DURHAM, N.C. (ABP) — While much writing about Baptist history in the 20th century focused on what distinguishes Baptists from other Christians, a group of contemporary scholars believes the Baptist movement now needs to reconnect to its ecumenical roots.
Most modern Baptist historians mark the birth of the Baptist movement at 1609. A minority and often-controversial counterview argues the "true" baptistic church established by Christ and the apostles has existed, in one form or another, in unbroken succession since the New Testament apart from a corrupted Roman Catholic Church.
John Smyth
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A small number of scholars put forth a third view. While not insisting on direct links between the Anabaptists and Baptist traditions as the Successionists do, they believe a kinship existed between early Baptists and Anabaptist communities that has been neglected, thus causing Baptists to marginalize themselves from the larger free-church family.
In a 1997 article, Curtis Freeman, now research professor and director of the Baptist House of Studies at Duke Divinity School, said the Baptist movement grew out of a conviction that the true church is a believer’s church, free to worship by the gospel of Jesus Christ and not by power conferred from the state.
Over time, he argued, those ideals were influenced by philosophers like John Locke and American notions of populism and revivalism, to produce a corrupted and individualist Baptist identity where “every tub must sit on its own bottom.”
“Anabaptist” was a term applied to various movements that emerged in Europe in the 16th-century period called the Radical Reformation. From the Greek prefix “ana,” which means “again,” and the word “baptize,” it means “re-baptizers.” Viewed as heretics, the term was applied originally to the Anabaptists as a term of contempt, an epithet today comparable to “sect” or “cult.”
Descendants of those who survived persecution today populate groups including the Amish, Mennonites, Church of the Brethren and some German Baptists.
There is no question the earliest Baptists interacted with Anabaptists in the Netherlands — when John Smyth’s group left England for Amsterdam, they met in a bake house owned by a member of a Waterlander Mennonite congregation — but historians disagree over the extent of cross-pollination between the groups.
Smyth’s self-baptism — viewed at the time as scandalous — suggested he was not convinced the Anabaptists represented a true church. He later began to question the validity of his own re-baptism, however, and was waiting to join the Mennonites when he died in 1612. Repenting of their baptism, Smyth and 31 church members asked to merge with the Mennonite congregation.
Ten members, including Thomas Helwys, a layman who helped finance the group’s move from England, believed their believer’s baptisms were valid. They split from Smyth’s church and later returned to England, where — in facing an oppressive environment — they became stalwart advocates for religious liberty and the separation of church and state.
William Estep, a longtime professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary who died in 2000, said it is impossible to understand Baptist origins without studying Anabaptists. Estep claimed the earliest Baptists “were dependent on the Mennonites for the determinative features of what was to become known as Baptist faith and practice.”
Glen Stassen, the Lewis B. Smedes Professor of Christian Ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary, contends a book by Menno Simons so shaped early Baptist confessions of faith that Baptists today ought to accept the Mennonite founder as a significant “parent.”
Freeman said recent books have questioned whether the Helwys congregation survived and if it did, how much it influenced the mainstream of Baptist life. Most scholars today accept a “polygenetic” view of both the Anabaptist and Baptist traditions, meaning they probably grew from multiple streams instead of a single source, he said.
In collecting essays for a 1999 book titled Baptist Roots, Freeman and two co-authors included chapters from the 15th and 16th centuries by Anabaptist founders to provide a sense of the “connectedness with the larger free-church tradition.”
They distinguished “Baptist” from “baptist,” with the small “b” denoting “spiritual and theological kindred” with an extended denominational family.
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Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.