Baptist History - Part 1

Sovereign Grace Family Church

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Finishing up this series on church history, it seemed like a good time to kind of address this.

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Two weeks ago, if you weren't, if you didn't hear that, the meat of the bones, after the fact, the people who were, we've got a lot to cover, be kind of speedy through some of this, hopefully.

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There's been a lot of things said, as we look back in history, we'll see was greatly fallen, in some cases, to various different beliefs.

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But we're going to look at, we're going to look back, we're talking about an entire false belief.

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I say conservatism, there have been men who have left it, taking key positions in various seminaries, who would consider it to be true doctrine.

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The doctrines that we hold to very much of this church.

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The doctrines of grace.

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It's growing, and there's still this growing movement within this other.

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During these lessons, I want to focus all the history we talk about, in pointing out three basic truths about the Baptists.

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First, Baptists have been overwhelmingly Reformed in their doctrinal system.

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The idea of a Reformed Baptist is not new by any stretch of the imagination.

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In fact, the original Baptists, we'll see in history, there were some, they eventually fell, but they've always been Reformed.

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Calvinism is not new to the Baptist church, I can assure you.

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The second thing is that Baptists have been confessional since their beginnings.

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I say confessional, and we'll get into this a little bit.

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In other words, they have always sought to defend the doctrines they believed in, through the use of confessions of faith.

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Two of them the pastor addressed a couple of weeks ago.

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There are dozens more I've got to get to.

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The third thing is that Baptists and the church in general have flourished the most in times of great persecution.

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As we look back on history and see what's went on in the church, there were some amazing times of persecution.

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Times where these men dealt with things.

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And so, the American notion we have that the Christian life is supposed to be comfortable, these guys didn't know about that.

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So, with that material I'll share with you.

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Much smarter men have blazed it.

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So, this is the system he uses to give an overview of Baptist theology.

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It's four points, and I'll write them up here.

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Why do I say Baptists are orthodox? Well, a couple of things.

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First of all, they're orthodox in their understanding of God as a revealing God.

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Baptists don't believe that God created the world, and then stepped back and set it spinning, and said, to conceive of a God, creation itself is an act of revelation, so it would be hard to imagine a God.

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The second thing is they're orthodox concerning the Trinity.

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With few exceptions, there were some of the deity of Christ, and again, there were some...

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The Baptists are evangelical in contrast to many heirs of the Reformation period, who we would call sacramental.

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And so, this holds it out by several doctrinal beliefs.

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We'll just look at a couple of them.

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First of all, justification by faith.

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While there are some challenges to this throughout the years, the central Baptist belief has been one of justification by faith alone.

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Again, Baptists do not believe in salvation by works or by sacraments.

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That's pretty clear.

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I don't think you would find many Baptist churches today or back then who would argue that.

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Second thing is the immediacy and necessity of the Spirit's work for salvation.

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Baptists have always held that the work of the Holy Spirit was necessary for salvation.

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Without regeneration by the Spirit, man is entirely unable to come to a belief in God.

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So again, a pretty orthodox position there.

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There would be some argument about where that comes into play, depending on which camp they were in, but ultimately, the Holy Spirit is necessary for regeneration.

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Third, the necessity and the completeness of the work in Christ, work of Christ.

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Baptists historically hold an orthodox view of the completed work of Christ on the cross.

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There's no need for a further sacrifice.

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Christ's work at the cross was perfect and achieved its intended purpose.

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Again, there are some discussions of the extent of the atonement.

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I think most of you in the room are familiar with the Calvinist versus the Armenian position of that, but we'll get to that a little later.

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Fourth thing, conversion above nurture.

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As above when we talked about the work of the Spirit, there must be a specific time of conversion that's present before nurture could come into play.

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What I mean by that is we can't disciple someone to becoming a believer without them first being regenerate.

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No one can work their way to salvation.

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It's another way of saying there is no workspace salvation.

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Those are some characteristics of Baptists as evangelicals.

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The third one, and we've talked about this before, Baptists are confessional and catechetical.

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They use catechisms.

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There are many examples of this throughout history.

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We've got roughly 500 years of history.

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We could pull confessions and catechisms from.

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A lot of people think that catechisms are strictly limited to certain denominations.

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Catechism were widely used in the Baptist Church up until probably around 50 or 60 years ago.

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A great tool that they use for educating children on doctrine as well as adults.

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Great for new believers.

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It's a great systematic way to go through the things we believe much like a confession is.

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They were confessional but not creedal.

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In other words, there's never been a specific creed of ordination for Baptists.

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Even today in the Southern Baptist Convention, if you are ordained as a minister of the Southern Baptist Convention, it's because you're ordained by a local church that is a part of the convention.

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The convention does not hold a specific ordination process.

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They have been corporately confessional.

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And this is what we've already said several ways.

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They've used confessions to define the body of an individual church and their beliefs.

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We know the Second London Baptist Confession is widely held by a lot of Baptist churches or was at one point.

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Many churches use their own.

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The Southern Baptist Convention now has the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, which is the most recent revision of that.

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But they've always used confessions to say, this is what we believe because it's important.

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If you're going to be a part of a church, shouldn't you know what they believe? Because by membership, you're implicitly saying, I agree.

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They've been individually confessional.

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I say that to mean that there's an expectation of every believer who desires membership in a local Baptist church to make a confession as evidence of their conversion.

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In other words, we would say there was a time in my life where I came to an understanding that I was a sinner in need of salvation.

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And by the work of the Spirit, they would make their confession of faith.

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We do this similarly when someone joins the church.

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We ask them, you know, do they believe? So individually confessional.

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The fourth thing, and this is, Dr.

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Nettles has this great phrase that eventually you start to understand after you read it a few hundred times.

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He says that Baptists have a theologically coherent ecclesiology.

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What that means is that the body of the beliefs of the Baptist drives how their churches are formed and how their churches function.

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So that separates us from other churches.

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Obviously, what you believe about baptism will dictate how your church is formed.

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You know, do you hold to infant baptism or believer's baptism? That's going to make a difference in how your church shapes up.

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So they have a theologically coherent ecclesiology.

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I'll give you an example of how this works.

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The belief in the early church, the belief was that the church was comprised of visible saints only.

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So that led them to believe that there should only be a regenerate church membership.

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Now remember, and we'll get into this, we're talking about a time when there was a state church and you were a part of that church because it was the church.

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And so they believed that the church should only be made up of believers.

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Well, if you believe that the church should only be made up of believers, that leads you eventually down the road to believing in baptism of believers only.

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Because by baptism, they're accepting people into membership of the church.

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That leads to an understanding that there should be discipline within the local congregation.

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Because if your congregation is formed of these people, you have to have some method of maintaining discipline.

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That leads to the understanding that there should be no interference or special favor from the magistrates.

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In other words, the government should not tell us how to constitute our church.

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The government can't say, you have to go to this church and be a part of it.

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That's not a true church.

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So in four pretty brief points there, that's a basic overview of historical Baptist theology.

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There's a lot more that needs to be said and could be said, but unfortunately I don't have time tonight to unpack for you every tenant of Baptist theology there is.

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But it gives us an overview and an understanding that now we can use to turn our events, turn to the events that shaped the Baptist church in England.

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And so now we're going to really go into, is everybody done with this? Anybody need this? I'll tell you guys ahead of time, we're going to hit a whole lot of dates and names tonight.

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The good news is there's not a test for you.

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There was for me.

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But I don't expect you to remember every time.

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I don't.

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That's why I have notes in front of me.

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I couldn't just write all this off.

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So I'll try and give them to you on the board so we get kind of an idea of the progression of things.

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In our recent study of church history and elsewhere, we've covered the Protestant Reformation and all that was involved in that.

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Specifically, I think at length we covered the work of the magisterial reformers.

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Those include Calvin, Luther, Zwingli.

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These were people who sought to reform the church from within the confines of or with the aid of the state.

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And so during this time period with all that was going on, men searching out scripture because they realized that the church was so far away from what it should have been and men starting to see the difference in what the Bible held out and what the church looked like.

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That led some people to start having a discussion about infant baptism.

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Is this in the Bible? Is this scriptural? It became apparent to some people that there was no scriptural warrant for infant baptism.

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And because of that and other concerns they had at the time, they felt that the only path to true reform was to separate from the established church.

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And so we have what are called separatists.

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They've come to the belief that the only way to truly reform the church is we have to separate from the established state church.

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We have to form a new church.

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During all this swirling around of discord and this time period, the Anabaptist movement comes forth.

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And the Anabaptists were part of a category of people called radical reformers.

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So when we talk about the Reformation, we have the magisterial reformers, we have the radical reformers.

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I'll tell you that the term radical reformer was not a term of endearment.

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It wasn't like, oh, these guys are radical.

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It was an epithet, if anything.

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The term Anabaptist literally means re-baptizer.

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They were called such because they rejected infant baptism.

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And so many of them who had been baptized as infants were re-baptized as adults because they came to believe that that was the only true baptism was a believer's baptism.

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And so an important thing for us to understand when talking about Baptist history, you will hear some people say the Baptists came from the Anabaptists.

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That's a gross oversimplification of the truth and really is not very accurate when you look at it.

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They certainly had a massive role and a crucial role in the eventual establishment of the Baptist church, but it would be incorrect to say they were direct descendants.

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There are several doctrinal differences between the Anabaptists and what became the Baptists that we should note.

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Just a couple of them.

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The Anabaptists were pacifists.

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They didn't believe that there should be anyone enrolled in the army who was a believer.

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They were total pacifists.

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They also believed that believers could not be part of the magistrate.

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In other words, if you were a believer, you shouldn't hold any government office.

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Because the government is there to enforce laws, the government at the time especially imposed upon the consciences of people.

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And so a Christian shouldn't be a part of that.

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Also, another thing that made them different from Baptists, they typically baptized by pouring, not immersion.

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And so we have this group of Anabaptists who do hold to believer's baptism and various other doctrinal things that we wouldn't really agree with.

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They split off into several groups over time.

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The Swiss Brethren, you may not have heard of.

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The South Germans.

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The Hutterites.

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Two groups you probably have heard of that are descendants of the Anabaptists, the Amish and the Mennonites.

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So you've heard of them before.

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You may know something of their theology.

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You may know nothing of it.

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But those are actually the true descendants of the Anabaptists.

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The Anabaptists had a great influence on what became general Baptist churches, but not really any influence on particular Baptist churches.

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We'll talk about that distinction in a few minutes.

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So this is what's going on in the world.

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The reform's happening.

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We've got the radical reformers.

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We've got people starting to look at the question of baptism along with all the other things that are being debated at the time.

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And so we'll take a look at some pretty important people.

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The first man we're going to look at is John Smith.

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We don't know exactly his date of birth.

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Electronic records keeping back then.

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So some of this stuff is questionable.

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But he lived sometime around the end of the 16th century, beginning of the 17th century.

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So sometime in the late 1580, 1690, 1600, 1620.

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He came from a poor family, but he was able to educate himself by being what's called a scissor.

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A scissor was like a servant at the school.

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So he would serve other students.

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He would clean their shoes, cook their meals, do whatever for them, and that way he paid his way to get his education.

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And so while in school, he earned a reputation for reading and knowing a lot of literature.

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They called him a scholar of no small reading.

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And so at the time, that was impressive, especially for someone who was essentially, he was doing it the hard way.

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He was working while many of those who were getting education at the time obviously were of a more privileged class.

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During that time, he came under the influence of a man named Francis Johnson.

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Francis Johnson was a tutor of his and was a Puritan scholar.

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And so Francis Johnson was a Puritan who was initially opposed to the idea of separatism or forming a new church.

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He wanted to purify the church that existed.

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Hence the term Puritan.

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In fact, several leading religious figures of his day wrote in support of separatism.

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He gathered up all the copies of this book that they published, burned them, but he kept one for himself.

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Over time, he read that copy he kept for himself, was convinced of what they said was true, that they did need to separate.

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He published the book and was promptly jailed for it.

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So kind of an interesting little story in history there.

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He was jailed in 1593.

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That gives you kind of an idea of the time frame we're working in.

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And his congregation, the majority of them fled to the Netherlands to escape the persecution that was going on.

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So this is a time when it was not popular or okay to not be a part of the state church or say that the state church was bad.

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It was a rough environment.

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He was released four years later in 1597.

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He went to the Netherlands to join them.

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His church is known as the Ancient Church.

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If you ever read about the Ancient Church in history, his was the church.

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So back to John Smith, he came into contact with Francis Johnson, learned a lot from him.

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He also, over time, came to agree with the separatist view that they had to form a new church to really achieve true reform.

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He was hired as a lecturer at the town of Lincoln in 1600.

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So during this time there were corporations that were allowed to use the parish churches and hold church services during days when there weren't the state church services.

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I know that seems crazy that they were persecuting them, but on one hand and allowing them to meet on the other.

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He was hired as their lecturer.

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By 1602, he had gained some popularity, and they elected him to the office of city preacher for a lifetime term.

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So they have preachers in these different little cities.

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He was elected, and they said, You're going to be our preacher for life.

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We love you to death.

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So more people started coming to hear what he had to say.

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The smaller groups gave way to bigger groups.

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It didn't last very long.

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That was August of 1602.

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In October of 1602, he was dismissed.

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So he had a very long two-month pastorate.

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They said that his preaching was so plain and so full of puritan application that many in the audience felt like he was preaching at them, and he made a lot of enemies very quickly.

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So he cut it straight.

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They didn't like it.

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He was gone.

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That's the short version of that story.

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So this happened.

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There was continued persecution going on.

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He wrote a book called Principles and Inferences Concerning the Visible Church in 1607.

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This was one of the first works that really addressed separatism in a full way.

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He'd become fully convinced that the Church of England could not be reformed and that they must form their own church.

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In the book, he said that the English church was the daughter of the great harlot Rome and was itself a whore.

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So you can imagine that was a very popular opinion to hold at the time, and you can tell now that he's not a guy who pulled any punches.

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Yeah.

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So he made a lot of friends, and real quickly, shortly after this time, they formed the church at Gainsborough by covenant.

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And so this was around, we're going to say, this is 1607 to 1608.

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We don't know.

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So this is important.

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These group of people come together.

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They say we've got to form a separate church.

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They decide to do it.

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They form this church by covenant.

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They split into two congregations for convenience sake.

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We really don't have a lot of the details why we would assume it's probably geography.

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But immediately, from the founding, there were two congregations forming one church.

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One was led by Smith.

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The other was led by a man named John Robinson.

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So at this time, they're Puritan separatists.

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We do know from other documents that they held firmly to a Calvinist soteriology, so they were reformed in their understanding of the doctrines of grace.

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By 1608, they decided to move their congregation to Amsterdam.

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You remember Francis Johnson had fled to Amsterdam and taken his congregation there.

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They decide we're going over there with those guys.

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It's a little rough here.

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So we have a Puritan separatist Calvinist congregation headed to Amsterdam.

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There was a man in the church named Thomas Helwes, who will become very important soon, and he was instrumental.

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They made the move to Amsterdam.

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Upon arrival, obviously back then they didn't have e-mails, so it wasn't like they said, hey, we'll be there in a few days.

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This is going to be great.

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They got there.

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He started talking with Francis Johnson again.

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He realized that they had significant doctrinal differences and that they weren't going to be able to make one church of these congregations.

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So they move all the way over to Amsterdam.

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They get there.

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They realize that they have a difference over the officers of the church.

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Francis Johnson held to the tri-fold presbytery, that there were ruling elders, teaching elders, and the third kind of elders that slip in my mind right now.

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Smith didn't agree with that.

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Neither did Helwes.

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They differed over style of worship.

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Smith believed that worship was a time for believers to come together after individually reading Scripture and prayer, and then wait for a move of the Spirit.

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Now, this may sound like something else you've heard of.

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Later on, they call this Quakerism.

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It's really similar to Quakerism.

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He didn't believe that they should use any books in worship.

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He felt that that would be introducing a man-made element.

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He believed in the authority or the infallibility of the autographs of Scripture, but not in the translations, and so they wouldn't use the translated Bible.

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And so they had some pretty big differences.

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They also disagreed over the treasury.

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Smith didn't think they should take any money from the state.

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Amsterdam was willing to contribute to keep their church going.

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Francis Johnson was more than happy to take the money to keep things going.

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Smith didn't agree.

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So they didn't join together, but the doctrinal struggles did produce some fruit.

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The separation between them led Smith to further consider how to maintain the purity of the church.

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Because remember, at this point, we haven't addressed the issue of baptism with John Smith and Helwes.

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And so he's looking at how to maintain the purity of the church.

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He meets with some Mennonites in the area and starts to look into the Scriptures.

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He's convinced that believers' baptism is scriptural while infant baptism is not.

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Now he's in a bit of a quandary.

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He's convinced that their church can't continue because there was no one in their church who had been scripturally baptized.

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But he wasn't willing to take baptism from the Mennonites because they had some pretty significant doctrinal differences as well.

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So he dissolves the church, says we're no longer a church, reforms the church by baptizing himself by pouring, and then baptizes everyone else in the church, and they're a new church.

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So an interesting formation of this church.

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This was in 1609.

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And so this was not yet what we would call a Baptist church by any means.

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They were baptizing by pouring.

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There were several differences.

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But ultimately, this congregation did become the first Baptist congregation on English shore.

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So 1609 comes around.

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As you can imagine at the time, there's all kinds of doctrinal things going on.

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Again, the Reformation is still happening in many ways.

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And he writes a book called The Character of the Beast in 1609.

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By the way, I give you the titles of these books because you can still find, not that you're going to go buy this book, but you can find portions of it on the Internet and see kind of what these guys were really thinking.

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The Character of the Beast served to explain two things.

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Number one, why they had rejected infant baptism because that was the widely held position of the day, obviously.

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Number two, to explain why they hadn't become Mennonites or Anabaptists.

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So they still had some massive differences.

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They had three reasons that he quoted for the rejection of infant baptism.

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First, he said they found no scriptural warrant or command in the Bible to baptize infants.

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He considered that by applying the regulative principle to this, that that would lead them to reject infant baptism as a human invention.

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Secondly, there was no scriptural example of an infant baptism.

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There was no case he found in the scriptures that showed when it had happened.

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And finally, there was no covenant reason to baptize infants, as is often argued.

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The example of the fulfillment of the covenant sign of circumcision is not baptism, he argued, but rather regeneration, as shown in Philippians chapter 3.

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So we're starting to get talk about baptism and some really deep theology and people who are really contending with this issue.

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Smith began to be challenged on the fact that he had baptized himself.

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And when pressed by the logic of the regulative principle, by many in the time, he ultimately relented and determined to be baptized by the Mennonites.

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And so here's where things start to slide downhill for John Smith.

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He started the process to receive baptism from the Mennonites.

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He had to go through several steps to do that.

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It wasn't just like he goes, I want to be baptized.

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They do it that day.

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He ultimately died before it could be completed.

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But he did begin to relent on several key doctrinal positions before his death.

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The change in heart that he had led to a division between him.

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And you remember earlier, we mentioned Thomas Helwes.

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And so ultimately, what happens here is Thomas Helwes and the majority of the congregation part ways with John Smith.

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John Smith passes away there.

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Smith's confession is an interesting thing to read because he wrote the confession later in life.

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It was a private confession.

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It wasn't meant to be the confession of the church.

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There's much in there that we would disagree with.

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So he really did fall quite a ways in his doctrine in his later days.

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Quickly talking about doctrinal differences between Helwes and Smith.

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The first thing is Smith began to believe in the Mennonite theory of celestial flesh.

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This is a belief that while Christ was conceived inside the womb of Mary, he was of a separate type of flesh.

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In other words, he was not flesh of man like we are.

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It's a perversion of the incarnation that takes away from Jesus being fully human.

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Second difference, they differed on original sin.

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Smith capitulated to the Mennonite view that ultimately disregards original sin and says that sin is by volition only.

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There is no original sin.

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He came to a modified understanding of justification, believing that it was partly by imputed righteousness, but partly by inherent righteousness.

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Now, I don't think you'll find many people who would agree with that now, especially in Baptist churches.

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So Helwes takes the congregation.

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This is 1612.

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Now we've gotten to and they're going back to England.

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This is the same congregation that left four years ago for Amsterdam.

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They were Separatists.

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They were Puritan.

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They were, well, couldn't be both, but they had Puritan theology in that they were Calvinist and Reformed.

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They were Separatists.

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When they come back, this whole issue between Smith and Helwes had really wreaked havoc on the theology of this group of people.

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Despite all that, they had adopted Believer's Baptism as the sole scriptural baptism and had disavowed any hope of returning to state-sponsored churches.

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Helwes wrote a book when he got back to England called A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity, which described Rome as the beast of Revelation 13 and Anglicanism as the second beast.

32:48

He actually made an appeal to King James, the monarch at the time, to destroy the state church.

32:54

How do you think that went? Not so well.

32:57

He was imprisoned promptly after that and died shortly thereafter.

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John Merton comes along as the next man to lead this congregation.

33:08

Remember, this was 1612.

33:10

Helwes in prison died.

33:12

1613, John Merton is in prison also.

33:15

Again, these guys are just one after the other being thrown in prison, basically for railing against the state church.

33:21

He died sometime after 1620, spent the entire time in prison.

33:25

The congregation was essentially without a pastor.

33:28

He did write several works while in prison on liberty of conscience and appealing to the monarchy for religious freedom.

33:36

Neat story about this guy, John Merton.

33:38

His most famous work is called A Most Humble Supplication.

33:41

The name of the book is actually like 38 more words long, but we'll just call it A Most Humble Supplication.

33:46

He wrote the entire book while in prison.

33:48

Every day his friends would bring his food to eat because prison back then wasn't anything like prison now, I think.

33:55

They didn't have cable, for sure.

33:58

They'd bring his food and there'd always be a bottle of milk and the milk had a stopple in it.

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He would remove the stopple from his milk and actually write on it with milk.

34:08

Then the next day when they would come and take his food away, bring new food, they'd take it back and they would heat it up and they'd be able to see what he'd written in the stopple and the milk.

34:17

He wrote this entire book this way.

34:20

Imagine writing a book remembering, okay, yesterday I stopped here.

34:24

I don't know how big it was, but it couldn't have been very large.

34:27

A few words at a time, he wrote a pretty amazing work.

34:32

Another person of note in this congregation was a man named Leonard Busher.

34:35

He came to agree with the Church on Believer's Baptism, but he would not forsake his Calvinist doctrine.

34:39

There was dissent, even this early on, between those who remained Calvinist, held to true Reformed theology, and those who started to believe in a form of Arminianism.

34:53

He wrote the first Baptist work that was entirely and specifically devoted to liberty of conscience.

34:58

When we say liberty of conscience, what I mean is the belief that the state cannot impose upon the conscience of anyone to believe something, nor really anyone.

35:09

In other words, you can't force someone to believe something.

35:11

I can't tell you, be a Christian.

35:15

He wrote a work on that that was pretty important at the time.

35:20

A quote from his book, The Scriptures do teach that the one true religion is gotten by a new birth, even by the Word and Spirit of God, and therewith also it is only maintained and defended.

35:34

He made some great arguments.

35:38

They're still under great persecution, but over time, almost 80 years later, they finally got toleration in 1689.

35:50

What we've talked about so far is the formation of what are called the General Baptists.

35:54

These came to hold to general atonement.

35:57

That's why they're called General Baptists.

35:59

They would be more Arminian in their theology.

36:02

But at this point, we have a congregation on English soil that holds the believer's baptism.

36:07

They're not fully Baptist, like we already mentioned.

36:09

Their baptism is by pouring, but soon their further study of Scripture and understanding of language will lead them to baptize by immersion only.

36:16

This congregation leads to what are eventually the General Baptists, those who hold to general atonement.

36:21

So that's General Baptists.

36:23

We're done with that.

36:33

We're going to move on to Particular Baptist Churches.

36:39

They're called Particular Baptists because they hold to the doctrine of Particular Atonement.

36:44

They are fully reformed in their understanding of salvation.

36:47

The first church in Particular Baptists is called the JLJ Church.

36:56

The reason it's called JLJ is the first three pastors.

36:58

It's their last names.

37:00

Henry Jacob, John Lathrop, and Henry Jesse.

37:04

This church was formed in 1616.

37:10

It was what can be best referred to as a semi-separatist, semi-Puritan group of people.

37:15

They were kind of still on the fence about that.

37:19

The ideas of Henry Jacob, their first pastor, would eventually become, we'll talk about this next week, the dominant ecclesiology of New England and the first Baptist churches in America.

37:32

His discussions on ecclesiology at the time led him to study and question baptism and also put forth the idea of local church autonomy.

37:40

So they're just starting to question baptism.

37:43

You know, believer's baptism, infant baptism, what's scripturally accurate? John Lathrop was his successor.

37:48

He continued the discussions on the question of baptism.

37:51

Eventually, under the pressure from the government, he took a group of about 30 people from the church and they left for the New World.

37:57

So we'll get to that next week.

38:01

Henry Jesse took over in 1637.

38:04

By that time, the discussions of baptism had really reached a fever pitch.

38:08

There were actually various groups of the church at this point pulling away from the congregation because they had come to the belief that believer's baptism was the only scriptural baptism.

38:16

The church wasn't fully there yet, and so we see some groups breaking off.

38:20

So a couple of things that were happening in the same time.

38:22

There was a man named Duffer.

38:24

The first record we have is that a man named Duffer seceded from the church because he felt that baptism by the parish clergy was invalid.

38:30

He didn't see the Anglican church as a true church, and so, therefore, their baptism wasn't true baptism.

38:38

1633, a man named Samuel Eaton, the records say he received a further baptism.

38:44

That's what we have.

38:45

We don't know specifically what that means, but we can probably come to infer that he rejected infant baptism and, therefore, was baptized as an adult, as a believer.

38:57

The most solid record we can point to is in 1638.

39:00

There's a group of six people who join a man named Mr.

39:03

Spillsbury, the first time he's mentioned in the church's records, and reject infant baptism.

39:08

They formed their own church around this time.

39:11

The records vary.

39:12

This could be as early as 1633 or as late as 1638, but we can safely say by 1638 that Mr.

39:21

Spillsbury has a church that is essentially the first particular Baptist church in England.

39:32

Again, it could have happened earlier.

39:33

It could be 1633, but definitely by 1638.

39:38

Spillsbury wrote a confession.

39:39

Remember, we said Baptists are confessional.

39:40

They've always used confessions.

39:41

He wrote a confession that is robustly Calvinistic and Reformed.

39:44

His confession displays all the four points we made earlier about Baptists, that they're Orthodox, that they're evangelical, that they're confessional, that they're separate.

39:53

It's actually not very long.

39:54

I have it in a Word document.

39:55

If any of you would like it, see me afterwards.

39:57

I'll send it to you.

39:57

It's actually pretty good reading.

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By 1641, the church had come to a full understanding of believer's baptism by immersion because, again, up until this point, there was some bypouring.

40:10

Because there was no one in the church who'd been baptized and what they believed was the correct manner, they chose a man named Richard Blunt who'd made a trip to visit Dutch Anabaptists for baptism by immersion.

40:21

They chose him to baptize as Mr.

40:23

Blacklock, who then baptized the remainder of the church.

40:26

The reason they did this is because there were some in the church who were concerned that there needed to be some kind of succession.

40:32

Richard and I spoke about this earlier.

40:34

There are some theories of church history that hold that you need some form of succession for your church to be a true church.

40:41

We're going to address why that's not the case very soon.

40:43

But there was concern in the church, so rather than divide, they decided that they would go through this.

40:48

Many in the church considered this an unnecessary thing.

40:54

So all this happened.

40:56

Spilsbury wrote about what he considered the four constituting causes for the church.

41:02

In other words, they sought to answer the question, how could they reconstitute a true church without any succession as their understanding of biblical baptism had been lost now for centuries? There were those at the time called seekers who believed that since the true church had failed to exist for so long, they must wait for a supernatural sign to mark the beginning of the true church again.

41:22

Some of these even believed that the signs, the apostolic signs, the signs from the Book of Acts would begin again.

41:31

That would be their indication that it was time to start the new church.

41:35

Interestingly, thereby, by them saying that some thought they'd wait for that, that tells us that they were cessationists.

41:43

Spilsbury made plain the legitimacy of this new church in what he called four constituting causes of the church.

41:50

The first was preparing the matter for the form.

41:52

He uses an analogy of matter in a form.

41:55

In other words, let's think of brick-making, old-fashioned brick-making.

41:59

You take some material, you put it into a form and make a brick.

42:02

The first thing was preparing the matter for the form.

42:04

The Word of God prepares the matter, the matter as believers, for the form of the church.

42:09

The second was the fitness of the matter for the form.

42:14

The confession of faith of believers declares them fit for the form.

42:18

Those who have heard the gospel and believed are ready to be part of the church.

42:23

Thirdly is the fitting of the matter to the form.

42:26

Believers, having been fitted by the Word and believed in the gospel, covenant to be a body of believers joined by free and mutual consent and agreement upon the practice of that truth, so by God revealed and by faith received.

42:38

Those are his words.

42:40

And then finally, molding the form together.

42:42

The Spirit works to knit together and unite the hearts of the church in truth.

42:46

In fact, the only true evidence that a work of the Spirit had occurred was the church coming together in doctrinal unity.

42:51

And so what he's saying is, in response to all this, he would say there needs to be some sort of succession.

42:57

The true church had essentially been lost.

42:59

There was not a clear line of people who believed in believers' baptism all the way back.

43:05

And so he's saying that's not important.

43:07

We have the scripture, which tells us what to do.

43:09

We have believers who, being convicted by the gospel, have been regenerate.

43:15

We have them then covenanting together willingly to form a church around a shared belief of what the ideas are.

43:23

And then finally, the Holy Spirit knits them together into a true body of the church.

43:28

And so from this JLJ church and the offshoots of it grows the first particular Baptist churches as well as other important ones.

43:35

Two men that I just don't have time to fully cover tonight.

43:39

A man named Hansard Nollis.

43:41

I don't have time to cover them all.

43:54

Hansard Nollis and William Kiffin.

44:05

Our brother Richard has probably a hundred books he could loan you that would tell you about him.

44:14

So this Spilsbury's church, it's notable that Mr.

44:18

Spilsbury was one of the main architects and one of the men who signed the first London Baptist Confession, which was in 1644.

44:24

You can see where we are in timeline.

44:26

Spilsbury's church was in 1638, the first London Baptist Confession was only six years later.

44:30

So very quickly as this church is forming, they're producing a confession to tell people this is who we are and what we believe.

44:37

Because we have to remember, we've just essentially birthed a new denomination.

44:41

There's not anyone else who's really followed this line because they're not Anabaptists.

44:45

They're not Mennonites.

44:46

They're not congregationalists.

44:48

Simply, they're something new.

44:52

So we move on to the time period from 1640 to 1660.

44:55

It was a time of great growth and strengthening of Baptist churches.

44:59

Because of the secular events of the time, there were large armies being formed.

45:02

I don't have time, unfortunately, to cover all the history, what was going on in the world at that time.

45:07

But there were big armies being formed and many Baptists were a part of them.

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Those Baptists who were in the army led a very effective lay ministry.

45:13

They were traveling because armies do that.

45:16

And these Baptist men who were in there were preaching and teaching and starting churches as they traveled.

45:21

So it started to spread pretty rapidly in various places, in areas outside of London.

45:26

Before this, everything's been kind of centered around the London area.

45:29

They also had a very effective, what they called, pamphlet warfare.

45:33

As you can imagine, if the last several hundred years of history, infant baptism had been the widely held position, and you started saying that was wrong, people would want to know why, how.

45:44

So a lot of the religious leaders of the time wrote pamphlets.

45:48

There were, I think in those 20 years, over 80 widely circulated pamphlets that addressed not only baptism, but other theological issues.

45:58

The time was not without trials.

46:00

There was a strong Presbyterian presence in Parliament at the time.

46:03

The Westminster Confession was adopted in 1646.

46:06

I know Keith covered that with you guys.

46:09

Two years later, in 1648, there was what was called the Blasphemy Ordinance.

46:13

This made adoption of believer's baptism punishable by life imprisonment and Socinianism, which was coming in at the time, punishable by death.

46:21

So pretty serious laws against being a Baptist at the time.

46:29

Life in prison for adopting believer's baptism.

46:33

Thankfully, Lord Cromwell's army purged Parliament in what's known as Pride's Purge, and the measure never took effect.

46:39

This ushered in the period of the Protectorate that showed the first signs of religious freedom in England.

46:43

So there was a time frame in there, in the middle, where everybody thought, this is great, we're free to believe what we believe.

46:50

It did not last.

46:52

Baptists did continue to be a large part of the army as well as the fleet, their navy, and again, through that, they got wide-ranging influence.

47:00

There were some high-ranking officers who were Baptists as well.

47:04

They held important state positions.

47:06

So during this time, the Baptist churches and the leaders of the time were able to develop a thorough doctrine of religious liberty, and they kind of became part of mainline Protestantism.

47:16

So essentially, they were a doctrine or a congregation, a denomination that people knew about.

47:26

And ultimately, during this time period, they were strengthened for what was to come, which was an intense time of persecution.

47:31

From 1660 to 1689, persecution was the order.

47:52

Real quick, I'm going to cover four specific acts and dates that happened.

47:58

1661, there was something called the Corporation Act.

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These were part of a larger body of laws called the Clarendon Code that were essentially in place to drive out or eliminate dissenting churches, anybody who didn't hold that the state church was the true church.

48:14

The Corporation Act in 1661 made resistance to the king unlawful, prohibited anyone who didn't take communion in the state church from holding public office.

48:24

So if you didn't take communion there, you couldn't hold office.

48:26

This actually led to several cases of church discipline in Baptist congregations because they had members who held state office, and rather than disavow that when they couldn't do that without taking communion, they would occasionally go.

48:37

They had to go like once a year, twice a year.

48:40

They would occasionally go and take communion in the state church, so they were held to task for that.

48:47

1662, the Act of Uniformity.

48:50

This was an effort to close all the loopholes in the previous laws.

48:54

Every parson, vicar, or minister must declare their total assent to the Common Book of Prayer, that was what the Church of England used, and every other Anglican system.

49:03

So this effectively reestablished the Anglican Church and resulted in what is known as the Grand Ejection of all those who refused to do so.

49:12

So during this time period before where they had some freedom, they actually had infiltrated into many of the parish churches, men of various denominations, various Protestant denominations.

49:25

This was the end of that.

49:26

They all got knocked out pretty quickly.

49:29

1664, the Conventicle Act.

49:31

This was an attempt to eliminate the home churches that had sprung up due to the previous restrictions.

49:36

They made it unlawful to have more than five people over 16 years old in a home for any religious purpose.

49:41

So they said, well, we can't meet in our church.

49:43

We'll just go home.

49:44

Your family, this family will come over.

49:46

If you had more than five people over 16 years of age and you were there for a religious purpose, they would jail you.

49:52

A lot of people responded to this by holding meetings under other pretenses.

49:56

They would say they were there to quilt or whatever they did back in that time.

50:01

So they tried to get away with it, but lots of them were caught and jailed.

50:05

The Five Mile Act of 1665 was kind of the last of these, and it really destroyed a lot of their hope of being able to continue to meet.

50:14

Anyone who was a minister or a teacher in a congregation before the restoration of the Anglican Church had to move at least five miles away from their previous residence.

50:22

It doesn't sound like much to us, five miles.

50:25

It's just down the street, but think about the times we're talking about, 1665.

50:29

I don't think transportation was quite what it is today.

50:32

They couldn't jump on the bus or fire up their car and drive over and see their friends.

50:38

So shortly after this period, there was an attempt by King Charles II to promote the Catholic Church under veiled motives.

50:43

He made a Declaration of Indulgence in 1672, which suspended all laws against nonconformists, including the Clarendon Code.

50:52

In that declaration, he said that Parliament had to designate places of worship for dissenters, only Protestants, not Roman Catholics.

51:00

The Roman Catholics were allowed excusal from the laws, but not to have public places of worship.

51:05

So he was a Catholic, secretly, not so secretly, and he said, well, we'll extend this olive branch.

51:13

It didn't last long.

51:14

That was in 1672.

51:15

In 1673, Parliament passed what's known as the Test Act, walked back all the reliefs, only now here's the catch.

51:25

1672, freedom for everyone.

51:27

Come tell us who you are, we'll find you a place of worship.

51:30

Now the government has this nice, convenient list of all the dissenters, and a year later, they walked back all of those reliefs, and you can imagine what they did.

51:37

They essentially rounded people up.

51:41

So a very rough time.

51:44

The oppression and persecution of the church at that time was heavy and harsh.

51:48

James II was the next monarch.

51:49

He was more Catholic than Charles had been.

51:52

He made another declaration of indulgence in 1687.

51:55

This time the people were a bit wiser and more hesitant.

51:58

Maybe they had a memory.

52:00

Charles was married to an heir of the Spanish throne.

52:03

His Catholicism was thinly veiled.

52:05

There weren't many people who didn't know about it.

52:07

He was soon demoted by Parliament.

52:10

His daughter raised to the throne.

52:11

William and Mary took the throne in 1688, and in 1689 the Act of Toleration was issued.

52:17

So this ends the official persecution of the church.

52:20

The effects lasted significantly longer than that.

52:22

It took time.

52:24

But the monarchy stopped persecuting the church officially in 1689 with the Act of Toleration.

52:31

And so Keith talked to you guys two weeks ago about the Second London Baptist Confession.

52:35

We know that it was published in 1689 despite the fact that it was written earlier than that.

52:41

And that's why.

52:44

So that's kind of what was going on.

52:47

Several notable Baptists during this time give us examples of the type of suffering that was common and how the church flourished despite this.

52:54

The first is a man who's well known to many believers.

52:56

His name is John Bunyan.

52:58

He's most famously known for his classic work, The Pilgrim's Progress.

53:01

I'm sure many of you have heard of it, probably read it.

53:04

He was born in 1628 in Elstow to a poor family, but they did manage to send him to school to learn to read and write.

53:11

Unfortunately, he said later in life he was a slovenly student and he lost most of his ability to read and write because he neglected it.

53:20

In 1644, when he was 16 years old, his mother died.

53:23

His father remarried only two months later and they were estranged from one another.

53:27

So he had kind of a rocky teenage years, as we would say.

53:33

At this time, he decided he would join the army.

53:35

We believe it was the parliamentary army.

53:38

I didn't get into this, but there were essentially three armies at the time.

53:41

That's kind of a complicated situation.

53:43

We believe it was the parliamentary army, but we're not sure.

53:47

A neat little story happened to him.

53:48

He told a story one time of swapping guard with another soldier who'd asked, hey, it was his night to stand watch or whatever, let's trade.

53:56

That night, that soldier who swapped with him was killed by a sniper.

53:59

And so his life was spared.

54:01

Obviously, he saw God's providence in that.

54:03

It greatly affected him.

54:07

1648, he left the army and married.

54:10

He tells in various places of how exceedingly poor he and his wife were.

54:16

They had two Christian books.

54:19

I can't remember how he says it, but essentially he said, we didn't have a pot or a spoon, but we had these two books.

54:25

Remember, he had kind of lost his ability to read, but he began to work at it with the assistance of his wife.

54:31

He regained the ability to read and read those two books frequently.

54:34

This led him to a time of great spiritual trial.

54:38

He wrote a work called Grace Abounding to the Chiefest of Sinners, which you will hear many mixed reviews about in the world because he was a man distraught.

54:49

Some people have even said he sounds crazed in it, but he was under the full weight and conviction of sin and just a man really crying out for God.

55:01

In 1653, he was converted.

55:03

He attended a church in Bedford.

55:05

He later became the pastor of a Baptist church, but a distinction, he did hold a belief in open communion and open church membership.

55:13

John Bunyan had some theological diversion from most of the typical Baptist churches.

55:22

He and William Kiffin, another great Baptist of the time, who we won't really get to talk about, clashed over the issue, over other issues of church membership.

55:30

He was in prison under the worst of conditions for 12 years before the introduction of the Clarendon Code.

55:34

All those things I just told you about, that wasn't the beginning of persecution.

55:38

That's just when it got really bad.

55:40

He was in prison for 12 years during that.

55:42

He was offered release.

55:44

They offered him to release him if he would just promise not to preach.

55:48

When that didn't work, they brought in his wife and his blind daughter and put them before him.

55:53

Obviously, he hadn't seen them.

55:54

He'd been in prison and said, look at what you're doing to your wife and your child.

55:59

Because you won't recant your faith, because you won't promise not to preach, they're suffering.

56:04

What kind of man are you? As a father and as a husband, you can imagine, you probably can't imagine, what that trial must be like.

56:12

He was definitely in some difficult conditions and wrote the Pilgrim's Progress while in prison.

56:20

Another notable Baptist of this time was a man named Benjamin Keech.

56:24

He lived a little bit of a different life from John Bunyan.

56:26

He was converted at age 15.

56:28

Through his personal study of the Bible, he became a Baptist.

56:31

He was set apart for the ministry at age 18, but was heavily persecuted for being the sinner.

56:36

In other words, they said, well, we want you to be a part of the state church.

56:39

He wasn't.

56:41

He began his ministry as a general Baptist and as an Arminian.

56:44

He had several doctrinal issues with traditional Calvinist belief.

56:52

The only other Baptist he knew was a man named John Russell, who was a general Baptist.

56:57

That's where he was baptized and where he began his ministry.

57:00

Through the influence and study of Scripture, as well as Hansard Nollis, who I already mentioned, he became a particular Baptist after moving to London in 1668.

57:10

Keech's congregation in London grew quite large.

57:13

They built several new buildings to house them.

57:16

Ultimately, they seated over 1,000 people, which in this time, I can imagine, would be massive.

57:21

It would be a megachurch, we would call it today.

57:25

This church eventually became a church you may have heard of before called the Metropolitan Tabernacle.

57:30

A relatively famous Baptist preacher of some fame preached there, Charles Spurgeon.

57:36

Keech made several important contributions during his time.

57:39

He was one of the first to argue for the use of music during the corporate worship service.

57:43

Up until this point, it was considered that music wasn't to be part of the worship service.

57:48

He wrote several hymns that Dr.

57:50

Nettles joked.

57:51

Some were good, most were not.

57:54

He was kind of at a new craft back then, so that's okay.

57:57

He also wrote arguing from Scripture why they were to be used.

58:01

He wrote and argued for discipline within the local church.

58:04

He was also one of the first to make solid arguments for ministerial support, that ministers should be supported by their congregation.

58:11

He was prolific in his published writings, probably more so than just about any other Baptist in history.

58:17

He wrote polemical works, theological works, expositional works, sermonic works, he wrote poetic works.

58:24

He wrote a lot and published a lot.

58:26

The central theme of his preaching was the eternal covenant of redemption.

58:30

He was a strong five-point Calvinist.

58:31

He published many works clarifying his theology.

58:34

He was imprisoned early on in his ministry for holding to Baptist convictions.

58:38

He suffered much throughout his life.

58:40

Despite the trials, his ministry was highly influential.

58:44

There are other men who, again, we don't have time to talk to.

58:47

I'll just give you a couple of names that you should look into.

58:59

He did a lot of great stuff and really did a lot to contribute during this time.

59:04

Henry Jesse also.

59:05

We already talked about Jesse earlier in the JLJ church.

59:10

We've made it to 1689.

59:13

The Act of Toleration has passed.

59:16

From the period of time from 1689 until 1770, overall, it really is a time of decline.

59:25

Not that nothing good happened during that time period, but there was quite a bit of decline in religion in general, really.

59:32

It became stagnant.

59:33

There were some notable events, but deism became prevalent in many churches.

59:40

There was a lot of what we would call latitudinarian theology.

59:44

There was a lot of people saying at this point, you know, anything goes.

59:48

Essentially, you know, whatever you believe is your truth.

59:52

That kind of thing started to creep in, and many failed to stand for the truth.

59:57

There was also an increasingly negative attitude towards Christianity in the broader public that was helped along by the example of the earlier monarchs.

01:00:05

Remember, they were Catholic.

01:00:08

Just the population in general didn't have much good to say about Christians or religion at this point in history.

01:00:15

There were two factions of Baptist churches at this point.

01:00:18

Remember earlier, we talked about the General Baptist and the Particular Baptist.

01:00:22

Both of them suffered decline, but for different reasons, and so I want to look at a couple of those reasons.

01:00:27

The General Baptist suffered from overly strong connectional government between their churches.

01:00:31

They were so tightly woven together that when one church had a problem, it became another church's problem, even though it had zero to do with them.

01:00:40

So, they were almost too tightly connected for their own good.

01:00:45

They began to suffer from the infiltration of legalism, and they argued over some of the pettiest stuff, clothes, several held that because they were General Baptists, you could only marry another General Baptist, not just any Baptist would do.

01:01:02

They had a very low view of trained ministers, and most of their ministers were unpaid and untrained, and because they had such a confidence in the work of the Holy Spirit, they leaned so far to that side that they doubted that they needed any kind of training.

01:01:15

They essentially said, we'll just go and read the Bible, and the Holy Spirit will do His work.

01:01:24

At this time, they held strongly to lifetime pastors.

01:01:27

It was a big no-no to call the pastor from another General Baptist church to come be your pastor.

01:01:32

That didn't happen.

01:01:32

They stayed in one place forever.

01:01:34

So, if one man began to teach falsely, he just got to teach falsely there for 30 or 40 or 50 years, however long it could be.

01:01:40

And so, this led to a big decline in their churches.

01:01:46

And finally, there was an infiltration of Socinianism, which is a heresy that denies the Trinity and demotes Christ to being merely a man.

01:01:53

Socinianism so thoroughly overtook the General Baptist churches that by 1770, the entire domination was essentially Unitarian.

01:02:03

Their beliefs had really eroded.

01:02:07

Particular Baptist churches suffered their own trials.

01:02:09

First, they had an unbending autonomy that prevented them from agreeing on much of anything other than confessions.

01:02:14

They said the local church is autonomous, which we would agree, but they were so so much sticklers to that point that they couldn't agree on anything, the color of the carpet.

01:02:30

They were also highly suspicious of educated ministers, doubting the need and motivations for education.

01:02:35

They had their own heresies that crept into their churches.

01:02:39

Antinomianism, which places an extreme emphasis on grace.

01:02:44

They called anyone who sought sanctification by obedience a legalist.

01:02:48

If you were trying to live according to Scripture, putting forth effort, you were a legalist.

01:02:55

Hyper-Calvinism crept in and became very prevalent in some of the congregations of the particular Baptist.

01:03:01

Some of them thought that because grace was the grounds of duty, therefore if there is no grace, there is no duty.

01:03:07

Follow this line of thinking with me.

01:03:09

No grace, no duty.

01:03:11

The implication is if there's no ability for a man to respond to the gospel, then we don't have an obligation to preach the gospel.

01:03:19

If man is unable to respond, then why would we preach the gospel? It's a pretty classic expression of Hyper-Calvinism.

01:03:28

There's a lot more there, so don't say that you were taught everything you need to know about Hyper-Calvinism tonight, but that was the basic line behind it.

01:03:37

Thankfully, we see in the future of Baptist history, there are many men who stood tall and defended good doctrine and the duty to call all men to repentance.

01:03:43

In fact, a couple of the men we're going to talk about really specifically key on that issue.

01:03:49

Real quickly, their final problem was a misapplication of the latter-day glory.

01:03:53

In other words, many of them were post-millennialists.

01:03:56

They believed there was a time coming when the gospel would be wildly successful.

01:04:01

Essentially, they took that belief to say that they believed that when this time came, there would be these observable providential occurrences.

01:04:09

These big things would happen, and we'll all know it's time.

01:04:11

And the gospel would be widely successful.

01:04:14

Until then, we wait, was kind of the attitude that many of them had.

01:04:20

Just some of the troubles they had, and again, like I've said, this is not in every single congregation, but these are some of the things that happened that caused decline.

01:04:28

There were several notable men during this time.

01:04:30

The most significant was John Gill.

01:04:32

He's a man who sometimes people consider a Hyper-Calvinist.

01:04:36

A fair assessment of his body of work would probably find that he's not.

01:04:42

Despite that argument some make, he made several valuable contributions.

01:04:47

First of all, he actively confronted the doctrinal infidelity, the antinomianism that came in, the Hyper-Calvinism.

01:04:54

He wrote books arguing against these things.

01:04:58

He exposed what were the...

01:05:01

There was this moralism that was creeping in at the time that reduced Christianity to following a set of laws or following set.

01:05:10

And then on the other side, there was Hyper-Calvinism.

01:05:12

And both of those things lead to what we call an anti-supernaturalism.

01:05:16

In other words, that there's nothing bigger going on in this.

01:05:19

There's not a God who is part of this salvation.

01:05:22

Essentially, it's just, can you obey this set of laws, or can you do these things? He exposed that and really argued against it effectively.

01:05:31

He pointed men away from the legalism that was common at the time.

01:05:38

And so many of the churches had stopped calling people to conversion because of this.

01:05:42

They had stopped saying to sinners, repent and believe.

01:05:47

And so he pointed that out and really started shifting the thinking back to where it should be.

01:05:52

He was faithful to maintain the issues of sin and its condemnation and corruption and point people to grace by arguing for the absoluteness of the gospel in a relativistic age.

01:06:02

We think that relativism is new.

01:06:04

It is not.

01:06:05

I can assure you there have been people who've said, my truth is my truth for Lord only knows how long now.

01:06:12

And he was fighting against that in his time by saying, essentially, they need the gospel.

01:06:17

They need the gospel.

01:06:17

It's the only source of absolute truth, the gospel.

01:06:21

He did aid and approve of the awakening, something that we really don't have time to discuss today.

01:06:27

Although he did have some concerns about the Wesley's, they were Arminian, he wouldn't have agreed with.

01:06:33

But overall, Gil was a voice of gospel truth.

01:06:35

He was a defender of the faith during a time when there were many who were not.

01:06:39

Many were falling and the situation was one of decline.

01:06:44

So after this roughly 80 year period of decline, several things began to happen that brought revival and new life to Baptist churches.

01:06:51

These occurred separately within the general Baptist churches and the particular Baptist churches.

01:06:56

The general Baptist came to life under the leadership of a man named Dan Taylor.

01:06:59

He was converted under the preaching of the Wesley's.

01:07:01

We know he was Arminian.

01:07:04

He sought baptism from the particular Baptist, but they declined because of his doctrine.

01:07:08

They talked with him and said, no, we don't feel it's right to baptize you.

01:07:12

But they were kind enough to refer him to some general Baptists in the area who would baptize him.

01:07:17

So this shows us that they were still, there was an importance upon doctrine at that time.

01:07:23

He was baptized and began to see the descent of many into Arianism and Socinianism and that led him to form a union called the New Connection.

01:07:32

So what we talked about before that the general Baptist had become essentially Unitarian.

01:07:38

He sees this going on and wants to call him back to good doctrine.

01:07:42

He forms a group called the New Connection.

01:07:44

This was in 1770 and so this is almost like for the general Baptist.

01:08:04

And he did a couple of important things.

01:08:06

He installed two safeguards to preserve the doctrinal purity.

01:08:09

First of all, he said that there must be a confession of faith.

01:08:11

We have to produce something that says this is what we believe.

01:08:15

Prior to that, many of the general Baptists had been unwilling or didn't want to do that, but he said we have to put it out there what we believe.

01:08:23

Second, there had to be a personal testimony by all who wished to join the church.

01:08:26

So you couldn't just come and say, I want to join the church.

01:08:29

Well, do you believe in God? Not really, but I want to join the church anyways, because that's where they come to.

01:08:34

It was come one, come all.

01:08:36

So this group flourished and by 1860 grew large enough to start the General Baptist Missionary Society.

01:08:43

And so all the way through until we get to 1891 the most recent formation of what's called the Baptist Union when all the Baptist churches of England, the majority of them kind of came together.

01:08:54

This group existed separately from the particular Baptist.

01:08:59

So during the same time frame, the particular Baptist also grew.

01:09:02

The start of this revival was marked by a circular letter of 1770 that went from church to church.

01:09:07

It addressed the rampant Hyper-Calvinism of the day, rebuked it, saying, Every soul that comes to Christ to be saved is to be encouraged.

01:09:15

The coming soul need not fear he is not elected, for none who are not elected would come.

01:09:22

So at the time, again, Hyper-Calvinism was rampant and so much so that men weren't willing to proclaim the gospel because they were afraid they would call someone who's not of the elect to repentance.

01:09:33

And he pretty much said, No one who's elect is going to come.

01:09:37

Or who's not elect.

01:09:39

Robert Hall was one of the leaders at this time.

01:09:41

He wrote a book called Help to Zion's Travelers.

01:09:44

It was a book encouraging those who wish to travel to Zion.

01:09:47

The first section of the book was doctrinal.

01:09:49

It addressed the deity of Christ, the love of God, the doctrine of election, union with Christ, adoption, regeneration, atonement.

01:09:56

They were still very boldly dealing with doctrinal issues at this time.

01:10:00

The second section, I'm sorry, the doctrinal section dealt with also something important to know about in Baptist history called the modern question.

01:10:10

This is the modern question.

01:10:11

I'm going to read it just so I say it correctly.

01:10:13

Does any unrepentant sinner have the duty to repent of sin and believe in Christ? So this is the question of ability.

01:10:22

Now, our pastor is actually going to preach in a couple weeks about, and expound on this, about the difference between moral ability and natural ability, and likewise moral inability and natural inability.

01:10:34

But this was the question.

01:10:35

The corollary of that question is does the preacher have the duty to call unregenerate men to repentance? And so again, they're contending with this issue of hyper-Calvinism.

01:10:47

Do we preach the gospel and tell men repent and believe? And so Robert Hall wrote this book.

01:10:54

He addressed that question.

01:10:56

In the second section he dealt with what they call the experimental difficulties.

01:11:00

This section was squarely aimed at destroying the flawed logic of hyper-Calvinism.

01:11:04

It was widely read.

01:11:06

The hyper-Calvinists of the day called it poison.

01:11:09

They really fought against it because it started to really and how it was unscriptural.

01:11:15

The second man to address this issue in a more thorough way is Andrew Fuller.

01:11:20

He wrote a work called The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation.

01:11:24

I would strongly encourage you to find this and read it.

01:11:26

It is excellent.

01:11:31

He investigated these issues apart from Hall.

01:11:33

They produced their works at almost the same time but they didn't collaborate.

01:11:36

His came out shortly after Hall's.

01:11:39

Fuller's book is a grand work that eloquently points out that the call to repent is not incompatible with historic Calvinism or any of its necessary related doctrines.

01:11:48

We obviously would stand here today and tell you the same thing.

01:11:50

That's what we believe.

01:11:51

We believe that salvation is of God.

01:11:54

We do not believe that that means we should not proclaim the gospel to all men.

01:12:00

Fuller expounded the difference between natural ability and moral ability in a way that helps us to understand the condition of an unregenerate center and the call to repentance.

01:12:07

His works are still very helpful today in understanding these issues.

01:12:11

Fuller's book is one of the best examples of a Reformed Baptist with robust Calvinistic theology.

01:12:16

Unfortunately after Fuller's death, the next generation did not maintain his theological integrity.

01:12:21

Shortly after that, the introduction of God's love as overtaking his other divine attributes became commonplace.

01:12:27

What we see today in a lot of places where people say God is love and God is love at the expense of all his other attributes, that started really to occur right after Fuller's generation.

01:12:38

We're really getting up to some of the more modern theological issues that we've dealt with.

01:12:43

Again, we're still in England, but these things happen really close together between England and America.

01:12:50

Our last noble person, we're almost done, I promise.

01:12:53

Thank you guys for sticking with me.

01:12:54

William Carey.

01:12:57

Many of you will know of William Carey as a missionary.

01:13:01

He was converted early in life at a dissenters prayer meeting.

01:13:04

After his conversion there, he felt a great guilt for having left the established church and he went back to the parish church.

01:13:13

He was there for almost four years.

01:13:15

After four years of study, he came to be a Baptist and again left the parish church.

01:13:22

He ultimately came to essentially the same theological conclusions that Fuller had.

01:13:28

They were contemporaries.

01:13:29

His study of Scripture convicted him that there needed to be an effort to take the gospel to foreign lands.

01:13:34

Up until this point, missionary work had been almost non-existent.

01:13:40

At least in the way we think of it today.

01:13:43

He published a work called Inquiry into the Obligations of Christians that explained his beliefs.

01:13:48

He expounded the Great Commission, how it should be fulfilled, and he began implementing a plan to do so.

01:13:54

This was the difference in Carey and so many others of the day.

01:13:56

He saw that this was a need and actually started to do something about it.

01:14:01

1792, he was at the associational meeting of particular Baptists listening to Andrew Fuller preach from Isaiah 54, a message called Expect Great Things, Attempt Great Things.

01:14:12

Sounds great.

01:14:13

This is kind of exactly what's going on in his mind.

01:14:15

Yeah.

01:14:15

We need to take the gospel everywhere.

01:14:19

The sermon comes to a close.

01:14:21

They're getting ready to dismiss.

01:14:22

Fuller's sitting there going, okay, we're going to get there.

01:14:24

We're going to do something.

01:14:25

We're going to form a missionary society.

01:14:27

We're going to do something.

01:14:28

We're going to take the gospel.

01:14:29

They get ready to close down and head to Denny's and have ice cream.

01:14:33

He grabs Fuller by the hand and says, is nothing going to be done again? He essentially says, are we going to preach this message again and walk out of here and not do anything different than we have? There are other stories about things that Carey said.

01:14:50

There was the time that the man told him in a prayer meeting, he said we need to take the gospel, and what did the man say? When it pleases God to save the heathen, he'll do it without your help.

01:14:59

He told him to sit down.

01:15:02

He was a pretty bold guy.

01:15:06

When that happened, they resumed discussion about it.

01:15:09

There was a resolution made to form a missionary society for the next meeting.

01:15:13

In October of 1792, they formed the first missionary society of the particular Baptist.

01:15:21

They had a society now.

01:15:23

All they needed was a missionary.

01:15:26

A man named John Thomas had actually been in India as a missionary, not with a particular Baptist.

01:15:32

He came to America shortly thereafter.

01:15:33

He and Carey met up.

01:15:34

Carey decided he would be the missionary.

01:15:36

He would go with him.

01:15:37

This is a gross oversimplification of the story, so if you'd like to read the life of Carey, please do.

01:15:42

I'm just giving you the not even close notes, half of close notes.

01:15:48

Carey went to India.

01:15:49

Ultimately, he translated the Bible into 31 languages.

01:15:52

To say that at that time he had a massive reach for the gospel would be an understatement.

01:15:56

He really made some big impact.

01:16:03

There's more to be said about Carey.

01:16:04

We'll have to leave it to another time, but we can certainly say that this turn of events and his strong push to proclaim the gospel in foreign lands broke down the power of the hyper-Calvinism that was rising amongst the particular Baptists of the time.

01:16:16

It gave them a clear picture of how the gospel could be taken to the world.

01:16:21

At a time when doctrine was declining and the hyper-Calvinism were gaining speed, it really was a bold example in the other direction, and it really restored much of it.

01:16:32

The majority of the 19th century was marked by several factors leading up to the eventual union of the English Baptists.

01:16:37

There were both general and particular Baptists who desired unity.

01:16:41

As mentioned previously, after Fuller's death, good theology began to decline again.

01:16:46

The coherent Calvinism of the particular Baptists really began to give way, as many people like we already said misunderstood God's love and the biblical concept of God's hate for sin and the extent of the atonement.

01:16:58

The doctrines of effectual calling and irresistible grace gave way to a belief in general conviction and the power of individual sinners to accept or reject grace, and this is within the particular Baptist churches.

01:17:09

We're not talking about the general Baptists who were already Arminian in their belief.

01:17:15

During this time, despite the fact that there still remained pockets of strong Calvinists, there were actually some particular Baptist churches who even called general Baptist ministers to their pulpits.

01:17:25

Oh, for shame.

01:17:27

I'm sure that was scandal in its day.

01:17:30

Another contributing factor was the rising popularity of open communion.

01:17:33

At this time, there are many who start to clamor for unity.

01:17:36

We want to present a unified Baptist front.

01:17:39

There were some who held the open communion.

01:17:41

There were some who held the open membership.

01:17:44

Many Baptist groups started to splinter off at this time because they would not abide with these theological declensions that were happening.

01:17:52

They wouldn't stand by and watch the decline.

01:17:53

So we get some different groups.

01:17:55

There's the strict Baptists, our group that splintered off, and there's various other ones that we don't have time to discuss.

01:18:03

The last notable event in English Baptist history that we had time to study and, again, only in minor details, was what's known as the downgrade controversy that Spurgeon was a part of.

01:18:13

We can't possibly cover all the details, but just the content so you know.

01:18:19

Spurgeon was concerned with doctrinal decline amongst the churches of the Union, the Baptist Union, that is.

01:18:24

He published articles about this in The Sword and the Trowel.

01:18:28

The first one addressed the loss of biblical infallibility.

01:18:32

Essentially, they pointed out how that once you give up biblical infallibility, the rest of doctrine shortly follows thereafter.

01:18:41

It really starts to just chip away.

01:18:45

He pointed out historical examples of how this had happened in other denominations.

01:18:50

The downgrade also affected issues of the deity of Christ, the person and the work of the Holy Spirit, and eternal punishment.

01:18:56

It wasn't just one small theological issue.

01:18:59

Many churches started to just pass whatever off as good theology.

01:19:05

Ultimately, Spurgeon resigned the Baptist Union in 1888 under great duress.

01:19:11

Again, I want you to know there's a lot more to that story.

01:19:14

Research that one day.

01:19:15

It's a really interesting story to read.

01:19:17

Everything that surrounded that, we could spend an hour easily just talking about that.

01:19:22

What we have now in 1891, an important date, this is when the latest organization of the Baptist Union occurred.

01:19:43

At this point, the majority of, not all of, just like not here in America today, but the majority of the Baptist churches became part of the Baptist Union.

01:19:52

Amongst that group are particular Baptist churches as well as some New Connection churches or general Baptist churches.

01:20:03

They, at this time frame, are struggling with doctrinal decline.

01:20:07

Keith taught last week on the last hundred years.

01:20:10

I don't know if he addressed any of this or not, but suffice it to say, if we've argued about it here in the last hundred years, they have there as well.

01:20:16

There's a lot of doctrine, a lot of people who are backing away from firm theology.

01:20:24

Despite all of the decline, we can still see strongly the roots of the historical Baptist that fit firmly within the four theological points we made at the beginning.

01:20:32

They're orthodox, they're evangelical, they're confessional, they're separate.

01:20:37

We can also look back now and see the three themes that we began with.

01:20:42

Baptists have been strongly Reformed in their theology from the beginning.

01:20:44

We've pointed that out, although there were some who did not hold that.

01:20:48

The majority were.

01:20:50

They also have been confessional.

01:20:53

I've got a book at home of pretty much all of the confessions of faith of the major Baptist churches of the years.

01:20:58

It's very large.

01:20:59

There's a lot printed.

01:21:02

And then finally, Baptists have flourished during times of persecution and struggle, often emerging from great trials with the great advance of the gospel.

01:21:09

And so, hopefully this gives you some picture of the English Baptists.

01:21:12

I know this was a lot to try and cover in one night.

01:21:14

I apologize for keeping you guys so long.

01:21:17

Next week, we will go to Baptists in America.

01:21:20

There's a lot more to cover there, but we will try and condense it down and get it all done.

01:21:25

I appreciate you guys coming tonight.

01:21:27

I hope to see you next week.

01:21:27

Let's close in prayer.

01:21:30

Father, we thank you, Lord, for this opportunity to come together tonight and study, Lord.

01:21:35

Father, we thank you for the study of history because it shows us not only where we came from, Lord, but we learn about the struggles and the trials and the successes of those who have lived before us, Father, that hopefully we may learn from them.

01:21:48

Father, ultimately, we trust your word alone as the sole rule of faith and practice for our lives.

01:21:55

And, Father, we trust that you would take this time tonight and make it fruitful in our lives or that we may understand you more clearly.

01:22:02

We may understand your church more clearly.

01:22:06

I pray that you would guard us and guide us until we meet again together.

01:22:11

I pray that when we go from here, Father, that we would do everything to your glory and your honor.

01:22:15

In Jesus' name, amen.

01:22:17

Thank you.