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Trail of Blood and Landmarkism
Men use the terms “Trail of Blood” and “Landmarkism” as a kind of mockery, almost never with evidence. They use them in the same manner as calling someone a “Flat Earther.” If I said I was “Trail of Blood” and “Landmark,” what would I mean? Should I embrace those terms in light of potential derision?
Trail of Blood
“Trail of Blood” refers to a booklet written by James Milton Carroll in 1931. Carroll did not originate the words “trail of blood” as referring to the persecution of churches. Others before used “trail of blood” to describe the ongoing record of atrocities of Roman Catholicism through the centuries in its opposition to the truth. I like the metaphor of Carroll, which is saying that you can detect true churches in the historical record through findings of state church persecution.
Carroll would say that the trail of blood started with the Lord Jesus Christ and that suffering marks the trajectory of true churches. I use this exact language all the time, “There have always been true churches separate from the state church.” I also ask this question, “Do you believe the truth was preserved in and through Roman Catholicism?” Men find it difficult to answer “yes” to that question. If they answer, “No,” then they essentially take a Trail of Blood position. I say, “Well, then we take the same position, don’t we?”
Whitsitt Controversy and English Separatism
Opposition to the Trail of Blood started with a liberal president of the Southern Baptist Convention, William Whitsitt (read here, here, here, and here). The work of Whitsitt is less famous than Carroll’s Trail of Blood, but if someone does not accept the Trail of Blood, his other option is called, “English Separatism.” Can we mock someone as “English Separatist”? The Trail of Blood position predates the English Separatist one. If someone rejects Trail of Blood, he is left with the Roman Catholic position on church perpetuity or succession. He denies the promise of Jesus, “the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18).
Whitsitt took from his European training a modernistic view of truth. He wrote and said that if it does not have primary source historical evidence, it isn’t true. From this, Whitsitt said that the earliest Baptist churches trace from 1610 in England.
A split occurred in the Southern Baptist Convention over Whitsitt. The Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary under the presidency of B. H. Carroll started in a major way because of the Whitsitt controversy. Most Southern Baptists then distinguished themselves from Protestants. Carroll’s brother wrote Trail of Blood.
The Application of Modernistic Historicism
Did you know a historical gap exists between the completion of the New Testament and the doctrine of justification? With that historical position, justification did not exist until after the Protestant Reformation. No primary source evidence exists for the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. I’ve been to Bethlehem in the Palestinian West Bank area, and the best historical evidence outside of scripture for Jesus’ birth is secondary and vague. It starts around 325 with Constantine’s mother Helena visiting there.
The mockery designated for Trail of Blood reminds me of the mockery by scientists of a God Hypothesis and intelligent design. Trail of Blood is true, but it is institutionally inconvenient. Intelligent design or a God Hypothesis puts people out of business. Trail of Blood is a strict ecclesiological position that undermines free-floating free agents, who function outside of church authority, like for instance, Alpha and Omega ministries. “Ministries” function outside of a church, not something we read in the Bible, and cross denominational lines on a regular basis.
Landmarkism
The attack on Landmarkism dovetails with the one on Trail of Blood. Landmarkism did not originate local-only ecclesiology. The Landmark movement began in the Southern Baptist Convention because of an ecumenical drift in the Convention. Modernism began affecting the Convention. Compromise grew. Baptist churches began allowing Presbyterians in their pulpit and accepted their “baptism” for transfer of church membership. The Landmarkers stood against this.
The Landmarkers believed local-only ecclesiology like most of the Southern Baptists in the middle 19th century, but they stressed and influenced a stronger practice. They rejected what they called, “alien immersion,” baptism without proper authority. They were saying, “Don’t accept Presbyterian baptism,” or any other Protestant baptism. The Protestants arose from Roman Catholicism with a continuation of state church doctrine. Baptist churches should reject their baptism, Landmarkers claimed, practiced, and encouraged all Baptists to join that.
Many today define Landmarkism with a giant falsehood. They say Landmarkism is chain-link succession of Baptist churches. Furthermore, they say that Landmarkism requires proof of a chain-link succession of Baptist churches all the way to the Jerusalem church. That is not what Landmarkism is.
In a more simple way, you should understand Landmarksim as, first, since Christ, true New Testament churches always existed separate from the state church. Second, churches start churches. Third, baptism requires a proper administrator. Authority is a matter of faith, but scripture recognizes the importance of it. It does not proceed from Roman Catholicism, so it also does not come from Protestantism.
Authority isn’t arbitrary. It is real and it is somewhere. We should not eliminate it. This arises from the rebellion of men’s hearts. Men don’t want authority, especially church authority. I see this as the primary cause of the controversy over Landmarkism and the Trail of Blood.
35th Anniversary of the Church I Planted in California, pt. 2
Every true church starts by the grace of God and under the headship of Jesus Christ. The Apostle Paul wrote and I echo his belief in 1 Corinthians 15:10:
But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.
He described in part his planting of the church at Corinth, a New Testament church under the authority of Jesus Christ.
My first church was a Baptist church, First Baptist Church of Covington, Indiana. As a 12 year old, I joined Maranatha Baptist Church in Covington. Later that year, I gave a public testimony of salvation to become a member of Calvary Baptist Church in Watertown, Wisconsin. For three months after my last year of graduate school, I became a part of Lehigh Valley Baptist Church in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. I came back to Calvary in Watertown for two years before joining Emmanuel Baptist Church in Elkhorn, WI.
One of my college professors, the late Richard Weeks, allegedly had the largest personal Baptist history library in the world. He accumulated a huge collection of old, out-of-print Baptist books available for his students to read. The bookstore sold Baptist books, required for outside reading. My college reprinted the two volume A History of Baptists by Thomas Armitage. The textbook for Baptist History was John T. Christian‘s, A History of Baptists. We read books by Roy Mason, S. E. Anderson, Chester Tulga, J. M. Carroll, and B. H. Carroll.
I was and am a Baptist. I believe that there have been true churches in perpetuity since the first church in Jerusalem, known by different names. They began calling those churches, Baptist churches. Certain distinctives characterize those churches, the first of which is the Bible is their sole authority for faith and practice. They are also separatist, separated personally and ecclesiastically. True Baptist churches are the Lord’s churches.
Three different summers I traveled to 70-80 churches out West. I witnessed firsthand the dearth of true, biblical churches in the San Francisco Bay Area. Both the teaching of Romans 15:20 and the obvious need to preach the gospel to every creature (Mark 16:15) worked on me toward the idea of starting a church in the San Francisco Bay Area, Romans 15:20 reading:
Yea, so have I strived to preach the gospel, not where Christ was named, lest I should build upon another man’s foundation.
It was not my desire to go somewhere where I believed the gospel was already being preached. With 40 million people in California and 7.75 million people in the San Francisco Bay Area, in my lifetime I would not run out of the opportunity to preach to people who had not heard, no matter how hard I worked. The Bay Area is also a transient society with a huge turnover. Every 5-10 years, new people or families occupy the same apartments or houses. Even if most didn’t listen or were hostile to the gospel, some would.
From my own observation, professing Christians were not bumping into each other and scrambling all over the Bay Area, like ants on an anthill, to preach the gospel to those who haven’t heard. I didn’t know how they would react, but I was optimistic. I theorized that the Bay Area was so bad, as bad as people think or worse, because not much preaching occurred there. Before fire fell like Sodom and Gomorrah, someone should make a greater attempt at preaching to it.
As I went to college in the early eighties, I heard very little exposition of scripture, except on the radio. I became convinced of exposition as superior or even God’s will for preaching and dedicated myself to its practice. Exposition became my belief for or philosophy of preaching. It was not until graduate school that I planned in the sense of preparing to preach exposition. Zooming forward to right now, I preached or taught through every word of the Bible over the thirty three years. Nothing had a greater impact toward success than the Word of God in its context.
I had decided that I would start the church with raising only limited support. I determined not to spend any extra time doing so. Instead, I would receive some money from churches and work a job. I had not heard the term, bivocational, but I did know the word, tentmaking. Rather than spend months waiting, I wanted to get going right away.
In May 1987, I knew the San Francisco Bay Area, but I wasn’t sure the exact location where I would begin. I drove out to California in a Dodge Omni my parents gave me, stopping in churches on the way. Once I arrived, I started scouting. I did that for one week. There was no internet. I couldn’t go online to find out about cities, towns, and other churches. Using paper maps, I went from one town to another, stopping at a phone booth to look for what churches were there in the yellow pages of phone books and took notes at each stop. I called churches at pay phones and talked to their leaders. I had a goal of finding towns with no Baptist church at all.
To Be Continued
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