Investigating Baptist origins

I found this interesting article by Leon McBeth today. It is over 35 years old, but is worth reading.

I was looking for an article on origins of the Baptist Church and was pleased with what is said in this short piece.

This part is particularly helpful:

Baptists New and Old

The story of Baptist beginnings forms a paradox. On one hand, Baptists are deeply convinced that theirs is a Bible faith, rooted in the message of Jesus Christ and the apostles. To that extent, Baptists can be called a New Testament church.

On the other hand, the historical evidence clearly states that Baptists originated, as a distinct denomination, in the early seventeenth century. How does one harmonize the sense of continuity from Bible times with the factual reality of more recent beginnings?

Some have so emphasized the sense of continuity from Bible times that they find it difficult to face up to historical facts about Baptist origins. Some have even erected elaborate schemes, or "Trails of Blood," seeking to trace Baptists through all the centuries from Christ to the present. These theories are based upon assumptions, unreliable or nonexistent historical data, or faulty interpretation of Jesus’ promise that the gates of death should never prevail against his church. A Baptist today can have a real sense of identification with the teachings of Christ without trying to prove historical succession.

Other Baptists, however, may so emphasize the recent origin of Baptists that they lose the sense of continuity in faith and practice from Jesus himself. The earliest Baptists recovered and proclaimed anew the old faith that has come down the centuries from the Lord and his apostles. The Baptist denomination dates from the seventeenth century; the Baptist faith, we believe, dates from the first century.

Question 21

I see there is a campaign to get people to answer No Religion in this year's Australian Census.

In the Youtube video the narrator challenges viewers that if they no longer practise the religion of their childhood, they should mark No Religion on the census form.

This reminds me of Sunday School, where we were told that being born into a Christian family does not make you a Christian, any more than being born in a garage would make you a car.

(I found this amusing when the band born in a garage named themselves The Cars.)

Interestingly, his script assumes that people who believe in euthanasia and same-sex marriage should make sure they check the No Religion box. I wonder if some people would agree with one or more of these points of view, but not consider themselves to be atheists?

I have my own misgivings about the question, because it assumes that there are religions called Catholic, Anglican, Uniting Church, Presbyterian, Baptist and Lutheran, which are put along side of Islam and Buddhism.

Firstly, wouldn't the grammatical equivalent of Islam be Catholicism?

And, secondly, are Catholic, Presbyterian, etc religions, or denominations of the Christian religion?

Baptism: why so many different views?

I've just finished reading Baptism: three views, edited by David Wright, with contributions by Bruce Ware [Baptist], Sinclair Ferguson [Presbyterian] and Anthony Lane, who argues that both the paedobaptist and credobaptist views are acceptable.

All three authors had interesting points to make, though I found Sinclair Ferguson the least helpful.

I'm now reading Understanding Four Views on Baptism, edited by John Armstrong, with contributions from Tom Nettles [Baptist], Richard Pratt [Reformed], Robert Kolb [Lutheran] and John Castelein [Churches of Christ].

But these books do not cover all of the major views on baptism, because there would appear to be at least these:
Roman Catholic
Eastern Orthodox
Anglican
Lutheran
Baptist
Churches of Christ
Pentecostal
Salvation Army
popular evangelical "don't-rock-the-boat" view
ultra-dispensational baptism is not for this age view
Lane's dual-practice view [also held by David Wright]
Have I missed any?

Why is baptism left out of gospel presentations?

John Richardson, The Ugley Vicar, notes that many popular modern presentations of the Christian message do not even mention baptism, yet it was a part of the message in the New Testament.

I haven't seen anyone mention this previously and it is a point I've often pondered. My own thought is that many churches fear presenting baptism as in any way important because mentioning it may lead to thoughts of baptismal regeneration. It is all-too-often thought of as an optional extra. In some paedobaptist churches it is not mentioned because it is assumed that people were "baptised" as babies. But in immersionist churches it is also not often mentioned, but comes up as a next step and as a prerequisite for local church membership.

I was raised in the Baptist church and when the gospel was presented, a was often quoted:

"Sirs, what must I do to be saved?"
They replied, "Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved

It is interesting that those who taught us that belief alone was all that was required did not seem to know that a few verses later tell the story of the Philippian gaoler and his household being baptised, showing that baptism was part of Paul's message.

I think many Christians today are afraid of baptism because they think it may cause division, so they think the wisest course of action is to omit it altogether.

Btu why is it left out of gospel presentations? I think that perhaps the main reason is that these summaries are intended to be used in many different Christian denominations and in interdenominational contexts.

Timothy George on The Baptist view of The Lord's Supper

Michael Spencer, The Internet Monk, asked Timothy George

How can Baptists respond to Catholic and Orthodox Christians who challenge our view of the Lord’s Supper as having no deeper historical/Biblical roots than Zwingli?

Dr George's answer is worth reading and considering. I love the Spurgeon quote.

Among many Baptist Christians there is a growing awareness that the Supper of the Lord should have a more prominent (and frequent) place in the life of worship, as it certainly did in the early church. There is also the realization that a more robust doctrine of (what Calvin called) the real spiritual presence of Christ in the Supper is called for by the participationist language of the New Testament itself and is in keeping with the best traditions of Baptist life. No less a figure than Charles Haddon Spurgeon portrayed the Lord’s Supper as nothing less than an encounter with the living Christ himself: “At all times when you come to the communion table, count it to have been no ordinance of grace to you unless you have gone right through the veil into Christ’s own arms, or at least have touched his garment, feeling that the first object, the life and soul of the means of grace, is to touch Jesus Christ himself.”

For most of our history, Baptists have been more concerned with the externals of the Table—grape juice or real wine, who may preside, who may partake—rather than with the question of what actually goes on at this sacred meal. It is well known that Luther and Zwingli differed strongly, and actually broke fellowship with one another, over the meaning of the words of institution, “This is my body.” Historically, Baptists have belonged more to the Reformed (whether Zwinglian or Calvinist) side of that debate, but it is important to realize that all of the mainline reformers reacted against the displacement of the Lord’s Supper as the central focus of Christian worship in medieval Catholicism. They criticized the fact that the Eucharist had become clericalized (the service in Latin and only bread for the laity), commercialized (votive masses used as a fundraising scheme in much of the church), and scholasticized (the dogma of transubstantiation and the view of the mass as a sacrifice).

The reformers harked back to the teaching of the New Testament, the practice of the early church, and especially to the theology of St. Augustine. Augustine argued that in the sacrament the sign must be identified as a sign by a word spoken about it, thus making the sacrament itself a “visible word.” In commenting on John 6:50, Augustine wrote: “ ‘He who eats of this bread will not die.’ But that means the one who eats what belongs to the power of the sacrament, not simply to the visible sacrament; the one who eats inwardly, not merely outwardly; the one who eats the sacrament in the heart not just the one who crushes it with his teeth” (In Ev. Joh. Tract. 26.12). While Luther could speak of the manducatio impiorum, “the eating of the ungodly,” the Reformed tradition picked up Augustine’s distinction and emphasized the cruciality of faith for the proper reception of the beneficium of grace in the Supper. This same theology they found echoed in other pre-reformation figures including Ratramnus, Wycliffe, and Hus. What they rejected, in keeping with Luther, was an understanding of the sacrifice of the mass as an expression of works-righteousness, a theology which seemed to them to undermine the all-sufficiency of Jesus’s once-and-for-all death on the cross—where, as Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer put it, he offered “a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world.”

Since the sixteenth century, and especially in the liturgical renewal stemming from Vatican II, many of the changes called for by the reformers have been accepted in the practice of the Catholic Church. Yet important, church-dividing differences still remain and I think the Church of Rome is right to resist the kind of easy-going ecumenism that would ignore such differences in order to achieve a false unity. In our discussions with our Catholic brothers and sisters, we Baptists and evangelicals must learn to distinguish the unity we are called to affirm and the divisions we must still sustain. But this we should do in the spirit of Jesus’s high priestly prayer for his disciples in John 17—“that they may be one, Father, as you and I are one so that world may believe.”