Featured A Baptist theological shift

This morning I posted on my blog Baptist moving: considering two theological shifts.

One of the shifts I considered is what specifically was at work on the majority of U. S. Baptists, the Regular Baptists, to move away from the doctrines of predestination toward libertarian free will? I suggested these possibilities:

• The possibility that some of these Regular Baptists nominally held the doctrines of grace, but were not consistent, clear and firm in their teaching of them.
• The anti-creedalism of the Separate Baptists, who merged with these Regular Baptists toward the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. Though they were generally predestinarians like the Regular Baptists, they would not commit to “man-made” confessions like the Second London or Philadelphia Confessions.
• The influence of the evangelism of revivalists like Finney and Moody on these Regular Baptists. Probably the Frontier Revivalism of the early 1800s should also be included. Those who came into Baptist churches from these revivals might be predisposed to favor such methods and find them more compatible with a “free will” theology.
• The removal from these Regular Baptists of an aggregation of doctrinally strong predestinarian churches in the so-called missions/anti-missions schism.
• The “Spirit” of the American experiment, emphasizing freedom and individualism, seemed to fit better into a system of free will than unconditional election – influencing some of these Regular Baptists either directly (causing change) or indirectly (causing re-evaluation).

I did not include “changing views due to the study of the Bible/New Testament.” I do not exclude the fact that people changed from a view they thought the Bible did not teach to a view they thought the Bible did teach. Most would earnestly profess that to be their case. But in the above list I am thinking of outside means that may have been at work with, without or in addition to this factor.

 

What factors do you think Wayland highlights?

Any thoughts on why Baptists moved any from Gill and toward Fuller?

 

This post has a background in a conversation that started on Facebook. I need to explain my use of "Regular Baptists" in the OP. I mean the Particular Baptists who came from England and came to be known in America as Regular Baptists rather than Particular Baptists. Early representatives would be associations such as the Philadelphia and Charleston Associations. These associations were solidly Calvinistic (or seemingly so) and most adopted the Philadelphia Confession of Faith, which the Philadelphia Association adapted from the 2nd London Confession of 1689.

Modern descendants of these include the Southern Baptist Convention, American Baptist Churches, Baptist Missionary Association, General Association of Regular Baptist Churches, Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and so on (but Primitive Baptists as well). So I was considering how these churches rooted in a strong Calvinistic tradition of the London and Philadelphia Confessions (like the SBC & ABCUSA) had pretty much by the end of the 19th century shed the strongest points of their Calvinism -- especially unconditional election, particular atonement and effectual call (irresistible grace).

I am considering this from an historical view, regardless of what one thinks of either position.

 

Here's one quote from Wayland, page 18:

"The extent of the atonement has been and still is a matter of honest but not unkind difference. Within the last fifty years a change has gradually taken place in the views of a large portion of our brethren. At the commencement of that period Gill's Divinity was a sort of standard, and Baptists imbibing his opinions were what may be called almost hyper-Calvinistic. A change commenced upon the publication of the writings of Andrew Fuller, especially his Gospel Worthy of all Acceptation, which, in the northern and eastern States, has become almost universal. The old view still prevails, if I mistake not, in our southern and western States."

Note, in Wayland's opinion the strict Calvinism had been mostly replaced in the North (the "Fullerism" view is "almost universal," he says) by the time he is writing circa 1856, and the change has taken place "within the last fifty years." On the other hand, he is of the opinion that the John Gill type of Calvinism still prevailed in the South.