THEY REACHED OUT FOR A BETTER CHURCH
by Dr Michael Haykin, visiting professor of church history in seminaries in CanadaFROM SWORD & TROWEL 1999 No
3
Our subject in these articles is my favourite theme in the whole of church
history. It is the history of the Calvinistic Baptists or Particular Baptists in what is called the
long 18th century. This is the period that runs from 1688 to about 1837 - from the Glorious
Revolution that brought William III to the throne of England to the accession of Queen
Victoria.
What does it mean to be a Baptist, or to be a Calvinistic Baptist, at the turn
of the millennium? And what lies at the heart of the Baptist vision of the Christian life? To
answer these questions Baptists need to remember their roots and their heritage, because
churches that forget their past lose their identity.
First, we need to focus on the earliest Calvinistic Baptist witness here in
England and also in Wales. There will be four parts to this review. The first quickly details
the soil out of which Calvinistic Baptists came.
The second looks at one of the early documents that gave such Baptists a
deep sense of their identity, and that is the document known as the First London
Confession of Faith, published in 1644, and reissued in 1646. This we distinguish
from the Second London Confession of Faith of 1689, which has been the
dominant confession among Calvinistic Baptists. The theology of the two confessions is the
same and this needs to be stressed.
There are some in North America who seem to want to drive a wedge
between the two confessions, but this is unwarranted. The two confessions, separated by
about 50 years, are rooted in the same theology, but our focus is going to be on the first.
The third part of our review will look briefly at the whole issue of
associations, those linkages between Calvinistic Baptist churches in local geographical
areas that gave them such strength.
Finally, we shall look at Benjamin Keach, author of The Glory of the
True Church - the book that provides the greatest insight into what these men sought
to achieve. Keach was pastor of the congregation now known as the Metropolitan
Tabernacle, founded in Southwark in the mid-17th century.
First, we take note of the soil out of which Calvinistic Baptists emerged.
They are the grandchildren of the Reformation. Their immediate forebears are the Puritans,
who run back in a straight line to the Reformers of the 16th century.
The Reformers had two main goals in mind - first, to restore the doctrine of
salvation that had been obscured for close to a millennium, and secondly, to reform the
purity of worship according to the pattern of the Scriptures. They had a deep desire to
cleanse the church of the idolatry and superstitions that had grown up during the Middle
Ages.
The Reformation, as I am sure most are aware, came to England during the
reign of Henry VIII. But it was not until the reign of his son Edward VI and then his
daughter Elizabeth I (the two reigns separated by the reign of ‘Bloody Mary’) that the
Reformation began to make deep roots in England.
The big question was - how far would Elizabeth encourage the reformation
of the church? A significant number of English Protestant leaders had been exiled during
the reign of Mary. About 800 men and women had fled to the Continent and found refuge
and asylum in places like Geneva and Zurich and Basle and Lausanne - all centres of the
Reformation. These returned to England with a deep desire to see England and Wales
reformed according to the pattern they had seen on the Continent.
Initially, they were quiet when Elizabeth began to establish her rule of the
church. They waited to see how far she would go in encouraging full reformation in the
church. But it soon became clear that Elizabeth was content with a very curious structure -
a church reformed in doctrine, but over which she was the head and sole ruler.
Also it was a church in which the worship was medieval.
To many of those who had come back from the Continent, this looked like
the church that had persecuted them under Mary. Not surprisingly, these men and women -
who had become known as Puritans - began to agitate for a more complete reformation. We
are not going to focus our thoughts on the Puritans, though it is a very important story. For
about 80-100 years they fought a losing struggle, and in 1662 they were expelled from the
Church of England, nearly 2,000 ministers being ejected. They had lost the struggle.
However, before this happened, there were groups of men and women who
came to the conviction that the Established Church would never be reformed according to
the pattern of the Scriptures. And so in the 1580s and 1590s a number began to set up what
they rightly conceived to be the pattern of church life in the New Testament - local
congregations of ‘visible saints’.
The term ‘visible saint’ is a term of the period. It describes those who could
make a credible profession of faith, and on that basis were received into a local church. It
was chiefly from the soil of these ‘separatists’ that Baptists emerged in the early 1600s.
There were two main Baptist groups. The first to emerge out of the Puritan
and separatist soil was a group that are known as the General Baptists. Because they were
the first, and because they had a striking leader named John Smyth, they have received most
attention from Baptist historians down through the years. These General Baptists were
Arminian in theology, and in the long run were of little significance in the Baptist story. The
vast majority of them had been lost in the bog or the morass of Unitarianism by the end of
the 18th century. They were lost to biblical faith.
The second group to emerge were the Calvinistic Baptists, or Particular
Baptists. The first Calvinistic Baptist church that can be located in time is probably that of
John Spilsbury in Wapping, London, in 1638. By 1644 there were seven churches clustered
in London, all of them very conscious of their identity. And so it was that they published in
1644 the First London Confession of Faith. Now I want to look at that
document, and especially how it defines a church.
Whatever might be said of the Congregationalists and the Presbyterians, the
Calvinistic Baptists in 1644 knew exactly who they were. They were people who had
embraced the view that the church is a congregation of men and women who have made a
credible profession of Christ, and, as evidence, have been baptised. It was on this basis that
they pursued church planting throughout England, Wales and also Ireland. They knew very
clearly who they were and what their churches were to be like. There was nothing indistinct
about them. It is very important to stress that right from the beginning of Baptist history
there was this consciousness of identity.
In the First London Confession of Faith there are 53 paragraphs.
The first 32 deal with the subjects that characterise orthodox Christianity, emphasising the
way of salvation as articulated by the Reformers and the Puritans. The last five articles deal
with how a Christian relates to the State. One of the charges that floated around England
and Wales in the 17th and 18th centuries was the indictment that Baptists were Anabaptists.
However, the links between Baptists and Anabaptists are tenuous.
The trouble with the Anabaptists in 16th-century Europe was that they were
considered as political revolutionaries. There was a famous incident at Münster on the
German-Dutch border, where revolutionary Anabaptists had seized control of the town and
put to the sword literally anyone who would not undergo believer’s baptism. Accordingly,
‘Anabaptist’ became a byword for political revolution.
Consequently the First London Confession had to detail a right
relationship to the State, accepting that God has given authorities to rule over us.
Articles 33 to 47 dealt with the church, and it is here that Calvinistic Baptists
broke new ground among the heirs of the Puritans. The local church was described as -
‘A company of visible saints, called and separated from the world, by the
Word and Spirit of God, to the visible profession of the faith of the Gospel, being baptised
into that faith, and joined to the Lord, and each other, by mutual agreement’ (Article 33).
In other words, the local church should consist only of those who can profess
that they have fled to Christ and Him alone for refuge from the wrath of God. They clearly
and distinctly rejected the idea that was so commonly assumed by virtually everyone in
17th-century Europe, that the church should be a State church. They rightly recognised that
the idea of a church that covers a territory, and to which everyone in that region
automatically belongs, is fundamentally wrong in the light of the New Testament.
Article 39 says -
‘Baptism is . . . to be dispensed only upon persons professing faith.’
Article 40 goes on to define the mode of baptism as - ‘dipping or plunging
the whole body under water’.
A very helpful feature of this confession is that along the margins proof texts
were inserted. If there is anything that is characteristic about these Calvinistic Baptists it is
that they sought to be people of the Word.
After describing the nature of the church and the issue of baptism, the
confession deals with church government - that churches are independent, autonomous
units, established to rule their affairs independently of any other body above them and over
them. Articles also mention the importance of elders and leaders in the local church.
These early Baptists placed great emphasis on the importance of a member
in the life of the local church. They insisted that believers need to be part of a church
fellowship in order to grow in Christ. They would have been appalled at many
contemporary evangelicals who have the idea that they can be Christians without being
joined to a local church.
They also felt the need for informal, inter-church connections. The 1644
confession provides a very strong affirmation of congregational autonomy, but on the other
hand there is also great emphasis on the importance of local churches being linked, not by
any hierarchy or by an organisation, but by associations. Article 47 reads -
‘Although the particular congregations be distinct and several bodies, every
one a compact and knit city in itself; yet are they all to walk by one and the same rule, and
by all means convenient to have the counsel and help one of another in all needful affairs of
the church, as members of one body in the common faith, under Christ their only Head.’
A characteristic feature of Calvinistic Baptists until the early 19th century
was the importance of local associations. There was no such thing as an overarching
denominational body until the mid-19th century. 1812 is the date when the so-called Baptist
Union came into existence, but its real strength did not start until the time of the accession
of Victoria in the late 1830s.
Yet Baptists up until that period flourished greatly and they did so, not
because of this overarching organisational link, but because of their commitment to
associations of groups of churches in given geographical areas. They worked together to
plant churches. Pastors and elders would fellowship and pray together on a regular basis. If
a church was suffering financially, other churches would know of it and help.
In the 17th century a number of associations grew up. There was one in
London. There was the Western Association centred on Bristol. There was one in the
Midlands, usually called the Abingdon Association. There was a Northern Association, and
there was one in Ireland.
Let me give you a statement from the Midlands Association which well
expresses what these associations saw themselves as doing. It comes from the minutes of
June 26th, 1656.
‘We . . . mutually acknowledge each other to be true churches of Christ, and
that it is our duty to hold a close communion each to other as the Lord shall give
opportunity and ability, endeavouring that we may all increase more and more in faith and
knowledge and in all purity and holiness to the honour of our God, and it is our resolution
in the strength of Christ thus to do.’
Now an excellent way to sum up all that we have looked at is to mention
Benjamin Keach. Here was the single most important Calvinistic Baptist theologian of the
late 17th century. (His dates are 1640-1704.) Keach began his life as a General Baptist, an
Arminian, and had his ministry in Aylesbury. In the 1670s he came to London, where,
through contacts with men like William Kiffin and Hanserd Knollys, he was won to the
reformed faith and was appointed minister of the Horselydown Baptist Meeting (now the
Metropolitan Tabernacle) in 1672. His ministry lasted until his death.
Keach was an indefatigable author, writing an enormous number of books,
most of them unfortunately forgotten today. He wrote against the general threat to Baptists
of that day from the charismatics of the time - the Quakers. He wrote against paedo-
baptism. He wrote allegories of the Christian life - his allegories often rivalling in
importance and sales those of John Bunyan, especially a book called Travels of True
Godliness.
He argued at length the case for singing hymns, although he damaged
his case by the poor quality hymns he composed. He was the first Calvinistic Baptist to
write a treatise on the nature of the church, called The Glory of the True Church and
its Doctrine Displayed.
Three themes of this book deserve mention. The first is that he
outlines what are the defining characteristics of the church. The glory of a church is that it
consists of converted persons - precious stones, lively stones, built together in Christ.
Secondly, the glory of a true church is that it is a place where the Word is
preached and the ordinances administered in purity.
Thirdly, the glory of the church is seen in its regular and orderly discipline.
Without this, he says, a church will soon lose its beauty and be polluted.
As one reads the pages of this book, one gets a marvellous perspective on the
vision and the experience of those Calvinistic Baptists in their local churches. Their
experience of the presence of God marked an intensity not available in most parish churches
in the Established Church. Keach could say that in the local church the believer may
experience the nearest resemblance of Heaven. He can receive the clearest manifestation of
God’s beauty, and His effectual, intimate presence.
Although Keach also emphasises the vital place of private, personal and
family worship, he nonetheless declares public worship to be preferred before private. That
is a startling statement for us on the verge of the millennium, when rampant individualism
has struck at the heart of evangelicalism.
Keach emphasised this because he rightly knew that while the call to follow
Jesus Christ is intensely personal, it also inescapably involves being joined with other
believers. New Testament discipleship is not a solitary journey, but a journey with like-
minded men and women. Otherwise, as Keach observes near the conclusion of The
Glory of the True Church, ‘Live coals separated soon die.’
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