The Collected Writings of James Leo Garrett Jr., 1950–2015: Volume One

Baptists, Part I

Garrett, Richardson

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781532607301
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

James Leo Garrett, Jr. has been called "the last of the gentlemen theologians" and "the dean of Southern Baptist theologians." In The Collected Writings of James Leo Garrett, Jr., 1950-2015, the reader will find a truly dazzling collection of works that clearly evince the meticulous scholarship, the even-handed treatment, the biblical fidelity, the wide historical breadth, and the honest sincerity that have made the work and person of James Leo Garrett, Jr. so esteemed and revered among so many. The first two volumes of the series explore Dr. Garrett's writings on the experience, history, and lives of Baptist Christians, and this inaugural volume specifically considers Baptists, Baptist views of the Bible, and Anabaptists. Spanning sixty-five years and touching on topics from Baptist history, theology, ecclesiology, church history and biography, religious liberty, Roman Catholicism, and the Christian life, The Collected Writings of James Leo Garrett, Jr., 1950-2015 will inform and inspire readers regardless of their religious or denominational affiliations.

I.

Baptists

1

“History of Baptist Theology” (1958)

Baptists, whose historical origin as such occurred early in the seventeenth century, have in common cherished principles. Likewise, Baptists share with the majority of the sixteenth-century Anabaptists the tenet of believers’ baptism, the ideal of churches composed solely of the regenerate who are walking in fellowship, and a belief in the separation of church and state. Other Anabaptist teachings—such as an anti-Augustinian theology; a negative attitude toward civil office, oaths, and warfare; and violent chiliasm, such as that practiced at Münster—have not been generally accepted by Baptists.

Baptist theology, like Baptist churches, had a twofold origin in England. General Baptists arose out of English Separatism when John Smyth’s congregation, exiled in Holland, rejected infant baptism and began (1609) de novo believers’ baptism by affusion. General Baptist theology, however, was essentially Arminian on election, free will, and universal atonement. Smyth and Thomas Helwys were pioneer protagonists of religious liberty, contending for it on Christological and theological grounds. After division between Smyth and Helwys, Smyth’s congregation was absorbed by the Waterlander Mennonites, and Helwys’s congregation returned to England to become the mother church of General Baptists. Helwys rejected historical succession and free will. Contact with the Mennonites caused the General Baptists to face the problem of Hoffmannite Christology.

Particular Baptists, so designated because of their doctrine of limited atonement, retained the basic Calvinistic theology of the Separatists, which they regarded as scriptural. A peaceful defection from a London Separatist church on the issue of believers’ baptism resulted in the first Particular Baptist congregation. Richard Blunt obtained immersion (1641) from the Dutch Collegiants, but John Spilsbury insisted that “baptizedness is not essential to the administrator.” The First London Confession (1644), moderately Calvinistic, was distinctive in prescribing single immersion as baptism. The General Baptists also adopted immersion.

Because of the oppressive measures of the Restoration era, English Dissenters were led to consider beliefs held in common. The Orthodox Creed of General Baptists (1678) mediated between Calvinism and Arminianism. Thomas Grantham defended the General Baptist practice of laying on of hands on new believers and the office of messenger. The Particulars adapted (1677) the Westminster Confession with modifications concerning baptism and church polity, yet retaining its strong Calvinism, even in regard to the Lord’s Supper. The controversy between John Bunyan, an open communionist, and William Kiffin, who held to immersion as prerequisite, opened a recurring and divisive issue among Baptists.

In the eighteenth century General Baptists suffered from deadening Socinianism, while Particular Baptists became hyper-Calvinistic, developing the “non-invitation, non-application” scheme of John Gill and others. The Evangelical Revival attracted neither the Particulars, who objected to John Wesley’s Arminianism, nor the Generals, who refuted him on baptism. Yet the new evangelicalism did produce the Leicestershire movement, which became immersionist. The resulting New Connexion of General Baptists, formed (1770) under Dan Taylor, taught both universal atonement and universal invitation, while the General Assembly of General Baptists became increasingly Unitarian. Particular Baptist hyper-Calvinism was modified under Andrew Fuller, who, opposing Socinianism and Arminianism, combined limited atonement with universal invitation. William Carey and the missionary movement issued from Fuller’s theology, while William Gadsby’s Strict and Particular Baptists refused to accept it. Calvinistic-Arminian differences diminished so that Particulars and Generals were fused by 1891.

The earliest Baptist churches in America were primarily Calvinistic, but Arminian teaching soon increased. The Philadelphia Confession (1742) was the Second London Confession (1677) with two articles added. The Separate Baptists, a product of the Great Awakening, added a conversion-centered evangelistic fervor to the Baptist stream. Benjamin Randall’s Free Will Baptist movement was Arminian and practiced a connectional polity and open communion. American hyper-Calvinism resulted in the Primitive Baptists, who resisted efforts initiated by Luther Rice to organize Baptists for educational and missionary purposes. In Daniel Parker’s teaching, hyper-Calvinism was joined with dualism. The main body of American Baptists incorporating the Calvinistic, the General, and the Separate sources, became moderately Calvinistic, as may be noted in the New Hampshire Confession (1833).

Alexander Campbell’s identification with the Baptists (1813–30) was marked by increasing tension. Campbell’s Sandemanian and Arminian ideas of faith, doctrine of baptism for the remission of sins, and criticism of Baptist ministers, denominational bodies, and confessions of faith, produced the inevitable separation.

In the 1850s there arose in the South a Baptist “high church” movement called Landmarkism, led by James Robinson Graves, James Madison Pendleton, and Amos Cooper Dayton. The kingdom of God was said to be visibly composed of the true churches of Christ, identified as local Baptist organizations whose unbroken existence from the Jerusalem church was deduced from the perpetuity of the kingdom and demonstrated as historical. Landmarkers, denying any nonlocal meaning of ecclesia, opposed preaching by paedobaptists in Baptist pulpits, rejected “alien” immersion, and advocated local church communion. The Landmarkers’ unsuccessful insistence on a local church basis of representation in the Southern Baptist Convention led to their defection (1905). The Convention later adopted this principle.

Baptists were not unaffected by liberal theological trends. The English Downgrad...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Permissions
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Editor’s Introduction
• Part I: Baptists
• Part II: Baptists and the Bible
• Part III: Anabaptists
• Bibliography