Where Did Baptists Come From?

Revised August 2014

1. WHAT SAITH BAPTISTS?

Where did Baptists come from? There are many different theories out there:

 English Separatism. Some say that the Baptist identity, as it exists today, is an outgrowth from
17th century English Separatism
 Anabaptist Origins. Some say that Baptists have their origins in the Anabaptist movement
from the 16th century
 Spiritual-Kinship. Others say that Baptistic churches, to greater or lesser extent, have always
existed since the church has been founded
 Unbroken Succession. Still others claim that there has been a sure, certain and unbroken chain
of true Baptist churches since the time of the apostles

This paper will not evaluate each position. I will simply put forth my own modest case for believing
in the Spiritual-Kinship view of Baptist origins. This position is simply stated by Jack Hoad:

“Making a full allowance for the failures of those early baptistic witnesses for the
truth, we conclude that the Holy Spirit has continually raised up a biblical witness
against apostasy and to a surprising extent those upsurges have borne a common
testimony, majoring on those principles of faith and order which are
characteristically Baptist, or what is even more important, the marks of true apostolic
Christianity.”1

Thomas Armitage adds:

“So, likewise, the unity of Christianity is not found by any visible tracing through one
set of people. It has been enwrapped in all who have followed purely apostolic
principles through the ages; and thus the purity of Baptist life is found in the essence
of their doctrines and practices by whomsoever enforced.”2

“Truth calls us back to the radical view, that any Church which bears the real
apostolic stamp is in direct historical descent from the apostles, without relation to
any other Church past or present.”3

2. WHAT IS A BAPTIST?

1Jack Hoad, The Baptist (London, UK: Grace Publications, 1986), 24.
2Thomas Armitage, A History of the Baptists (New York, NY: Bryan, Taylor & Co., 1890; reprint, Watertown,
WI: Roger Williams Archive, n.d.), 1.
3 Hoad, The Baptist, 2.

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Pastor Tyler Robbins
Faith Baptist Church, Divernon, Illinois
 Where Did Baptists Come From?
Revised August 2014

Baptists are not a denomination, as such. A denomination has a united, common confession and a
creed. It has a hierarchy and layers of authority. It has periodic meetings and issues edicts that the
churches are required to follow, or be at risk of expulsion. In short, a denomination controls its
churches, in some form or fashion. No Baptist ought to submit to this. We’re autonomous, not
monolithic. Basically, I think it is safe to say that that the Baptist is not defined by a list of
distinctives per se, but by a philosophy of ministry.

“Baptists, let it be repeated, are not in essence a denomination at all. Their ‘stripes’ or
‘spots’ may be deep-dyed but are not all found uniformly and consistently in all those
families of Christians called by that name . . . One clear factor, which is emerging in
thus ecumenical age, is that Baptists, true Baptists, are uncomfortable bedfellows.
Their inherent nonconformity and rugged independence is liable to wreck the best
laid schemes to merge into one the many strands of professed Christianity in the
world.”4

Baptists are concerned with the purity of the church, and simply abiding by what the New
Testament says about the church – nothing more and nothing less. Jack Hoad bluntly stated, “the
Baptist Identity is therefore defined by the thorough-going submission to the Word of God in
everything, with the consequent rejection of all else that has no explicit requirement in scripture.”5
What does it means to be concerned with the “purity” of the church? This is where the various
acrostics of “Baptist distinctives” come into play. All the Baptist acrostics (both BAPTIST and
BRAPSIS2) exist to explain what the New Testament teaches about the church. The distinctives do
not, in and of themselves, explain the Baptist identity. They are not infallible “marks” of a Baptist.
They merely elaborate on what the New Testament teaches about the doctrine of the church.

“From their earliest manifestations, they have been a protest movement against any
over-riding authority, whether secular or ecclesiastical. They stand for the simplicity
of the New Testament order of local independent churches. Not that they are
isolationists for they have readily recognized like-minded churches and sought to
express their inherent responsibilities towards each other. They have, however,
persisted in there being one only God-appointed basic unit, the local church, with no
overlordship of any kind, other than that of Christ Himself, who is the Head of the
Church. It is this, taken with the insistence on a regenerate, believing and baptized
church-membership, which makes that primary distinctive of Baptist churches. This
is the Baptist doctrine of the church.”6

4 Ibid, 10.
5 Ibid, 17.
6 Ibid, 10-11.

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Pastor Tyler Robbins
Faith Baptist Church, Divernon, Illinois
 Where Did Baptists Come From?
Revised August 2014

To define what a Baptist is, and to therefore answer the question ‘where did Baptists come from,’ it
is necessary to set aside detailed acrostics and distill and crystallize what the Baptist philosophy is.
They are:7

 The supremacy, sole authority and sufficiency of the Scriptures in all matters of Christian faith
and practice, which translates into a complete obedience and submission to . . .
 The Biblical Doctrine of the Church and a willingness to be always reforming our
church polity, practice and philosophy to that ideal

A Baptist believes the Bible is the only place where the doctrine of the church (and all that entails) is
taught. The distinctives flow from that principle:

“Where scripture rules there can be no marriage to the state, no shared rule with the
magistracy, no subservience of the local church to denominational structures or
officialdom, no use of force of any kind to compel faith, no unwilling or
unconscious ‘baptisms’ and no compromise with erroneous bodies.”8

Notice that Hoad touched on all of the so-called “Baptist distinctives” in this brief explanation.
Obedience to Scripture will yield every single Baptist distinctive without exception. Insofar as a local
church pursued the NT doctrine of the church, it was a baptistic church. This is why the so-called Spiritual-
Kinship theory of Baptist origins is correct. There is massive evidence that various separatist groups
throughout church history have struggled, to greater or lesser extent, to cast off the doctrines of
men and follow a distinctly Biblical church polity.

3. THE STRUGGLE FOR PURITY – THE SEPARATIST GROUPS:

a. The Novatians:

In the mid-3rd century, the Novatian schism arose in the aftermath of religious persecution. Should
church members who apostatized during persecution be re-admitted to fellowship? Novatians
insisted the apostates not be re-admitted. They were separatists who took church membership
seriously. Rome developed her own ecclesiology partly in response to this challenge.

“The Novatianists considered themselves the only pure communion, and

unchurched all churches which defiled themselves by re-admitting the lapsed, or any
other gross offenders. They went much farther than Cyprian, even as far as the later
Donatists. They admitted the possibility of mercy for a mortal sinner, but denied the

7 Ibid, 14.
8 Ibid, 17.
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Pastor Tyler Robbins
Faith Baptist Church, Divernon, Illinois
 Where Did Baptists Come From?
Revised August 2014

power and the right of the church to decide upon it, and to prevent, by absolution,
the judgment of God upon such offenders. They also, like Cyprian, rejected heretical
baptism, and baptized all who came over to them from other communions not just
so rigid as themselves.”9

Thomas Armitage wrote:

“The Novatians demanded pure Churches which enforced strict discipline, and so
were called Puritans. They refused to receive the lapsed back into the Churches, and
because they held the Catholics corrupt in receiving them, they re-immersed all who
came to them from the Catholics. For this reason alone they were called
‘Anabaptists,’ although they denied that this was rebaptism, holding the first
immersion null and void because it had been received from corrupt Churches.”10

As Justo Gonzalez has put it, “the issue was whether purity or forgiving love should be the
characteristic note of the church.”11 The Novatians were worried about the purity of the church, and
took the Bible’s commands for church discipline and membership seriously.

b. The Donatists:

This schism was once again about the purity of the church, specifically those who has apostatized
amidst persecution. We have more information about these folks than the others. They were
concerned about:

 Church membership (true believers)

 Separation from impure fellowships
 Church purity
 Godly ministers
 A free church mindset (autonomy)

“The Donatists championed a church which was pure, a church was intolerant of those
elements which would contaminate it. A chief emphasis of the Donatists was upon the
holiness of the church.”12

9 Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, 8 vols. (Peabody, MS: Hendrickson, 2011), 2:196.
10 Armitage, History of the Baptists, 178.
11 Justo Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity: The Early Church to the Present Day, combined ed. (Peabody, MS: Prince

Press, 2007), 1:90.

12 Ernest Pickering, Biblical Separation: The Struggle for a Pure Church (Schaumberg, IL: Regular Baptist Press,

1979), 20.
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Pastor Tyler Robbins
Faith Baptist Church, Divernon, Illinois
 Where Did Baptists Come From?
Revised August 2014

The tale of the Donatist controversy is too long to tell here, but suffice it to say that they stood firm
amidst intolerance and persecution – because they believed what the Bible taught about the church.
Augustine, when gentle persuasion failed, turned to force to achieve his aims.

“. . . by his misuse of the words of Luke 14:23, ‘Compel them to come in,’
Augustine, during this time, set forth teachings that would ultimately make him the
first widely influential churchman to assert and argue the doctrine that the power of
the state can legitimately banish separatist Christians in favor of the Catholic Church
and transfer their properties to the Catholics.”13

Schaff’s words here are excellent:

“The Donatist controversy was a conflict between separatism and catholicism;

between ecclesiastical purism and ecclesiastical eclecticism; between the idea of the
church as an exclusive community of regenerate saints and the idea of the church as
the general Christendom of state and people. It revolved around the doctrine of the
essence of the Christian church, and, in particular, of the predicate of holiness.”14

As Beale has observed, “[t]he orthodox Donatists’ only crimes were separation and rebaptism.”15

c. The Dark Ages:

It’s easy to scour historical records, searching for something “Baptist” to hang one’s hat on. “We
may attribute to them more light and knowledge than they really believed, thus adopting too rosy-
hued a viewpoint.”16 You see traces of concern for a pure church from groups in the medieval age.
The Albigenses thought the Roman Catholic Church was the whore of Babylon.17 The Paulicans
“were really ‘men who were disgusted with the doctrines and ceremonies of human invention, and
desirous of returning to the apostolic doctrine and practice.’ ”18 The Waldensians were likewise very
concerned about the purity of the church and believed in separation from false teaching. Pickering
concludes that “[i]n the study of these dissident groups, the doctrine of the ‘gathered’ church, that is,
the church of the regenerate only, comes to the fore time and again.”19

d. The Anabaptists:

13 David O. Beale, Historical Theology In-Depth (Greenville, SC: BJU Press, 2013), 1:376.
14 Schaff, History, 3:365.
15 Beale, Historical Theology, 1:376-377.
16 Pickering, Separation, 29.
17 Ibid, 31.
18 Ibid, 33.
19 Ibid, 39.

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Pastor Tyler Robbins
Faith Baptist Church, Divernon, Illinois
 Where Did Baptists Come From?
Revised August 2014

“They thought that the Reformers stopped half-way, and did not go to the root of
the evil. They broke with the historical tradition, and constructed a new church of
believers on the voluntary principle. Their fundamental doctrine was, that baptism is
a voluntary act, and requires personal repentance, and faith in Christ. They rejected
infant-baptism as an anti-scriptural invention. They could find no trace of it in the
New Testament, the only authority in matters of faith. They were cruelly persecuted
in Protestant as well as Roman Catholic countries. We must carefully distinguish the
better class of Baptists and the Mennonites from the restless revolutionary radicals
and fanatics, like Carlstadt, Muenzer, and the leaders of the Muenster tragedy.”20

One scholar says that Anabaptists “were the main forerunners of ‘sectarian Protestantism,’ and their
views on religious liberty are today common currency among free church groups.”21

In the main, the orthodox Anabaptists believed:

(1) Church members had to be regenerate, and therefore only believers could be baptized. “By baptism the
believer comes under the discipline of a Biblical people, and if the door of entrance is closely
watched a strong and true church can be maintained.”22

(2) Separation. If you’re concerned about a pure church, then it means that separation is sometimes
necessary

(3) Church discipline, which is rooted in the concern for the purity of the church and its members.
“Spiritual government rests, in the end, upon the threat of expulsion from the congregation of
believers: the Ban. In some cases this may have meant social ostracism, but generally it meant the
loss of privileges within the brotherhood.”23

(4) Soul liberty. Because of incessant persecution, Anabaptists firmly believed that a man ought to be
left alone to worship God as he sees fit. For example, Schaff writes that in Zurich the Anabaptists
were forced to baptize their infants:

“The magistracy decided against them, and issued an order that infants should be
baptized as heretofore, and that parents who refuse to have their children baptized
should leave the city and canton with their families and goods.”24

20 Schaff, History, 7:607.

21 Franklin Littell, “The Anabaptist Doctrine of the Restitution of the True Church,” Mennonite Quarterly Review
24 (1950), 33.
22 Ibid, 36.
23 Ibid, 37.
24 Schaff, History, 8:82.

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Pastor Tyler Robbins
Faith Baptist Church, Divernon, Illinois
 Where Did Baptists Come From?
Revised August 2014

“The blood of these poor people flowed like water so that they cried to the Lord for
help.… But hundreds of them of all ages and both sexes suffered the pangs of
torture without a murmur, despised to buy their lives by recantation, and went to the
place of execution joyfully and singing psalms.”25

Baptists have inherited this insistence on religious liberty from the Anabaptists. “The concept of
religious freedom was implicit in the Anabaptist movement. They, as well as others within that
which has been called the ‘Radical Reformation,’ insisted that one’s personal religious commitment
was between himself and God alone and that the nature of the Christian faith, discipleship, and the
church demanded complete freedom.”26

Estep well remarks, “[i]f we can learn anything from the Anabaptist experience, it should teach us
that coercion makes no true Christians, but, as Roger Williams said three centuries ago, only
hypocrites.”27

4. CONCLUSION:

There have always been groups throughout the ages who have sought to go “back to the Bible” for
their ecclesiology. Insofar as a group actually followed the New Testament doctrine of the church,
they were baptistic (to greater or lesser extent). The Baptist “denomination” (philosophy would be a
better term) is not an invention of 17th-century English separatism.

Leon McBeth writes that Baptist viewpoints certainly did exist before that time, but “[t]he
seventeenth-century Baptists did not invent these doctrines; they rediscovered and articulated them
afresh for a new era.”28 This is specious reasoning. Baptist ecclesiology is Biblical ecclesiology. To
say that the Baptist identity did not form until the 17th-century is to suggest that every single local
church, to some extent, was not following the New Testament pattern up until that time. Nothing
could be more outrageous.

McBeth anticipates this accusation, and retorts that “one should distinguish between faith
assumptions and historical evidence.”29 To follow McBeth’s reasoning, one would also have to
conclude:

25 Ibid, 8:84.
26 William Estep, “The Reformation: Anabaptist Style,” Criswell Theological Review 6.2 (1993), 201.
27 Ibid, 206.
28 Leon McBeth, The Baptist Heritage (Nashville, TN: B&H, 1987), 61.
29 Ibid, 62.

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Pastor Tyler Robbins
Faith Baptist Church, Divernon, Illinois
 Where Did Baptists Come From?
Revised August 2014

 The doctrine of justification by faith first came about during the Reformation. The
Reformers didn’t invent the doctrine, but rediscovered and articulated it afresh for a new
era. No church must have actually taught the doctrine as a whole before the
Reformation, because it wasn’t neatly packaged and systematized until that time.

 The deity of Christ came about at the Council of Nicea. They didn’t invent the
doctrine, but rediscovered and articulated it afresh for a new era. No church must have
actually taught the doctrine as a whole before that time, because it wasn’t neatly
packaged and systematized until then.

I could go on, but the point is made. Just because a doctrine is systematized at some later date, it does
not follow that the doctrine was not taught, believed and practiced prior to that date. If it is a Biblical
doctrine, men everywhere have taught, believed and practiced it to some extent. This is why I
believe in the Spiritual-Kinship view of Baptist origins.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Armitage, Thomas. A History of the Baptists. New York: Bryan, Taylor & Co., 1890; reprint,
Watertown, WI: Roger Williams Archive, n.d.

Beale, David O. Historical Theology In-Depth, 2 vols. Greenville: BJU Press, 2013.

Estep, William. “The Reformation: Anabaptist Style.” Criswell Theological Review 6.2 (1993), 195-206.

Gonzalez, Justo. The Story of Christianity: The Early Church to the Present Day, combined ed. Peabody:
Prince Press, 2007.

Hoad, Jack. The Baptist. London: Grace Publications, 1986.

Littell, Franklin. “The Anabaptist Doctrine of the Restitution of the True Church.” Mennonite
Quarterly Review 24 (1950), no. 1, 33-52.

McBeth, Leon. The Baptist Heritage. Nashville: B&H Publishers, 1987.

Pickering, Ernest. Biblical Separation: The Struggle for a Pure Church. Schaumberg: Regular Baptist Press,
1979.

Schaff, Philip. History of the Christian Church, 8 vols. Peabody: Hendrickson, 2011.

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Pastor Tyler Robbins
Faith Baptist Church, Divernon, Illinois