal and moral" regeneration - is not bestowed in Holy Baptism. It comes with the process of conversion in adult life. The dispute, therefore, regarding the relationship between the Sacrament of Baptism and regeneration is confused and obscured by a failure to distinguish between the "primary and secondary" meanings of the term:

The whole contention on the subject has arisen in great measure from confounding the primary and secondary meaning of the term regeneration. Baptism is not conversion, though it may be accompanied with it [i.e. in adults], and conversion is not regeneration with out its outward and visible sign. Baptism will not save from sin committed after baptism without conversion; nor, we may be assured by our Saviour's words, and the corresponding practice of the Apostles, will conversion save without Baptism those who can partake of it, and do not.

Twenty-one years after Burgess delivered his charge, the Gorham Controversy erupted in the Church of England. We might read this portion of his charge as addressing the two parties in that Controversy:

The whole contention on the subject has arisen in great measure from confounding the primary and secondary meaning of the term regeneration.

This does, however, raise a significant question as to how and why the clearly established and consistent sacramental, doctrinal, and pastoral understanding of Anglicanism across the 'long 18th century' was seemingly displaced to the extent that both Phillpotts and Gorham defined the debate apart from the earlier consensus. It is a matter for another post to address this. In the mean time, we have reason both to regret how the Gorham Controversy obscured the earlier consensus and to recognise how that consensus continues to be a coherent and wise understanding of the words of the Prayer Book baptismal rite: "Seeing now, dearly beloved brethren, that this Child is regenerate and grafted into the body of Christ's Church".