Calvinist History of a Baptist Church

Your Calvinist Podcast is filmed before a live studio audience. And hello, yes, this is Your Calvinist Podcast, and I am Keith Foskey, and as always, I am Your Calvinist. I want to thank you for being with me today, and I have a very important subject that we're going to be talking about with one of my favorite pastors in the world, Dr. Michael Schultz, and I'm going to bring him in in just a moment.

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Introducing Dr. Michael Schultz and the Church History Topic

All right, that was all my introduction stuff. I want to no more delay, I want to bring in my good friend, Dr. Michael Schultz. Hey, Michael, how are you doing today, buddy? I'm all right. How's Dr. Keith Foskey today?

Yeah, I'm doing pretty good. I'm thankful that you're here. We're going to be talking about something that is really near and dear to your heart, because we're actually going to be talking about your particular church.

Real quick for the people who don't know you, can you tell us just a little bit about yourself, the church that you're in, how old it is, just a little history as we begin this conversation? Yeah.

My name is Michael Schultz. Again, you can say that on screen, but I came to Antioch Baptist Church in Western Kentucky here in Lewisburg, Kentucky in 2019. The church was founded in September of 1818.

The church, at that point, was in their 201st year. They had just celebrated their second centennial. It's a very historical church. They've done a really good job of maintaining what they've had. The sanctuary that we currently worship in was completed during the Civil War.

It is not marginal and very few updates and renovations, things like windows and the insertion of a baptismal pool. There's been some updates in that way, but most all of the sanctuary, as far as the bones of it and the general layout, is 150 years old.

The church is a very historical church in that way. Nice.

Nice. The title of today's show is Reclaiming Calvinistic Roots in a Historic Baptist Church. The reason why that's the title is because we're going to be talking about how you have discovered in your research of the church's history and the doctrines and the documents of the church's history that the church was once a Calvinistic Baptist church and had moved away from that.

What caused me to reach out to you on this is you actually sent to me and a few friends of ours, you showed a chart that you had created. On this chart, you showed an evolution of theology, which started with very conservative Calvinistic theology.

And then as you showed the transition to the different statements of faith that had been, I guess, published or agreed upon by the congregation over the last century and a half, it shows a progression of moving away from Calvinistic theology.

And you're sort of, in your heart, because you're a Calvinistic Baptist, you're trying to reestablish not something new, but rather going back to what was once there. And before we get to looking at the chart, and we are going to bring it up on the screen in a minute, I just wanted to kind of talk with you about the reality that there's a lot of accusations that come toward Calvinists, that one of the things that Calvinists do is that they come into churches and they come into non-Calvinistic churches and they, in the language, I'm using the language of those who say this, some people say we come into Calvinistic churches or non-Calvinistic churches and we steal them.

That's the language. It's sometimes very harsh that we're actually taking them, we're stealing them, and I mean, if you, I'll bring up Leighton. I know Leighton is a person that you and I have interacted with and have had good conversations with, but even Leighton has said in some of his videos that there are, and for those who don't know, I'm talking about Leighton Flier's Soteriology 101, and he would say that there are Baptists who come in who are, I'm sorry, Calvinists who come into Baptist churches unaware and they sort of sneak in and they're doing so for the purpose of sort of stealing the church.

Have you heard people say that? Have you ever had that accusation made toward you in any regard, or have you seen that accusation made towards other people?

The Church’s Calvinistic Roots and Founding Documents

Yeah, so when I first began at Antioch, and I began introducing some of these principles, maybe for the first time in a long time, but definitely not for the first time in our history, even some of our senior most members, these people that were well into their eighties, they began to, they would actually say to me, you're teaching us something that is new.

You're teaching us something that we've never heard before. This is some new thing that you've come up with. And initially what I was saying was, no, it's not that this is new, it's that this is so old.

Your grandparents never heard of it. Like this is a very, very old thing that I'm teaching to you. It's much older than what you believe. And so I'm not teaching some new thing. I'm teaching a very, very old thing.

But then really what got me across the bridge was I'm a historian by training up through my master's degree. All of my training had been in history. I had almost gotten no formal training in theology until I started with my MDiv.

So I'd always been a historian, and that was actually my aspiration was to be a professor of history, not a professor of theology or church history for that matter. So I started asking the church if they had any of their historical documents just because it's a very cool thing to be at such an old church with history.

And one of my deacons showed up with this page here, and it's not going to be able to be read on the video or anything. Not great, but it's a very old book. The cover of it is wood and it's held together by nails.

So this is actually the original ledger of the church. And these are the founding documents, and it's got the original signatures of the founding presbytery. And so I thought, this is unfathomable that they still have this.

And when I started looking into their history, I looked at their statement of faith and I thought, these guys believed exactly what I do. And so that started this whole process where and when I pulled that out and laid it out on our communion table for service, I said, guys, you need to see this, that this is where the church was founded.

And I even at one point, this is something that I've pulled back on because our church isn't ready for it yet. But when I started introducing the concept of a plurality of elders, I had people saying to me, well, no, that's what presbyterians do.

We don't do that. And we've never had elders. And then I look at the documents and I say, well, no, for the first, say, hundred years of our church, they referred to the pastor as Elder Conyers or Elder Tatum.

This is our history. And so it was a very shocking realization for a lot of the people at our church to say, oh, this isn't something new.

It's something very, very old. That's really cool. And you mentioned in the document, you mentioned that the word presbytery, is that a word that Baptists have used? Again, I'm showing a little ignorance here.

I've studied Baptist history a little, but have we used the word presbytery? They do use the word presbytery.

In their founding document, the way that they address themselves, this plurality of elders, they actually begin by saying September the 26th, 1818, we the undernamed presbytery, having met to look into the ability of our brethren at Antioch Meeting House.

And so they consider themselves as a group of elders to be a presbytery. And you'll see later when we get into the discussion of the statement, in their ecclesiology, they refuse for anybody to perform.

They won't allow anybody to oversee the ordinances unless they have come under the imposition of hands by the presbytery. So unless you've been formally ordained by this presbytery, they won't let you oversee the ordinances.

So, yeah, they use that word quite liberally.

Wow. OK, well, that's interesting. Well, what I want to do, and we're going to pull this up here on the screen, and I hope that everybody's able to see it. I want to actually show some of the progression.

But I guess before we do that, let me let me just back up before I, because I don't want to put the cart before the horse. When did you begin this, this putting this this chart together and how long did it take you to put everything together?

And how many statement of faiths are we looking at here in this in this chart that we're about to look at? So kind of give everybody a little context of the chart.

Yeah. So this chart that you're about to see, to my knowledge, these are the three statements of faith that our church has formally accepted in our 200 year history. The initial one is the founding statement of faith from 1818.

The second one you'll see in the middle column is the first revision ever that was written in 1843. And then the third one is wildly recent. It was written in 1984. So I started looking for these when I was at our church.

I'm doing a history of our church, and this is in part so that people can understand really where we've come from and how we got to where we were and where I'm hoping that we'll get back to. But the 1818 statement wasn't written by us.

In my research, what I found is that in 17, what was it, 1742, when the Philadelphia Baptist Confession was formally published and accepted by the Philadelphia Baptist Association, which for those of you that aren't familiar with all these confessions, the Philadelphia Confession of 1742 was the 1689, but the psalm singing and laying hands, they wanted to add those things in because that was very important to some of the Welsh believers that had moved to America and create the Philadelphia Baptist Confession.

But as the revolutionary war ended, they start flooding over the Appalachian Allegheny Mountains and all of these frontier preachers, they don't have access to carry a full confession of faith. Printing was very rare.

It was expensive and they didn't have access to that kind of thing. They also didn't have the time to sit and memorize, you know, 32 chalk document. So what they did in 1791 was the Philadelphia Association put together an abstract of principles that was 12 very short statements that explained what they believed, and it could be printed on a single sheet of paper or it could be written by hand or you could memorize it.

Those 12 abstracts of principles are the 1818 statement that we have here at Antioch. So it is directly taken from the Philadelphia Baptist Association. It's a straight line between our church and the 1689, and there's a lot of reasons why.

Is that the same abstract of principles that's used at Southern Seminary that is that all the professors have to sign?

No, this is much older. The abstract of principles that's used at Southern was written in 1858. So this is almost a century older.

Well, that's helpful. Great, because I would have heard the name and I guess just assumed at least a length there. Where does that just historically. Curiosity gets me? Where do they where do their abstract of principles draw from?

Or is it just I know what was it Boyce who wrote that?

That's right. Yeah, James Pettigrew Boyce. He wrote that right around that same time. And it's also based off of the Philadelphia Confession, but it was original to him. They didn't take it from the Philadelphia Association.

All right, well, let's look at the first page here. I'm going to bring it up on the screen for everyone and hopefully everybody will be able to see it nice and clearly. This is the Antioch document 1818, the 1843 and the 1894.

And as you can see, as you're looking at this, there are some places where there are blanks. And the reason why there are blanks, I'm assuming, Michael, is because there are places where one document says something about a particular doctrine and the other document simply doesn't say it in or it's in another part of the document.

Maybe. Am I getting that correct? Yeah. OK, so what I found interesting right away looking at this is that the 1818 and the 1843 have a doctrine of God. Both of them have a what seems to be a reference to the Trinity.

Yeah. So it's not written as in this is our doctrine of God. The numbers that are next to them actually recognize the way that they were written in that statement. So you'll see like in the 1818, number one and number two are separated.

The same thing with 1843, but as later points in the document, you'll see they're out of order. And that's just because the way that I've arranged them by doctrine, it's a little different.

Gotcha. Well, do you think what do you think really happened in 84? Because again, when you look at this, you'll see the 84 is really quite different. Do you think it was a really a getting away from Calvinism?

Do you think maybe there was, do you know? I mean, maybe in your study of the history, what caused this evolution in this shift? Was there people that were rising up against Calvinism? Was this just an acquiescence to the time?

Or I know maybe you can't read the minds of people 40 years ago, but just kind of wondering because leaving out the doctrine of God seems odd to me. I don't know.

Yeah. So the big shift occurs actually with the 1843. They set the church on an entirely different trajectory. And so by the time you get to the 1984, the church has followed what we would maybe call traditional Southern Baptist doctrine, where for the longest time, Southern Baptists, they were not Calvinist.

The original Southern Baptists, late 1800s, were by and large Calvinist. But most of the 20th century, they weren't because they came under the influence of E .Y. Mullins. E .Y. Mullins was a, by most any reckoning, he was a Northern Baptist that ended up being the president of the Southern Baptist 20th century.

He was the head honcho that oversaw the 1925 Baptist faith and message. And he really influenced that a lot. The reason that the 1984 doesn't have a doctrine of God, but it has a rather lengthy doctrine of Christ that doesn't appear in the other two, is because Southern Baptists specifically, and Antioch joined the SBC in 1929 or 28, Southern Baptists specifically were engaging this difficult idea that's now called Christomonism.

And it was the idea that the entire Bible should be read in such a way that you're trying to reconcile everything with Christ. So we would see types and shadows of Jesus all through the Old Testament, and you'll see, obviously, the spirit of Christ running through the new.

But what it turned into was if there was something in the Old Testament or anywhere in the Bible, actually, that people said didn't line up with the spirit of Christ, this person that they believed Christ to be, they started trying to figure out how to reckon that.

And it turned into this hyper-dispensational, well, the God of the Old Testament was a God without grace, and that's why some of those things look that way, while the God of the New Testament is a God with grace.

The most extreme form of it found its way through in people who said, if passages don't align with the spirit of Christ, then they're not inspired because they don't actually represent Jesus. And so you'll see there in 1984 that influence of the everything has to align with Jesus in that they don't even define themselves as Trinitarian.

They encompass their entire doctrine of God around Jesus himself. So, yeah, you can see there they no longer even have a statement on the Trinity. They simply believe in the Lordship of Christ as the eternal Son of God.

And they only refer to the Father and the Spirit insofar as they relate to Jesus. So everything's about Jesus. And that was a movement in the SBC that really took a lot of very careful work to find our way out of.

But that's probably what Antioch was being influenced by in 84, was everything has to align with Jesus and it's all about Jesus.

Scripture, Salvation, and the Move Away from Calvinism

All right, cool. All right. So that gives at least some explanation to this first part. Now, again, the doctrine of Scripture, the first two, we believe the Scripture of the Old and New Testaments are the word of God.

And then the word infallible is in the second article. But then by the third, by Antioch 84, we see the Bible to be the inspired written word of God, our supreme and sufficient source of authority for faith and practice.

We believe both the Old and New Testaments to be verbally inspired by God and to be without error in the original writings. Now, I would actually and I'm one of those guys who I like that they actually use the term the original autographs there.

And that's something that our statement references that because of the issues of textual variation and things like that, that are now, I guess, a little more frequently discussed in the conversation of when we talk about verbal inspiration and plenary inspiration and things like that.

So I actually I'm fine with the 84. So when you redraft for your new, are you thinking of how will you redraft that one? Or will that one mention the original autographs? Or you guys have a different view on that?

Or what's your thoughts?

Yeah. So their statement on the doctrine of Scripture in 1984 is probably better than the first two. Like you're saying, I'm with that. And that's probably, again, the result of engaging problems and heresies.

Please excuse me. So they had a better understanding of what they needed to say to specify in order to battle against these problems that were being faced. A lot of it also has to do with the fact that in 1818 and 1843, a lot of what we would call the ancient manuscripts were either not found yet or they didn't know about them.

It was not widespread knowledge that we had documents from the second and third and fourth centuries. They didn't know. They were operating with King James Version and that's the Bible. So, you know, now that we're a little more informed, I think we can make a more informed statement on that.

Are you guys King James? Not necessarily King James only, but do you guys use the King James as your normal translation for worship? Or what is that? What's your tradition on that?

When I arrived at Antioch, they used the King James Version, and so did I. That was actually something that we all transitioned together because I had always used the King James coming out of a more independent fundamental Baptist background.

The King James was just the language that I spoke. But one of the things here at Antioch that was unique is that when I arrived, being out here, and this is going to feed into some stereotypes, but it is nevertheless the case.

Anecdotally, in our case, there was a real problem out here with illiteracy and there still is both in young people and in full grown adults and in seniors. There was there was a sizable amount of our community that fully could not read or write.

And so using the King James Version was an active impediment to getting people to actually read the Bible, because not only were they not overly fluent in reading and writing anyway, but when you are introducing to them a text that is written in the 17th century, it is even more difficult when they're using words that no one uses today.

I mean, what does this even mean now that I can read it? I still don't get it. So we transitioned. We spent a year just preparing for a transition from the King James over the English Standard Version, not for any purposes of textual preference, although I do have textual preferences.

The church transitioned not for those reasons, but just for the sake of understandability. So we did transition from the King James in 2021.

Original Sin, Election, and Free Will in the Church’s Confessions

Well, when we get to page two of the statement here, this is where it really starts to hit on the issues that we would say are Calvinistic in nature. And so what I wanted to do is to just sort of read through these and show how we would understand them.

Looking at the doctrine of sin, it says in the original statement, which was the 1818 statement, it says, we believe in the doctrine of original sin. Now, that's a simple way of saying it. I mean, in the next one, it's clearer what's being said.

We believe that Adam, our representative by disobedience, became dead and trespasses in sin. Therefore, by the offense of one man, judgment came upon all men to condemnation for all have sinned. I actually like that.

I think that's a little more expressive about what was being said. But then we get to 84, and there's nothing about original sin. It's just a blank. And then again, it goes to salvation being a gift, but it doesn't reference anything about where sin came from or what the doctrine of sin is.

Excuse me. So then you get to the doctrine of salvation. And it's interesting that you have a blank on the first, but then you have these two spots where there are blanks. And it's like there's no doctrine of salvation in those because the doctrine of salvation is going to come in under the doctrine of election.

And so it's interesting. I mean, if you look at it, it's like blank, blank, or information, information, no information, then no information. It's just like it was like they were intentionally one going one direction and the other.

And the doctrine of salvation from the 84 statement says, we believe salvation is the gift of God's grace and is received when one repents of sin and places his faith and trust in Christ Jesus as Lord and Savior.

I mean, I wouldn't disagree with that statement. It just, you know, I mean, it's not like it's wrong. It's just it's sort of in one sense seems to be taking out the necessary prerequisite. And that's what are you saved from?

So when you're looking at this, what do you what are your thoughts about that part?

Yeah, their movement with the 84 statements and just try to dodge everything. But when I don't think that they had any knowledge of those former statements at all when they wrote the 84, to my knowledge, I'm the first person to go back and try to look at these early statements.

You know, they are clearly based on what you're going to see at the bottom of that page doctrine of free will. They're very clearly anti-Calvinist. They have no desire to be associated with anything relatively approaching Calvinism.

And like you said, on the doctrine of salvation that they define, I had to create that category because, like you mentioned, it just it's you couldn't call that a doctrine of election, but it's it's nothing else.

And the other statements just define salvation under the confines of election. That moves very oddly from 1818 to 1843. There's a there's an outbreak and it was the fact that here in Logan County, Kentucky, where we are in 1801, 1800 and 1801, we had what they called the Red River Revival with the Second Great Awakening.

That's that's the major revival that really threw all of that to the forefront. That was here in our backyard. And out of that movement came Alexander Campbell, who founded the Church of Christ, although at the time they were called Campbellites.

And he was Baptistic. He was a credo Baptist, but he eschewed any sort of historical Christian faith. He was one of the first guys to say no creed, but the Bible, no confession, but Christ. And so as they're throwing off historical Christianity, they go about rewriting a lot of statements of faith.

And evidently, Antioch came under the influence of a lot of those guys. You can see it in a lot of different ways. For example, in their doctrine of God, they they stop referring to the Holy Ghost as the Holy Ghost.

They just call him spirit. They don't even call him the spirit or the Holy Spirit. They just call him spirit. They move away from Calvinism because Campbell was not a Calvinist. Their doctrine of election takes out the idea that God chose the elect before the foundation of the world, because Alexander Campbell believed that when you got baptized, you became elect.

So that was something that happened in time. And then in their ecclesiology in 1818, they said nobody's allowed to oversee the ordinances except people who have been ordained by the presbytery. Well, Campbellites didn't believe that.

So they took that out and they said, we believe in baptism by immersion. And that was it. And anybody's allowed to baptize. So they had this big influx of Campbellites that came in that influenced that statement.

And from that point forward, they set Antioch on a trajectory that was away from Calvinism. But we're very fortunate that we didn't just turn into the Church of Christ.

Well, looking at the page again, looking at this the second page, let's look at the doctrine of election, because the original statement said we believe in the doctrine of election and that God has chose his people in Christ before the foundation of the world.

Obviously, as a Calvinist, I would affirm that. But then it says in the second document, we believe in the doctrine of election by grace, by grace or we save through faith. Again, that's a very that's that's a much different, if you will, much less stated.

I think most whether they're, you know, I think most people would agree with that, whether they're Calvinistic or not, you know, doctrine of election by grace, by grace, we're saved through faith. OK, but then there's nothing in the in the last one.

But where we see the real divergence, like you said, is here on the doctrine of free will. In the first document, it says we believe in man's impotency, meaning inability to recover himself from the fallen state he is in by nature, by his own free will and ability.

I like that. That's that's that's that's that's saying it, saying what the issue is. The issue is man is in a state of inability, impotency, but there's nothing in the middle. But then at the end, we get this.

We believe that every individual is responsible for choosing his own eternal destiny. Man, what a statement to say that. I mean, that just comes out and says it choosing his own eternal destiny and is free to make such a choice.

No person is predestined to eternal life or eternal death without his own choosing. Boy, I have rarely read such a bold assertion of the freedom of the will. I mean, that that's just that that's absolutely I mean, in my mind, it's bonkers.

But I don't want to be too abrasive. But I mean, just to say every man chooses his own eternal destiny. I don't even think provisionists would say that necessarily in that way.

Yeah, no, it's a 100 percent reversal from where they were. And but and you'll notice there, I can't fathom even just saying no person is predestined just to say those words, because the you know, make what you will of the doctrine of predestination.

I was educated at a non reform, non Calvinist seminary. And the way that they taught election was they said God has elected people in Christ. And so anyone who is in Christ will ultimately be saved. That's God's election.

But then God has left it up to us to find our way into Christ. And so once we make it into Christ, then we are in the body that he decided before the world would be elect. That's a very different doctrine of predestination than what we would hold.

But you still have a doctrine of predestination that God has predestined this body of people. But this statement, they just out now say there is no such thing as predestination. And I look at that and I go, where in the world would you justify that biblically?

I mean, the the word predestination is a biblical word. You've got to do something with it. So you can't just say we don't believe in predestination. That's you cannot be a Christian and not believe in predestination.

That's that's a biblical doctrine. So you have to do something with it. But to just say no person is predestined, like, well, that means that's nothing. You have left no room for anything in the Bible to correct what you believe.

All right. The doctrine of the free offer of the gospel. So this is this is the the one where it's the opposite of what just came before, because what came before there was a the middle was left out. Well, now the two other ends, there's nothing on the first or the last, but something in the middle that says we believe that Jesus Christ came in the world to save sinners and he offered himself a sacrifice for our sins and not ours only, but also for the whole world.

Obviously, a reference there to First John's reference that he's a propitiation not only for us, but for the sins of the whole world. And that's usually that passage is used as as in opposition to Calvinism.

And I've done videos on that before and how Calvinists understand it. But do you think in a way, looking back at what came before it, that maybe that was that was sort of moving toward the free will position by by saying, hey, you know, Christ is a sacrifice and he's a sacrifice for the whole world.

Therefore, the whole world is it's an open opportunity for everyone kind of thing. Is that what you see there?

Yeah, definitely. And at the very best, they've moved into a breed of Calvinism that's much closer to Andrew Fuller. So for I'm sure you're familiar with his position, but for the audience that may not be Andrew Fuller was what we would call a four point Calvinist because he believed in general atonement.

He didn't believe in limited atonement. He believed in a particular application of the atonement. And so they seem to be favoring that there in the 1843. And that is the result of cultural union between what they used to call regular Baptists and separate Baptists.

The separate Baptists largely were non-Calvinist. The regular Baptists were almost universally Calvinist. And in 1801, those guys came together and they formed what they called the United Baptists or the Union Baptists.

And one of the resolutions that they made to unite was that you could be a part of their group and still believe that Christ tasted death for every man. So that that's a recognition of that. But it is definitely a move away from five point Calvinism at a minimum and probably a move toward Arminianism as I'm going to call it.

Maybe not full fledged Arminianism. Now, there's a context to this that pertains. See, and we were founded in 1818. In 1820, they tried to ordain a deacon named John Driscoll and they got all the way to the Ordination Council and they discover a statement of faith.

And so they refused to ordain him. Now, the fourth article of the Statement of Faith back on the front page is the Doctrine of Election. So this guy, John Driscoll, who they wanted to ordain as a deacon was probably not a Calvinist, but they they wouldn't ordain him because he wasn't a Calvinist.

In 1821, the very next year, there was another guy named Zachariah Duncan and they wanted to ordain him as a deacon. But again, they get all the way to the Ordination Council and they say he does not believe in the fourth article of the Statement of Faith.

And so they don't ordain him. So in the early years, they were so thoroughly Calvinist that they would not even ordain you as a deacon if you were not a Calvinist. But in 1843, when the Statement of Faith is the 1843 Statement of Faith, the president consisted of a guy named John Conyers and then John Driscoll, Zachariah Duncan and one other fellow.

So those two guys that they wouldn't ordain as deacons because they were not Calvinist had stuck around 25 years. And when they rewrote the Statement of Faith, those two guys are two of the four presbyters.

They would take out anything that they disagreed with in the original statement. And you'll see there now in the Doctrine of the Free Offer of the Gospel probably why they disagreed with it. Contextually, again, from the broader culture around us, the war that was going on at this point was between what we now call missionary Baptists and what they labeled then as anti-missionary Baptists.

And it had a lot to do with Calvinism. There were some Calvinists who were going into what we call hyper-Calvinism. Well, they didn't believe in presenting the gospel to someone unless they had already shown that the Spirit of God was drawing them, which is a weird thought, but that's a historical problem that Calvinists have faced.

And so in Kentucky, specifically in our area, there was a huge falling out between people who believe that you should present the gospel and people who believe that you shouldn't. And unfortunately, it became divided on the lines of Calvinism.

A lot of the Calvinists were saying, no, you should not present the gospel. And the people who believed in presenting the gospel took that to mean if you're a Calvinist, you don't believe in missions.

And this is also around the same time as the development of Baptist mission boards, both in England and here in America with the Triennial Convention. Luther Rice is campaigning for mission funding. Adenyrum and Ann Judson have left to go to Burma.

Unfortunately, a lot of the Calvinists of the era really did not believe in doing mission work. And since then, we don't. It was, you are a Calvinist and you don't believe in missions, so we reject Calvinism.