Is it true that Baptists go back to John the Baptist?

Daniel, I agree. I am really wondering if there were consistently schismatic groups with relatively sound theology. It bothers me that the Church fell into such apostasy.

 

The Catholic, Methodist and Dutch Reform Church Historians all claim that Baptist have been around since anywhere from 100 AD to Jesus Christ.

Do not have time to quote them now will later.

Just remember they have not always been called Baptist, because that is a name given to us by thoses who hated us.

Richard

 

Charlie,

What amazes me is that those who claim perpetuity so narrowly define what it means to have "true doctrine" that they wouldn't consider me a baptist (though I have been one all my life). And yet they find themselves and their beliefs in ancient heresies. What it means to be the true church theologically is not primarily tied to absolutely uniform doctrine. "Whereever Christ is, it should not be doubted that there is the Church."

 

A historically balanced book on Baptist history is Leon McBeth's "Baptist Heritage" (I think that's the title. I don't have it in front of me.).

 

Here are some qoutes from other than Baptist on when and how long they have been around.

Cardinal Hosius (Catholic, 1524), President of the Council of Trent:
"Were it not that the baptists have been grievously tormented and cut off with the knife during the past twelve hundred years, they would swarm in greater number than all the Reformers." (Hosius, Letters, Apud Opera, pp. 112, 113.)

Sir Isaac Newton:
"The Baptists are the only body of known Christians that have never symbolized with Rome."

Mosheim (Lutheran):
"Before the rise of Luther and Calvin, there lay secreted in almost all the countries of Europe persons who adhered tenaciously to the principles of modern Dutch Baptists."

Edinburg Cyclopedia (Presbyterian):
"It must have already occurred to our readers that the Baptists are the same sect of Christians that were formerly described as Ana-Baptists. Indeed this seems to have been their leading principle from the time of Tertullian to the present time."

Tertullian was born just fifty years after the death of the Apostle John.

 

They were just using him as a reference to a date.

 

It seems to me that most of the constroversies amongst Baptists and as Christians in general deal with doctrinal disputes and semantics more so than the Bible and various interpretations of scripture. It can be quite confusing to non-believers and believers alike when they see Christians arguing amongst themselves when they all profess to believe in the same God. I've come to notice that most of it is mainly political and legalistic rather than spiritual or moral. Many of us will based or try to base our view of the world including our politics on what we have read in the Bible. How can it be then that some Baptists are Democrat, others are Republicans and yet others Libertarian, independent, etc... When it is all said and done, your personal relationship with Christ is what matters most.

Walter Shurden had some things to say about this in a speech he gave in 1996 to the Baptist Joint Committee:

In the United States one can count 28,921,564 individual Baptists in 122,811 local churches in 63 different denominational bodies.1 Worldwide one can identify 37,334,191 Baptists in 157,240 local Baptist churches.2 Those are impressive statistics of no small measure. So why then does that idiosyncratic Baptist Farmer Preacher, Will Campbell, say in several of his books that not many Baptists exist any longer? What Campbell means, I gather, is that not many Baptists continue to act out of the muscular Baptist tradition of freedom, including religious liberty and separation of church and state.

Walker Percy, the psychiatrist turned novelist, was, for my money, one of the most prophetic and perceptive readers of American life in the last half of the twentieth century. Here is what Percy said about the Baptists he knew in the deep South. He said they are a group of evangelistically repulsive anti-Catholics who are political opportunists advocating scientific creationism in the public school system.

Baptists came from the womb of the seventeenth century English Reformation and landed immediately in hostile territory. Almost twenty-five years ago I published a little book titled Not A Silent People: Controversies That Have Shaped Southern Baptists. Some may recall that I titled the very first chapter “Here Come the Battling Baptists.” After twenty-five years I remain convinced of the appropriateness of the title of the first chapter to describe the emergence of Baptists as a distinct denomination.

How did Baptists get to these heady ideas of religious freedom for absolutely everybody and separation of church and state for both the good of the church and the good of the state? As I said, there is no question that Baptists got there. How did they?

I will suggest that Baptists finally got that way because of three factors. First, Baptists got that way because they were birthed in adversity. Second, Baptists got that way because their peculiar Christian convictions and common sense encouraged theological diversity. Third, Baptists got that way on religious liberty and separation of church and state because, birthed in adversity and with Christian convictions encouraging theological diversity, they inevitably sealed their convictions by engaging in political activity. They got that way because of their birthing, their believing, and their way of being in the world.

Religious freedom, said the early Baptists, is rooted in the nature of God. A Sovereign God who dared to create people as free beings is portrayed in the Bible as a liberating Deity. Throughout the Old Testament, God is set against persons and institutions that restricted the freedom of God’s people. And the complete thrust of Jesus’ ministry was to free people from all that would hold them back from obedience to God. Freedom for Baptists was far more than a constitutional right or a governmental gift. God, not nations or courts or human law, is the ultimate source of liberty.

First, how did the world come together for Baptists biblically? That is, how did they read their Bibles?

Second, how did the world come together for Baptists theologically? How did they think about God and humanity?

Third, how did the world come together for Baptists ecclesiologically? How did they think about the church?

Fourth, how did the world come together for Baptists philosophically? With what kind of common sense did they approach life in general?

And fifth, how did the world come together for Baptists historically? How did they read human history?

In no place in Baptist life does one see political engagement by the entire denomination better than in America in the work of Baptist associations in the eighteenth century. The temptation in Baptist historiography has been to isolate the accomplishments of salient individuals without recognizing and giving due credit to the denominational context within in which the individuals worked. John Leland cannot be understood apart from his work on behalf of associations in both Virginia and New England. Isaac Backus, likewise, cannot be properly appraised apart from the Warren Association.

Here is my point: The Baptist fight to disestablish state churches was not a political fray which courageous individuals entered alone; it was a melee in which the entire denomination was involved. Many Baptists in America may have forgotten that it was the struggle for religious liberty and the struggle for an educated ministry which first brought Baptists in America together. Foreign missions is often given that credit, but that is to read later affections back into early Baptist history. Not until William Carey and 1792 did Baptists get together on global missions. Years prior to Carey, Baptists had been plugging away for soul liberty.

Interestingly, it is on issues of religious liberty that Baptists of America still cooperate more than they do on any other issue. It has been an ecumenical force for Baptist life for most of Baptist history. Their denominational cooperation in lobbying on behalf of religious liberty and separation of church and state has made them more committed to the concepts for which they lobbied.

How We Got That Way

[ November 17, 2002, 09:55 AM: Message edited by: christianliberty1976 ]

 

I have been looking into Baptist history my self and have been told that the trail of blood by J. M. Carrol is not true. especialy the part about cardinal hosius. dose anyone have any insight on this

 

This kind of speculation is unprofitable. The authority of the church comes through the word of God, not the "endless genealogy" of successionism.