Bunyan Against Kiffin, and the Argument Since

The sharpest Protestant version of the argument broke out among English Baptists in the 1670s, and both sides agreed on the theology of the supper. John Bunyan, writing from and after his imprisonment, held that a difference of judgement about water baptism was no bar to communion, and that to refuse the table to a Christian whose faith and life were not in question was to make a secondary matter into the test of fellowship. William Kiffin and others replied that baptism is the door into the church and the table is inside it, so admitting the unbaptised, or those baptised only as infants, reverses an order that is not the church's to rearrange. Neither man doubted the other's Christianity, which is what made the exchange difficult, and Baptist churches have divided on it ever since: some open the table to any believer, some to any baptised believer, and some to members of that congregation alone.

The same argument has reappeared in a harder form. From the late twentieth century congregations in the Episcopal Church and elsewhere began inviting the unbaptised, on the grounds that Jesus ate with people before they had qualified for anything and that a meal used as a boundary has become the opposite of a meal. Their opponents answer that this makes baptism ornamental and inverts the sequence of Christian initiation kept since the second century. The canons of the Episcopal Church still require baptism and successive General Conventions have debated the practice without changing them, so the position exists as a widespread practice that its own church has not authorised, which is an unusual state for a liturgical question to be in.