I have enjoyed reading Beth Newman's thought provoking editorials on the Baptist identity. Her most recent opinion piece, “Historical Amnesia and the Christian Creeds,” stirred memories of conversations I have had with other Baptist theologians.
Lately, there has been a blossoming love affair between Baptist theologians and the classical Christian creeds. Many idealize the patristic era and champion the creeds as the solution to innumerable Baptist deficiencies. In some ways, historians and theologians have been talking past each other when we dialogue about creeds and confessions. Many of the “contemporary” discussions in moderate Baptist circles over creeds, confessions, individuals and community have their roots in earlier Baptist debates — debates that took place over three centuries ago.
Baptist scholars have frequently struggled to harmonize the varieties of the Baptist experience — to call order from the chaos. Some see the creeds as the most promising hope for charting a fresh course for Baptist communities of faith. Many Baptist historians resist this for a variety of reasons, not because they oppose the content of the creeds, but because anchoring the community with the creeds would betray the uniqueness of early Baptist conceptions of the church.
The Baptist identity was hewn in the fire of persecution. State churches wielded doctrine to fine, whip, banish and imprison those who dissented from the official dogma. Many Baptists viewed this persecution as evidence that the state churches were not pure churches. They endeavored to gather a pure church from those who could testify to an experience of grace and who were willing to seal that testimony with baptism. Baptists longed for pure churches composed of true believers and depended upon the Holy Spirit, not creeds, to accomplish this.
When they gathered their churches, they carefully worded their statements of faith to emphasize their human origins. Baptists did not view the Nicene or Chalcedonian creeds as equivalent to Scripture, even though they took those creeds for granted in most of their own confessions. Does this mean that the Baptists departed from classical orthodoxy? Occasionally, they did — just as every Christian community has done at some point in its history. This is precisely the point Baptists were making. Because we are human we cannot be absolutely sure that our own theological constructs accurately portray God or the faith. Furthermore, however critical, influential and meaningful the classical creeds may have been to early Baptists, they did not view them as a panacea for heresy or secularism. Our sisters and brothers in profoundly creedal denominations can confirm this.
So what is left? Anarchy? Heresy? Chaos? What shall unite us, if not a creed? That question has been asked of Baptists over and over again. A great example of this is a debate that occurred between the Puritans and the founders of the First Baptist Church of Boston. In 1655 a Puritan farmer in Boston named Thomas Gould refused to have his infant daughter baptized. His Puritan tutelage had produced in him a rigid adherence to Scripture and consequently his unyielding commitment to adult believer's baptism.
Because of the Baptist agitations, the governor and council of Boston called for a debate with the Baptists in 1668. The Puritan ministers pressed Gould and his fellow Baptists to explain what authority allowed them to dissent from the majority. The debate boiled down to a question of whether an individual had the right to challenge the tradition of the community. William McLoughlin argued that the heart of the debate “was a more complicated and far-reaching issue: the implicit challenge of the Baptist individualism (through reliance upon the Holy Spirit) to the corporate ideals of Bible Commonwealth.” Note the parenthetic reference to the Holy Spirit. This is the basis of a Baptist understanding of both individualism and community. The authority or the “glue” that holds Baptists in community is the presence of the Holy Spirit in each individual.
The Puritan leadership believed this was a dangerous doctrine and would lead to fanaticism, individualism and all manner of chaos. When Gould was pressed further to explain why an individual could dissent, he replied “Christ dwelleth in no temple but in the heart of the believer.” The Puritans said, “No!” Christ's words were “I will dwell in them” (the community). “Every man must judge for himself,” the Baptists argued. “The spirit of God in every Christian tells them whether the other be right in spirit or in form only.” If indeed the Puritans were correct and the spirit indwelled “them” (the collective of the institutional church rather than the individual), then adult baptism would have been superfluous. Adult believer's baptism is predicated on the idea that the Holy Spirit indwells individuals who together constitute the church.
After being dismissed from the established churches, Boston Baptists immediately signed a covenant and formed a new community of faith — a community bound together by the Holy Spirit. They rejected the Puritan conception of the community that would stifle the freedom of the individual to respond to the Holy Spirit. John Russell, the second pastor of the Boston Baptist congregation, referred to this as “tenderness of conscience” — not a conscience informed by a secular individualism, but a conscience made tender by the Word of God and guided by the Holy Spirit.
To the Puritans this was a “recipe for anarchy” and, frankly, a willy-nilly way to run a church. To the Baptists, it was nothing more than the exercise of their faith in the power of the Spirit of God. As McLoughlin observed, this new Baptist community would not be sustained or expanded on the basis of the ordered means of the “New England way,” but rather by the “sporadic, unpredictable, spontaneous” workings of the Holy Spirit.
Likewise, their unity hinged upon their shared testimony — a common narrative of how God had extended the riches of his grace to them in Christ Jesus and sealed them with the Holy Spirit — rather than mental assent to one of the historic creeds.
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— Carol Crawford Holcomb is an associate professor of Christian studies at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in Belton, Texas.
Read more:
Opinion: 'Historical amnesia' and the Christian creeds (7/2/2007)