Baptist History, Heritage & Distinctives – German Baptists did not originate with the Munster Riot – Part THREE of SEVEN
Thomas E Kresal Admin · 5 hrs April 27, 2020
Baptist History, Heritage & Distinctives – German Baptists did not originate with the Munster Riot – Part THREE of SEVEN
6. It is extremely unjust, therefore, to censure the Baptist denomination for the improprieties of some of its members who were, or may have been, seduced into fanaticism and turbulence. Of the unjustness of these aspersions, Mr. Evans says: ” Historians of a certain class, and partisan writers, have been fond of designating as ‘Anabaptists,’ and gathering around us all those elements of social disorder and fearful profligacy which the scenes of Munster, and the mad vagaries of Stork and his brethren, ever suggest. Hard have they labored to identify us with these men. We are not careful to answer them in this matter.
The men that shrunk not from the severe privations of the jail, and the more terrible punishment of the stake, were not affected much by a name. It answered the purpose of their adversaries for a time; but they were blind to the logical consequences of their own position. They forgot, in the fullness of their malice, the retribution to which they were exposing themselves.
To trace the sad events which resulted from the efforts to secure social freedom, to the doctrines that the individual consciousness of God’s claim on man’s affections, and that the Christian profession is only made by an immersion of the individual in water, ‘in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost’; is only to lay open their own system to the most crushing retort. It were just as easy to demonstrate that the world has been the vast theater on which Pedobaptists have perpetrated crimes at which humanity shudders, and over which piety and virtue must weep, as that the Anabaptists, as a body, were found steeped in crime and reveling in lust.” Evans Early English Baptist History, Vol. 1, p. 356
Point 6 Continues tomorrow
Presented by Thomas E. Kresal: Excerpt from 1870 Edition of “Baptist Succession” By D.B. Ray pg. 94-95
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