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Baptists, Calvinistic or Arminian?

In the last post of this series, I wrote that John T. Christian said in his book on The History of Baptists, that Baptists were more Calvinistic than Arminian.  When I wrote that or referenced him, I wasn’t saying that Baptists are Calvinists.  At least since the advent of Calvinism, they are more Calvinistic, mainly referring to eternal security.  Eternal security very often and for some is shorthand for Calvinistic, setting someone apart from Arminianism.

Even with a Calvinistic resurgence in the Southern Baptists, only 30% are Calvinist.  They aren’t the majority.  I know some look at the English and American Baptist Confessions to get or have the opinion that Baptists were mainly Calvinists for the last four hundred years.  You would be wrong again.

Particular and General Baptists

Particular Baptists, the Calvinist wing of Baptists in England especially in the 17th and 18th centuries, wrote the London Baptist Confession.  At the time of their writing of that confession, they represented slightly more of the Baptist churches in England than the General Baptists, the non-Calvinist wing.  That Confession did not speak for all Baptists in England.  John T. Christian writes about this:

This body (of General Baptists) constituted by far the larger portion of the Baptists of that country, and their history runs on in an uninterrupted stream from generation to generation.

The first Baptists in England were not Calvinists.  The Calvinists came later as a separation from the Anglican church in 1633.  Calvinism was an unnatural growth for Baptist churches.  Calvinist Baptists came first from a break with the Church of England, not an adaptation on Baptist churches.  They broke with the Anglicans over such doctrine or practices like infant sprinkling.

Apparently because of the doctrinal problems among the General Baptists, once the Particular Baptists came to England, the latter outgrew the former for a short period.  By 1660, Particular Baptist churches outnumbered General Baptist ones, 130 to 110.   Anglican England, however, persecuted both Baptist factions until the Glorious Revolution of William and Mary and the Toleration Act of 1688.

Calvinism and Arminianism Both Clash with Historical Baptist Belief

Calvinism does not characterize Baptists.  Eric Hankins explains this well in his journal article, Beyond Calvinism and Arminianism Toward A Baptist Soteriology:

Baptists believe in the clarity and simplicity of the Bible. We search in vain for decrees, a Covenant of Works, the distinction between a “general call” and an “effectual call,” hidden wills, and prevenient grace. We react with consternation to the ideas that God regenerates before He converts, that He hates sinners, that reprobation without respect to a response of faith brings Him the greatest glory, or that the truly converted can lose their salvation. Baptists have felt free to agree with certain emphases within Calvinism and Arminianism, while rejecting those that offend our commitments to the possibility of salvation for all and to the eternal security of that salvation based exclusively on faith in the covenant promises of God.

The free offer of an eternal, life-changing covenant with the Father through the Son by the Spirit to all sinners by the free exercise of personal faith alone has been the simple, non-speculative but inviolable core of Baptist soteriological belief and practice. Baptist soteriology (specifically including the doctrines of the sovereign, elective purposes of God, the sinfulness of all humans, the substitutionary atonement of Christ, salvation by grace alone through faith alone, and the security of the believer) is not in jeopardy and does not need to be reinforced by Calvinism or Arminianism. It can be successfully taught, maintained, and defended without resorting to either system.

Calvinism, Arminianism, and Infant Sprinkling

Hankins continues:

It has been typical of Baptists to believe that anyone who reaches the point of moral responsibility has the capacity to respond to the gospel. While all persons are radically sinful and totally unable to save themselves, their ability to “choose otherwise” defines human existence, including the ability to respond to the gospel in faith or reject it in rebellion.

God initiates the process; He imbues it with His Spirit’s enabling. When people respond in faith, God acts according to His promises to seal that relationship for eternity, welding the will of the believer to His own, setting the believer free by His sovereign embrace. Our assurance of salvation comes not from a “sense” that we are elect or from our persistence in holy living. Assurance comes from the simple, surrendered faith that God keeps every one of His promises in Christ Jesus.

Baptist Insistence on Believer’s Baptism

Baptists’ historical insistence on believer’s baptism is a solid indicator of our soteriological instinct. Historically, neither Calvinism nor Arminianism had a correct word for infant baptism because both were burdened with the justification for total depravity, original sin, and individual election. For many Arminians (like those in the Wesleyan tradition), infant baptism functions with reference to original sin and prevenient grace and plays a role in the faith that God “foresees.” For many Calvinists, infant baptism has become an extremely odd vehicle by which they deal with the fate of infants, an issue that is illustrative of the fundamental inadequacy of the system.

If Calvinism is true, then its own logic demands that at least some infants who die before reaching the point of moral responsibility spend eternity in hell. By and large, Calvinists do not want to say this and will go to great lengths to avoid doing so.  Covenant Theology and infant baptism have been the preferred method for assuring (at least Christian) parents that they can believe in original guilt and total depravity and still know that their children who die in infancy will be with them in heaven. While Baptist Calvinists and Arminians do not allow for infant baptism, the fact that their systems allow for and even advocate it is telling.

Baptist Rejection of Covenant Theology

Prevenient grace and Covenant Theology have never played a role in Baptist theology. This frees us to deal biblically with the issue of infant baptism: it is simply a popular vestige of Roman Catholic sacramentalism that the Magisterial Reformers did not have either the courage or theological acuity to address. Privileging election necessarily diminishes the significance of the individual response of faith for salvation, thus creating room for infant baptism and its theological justification. But with faith as the proper center of Baptist soteriology, infant baptism has never made any sense. Our distinctive understanding of the ordinance of baptism celebrates the centrality of the individual’s actual response of faith to the free offer of the gospel.

Hankins gets at the crux of the doctrinal conflict between true Baptist doctrine, actual New Testament doctrine and practice, and the innovation of Calvinism and Arminianism.  The doctrinal and practical deviation from scripture of Calvinists and Arminians both clash with the doctrinal and practical sensibility of Baptists.  They are a diversion off the true line or trajectory of Baptist churches from their beginning, almost a mutation.

Baptists Not Protestant

Sadly, many professing Baptists embrace Protestantism as their history through Roman Catholicism.  This is a new historical revisionism that arose in the late 19th century.  Here is what C. H. Spurgeon wrote in the Sword and the Trowel concerning the History of English Baptists in a review of J. M. Cramp’s History:

The history of English Baptists is full of interest. From the first they were peculiarly offensive to “the powers that be.” Henry the Eighth – who did so much for the Anglican Establishmentarians that he ought to be regarded by them as a pet saint, even as he was befooled and belarded by the intriguing Cranmer – when he assumed the headship of the Anglican church which never acknowledged Christ to be its only Head, proclaimed against two kinds of heretics, viz., those who disputed about baptism and the Lord’s Supper; and such as were re-baptised. These Anabaptists were commanded to withdraw from the country at once. Cranmer ordered some to be burnt, and burnt they were.

1357 Date for English Baptists

Mr. Kenworthy, the present pastor of the Baptist church at Hill Cliffe, in Cheshire, has stated that if the traditions of the place are to be trusted, the church is five hundred years old. “A tombstone has been lately dug up in the burial ground belonging to that church, bearing date 1357. The origin of the church is assigned to the year 1523.

It is evident that there were Baptist communities in this country in the reign of Edward VI, since Ridley, who was martyred in the following reign, had the following among his “Articles of Visitation:” “Whether any of the Anabaptists’ sect or other, use notoriously any unlawful or private conventicles, wherein they do use doctrines or administration of sacraments, separating themselves from the rest of the parish?” A fearful crime which many Anglicans of the present day would be as ready to punish were it not that other notions of religious liberty exist and powerfully influence public opinion.

We can trace the same spirit, though in embryo perhaps, in the ritualistic prints of the present age, and indeed in the two delightfully amiable Evangelical newspapers whose unbounded hatred of all outside the pale of their theology and clique is as relentless and unscrupulous as the bitterest feelings of Papal days. All history teaches that state-churchism means persecution, in one form or another, according to the sentiments of the age; and the only cure for the evil is to put all religions on an equality.

True History of Baptists Not Protestant

Spurgeon did not believe the Protestant view of English separatism.  He with his mammoth library and well-read wrote the following:

We believe that the Baptists are the original Christians. We did not commence our existence at the reformation, we were reformers before Luther and Calvin were born; we never came from the Church of Rome, for we were never in it, but we have an unbroken line up to the apostles themselves. We have always existed from the days of Christ, and our principles, sometimes veiled and forgotten, like a river which may travel under ground for a little season, have always had honest and holy adherents.

Persecuted alike by Romanists and Protestants of almost every sect, yet there has never existed a Government holding Baptist principles which persecuted others; nor, I believe, any body of Baptists ever held it to be right to put the consciences of others under the control of man. We have ever been ready to suffer, as our martyrologies will prove, but we are not ready to accept any help from the State, to prostitute the purity of the Bride of Christ to any alliance with Government, and we will never make the Church, although the Queen, the despot over the consciences of men.

Spurgeon made statements like this many times in sermons through the years, not from the seat of his trousers, but from what he read of prime sources and other history.  He also talked among many English men for years as to the truth of Baptists.