Baptist Heritage

[From the back cover:] "As [Edmund S.] Morgan re-creates the evolution of [Roger] Williams's thoughts on the nature of the church and the state, he captures the institutions that informed Williams's worldview, from the Protestant Church in England to the Massachusetts government in the seventeenth century."

This is a peer-reviewed journal article published in 2009. The paper examines various Southern Baptist writings on the doctrine of the Lord's Supper to determine if restricting communion from non-baptized believers is a necessary component of Baptist ecclesiology.

"An historical examination into the theological motives behind the Baptist insistence on total immersion will demonstrate that symbolism was the primary stimulus for its resurgence.  More than a study of the Greek New Testament or ancient church writings, the dominant theological stress was the believer’s death, burial, and resurrection in Christ.  The first section of this paper will provide a brief history of total immersion throughout church history, including its emergence in the Baptist denomination.  The second section will describe the common mode of baptism in seventeenth century England.  The final section will detail the importance of symbolism among early Baptists and demonstrate that the original immersionist churches also accepted other modes of baptism.  Though not initially required for church membership, seventeenth century Baptists reinstituted total immersion in baptism primarily to emphasize the symbolism of death, burial, and resurrection" (taken from the introduction).

Historians have long debated John Gill’s theological identity. Some contend he was a hyper-Calvinist who denied the free offer of the Gospel and the duty of all people to receive it. Others seek to defend him from this charge. Defences of Gill have surprisingly failed to assess his convictions on these matters in the context of his overall soteriological project. Gill constructed a soteriology that minimised human responsibility in the reception of salvation, and this framework indeed led him to espouse a practical theology marked by the rejection of Gospel offers and duty faith, two tenets commonly associated with hyper-Calvinism. Reading Gill in light of his soteriology therefore helps to settle this important question of his theological identity.

Andrew Fuller: Model Pastor-Theologian by Paul Brewster was published in 2010.  Mr. Brewster was a pastor of Ryker’s Ridge Baptist Church in Madison, Indiana and earned a Ph.D. From Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and an M.Div. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

 Introduction to the Theological Studies  Global Church History  Historical Theology I Rationale:  This course is an investigation of the main theological issues, theologians, and religious movements from late Middle Ages to the 17 th century. It focuses on the most significant theological topics of the period, such as ecclesiology and soteriology; and on schools/movements, such as scholasticism, nominalism, Lutheranism, Radical Reformation, and Puritanism. The course ends with the emergence of Baptists, thus completing the two-semester long historical overview of theology from the first century up to that time. Course Goals and Objectives:  HC 3112 considers a crucial time-period in the Christian history, which has shaped our theological identity. We can understand Baptist movement(s), as well as contemporary theology, only if we understand what these presuppose.  It continues to investigate various theological topics that students have already countered in patristic and early medieval theology (HT I). Instructional Methods:  Seminar type of discussion of video-lectures and assigned readings. Students are evaluated on the basis of quizzes, two exams, and a book review. Course Requirements and Grading: 1. Reading and discussing the assigned readings (texts and lectures) (40% of the grade). 2. Pop-up Quizzes (10% of the grade). 3. Two Exams (each 20% of the grade). 4. Book review (10% of your grade).

Although not uniform in faith and practice, Southern Baptists have acquired a reputation of general suspicion toward critical biblical scholarship.  Southern Baptists did not significantly engage with higher criticism until the arrival of Clyde Francisco at SBTS.  Not two decades after Francisco began his career at SBTS, did the denominational fault line over the use of historical critical scholarship emerge in the form of the “Genesis Controversies” revolving around Francisco’s student Ralph Elliott and the 1961 publication of The Message of Genesis, and the 1969 Broadman Bible Commentary entry by G. Henton Davies on the book of Genesis.  Curiously, Francisco as one of the forerunners of critical scholarship in Southern Baptist life, differed little from Elliott and Davies in his use of historical criticism, yet he generated almost no controversy over the course of more than 30 years in the leading Southern Baptist academic institution.  This investigation will therefore compare Francisco’s, Elliott’s, and Davies’ published use of historical criticism, in an effort to identify how Francisco utilized historical criticism without generating controversy in the SBC.
This investigation will argue that Francisco differed from Elliott and Davies principally by intentionally employing historical critical methodologies without allowing the conclusions to undermine the Baptist necessity for certainty in the reliability of the biblical text.  This commitment is manifest in the Francisco’s writings in two ways.  First, Francisco exhibits a clear concern for the reliability of the text as inspired, thus when he raises questions of historicity, he does so through the lens of interpretation and not inspiration.  Second, he does not allow historical critical conclusions to obscure the interpretation of a passage.  Francisco used historical criticism to buttress theological interpretation, not diminish it.

During this exercise a sub-rectangular pit cut was revealed in sloping section, measuring c. 3.7 m by 2.2 m by 1 m deep. The primary fill of the pit produced an exceptional assemblage of
pottery, glass and clay tobacco pipe, together with other artefacts of the period, dated to the mid 18th century. This important collection of 18th century artefacts, many of which were complete on deposition, was probably disposed of in a single event, in what was most likely a freshly dug rubbish pit located in the rear yard of a tenement fronting East Street.

The attached PDF contains the title page, copyright page, epigraphs, and table of contents for "The First American Founder: Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience" by Alan E. Johnson (available in paperback and Kindle editions at Amazon websites throughout the world).  For additional information, see http://www.amazon.com/First-American-Founder-Williams-Conscience/dp/1511823712/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1436397728&sr=1-1.

This book is about Roger Williams (ca. 1603-83), who was banished from the colony of Massachusetts Bay for advocating freedom of conscience, separation of church and state, Native American rights, and related matters.  He founded the town of Providence in what became Rhode Island on the basis of full liberty of conscience and complete separation of religion and government.  For additional information, see the uploaded PDF and links.

The book is available in paperback and Kindle e-book editions at Amazon websites throughout the world.  The paperback is also available at some other websites and bookstores.

See also my YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOlUZaehYk7WmwW8v9oBMzQ) about Roger Williams, including an interview (https://youtu.be/mGRl5lIbdYY) with me about this book.

For Errata and Supplemental Comments, see the separate document uploaded at https://www.academia.edu/13798228/Errata_and_Supplemental_Comments_to_The_First_American_Founder_Roger_Williams_and_Freedom_of_Conscience.

Alan E. Johnson

Cedarville University is a private, co-educational university located in Cedarville, Ohio, United States.

At its founding, the school was affiliated with the conservative General Synod of the Reformed Presbyterian Church in North America.  Today, Cedarville is an independent Baptist school known for its adherence to the Christian tradition.  Across all academic disciplines, student life is influenced by codes of personal conduct, community service, and theological study.

Chartered by the state of Ohio and accredited by the Ohio Board of Regents, Cedarville University is a member of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools.

Baptists have often been accused of holding an impoverished Eucharistic theology: our general attachment to a “memorialist” interpretation of the Lord’s Supper often tends in practice to minimize its importance in the life of the church. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, the rise of the Old Landmark movement brought renewed attention (and sharp disagreement) to the nature of the rite among American Baptists. 

Landmark Baptists were distinguished by their often vehement insistence on “closed communion” even to the point of excluding from the table anyone who was not a member of the particular local congregation. In their defense of this practice, some Landmark Baptists developed surprisingly robust views of the nature of the Supper. The tern “substantial” in my title is exaggerated: at no time do we find Landmark leaders espousing a variation of real presence within of the rite. Yet at the same time, we do find couched within such sternly memorialistic interpretations an increased appreciation of its significance: Communion becomes something more than a “mere” memorial, even if it always retains that essential characteristic.

In this paper, I want to set aside the framing question of open or closed communion in order to look deeper into the spiritual significance of partaking in the Eucharist in the minds of two prominent early Landmark leaders, J. R. Graves and J. M. Pendleton, and prominent Landmarkist sympathizer B. H. Carroll (an especially fitting subject for the present NABPR meeting, as Carroll served as pastor of the First Baptist Church in Waco for 27 years). My purpose is to recover from their writings a constructive theology of Communion with surprisingly strong latent connections to other Christian traditions. As odd as it may sound, the Eucharistic interpretations that developed out of the deliberately insular Old Landmark movement may in fact serve as bridges to bring Baptists into interdenominational dialogue with other, more “substantialist” traditions.

This study of the life and ministry of Abraham Cheare (1626–1668), which also contains selections from his works, rescues an important seventeenth-century Baptist from obscurity. Cheare has been overshadowed by other more celebrated Baptist contemporaries, but, as the pastor of the Particular Baptist work in Plymouth, Devon, Cheare played a key role in the advance of the Baptist cause in the West Country in the 1650s. His Sighs for Sion is an excellent illustration of early Baptist piety. With the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Cheare, like many other Dissenters, suffered arrest for his refusal to give up preaching. Cheare’s prison writings reveal both a sturdy faith in God and deep-seated piety. Despite the fact that he was incarcerated in a series of “nasty prisons,” Cheare used this time of suffering to deepen his walk with God and so provide a model for his congregation of Christian integrity and joy in the midst of trial. To the very end of his life, Cheare was eagerly awaiting further outpourings of the Spirit of Promise upon the Church and looking forward to that Day when his Lord Jesus would make all things right.