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.”
“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.”
