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“Reformed Baptist”: Anachronistic Oxymoron or Useful Signpost?

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On Being Reformed

Part of the book series: Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World ((CTAW))

Abstract

A growing number of Christian churches around the world describe themselves as “Reformed Baptist.” But while those adopting the moniker believe it to accurately describe their distinct theological heritage, some within the wider Presbyterian and Reformed community strongly disagree. Some Reformed historians and theologians have argued that the term “Reformed Baptist” is an anachronistic oxymoron, an inaccurate label that both distorts our understanding of what it means to be “Reformed” and obscures the real identity of those it purports to describe. This chapter critically engages with these claims from both historical and theological perspectives. While conceding that the term “Reformed Baptist” would not have been easily intelligible to early modern actors, the chapter argues that this historical reality does not imply any logical inconsistency on the part of those adopting the label today. Thus, the term “Reformed Baptist” remains a useful signpost for the twenty-first-century church.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “Henry Cromwell to Sir John Clotworthy, Sir John Skevington, Thomas Cooper, Arthur Hill, John Druckenfield, George Rawdon and Roger Lindon” in Robert Dunlop, ed., Ireland under the Commonwealth: Being a Selection of Documents Relating to the Government of Ireland from 1651 to 1659, vol. ii (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1913), 670–672.

  2. 2.

    R. Scott Clark, Recovering the Reformed Confession: Our Theology, Piety, and Practice (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2008), 36.

  3. 3.

    See Collin Hansen, Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist’s Journey with the New Calvinists (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2008).

  4. 4.

    Kevin DeYoung, “Is John Piper Really Reformed?,” https://blogs.thegospelcoalition.org/kevindeyoung/2013/11/07/is-john-piper-really-reformed; (accessed June 8, 2016); R. Scott Clark, “Is John Piper Reformed? Or Holding the Coalition Together (Updated),” http://heidelblog.net/2013/11/is-john-piper-reformed-or-holding-the-coalition-together (accessed June 8, 2016).

  5. 5.

    See Faith and Life for Baptists: The Documents of the London Particular Baptist General Assemblies, 1689–1694, James M. Renihan, ed. (Palmdale, CA: Reformed Baptist Academic Press, 2016).

  6. 6.

    A Confession of Faith (London, 1688), “To the Judicious and Impartial Reader,” no pagination.

  7. 7.

    James M. Renihan, Edification and Beauty: The Practical Ecclesiology of the English Particular Baptists, 1675–1705 (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2009), 20.

  8. 8.

    P[raisegod] B[arbon], A Discourse Tending to Prove the Baptisme in Or under the Defection of Antichrist, to Be the Ordinance of Jesus Christ (London, 1642), sig. A2r.

  9. 9.

    For example, Immanuel Knutton, Seven Questions about the Controversie between the Church of England, and the Separatists and Anabaptists, Briefly Discussed (London: 1645) on March 29, 1644 Sir H. Mildmay was ordered to “prepare and bring in an Ordinance for suppressing the unlawful assembling and meeting together of Antinomians and Anabaptists; and the venting their erroneous and schismatical Opinions, in the Countries as well as in London;” “House of Commons Journal Volume 3: 29 March 1644”, in Journal of the House of Commons: Volume 3, 1643–1644 (London, 1802), pp. 440–441. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/commons-jrnl/vol3/pp440-441 (accessed May 19, 2016).

  10. 10.

    Stephen Marshall, A Sermon of the Baptizing of Infants (London: 1644), 3.

  11. 11.

    William Kiffen, A Briefe Remonstrance (London: 1645), 6, 10, 11.

  12. 12.

    Robert W. Oliver, “Baptist Confession Making 1644 and 1689,” presented to the Strict Baptist Historical Society, March 17, 1989; accessed online at http://www.reformation-today.org/articles-of-interest/455 (accessed May 14, 2018); I am grateful to Dr. Oliver for drawing my attention to this point.

  13. 13.

    A Solemn League and Covenant, for Reformation and Defence of Religion (London: 1643), 5.

  14. 14.

    Edmund Calamy, Englands looking-glasse (London: 1642), 46.

  15. 15.

    Christopher Blackwood, The Storming of Antichrist (London: 1644), title page.

  16. 16.

    Cf. Edward Terrill’s description of “reformation” within his own Broadmead Church in Bristol. Terrill characterizes the rejection of paedobaptism as one part of a larger reformation process through which he and his co-religionists cast off “popish darkness” and “were truly reformed in a greate measure, in turning from the Worship of Antichrist.” Here, “reformed” clearly conveys a dynamic, rather than static sense, with the emphasis on movement away from Roman Catholicism. I am grateful to James Renihan for drawing my attention to this reference. The Records of a Church of Christ in Bristol, 1647–1687, Roger Hayden, ed. (Gateshead: The Bristol Record Society, 1974), 93–96.

  17. 17.

    Kiffen, A Briefe Remonstrance, 12.

  18. 18.

    Clark, Recovering the Reformed Confession, 344.

  19. 19.

    C. Scott Dixon, Protestants: A History from Wittenberg to Pennsylvania, 1517–1740 (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 99.

  20. 20.

    J.A. Halcomb, “A Social History of Congregational Religious Practice during the Puritan Revolution” (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2010), 144–167.

  21. 21.

    See Sigrun Haude, In the Shadow of “Savage Wolves”: Anabaptist Münster and the German Reformation during the 1530s (Boston: Humanities Press, 2000); Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (London: Pimlico, 2004), 252–280; Ralf Klötzer, “The Melchiorites and Münster,” in A Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 1521–1700, ed. John Roth and James Stayer (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 217–256.

  22. 22.

    Immanuel Knutton, Seven Questions about the Controversie Between the Church of England and the Separatists and Anabaptists, Briefly Discussed (London: 1645), 23.

  23. 23.

    Daniel Featley, The Dippers Dipt (London: 1646), 199–219.

  24. 24.

    Robert Baillie, Anabaptism, The True Fountain of Independency, Antinomy, Brownisme, Familisme (London: 1647), 18, 28–29.

  25. 25.

    Featley, The Dippers Dipt, 220; for mid-seventeenth-century polemical exchange between Baptists and their critics, see Matthew C. Bingham, “English Baptists and the Struggle for Theological Authority, 1642–1646,” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 68:3 (2017), 546–569.

  26. 26.

    For example, John Frame, “A Fresh Look at the Regulative Principle: A Broader View,” http://frame-poythress.org/a-fresh-look-at-the-regulative-principle-a-broader-view (accessed June 8, 2016).

  27. 27.

    Westminster Larger Catechism, 112.

  28. 28.

    For example, the Scottish commissioner to the Westminster Assembly Samuel Rutherford wrote: “And I thinke the Scripture saith here with us, that the nearest parents be not the onely conveyers and propagators of federall holinesse to the posteritie … We also affirme, that the Lord extendeth the mercy of the Covenant to a thousand generations, and therefore the line of the covenant-mercy is not broken off, for the unbeleefe of the nearest parents;” Samuel Rutherford, The Due Right of Presbyteries (London: 1644), 259–263.

  29. 29.

    I recognize that the primary burden of Clark’s Recovering the Reformed Confession is, as the title suggests, to call those within his own ecclesiastical circles to greater confessional fidelity. Thus, one might reply that the answer to confessional slippage within Reformed and Presbyterian churches is to do precisely that, rather than opening up the tradition to allow for greater diversity. However, while this might apply to certain issues I have identified—say, the relaxation of the regulative principle—no one, to my knowledge, is seriously proposing a complete “recovery of the Reformed confession” with respect to all the various areas of divergence between seventeenth- and twenty-first-century theology and practice (e.g., regarding the role of the civil magistrate, the baptizing of infants on the strength of a distant relative’s profession of faith, etc.). Thus, no one involved in this conversation is immune from the tensions created by subscription to historically situated—and increasingly historically distant—confessional standards.

  30. 30.

    See Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

  31. 31.

    Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c. 1590–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).

  32. 32.

    On Congregationalism, see Geoffrey F. Nuttall, Visible Saints: The Congregational Way, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957); Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York: New York University Press, 1963); Stephen Brachlow, The Communion of the Saints: Radical Puritan and Separatist Ecclesiology, 1570–1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); James F. Cooper, Tenacious of Their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial Massachusetts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Michael P. Winship, Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2012).

  33. 33.

    R. Michael Allen, Reformed Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 46.

  34. 34.

    For a sense of just how subtle these distinctions were in seventeenth-century debate, see Hunter Powell, The Crisis of British Protestantism: Church Power in the Puritan Revolution 1638–44 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015).

  35. 35.

    See Polly Ha, English Presbyterianism, 1590–1640 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).

  36. 36.

    See A Confession of Faith Put Forth by the Elders and Brethren of Many Congregations of Christians (Baptized upon Profession of Their Faith) in London and the Country (London: 1677), xxvi.

  37. 37.

    This passage is taken from a comment Clark left on his blog; http://heidelblog.net/2013/11/is-john-piper-reformed-or-holding-the-coalition-together/#comments (accessed June 8, 2016).

  38. 38.

    David F Wright, Infant Baptism in Historical Perspective: Collected Studies (Milton Keynes: Paternoster Press, 2007), xxvii, see also 68–88.

  39. 39.

    Geerhardus Vos, “The Doctrine of the Covenant in Reformed Theology” in R.B. Gaffin, ed., Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation, The Shorter Writings of Geerhardus Vos (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2012), 234.

  40. 40.

    Allen, Reformed Theology, 5.

  41. 41.

    “Bowen vs. Eastern Carolina Presbytery, Case 90–98,” Minutes of the Nineteenth General Assembly (1991), http://www.pcahistory.org/documents/bowen-vs-easterncarolina.pdf (accessed June 8, 2016).

  42. 42.

    Ibid., 18–22.

  43. 43.

    John Spilsbery, A Treatise Concerning the Lawfull Subject of Baptisme (London: 1643), 8.

  44. 44.

    The Confession of Faith, of Those Churches Which Are Commonly (Though Falsly) Called Anabaptists (London: 1644), x, xii.

  45. 45.

    John Tombes, An Examen of the Sermon of Mr. Stephen Marshal (London: 1645); John Tombes, Antipaedobaptism, or No Plain nor Obscure Scripture-Proof of Infants Baptism or Church-Membership (London: 1652); Michael Thomas Renihan, Antipaedobaptism in the Thought of John Tombes (Auburn, MA: B & R Press, 2001); Thomas Patient, The Doctrine of Baptism and the Distinction of the Covenants (London: 1654); on Baptist federalism during the 1650s, see Crawford Gribben, God’s Irishmen: Theological Debates in Cromwellian Ireland, Oxford Studies in Historical Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 79–98; Nehemiah Coxe, A Discourse of the Covenants That God Made with Men before the Law (London: 1681).

  46. 46.

    See, for example, Richard C. Barcellos, ed., Recovering a Covenantal Heritage: Essays in Baptist Covenant Theology (Palmdale, CA: Reformed Baptist Academic Press, 2014); Samuel D. Renihan, From Shadow to Substance: The Federal Theology of the English Particular Baptists (1642–1704) (Oxford: Centre for Baptist History and Heritage, 2018); Pascal Denault, The Distinctiveness of Baptist Covenant Theology: A Comparison Between Seventeenth-Century Particular Baptist and Paedobaptist Federalism, trans. Mac Wigfield and Elizabeth Wigfield (Birmingham, AL: Solid Ground Christian Books, 2013); Nehemiah Coxe and John Owen, Covenant Theology from Adam to Christ, ed. Ronald D. Miller, James M. Renihan, and Francisco Orozco (Palmdale, CA: Reformed Baptist Academic Press, 2005).

  47. 47.

    Brenton C. Ferry, “Works in the Mosaic Covenant: A Reformed Taxonomy,” in Bryan D. Estelle, J.V. Fesko, and David VanDrunen, eds. The Law Is Not of Faith: Essays on Works and Grace in the Mosaic Covenant (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2009); Andrew Woolsey, Unity and Continuity in Covenantal Thought: A Study in the Reformed Tradition to the Westminster Assembly (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2012); “Report of the Committee to Study Republication,” Eighty-third (2016) General Assembly of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, http://opc.org/GA/republication.html (accessed September 15, 2016).

  48. 48.

    Clark, Recovering the Reformed Confession, 149.

  49. 49.

    Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance, eds., G.W. Bromiley, trans. (London: T&T Clark, 2009), IV.4, 160–190; see also Karl Barth, The Teaching of the Church Regarding Baptism, Ernest A. Payne, trans. (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1948), 41–54.

  50. 50.

    Such debates are amply illustrated by the essays collected in Michael A.G. Haykin and Mark Jones eds., Drawn into Controversie: Reformed Theological Diversity and Debates within Seventeenth-Century British Puritanism (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011).

  51. 51.

    Peter Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: “Orthodoxy,” “Heterodoxy” and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 404.

  52. 52.

    1689 Second London Baptist Confession, 5.1.

  53. 53.

    Ibid., 26.15.

  54. 54.

    Ibid., 30.1; see also Richard C. Barcellos, The Lord’s Supper as a Means of Grace: More Than a Memory (Fearn, Ross-shire: Mentor, 2013).

  55. 55.

    For an illustration of just how variegated the “Baptist” experience can be, observe the incredible diversity on display in Thomas Kidd and Barry Hankin’s excellent survey, Thomas S. Kidd and Barry Hankins, Baptists in America: A History (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

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Bingham, M.C. (2018). “Reformed Baptist”: Anachronistic Oxymoron or Useful Signpost?. In: On Being Reformed. Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95192-8_2

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