Why Study Baptist History (Part 3) To Clarify Misunderstandings

‎Dan Nelson‎ to Baptist Church History June 4 at 2:16 PM · 

Why Study Baptist History (Part 3) To Clarify Misunderstandings

There have probably been more misunderstandings of Baptists than any Christian group of people. The misunderstandings continue to this day. We are faced with the challenge of either accepting what others have said about us or study for ourselves what is the truth.

One of the great tragedies today in churches today is that most people don’t know why they are Baptists. I have attended four seminaries and have even seen professors that could not really tell you in clear concise terms why they were Baptists. Certainly, the Scripture is our guide in determining why we are Baptists and the truths we have believed are seen in confessions and our statements of faith. Yet, Baptist History has a big part to play in demonstrating how these truths have not only changed lives but also been sticking points with other religious groups in our quest for religious liberty.

There are many basic assumptions that people through the centuries have been wrong about in trying to classify Baptists.

Let’s start with one a lot of people are thinking about in the day of governors preventing churches from assembling again because of the virus pandemic. The majority of people think the first amendment phrases about religious liberty not to have a state church and congress and not prohibiting religious expression was something the early founders cooked up. While James Madison was the chief architect of the constitution, he was lobbied heavily by John Leland a Baptist preacher who had known religious persecution first hand in Virginia. There Baptist preachers had been jailed for not being licensed by the state church of England in the colony and baptizing people as believers. He was even going to run against Madison as a representative unless Madison did something in the countries founding document to insure against the imprisonment and incrimination of Baptists in Virginia and other provincial colonies. The freedom of religion clauses are Baptist oriented and every religious group owes Baptists a debt of gratitude for Leland and Baptists push to have these guarantees.

Another big misunderstanding is to think that Baptists are just another Protestant Reformation group which started with the Protestant reformers break with Catholicism. However, we have groups going back to the time of the New Testament which practiced believer’s baptism, refused to be part of any state church, and saw the local church as the only church the Bible talks about. It is hard to label Baptists as Protestants when the Protestants killed just as many Baptists as the Catholics did.

Another interesting feature is to understand that Baptists do not have any traces of Catholicism in them as Protestants groups do. Certain vestiges of Catholicism are in most Protestant churches. Infant Sprinkling, a hierarchical church structure in governance, the universal church instead of the gathered assembly, and the belief in the sacraments instead of ordinances are primary culprits proving that Protestantism came out of the universal Catholic church. Up until the last few decades, Baptists have asserted; they were not Protestants. Baptists, though, are separate from both Catholic and Protestantism so that the Anabaptists were not content with a state-church relationship that substituted another state-church favoring Protestants. They were looked upon by other dissenters as heretics when they refused to support this switch. Notable in the struggle was the Swiss reformation and persecution wrought under Ulrich Zwingli against Anabaptist leaders. For this very reason, many Baptists in the Anabaptist tradition have a hard time embracing Reformed theology, especially concerning ecclesiology and infant sprinkling.

Another misassumption that began in the Reformation time is to label the term “: Anabaptist” as a criminal of the state. This is because the early Anabaptists refused to be part of the state church and have their babies sprinkled. Dissenters were labeled Anabaptists and the name would identify them as despicable in society. The term was a mischaracterization to have justification to imprison them and later kill them. Did you know the “Diet of Speyer” in 1526 in present-day Germany pronounced the death sentence on all Anabaptists? Officials who refused to comply resulted in their removal from office. What had begun with the movement had destined them for imprisonment, torture, and martyrdom? From then on, all Anabaptists were criminals and could be hunted down and killed as a service to the state. It is always interesting to me to hear churches remove the name Baptist off their identification when so many died for it in our history. They think it will turn people off from coming to church, but we were turnoffs to almost everyone in the Reformation time because of the stands we took.

Some even believe the name Anabaptist means no baptism. When it means a rejection of infant sprinkling as baptism because of it giving false assurance to someone about salvation and it is not Scriptural. In a sense, the Anabaptists were saying infant sprinkling and any other baptism that was not administered to believers was “no baptism.” Only believer’s baptism in New Testament baptism.

A common misunderstanding still today is to think Baptists have a hierarchical structure that can decide for every church what we believe what we will do and certain policy decisions a denomination or group of churches will dictate. When in reality the head of any true Baptist Church is Christ. We can come together for a statement that is a consensus of what we believe or missions, but no group or body can tell a Baptist church what they can or cannot do. We are free under Christ’s authority, so we are not like Catholics and other Protestant groups in our local church autonomy.

These are just some openers about misunderstandings about Baptists. There are many more. We can sit make a take what the world and other religious groups say we believe or study about our history personally so that our beliefs became personal and not hearsay. The choice is up to us. But I for one am not going to take secondhand information from others who are not Baptists or uniformed Baptists to be the understandings for what we believe. I hope you will not either.