Baptist History - Part 2

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Reformed Theology (Part 3)

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Well, thank you guys for coming tonight.
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We went long last week and you guys came back still, so that's a good sign, appreciate it.
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As we talked last week about the history of the Baptist in England, I hope that you kind of started to get a picture.
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If you came in the door last week with no inclination of Baptist history whatsoever, I think you probably, hopefully left realizing that what you may have thought was Baptist history, especially in light of many current Baptist churches, indeed there are quite large differences from the historical Baptist.
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And so this week we'll move our focus to the Baptist in America, and in doing so we're going to see a lot of the same themes come out.
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We'll also see some nuances and some differences in how things form here.
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You'll recall from last week's lesson, if you weren't here, I'd encourage you to look it up online and listen.
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It'll help kind of put this all in perspective for you.
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But you'll recall we talked about in the mid-early 17th century, there were some people in England who were already starting to leave for America because of persecution, and some of these people held Baptist beliefs.
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So we're going to see that that pretty quickly led to the establishment of Baptist churches in America, and ultimately what we find out is that the beginning of the Baptist churches in America and the beginning of the Baptist churches in England, right in the same time frame, very close together.
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So it's not like there was a large delay, you know, 40, 50, 100 years later.
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It's all happening at the same time, and really ultimately later in history there was a lot of influence back and forth between the two groups.
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We're going to see that the same Baptist identity takes shape in America that we saw in England.
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Remember the four things that we talked about, Baptists are Orthodox, Baptists are Evangelical, Baptists are Confessional, and then the Baptists are Separate.
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And so those same things will still carry through.
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I'm not going to spend time tonight to rehash that, so again, if you missed that, go back and listen to last week's lesson, that'll give you kind of a profile to look at this through.
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One thing we will see is that the American Baptists were and are more staunchly Calvinist in their theology and held fervently to the doctrines of grace.
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We're only going to cover about half of the time period that we covered last week because I'm going to try and not go so long and not be quite so tedious with facts and details.
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But what you're going to see is when we reach the end of the time period we covered around the year of 1800, virtually every Baptist in America was Reformed in their understanding of the doctrines of grace, of salvation.
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And so I'll say this a couple times, but I want to put it right out there now.
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There are those in the Baptist churches today who would say that they are traditional, and by traditional they mean that they are Arminian and they do not believe what we believe as Calvinist.
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They couldn't be more wrong.
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They have to look over the entire history of the Baptist church to really say that.
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They draw their tradition from some different time period.
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So without further ado, we're going to start looking at the important people and dates and things that happened, and we'll begin our study with a man named Roger Williams.
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Roger Williams was born in England sometime between the years of 1603 and 1606.
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We don't know exactly when because his birth records were burnt in the Great Fire of London.
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He was given a formal education that included spending some time at Cambridge, and also he received a BA degree from Pembroke College, so he was an educated man.
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During his time at university, he came to Puritan convictions by the influence of some there.
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And so as a Puritan, he looks around and sees this is a great time of turmoil, distress.
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Many of the dissenters, those who are arguing against the way things are working in the state church, are being persecuted.
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He quickly came to the opinion that England wasn't probably the best place for him to be.
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It was a dangerous place, wasn't safe.
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He decided the best thing for him to do was to head for America.
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And so he heads to America and arrives in Boston on February 5th of 1631.
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So that gives you some idea of where we're kind of starting our time frame here.
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1631, Roger Williams is in America.
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He was pretty quickly elected as a teacher at the church in Boston at the time.
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Remember, this would have been a state sponsor, a Congregationalist church.
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This was not a Baptist church.
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He was elected as a teacher there.
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Over time, he came to be a separatist.
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And we talked about separatists last week quite a bit.
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Those are the people who came to believe that the only way for them to purify the church was to separate and form a new church.
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They weren't going to be able to do it through the established order of things.
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And so because of those beliefs, when he was asked shortly thereafter to be the pastor of the church at Boston, he declined.
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He didn't think that it would be in keeping with what he believed to take the pastor there when he thought they needed to essentially abolish the church and form a new church.
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So he decided to leave Boston and he moved down to Salem and he joined the church there in Salem.
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And again, he was apparently a man of gifting as far as a teacher.
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He was asked pretty shortly after that to assist the pastor of that church, a man named Samuel Skelton.
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Unfortunately, that never came to pass.
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When the shortly after that, the people of the church at Boston who were upset because he'd refused the pastorate he was offered, they sent a letter to the church at Salem and told them, if you receive this man into your fellowship, we will no longer fellowship with you.
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So that was a big deal.
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And they essentially put the put the squash on that.
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So our man, Roger Williams, is on the move again pretty quickly.
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And this time he heads to Plymouth, Massachusetts.
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After a short time in Plymouth, being a part of the church there, he became concerned because essentially they had stolen the land that the church was on from the Indians, from the Native Americans in the area.
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They'd done this under some false assumptions.
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They had assumed that they had the rights of a Christian king and that because they were there to establish a Christian nation, they could take whatever was there.
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They misinterpreted some Old Testament passages that made promises to Israel and used them to warrant that they could just take the land, do whatever they wanted to do.
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So he was pretty upset about this, didn't think it was very Christian or in keeping with scripture to do that.
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And he started to argue with a few of them about it.
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And as you can imagine, he made quite a few friends or enemies.
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And so while doing this, he started to make relationships with the Indians and study their language.
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And shortly after this, they actually called him back to Salem because their pastor, Samuel Skelton, we referred to earlier, had to return to England.
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So again, he hasn't been in America a long time.
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He's been quite on the move in a time when moving probably wasn't the easiest process.
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He's headed back to Salem now.
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While he was at Salem, he continued to argue for the fair treatment of the Indians because he saw so many injustices happening.
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And obviously, from history now, we can look back and see all of the terrible things that happened to the Native Americans.
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He started to attend a weekly ministers meeting there with ministers from several congregations.
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But over time, he became increasingly suspicious that the association of churches that had formed in that area was overtaking the autonomy of the local church.
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Essentially, it was being run from an associational level.
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He also continued to argue that the Indians had been treated poorly, that they should purchase the land from them for a fair price.
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And so he gained a lot of enemies.
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Ultimately, what happened was there was an alliance formed among several people who wanted this man gone.
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He was causing trouble.
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They wanted to send him back to England.
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He managed to escape that narrowly, and in doing so, he headed to Rhode Island.
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And so he comes to the area that is Providence, Rhode Island.
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He negotiates with the Indians.
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At this time, he's learned to speak to the Indians, learned some of their language.
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He actually wrote some books addressing the language of the Indians.
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And he bought some land from them, paid them a fair price to build a church.
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And so in 1639, this is the date he established the First Baptist Church, what is now the First Baptist Church of Providence, Rhode Island.
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So we remember from our study in England that it was sometime between 1633 and 1638 when the First Baptist Church was formed.
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First particular Baptist Church was formed there again, right in the same time frame, 1639 in Providence, Rhode Island.
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There's a church.
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That church still is there.
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Interesting history there.
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It is insanely liberal at this point today.
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They are not part of the Southern Baptist Convention.
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They are way far gone.
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But the history is still there.
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He remained in Providence until his death in 1683, and he did several important things.
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Yes, sir.
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No, go ahead.
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I could presume, but I don't technically know the answer.
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So I'll defer.
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It seems like every town has a First Baptist.
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Yeah, I have seen second, third and even fifth Baptist churches.
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So I don't know if it's just a matter of who showed up first or what, but I have seen fifth.
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I think fifth is the highest number I've seen.
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The Fifth Baptist Church.
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And I didn't mean to interrupt that.
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No, it's OK.
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He fought many important battles of the time, liberty of conscience, we talked about last week, arguing that the state didn't have the right to compel people to attend church or be a part of a certain church.
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And so this is this is one of the most important things to understand about Baptist history is liberty of conscience was a Baptist cause from the very beginning because the state ruled in England and even here in America.
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We're going to see a little bit of persecution continued in America.
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You know, we talk about how they left England because of persecution.
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Well, guess what? They got here.
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And some of the first people who showed up said, we're here, we're free, no persecution unless you didn't believe exactly like them.
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In that case, they railed on people.
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So he fought for liberty of conscience.
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He also addressed various other doctrinal issues.
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As you can imagine, this was a tumultuous time as far as doctrine is concerned.
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On the heels of the Reformation, there's a lot being argued.
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People were back to scripture for the first time in a long time.
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He battled with the Massachusetts Bay, which we'll see more of this later because they continue to infringe upon religious liberty.
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That's what I was just saying.
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He battled with the Quakers and others who held errant theology.
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He was firmly Calvinist.
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He expounded his theology, his Calvinist theology, to show how it made no sense for the state to try to build a church.
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So he argued from total depravity and other of the points of the tulip that it makes no sense to try and impose someone into a church.
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You can't regenerate someone by forcing them to attend a church.
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So he made a very significant contribution to the body of the American Baptist police very early on.
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The next person we'll look at is a man named John Clark.
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He was another American early Baptist father.
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He was born in Suffolk, England, 1609.
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So he was a contemporary of Roger Williams.
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He was a highly educated man.
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He studied law, medicine and theology.
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Now, you can imagine today you would study law, medicine or theology, maybe, but definitely not all three.
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So he was a very smart man.
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Early in life, he became a dissenter.
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He came to Boston in 1637.
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When he showed up in Boston, it was at the height of a growing antinomian controversy.
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There were there was an antinomian controversy going on.
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A person you may remember from history, Anne Hutchinson, was being tried at the time.
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So he looked around, saw the scene there and decided that wasn't probably the best place for him to hang out either.
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And he moved quickly in 1638.
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He moved to Rhode Island.
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So Rhode Island is kind of where the center of these very earliest Baptist life began.
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In 1639, he met Roger Williams and helped him who helped him purchase land from the Indians.
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So now Roger Williams has bought land fairly from the Indians, so has John Clark.
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He founded the founded Newport, Rhode Island and the Baptist Church.
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There was established shortly thereafter, sometime between 1640 and 1644.
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So now we've got two Baptist churches in Rhode Island in the early 1640s.
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We have a historical account of the poor treatment of some of these early Baptists.
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Remember, I told you last week that Baptists and the church in general have suffered and grown the most during times of suffering.
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John Clark, a man named John Crandall and a man named Obadiah Holmes, who was also a significant contributor to Baptist life, went on a trip to Massachusetts to visit a man named William Witter, also someone who you may have heard of.
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While they were there, they were jailed.
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Why were they jailed? They were jailed because they were dissenters.
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They didn't believe as the people of Massachusetts believe.
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They remained in jail until some friends from Rhode Island came and paid their fines.
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Two of the men, Clark and Crandall, were released, but they held Obadiah Holmes in jail and sentenced him to be, this is the historical description, well whipped.
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And so he was thoroughly whipped and beaten in the public square.
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Some of the other members of the church came later on to aid him to try and negotiate his release from prison to pay his fines, whatever the case may be.
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They jailed them also.
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So this was not a popular time to be a Baptist.
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It wasn't like they came to America and it was just suddenly OK to believe whatever you wanted to believe.
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The persecution like this continued for some time.
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I don't have time to go into all the details, but there are many stories like this.
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And so John Clark sought a charter from England to establish Rhode Island so that he could prevent this, because if they had a charter from the king establishing, then that would make it essentially they would have their own sovereign territory and the Massachusetts Bay could not legally infringe.
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Clark heads back to England because to get this, you have to go there.
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Again, this was before Google or Skype or any of those neat things.
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And so while he was there, he wrote a book called Ill News from New England.
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In it, he had the story of the poor treatment of the dissenters in the New World, including Obadiah Holmes being whipped and those things that had happened.
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He presented that work to Parliament.
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He spent 12 years in England awaiting a charter from Oliver Cromwell.
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This was during the time of the Protectorate.
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And unfortunately, he didn't even get a hearing until the monarchy was restored in 1662.
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So, as you can imagine, Connecticut and Massachusetts opposed the charter.
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They didn't want the charter to be issued to Rhode Island specifically because Massachusetts was seeking at the time to take over Rhode Island.
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But it was granted by Charles II in 1663 and Clark returned to Newport.
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He spent the remainder of his life until 1676 as an active participant in Baptist life and the political affairs of the colony.
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And so this is essentially the life and times of the very earliest Baptist churches.
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We're going to kind of skip forward a little bit now and get into the formation of some of the early associations.
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When I say skip forward, we're not going very far.
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We're going from 1640, 1650 to right around 1700s.
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But like we said, these people were struggling greatly and being persecuted for their faith.
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Whipped, beaten, jailed.
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You know, they were deprived of their families, of their churches, of everything.
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Yet they were faithful.
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So on to the formation of associations.
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The formation of associations was a very important milestone in American Baptist life.
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The associations did several things and we'll get into that, but mainly what they did was solidify the influence and help to clarify the beliefs of Baptists in America.
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We had this infantile new group of believers who believe in this certain way and hold these beliefs, but they really didn't have a wide influence at the time and they weren't fully accepted.
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Through the associations, it becomes very clear what they believe, who they are, why they believe it from scripture and all these things.
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And so the first association that we'll talk about is the Philadelphia Association.
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I think you've mentioned this briefly.
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You mentioned their confession in your lesson.
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So while the persecution in the Massachusetts Bay was rampant, the middle colonies were much more tolerant.
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With the exception of a brief period in New Amsterdam, religious liberty was the norm.
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Both New Jersey and Pennsylvania had policies of religious toleration.
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In other words, you could essentially, for the most part, practice freely what you believed in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
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This environment allowed Baptist churches to grow and flourish in the area.
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In 1707, five Baptist churches came together to form the Philadelphia Association.
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I apologize again, my writing is truly horrible.
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Excuse me.
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So in 1707, we have five churches.
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They were the Pinnipac Church, led by a man named Elias Keech.
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He was the son of a man named Benjamin Keech, another famous Baptist.
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Interesting to see in Baptist life, there are a lot of father-son duos who really both made large contributions.
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And so I think that's kind of a neat thing.
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We're a church that focuses, obviously, on the family and on fathers being leaders and teaching their children.
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You really can see this through history.
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The Pinnipac Church, the second was the Church of Piscataway, New Jersey.
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I probably butchered that name.
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The Middletown Church, the Welsh Track Church, which is a group that had immigrated, a congregation that actually came from Wales, and the Church at Cohancey.
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So five churches come together and they form this Philadelphia Association.
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This association grew over time and we're going to continue to see throughout history how they had an amazing influence.
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But I want to go through just kind of a list of the ways that the association aided the churches, why they got together.
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And most of this information is compiled from the minutes of their meetings because they had annual meetings and other meetings and they kept pretty good records.
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So a neat thing to look that we can look all the way back to the 1700s and see these records.
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The first way the association aided the churches was to give advice to those churches that were facing difficult situations.
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Again, this was a relatively new group of these specific type of believers.
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And so although many of them had been Christians or came from Christian families or had a Christian history, there were new issues they were facing and addressing that they sometimes needed help working through.
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No different than today.
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You know, our pastor faces issues sometimes and sometimes two heads are better than one and usually five or six are better than two.
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And, you know, it helps to get other thoughts.
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And so the body of ministers would come together to address issues and consider them in light of scripture together.
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This would frequently lead to the production of essays in how to deal with the challenges that other churches had already faced.
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These essays became widely used because as they would contend with an issue, they would produce this written work and then it would be used by the other churches.
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So when they came to face the same problem, they had some scriptural and guidance from wisdom to help them know how to deal with it.
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Another important thing the association did was to discipline ministers who were in need of it.
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There are a couple examples of this.
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I should read you in the minutes of the associated associational meeting of 1712.
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We read of a man named Thomas Selby, who was being disciplined.
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And this is the quote in the minutes.
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He was discharged from any further service in the work of the ministry.
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He being a person in our judgment, not likely for the promotion of the gospel in these parts of the country.
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He was essentially summarily dismissed.
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We don't know what he did or how it all came to pass, but we do know that he was given the boot.
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Another case in 1789, a man named Mr.
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Worth from the Pittsburgh church.
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The minutes say of him, he was far gone in the doctrine of universal salvation.
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We are well certified by undoubted authority that he is now fully in that belief.
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We therefore to show our abhorrence of that doctrine and of his disingenuous conduct for a long time past, caution our churches to beware of him and of artists, seagraves of the same place also who is espoused the same doctrine.
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And so these people were not saying, come anybody, doesn't matter what you believe.
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Join our church.
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It's all good.
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They held very firm doctrinal positions and they did not tolerate heresy.
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And so when appropriate, they dealt with it.
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Yeah, you're right.
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They held a pretty firm stance on that as well.
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I don't have any specific examples of it, but I wouldn't be surprised.
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Another thing they did, the association also could discipline a disorderly church, and they would do that by withdrawing fellowship from an interesting Baptist distinctive.
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Even today, the Southern Baptist Convention has a statement of belief.
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It's called the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 because that's when it was last updated.
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They they put out their overarching positions on things, but they do not interfere necessarily in the life of a local church.
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Now, what they will do if this church goes essentially off the rails and is no longer in agreement with what they teach is they'll disfellowship them.
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And so that's a unique way.
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They don't punish the church necessarily by coming out saying, you must believe this.
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They'll just say, if that's what you choose, we see this.
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If you choose to continue in this error, we'll no longer have fellowship.
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And so they were doing that all the way back here.
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One of the essays that I mentioned earlier, there was an exposition of 2 Corinthians 6, 16 and 17, which says, What agreement has the temple of God with idols for we are the temple of the living God.
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As God said, I will make my dwelling among them, among them and walk among them.
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And I will be their God and they shall be my people.
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Therefore, go out from their midst and be separate from them, says the Lord and touch no unclean thing.
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Then I will welcome you.
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And so that essay essentially expounded that and they use that to build their scriptural warrant for a church who would not hold to purity of doctrine.
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They would essentially just break fellowship with them.
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So they were definitely used to enforce what they believe, but hopefully that doesn't give you the impression that all the association did was to work in a negative sense.
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That's far from the truth.
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They also work to maintain harmony between the churches.
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Another note from the minutes of 1805, there was apparently a difference of opinion between individuals in the middle town and the Heights Town Church.
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The association adopted a resolution that recommended, here's a quote, a speedy termination of the difficulty referred to.
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And it also offered practical help in resolving this matter and many others like it.
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Furthermore, in the promotion of unity, the Philadelphia Association worked to adopt a confession of faith.
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This is where we say Baptists are confessional.
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This was an important thing to them.
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The purpose of adopting the confession of faith was that it would lead to doctrinal unity.
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They believe very much that the goal was for us to come together as believers and come to a unity of what we believe about the scriptures so that we can promote those things together.
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Keith, three weeks ago now, discussed that briefly, the Philadelphia Confession.
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It strongly resembles the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession.
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Essentially, that's the skeleton of it.
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They added a few things to it.
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Another neat thing they did, the association voted to print their confession in 1742 so that it could be circulated.
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I can imagine that some cost, but it wasn't just that they this body of leaders came together somewhere in a room and came up with this confession and then they kept it secret.
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They wanted everybody to know what it said and what they believe from the pastors all the way down to the church members in 1774.
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They adopted a practice of making observations and improvements of some particular article of faith contained in our confession, beginning with the first and so on in order.
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So, in other words, every year they would come together at their associational meeting.
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They would take one of the articles of their confession, starting with the first, and they would jointly discuss it and expound it and talk about what it meant so that, again, it wasn't just some document they produced long ago and set it on the wall somewhere and said, yeah, that's what we believe.
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It was continuously being made of importance.
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This led to a strong doctrinal clarity amongst the churches of the Philadelphia Association and led other associations to later adopt its confession verbatim and cheerfully join with them in the work.
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What we'll see later is that the Philadelphia Confession became the confession for many other associations.
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They just took it because it was pretty well put together and said, yes, that.
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The association also was able to speak on current events of the day, including immediate and important issues that were of ethical or religious concerns to the denomination.
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They were one of the earliest and strongest voices against slavery in the United States.
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The association also encouraged the education and continuing education of those in the ministry.
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In 1789, they began a fund to be used to educate young men for the ministry.
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Through this endeavor and by others, they were also available to meet the mission needs of the churches in the surrounding area.
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And so they would actually support ministers who could go preach and teach in areas where there was no preacher or no teacher.
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There was a church that couldn't support a full time minister.
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The association actually had had men who they supported who could go and do that.
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We'll see that that specific function will play a vital role as other associations are formed in the South and elsewhere.
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Do you have a question? The cooperative program was born out of what's called the hundred million, the hundred million dollar campaign.
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The cooperative program came because in the 1920s, they had this campaign to raise money to do all these things and they formed a board for the purpose of dispersing that money.
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And once that program was over, they said, hey, this worked really well.
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This board of people who helped us say this goes here and this goes there.
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And that ultimately grandfathered the cooperative program as it is today.
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And so when Keith refers to the cooperative program, the Southern Baptist Convention today gets its funding from Southern Baptist churches through the local and state conventions to the national convention, the cooperative program.
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And that's how they fund all their mission efforts and various other things.
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We were talking about this not long ago.
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It's interesting that the cooperative program, 97 percent of the funds that are given to the Southern Baptist Convention end up going to the work.
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And so it's actually a little more than that.
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Less than 3 percent is what it costs them to administer.
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That's pretty good considering the size, the sheer size of the Southern Baptist Convention.
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It's huge.
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So that's the Philadelphia Association.
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In 1707, they were the first ones.
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They were forerunners in every sense of the word because not only were they the first ones there, but they were very influential later on.
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They did a lot of things that helped form new churches, helped them to grow, helped establish their doctrine.
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And so I think I could be overstating this, but I think the strength of the Philadelphia Association early on is why we see later that the doctrinal purity in the American Baptist Church is actually stronger than it was in the English Baptist Church.
28:27
Excuse me.
28:29
Next, we're going to move on to talking about a man named William Screvin and the Charleston Association.
28:37
The association itself didn't form until 1751 under the direction of a man named, we won't get to talk about Oliver Hart, but he is an interesting association.
28:57
It was 1751, but the church that started it all was founded by a man named William Screvin.
29:02
Screvin was also born in England, Somerton, England, 1629.
29:07
We know that he was baptized sometime before 1652 by a man named Thomas Collier, who was a Calvinistic Baptist minister in England.
29:14
He functioned while in England in a position called Gifted Brother.
29:18
And so what that meant was if the minister was absent or couldn't make it or whatever the case may be, he would actually be the one to preach.
29:24
So he wasn't like a full time minister, but he did fill in.
29:28
Yes, ma'am.
29:34
He was born in 1629.
29:39
The Charleston Association was formed in 1751, not by him.
29:44
He formed the church that eventually was the cornerstone of the association.
29:48
That is confusing.
29:51
And then he patted Methuselah on the shoulder and said, good job.
29:59
So he left England during the repression of Charles II, right as the Clarendon Code.
30:03
You remember we talked about the Clarendon Code last week.
30:06
That was the four very stifling acts of Parliament that were meant to repress the dissenters.
30:14
So he left about that time, came to Boston in 1668.
30:20
And he apprenticed himself to a man named George Carr.
30:23
He became a prosperous businessman as a shipbuilder.
30:28
So he did again.
30:29
He was a lay person in much of the sense at this time.
30:34
He had a desire to form a dissenters church.
30:38
He, again, had been baptized, so we know he had Baptist beliefs or believed in believers baptism at least.
30:43
He had heard about a place called Kittery, Maine, that was held out as a haven for dissenters, a place where it was safe to be a dissenter.
30:50
And so he moved there in 1673.
30:54
By 1675, in this haven for dissenters, he was being he was facing charges because he wasn't attending the the official church in the area.
31:02
So it wasn't much of a haven.
31:05
Luckily, the charges were dropped.
31:07
He didn't end up in too much trouble there.
31:08
But by July of 1681, he returned to Boston.
31:13
And here's an interesting thing.
31:15
He was baptized in the membership of the First Baptist Church of Boston, even though he'd already previously been baptized by Thomas Collier in England.
31:23
We don't know for sure why he was baptized the second time.
31:28
There's a couple of things that people guess that.
31:31
First of all, the records of his baptism probably didn't exist.
31:35
And so he wasn't able to prove that he had been baptized.
31:40
Also, Thomas Collier, who had baptized him at the time at that point, had become a heretic.
31:45
So it could have been because of that, too.
31:48
So he was baptized there.
31:50
Shortly thereafter, he was licensed to preach there.
31:53
And shortly thereafter that he was ordained all in Boston at the First Baptist Church.
31:57
And he decides that he will return to Kittery, Maine, where he had once been.
32:03
1682 is when he goes back to Kittery and he founds a Baptist church there.
32:13
There is some early repression.
32:15
Remember, we said Kittery was supposed to be a dissenter's haven.
32:18
It wasn't really.
32:19
They faced some early struggles, but not nearly to the level that some other people did, especially in the Massachusetts Bay Area.
32:27
It gave way pretty shortly thereafter.
32:30
And so they were free to practice.
32:34
He was very active in the civic and political affairs of the area all the way until 1696.
32:43
And so in 1696, some things happened that lead him and his congregation, or at least a good chunk of it, to move to Charleston, South Carolina.
32:52
Quite the move in those days, I would imagine.
32:56
What had happened is they had, first of all, they had some trouble brewing with the Native Americans in the area.
33:02
Second of all, they had depleted all of the available timber that was right there and easily accessible.
33:07
So they had some very practical reasons to move.
33:10
But he also had received a call from some in South Carolina to come there and minister.
33:17
And so he saw that he took those two very practical signs in the call as a good indication of God's providence for him to head down to South Carolina.
33:26
And we'll see that that was a very, very good move because it proved to be very beneficial.
33:32
He arrived in South Carolina with a good portion of his congregation.
33:35
And so there were already dissenters there.
33:38
There were some general Baptists and there were some particular Baptists, but there was no official church at the time.
33:44
And so he brought his congregation.
33:47
So essentially they had a church and he received those others in.
33:49
He had some hesitations about receiving the general Baptists in.
33:52
You'll remember the general Baptists are the English Baptists who were believed in general atonement.
33:58
So they were Arminian in their theology, greatly Arminian.
34:01
And so he decided that he would receive them in and hopefully not upset the theological balance.
34:09
And ultimately it did work out.
34:12
Essentially, we'll see the particular the particular Baptists theology won the day and most of the general Baptists at that time were assimilated in.
34:22
So Screven's work in South Carolina leads to the formation of several other churches and eventually the association later.
34:29
The churches there were the U-Haul Church, the Ashley River Church, the Stono Church and the Welsh Neck Churches.
34:38
Those were the first core group that formed the association.
34:41
The Charleston Association has been referred to as the womb from which the Southern Baptist Convention was formed.
34:49
The association was thoroughly Calvinistic in its theology and adopted the Second London Baptist Confession.
34:55
So, again, we have those people who would like to say that they are traditional Baptists and are and they mean to say by that that they're not Calvinist like we are.
35:04
That's a false history.
35:06
That's a revisionist history.
35:10
A really neat thing they did in 1813 that really kind of presses this point home.
35:15
The association commissioned the printing of a work for the church called the Charleston Manual.
35:20
I would love to have a copy of this.
35:22
It included the Second London Baptist Confession, a work called A Summary of Church Discipline and the Baptist Catechism.
35:29
Remember, I told you guys the Baptist used catechisms at one time.
35:32
It was in this book.
35:33
And so this was the Charleston Manual for the churches.
35:35
It had their confession.
35:38
It had how they viewed church discipline is how it should be carried out and had their catechism.
35:44
So very neat work, very reformed and all of its theology could not be mistaken for anything other than that.
35:52
It was not it was not ambivalent or ambiguous in any way.
35:58
And so those are the first two associations to form.
36:02
And they will we'll talk about this in a minute.
36:04
They will form what we call in American Baptist history regular Baptists.
36:09
We're going to try and clarify all these distinctions we make between regular, separate, particular, general, all those things in a few minutes because it can get confusing.
36:19
But at this point, I want to move on to talk about the First Great Awakening.
36:25
The First Great Awakening was a great evangelical movement spurred on by many preachers.
36:29
It swept across Protestant Europe and into America.
36:33
Probably the most famous people from the Great Awakening would be the Westleys.
36:38
But there were also many others who were very influential.
36:41
Whitefield was actually the one who brought it to America.
36:44
It's credited with that.
36:45
But there was also Jonathan Edwards, Gilbert Tennant, many others who contributed.
36:51
It started in 1726 and lasted beyond the 1740s, 1750s.
36:57
There were revivals that they carried on through various areas.
37:00
So it's hard to say that there was a specific time that it ended.
37:05
So during this period of time where there's revival occurring in America, we're also seeing Baptist churches be born.
37:13
And this is where we get into our distinction of regular Baptist churches, separate Baptist churches, general Baptist churches and particular Baptist churches.
37:21
So those are the four kinds.
37:22
I'm going to write this down real quick and I'm just going to go over them one more time.
37:31
Separate, general and particular.
37:43
It's important to understand these distinctions because they don't always, people think, well, you had to be one or the other.
37:51
There was some theological carryover between some of these groups.
37:55
They're not four different types of Baptists.
37:57
When we say regular Baptist, those are essentially the pre-awakening Baptist churches.
38:01
So those Baptist churches that were in existence before the awakening, specifically the ones we just talked about, they were the churches of the Philadelphia Association and the churches of the Charleston Association.
38:11
There were a few other congregations that we didn't hit on, but not a whole lot.
38:17
General Baptist congregations are English Baptists who believe in general atonement.
38:21
These are, to make it simple, these are Armenian Baptist believers.
38:26
They are the group from England that essentially descended into universalism, Unitarianism, until the New Connection led by Dan Taylor came and then they had some doctrinal revival.
38:39
The particular Baptists were the English Baptist churches who were Calvinist or Reformed in their theology.
38:46
And so they're the ones who we would align with mostly in our theology.
38:50
So hopefully that regular, separate, general, particular, excuse me.
39:01
So during the time of the awakening, there was there was much growth in the regular Baptist life.
39:06
The churches in South Carolina grew and we already talked about how they formed the association.
39:10
The churches that existed in Virginia appealed to the Philadelphia ministers for help.
39:15
They sent some guys down and the ones who weren't Calvinistic before, under the influence of the Philadelphia Association ministers, they all became Calvinist.
39:24
North Carolina, there was a revival among some churches that that were in North Carolina that was started by general Baptist missionaries from England.
39:33
So these were general Baptist churches, in a sense, on American soil.
39:40
They, excuse me, those general Baptist churches would eventually also become influenced by the ministers from the Philadelphia Association and a man named Robert Williams.
39:51
They became Calvinist, Reformed in their theology as well.
39:55
There were several associations forming in North Carolina at the time.
39:58
So it's growing from just these two main associations into other associations.
40:02
There's one called the Key Tochten Association, which was a very strong particular Baptist association that held an important place in Baptist life during this time.
40:11
And so the question is, why the shift from general Baptists to particular Baptists in America? I know we don't call them that here, but there were some generals who general Baptist churches that were started by general Baptists from England.
40:24
And they almost all shifted to being particular Baptists.
40:28
Why did that happen? There's a couple of reasons.
40:32
First of all, the general Baptists in America were very affected by zeal or the emotion of religion.
40:39
And so they didn't pay much attention to confessions of theology.
40:42
They didn't fit the bill of what we were talking about, how Baptists have always been confessional.
40:47
This led them to focus on the experience part of religion, but neglect the knowledge.
40:52
And so we all know that if you just interpret your religion through experience and not through scripture, through what we know, it can lead to all kinds of things.
41:01
So they were very uncertain because they didn't have a whole lot of footing to stand on.
41:06
They also had a conscious lack of assurance in regards to their church members.
41:09
There was a lack of assurance of salvation that was common amongst them.
41:14
Because, again, imagine if you associated Christianity with a feeling, what does it mean when that feeling is gone? There's nothing left, right? Am I a believer? Am I not a believer? They also had a great lack of discipline in the churches that existed.
41:30
And so when they were introduced to the reformed theology and specifically the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints, it started to make sense to them in their mind.
41:40
A believer, a true believer perseveres.
41:45
And we know what that means.
41:46
So it allowed them to have some discipline in their church.
41:50
It gave them scriptural assurance to those who were converted.
41:54
It gave them grounds also to discipline those who were unconverted or who were behaving badly in the church.
41:58
And so, again, I've made this point before.
42:01
I will make it again.
42:02
Virtually all of these churches shifted towards a reformed understanding of the gospel.
42:10
The group we haven't really talked about yet are the separate Baptists, and they formed under the leadership of a man named Shubal Stearns.
42:19
Shubal Stearns was born in Boston in 1706.
42:22
So he's American born.
42:24
He had little formal education, but he did learn to read and write and he read pretty extensively.
42:30
He was active in congregational life and was considered a faithful churchman.
42:35
In 1745, he heard the preaching of Whitefield and was converted.
42:39
He became what's called a new light.
42:42
If you've never heard of that, a new light is a term used to describe those who, during the awakening, embraced the revivals that were occurring throughout the colonies.
42:49
That's kind of a simplification.
42:51
There were new lights and old lights.
42:52
So new lights were those who said embrace the revivals that were going on.
42:57
The old lights were those who said, I'm not too sure about all this.
43:01
They were reticent or suspicious of the revivals and of how they might overtake the authority of the church.
43:08
So during this time, many of the new lights were former congregationalists.
43:12
And because they didn't agree with the old lights, they ended up forming their own churches.
43:16
And a lot of those churches were Baptist.
43:20
Stearns was part of a church that was full of old lights, and that ultimately led him to do just that.
43:24
He left the church, started his own congregation, and he and they adopted Baptist beliefs.
43:31
In 1751, Schuble Stearns was baptized.
43:36
And so he remained as pastor of that church until 1754.
43:41
Upon hearing about the poor conditions in the South and the lack of the churches that were in the South at the time, he and five other couples from that church left for Virginia.
43:50
They came to a couple of places.
43:52
There's actually some really neat stories about it.
43:53
But ultimately, they didn't they didn't plant in the first three or four places they went to.
43:58
They had some troubles.
43:58
They ended up in a place called Sandy Creek, North Carolina.
44:04
And so the next year, in 1755, he was joined by his brother-in-law, Daniel Marshall, and they founded the Sandy Creek Church with 16 people.
44:14
So 1755 is when the Sandy Creek Church, with 16 people, was founded.
44:26
1758, three years later, there were three fully established churches with over 900 communicants, as well as several preaching points throughout the area, supported through itinerant preachers.
44:38
And so when we talk about revival and things happening in this time, it wasn't like the day where we have churches that might report a conversion or a baptism every couple of years.
44:48
It was these people were growing.
44:52
So they went, they grew very quickly.
44:55
The Sandy Creek Association was formed in 1758.
44:58
They were harmonious and active for years.
45:01
It did eventually divide, for convenience sake, into three associations.
45:04
There was one in North Carolina, one in Virginia, and one in South Carolina.
45:07
And there are some distinctions there, but we unfortunately won't be able to get really into that today.
45:14
So at this point in American Baptist history, we've got regulars and we've got separates.
45:19
But essentially, all of them are Calvinists in their understanding of the doctrines of grace.
45:26
Excuse me.
45:29
Well, what happened in America is these two groups basically came together after the time of the Revolution.
45:37
The first official joining of the two branches of American Baptist occurred in Virginia in the year of 1786.
45:48
1786, Virginia joined.
45:54
That's just the way I'll shorten that up.
45:57
The church has formed a committee to join the two together, and they decided that they would do it upon the basis of the Philadelphia Confession.
46:05
Remember, I told you earlier, the Philadelphia Association and specifically their confession would be very important in Baptist life later.
46:12
The separatists were hesitant at first because of their past experience with confessionalism in the congregational churches.
46:18
They had seen confessions be used as a substitute for conversion, but they didn't want to go down that road again.
46:24
So there were churches back then who would say, yeah, I believe all those things.
46:28
Yes, I intellectually assent to those things.
46:30
Obviously, we don't we don't we don't believe that intellectual assent is the same as conversion.
46:36
And so they were a little reticent about using a confession.
46:39
But as they the committee worked it out, worked through things and they saw what the regular Baptist believed, they agreed to unite around essentially what was the second London Baptist confession.
46:49
There was a caveat.
46:51
They agreed that not everyone was bound to hold every single item of the confession, but the doctrines of Christ and the doctrines that concern salvation, which were Calvinist reformed in their understanding were necessary for all to affirm.
47:05
So they offered some latitude in belief, but they held out the things that they felt were very important.
47:12
We must all agree on these points.
47:16
Shortly after this, in 1788, the churches of North Carolina did the same thing.
47:21
They had actually attempted this earlier as far back as 1772, but there was disagreement because some of the regular Baptists had admitted to having been converted after their baptism.
47:31
And so that that made them a little reticent and they didn't end up joining then.
47:34
But in 1788, they did.
47:37
1801, the Kentucky churches joined together by adopting a confession of faith that included 11 articles.
47:44
Now, there was some disagreement in the churches of Kentucky over the issue of the atonement.
47:48
They were based basing their differences over a view put forth by Andrew Fuller and a view put forth by John Gill.
47:56
And some people mistakenly characterize this as Armenian view versus Calvinist view.
48:01
That's not correct.
48:02
There were actually two nuanced Calvinist views of the doctrine of the atonement.
48:06
So they did have some disagreement.
48:08
They worked it out.
48:09
They joined together.
48:10
And ultimately, in the next few years, all the other states, without necessarily formally doing it like these states had, joined together the regular Baptist churches and the separate Baptist churches.
48:20
So in America, 1810-ish, all the churches are essentially one.
48:27
There's really just one Baptist church.
48:30
And so I'll say again, this proves the point that we've talked about multiple times now.
48:34
It's the year 1800, roughly, virtually every American Baptist church is Calvinist.
48:39
I know there are many Baptist churches nowadays who would consider that a curse word, but they are Calvinist.
48:50
So unfortunately, due to time, this is where we're going to stop our step by step walk through of history, because I told you guys I wouldn't keep you an hour and a half tonight like I did last week.
48:59
But we are going to cover the life of an important man.
49:03
There's a couple of things I want you guys to know that we're leaving out just because I feel like it's important that you know what else has happened.
49:09
I can't go through it, but please feel free to ask me questions about it or look into it.
49:14
We're leaving out the formation of mission societies in the beginning of the work of sending missionaries all over the world.
49:20
We're leaving out the anti-mission society movement.
49:23
Those who argued against the formation of missionary societies and the sending of missionaries.
49:28
It happened.
49:32
Yes, ma'am.
49:34
Yeah.
49:43
They did.
49:44
They made several arguments.
49:46
Just one I'll give you is that they were concerned that the formation of these societies that sent missionaries was extra biblical.
49:55
And because these missionaries existed outside of the authority of one specific local church, they were concerned about that.
50:03
No, that's OK.
50:04
That there's a lot of other reasons, but that's one of the main reasons that a lot of them put forth was they felt like another reason that a lot of them were concerned is because they were concerned that there was use of Arminian type theology in offering.
50:18
Again, it's the old debate between Calvinism, true Calvinism, hyper Calvinism.
50:22
Just because we believe in the doctrine of election doesn't mean we don't evangelize.
50:26
It actually emboldens our evangelism.
50:28
But there were some who didn't understand that at the time.
50:32
So I'd be glad to talk to you more about that later.
50:34
It's a really interesting time.
50:35
The other thing we're not going to be able to get to is the actual formation of the Southern Baptist Convention, which is today essentially the largest body of Baptists.
50:43
It's a massive denomination.
50:45
There are.
50:46
I don't even know the number.
50:48
A lot of.
50:49
How many? Sixteen million Southern Baptists in America.
50:54
Well, I don't think that's worldwide.
51:02
Right.
51:02
Yeah.
51:03
So there are a lot of Southern Baptists.
51:04
And like I've told you guys all along, when I tell you these things and tell you we're Baptists, the perception today is that there are that all Baptist churches today are Arminian.
51:13
They've gone off the far end of theology.
51:15
That's not accurate.
51:17
There was a.
51:17
Time when the convention was that way, but there really has been a resurgence and there has always been many churches who have held a good doctrine.
51:25
Brother Richard, you're going to say something.
51:26
The.
51:28
Yes, sir.
51:36
Yeah.
51:37
Yeah.
51:37
John brought us and.
51:40
Yeah.
51:41
And Basil Manley.
51:43
Interestingly enough, we're going to talk about a man named Basil Manley now.
51:47
So we're going to step out of this history and just look at one individual and just talk about his life.
51:53
And that man is Basil Manley, Sr., another pair of a interesting father son duo in Baptist life, because Basil Manley, Jr.
52:01
was part of the original faculty of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, a place that I'm very proud to study at right now.
52:08
But Basil Manley, Sr.
52:10
was a highly effective minister of the gospel and preacher.
52:14
But more so than that, his character and his love for God was evident in every aspect of life he touched.
52:19
So, you know, this man really we see great preachers and sometimes we think, oh, well, they're great preachers.
52:28
But this man lived a life that in every aspect of it that he faced, he brought to bear the scriptures and his love for God.
52:35
He was a pastor.
52:36
This is a quote from Dr.
52:38
Nettles book.
52:38
He was a pastor, a political commentator, a family man, an administrator, an amateur naturalist, an educator, as well as an educational theorist.
52:46
But preeminently, he was a preacher.
52:50
And so he was a real well-respected man.
52:52
J.P.
52:52
Boyce, James Pettigrew Boyce, said when speaking of Manley's position as general missionary and evangelist in Alabama late in his life that it afforded him an abundant opportunity for preaching, which after all was his great gift.
53:04
And so he was all these things, but he was also a great preacher, a man who really, really preached the word, preached the truth of the gospel.
53:11
And he, more so than many at the time, infused theology into his teaching in a way that few people were able to do.
53:19
Yes, ma'am.
53:22
He.
53:22
All right.
53:22
We're going to go biography right now.
53:24
You're right on time.
53:24
Thank you.
53:25
Convenient segue.
53:27
Manley was born in January twenty ninth, seventeen ninety eight.
53:32
In North Carolina.
53:36
He would be baptized by a man named Robert Daniel of the Rocky Springs Baptist Church on August twenty sixth of eighteen sixteen and a little less than two years later, he was licensed by that same church to preach on April twenty fifth of eighteen eighteen.
53:56
He studied at South Carolina College.
53:58
He also served during that time as pastor at Edgefield Courthouse Church from eighteen twenty two until eighteen twenty six.
54:06
So that was his first pastor.
54:08
Eighteen twenty two to eighteen twenty six were the times he served there.
54:14
During this time, he started to see a great need for competent Baptist ministers.
54:18
Let me tell you how things were in this time in many places.
54:21
Many of the Baptist churches or the gatherings of Baptist at the time listened to Presbyterian and Methodist preachers regularly.
54:28
That was their method of receiving instruction.
54:30
Methodist and Presbyterian preachers.
54:32
And while there are many points we would agree with those people on, there are some we would disagree on.
54:36
And so there were there was the message that came through Georgia.
54:44
Right.
54:45
There were ample Methodist and Presbyterian ministers at the time and a lack of Baptist ministers.
54:49
OK, we feel the method is correct.
54:52
Correct.
54:53
Yeah.
54:53
Yeah.
54:53
Yeah.
54:54
A lot of the big voices in this, the strongest, most successful men of the awakening were were Methodist.
55:04
And so during his time there at the church, the Holy Spirit worked greatly amongst the churches in the area, giving rise to a revival that spread from Edgefield out through South Carolina and into Georgia.
55:15
And so Manly is the pastor of this church, a revival began under his preaching that really took root and spread.
55:22
He was a young man at the time.
55:24
This gave Manly the ability later in life when dealing with new and novel methods of inducing revival, which were soon to come, to point to the true work of the Holy Spirit and give example of authentic revival, not one crafted by men.
55:36
And we'll see how he deals with that later in doctrinal life as we start to see some of the things that we still see in churches today, you know, men using emotional manipulation to try and whip people up into a frenzy and create a revival.
55:47
So in 1826, he succeeded Richard Furman, a great man in his own right, as the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Charleston.
56:02
So he is 28 years old.
56:04
He is the pastor of First Baptist Church of Charleston.
56:07
If that doesn't ring with you yet, that was a big deal.
56:11
It was a big church and a big calling.
56:14
Actually, the church had a great debate and debacle over calling him to the ministry there because he said they said, well, he's so young, he's not he's not able, he's not confident.
56:23
And he essentially told him this.
56:25
My God is able that that's a summation of what he said.
56:29
He said, I don't come here to tell you how great I am, but the God I serve is able.
56:33
So he really did have a strong reliance on God.
56:37
And so at First Baptist Charleston, he oversaw great times of revival here under his faithful preaching from 1829 till 1830.
56:44
And then later again in 1835, there was a revival in the area when Richard Fuller was invited to preach there.
56:52
And so despite all these great times, he did also have quite a bit of suffering in his personal life.
56:59
Just to give you an idea, during that time while he was there, he struggled through the death of two of his sons.
57:06
He had a stillborn daughter and his wife had a miscarriage in that time of his pastor.
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And so this man was no stranger to personal suffering.
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And as we often see with those who are greatly affected, affected for the gospel and for the kingdom, suffering is a way of life.
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But he persevered in his work there.
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He became a well-respected preacher.
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During his time there, he was given many offers of come here, minister, come there, minister, as you can imagine.
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He turned them all down, but he did finally accept a call to become the president of the University of Alabama in 1838.
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And so he's in the educational field at this point, and he served there until 1855.
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So nearly 20 years, he was the president of the University of Alabama.
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I don't think he was a fan of their football program.
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Despite this busy labor, as you can imagine, the president of a large university is quite a busy man.
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He also continued to do work at the associational and the state level to achieve denominational integrity and confessional unity.
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So they're still working for unity among the denomination and to keep everybody on the same page and to hold out the doctrines that are so important to the Baptist church and always have been.
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His work in the denomination eventually led to the Alabama Resolution, which is what prompted the calling of the convention of 1845, where the Southern Baptist Convention was born.
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And so he was a key player in that process in what came to pass.
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And I really wish I had time to go over that because there's so much misconception surrounding it, but we just can't do it tonight.
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So after a brief stint at a pastorate back in Charleston, after he retired as president of the University of Alabama, he came back for about four years at a church.
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He returned to Alabama in 1859 to serve as general missionary and evangelist for the convention.
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And so he went all over the state of Alabama and other places preaching and teaching.
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1859, you might notice the same year that the first session of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary was held.
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Manley was the first president of the Board of Trustees, so not president of the college, but president of the Board of Trustees.
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He was involved highly there.
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He delivered the first commencement address in May of 1860.
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He also led prayer at the meeting of Montgomery, Alabama, where the Confederate government was organized.
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So he was chaplain to Jefferson Davis and rode in the carriage with him to his inauguration, led the prayer at the inauguration.
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It's an interesting piece of Confederate or Civil War history there.
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Manley was a great defender of the South, and he believed in secession thoroughly.
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He joined the chorus of Southern Baptists who defended slavery.
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He defended the institution of slavery while decrying the violation of the proper relationship of slave and master.
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So he was a man who believed the regulations offered by scripture regarding slaves and masters were for the benefit of both.
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And he worked to provide proper religious instruction for his slaves and also argued for the inclusion of slaves with equal privileges within the church.
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And so there were those, obviously of this time, it's an undeniable fact of history that many of these men did defend slavery.
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They actually did believe that you could have biblical slavery.
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So he was a slave owner, but he did argue strongly that slaves be given religious instruction and included in the church.
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Later in life, Manley would become paralyzed.
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He did recover enough to be able to preach and teach at times, but his abilities were very limited.
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His life came to a close after moving to Greenville, South Carolina, to live with his son, Basil Manley, Jr.
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He died on December 21st of 1868.
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His death was widely mourned throughout the South and particularly amongst the Baptists whom he had so greatly influenced.
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This man made a huge impact.
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And so that's kind of his biography.
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I want to talk to you about what he believed and what he fought for his whole life.
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And this will only take a few more minutes.
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We're drawing to a close.
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Basil Manley was an educator because he saw the great value of education.
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He felt that education was important in every profession, whether you were to be a doctor or lawyer, a cobbler, a blacksmith, whatever.
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But he really saw it of highest importance for those who would be ministers of the gospel.
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It's part of the reason that he felt so strongly about this is because he was so grateful for his call to the ministry.
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I was reading about him and there's a time he wrote to a friend and talked about how grateful he was that God would call him to the ministry.
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And he just gushes, you know, he's just really affected by it and so thankful that he doesn't have a high opinion of himself.
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But he's so grateful that God would call him to the ministry and use him.
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He said, there was nothing I desired more than to serve God's people.
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So he really had a heart for it.
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As early as March of 1819, so at a young age, he started to express that desire for the ministry, but he felt that he must first be educated properly.
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So he saw the value and the need of sitting at the feet of those who could help properly educate him for the task.
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He made his study a priority early in his ministry.
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But at this time, there was not much in the way of formal theological education that could be had that we would consider good.
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And so he did a couple of things early on while he was the pastor at Edgefield Village in 1825.
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He came to an agreement with the congregants of his church that rather than try to visit every member of the church on a regular schedule, he would rather devote himself first to the study of the word so that he could provide for their greatest need, their spiritual welfare.
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And so this was a man who said, I love my congregation and I want to be with them.
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But rather than say, I'm going to hit every home on this certain schedule, I'm going to study the word so that I can deliver you what you really need to hear.
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And that's the truth of God's word preached.
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And so that was probably, I would I would imagine a an interesting opinion at the time.
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He did agree that he would visit people in the case of illness or distress, but he made it clear that his home was always open, too.
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So he opened his home, said, if you need me, come here, I'll be here, but I'm going to study.
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But other than that, he did exactly what he set out to do.
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He made the most of his time to study the word.
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And so Manly developed this theory of religious education during his life, and he became one of the leading proponents of exclusively theological education, because at the time it was OK, if we're going to train these young men for the ministry, we're going to teach them reading, writing math, and then we're going to teach this and then back and forth.
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He said, you need to have an exclusively theological education, something that's set apart to this.
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Not that all that other stuff's not important.
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But what he said was that if you tried to blend the two, those people who had donated their money and their time to train people for the gospel would essentially be paying for algebra and math class and those other things that, while important, were not necessary for the preaching the gospel.
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So he called for, in his words, an institution suitably furnished and endowed for the exclusive benefit of those who are entering upon the ministry of the word.
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So during this time, the states were trying to provide theological education, you know, you had statewide Baptist associations and they were trying to to provide some sort of education.
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But what he said was, if we get a few states together, how much more can we do? How much greater? Because the state was just too small.
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They didn't have enough money, enough resources to make it firm.
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So he really pushed for the states to join together and do this.
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And despite this drive for theological education, Manley never looked down upon the uneducated minister, because at the time there were tons of uneducated ministers, men who were just being as faithful as they could.
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And instead of looking down on him, he showed how many of them in their same situation have been greatly used by God to further the kingdom.
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And what he did was encourage their churches through his associational influence to give these men time to study the word.
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He said, if we can't provide you with a theological education, the least you can do is let the man study the word so that he can preach faithfully.
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And so, again, he was very committed to the study of the word.
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He saw that as the foremost importance in his ministry.
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It didn't let him stop from pressing for the theological training center for young men in the South.
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In 1844, he said there is no object so important, so worthy to be cherished and sought by the Baptists of the South as some great literary and theological center, some rallying point, embodying force enough to make us felt wherever we choose to lay our arm.
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And so with eloquent words, he said, this is very important.
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Through his continuing work towards this end, it was decided in 1857 that the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary would be founded in Greenville, South Carolina.
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And this stands as mainly his most lasting contribution of Baptist life.
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As you know, the seminary is still there today, still firmly committed to the abstract principles it was founded upon and to training men for the gospel work in the reformed tradition.
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Manley envisioned the gospel minister to maintain two vital traits.
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He brought this together in a way that really is intriguing.
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First, he must know and hold to the truth of God's word.
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Everything done by the minister must come from his knowledge of Scripture.
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All spiritual progress is to come on the heels of an advance in scriptural understanding.
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In other words, he said, we don't grow as believers by some random outside force or some magical thing.
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We grow because we study and we learn more.
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And that's how we grow.
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Much like you wouldn't expect a child to grow if he didn't eat by feeding on the word.
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That's how we grow.
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He said that feeling could not occur properly without thinking, but.
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Not in contrast, but in complement, second, the minister must be true in his affections.
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He can't be someone who simply knows the truth of Scripture.
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He must be someone who's taken in the heart.
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And so we often talk about the head and the heart and having head knowledge or heart knowledge.
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But really, he saw it as both.
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You need to know it because if you don't know it, it can't come into your heart.
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But it also needs to be not just mere knowledge, but part of who you are, a genuine love for Christ that would that would carry the minister in the gospel only by a bond of thinking and feeling comes knowing where the minister can deal faithfully with the people of his congregation.
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And so these beliefs held together made him a powerful preacher.
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John brought a set of his preaching that it was always marked by deep thought and strong argument expressed in a very clear style and by extraordinary earnestness and tender pathos.
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He continued saying people were born down by his passion, convinced by his arguments, melted by his tenderness and swayed by his force of will.
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So his doctrine and his delivery were both exceptional.
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He was really a standout.
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So real quickly, we'll talk about Manley's theology.
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I don't want to belabor this point that I've already made several times that the Baptists of the 19th century were universally Calvinist, but no discussion of his theology could be had without discussing his reformed understanding of the gospel.
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JP Boyce said of Manley in his doctrinal sentiments, Dr.
01:08:38
Manley was a decided Calvinist.
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Others point out that Manley didn't hold to Calvinism because Calvin taught it, but rather he thought it to be what was taught in the Bible.
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He felt that the doctrines of grace being called Calvinism was akin to justification by faith being called Lutheran, not because it wasn't from scripture, but to say that Luther gave a distinct exposition of it.
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So this system we call Calvinism, Calvin didn't invent it.
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He systematized it.
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He put it forth.
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He expounded it.
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Manley felt so strongly about the doctrines of grace that he believed it to be believed.
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If our minds weren't so biased by pride and self-defendance, we wouldn't need to argue them.
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Simple scripture quotation would be sufficient to convince someone.
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So I want to read you a quote, this is writing of Manley in a circular letter on election found in Dr.
01:09:28
Nettles book.
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It says, If the human mind were not unreconciled to God, nothing more than the bare citation of the appropriate portions of scripture would be requisite to the universal reception of the doctrine they contain.
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The deep derangement of our nature is such that we are opposed to God and chiefly in those attributes and measures which imply our guilt and ruin.
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Election is of this nature, and as it is more obviously of grace purely and exclusively than any other blessing, it is more violently disliked and opposed than any other by whatever is unrenewed and unsanctified in the human breast.
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In regard to this perverseness, therefore, it is allowable to assist our conceptions and belief by reasonings and illustrations.
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So he laid it pretty straight that this was the truth of scripture and that the only reason we rejected it was because our human flesh and he really he really brought it home.
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He was not only staunchly Calvinist, he was also confessional.
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He saw the doctrinal unity was a great prize, something that we should seek after.
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He felt the only way to attain this was not by the attrition of doctrine.
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And so many people have tried.
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We'll just keep taking away points until we can all agree on something.
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He saw that it was by building up doctrine.
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That's how we bring people together, attaining to doctrine.
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So he firmly held to the confessions of the associations which he ministered to and several times.
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I won't go into all of it, but several times there are issues of him writing to different churches that had doctrinal disagreements and helping them to resolve these conflicts.
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This actually happened in these days when there was a disagreement or somebody who believed something that was that was contrary to the confession.
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They would all get together and talk about it and come to an agreement based around the scripture.
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So, you know, I pray that we could do that more these days.
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You know, unfortunately, so many things these days evolved to a theological shouting match or, you know, spitting from our corners.
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But these people really worked out several issues.
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It was quite amazing.
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His theology was not simply about knowledge.
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It also came forward in his preaching and in his practice.
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He didn't see any inconsistency in holding to the doctrines of grace and preaching the gospel to all men.
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Rather, he felt more emboldened and free to preach the gospel to all.
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He gave passionate pleas to the center to repent.
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He had a rich understanding of the doctrine that led him to use every ordained mean of bringing sinners to repentance, but stopping short of using manipulative means that were becoming popular at the time.
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He would not suffer emotional manipulation or protracted imitations, but he would gladly and with every ounce of emotion that he could muster, proclaim the truth of the gospel and call sinners to repent and remind them there was an impending day of judgment.
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And so he he as thoroughly as he could boldly proclaim these things, not despite the fact that he was reformed in his understanding, but because it emboldened his evangelism like we've been talking about for a few weeks now.
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This was a time where many of the methods we saw we see today as commonplace were first being manifest, the methods that men use to manipulate people.
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And Manley really toed the line, never stepping over it, but always using all the passion that he could muster.
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He he wanted people to hear the gospel and to be converted.
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He saw the need for passionate preaching informed by clear doctrine.
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And so Basil Manley Sr.
01:12:57
was a Baptist.
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He was Orthodox.
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He was evangelical.
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He was confessional.
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He was separate, right in line with the profile that we've already established.
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And I'll stand before you today and tell you that I'm a Baptist, too.
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These are the things that I believe.
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Not because there's a group of men who call this, but because it's the way that I understand scripture as as revealed to me through the Holy Spirit.
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And so we stand in the company of many historical men like Basil Manley, Andrew Fuller, JP Boyce, and more recent men like Dr.
01:13:29
Albert Moeller, Dr.
01:13:30
Tom Nettles, Dr.
01:13:31
Tom Askew, and present these things and say, this is what we believe.
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And so while there would be people who would refrain from using a term like Calvinist because of the fear of being labeled a hyper-Calvinist, I wouldn't let fear of some Baptists who believe differently or who have perverted the history of the true Baptist church stop me from telling you that I'm a Baptist.
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Our church teaches historical Baptist truth and doctrine.
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So I hope this study has helped you out and been profitable to you.
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I hope you've learned some things and I would encourage you guys, like I said already, there's a lot we left out.
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I'd be glad to talk with you about it.
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I'd be glad to point you in the direction of some things that can help you if you need books or things to read about this.
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There's a lot more out there, but I hope this has been informative to us to see historically what these people believe and where we are now and be able to tie the two things together.
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So let's close in prayer.
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Father, we thank you, Lord, for this time to get together and study, Lord, from history and Lord to study and learn about men who, with all their might, fought to defend doctrinal truth as revealed to them by the Holy Spirit.
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Lord, we pray that you would embolden us to stand for what we believe, never to stand on our own knowledge or own might, Lord, but to trust in your word, Lord, and to trust in your power to speak through us.
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Father, we thank you for this night.
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We pray that you would keep us safe as we travel home and be with us until we meet again.
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In Jesus name.