The Baptists

Wet behind the years

THE BAPTISTS
Key people involved in forming a Baptist identity
Volume Two: Beginnings in America
By Tom Nettles
Christian Focus. 510 pages. £17.99
ISBN 978-1-84550-073-3

What is a Baptist Church? What are the main features that constitute the identity of Baptists? This is the second in a three volume series which describe the Baptists as they have spread through the world but mostly how they proliferated mightily in the USA.

In the first volume Tom Nettles, who is professor of historical theology at Southern Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky, described the emergence from the English Puritans of Calvinistic Baptists known as Particular Baptists because of their belief in a definite atonement. Alongside them developed a different stream of General Baptists, who were Arminian in doctrine.

Accounts of leaders such as John Spilsbury, Knollys, Keach and Kiffin made up part of volume one. Leaders of the first generation of Particular Baptists compiled the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith now popularly known as the 1689 Baptist Confession. The Particular Baptists united in regional associations and so a very clear character or identity marked them which identity has re-merged strongly in various parts of the world in the late 20th and first part of the 21st century.

Church and State separate

There are several characteristics which are peculiar to Baptists. One of these is a belief in religious freedom, liberty of conscience and the separation of Church and State. This is where Nettles begins in this second volume which he divides into three sections. He shows how John Smyth and Thomas Helwys contended that it is not for civil magistrates to minister the ‘new creature’. Christ’s Church is not created by force and by persecution. The Church is God’s creation by the preaching of the Word.

Helwys boldly petitioned King James I to give up his power to appoint bishops and archbishops. Christopher Blackwood sent a book to the press with the title The Storming of Antichrist in his two last and strongest garrisons; of compulsion of Conscience, and Infant Baptism. In young America Roger Williams and John Clarke were foremost in running with the same baton of religious freedom. Williams illustrated the ludicrous nature of religious coercion by pointing to the fact that under the Tudors each succeeding monarch imposed a different religion from Half-Papist to Protestant to Papist and back again to Protestant (p.43). Following were Isaac Backus (1724-1806) and John Leland (1754-1841) both from Congregational background and both leaders of exceptional preaching and intellectual ability who used their pens to effectively establish Baptist principles especially in the disestablishment of a state church.

John Leland was privileged to witness powerful revivals. In one year alone he baptised 300. His theology of salvation accorded entirely with that of Jonathan Edwards. He was fiercely opposed to manipulation on the basis that the new birth can be achieved by self-exertion which later was to be associated with Charles Finney. Backus calls Jonathan Edwards ‘the greatest writer against a self-determining power in man that our age has seen’ (p. 454).

Church unity

Section two addresses the subject of unity and co-operation among Baptist churches as seen in the development of associations, the Philadelphia Association, the Charleston and the Sandy Creek Associations which bodies followed the Second London Baptist Confession with a few minor variations.

The account of these associations and their influence is woven round fascinating biographies of leaders, Oliver Hart, John Gano, Richard Furman and Shubal Stearns. Matters of lively and vital interest fill these fascinating short biographies. The striking overall feature is that these pastors possessed the gift of preaching to a remarkable degree. It was through their gospel preaching that extensive church planting was accomplished. For instance such was Gano’s unction in preaching that some of the young preachers when they heard him remarked that they felt that they could never undertake to preach again. The leaders were Calvinists. They were clear doctrinal preachers. None were decisionists. They preached the necessity of repentance. Nettles describes in detail the confessional doctrinal teaching of Richard Furman. Eternal punishment is clearly defined as not a ruin which culminates in annihilation ‘for the soul is declared to be immortal’ (p.150).

‘Come-outers’

Shubal Stearns moved south and planted a church at Sandy Creek, which grew rapidly from 16 to 606. It was from there that revival spread all over the south. Stearns born in 1706 was converted under the preaching of George Whitefield and adopted the New Light understanding of revival and conversion.

One part of that was the conviction that it was impossible to reform established churches from within. It was imperative to start new churches. A favourite text was 2 Corinthians 6:17, ‘Come out from among them and be ye separate.’ And so the Separate Baptists were nicknamed ‘come-outers’ or ‘separates’. While following the Calvinism of Jonathan Edwards and Whitefield Stearns rejected infant baptism. Fervent evangelism characterised the Separate Baptists. The preachers were revivalist preachers often evoking tears, trembling, screams, shouts and acclamations. There were some idiosyncratic practices which led Gano to use the word ‘immethodical’ to describe this group which belonged to the Sandy Creek Association which eventually split into three different associations. Specific conditions were described when women had the right to speak. One lady, a sister of Stearns, frequently melted a whole concourse by her prayers and exhortations. In defence of the Separate movement one wrote, ‘Surely we ought to prefer a revival of religion, though dished with some irregularities to the death-like coldness of mere orthodoxy and form’ (p. 162).

World Mission

In section three Nettles turns his attention to worldwide Mission. The example of Adoniram and Ann Judson gripped the imagination of Baptists across America. Nettles explains the thinking of the distasteful and misguided reactions of the Anti-Mission Society Movement.

The story of the formation of the first Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is intertwined with splendid biographies of Basil Manly Sr. and John A Broadus. Broadus never stopped labouring to improve the effectiveness of the Christian pulpit in America.

Manly’s preaching was characterised as ‘always marked by deep thought and strong argument expressed in a very clear style, and by extraordinary earnestness and tender pathos’. Manly was gripped passionately by the subject of theological training and the provision of top rate preachers and pastors for the churches. ‘Dull, careless sinners can never be built up by lifeless oration, dispassionate praying and theatrical reading of Scripture’ (p. 263). In 1859 Manly co-operated with James P Boyce, William Williams and Basil Manly Jr. in establishing the first theological seminary among Baptists in the South in Greenville, South Carolina. This seminary moved to Louisville in 1877 and today is the foremost Southern Baptist Seminary in America. We learn from these pages of the considerable enterprise, energy and funding necessary to establish an institution of this nature.

Woman in China

The life of Lottie Moon (1840-1912), famous single lady missionary to China, is described in gripping style by Nettles. Her time of service was marked by terrible defections from the faith. She would have liked to marry Crawford Toy, a brilliant academic who at one stage seemed heading for the mission field. Seeds of error were sown in Toy’s mind when he studied in Berlin. These germinated, he embraced liberal theology and eventually he gave up the Christian faith altogether. Lottie Moon, herself faithful to the end, often noted the destructive advance of the new theology which is a principal theme of Nettles’s volume three on Baptist Identity.

The Southern leaders, for reasons which to this reviewer seem pragmatic and unbiblical, defended the owning of slaves. Nettles deals with this issue, which bitterly divided America, in perspective so the reader can make his or her own judgement.

International stage

The volume concludes with some descriptions of Baptists on the international stage, with excellent biographies of Robert (1764-1842) and James Haldane (1768-1851) of Scotland, and Gerhard Oncken (1800-1880), a German who, for widespread effectiveness in church planting, knows few equals.

Overall, this volume is rich in anecdotal material. It brims with human interest which sustains the reader’s interest and enjoyment. I take the life of John Leland (1754-1841) to illustrate this. John Leland’s earliest memory went back to when he was only three years old. It concerned an outrageous violation of his conscience. His father, after some years of serious scruples about baptising his children, threw aside these hesitations and determined that they would all be baptised on one day. The minister arrived and Leland, learning of the purpose of his coming, sought to escape and fell flat on his nose. He was retrieved, washed, and baptised, as he testifies, ‘not a voluntary, but a reluctant subject, forced against my will’ (p.59).

Leland records that on one occasion in the home of ‘Deacon Wood’ he experienced great liberty and thought that of all his sermons that one was the best he ever delivered. Yet it was followed with ‘small effects’ and only one young woman was ‘divinely wrought upon’. Yet 30 years later he recorded he had been privileged to baptise 57 grand and great-grandchildren of the said Deacon Wood.

Talented leaders

The Baptist subject is so extensive that discipline is required to keep main issues in focus. Many talented leaders make up the story and it is not possible to do justice to them all. Thus Nettles has resorted to information boxes of a page or two each. There are 22 of these. In this way leaders are described such as Luther Rice, John L. Dagg, Lott Cary, Jesse Mercer, P.H. Mell, David Bogue, Vasili Pavlov, Alexander Carson and John Jasper. The latter was a slave, the last of 24 children by his mother Nina. He drew both blacks and whites by his powerful preaching and his church grew to near 2,000 members.

A number of well-drawn portraits by Robert Nettles are included in the book, which is highly commended and will be a valuable resource for years to come. Tom Nettles has utilised to advantage the vastly stocked library at Southern Seminary, and, as he acknowledges, has been blessed with the constant stimulus of teaching Church history in the seminary. About 60 pages of references and indices insure that students will not be frustrated in locating source materials.

Vol. 2: Beginnings in America