The Heritage Anglican Network: The Baptismal Controversy

In the nineteenth century a major controversy that divided the Church of England and the Protestant Episcopal Church was the baptismal controversy. This controversy centered upon the doctrine of the Baptismal Offices in the English and America Prayer Books. With the exception of the Scottish Prayer Book they were the only two Prayer Books in use at the time. (The Church of Ireland did not adopt its own Prayer Book until disestablishment in 1871.) The controversy was sparked by the adherents of Tractarianism, the Oxford High Church movement led by John Henry Newman, Edward Bouverie Pusey, and others in the Tracts for the Times 1833-1841. The Tractarians asserted that the Baptismal Offices of the two Prayer Books taught the doctrine of baptismal regeneration. In the Church of England the controversy was eventually settled at least officially by the Gorham Judgment, which ruled that baptismal regeneration was not the doctrine of the Church of England....

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