Lecture 25: Baptists and Quakers

Baptists and Quakers .......................................................................

Lecture 25

We begin Part III of the course as we continue our treatment of

Protestant theology, but we take it beyond the 16th century, beyond the

origination of Protestant theology in the Reformation, and we’ll trace

the Protestant theological tradition through modernity in our next set

of lectures.

T

he Baptists originated in the early 17th century in England as Puritan

Separatists who rejected infant baptism. They are not the same as the

Anabaptists, though the two have much in common. Both Anabaptists

and Baptists reject infant baptism, insisting that only believers can properly

be baptized. Both arose initially from Reformed theology, the Anabaptists in

Switzerland and the Baptists in England. Both draw what they regard as the

logical inference from the Reformed rejection of baptismal regeneration: If we

are not born again through baptism, then there is no reason for infants to be

baptized. More fundamentally, they see no basis for infant baptism in scripture.

Both came to insist that baptism requires full immersion in water, not just

sprinkling. Both reject the underlying Catholic notion of sacraments as a means

or instruments of grace. Both are at the end of the Protestant spectrum farthest

from Catholicism, the left wing end of the spectrum. Both were persecuted.

In fact, the Baptist church was illegal when it ¿ rst arose. The earliest Baptist

congregations had contacts with Anabaptists in the Netherlands.

What distinguishes Baptists is their Puritan Separatist (or Congregationalist)

origins. Whereas Anabaptists rejected Christendom, Baptists rejected the

national church. In early Baptist theology, as in the Puritan Separatists,

the church is a local congregation of covenanted believers. This means

the church is a voluntary society, not based on geographical parishes but

on a regenerate church membership. In their struggle to win freedom from

government persecution, the Baptists became leaders in the ¿ ght for religious

liberty for all, both in England and America.

There is great variety in Baptist theology, but also certain characteristically

Baptist topics of debate. It is often hard to generalize about the large variety