Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Well, good morning and welcome to this edition of Church History at ubc. We are covering the topic of Baptist history this morning.
[00:00:08] Now, when it comes to Baptist history, it feels a little bit like my grandmother's task of developing our family ancestry tree. So my grandmother is very into Ancestry.com.
[00:00:23] she's gone back, I want to say, 500 years or so. Like, she's getting records from places over in Germany that I didn't even know existed that I didn't know you could get records to.
[00:00:35] And so she comes over to my home often and she'll have like this big binder of like, hey, I had these new developments. We go even further back. 500 might be a conservative number even.
[00:00:46] And as I look back through our family history, I see a lot of German blood, but I also see a lot of mix of European blood.
[00:00:54] And that sometimes is a little bit of what it's like to study Baptist history. We know some things really clearly, but then there's just a giant conglomeration of, I think you're family. I'm not quite sure how to relate to you.
[00:01:07] I have a lot of Irish and English blood in me. I don't think I have any Estonian blood in me, though.
[00:01:14] And Estonians, they might look like me, but just because they look like me. Oh, did the mic that. Oh, there we go. Just because they look like me doesn't actually mean that we're family. And so as we study Baptist history, it's a bit like that, trying to sort out the who's who of. Okay, we know that there are clear lines, there's clear family, but then there's also those who look like us but don't actually resemble us. And so this morning, as we jump into Baptist history, we're going to do so examining our roots in four parts.
[00:01:42] First, we are going to look at Baptist beginnings in England. That'll be the longest point, the biggest one. And so just know if we spend a lot of time there and you're like, he's got three more points. Just notice we're going to spend the most time there. Secondly, we're going to see how Baptists came to America and what religious liberty in America meant to Baptists at that time. Thirdly, we're going to cover the unfortunate topic of Baptists slavery and then the African American church. And then finally, we'll just have some reflections and thoughts on Baptist life today, particularly in the SBC. Now, this is a 30,000 foot flyover. There are many faces, names and dates that we could talk about in Baptist history. I'm going to do my best not to throw 400 dates and names at you.
[00:02:30] And I'm going to do my best to have us engaged in getting a lot of the high points. And so we get this overarching view. So we're going to take a step back. Rather than zooming in on a few really important characters, we're going to try and get a big view of Baptist history. So with that being said, let's start out with our Baptist beginnings in England.
[00:02:51] So before I became a Baptist, when I grew up as a non denominational, which you might joke is a closeted Baptist or a Baptist functionally in practice, I had the view that Baptists came around kind of the same way that Gimli describes dwarves in the Two Towers. He says dwarves just spring up out of the ground. I just thought Baptists kind of came out of nowhere.
[00:03:14] I don't. I could not give you a healthy understanding of what a Baptist was. So when we think about Baptists, we look backwards.
[00:03:21] We should be careful to recognize that Baptists were not initially called Baptists.
[00:03:27] They would have been Baptistic Congregationalists. Last week we studied the English Reformation and the Congregationalists and the Separatists that that came out of that which we'll review here briefly. And so it would just be wrong for us to say, oh yeah, the Baptists in 1650, they wouldn't have called themselves that. In fact, the Baptists weren't called Baptists. They were often penned by their enemies as Anabaptists. So Anabaptists1, we should stay away from Anabaptists. We are not Anabaptists. The closest we get in this church to being Anabaptist is my wife Anna, who is a Baptist.
[00:04:03] That is the closest I hope that we will come after this. But Anabaptists was a term that they would have protested to be an Anabaptist. What that means is like re baptizer. Re baptizer Anabaptists. They were radical reformers who splintered away from Zwingli and Luther. They believed the Reformation did not go far enough. They were anarchists. There was even a few towns where they were trying to legalize polygamy. And it was, it was a theocracy. It was a mess. Anabaptists rejected both Rome and the Reformation. They had problems with both of them. So historically, because Baptists, as we understand them, came out of the Reformation or followed our Reformation roots, we've rejected Anabaptists.
[00:04:47] A common leader of the. Or a leader that you might recognize from the Anabaptist movement was a guy named Menno Simmons, who was the father of Mennonites. And so we think of Mennonites. You know, my family grew. Much of my family's in Enid, where there's a lot of Mennonites over there. Mennonites came out of the Anabaptist movement. Basically. They rejected both Rome and the Reformation. A few Anabaptists were Unitarian, most were Trinitarians. But we really don't have a lot in common with Anabaptists, after all, other than our opposition to Rome.
[00:05:22] And so for that reason, Baptists in the early 1600s simply considered themselves to be Reformed Protestants in the separatist Puritan tradition. They believed that they were outside of the Church of England.
[00:05:36] Who other than their.
[00:05:37] They were outside of the Church of England. And they pretty much were in lockstep with Protestant orthodoxy, except for the fact that they wouldn't sprinkle babies. And so in this sense, the English Baptists, they were really just Puritans who took Puritanism to its logical conclusion. The Puritans had significant issues with the Church of Rome, certainly with the Church of Rome, with the Church of England, and the way that the Church and the state were mixing very unhelpfully there. And so Baptists were like, yeah, we don't like any of that either. We really do believe in a purity of the church, and that's why we only baptize believers. We'll talk about that more later.
[00:06:16] So as we look at these early views of the Baptists, as much as we might rightly want to separate from Rome, we have to be careful to not let opposition to Rome shade our entire view of history.
[00:06:29] So the reason that that's important is because there are some Baptists today who will claim that there's this unbroken line all the way back to John the Baptist, who that Baptists have always existed away from Rome, away from Orthodoxy. All these. They just this faithful line that's been trucking along for millennia.
[00:06:50] That would be called secessionism. So successionists would claim there's always been a Baptist church. There's never not been a Baptist church. And those historical groups or the successionists will claim, as I just said, that there's this line tracing back all the way to John the Baptist. Looking at different groups throughout history, such as the Novatians, the Montanists, some of them will even claim guys like St. Patrick were Baptists.
[00:07:15] I don't have the time to go into the whole argument of why that's not true. But just a quick note is that there is simply more to being a Baptist than being opposed to Roman Catholicism.
[00:07:27] Many of these groups that people will claim have long been Baptists, just simply did not like Rome. They would have baptized babies. They would have done all sorts of other things that are not explicitly Baptist. They would have not had a right view of religious toleration. And so we need to be just careful on the front end to not say, well, we've always been around forever in this particular way. We just need to be cautious and to assess history rightly.
[00:07:55] The scholarship that would support secessionism just simply isn't.
[00:08:01] It's not there is my point. And so, anyways, we should gladly be Protestants, we should gladly be Puritans or out of the Puritan tradition. So with that being said, we trace the origins of the Baptists out of the English separatists who did not like the Church of England. We're in the company of guys like Thomas Goodwin and John Owen, who we learned about last week, and countless other guys who were unable to subscribe to the Articles of Faith in the Church of England. They chose rather to organize separately, sometimes illegally, outside of the interference of the Church of England and outside of any other Congregationalists that would have opposed them. So to explain how Baptists emerge again, some historical context is required.
[00:08:48] Think about being in the 16, 1700s and the king gets to decide. Whatever you say. Whatever I say theologically goes.
[00:08:57] So today. Imagine if President Trump said, I think I'm a Roman Catholic today and we're going to make the law Roman Catholic.
[00:09:06] That would change the way that we gather, perhaps. Or even if he said, I'm a Methodist today, that would change the way that we gather. Not gather in the sense that we would still be doing the right things of preaching the word, singing the word, all that for sure. But you can imagine there'd be a lot of legal implications for that that would make life difficult, social implications that would make life particularly difficult. And so the English separatists, they really opposed the doctrines of royal supremacy, the 39 articles, the Episcopalian church government and the Book of Common Prayer. And those who did not accept those were essentially fired.
[00:09:41] We learned about that last week with the great ejection that only about 90 ministers, or, well, 300 initially resigned, but only 90 ministers held out and were deprived of their positions finally. And those guys became known as the separatists over their desire to separate from the Church of England.
[00:09:58] So the central principle here to which separatists held was that church members were bound together, not by geography or nationality, but by entering into a covenant with one another. For them, it was the church covenant that made a church a church. So I'm not a church member because I'm an American and my president is a church member. No, I'm at a church member here because I have covenanted alongside EJ and Josh and the Tunes. That's what makes the church a church. That's what separatists believed. And because of that, they believe that there was no authority over the local congregation. Secondly, they also believe that every member is responsible for the work of church ministry and upholding the covenant. And so it's not just the king who should be leading out the church. It should be each of us. We have a responsibility and duties as church members to care for one another and protect one another.
[00:10:53] And lastly, because that's the case, every member of the church should show evidence of true conversion. I should not be a member of a church just because, well, mom and dad were so like, I guess I'm here.
[00:11:05] It's great that children are raised in the church, most certainly, and we want to be pastorally sensitive to kids who are working out their faith and making their faith their own. However, a true church should be made up of those who are truly converted. Not we don't want a church that is, that has mixed membership where we have regenerate and unregenerate. And so these were the convictions of these separatists, these English separatists at the time.
[00:11:31] And that was in a growing conviction among the Puritans in the early 17th century England. And that led to the first baptistic churches in England.
[00:11:39] Separatists saw the church as made up of redeemed people of God, not just anyone. And therefore they are united into one body.
[00:11:48] So a quick word for how this is helpful for UBC today.
[00:11:51] Baptist churches or Baptistic Congregationalist churches required regenerate church membership, meaning you were baptized as a believer into the church. And we practice things like church discipline because we long to see the true church reflected in the local church. We long for the gospel to be preserved. We long for the gospel to be held up. We. We long for Christ's body to be pure. And so for that reason we hold these things really tightly. We're not doing it just because, well, that's what good Baptists do, although that is most certainly the case. We don't do things like church discipline because we want to be exclusivistic and mean no. Rather we're looking at one, what the scriptures say, but also two, church History. And we're going look at how badly things go whenever we don't have church discipline. Look at how badly things go whenever we just let whoever into the Covenant Church body. And so these parameters that we have are wonderfully encouraging for us because on the one hand it means that everyone who's a member of this church is responsible for one another. And so you get to pray through your directory knowing I'm responsible for the crows, I'm responsible for Justin West, I'm responsible for the tills and they're responsible for me. And so that's a wonderful form of discipleship. It is Christ's place plan for discipleship. And so like tonight we have a church members meeting right here and we'll do things like vote on new members.
[00:13:15] That is a privilege that our Baptistic forefathers really fought to preserve and give us. And so yes, what we're doing tonight is we're going to be able to affirm the faith of people as we're welcoming them into the church, as we're saying, hey, perhaps, I don't know if this is the case, but perhaps there are teenagers who are seeking baptism and we're going to welcome them into the church as, as soon as they get baptized. Like that's more than just church business.
[00:13:39] Members meetings are not just boring board meetings where we just present to the body what's going on. This is actually where we get to do the work of ministry for one another. So if you're a member of ubc, come tonight, that'd be wonderful. And vote on me and my wife.
[00:13:57] There are two Baptists, early Baptistic people that I want us to examine. So, so first I want us to recognize the first English Baptist, a fellow named John Smith.
[00:14:09] John smith, born in 1565 and lived until 1612, was a Cambridge educated minister in the Church of England. He, while at Cambridge, became influenced by the Puritans and he was ordained in Cambridge in 1594.
[00:14:23] After leaving the Church of England, he helped form a church in the town of Gainsborough in Lincolnshire. Christian, correct me if I'm wrong on that pronunciation.
[00:14:33] Sometime around 1606-07 and when he was at that church. Let me read for you briefly the words of that church covenant and listen. I didn't put them up here. So do your best to listen. Listen to how they explain themselves as a Congregationalist body bound to one another. So this, yeah. John Smith, his church covenant said this as the Lord's free people joined themselves by a covenant of the Lord into a church estate in the fellowship of the Gospel, to walk in all his ways made known, or to be made known unto them according to their best endeavors whatsoever it should cost them, the Lord assisting them. So it's the Lord's free people joining themselves together. That's what their church covenant said. So that you know, if you were going through the John Smith church membership class, that you would have had a portion on this, where he says, you are joining freely to come do the work of ministry with us. You can hear that language. You know, that's 500-year-old language, but you can hear it nonetheless echoed today.
[00:15:33] So in John Smith congregation, John Smith's Congregation, there were 43 members who signed the church confession and their statement of faith. They had a plurality of elders, which is good.
[00:15:44] They had elders who regularly taught the world word. So it wasn't just John Smith the bishop, doing all his preaching. He delegated it out to his other elders as well. There was equality there. They only permitted two offices in the church, elder and deacon. So they had deacons who were assisting the elders in the word work by doing the practical work. Elders governed and taught the word. Deacons met practical needs. And a unique thing that John Smith had in his church that would maybe ruffle some feathers, depending on your Baptist flavor today, is that all the way back in the 1600s, he had deacons who were women. And I just think that's an interesting fact. Despite that fact, however, or despite this, they weren't yet Baptists. Eventually, John Smith's church fled England. So they all picked up and moved, like. Imagine all of us picking up and moving to, like, Alberta. They fled England due to persecution and settled in Amsterdam in 1608.
[00:16:40] So you can imagine this new renegade church that's just been planted over here, the Church of England, not very thrilled with them. Their friends and family, not very thrilled with them. All sorts of troubles coming their way. Well, what do they do? They say, we're out of here. We're going to go where we can freely worship, which is over in Amsterdam. No king is trying to kill us over there. And while in Holland, John Smith became convinced that believers baptism was biblical and that infant baptism was not.
[00:17:08] So he baptized himself, and then the rest of the congregation.
[00:17:14] Don't do that.
[00:17:16] Don't do that. All right?
[00:17:19] And don't.
[00:17:21] They were not yet practicing believers baptism at that point by immersion. So don't imagine him doing this and then, like, flinging himself into a pond.
[00:17:30] They baptized by pouring at that time. So early Baptists, they're like, we're Only going to baptize you if you're a believer, but like we're going to wash your hair while we're at it. That's the way that they did things.
[00:17:41] And so great that they became convinced of believers baptism.
[00:17:45] Not great that he baptized himself. So don't think, oh, I'm on, you know, I'm on a hike up in Colorado. There's a beautiful lake. I think I'm a Christian now. Let me throw myself in.
[00:17:55] That's not an application for you to take away from this. All right, don't do that.
[00:17:59] Now the development of baptism by full body immersion did not come until later, but we can cut them a little slack given the circumstances.
[00:18:09] And yeah, tragically, not long after arriving in Amsterdam, John Smith tried to lead the English congregation into uniting with an Anabaptist Mennonite church, which eventually led to his excommunication by his church and most of the members returned to England. So. So I think that that is right there. A cool thing that the church body did is that when he.
[00:18:31] They followed him into believers baptism and then he said, hey, let's go believe these other wild things too. And they said, no, that's. You're not allowed to believe these other wild things here.
[00:18:40] That's the church body working congregationally to protect the gospel. And so whenever we again have members meetings.
[00:18:48] Now let me be abundantly clear. Our pastors are not Anabaptist Mennonites. All right? They are. They are staunch Baptists. Very happy. Brad beforehand was talking to me about Baptist's view of civil government and why we're different than Anabaptists. And they are very much Baptists through and through. But the congregation saw the priority of protecting the gospel. And I think that that's a wonderful application for us is to think about how doctrine protects purity.
[00:19:15] Now still, John Smith serves as an example of how believers baptism was logically developed as a local outgrowth. Logical outgrowth of understanding the local church to be a community of saints covenanted together. That's a tongue twister.
[00:19:30] To live faithfully to God's word. All right, John Smith.
[00:19:34] Secondly, we're going to learn about this guy Henry Jesse. So another example of the same process comes from the life of Henry Jesse. He was born in 1601.
[00:19:43] He studied at Cambridge at the age of seven.
[00:19:46] And that was a time when Cambridge again was producing hundreds of godly Reformed ministers.
[00:19:52] The college at the time was known as a hotbed of Puritanism.
[00:19:56] It produced Richard Sibbes, John Arrowsmith and plenty of other Fellows. In fact, Richard Sibbes was. We know that he was appointed a Senior Fellow in 1619, just as Jesse arrived at the school, making it possible that Henry Jesse was sitting underneath the preaching of Richard Sibbes, the guy that we learned. One of the guys we learned about last week, the heavenly dropper. The guy who they said heaven was in him before he was in heaven. Like, imagine sitting underneath that preaching and that theological education.
[00:20:25] And so he's sitting under that kind of teaching while at college.
[00:20:30] And as he's sitting under that kind of preaching and that kind of teaching where he's getting rich doctrines of Christ in the Gospel, he decides, I want to become a minister.
[00:20:41] And so that was more or less that stoked the flame within him.
[00:20:45] And so great reflection for us there as well is not everyone needs to be a pastor, most certainly not. But how the preaching of God's word can so woo us to desire to preach, I think that's a great thought for us, especially men in the room. As you hear rich preaching, do you aspire to share the gospel? Not maybe from a pulpit, but even evangelistically?
[00:21:11] And so anyways, being ordained in the Church of England in 1627, he was a chaplain working in Suffolk, later in another town called Oughton.
[00:21:22] But like many Puritans of his day, the re. Romanizing of the Church of England under Archbishop Laud got too much for him. So he was seeing a lot of the Roman tendencies starting to creep back into the Church of England. And he's like, I don't want to go through this. And so he bounced.
[00:21:40] In fact, he was. He embraced what was called nonconformity, the separatists. And he was removed from his position as a pastor because he was not using the ceremonies that were imposed. And he removed a crucifix in his church. So imagine if there was a giant cross with Christ on it. And he's like, I don't. That's too Roman for me. Takes it down and gets. Loses his job because of it. That's what happened to him.
[00:22:04] So he moved to London with his benefactor, a guy named Matthew Boynton, in 1635. And Jesse planned on continuing onto New England with Boynton and supporting the work there. So he wanted to go to New England. But only a month or two after arriving in London, he visited a church where two guys named Henry Jacob had pastored and John Lathrop had pastored. So he goes to this church that has this history of having some really solid pastors, and he gets convinced and goes, I actually want to Stay here.
[00:22:38] This congregation became known as the JLJ Church. Jacob, Lathrop, Jesse. So it's just names of their pastors.
[00:22:46] JLJ is a whole lot easier to say than pronouncing all these names. So the JLJ church would be.
[00:22:52] It was founded in 1616. It was part of the separatist movement. And then they see Jesse come along, they're like, hey, you're, you're a pastor who's been trained. You know, what's going on? Will you be our pastor? He's like, okay. And so he stays and becomes their pastor. They had to convince him. They, he didn't initially think, oh, yes, I would love to be right here. He was there. And they insistently were like, you're gifted. We would love for you to pastor. And he finally broke down and became their pastor. And he labored in that congregation for over 25 years until he died in sin, 1663. So a few things here that are important for us about Jesse. Okay? He was a great linguist and scholar. He had a great grasp of Greek, Hebrew, Chaldean and Syriac.
[00:23:35] That was so unparalleled that when the House of commons in 1652 were trying to revise the King James Version, they picked him to be one of the nine translators alongside guys like John Owen. All right, so he was a big deal in the revision of the King James language or the King James Bible because he was so gifted at Greek and Hebrew.
[00:23:57] That's a wonderful thing to have as a pastor who knows his Bible well and who understands language well. And actually it would be one of the reasons he became a Baptist. The one event for which he's most remembered today, however, is his change of his views on baptism.
[00:24:13] Now, unlike John Smith Henry Jesse did not change initially on whether or not a believer should be baptized, but he was changed on the mode of baptism. So because he understood Greek and Hebrew so well, particularly Greek, he became convinced that immersion or dipping of the whole body into the water made the most sense out of the word baptizo. Alright, so as he's looking at the Greek, he's like, I just don't think that this means sprinkling or pouring. I think that this means a full immersion, like Romans 6, buried like that. It has to be that.
[00:24:45] And so for the next two to three years, as he's working through his own theology, he continued to baptize children, but actually did so by immersion. So take the one year old and dip him in the water around the year 1644. The question of the proper subject of baptism became disputed at that JLJ church. And after a long discussion, many late night elder meetings, Jesse became convinced of believers baptism. And he even went on to consult guys like Thomas Goodwin and Jeremiah Burroughs, wonderful puritans we probably know about or you probably know about. And after he found no argument satisfactory against him. So he's going to like the brightest minds who would defend infant baptism. And he's like, I just don't see that argument. He said, I'm convinced that believers should be dunked and believers alone.
[00:25:33] Now, despite his change about believers baptism, he did not split the church over the question. So he didn't say, full throttle ahead, everyone, come on with me right now or else get out of here. He recognized that that had not been a prerequisite for church membership at the start of the church. And it would have been unwise for him to say, hey, existing members, I'm going to violate your conscience here by submitting to what they would have considered rebaptism.
[00:26:00] So he just stuck it out. He patiently waited, preached the truth, and waited for the minds of his church members to change, just as it had taken years for his own view on the subject to change. And so he was patient and he slowly changed the church and slowly they became Baptists.
[00:26:18] So an application for you is if you have questions about our church's doctrines or statements of faith, ask our pastors.
[00:26:26] They would love nothing more than for you to go to them with questions about like, hey, what is, what does this mean when we talk about the resurrection of the dead? Or what does this mean about Jesus and being fully God and fully man? What does this mean about believers only? Or these. Why do we have a subject about civil government in here? What's going on?
[00:26:45] Our pastors would love to talk with you about that. So if you have any questions at all, shoot them an email this week. And I'm sure that Nick or Scott or whoever would love to, love to meet up with you. So last thing we'll talk about with Baptist beginnings and then we'll fly through the last few points here. We talked about John Smith and we talked about Henry Jesse, and these two guys more or less represent the two dominant Baptist groups at that time. So you have general Baptists and John Smith and you have particular Baptists with Henry Jesse.
[00:27:18] As Baptists were coming onto the forefront, they had some theological differences that they were working through.
[00:27:23] We understand that there are many Baptist churches and towns all with different maybe flavors of theology. Well, the two were general in particular.
[00:27:30] And to put it somewhat crudely, General Baptists were more Arminian Baptists. Particular Baptists were more Calvinistic Baptists. And most Baptist churches today, whether they realize it or not, flowed out of the particular Baptist because the General Baptists, they kind of died out, lost influence over time.
[00:27:50] And this is reflected in the fact that all of the popular Baptist confessions are written from a particular Baptist viewpoint. So we have the first London Confession in 1644, the later second London Confession of 1689.
[00:28:07] The 1689 is actually similar, as Jacob mentioned last week, to the Westminster Confession of Faith, primarily differing in baptism. It was similar to the Savoy Declaration that the Congregationalists had written. But the particular Baptists began to write these confessions of faith in union with other Protestant reformers at the time because they wanted to show, hey, we are so similar to you guys. We differ on the issue of baptism, but we're not like this rogue group out of here that's saying, oh, we've always existed and all of you guys are wrong all the time, is actually their way of saying, we believe you're Christians, even though you're Presbyterian or Anglican or whatever, but we actually don't believe the same things as you do. And so writing all these confessions of faith, you might think, man, that is something for seminarian nerds to just sit around and discuss all the time. It's actually their way of helping us have unity with other churches and doctrinally make ourselves distinct. Now, General Baptist had a few of their own declarations and confessions as well, but particular Baptists really influenced modern Baptist churches. They went on to write the 1742 Philadelphia Confession and the New Hampshire Confession of 1853.
[00:29:18] Earlier, I had mentioned successionists who believe that there's this unbroken lineage.
[00:29:24] They believe that no one outside of our unbroken lineage is really of the true church.
[00:29:28] You might find sentiments like that today in independent fundamentalist Baptist churches, where we believe most certainly, as long as you have the gospel, you're a Christian.
[00:29:38] But they might, and I have anecdotally heard sentiments where, well, no, we're not even Protestant.
[00:29:45] Well, that's kind of a disservice to history, and that's a little confusing. But it's important for us to recognize that confessions throughout history have actually helped us not separate from the true church, but actually unite with Christ's true church. And so as we subscribe to the New Hampshire Confession or something along those lines, we're actually saying, yeah, we agree with all Christians throughout history and throughout time that we're not this renegade church. We're not the ones who finally, so to speak, got it right and everyone before us was dead in their sin. Actually, there are many Christians who have lived throughout the centuries, and we wholeheartedly hold to the same gospel as them. We just want to be clear on our theology. So anyways, confessions are good.
[00:30:28] Secondly, let's talk about Baptists in America. All right, we can all stretch and wake up. I know that this is riveting stuff on a Sunday morning here. Baptists in America. So they're getting persecuted. We saw the Smith congregation flee to Holland. Well, many Puritans were fleeing to the, to the Netherlands and to America where they could freely gather and worship God according to their own convictions. So the Pilgrims did not simply come to America for free market capitalism. They came to escape religious persecution. And just as in England, many of these Puritans became convinced of believers baptism. And one of those guys was named Roger Williams. And so we're hopping over to America primarily because of persecution.
[00:31:10] So like Smith and Jesse, Roger Williams was a graduate of Cambridge, became ordained in the Church of England, arrived in Massachusetts in 1631, and he quickly began to make trouble.
[00:31:21] So one of the ways he made trouble was he was insisting that settlers had zero right to steal Indian land and that the magistrate should not persecute people who are religious dissenters.
[00:31:32] Roger Williams went on to found the town of Providence, Rhode island, and in 1638 established the First Battle Baptistic Church in America in that city. So in one way we could say he planted the first Baptist church in America. And he fought largely for religious toleration. Now that's what he's most remembered for.
[00:31:52] He had a treaty called the Bloody Tenet of Persecution for the cause of conscience, which is really a fascinating, or really a, not a fascinating way, but an old way of saying we should be allowed to baptize how we want. We should not be getting murdered for baptizing believers.
[00:32:09] He appealed to Old Testament laws, saying, hey, just because the Old Testament laws said you could execute heretics then or whatever, does not mean that necessarily we do the same thing today. We don't think that the King of England has right to determine our theology and then persecute us because of our theology.
[00:32:24] So his argument for religious toleration was grounded ultimately in his understanding of how the New and Old Covenants work together. But all that being said, in addition to believers baptism, the issue of religious liberty or religious toleration began to really make problems in New England. So we think, great, we're in America, we're starting afresh. We're all good over here. Well, some Congregationalists had made their way over here as well and they had serious issues and disagreements with over how do you worship.
[00:32:57] And so many Puritans believe that civil government was responsible for suppressing heresy and had the right to punish heretics.
[00:33:05] So we think, okay, like, you know, government is supposed to promote the gospel. Good.
[00:33:11] We want our government to honor God. Everyone in this room can agree with that.
[00:33:16] Does that mean that we kill Baptists?
[00:33:20] We would hopefully say no, otherwise we need to run out of here.
[00:33:28] So what religious persecution looked like for Baptists?
[00:33:32] I'll give an example. On September 5th in 1651, there's a guy named Obadiah Holmes and He was whipped 31 times with a three corded whip in Boston. And his crime was that he had been fined 30 pounds for meeting for worship with Baptists and he'd refused to not pay the penalty or refuse to pay the penalty. So imagine going to church at UBC and then Fayetteville's government saying, you're not allowed to do that. Pay 50 bucks and you say no. And then they say, fine, we're going to flog you in the public square.
[00:34:04] That's what Baptists were going up against.
[00:34:06] We think government should do good. But government's whipping Christians, government is persecuting Christians. And so the discussion of religious liberty, it was far from theoretical for early Baptists in America. So when Baptists became in charge in Rhode island, they made religious toleration a law. They said, look, just literally stop whipping us, get off of our backs, like let us do what we want to do. And so that's where the idea of religious liberty began in America. Now there's a lot of confusion over what religious liberty means. And of course today it has its own tricky hurdles. But the idea was initially there to largely protect Baptists from suffering for merely existing there.
[00:34:47] So I understand when we hear the term religious liberty, what we want to do is be careful not to say, well, like we all think all religions are equal in the same way. We just need to recognize when Baptists speak about religious liberty, we mean, don't let the king or the president or the governor tell you how to worship essentially, is what we're getting at. Just, I know that there's all these tricky nuances with that. I'm not going to provide solutions to all those tricky nuances right now because I don't think this is the place. But it is important for us to recognize that's just how religious liberty came about.
[00:35:23] As Baptists began In America, they quickly developed associations with one another. So throughout the colonial period, Baptist churches were springing up all across the colonies.
[00:35:34] There's a guy named William Screven who started a church in Kittery, Maine that relocated all the way down south to Charleston, South Carolina.
[00:35:41] Elias Keach, the son of a famous guy named Benjamin Keach, came to America in 1686 and he established churches in Pennsylvania and New Jersey and even in, yeah, in Philadelphia in 1698.
[00:35:54] And those city churches in Charleston and Philadelphia, they began to establish associations with one another to help regularize practices, resolve congregational dispositions, disputes, test ministerial candidates, and support missionary efforts.
[00:36:08] So although Baptists are congregational in the sense that it's the local body who determines what the local body does, they were also connectionalists, meaning that they partnered together. You know, it's good for us to partner with other churches to think about how we can help other churches, share pastoral candidates, give wisdom, insight, refine ourselves, like that's good and some historic Baptist practice. And so we should be friendly with other like minded Baptist churches because these associations helped produce the spread of the gospel. It is good for Baptists to work one another or work with one another. And one of the fruits of them working together was missions. So by the early 1800s, the Baptists largely secured religious liberty for themselves. And so once they've got their house in order, they're like, all right now let's go work outwardly and expand and organize. So you have guys like Adoniram Judson, he adopts Baptist convictions and that brought Baptist associations together that would have otherwise maintained independence from one another. And so you have guys like him saying, I need help and support. And so these Baptist churches are all going, wait, you're helping him too? Like, let's work and go help him take the gospel to the nations. And so in May 1814, delegates across Baptist churches across the United States met in Philadelphia and, and began, they started something called the Triennial Convention where they agreed to meet every three years and help one another in their doctrine practices, supporting one another, encouraging, essentially that was the start of, think of like the sbc, the annual meeting, how we have that. That was like the first time that happened, okay? And there they discovered a few things that are important for us today.
[00:37:47] In 1817, Baptists decided to take steps to establish a national Baptist theological college.
[00:37:55] In 1824, they started a publishing company called the Baptist General tract society.
[00:38:00] In 1832, they started the American Baptist Home Mission Society, which was kind of like a precursor to namm. If you're familiar with NAMM today, focusing on like domestic missions and church planning. And so throughout the early 1800s, the Baptists were really a able to begin to build these institutions to help one another.
[00:38:18] And so again, it is good for us today to think about how we help one another as well. In the back of our directory we have a list of churches and organizations that we support.
[00:38:28] That is not by accident, that is intentional one, because we believe in the organizations and the churches that are there.
[00:38:36] We believe the same things that they do, we have the same mission that they do, and we think you guys are doing wonderful work. So we'll give to you, we'll pray for you, we'll work alongside you. And so consider even today what it looks like for you maybe this afternoon to go to the back of your directory and look at those organizations and just pray through them. We pray for the call or we pray for these supported workers overseas.
[00:39:03] That is a way that you can not just be a good Christian, but a good Baptist.
[00:39:08] And so I would encourage you to think about how we support other churches.
[00:39:12] So everything seems to be going well. Baptists can do their thing in America without fear of persecution and suffering. They're building these organizations, things are going great, Gospel starting to go to the nations and churches are being planted.
[00:39:27] But then something came up in the mid-1800s that really drove a wedge between Baptists and that is the, the unfortunate and tragic circumstance of slavery. So let us turn to our third point here, understanding Baptist slavery in the African American church.
[00:39:46] There's no question that the existence of race based slavery is a wicked stain on American history.
[00:39:54] It is. And the fact is that in the 1840s every major Protestant denomination spread split ultimately along north south borders on the issue of slavery. And Baptists were no exception to that.
[00:40:09] So a way in which the Baptists began, or the SBC particularly began, was in 1844, Georgia Baptists sent a test case to the Baptist Home Mission Society. So think like they're sending someone to namm. And they were sending a slaveholder named James Reeves who is presenting himself for appointment as a missionary to the Cherokees.
[00:40:30] And when his appointment was voted down 7 to 5, the Alabama Baptist Convention asked the Foreign Mission Board whether a slaveholder could be appointed.
[00:40:38] And they received the reply from the Foreign Mission Board that if anyone should offer himself as a missionary while having slaves and should insist on retaining them as property, we could not appoint him.
[00:40:49] So the Foreign Mission Board says you can't be a missionary and a slaveholder at the same time.
[00:40:56] So in May, 1845, delegates from nine state conventions gathered in Augusta, Georgia, and formed the Southern Baptist Convention.
[00:41:04] That's unfortunate. It is tragic that that was the reason for beginning the issue of slavery. It had been growing for a long time.
[00:41:13] However, for a lot of people in the south, they simply made peace with the institution of slavery, whether they owned slaves or not.
[00:41:22] And so you might hear someone say in Georgia in the 1800s, like, well, yeah, I think it's wrong, but, like, I don't have any. But, like, it is what it is. And so there was a sort of resolved passivity towards it.
[00:41:37] And the fact of this, that our theological forefathers and foremothers were silent on the issue, despite the fact that they agree with us on nearly every theological issue.
[00:41:48] That's tragic. And it has consequences that are still playing that we're dealing with today, consequences that are still playing themselves out.
[00:41:58] History is certainly complicated. You know, it's ironic that Baptists generally agree that the Bible condemned man stealing. So they recognize at some level that the system of slave trade was fundamentally flawed. What they largely disagreed over was, if anything, what should be done, if anything should be done, and how that it is already deeply in place.
[00:42:19] What they did agree upon, however, was that at the very least, masters had an obligation to provide religious instructions for their slaves.
[00:42:28] First, Timothy5.8 says that whoever fails to provide for members of his household is worse than an unbeliever.
[00:42:34] And what could be more basic than providing spiritually for those under your oversight, even if they're slaves?
[00:42:41] So, as terrible as that sounds, and we should rightly feel a little, not a little, very largely prickly at that, such views were considered highly controversial in the American South. In 1840, 1850, education would only encourage insubordination.
[00:43:00] And those systemically racist laws had a chilling effect on any attempt to provide religious instruction for slaves.
[00:43:07] We think of guys like Frederick Douglass, who essentially liberated himself through education. You can imagine people in the south looking at characters like him saying, see, look at all the trouble he's creating because he's educated in reads. Don't teach people the Bible.
[00:43:24] That's the unfortunate sentiment, the wicked sentiment that was prevalent at the time. So how did Baptists respond to this? What did they do?
[00:43:33] There were a few people that I want us to highlight quickly to discuss slavery. So Richard Furman, he was a Baptist pastor in Charleston. He refused to let social pressure stop him from working to educate slaves in the Scriptures. And in that way, he stood out like a sore thumb. He was pushing hard against the grain of the social context because he was teaching slaves the scriptures.
[00:43:58] As one historian wrote, that defending and teaching Christianity to slaves at such a time put baptist discip decidedly on the wrong side of white public opinion. And so despite the fact that it was the common public opinion, there were actually many baptists who pushed against it, who saw the imago DEI in people and tried to reconcile. Here are our social systems, here's what I believe the scriptures to teach. How can we mesh these together? And at the end of the day, social systems are going to give way rather than my view of the imago DEI and my desire to see all men come to know Christ.
[00:44:30] So fortunately, after the civil war, black churches were free to form independent institutions such as seminary schools, publishing companies, denominations. And so actually, through the post civil war era, through the reconstruction era.
[00:44:43] The reconstruction era witnessed one of the greatest periods of church growth in the history of the church as hundreds of thousands of formerly enslaved persons were baptized into membership at baptist churches.
[00:44:55] So here's a few statistics here. In 1892, black Baptists were estimated to number around 1.2 million church members, 1.2 million in 1892. By 1899, the National Baptist Convention claimed there were 14,462 churches, 449 local and regional associations, 10,000 ordained ministers, and a total membership of 1.7 million church members. And if that number is reliable, then of the three major Baptist families in America, between southern baptist, northern Baptists and black Baptists, it's actually the black Baptists who are the largest of the three. And so we can speculate about the causes of that.
[00:45:37] But praise the lord that he redeemed such a wicked situation and worked it out for his glory and our country's good. It was a mighty work of God that that happened.
[00:45:48] Remember, millions of people at that time is a significant number. Unlike, you know, today, that might seem small, but in 1899, that's a massive number.
[00:45:57] And so a quick reflection for us is that we have to digest all of our history.
[00:46:01] You know, it is right for us to own up and to see stains for what they are.
[00:46:05] We have to. We should not try and cover up past and just quickly cover them and move on, but we should feel them one, so that way we don't make the same mistakes and sentiments that we have in the past, but we should pray for wisdom to see our sins today as well. You know, it's easy for us to look back and have what Lewis called chronological snobbery. How could they ever believe that? How could they ever do that?
[00:46:31] I'M sure that there are blind spots that we have today. And so we ought to pray to the Lord to show us our sins and where we're falling short and how we are putting a stain on the gospel.
[00:46:42] Baptists who were so concerned about the purity of the gospel were willing to break off. The Church of England were slaveholders. That's horrible. The irony is wicked. And so we should pray today.
[00:46:54] Lord, show me the ways in which I'm being hypocritical. Lord, protect our church from making the same mistakes as in the past. God help us to preserve the purity of the gospel.
[00:47:06] We must be always seeking God's wisdom to see our sin for what it is to pray for our church and denomination to be righteous and faithful.
[00:47:14] All right, let's move on to our final section here this morning. Baptists today.
[00:47:22] I know. Thank you for the chuckle there, Imelda.
[00:47:25] All right, the final part of the Baptist story that we'll cover in this class has to do with the recovery of doctrinal fidelity within the denomination or the convention that we're currently in friendly cooperation with. We are Southern Baptists. UBC is a Southern Baptist church. And the recovery of doctrinal fidelity is something that is still in progress always. So in the 20th century, the 1900s, the Northern Baptist Convention was quickly tracking liberal and the Southern Baptist Convention was racing right behind them. So when we talk about tracking liberal, we don't mean politically necessarily. What we mean is theologically, which liberal theology would have held to. A few different things here.
[00:48:06] Anti supernatural thinking about the Bible, seeking a middle way for Christianity between orthodoxy and modern scientific discoveries, challenging major historic Christian doctrines such as the virgin birth or the bodily return of Christ. That's just kind of a fable, that kind of sentiment, emphasizing ethics over doctrine, you know, as if you could have one without the other. You know, oh, you don't need all that Jesus stuff. Just love somebody. That was kind of the sentiment that you would have had at the time. All those ideas were slowly seeping into the Southern Baptist seminaries and institutions and churches began to push back in the mid to late 1900s. And so I just want to cover two quick views or liberal issues that we Theologically liberal issues that Baptists had to work with. One was inerrancy, and second was women's ordination. So when we say inerrancy, what we mean is that the Bible is truthful in all things that the Bible authors assert.
[00:49:01] So what the Bible says is truthful?
[00:49:04] These.
[00:49:06] Yeah, these. When they say that Christ resurrected, we don't Mean kind of like in a dream, and they're just being poetic about it. We mean Jesus Christ resurrected from the dead. So by the mid 20th century, that doctrine was coming under neglect and attack from major Southern Baptist institutions. So I'm a graduate from Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. I love Midwestern.
[00:49:28] But in 1961, there was a Midwestern professor by the name of Ralph Elliott who published a commentary on Genesis with the SBC affiliated Broadman Press, which denied Mosaic authorship of Genesis and it denied a literal six day creation. And that caused a whole lot of issues among the Southern Baptists who were concerned about not just by his conclusions, but by his modernist methods.
[00:49:52] And so they found the term or Eliot and other moderates saw biblical history and science as conditioned by the times in which it was written and only believed that its religious truths were really without error. So essentially Midwestern professors were teaching, yeah, the Bible says this, but really we should just glean like kind of the messages behind it rather than what it actually says says. You know, it's kind of. It's more or less just trying to communicate truths rather than actual statements of fact. How's that Midwestern?
[00:50:23] That is crazy.
[00:50:26] So they found terms like inerrancy unhelpful. And when you find people saying, yeah, we don't think inerrancy is a good word, that should be like when some alarm bells start going off. And so Southern Baptists began to really push back on that for liberals, ultimate commitment, they believed, should belong to a person, Jesus Christ, and not to a book like the Bible.
[00:50:47] As one SBC moderate explained in 1960s, you know, people who are hungry and hurting and lonely don't come saying, oh, help me understand the doctrines of the virgin birth, direct creation, and verbal plenary inspiration.
[00:51:00] Whether there was a real person named Adam or Eve was far less important than an affirmation of God's role in creating the universe.
[00:51:06] And those were arguments being made by seminary professors like, imagine if you tried to send someone to Southern and they came back and saying like, yeah, I don't think the Bible really means what it says.
[00:51:18] That's what was happening.
[00:51:20] Another issue significantly was women's ordination. The second issue at the heart of theological liberalism was that ultimately, complementarianism. By 1988, over 500 women had been ordained by local Southern Baptist churches, with perhaps a dozen of them serving as senior pastors.
[00:51:41] In 1985, a Baptist student magazine devoted an issue toward women in ministry, ordained or unordained, and said that our churches could wisely ordain anyone male or female who had a special call of God because of Galatians 3. 28. Now, I'm not having the time here to speak into complementarianism and all that that entails, but there was gender egalitarianism seeping into the seminaries and a denial of inerrancy seeping into the seminaries.
[00:52:10] And so in 1961, or after that commentary is published, the leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention quoted sections of that commentary and concluded that that is liberalism, pure and simple. And that started a decades long battle for theological conservatism. Conservatism within the Southern Baptist Convention.
[00:52:34] I'm going to give you a little bit of a Colepennick special here and explain how the SBC works. Right. I learned all this from him this last year or this last SBC trip. So listen. What was that? It's a quiz. It is a quiz.
[00:52:52] This. This will really keep you awake right here.
[00:52:55] All right, bear with me. They realized that to change Southern Baptist institutions, you need to get a majority of conservative trustees on individual boards. And Baptists, we love our boards and committees. Trustees were appointed by a committee of nominations, which was in turn nominated by the convention president.
[00:53:14] So in other words, there's a lot of steps to get conservative theology back into the schools, back into the churches. They needed to get a conservative president elected at the top for enough years successively to eventually place trustworthy trustees on these boards, to change the direction theologically.
[00:53:32] That took a long time. The whole process of anointing trustees takes three years from a president being elected to a trustee finally taking their place. And so baptists in the mid 16, not 1600s, 1900s, they're like, all right, let's do this for the long haul. And so they worked really hard and campaigned really hard for many years. Guys like Charles Stanley, Adrian Rogers, W. A. Criswell, Jerry Vines were pushing hard among Southern Baptists to elect conservative presidents. Now, it took nearly a decade.
[00:54:08] Yeah, it started in 1979, and by 1988, a majority conservative trustees sat on every major SBC entity. So whether it's the IMB or Southern's board of Trustees or whoever, finally they were all conservative theologically. And that's. That was called the conservative resurgence. And that is how the seminaries look the way that they do today. It's because five decades ago, we had faithful brothers and sisters pushing hard against the grains of modern theology and sought to preserve doctrinal fidelity. And they didn't just go and vote at one SBC meeting and call it good. They stuck around. They toughed it Out. They fought for it year after year after year after year after year after year after year to make it happen. And so today we enjoy the fruits of that. I love Midwestern Seminary. And it looks very, very different than it did in 1961. It's growing rapidly and they are recruiting excellent organization. Orthodox professors, very orthodox professors. Look, we're getting Baptist royalty. You guys know Tom Shriner at Southern. His son Patrick Shriner is at Midwestern. Like, that's incredible for us to see faithful Baptist scholars continuing to lay the ground and defend the truth at the institutional level. And so we ought to praise God for that. And that's again another reminder for us to pray for those in leadership at the associational level to pray for our president.
[00:55:34] Oh, I just lost his name. Cole. What's the new president's name?
[00:55:38] Yeah, Willie Rice. I was like, it's not Jerry Rice. You know, Willie Rice. Pray for him. Pray for the presidents of our seminaries. Pray for our pastors to have wisdom on knowing how to deal with the sbc.
[00:55:53] That is good for us to do. All right, so everyone breathe. You made it to the end. Baptist history.
[00:56:00] There we go. What does it mean to be Baptist today? First, it means to be confessional. We stand in historic Baptist Confessions of 1644-1689-1742-1853.
[00:56:12] We are doctrinally clear. We're confessional. It also largely means to be Calvinistic because to stand firmly on the doctrines of grace as articulated by the Protestant reformers. We're not ashamed of holding an explicitly God centered view of the universe. Again, as I mentioned, we come out of the particular Baptists.
[00:56:31] It means also to be congregational. We're committed to independence and autonomy of local churches and that every member of this church has a job to do. Just because you're 16 doesn't mean you have no job to do. Just because you're 88 doesn't mean you have no job to do. We're congregational.
[00:56:48] It also means to be connectionalist. Look, we're not isolated doing our own silo thing over here, but we're partnering with like minded churches for the furtherance of the gospel, the extension of Christ's kingdom.
[00:57:00] And it means also to be Credo Baptist that only those truly converted ought to be baptized means to have a high view of conscience that to deny the state has any coercive power to bind our conscience into affirm the autonomy of local churches.
[00:57:17] And finally, it does mean to live with contradictions. There are lingering effects of slavery and Baptist complicity with the unjust system of slavery that we have to reckon with and we should not gloss over. So confessional, Calvinistic, congregational connectionalist credo. Baptist conscience and contradictions. There's a lot of C's there. It's okay.
[00:57:40] We have a rich heritage as Baptists. We did not just spring up out of the ground like Gimli said in Lord of the Rings. We didn't come from nowhere. We are not Anabaptists. We are very orthodox. We have a wonderful history of forefathers and forerunners who have gone before us and fought fights that we now get to reap the benefit of. We are worshiping freely today, right now, because of Baptists.
[00:58:05] So we ought to be thankful for how the Lord has worked through unique times and unique places and certainly unique characters to bring us to where we are today. So you can walk out of this room and be happy to be a Baptist. You can walk out of this room and be proud to be a Baptist and to be able to say we are joyfully one part of Christ's kingdom. We are going to happily pray for other churches in the area. We are happily going to worship freely because the Lord has granted us these privileges. So with that being said, we have some discussion. Questions.
[00:58:40] Do we have any questions? First from the room.
[00:58:48] Wonderful.
[00:58:50] All right, let's take 10 minutes or so and we can discuss. There should be some questions on the back of the guide.
[00:58:58] I'll pray us out here in just a moment whenever it's time.
