God’s Work through His People

A History of Baptist Principles

As Baptists we are a part of His story. I believe that the core of Baptist beliefs that will be enunciated in this issue by the faculty of International Baptist College and Seminary are the closest to the New Testament Church as is possible today.¹ That makes us “primitivists.” We believe the model of the primitive church is the best model for us to follow. Some may counter that a belief system like that is “narrow-minded,” and to that I plead guilty.

Obviously, some parts of our theology are less important than others. If you compare the deity of Christ to forms of church government, you will certainly see a difference in importance. However, congregational church government was the primary motivator behind the Pilgrims’ coming to America. They thought it important enough to die for. While the Pilgrims weren’t Baptists, they had in common with Baptist thought congregational government. They created a congregational civil government instead of an episcopal or “King”-oriented church government with the Mayflower Compact. That was revolutionary in and of itself. I do accept that each of the Baptist Distinctives that we believe is important, and while some hold to some, none hold to all except for Baptists. These distinctives have remade the civil governments worldwide over the past five hundred years. (The World’s Debt to Baptists by John Porter is a classic on this discussion.)

A study of the principles that bind Baptists together is an encouragement, but it also ties me to Christ and His mission for us. As Armitage states, Baptists are not “an organization, but … a people, traced by their vital principles and gospel practices”² These principles that we expound in these pages, I believe, have been held, “by individual men and scattered companies, but never in unbroken continuity by any sect as such.”³ However, this belief of “kinship” with dissenting groups does not move us to successionism, for Baptists do not need such authority, as Armitage forcefully argues: “The very attempt to trace an unbroken line of persons duly baptized upon their personal trust in Christ, or of ministers ordained by lineal descent from the apostles or of churches organized upon these principles, and adhering to the New Testament in all things, is in itself an attempt to erect a bulwark of error. … The idea is the very life of Catholicism.”⁴

When I went to college and seminary the common view of men in the different branches of independent Baptists was that Baptists need not have a successionist view of our history because it couldn’t be proven and it is Catholic and Reformed to demand such an authority trail. As Biblical Christians our sole source for faith and practice is the Word of God. We don’t gain authority from earthly connections unbroken back to the apostles but rather from a Spirit connection through rightly dividing the Word of Truth.

I had professor after professor in my younger years teach me that we did have kinship, spiritually, with other separatist groups who differed with the state church from the time of Constantine forward. In fact, Dr. Pickering, in his book Biblical Separation,⁵ takes his whole first four chapters to show commonality with our views of separation to many of these dissenting groups.

“Always Protesting”

However, today, the common position is that Baptists are just another group born out of the Protestant Reformation. As my mother always said, “Baptists never protested with Luther because we have always been protesting.” That was the view of Spurgeon. By that she didn’t mean there was a link-to-link succession, but she was expounding the common view of Baptists from the ‘40s through the ‘90s that we had a spiritual kinship with many dissenter groups through the ages. Armitage, as well as many others, held this view, and he was the greatest of the Baptist historians for a three-hundred-year period of time.

I think the disagreement, which may seem a nuance but appears foundational for us who are separatists, is really about definitions. I don’t consider pacifism as a core issue for a Baptist. Yet I have been repeatedly told I cannot identify with Grebel of Zurich in his debate with Zwingli over infant baptism because he was a pacifist. I reject such a notion. I am fine with identifying with a pacifist, even though I am not one myself. Pacifism is not a core belief of Baptists. (In fact, Leland, a leading Baptist colonial pastor, identifies a Baptist church in Virginia that was pacifist, but he still claimed them as a Baptist church.)⁶ So I have no problem claiming some Swiss and German Anabaptists as “kin” to me. Many independent Baptists today would not want to claim them because they aren’t “exactly like us.” I reject such a notion.

Those who disagree with me will point to some views in these different dissenting groups that modern Baptists would strongly disagree with as the reason to reject any “kinship.” First of all, these groups were often hunted to extermination, and often the only records we have of their beliefs are from their enemies. The Catholic priest I just served with in Kyrgyzstan for several months would, if asked pointedly, readily assert that I did not believe in communion. Of course, I do, but not his view of communion, as I hold to a symbolic view and he to a literal-presence view. If he wrote that and I was not allowed a chance at explanation, the reader could conclude I was a heretic. That’s the power of writing history. You can make your opponent say whatever you want him to say.

Secondly, these groups had limited access to books, information, study helps, and so on. I am amazed—considering the level of illiteracy common in these ages and lack of Bibles for the common man—that many of these groups were able to articulate anything close to Biblical doctrine in the face of the black night of the Middle Ages in both the East and West. These groups should generally be applauded for admirable attempts to return a most corrupted dominant church to a primitive standard that aligned itself with the New Testament with their few and meager tools for study and research. In many cases they sealed their attempt at reformation with their blood. Rather than recoiling from them, we should applaud them and appreciate their efforts. Their sacrifice reminds us and our young people that it always is costly to plead for primitivism.

I believe we lose a very rich heritage of the dissenting movement, which allows us to explain to our college and seminary students that “we have always protested,” when we cut these groups completely from our “family tree.” To a young man in the ministry, our constant “protesting” can seem unnecessary and irrelevant, but when he can see that it is tied to a stream of protesting against the evils of the dominant church of the day, then he better understands that he is swimming in a stream of protest that isn’t new.⁷

The Kinship of Biblical Separation

When we tell our young people that they are simply a different Protestant sect because we draw the line too sharply on what it means to have “spiritual kinship,” it is only natural that they drift away from a distinctively separatist Baptist position into the Reformed movement. This was Pickering’s whole point in his book Biblical Separation. He started his case for Biblical separation based on “kinship” with numerous dissenter groups from ad 300 to 1600. This “kinship” was the view of both Dr. Clearwaters and Dr. Weniger, who founded separatist Baptist seminaries where my father attended. As my father told me, it was sitting at the feet of Drs. Clearwaters, Weniger, and Dollar that he learned he wasn’t a Protestant, but a Baptist.

We lose much that is foundational to our Baptist life and thought when we divorce ourselves from the dissenters who stretched across 1300 years. We leave our young men with a sense that separatism is a new thing and not really that important when we draw the noose so tightly regarding the definition on what it means to be in the spiritual lineage of Baptists. This view of kinship with dissenting groups was the common view among independent Baptist thinkers only thirty years ago, and now it has been nearly completely abandoned, while at the same time some young men drift away wondering if it is worth the cost to be a separatist Baptist. I believe we have pulled out the historical foundation for our understanding of Scripture from our young men and women.

I will close with one more quote from the dean of Baptist historians, Thomas Armitage: “Obscure communities, as the Cathari of the Novatians, the Paulicians, the Albigenses, and the Waldenses, maintained the ancient faith in comparative purity from the beginning of the fourth century down to the Reformation. These and other sects held one or more distinctives, but none of them were thorough Baptists, through and through.”⁸

Men and women through all ages have died as dissenters for these distinctives. We do a disservice to our physical and spiritual children if we do not pass on these principles for them to learn. “Modern-day separatists can rejoice that they do not walk alone. Others have paid a price in days gone by for the truth of God. An examination of the witness of such groups of believers reminds us again that the principle of separation, with its corollary, that believer’s church, brings upon its adherents tremendous opposition.”⁹ In these pages, we hope to pass on an appreciation for these vital principles and thankfulness for those who fought to secure them for us.

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Mike Sproul serves as the pastor of Littleton Baptist Church, Littleton, CO.

(Originally published in FrontLine • March/April 2014. Click here to subscribe to the magazine.)

1. P&D Editor’s note: This article introduced the March/April 2014 FrontLine Magazine. We republish it today for its content. Other articles from this issue previously published here on Proclaim & Defend are “Editorial & Contents,” “Individual Soul Liberty,” “Regenerate Church Membership,” and “Wanted: A Few Godly Men.” For back issues [some issues are not available], check with our office. [↩]
2. Armitage, Thomas, A History of the Baptists Traced by their Vital Principles and Practices from the Time of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ to the Year 1886, Volume 1, 1980 (Watertown, WI: Maranatha Baptist Press), vii. [↩]
3. Armitage, iii. [↩]
4. Armitage, 2. [↩]
5. Pickering, Ernest, Biblical Separation: The Struggle for a Pure Church (Schaumburg, IL: Regular Baptist Press). [↩]
6. Leland, John. The Writings of the Late Elder John Leland including some events in His Life, 1845, reprinted 1986 (Dayton, OH: Church History Research and Archives), 103. [↩]
7. Pickering, 140. [↩]
8. Armitage, 9. [↩]
9. Pickering, 40. [↩]