I talked in my last post about James McClendon’s claim that Baptists have organically developed “their own way of using Scripture, their own communal practices, [and] their own guiding vision,” but that baptist theologians had largely failed to notice and develop these things, preferring instead to borrow from other traditions or cultural movements. While I quibbled with his somewhat moralizing presentation of this claim, I think the basic idea is true: the Baptist tradition has unique theological resources that go mostly unappreciated by our own thinkers, and this has left Baptist Christians tragically susceptible to being blown about by cultural (and especially political) winds.
So, what is “the Baptist vision?” What makes Baptist Christianity unique and meaningful? The structure of Baptist churches makes this a difficult question to answer. We have no institutions with the authority to decide and proscribe. We have denominational bodies, but those bodies can only speak for themselves and what they assume to be true of churches that cooperate with them. No authority in Baptist life goes higher than the local church; what could constitute a “Baptist vision” for theology if we lack any way to codify beliefs?
If we can’t point to an institution or publication and say “these are our beliefs, as a specific type of Christian people,” then our vision ourselves must instead start with our history, the one concrete thing we all share: we are a people who exist because of a certain set of historical contingencies, and therefore, a community of people who are all participating in an observable narrative. Our churches today draw their existence from a specific group of people in a specific time and place. The founders of our group and those who came after, for as much as they varied, displayed specific patterns and motifs in their theology, worship, and public life, motifs that bore an obvious connection to Baptist origins and histories. Even if no official catalog of Baptist beliefs exist, certain themes and ideas emerging out of our unique story impress themselves upon Baptist life.
Writing distinctly Baptist theology requires working with a distinctly Baptist vision of the Christian life, and that Baptist vision will consist of an understanding of our story as a people and the important ideas and beliefs that we have traditionally held that have an obvious and explainable connection to our history.
So here’s my thesis, what I think it means to be a Baptist. Being a Baptist means being a part of a certain story and holding to a certain set of ideal because of that story. I’ll sketch this out with the rest of this post, and go into greater detail on each piece in follow-ups.
So, who are Baptists? We are separatists from separatists, an offshoot of an offshoot of the Church of England, puritans’ puritans. This, I believe, is the most important grounding historical reality in Baptist life: we are a people who believe we have taken the Protestant Reformation to its fullest extent, completing a project that the Reformers started but did not complete.
The first Baptist congregations emerged in England in the seventeenth century, a subgroup of the English separatists disillusioned with the relatively new Anglican church. They were glad to see a Protestant England but felt that the Anglican church retained too much of the symbolism and traditions of Roman Catholicism, and felt that the alignment of church and state limited the degree to which the Church of England could fulfill the promise and demands of the Reformation.
These separatists had a special concern for idolatry in the church; too much of the liturgy and worship of the Anglican church was based on human tradition and sinful ambition. Worship, the puritans believed, was a matter so serious that not even the possibility of accidental idolatry could be allowed; the only way to ensure that human pride and ambition did not pollute worship was to only allow that which Scripture directly teaches into the service. With this criteria, the separatists objected to things like the use of images in worship, special clerical garb, episcopal polity, and, for some, the baptizing of infants.
None of this is to say that the Anglican church is or was corrupt or idolatrous. Rather, it is to say that Baptist Christianity emerged out of the conviction that Scripture is the revealed Word of God and must therefore be the sole basis for our worship and theology. They believed that the Protestant Reformation was the future of the Church but had stalled in their context due to outside factors, and they were willing to chart their own way forward in their pursuit of faithfulness, even when that meant persecution. As David Bebbington writes in the second edition of Baptists Through the Centuries:
Baptists were heirs of the Reformation, Puritanism, and separatism. They adopted the same principles of punctilious loyalty to the word of God, of passionate desire to worship the Almighty correctly, and of willingness to restructure the church in accordance with God’s precepts. Their biblical, liturgical, and ecclesiastical priorities drove them through Puritan loyalties into separatism, and, eventually, to the further step of repudiating infant baptism. Baptists were the people who took Reformation principles to their ultimate conclusion. (23)
So, from a historical-narrative perspective, Baptists are a group of puritan separatists who broke from the Anglican church in order to structure their theology and corporate life in a way they believed was faithful to the teaching of Scripture. What can that tell us about what we believe, and why?
In the same volume of his systematic theology discussed in my previous article, James McClendon has excellent (if a bit dated) overview of what various Baptist historians and theologians have identified as components of “the distinctive spirit” of Baptists, landing on five “Baptist distinctive.” Building on his work and combining it with the the historical narrative I’ve given above, I would like to submit my list of four concepts that grew out of our founding that I think define “the Baptist spirit.” The following list is not the same as McClendon’s, but it is indebted to it.
First, Baptists are biblicists. This is to say that we are a people who recognize Scripture as uniquely authoritative. The Bible has no peer and is not one of many conversation partners in how we order our churches. Experience, tradition, and reason might all help us read Scripture rightly and make Christian decisions on things the Bible does not speak clearly to, but we believe that all decisions about our theology and corporate life must have their ultimate grounding in Scripture.
Second, because we are biblicists, Baptists are also primitivists, or restorationists. Our founders did not think of themselves as doing something new in the history of Christianity; rather, they believed that Baptist Christianity was a modern attempt to return to the ways of the early church, the Church as it appears in the Bible. Baptists are a people always, to quote historian C. Douglas Weaver, “in search of the New Testament church.”
Third, in their attempt to organize a church purely according to the vision of the New Testaments, Baptists have been confessionalists, i.e., a people who see the act of confessing as the primary, constituting act of the church. This is why Baptists only baptize professing believers; at its core, the New Testament church is organized around the proclaiming of faith; a believer speaks the message of the Gospel, a hearer affirms it and is then united with the church, first through baptism and then regularly through the taking of the Lord’s supper. Believer’s baptism may be our most obvious distinguishing mark, but it exists in service to an earlier, more basic commitment to the true church as an organization of confessing believers.
Fourth, organizing the Church around the act of confessing means that Baptists have historically had a unique concern for liberty. True confessions of faith cannot be brought about by force or coercion, so the true church can only exist in settings where true expression is possible. The earliest Baptists were staunch advocates of freedom of religious expression in England and later in the United States for this reason. Concern for the freedom of the individual to accept or reject Christ extends beyond political rights. The polity (or organization) of Baptist churches is also structured around this idea, with no authorities outside of the local congregation able to tell a congregation what to believe or how to worship. For confession to be meaningful the person must be free from coercion, and so all forms of bondage must be opposed.
So, to tie this all together: what does it mean to be a Baptist? At the end of the day we’re a people, not an institution, so there can be no one single answer to this question.
What should it mean to be a Baptist, though? In my opinion, being a Baptist means being a Christian who participates in a community that traces its ancestry to the seventeenth-century English separatists who controversially added “believer’s baptism” to the list of church reforms they saw as necessary. Since Baptists today affirm the correctness of that founding (why else be Baptist?), they therefore prioritize Scripture above all other forms of religious knowledge, consciously try to model their church after the examples in the New Testament, see confession of faith as the basic forming act of the true church, and show a deep concern for personal liberty and free religious expression.
This, again, is not any kind of scientific definition of “Baptist,” because that cannot exist. It is, I believe, a basic summary of the most important resources for thought and practice that we have as a people. McClendon claimed that Baptists were prone to being blown about by cultural winds due to “a distrust of their own vision” (26). He believed, and I along with him, that Baptists Christians can only resist these winds and be their fullest possible blessing to the Body of Christ once we recognize this heritage, form it into a theological and moral vision, and apply it.
That’s what I’m hoping to do with this project. In the coming weeks I’ll be writing more about each of these four distinctives, one by one. If you would like to follow along, enter your email address in the subscription box. A lot more of you read my last piece than I expected, and I’m really grateful for that. It was super energizing and I can’t thank you all enough for your time, support, and kind words. I’m excited to see where this goes!