This issue of the Founders Journal explores the impact of Puritanism on Baptist origins. Reagan Marsh does this in light of the ministry of Hercules Collins. Reagan’s article is entitled Revised, Because it’s Regulated: Hercules Collins and An Orthodox Catechism on Credobaptism. He looks at Collins’ views of believers baptism in light of the Westminster documents and the Heidelberg Catechism. He argues that Collins employed the Regulative Principle as it relates both to baptism and covenants in a more consistent way than either Westminster or Heidelberg. If one understands, like Paul, that circumcision is fulfilled in regeneration (Galatians 5:6; 6:15; Philippians 3:3; Colossians 2:11-15), then the New Testament commands and examples concerning baptism and belief make perfect sense in a covenantal framework. Marsh demonstrates that Collins did not have to maneuver out of a coherent Reformed, covenantal position to defend believers baptism but saw it at the center both of covenantal theology and correct application of the Regulative Principle.
Daniel Scheiderer dives deeply into the Puritan method preaching and thoughts about preaching. As his article’s title indicates, The Art of Listening to the Best Method of Preaching, he also gives counsel to Christians who sit under this preaching today about their stewardship of hearing—“Take care then how you hear.” Using William Perkins’s The Art of Prophesying as a starting point, Scheiderer sees the simple structure of text, doctrine, and usesas a way to plumb any text of Scripture for its intended impact on the listener or reader. After some personal illustration of this method, he gives a rich variety of Puritan-style preachers and how each of these categories makes its way into the proclamation. Even as he emphasizes the sober responsibility on the preacher to preach as one under authority, so he argues for a deep and accountable responsibility for those listening, to hear sermons, not as the word of men, but as it truly is when faithfully executed, the word of God. Listeners will give account, not only for themselves but for those within their sphere of responsible connections. Baptists were within this strain of Puritan preaching and will benefit in pulpit and pew in embracing the strengths of this profound heritage in heralding.
John Carpenter, pastor of Covenant Reformed Baptist Church in Danville, Virginia, has contributed an article entitled Why Baptists Don’t Know They’re Puritans. He discusses seven reasons, i.e. “The Narrative,” “Confusion about the definition of Puritanism, “The Demise of Congregationalism,” “The Persecution Obsession,” “The Lack of a ‘Great Man,’” “Lack of Pre-History,” and “Anti-Calvinism.” The writer engages a breadth of secondary sources in his description of options concerning Baptist origins and shows a deft synthesis of primary sources in pursuit of his argument for Baptists as a part of the family of Puritans.
There are three basic approaches to Baptist origins: one, an unbroken line of pure churches from the apostolic age to the present, a view mainly characteristic of the Landmark movement; two, the Anabaptist Kinship theory that posits formative and organic connections between continental Anabaptists and the emergence of English Baptists; three, the English Separatist Descent theory, that sees the dynamic from Puritanism to Separatism to Baptists as uninfluenced by Anabaptist provocation. Carpenter presents a case for this third option giving strong emphasis to a Puritan identity for Baptists. He calls on Baptists to “make a deep dive into Puritanism,” for they will clear our confusion and will serve as “spiritual fathers eager to guide us back home.”
The article on John Smyth is a slightly edited version of my chapter on John Smyth in volume 1 of The Baptists.
[1] It traces his profoundly Puritan roots and ministerial operation within that movement, his shift to Separatism, his pilgrimage to Amsterdam, his adoption of believers baptism and formation of a church on that basis, his initial resistance to joining the Mennonites based on doctrinal differences, and his eventual efforts to lead his church to unite with them. The doctrinal shifts this involved for Smyth are identified concisely as well as some elements of conflict with contemporaries.
Although I do not argue the case in this article, I differ in some details from Carpenter in seeing a material connection between these events and the rise of Baptists. The vigorous literary engagement that Smyth had with former Separatist associates showed that his views and his action of initiating baptism were well-known and discussed in the Separatist communities. He and John Robinson (1575-1625) were part of the same covenanting community at Gainsborough in England ca. 1606. Robinson’s departure from Amsterdam to Leyden in 1609 was prompted by Smyth’s movement away from infant baptism. Robinson stayed in touch with events in this congregation and wrote about the theological dynamics.
For example, the writings of Thomas Helwys in 1612, which landed him in prison in England, and John Murton in 1620, “close prisoner of Newgate,” former sympathetic associates of Smyth and promulgaters of his view on baptism and liberty of conscience, were known and engendered response. John Robinson from Leyden published against Helwys’s view of baptism in 1614 and against Murton in 1624, disputing his rejection of the canons of Dort and his defense of believers baptism.[2] Murton’s arguments made their way into New England by the late 1630’s where John Cotton wrote against him. Roger Williams’s Bloudy Tenent of Persecution printed in 1644 in England was a refutation of Cotton and an extended defense of Murton’s treatise decrying persecution for cause of conscience.
The Puritan/Separatist congregation begun in 1616 by Henry Jacob under the influence of Robinson’s kind of separatism eventually gave rise to the Particular Baptist movement. Under subsequent pastors, John Lathrop and Henry Jessey, they discussed baptism freely. Several persons in waves adopted the practice of baptizing only believers. It would assume a high degree of isolation from stirring events within their own small fraternity of ecclesial reformation to think this congregation of open discussion knew nothing of Smyth’s changes and arguments, especially given the influence of John Robinson in both of these camps.
Denial of Anabaptism does not mean absence of influence. Though clearly indebted to Anabaptist influence in the adoption of baptism of believers, Murton closed the title page with this assignation, “your Majesty’s loyal subjects unjustly called Anabaptists.”[3] The 1644 confession, the so-called First London Confession, was based largely on A True Confessionwritten by Henry Ainsworth of the congregation of Francis Johnson, issues a similar caveat identifying its signatories as pastors of “those churches which are commonly (though falsely) called Anabaptists.” This denial probably is two-fold. First, it is a claim that “We do not baptize again: we baptize.” Second, because their ordinance of initiation into a Christian congregation was like that of the Anabaptists, and could very well have been influenced by knowledge of their views, that did not mean that they adopted the Anabaptists’ idiosyncratic views of government, oaths of loyalty, holding the office of magistrate, the nature of Christ’s flesh, and other issues. The Calvinistic and consistently Reformed wing of the Baptists also explicitly repudiated the anti-Augustinianism of the Anabaptists.
In short, to recognize—through Smyth, Helwys, Murton, and others—an Anabaptist component in their adoption of believers baptism does not diminish the influence of Puritanism on the seventeenth-century development of Baptists.
Nor does my opting for a different view of Anabaptist influence on Baptists diminish the importance of John Carpenter’s reminder of the heavily Puritan context of Baptist origins. He has made the point well and given a healthy call for Baptists to recapture the doctrinal synthesis, moral rigor, plain preaching, and holy living of their fellow Puritans.
On the basis of the content of this Founders Journal, I want to express a short defense of the legitimacy of using the theological category of “Reformed” to describe Baptists who are conscious and conscientious heirs of the Particular Baptist doctrinal convictions. To avoid prolixity, I will make four basic points, one negative and three positive.
First, the term “Reformed” should not be isolated to the practice of baptizing the infants of church members. Reducing the sinewy theological propositions of Reformed Christianity to that one thing based on a particular understanding of the covenant makes the broader, and more central, theological consensus irrelevant, or at most minimalistic.
Second, Reformed Baptists take seriously the covenantal framework of the Bible. They see circumcision as fulfilled, not in the baptism of infants, but in the circumcision of the heart, regeneration. The continuity of the covenant, therefore, is now based on the promise to Abraham that elicited his faith—the covenant is for “the one who shares the faith of Abraham” (Romans 4:16). Those in continuity with the sign of circumcision are those “who worship by the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh” (Philippians 3:3).
Third, Reformed Baptists reach this conclusion through close adherence to the Regulative Principle, a hermeneutical commitment uniquely operative in the Reformed, Puritan, confessional stream of Protestant theologizing. Reformed Baptists, having seen the continuity of covenants in the Spirit’s work of giving faith through regeneration, find no example or command for baptizing any person who does not give a personal confession that Jesus is Lord believing, at least ostensibly, from the heart that God raised him from the dead for our justification.
Fourth, Reformed Baptists believe the exegetically-justified doctrines that were given great clarity at the Synod of Dort and were embedded in the framework of the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Savoy Declaration. Reformed Baptists followed the example of those confessions “in making use of the very same words with them both, in those articles (which are many) wherein our faith and doctrine is the same with theirs.” In fact we declare “before God, angels, and men, our hearty agreement with them, in that wholesome protestant doctrine, which with so clear evidence of scriptures they have asserted.” (From the preface to the Second London Confession).
If this be not enough to be included within the “Reformed” witness to the saving truth of Christian doctrine and faith, then the term is meaningless.
[1] Tom J. Nettles, The Baptists, 3 vols (Fearn, Ross-Shire: Christian Focus Publlications, 2005-2007), 1:53-69.
[2] The Life and Writings of Thomas Helwys, ed. Joe Early, Jr. (Macon” Mercer university Press, 2009), 19; The Complete Writings of Roger Williams, 7 vols. (Paris, AK; The Baptist Standard Bearer, 2005) 3:v. Part of the title of Robinson’s work against Helwys reads, “Silencing of the Clamours Raysed by Mr. Thomas Helvvisse against Our Reteyning the Baptism Receaved in Engl: & Administering of Bapt: unto Infants.”
[3] The Complete Works of Roger Williams, 7 vols., 3:iv.
