In its August edition, the journal First Things features an article by R. Albert Mohler, Jr., entitled “Why I am a Baptist.” Mohler has been dean of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, for 27 years. I was surprised to see his piece in First Things because that journal is decidedly high church, e.g., Catholics and Episcopalians. But apparently it is broadening its horizons.
As Adventists also do, Mohler places the Baptist denomination squarely in the tradition of the Reformation:
Every great movement probably begins in an argument of some sort, and the Baptists emerged in the context of an argument that was intense, significant, and sometimes deadly. Luther had started it. The Calvinists believed he had not taken it far enough. The English Puritans likewise became convinced that the moderately reforming Church of England was not taking the argument far enough. The Separatists (who would include Congregationalists and Presbyterians) believed that the Puritans who remained in the Church of England were not taking it far enough. The Baptists then separated from the Separatists because they were not taking it far enough. Since then, Baptists have not stopped arguing. They often argue among themselves, but more urgently, they argue for the necessity of conversion, for the believers’ church, for the baptism of believers alone, and for liberty of conscience.
And just like the Baptists before them, the pioneer Seventh-day Adventists also argued that the then-existing Protestant denominations were not taking it—the argument, the Reformation—far enough.
Mohler argues that the Baptists’ most important contribution was their insistence that no one could be born into the church. One had to choose the church through conversion and baptism.
But the Baptists were united in perplexity over the fact that other Protestants seemed reluctant to follow the logic of the Reformation to its conclusion. What did the famed solas of the Reformation mean, if the meaning and necessity of conversion could be so obscured, and the very nature of the church thereby so confused?
For Baptists, the foundation is the radical reality of conversion as the entry into the Christian life. Is this not the clear teaching of Christ himself, who told Nicodemus, “Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again’” (John 3:7)? For Baptists, the necessity of conversion is the key to understanding the gospel and all of Scripture. The human race is divided between those who do not believe in Christ and those who do, between the once-born and the twice-born, between the rebels against God and those who have been conquered by the grace of Christ and belong to him forever.
The implication of this belief is that no one is saved, nor is he really a member of the church, unless he has been converted. That conveyed tremendous urgency to the Great Commission, preaching the gospel:
When Baptist churches come together, as Southern Baptists in the United States did in 1845, they establish mission boards and organize evangelism before doing anything else. The Southern Baptists did not establish a theological seminary until 1859 or a publishing house until 1891, but they did not leave their first meeting without establishing mission boards. Getting first things first among the Baptists means preaching the gospel for the conversion of sinners. Everything else will have to wait.
The Baptist doctrine that only the converted are really in the church, and that the church is and should be a wholly regenerate body of believers, also has profound church-state implications. The Church consists only of the converted, not of those who are born in a given polity or geographical area, which put the Baptists in conflict with the established churches, and those who embrace the idea of establishment and church-state combinations. The Baptists rejected a church-state worldview that had prevailed since Constantine and throughout the middle ages:
With this affirmation, the Baptists transformed themselves into perceived enemies of the established churches and the civil order. The union of throne and altar rendered membership in the church and citizenship in the state effectively one and the same. The Baptists were accused of heresy and treason. . . . Baptist logic severed the concept of citizenship from membership in an established church. One could be born an Englishman, but one had to be born again to be a Christian. The church consists only of Christians under the rule of Christ.
The powers that be—both civil and ecclesiastical—were scandalized. To monarchs, the threat was real. Can you have a stable national order (and a secure throne) if your subjects are not subservient to your priests? How can societal order be maintained if civil law and church law are totally separated? Can government wield true authority if the most it can threaten is execution? How could a person excommunicated by a church remain in good standing with the state? Are unbelievers and not-yet-believers part of no church?
It is easy to imagine how, in a time of social disorder, when violent Marxists and anarchists roam the streets, contemporary Christians might start asking similar questions.
In 1612, one of the earliest Baptists, Thomas Helwys from Nottinghamshire, wrote a powerful refutation of the idea of the established church or the state church. He addressed it to King James:
Hear O King, and diligently note the counsel of your poor, and let their complaints come before thee. The king is a mortal man, and not God, therefore hath no power over the immortal souls of his subjects, to make laws and ordinances for them, and to set spiritual Lords over them. If the king have authority to make spiritual Lords and laws, then he is an immortal God and not a mortal man. O king, be not seduced by deceivers to sin so against God whom thou oughtest to obey, nor against thy poor subjects who ought and will obey thee in all things with body life and goods, or else let their lives be taken from the earth. God save the king.
Roger Williams, who left puritanism to establish America’s first Baptist church, argued for extending religious liberty even to “the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or antichristian consciences and worships.”
Later, President Thomas Jefferson, though considered an infidel by many Baptists then (and now), was presented with a 1,325-pound cheese made by Baptist women in Massachusetts and delivered to the White House by Elder John Leland in appreciation of Jefferson’s support for religious liberty. Writing to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut in 1802, Jefferson had borrowed language from Roger Williams, defining “a wall of separation between church and state.” In more recent times, Jefferson’s language of a “wall of separation” has been employed to mischievous ends by those who oppose any religious influence in civil society. But in its historical context, Jefferson’s assurance to the Baptists stood in contrast to the persecution Baptists had experienced at the hands of governments on both sides of the Atlantic.
This logic led eventually to the United States eschewing the concept of a state church, and including in the Bill of Rights the provision that Congress “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”
We owe much to the Baptists, both as a nation and as a Seventh-day Adventist denomination. In many ways, we are standing on their shoulders.