About the Landmarks

[Salty]

What would you add:

What is Landmarkism? What is “Baptist Bride” theology? | GotQuestions.org

 

[37818]

What would you add:

What is Landmarkism? What is “Baptist Bride” theology? | GotQuestions.org

Well the article is wrong on the "one baptism" not being the water immersion. There is the singular teaching of "baptisms". The water, the Holy Spirit and fire. Two of the "one's" are "baptism" and "Spirit." To claim the one Spirit is the one baptism is to count the Spirit twice.

 

[rlvaughn]

I would add that the author paints with a broad brush, and sometimes contradictory information.

church succession—a landmark Baptist church traces its “lineage” back to the time of the New Testament, usually to Jesus’ calling of the disciples in Galilee

The church did not begin with John the Baptist but with the Spirit’s baptism on the Day of Pentecost

If the church is traced back to Jesus calling the disciples in Galilee (a common idea) it did not begin with John the Baptist (a claim I have never heard any landmark Baptist make, but which they are often accused of).

Another corollary belief is that only faithful landmark Baptists will comprise the Bride of Christ.

The author equates landmarkism with Baptist Bridism. While possibly all Baptist Briders would be landmarkers, not all landmarkers hold the Baptist Bride view.

landmark Baptists hold a closed communion; that is, only official members of their own local church are allowed to share in the ordinance of communion. No one, not even a Baptist, can partake of the Lord’s table away from his or her home church.

This is not a universal position among landmark Baptists. It might be the predominant view (not sure), but many landmark Baptists make scriptural baptism, not local church membership, the prerequisite for the Lord's supper.

Landmarkism had its beginning in 1851, when a group of Southern Baptists met to oppose the liberalism creeping into their denomination.

Partially true. Baptists who held some or all of these views obtained the label pejoratively (which they themselves embraced) after J. M. Pendleton wrote An Old Landmark Reset. Further, various researchers (such as Thomas Williamson) have shown the existence of these beliefs among Baptists long before 1851, J.R. Graves, and J. M. Pendleton. What J. R. Graves was successful in doing, in my opinion, was in synthesizing certain Baptist ecclesiological beliefs into one unified theological system (i.e., Landmarkism is a logical ecclesiological system is the same sense Calvinism is a logical soteriological system, premillennialism is a logical eschatological system, etc.).