I must confess that I do not share the concern voiced across the spectrum of Baptist life that Baptists are afflicted by historical amnesia. My concerns lie elsewhere, and so I must explain. What is amnesia? It results in a loss of memory, yes, but not simply a loss of memory. It results also in a loss of identity because identity is bound up with memory. We are who we remember ourselves to be.
Baptists have not lost a sense of their identity. They have, after all, been arguing about identity quite forcefully for nearly three decades, with all parties to the argument possessing certainty that they are right. They believe that they rightly remember who Baptists are supposed to be.
Baptists are, according to some, a people who are Protestant scholastic inerrantists. Others say Baptists are Calvinists. Still others, anti-Calvinists. Many assert confidently that Baptist identity is found in championing individual freedom and responsibility above all.
So if Baptists have identity, they are not amnesiacs. But they remember themselves in many different ways. Their identities are at odds; the traditions they invoke to guide their memory are at variance. My concern, therefore, is that Baptists do not remember carefully. Baptist memory is not absent; it is defective.
To understand why this is so, we need to listen to historian Glenn Hinson who observed that in the years following the American Revolution there was “a critical alteration in Baptist self-consciousness.” While it would be impossible to explore this phenomenon fully here, I believe it brought a shift in Baptist memory and identity as well. My concern is to see that Baptists gain the ability to remember their ancestors in a way that does justice to these ancestors and enables a vibrant life of faithful interpersonal and social actions in our own day.
It was with this concern in mind that I read the recent ABP opinion articles by Beth Newman and Carol Holcomb about Baptists and creeds. Both scholars express valid cautions and insights. Holcomb rightly reminds us that the roots of present-day Baptist concerns extend back over three centuries. Newman, in her essays of July 2 and May 15, has rightly expressed apprehension that if there are tendencies in Baptist life that threaten our identity as Christians, some corrective is needed. The creeds, she says, “are gifts that help us remember” and, therefore, “our surest defense” against historical amnesia. Meanwhile, Holcomb is justified to worry whether this correction imposes something that would deface the legacy of our forebears, who endured great persecution for their Baptist convictions.
The question we must ask is whether adherence to the historic Christian creeds, and understanding the church as necessary for salvation (humanly speaking) rather than merely subsequent to it, are impositions on the past. Holcomb, and many others we might add, strongly believe that it is. Newman does not address this important matter in her recent essay with detail sufficient to allay their fears.
Listening to the early Baptists, we find that they were indeed opposed to the established state church, but also that dogma was not their chief complaint. The early Baptists believed that the state church was arrogating to itself the authority and honor that belonged to God alone.
Thomas Helwys, for instance, posed the hard question to the established church: “[People] must pray and repent as you by your power appoint them. Have you power also to appoint the Lord to accept these prayers and repentances? Or do you not care whether the Lord accept them or no, so that you be submitted to?”
But those early Baptists did not reject the creeds. While they certainly did give at best a relative authority to their own confessions, the ecumenical creeds were a different matter. A Baptist confession titled “An Orthodox Creed” (1679) gave the text of the Apostles, Nicene, and Athanasian creeds, declaring they “are necessary to be understood of all Christians . . . which might be a means to prevent heresy in doctrine and practice, these creeds containing all things in a brief manner, that are necessary to be known, fundamentally, in order to our salvation. . . .” An early Baptist leader, Thomas Grantham, included the text of the Nicene Creed in a catechism he penned. And in his theological work, Christianismus Primitivus, he provided the Apostles Creed before presenting a Baptist confession. He did this “to shew that though the composition of these [Baptist] articles be new, yet the doctrine contained therein is truly ancient, being witnessed to by the Holy Scriptures, and later writers of Christianity.”
To grasp the importance of the creeds, we must understand that our earliest Baptist ancestors never diminished the importance of the church. Indeed, the Orthodox Creed stated that it is to the church “and not elsewhere [that] all persons that seek eternal life, should gladly join themselves.” Grantham asked a question that could easily have been asked in our own time. Where are Christians to seek guidance in the concerns of the soul? Would it be the Holy Spirit, the Scripture or the Holy Church? “There is no doubt,” he answered, “that these three agree in one testimony.” Clearly, he did not mean to elevate the church to the status of the Word or Holy Spirit. Rather, it is by the action of the Spirit that the Word is truly heard in the church that he could make this claim. “Christ dwells in his church by the Holy Spirit,” Grantham stated, making the church the “habitation of God.”
To be sure, our forebears believed that the church is fallible. They declared that even the purest churches are a “mixture of truth and error.” Even so, they did not believe that we are at liberty to cast it aside, because God will not lead “in a more sublime or spiritual path of gospel obedience than Christ or the Apostles prescribed.” Thus Grantham called the church “the mother of us all.”
I am concerned that many Baptists now remember in such a way that they overlook many important aspects of the earliest Baptists in order that their memories be coherent. Some descendants of the first Baptists reject elements of belief that these persecuted ancestors embraced, and do so in the name of being Baptist.
Are we somehow “more Baptist” than those who first bore the name?
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— Philip Thompson is professor of systematic theology and Christian heritage at Sioux Falls Seminary in Sioux Falls, S.D. ([email protected])
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