One of the most interesting outcomes of this little analysis of two paragraphs written in the late 1640s is how wide-ranging the implications are. Let's start with its three basic assertions:
Profession of Faith Puritanism took a rather oblique stance on salvation. Puritans (and by this I mean the self-identifying Calvinistic party that arose out of the larger movement to purify the Church of England) inherited just enough of Calvin's church/state covenant theology to assume that their church communities would have Christians and nonchristians alike. Throw in enough predestinarianism and they didn't know (or really care) who was who. Because it was God's choice alone who would be saved, all one could do in this life was look for evidence of it. Hence the Puritan approach was to baptize everyone into the church community (preferably as a baby) and let the chips fall where they may. But to give some sort of hope to the community members, Puritans created a very elaborate step-by-step salvation experience (Perkins' "Golden Chain" anyone?) that people could place themselves on. At the end of this set of experiences was repentance/salvation, and if one didn't make it all the way to the end of the chain, he or she was predestined to be damned. I suppose this means I'll have to do a blog entry on the Golden Chain some day. Anyway, Baptists saw through all of that. They never desired to play the role of God in determining salvation because they knew the heart was beyond their vision. They absolutely cared about behavior (moreso as a witness to the lordship of Christ but also as a view to the fruit of salvation); surviving meeting minutes are filled with exercises of church discipline. But their emphasis on proper baptism, proper submission within a church structure, and so on was not about the Puritan test for salvation. It was about proper church order. It was about a church being right with God through its individual members being right with God. Believe it or not, this was a scandalous position to take in that day. {If anyone without a Baptist history background actually reads this blog, I know I need to validate that statement. Take a look at the First London Confession [1644], Article XXXIII for the easiest summary. You can also see Cox, Knollys, and Kiffin, A Declaration Concerning The Publike Dispute, particulary page 20. Kiffin said, "and that being thus baptized upon profession of Faith, they are then added to the Church, 2 Act. 41. and being added to the Church, wee conceive our selves bound to watch over one another, and in case of sinne, to deale faithfully one with another" (A Briefe Remonstrance, 13). They understood that a profession of faith did not mean one had saving faith; one could not verbalize his way into the kingdom of heaven. But they also understood that everyone stood on his own before God in judgment, so they would accept a profession on its face.} The Universal Church of Christ
I don't really want to spend too much time on the local/universal or visible/invisible church debate (because someone has to argue about everything). Christians understand that we are brothers and sisters of every other Christian alive, and in that sense we are all part of "The Church" of Jesus Christ. The New Testament absolutely confirms this (any ecclesiology worth its salt will give you all of the verse references). However, the New Testament always emphasizes the local manifestation of that Church, and as a result so did (and do) Baptists. You will always hear references to "The Church" and "a Baptist church" but you should never hear anything about "The Baptist Church" because it doesn't exist. I suppose I'll throw in a blog entry on that as well at some point. So when John Tombes read the First London Confession definition of a church, he saw a contradiction. (It's been a few entries, so here it is again: "a company of visible Saints, called and separated from the world, by the Word and Spirit of God, to the visible profession of the faith of the Gospel, being baptized into that faith, and joined to the Lord, and each to other, by mutual consent in the practical enjoyment of the ordinances.") By it, the Baptist leaders meant that church members would share the faith and identification with Jesus. But Tombes thought that common Baptist church members understood "being baptized into that faith" to mean "into the Baptist faith" at which point they would be isolating themselves from all other Christians. This is important to catch. As I said before, people understand baptism in a number of different ways, and it's always been a question (see 1 Cor 1 for a very early quarrel about it). The long and short is this: baptism is an identification. We are baptized into the name of the Father, Son and Spirit and thus identified with them. If we add the further stipulation that we are baptized into a certain church tradition, then we are identified with that church at the exclusion of all other traditions. If we are baptized into a specific local church, then we are not baptized into any other local church. Do you see Tombes's concern? If people were baptized a Baptist, then their baptism excludes (and would be excluded) everyone else. Certainly early Baptist opponents saw their practice in that way; they accused that Baptists would have to be re-baptized every time they moved their church membership, which all rightfully saw as ridiculous. (Tombes opened a very interesting dichotomy between the teachings and the beliefs of a church. He said that it wouldn't matter what the leaders intended with their statement of faith if none of the people subscribing to that statement understood it in that way! This is why those leaders sent him the clarification, "we do not baptize any into this or that particular congregation: but only into that one body in general spoken of 1 Cor. 12. 13." I can only conclude (because this is how they solved such questions in those days) that their churches openly discussed this matter in church conference.) Their approach does seem to be at odds with modern Baptist practice. I would say that the easiest way to describe our practice is that it is directly associated with entrance into a local church. My personal understanding about how this works really has no problem reconciling these two angles. Baptism is always associated with a local church because it takes place in and through a local church (with exceptions - for another blog entry). There is no "universal church" baptism committee out there somewhere. In baptism, a local church recognizes God's call in a new Christian's life and commits to caring for that Christian. That church then baptizes him or her into Jesus and then also admits him or her into the local fellowship. Two different steps; linked together but not causally. However, that's not necessarily the way these early Baptists saw it! Remember that I threw in the possibility that not all of these Baptists recognized paedobaptist churches as true churches? You get a sense of frustration in some of their writings that true churches would agree with their statement of faith. That could mean for at least some of these men that the "universal church" in London consisted of the seven (in 1644) congregations willing to sign the First London Confession. That creates a very different feel for Tombes's Answer, should it be true. So what did they say about the universal church? Benjamin Cox and Thomas Patient almost exclusively spoke of "churches" and not "the Church." Henry Jessey completely distinguished between the universal and local church in category and kind. The local church had form and structure. The universal church "existed" in the mind of God only. William Kiffin believed the universal church existed as divided into local assemblies or companies. Hanserd Knollys took a similar but more regional approach with the universal church. In both of their writings there was tension what to do with multiple local assemblies failing to recognize one another; could they all be in the universal church? (Jessey basically said that this question didn't matter). Spilsbury basically said the same thing as Jessey, Kiffin and Knollys - that a person was baptized into the universal church and then joined a local congregation - without answering the nature of that universal church. (Aside: When this answer was written, there were very few baptizing churches in all of England. In London, there were the seven First London Confession churches, and there were a number of other baptizing churches, many of which would later be known as General Baptist churches because they held a non-Calvinistic perspective on unlimited or general atonement. Considering the previous example of Kiffin prefacing Goodwin's book, and you can check out Wright's Early English Baptists for lots of examples of crossover, there was mutual recognition of some kind. However, certain Particular Baptists so abhorred the doctrine of general atonement that they questioned General Baptist salvation and obviously did not think of their churches as true. I personally wonder how these early Baptists would react to the sheer number of baptizing traditions we have in the United States. Which ones would they recognize? Would they give up on their design for close cooperation based on scale alone?) That's quite a range of beliefs on one very specific question with one very specific answer with which all of these men explicitly agreed, and this was a fairly small group of men who communicated regularly about such matters! We probably have no clue as to the variety of understandings within the Southern Baptist Convention today! Church Communion When people see these words today, they probably think "Lord's Supper." If you're a Baptist history buff, you probably think "eligibility for Lord's Supper." But really, all this is talking about is church membership. Members commune with one another in community. Remember that a criterion for baptism according to these early Baptists was a willingness to be in communion with any particular church of Christ (not the denomination, of course, which didn't exist yet) and a readiness to be in communion with all churches of Christ. This was intended to allay fears of sectarianism (a common accusation of Baptists) - that their church members would recognize all true churches. (I just give one last reminder that they didn't fully agree on that identification.) There are a couple of ways we can approach what this might have meant to these men. One of them involves the eligibility for Lord's Supper mentioned above, but maybe not in the way you're thinking. The Bunyan/Kiffin debate mentioned earlier about right of church communion certainly involved who should be accepted at the Lord's table in a local church, but at its heart was actually a debate about church membership. In a nutshell, could a Baptist church accept someone's infant baptism in the Church of England? I brought up some of these data points in the bio section, so I'll just explain the implications here. Henry Jessey was the only one of these men who advocated for open communion (in other words, answered the above question Yes). His reasoning is crucial, though. He did not want a man to be able to come between another man and Christ. In this case, not allowing a man membership because of his baptism meant that an administrator of baptism was coming between that man and his enjoyment of the ordinances (including the Lord's Supper). Early Baptists understood far better than we do that all of Christ's ordinances for worship (including preaching and teaching and prayer and so on) are the ways that we meet Christ and enjoy Christ. Jessey did not think we could cut someone off from that. Kiffin and Spilsbury (and even John Tombes) saw Jessey's argument as a non sequitur. Because church membership did not impact a man's salvation, the criteria for church membership must be different than the criteria for salvation. Being a Christian granted one an incalculable set of rights; being a church membership granted one a different set of rights. Baptism was not "coming between" a man and Christ; baptism was bringing one into a different realm of Christian experience. Furthermore, such a one could always go enjoy the ordinances in a different church that would accept his infant baptism. If he thought that *this church* (the one that won't accept his infant baptism) enjoyed the ordinances better and more fully and so he wouldn't go anywhere else, then perhaps that man ought to pay attention to this church's teachings on all of the ordinances, including baptism! Another way we can look at the importance of baptism is in its relation to the church. As might be expected, Jessey put baptism in the category of "well-being" but not "being" of a church. The being of a church existed in its matter (visible saints) and form (mutual covenant). John Spilsbury explicitly agreed with Jessey about both matter and form. However, Spilsbury believed that baptism was a part of any true covenant. In other words, a church could be a church without believers' baptism, but it could not be a true church. (Now, what exactly does that mean? I'm not sure. I'm working on it.) The other four gentlemen involved actually would have disagreed with both Jessey and Spilsbury. Cox put both baptism and covenant in the "being" of a church; Patient and Knollys put baptism and faith; Kiffin put baptism for the universal church and covenant for the local church. In other words, not a lot of agreement. A third way we can approach communion is in the membership process. Jessey observed the practice of the Apostles to be to baptize new believers and them leave them to form a church. Baptists, however, had no apostles but only new Baptists, therefore Jessey was extremely generous about the rules for forming and joining a Baptist church. The other men put rules into place, but did not agree about them. Patient saw a one-step process of faith+baptism turning a person into a church member. The others held a range of two-step processes. Kiffin believed that baptism admitted one to the universal church, and then a particular church (probably the one doing the baptizing) reached out to the newly baptized person. Knollys believed that baptism mainly just identified someone as a suitable candidate for local church membership because in baptism he declared a willingness to submit to local church order. Cox further reduced baptism into a simple prerequisite for church membership. Spilsbury worked in reverse - covenant preceded baptism. Individuals would covenant to be a church together, and then baptism was administered as a seal of that covenant. My goodness, that's a wide range of interpretations! Conclusions So what can we conclude from all of this diversity? Obviously, this means that diversity has always been a part of the Baptist tradition. These early Baptists worked very hard to hold unity and diversity in tension, and they did so with mixed results (my book uses the area of worship for lots of such examples). This is the way, then, that I look at Tombes's Answer: the early Baptists did not see themselves as starting a new church, they were simply carrying on the mission of the Apostles. They were not planting competitive churches; they were cooperating as the true Body of Christ should cooperate. They better understood the primitive apostolic church than the well-educated Angelicans (and Presbyterians) because they were not tied to centuries of human accretion. It is no surprise that many Baptists fell prey to the extreme Restorationist movements of the Interregnum (or in 1800s America). I don't know if this is ironic or not, but Baptists today are significantly more willing to cooperate with paedobaptist traditions than the early Baptists would ever have dreamed. Certainly, in their day, paedobaptists imprisoned Baptists. That's not good for relationships. Part of it, however, is the lack of understanding of the differences between the two traditions. Early Baptists were forced incessantly to explain themselves to the Anglicans and then Presbyterians, so they were much more aware of the issue. Here's my conclusion based on everything I think I know about these men, their world, and this Answer. Both isolationist Baptists (Landmarkers; J. R. Graves, etc.) and ecumenical Baptists (Carl F. H. Henry) would find support for their approach in this Answer, and they would be wrong. These early Baptists strongly believed in the universal church into which they baptized. They baptized as Christians, not as Baptists! But they believed that the Apostles planted baptist churches, not paedobaptist churches. The universal church was a "Baptistdom" in the Anabaptist sense of taufertum. Paedobaptist churches, because they did not fully obey God, would always be disobedient and must be kept at arm's length. Again, I don't know how they would respond to the number of baptistic traditions we have in America today, or how they would treat them individually (that would answer a lot of questions for me). They were Restorationists, but they were more mindful of orthodoxy than Alexander Campbell. They took a harder line than Carl Henry, but they were far more willing to talk and admit error than J. R. Graves. They believed that their role was to carry on the Apostolic mission. They could not agree on exactly what that meant, which led to their eventual disintegration. But are you better off trying and failing, or not trying at all? There are plenty of Baptist churches who aren't trying at all, and it's not due to the historical precedent. They're just not trying. And we're just talking about being biblical, nothing crazy. But being intentionally and only biblical. That's the crazy step. I have a lot to think about here!
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