Featured Whitsitt controversy

One of the controversies Walter B. Shurden discusses in his book Not a Silent People is the controversy over Baptist origins, also known as the Whitsitt controversy. In the 1890s, William Heth Whitsitt (1841-1911) wrote an article for the Johnson’s Universal Encyclopedia, in which he set forth the belief that the Baptists in England began to baptize by immersion in 1641 and previously had not practiced immersion. Before this he had anonymously proposed this theory in New York Independent in 1880. In September 1896 he put out a book on the subject entitled A Question in Baptist History.

“During the autumn of 1877, shortly after I had been put in charge of the school of Church History at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in preparing my lectures on Baptist History, I made the discovery that, prior to the year 1641 our Baptist people in England were in the practice or sprinkling and pouring for baptism. I kept it to myself until the year 1880...”

Whitsitt’s “discovery” set off a firestorm which only subsided with his dismissal as president and church history professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. He had strong supporters, but perhaps at some point they decided that the survival of the seminary was more important than the theory of Whitsitt. The battle against Whitsitt was led by such men as T. T. Eaton, John T. Christian, and B. H. Carroll. Later commentators would claim that these leaders “won the battle but lost the war”, pointing out that all six of the Southern Baptist seminaries taught as church history the very point Whitsitt raised.

Did Whitsitt and his followers really win the war? The battle never came into many of the otherwise affiliated Baptist groups, who had been separated from the Convention Baptists long before Whitsitt – even before the Convention was organized. Shortly after the Whitsitt controversy, some Landmark Baptists took their marbles and went to play elsewhere. Landmarkers in the SBC evidently gradually went “underground”, and a Baptist academia full of Whitsitt’s disciples was left to teach Baptist origins as they saw it. Yet well over 100 years later it seems that common Baptists and even young historians within the SBC (and elsewhere) don’t believe that Whitsitt’s word is the final word. A strong “Baptist Identity” movement in the SBC bears some resemblance to Landmarkism, with Wade Burleson calling these folks out as “Neo-Landmarkists” (whether fairly or not). SEBTS Historian Nathan Finn has made a case for a “convergent view” of Baptist origins, noting that “earliest Baptists were aware that they were not the first baptistic Christians since the New Testament era” and advocating “breaking out of the too-simplistic either/or approaches to Baptist origins.” This is still new and held only by a minority of scholars, but Finn stated that he sensed there is a growing trend in this direction. It may not be a matter of “who won the war” but that the war is still to be fought. Finn sums it up this way: “The portrait is too complicated for tidy answers.”

 

Please note that I am quoting Burleson as an easy to find example and not as an authority. Most, if not all, the Baptist Identity Movement folks in the SBC deny being Landmarkers, and probably rightly so; but many of them posit some kind of existence of baptistic principles off and on throughout church history. One of my main points is that SB historians in the 1950s and 1960s would probably have thought this was a closed issue, while some newer members of their cadre are now willing to think outside Whitsitt's box.

 

I don't think so, unless one is a strict chain-link successionist requiring historical evidence to believe it. Most Landmarkers base their ecclesiology on the Bible and consider the historical record fallible.

I don't think this question, historically, relates to Landmarkism alone and to discuss it in these terms may even skew the issue negatively for many people. Many Baptists in the past (e.g. R.B.C. Howell, C. H. Spurgeon) and some in the present -- who are not Landmarkers -- have considered that there is some kind of perpetuity of New Testament Christianity of which Baptists are a part. W. A. Criswell, often made statements in which he is saying Baptists go back to the New Testament. (His "Saint Patrick was a Baptist Preacher" is an example.)

My main point in the OP is not that there has been a great new discovery or that Whitsitt's view no longer prevails, but that there is a new breeze blowing that doesn't necessarily consider this a closed issue and may even be willing to put some kind of reinterpretation on the facts. I consider Nathan Finn's "convergent view" to be that, even though he doesn't disagree, as far as I know, with the recovery of immersion by the English Separatists.

 

I'm not as familiar with Newman as the other two. In a PhD dissertation titled The Historiography of Baptist Origins in Selected Southern Baptist Historians: William Heth Whitsitt, John Tyler Christian, and Albert Henry Newman, Donald Alan Cureton described these men as "three realms of diversity" with "...differing historical methods, superimposed biases, and divergent definitions of Baptists." (p. 166) IIRC, Cureton puts Newman in the "Spiritual Kinship" camp rather than a successionist.

From James H. Slatton's book W. H. Whitsitt: The Man and the Controversy we find that Whitsitt not only "was no friend of the Landmarkers" but was, though somewhat closeted, not a real friend of Baptist doctrine. Whitsitt's letters and diary reveal a man who regularly criticized his colleagues, Baptist preachers, Baptist churches, Baptist associations and Baptists in general.
http://baptistsearch.blogspot.com/2010/06/man-and-controversy.html

 

Was just reading some of Ron Pound's remarks on his research of the Kiffin Manuscript and the Jessey Church records. According to him some the confusion is that the church records must be understood in light of the fact that they at the time did not know of others practicing immersion in England -- rather than it was not being practiced.

 

I thought so, but I'm no expert on the Anglicans. But I think the distinction in the Jessey church records would be about adult believer immersion as opposed to infant baptism/immersion. A clip from Pound's pdf says, "none having then so Practiced in England to Professed Believers," for example.