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LIVING STONES IN A SPIRITUAL HOUSE: THE PRIESTHOOD OF THE SAINT
IN THE BAPTIST SANCTORUM COMMUNIO
by
Gordon Lansdowne Belyea
A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Wycliffe College and the Theology Department of the Toronto School of Theology
in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Theology
awarded by Wycliffe College and the University of Toronto.
© Copyright by Gordon Lansdowne Belyea 2012
i
Living Stones in a Spiritual House: The Priesthood of the Saint
in the Baptist Sanctorum Communio
Gordon Lansdowne Belyea
Doctor of Theology
Wycliffe College of University of Toronto
2012
Abstract
This dissertation seeks to examine and address flaws in the contemporary understanding
of the role of the individual in Baptist ecclesiology by drawing on the historical
background of the movement from its Puritan roots and analysing the subsequent
influence of Enlightenment thought, theological development, and contemporary events
as causes of the resulting distortions in the understanding of the believer’s liberty under
God. It then seeks to situate a recovery of the individual believer’s expression and
formation in the faith in the ecclesiological concept of the priesthood of all believers. It
concludes by bringing out some implications for Baptist practice of the insights gathered
by this examination.
The doctrine of the priesthood of all believers is presented as the most suitable vehicle by
which individualism might be addressed while remaining faithful to the primitive Baptist
vision in the modern age. It is hoped thereby to preserve and reinforce the concept of the
church as the body of the elect called out by God in Christ, individuals saved together to
serve the Lord and witness to him in the world in which we live: living stones gathered
expressly to be built up into that spiritual house that serves Christ and forms and
preserves men and women. The essential role of the traditional Reformed marks of Word,
sacrament, and discipline in both expressing and in forming the faith of the individual
within the local church are examined as the foundational elements which must anchor the
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ecclesial recovery and application of the priesthood of all believers. This analysis and
prescription is informed by current debates about epistemology and ethics as represented
by those seeking to redress the current perceived imbalance in Baptist faith and practice,
while answering to the Reformed understanding of God’s work in salvation and in the
church, and draws on and responds to investigations undertaken by those involved in the
Re-Envisioning the Baptist Identity statement.
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Table of Contents
Page
1 Chapter One: Introduction: Whence Then Hath It Tares? 1 1.1 Introduction 1
1.1.1 Healing the Hurt of the Daughter of My People Slightly? 7 1.1.2 In the Beginning 14 1.1.3 The Journey into the Far Country 16 1.1.4 Plainly Seeking Our Country 18 1.1.5 What Manner of Persons Ought We to Be? 20
2 Chapter Two: In the Beginning 21
2.1 Origins 21 2.2 Particulars and Puritans 25 2.3 Baptist Broadness: General and Particular 28 2.4 Ecclesiology as Essential: Church and Salvation for the Puritans 29 2.5 Holiness as a Hallmark 38 2.6 Covenant and Confidence 43 2.7 Experimental Predestinarianism: Problem or Perception? 46 2.8 Priesthood: A Priority? 49 2.9 Summary: The Conclusion of the Matter 52
3 Chapter Three: The Journey into the Far Country 55
3.1 England and Wales 55 3.1.1 High-Calvinism 56 3.1.2 Welsh Ways 59 3.1.3 England and the Evangelicals 61
3.2 The American Colonies: 18th Century– Individuality Not Yet Individualism 66
3.2.1 Pariahs in a Pilgrim Land 66 3.2.1.1 Revival Realignments 68 3.2.2 The Plunder of the Egyptians or Greeks Bearing Gifts? 73 3.2.2.1 The Self and Society 74 3.2.2.2 Eschatology Essential 75 3.2.2.3 The Goodness of Government 76 3.2.2.4 Looking to Locke 77 3.2.2.5 The Perils of Pietism 81
3.3 Implications of Individualism 83 3.3.1 Perish the Priesthood? 88
3.4 The 19th Century: The Tares in the Ear, the Church of the Hat 91 3.4.1 Theological Tides and Trends 92 3.4.2 Peculiar Priesthood 97
3.5 Strangers in a Strange Land 100
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4 Chapter Four: The Search for A Country 107 4.1 Crisis 107
4.1.1 What’s At Stake 107 4.1.1.1 How Great Salvation? 109 4.1.1.2 Blind Guides of the Blind 111 4.1.1.3 Rest in Pieces 113
4.2 The Answer 116 4.3 Priesthood: Principles 117
4.3.1 Principal Passages 121 4.3.2 Priesthood as Particular Peoplehood 124 4.3.3 Priesthood as Presenters 127 4.3.4 Priesthood as Peripatetic: The People of the Wilderness 131 4.3.5 Law Before Liturgy 131
4.4 Priesthood: Implications and Applications 134 4.4.1 Conceptual Implications 136 4.4.1.1 Propriety 136 4.4.1.2 Peoplehood and Priesthood 140 4.4.1.3 Eschatology Essential 141 4.4.1.4 Remembering and Re-membering 146 4.4.1.5 Gathered and Gathering 152 4.4.1.6 Priesthood and Palpability 154 4.4.2 Concrete Applications 156 4.4.2.1 Word: Preaching in the Priesthood 156 4.4.2.1.1 Preaching and Eschatology 158 4.4.2.1.2 Preaching and Performative Links 159 4.4.2.1.3 Word and Tradition 165 4.4.2.1.4 Word and Mission 169 4.4.2.2 Sacrament: Food for the Faithful 171 4.4.2.2.1 Baptism 174 4.4.2.2.2 The Lord’s Table 180 4.4.2.3 Discipline: Order for the Ordained 186 4.5 Priesthood: Appropriateness and Application 188 5 Chapter Five: What Manner of Persons Ought We to Be?:
Manifestations and Conclusions 192 5.1 Manifestations 192
5.1.1 Corrective Manifestations 192 5.1.1.1 Priesthood and Perspective 192 5.1.1.2 Mystery, not Management 194 5.1.1.3 Safety in the Multitude of Counsellors:
Tradition 196 5.1.1.4 Priesthood and the Recovery of
Trinitarian Understanding 198 5.1.1.5 Priesthood and Pneumatology 201
5.1.1.6 Priesthood and Practices 202 5.1.1.6.1 Strength in the Subjective 204
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5.1.1.6.2 Opportunity in the Objective 206 5.1.1.6.3 Locality and Visibility 209 5.1.1.6.4 Covenant as Crucial 212
5.2 Conclusion 215 Bibliography 219
1
Chapter 1
Introduction: Whence Then Hath It Tares?
1.1 Introduction
The individual has from the beginning played a central role in the Baptist understanding
of the gathered church. One of the organisers of the first General Baptist work in
England, Thomas Helwys, is renowned for his proclamation of this tenet in A Short
Declaration of the Mistery of Iniquity, which work (and its inscription) earned him
imprisonment by King James I.1 A “healthy dose of individualism”2 has been a
distinctive mark of the marriage of Reformed soteriology and Free Church ecclesiology
that has been the Baptist expression of the Christian faith. However, over time this
distinctive mark has become less distinctively Christian, to the point at which it is, in the
minds of many, indistinguishable from a modern, Enlightenment understanding of the
individual. This threatens the validity and faithfulness of the Baptist movement. Called to
life in Christ as living stones to be built up into a spiritual house to offer up spiritual
sacrifices acceptable to God in Christ, as they consider the modern Baptist view of the
individual’s competency and rights before God and the church, well might Baptists and
other Christians now ask, “What mean ye by these stones?”
This dissertation is a theological investigation which examines and addresses flaws in the
contemporary understanding of the role of the individual Baptist saint in the communio
sanctorum by drawing on the historical background of the movement from its Puritan
roots, analysing the subsequent influence of Enlightenment thought and the resulting
distortions in the understanding of the believer’s liberty under God, and then seeking to
situate the individual believer’s expression and formation in the faith in the
1 Robert Torbet, A History of the Baptists, (Philadelphia: Judson Press, 1950), 67. In this work, Helwys wrote, “…men should choose their religion themselves, seeing they only must stand themselves before the judgment seat of God to answer for themselves…” 2 Walter B Shurden, “The Baptist Identity and the Baptist Manifesto,” PRSt 25 (1998): 327.
2
ecclesiological concept of the priesthood of all believers. It is hoped thereby to preserve
and reinforce the concept of the church as the body of the elect called out by God in
Christ, individuals saved together to serve the Lord and witness to him in the world in
which we live: living stones gathered expressly to be built up into that spiritual house that
serves Christ and forms and preserves men and women. This analysis and prescription
will be informed by current debates about epistemology and ethics as represented by
those seeking to redress the current perceived imbalance in Baptist faith and practice
while answering to the Reformed understanding of God’s work in salvation and in the
church.3
Baptist ecclesiology as originally conceived was not a product of modern Enlightenment
views of the autonomy of the individual but rather sought to honour God’s sovereignty in
the salvation of individuals by preserving for them liberty in the practice of religion. It
originated in an early modern biblical understanding of the responsibilities and freedoms
of the individual before God, freedoms inseparable from God’s free election and calling
in Christ, and has been developed and forged in the fires of persecution. Consequently, its
roots, if not always its expression, lie in different soil from both the Enlightenment
concept of the sovereignty and competency of the individual, which it pre-dates, and the
purely sociological view of community.4 This vision as regards the role of the individual
has sought to combine the voluntary nature of religion from a human point of view, the
sovereign calling according to the free election of the believer by God, and the
compulsory call of disciples to gather in communities under the lordship of Christ, to
serve and to be formed in him. But while it would be false to overlook this emphasis on
the individual in the roots of the movement, an emphasis that was certainly one of its
distinguishing features, the Baptist regard for the freedom of the individual is now often
confused in Baptist thinking itself with the Enlightenment concept of the sovereignty of
3 By convention, throughout the dissertation the term “Church”, when the first letter is capitalised, refers to either the universal body or to the Church in general; when not capitalised, the church as a local or particular expression is addressed. 4 In citing Glenn Hinson, White notes that “Baptist Individualism pre-dates the Enlightenment and…(is) rooted in the ‘Puritan desire for immediate access to God’”, Sean White, “Southern Baptists, Sacramentalism, and Soul Competency,” in Baptist Sacramentalism 2, Studies in Baptist History and Thought, Vol. 25, eds. Anthony R. Cross and Philip E. Thompson, (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2008): 217.
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the individual, to the extent that freedom is seen as being a right or essence inherent to
the person and not solely the product of God’s freedom for us and thus a gift inseparable
from the grace of God and reserved for his service.
As it first began and as it must remain in order to represent a valid expression of
Christian discipleship, the Baptist concept of the freedom of the individual must be
defined by God’s free and sovereign action in salvation. It must, while maintaining the
place of the individual as competent before God, ensure that this individuality and
competency has its source and sustenance in God’s work in Jesus Christ and not
autonomously in any philosophy or independent characteristic of men and women as
such. It must thus be a freedom not from but for God and for others, as God’s freedom
has been expressed in his self-giving for us in Christ. As God is triune, Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit, the freedom and life of his redeemed creatures cannot express itself without
first doing so in the community of God’s choosing and formation. As the Son’s meat was
to do the will of the Father by the power of the Spirit, the Christian’s freedom must be
lived out in obedience in the midst of the community within which Christ dwells. It must
be fed through the preaching of the Word of God, the keeping of the sacraments, and the
loving discipline of God’s People. Such was the Baptist way in the beginning, for the
protection and cultivation of which Baptists stood out from the Established Church.
However, the freedom of the individual has come to be seen by many in Baptist circles as
the sine qua non of any understanding of God and his dealings with humanity. In
practice, that membership in a given church is voluntary means for many that it is not
compulsory for the Christian to be gathered to any church at all. Voluntarism, initially
seen as necessary both to preserve to the Lord his role as lord of the conscience and of the
church and to preserve for the church her capacity to function as a society capable of
forming the saints in faithfulness to Christ’s command, has now become the defining
feature, for many, of the individual’s relationship with the church…or with God. The
God whose sovereign grace turned the heart that it might embrace Christ has been
subordinated to the ostensibly free exercise of the will that flows from the heart whose
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yearnings, when genuine, are beyond challenging. What served to secure the individual
and the local church from persecution and interference from the State in areas in which it
has no God-given competency has been turned around to preserve individuals from
interference by the church, which is now seen to have no competency in the matter of the
individual’s free religious choice! This has resulted in a piety that pays lip service to the
objective nature of the church, specifically as regards preaching, the sacraments, and the
characteristic mark of discipline. Loosed from the constraints not only of state religion
but of church religion, the Christian faith in many Baptist assemblies has become an
increasingly individualistic and intellectual exercise.
Criticism of this distortion no longer comes only from without but now also from within
Baptist circles. Many maintain that the concept of individualism now present in Baptist
convictions is not only clothed in the language of liberal democratic individualism but
has taken on its essence. This development has been hastened along its way by the focus
on soul competency by many Baptist luminaries subsequent to the beginning of the
Enlightenment (e.g., Francis Wayland, E.Y. Mullins) in terms that seem to pay only lip
service to the distinctive calling of God in Christ of and upon the individual within the
People of God. Their thought seems at times so steeped in the language of Christendom
and progress as to be incompatible with the tenets of a believing, gathered church. This is
further symptomatic, for some, not only of the compromise of Baptist ecclesiology by
Enlightenment thought but of its effective uniting of Church and State – as much a
betrayal of Baptist and biblical roots as any union with Enlightenment rationalism might
be. For others, it simply reflects the poison of voluntarism in the body of the Church
catholic.
Of course, individualism per se can neither be praised nor condemned until properly
defined. The dictionary defines the individual as one who exists as a separate being;
individualism is not precisely the same, being the tendency to behave “with marked
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independence.”5 These are evidently not particularly helpful as they stand. Much of the
literature with which this thesis engages has a clear, though unstated, understanding of
the term, which is used sometimes favourably, usually negatively, but which describes an
affliction understood to plague both conservative and liberal expressions of Protestantism
to similar degrees, if with different manifestations. Interestingly enough, while many
Baptists might identify individual religion as the genius of the Baptist project, Reinhold
Neibuhr would claim the same for Protestant liberalism, the only problem being that it
had gotten out of hand.6
Individualism as it is used in this literature, and in this thesis, refers to the understanding
on an individual and corporate basis that the lone person is at the centre of God’s and his
own actions and intents. The individual is capable of determining his own goals, based on
an ability to accurately interpret the surrounding environment, and can be properly
defined without necessary reference to society. It is not so much that society is not
important as that it is secondary in importance to the individual, who is the formative unit
of which society is constituted, and not the converse. As such, God’s action and society’s
significance are seen as centred in the individual qua individual and not as a participant
in an organic entity – be this the culture or the church. Individualism is seen more by the
antithesis it expresses: the personal versus the social.7 It is in the very refusal to see the
dialectic of personal and social, and the “development of individuality beyond the limits
set in the Christian religion…the development of the autonomous individual,”8 that
individualism passes from healthy to destructive, and from orthodox to heretical –
literally so, as a church cannot be formed from autonomous, self-defining individuals,
and thus is schismatic from its inception.
5 Webster’s Universal Dictionary and Thesaurus, s.v. “Individual” and “Individualism”. 6 Philip J Lee, Against the Protestant Gnostics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 150. 7 “Human being is therefore essentially relational and social; to be human is to be a person related to others in human communities. Granted that the person is an individual, who lives as an independent unity of willing, feeling and knowing, nevertheless one only realizes his or her full humanity as a person essentially related to others in human communities.” Clifford J Green, Bonhoeffer: A Theology of Sociality (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 31. 8 Lee, 150.
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In any event, things have come to such a pass that, in the view of many, the movement
cannot continue to recognise the individual in the manner it does now. The voluntary
society is no longer a society but a loose formation of individuals all generally headed in
the same direction. Perhaps most significantly, the soul who is free is no longer seen as
one set free by Christ for Christ and for others but as one whose liberty is intrinsic:
almost an analogia entis, a function of the imago Dei. Some would argue that the
progression is markedly less Christian than this, the Baptist expression of Christianity,
being only typical of American Religion in general, seeking not just to transform but to
release the inner person; and this inner person is not a created being but that which is as
old as God himself, not so much in God’s image but in its own.9 The real presence of
Christ in the Lord’s Supper, a Reformed understanding now rejected by most Baptists,
has effectively been replaced by a real presence of God in the believer at all times, the
epicletic prayer seeking not so much the presence and filling of the Holy Spirit as the
self-fulfilment of the communicant!
A problem that pervades Evangelicalism, if not all Western churches, this seems most
pronounced in Baptist circles, for individualism has been woven into the warp and woof
of Baptist identity from the beginning. The unique mix of Reformed theology and Free
Church voluntarist ecclesiology that is the heritage of the bulk of the movement has
evidently provided fertile ground for this, especially in its American expression where it
has been subjected to the dissolving acid of revivalism and its almost exclusive focus on
the conversion of individuals, not their subsequent formation in and with the communion
of saints. The question is, if it remains thus in a society so bent upon individualism and
self-determination itself, is there a future for a distinct Baptist movement in the West?
Have Baptist churches anything of importance to say to society that it is not already
saying itself, albeit in plainer language? Can a movement so focused on the freedom of
the individual possibly have a lord outside of that individual? The problem extends
beyond the place of the individual in the local church to how the church as a whole is
perceived: individualism as applied to the person has been applied in terms of governance
9 A recurring thesis in Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).
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to award autonomy and independence to the local church, often leading to individual
churches having no firm ties or obligations to any other bodies, Baptist or otherwise.10 In
both individual and corporate senses, any pretence at catholicity has been abandoned.
1.1.1 Healing the Hurt of the Daughter of my People Slightly?
A number of theologians are proposing a drastic revision of the Baptist Identity. This has
coalesced in and around a document, published as an appendix to a paper by Curtis W
Freeman, entitled rather provocatively (intentionally or otherwise) “Re-Envisioning
Baptist Identity: A Manifesto for Baptist Communities in North America”11 (RBI). The
signatories to this document draw from post-liberal theologians and those sympathetic to
pre-modern and extra-Baptist baptistic streams. Their proposal seems to counter directly
the more “traditional” view of Baptist identity as dependent upon the freedom of the
individual, as held forth by such as Walter Shurden.12 Central to their analysis, though
not always explicitly so, is the place and understanding of the individual in Baptist faith
and practice.
Finding current understanding of the vocation of the Christian and the church to have
been corrupted in Baptist circles by the influences of modernism and individualism, RBI
proposes addressing the problem under five major heads13: community study of the Bible,
as opposed to private interpretation on the one hand or scientific objectivity on the other;
Christianity as based on a call to shared discipleship, not individual soul competency;
churches as called to a free common life in Christ in gathered, reforming communities,
rather than in withdrawn, self-chosen, or authoritarian ones; ordinances that are seen and
10 John S Hammett, “From Church Competence to Soul Competence,: The Devolution of Baptist Ecclesiology,” Journal for Baptist Theology and Ministry, Vol 3, No 1, (Spring 2005): 159. 11 Curtis W Freeman, “Can Baptist Theology Be Revisioned?,” PRSt 24 (1997): 303-310. 12 Walter B Shurden, The Baptist Identity – Four Fragile Freedoms (Macon: Smith & Helwys, 1993), 4-5. Dr. Shurden, while ‘traditional’ in his view of soul competency, would be considered ‘progressive’ and rather non-traditional in other areas by many more conservative, traditional Baptists, a diversity that makes our problem all the more challenging! 13 Freeman, “Can Baptist Theology Be Revisioned?”: 303-308.
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received as more than simple emblems; and the church as a distinct people free under
God rather than defined by political theories, powers, or authorities.
In the paper to which this manifesto is the appendix, Freeman traces the Baptist
movement from its infancy to the present day. Where perhaps I would take issue is with
the emphases the manifesto’s authors find prominent in the beginning of the movement -
which seems in their telling to be far more modern than contemporary confessions reflect
– and with the tenor of the solution, which again reflects a more narrative and
communitarian-driven approach than most Baptists, it is suspected, would be familiar
with. Both seem somewhat foreign to past and contemporary Baptist practice.14
In reflecting upon this initiative, what first comes to one’s attention is the particular view
of history reflected in RBI. From its use of the term “baptist,” to the theologians it cites,
to the marked antipathy to the State it manifests, the document espouses an understanding
of continuity in the Baptist movement that holds the Continental Brethren movements
(Anabaptists) to be the natural root of English (and thus American) Baptists – or, perhaps
that they should have been (though its supporters would not claim a direct lineage). It is
far from proven and, I hold, not likely, that English Baptist churches find their roots or
spirit in continental Free Church practice. The origins of English Baptist churches,
particularly the Calvinistic assemblies, most certainly lie in Puritanism. As such, their
theology and view of Church and State reflect not Anabaptist views but those of English
Separatists and Independents.
The second area that begs closer examination is that of theology. RBI represents a
significant departure from conventional Baptist theological practice. Freeman sees the
current crisis in Baptist theology as occasioned by the collapse of the Enlightenment
14 “(most Southern Baptists would be uncomfortable with) narrative theology. We have a strong sense of the integrity of Scripture based on its inspiration by the one God, and a wariness concerning the claims of narrative theology without a concomitant affirmation of the biblical propositions which give cognitive meaning to the biblical narratives.” Malcolm Yarnell, “Congregational Priesthood and the Inventio or Invention of Authority,” Journal for Baptist Theology and Ministry, Vol. 3, No 1 (Spr 2005): 112.
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project. He makes much of the critique of foundationalism to attack both conservative
and liberal approaches to theology,15 drawing upon post-liberal analysis by such as Hans
Frei. With the end of the Enlightenment era another way must be found for Baptists to do
theology: RBI represents this. The narrative basis to theology that it reflects and its
insistence on communitarian reading is a shift in theological method, as Freeman openly
admits. How this is to remain theologically faithful to Baptist roots is a question, for post-
liberal theology is a modern approach of which early moderns (Baptists included) would
have been unaware. It handles the Bible, for better or for worse, differently than did our
forebears and gives Scripture a relative authority quite removed from the Reformation
view evident in early Baptist confessions.16 One could certainly argue that in theology,
continuity is far from being what is required in our day. However, the genius of the early
Baptist movement was not simply its communitarian emphasis but its application of a
Free Church ecclesiology in refining the Reformed (and thus Augustinian) understanding
and application of theology.
A third area in which RBI is not innocent of the influences of our own time lies in its
Weltanschaaung. The language and concerns it expresses represent a particular view,
particularly insofar as Western hegemony is concerned: many of these men and women
would be far less than sanguine about the comfort of many modern Baptists with both
current American politics and Christendom in general.17 This reflects a legitimate
concern over the effective Constantinianism of many Western Baptist churches and the
isolation of North American Baptists from the world-wide movement reflected in the
individualism of the Western Church. However, both the confessions of the 17th century
and Stanley Grenz’s examination of Isaac Backus’ view of Church-State relations in the
18th century reveal that Baptists have hardly historically been opposed to the State per se.
15 Freeman, “Can Baptist Theology Be Revisioned?”: 290. 16 Some, such as Harmon, would view the narrative approach in general as more faithful to the patristic understanding of the role of Scripture in formulating theology – see Steven Harmon, “Scripture in the Life of the Baptist Churches: Openings for a Differentiated Catholic-Baptist Consensus on Sacred Scripture,” Pro Ecclesia XVIII: 191ff. 17 This is hardly the uniform stance of modern theologians, as Ellul’s more sympathetic analysis of the kingdom realism present in medieval Christendom reflects. Jacques Ellul, Les nouveaux possédés (Paris: Fayard, 1973), 14-19.
10
Such anti-Constantinianism as was expressed sought only freedom from interference and
persecution; there is a generally irenic spirit toward the State. Its legitimacy is seen as
being given by God and a necessary corrective to fallen humanity’s natural bent for
evil.18 This certainly shows indebtedness to Reformed theology in this area, though with
a marked ambivalence in its expression. What it does not reflect is an Anabaptist or even
an early General Baptist view of the Church-State relationship. In condemning,
commendably, an uncritical relationship between Church and State, RBI needs examine
whether Baptists have in actuality ever been as anti-Constantinian as they might have
preferred.
Jones also quite cogently points out that it may be asked whether what is in view in RBI
is not a biblical separation of Church from State but rather from culture.19 Such a breach
is neither desirable nor sustainable, precisely because the terms under which it is
undertaken will tend to be those of the culture with which a break is sought. We are
steeped in our culture, as is the work of Christ – Yoder, among others, has challenged the
whole basis of the “Christ vs. Culture” approach of H Richard Niebuhr.20 As well, part of
the unique genius of Christianity, expressive of the understanding of God as both Creator
and Redeemer, Maker of spirit and body, is its apprehension and use of secular forms to
express its truths.21 There is a proper concern for the corrupted understanding of
individual freedom expressed here; but accompanying this is also a poorly attenuated
revulsion at the power structures of Western culture itself, it would appear.
The draughters of RBI are not mistaken in declaring the need for the Church to stand
apart from culture where this would seek to usurp Christ’s role as Lord, or where culture
risks defining itself outside of criticism from the Lord’s people. However, there is more
18 Stanley Grenz, “Church and State: The Legacy of Isaac Backus,” Center Journal, Vol 2 No 2, (Spr 83): 84. 19 Robert Jones, “Revisioning Baptist Identity from a Theocentric Perspective,” PRSt 26 (1999): 52. 20 John H Yoder, The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiastical and Ecumenical, ed. Michael G Cartwright (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1998), 20-21. These challenges are themselves rebutted by James Gustafson in his preface to H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), xxiff. 21 Ellul, Les nouveaux possédés, 15.
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than a hint of Red/Blue divide here, of conservative/liberal rancour. Recent events in the
Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) cannot be ignored as a catalyst for the manifesto.
Indeed, there is an almost visceral dislike of one camp for the other. This does not
invalidate the importance of the points RBI is making; it means that they must be made
all the more carefully and precisely, to avoid misidentifying the true opponent.
The aforementioned concerns notwithstanding, the repercussions of the questions RBI
seeks to address are important. If the basis for the meeting of a Baptist church has
become axed on the free choice of the individual and not reliant upon and subject to the
calling of Christ in the midst of his people, one can ask whether this even constitutes a
church. The exodus of Baptists to more hierarchical and liturgically-based churches may
reflect how some are answering this question; the tenacious grasping of a rationalistic
literalism while rejecting as “superstitious” reliance on anything (e.g., sacraments,
tradition) that might move the seat of authority away from the personal faith and reason
of the individual shows how others are doing so. In either case, the basis of the movement
is called into question. Are the sacraments of the church thus void? Is there even
salvation for Baptists if they are without the true church? Can true doctrine be taught if
every individual is the final arbiter over what he or she will believe, unaware of the
influence of culturally-derived beliefs upon their response? Interestingly enough, it is
likely that these questions might well not be understood or seen as relevant in many
Baptist circles today – perhaps itself a testament to how far in certain ways we have come
from both the Reformers and our Baptist forebears, and how pervasive the primacy of the
individual is in our contemporary understanding of the church.
The implications of modifying the current understanding of the freedom of the individual
as proposed in RBI are wrought with peril, however. Are Baptists to seek to impose a
magisterial authority over their faith and practice? It appears that both sides of the RBI
argument fear this, which they perceive to be occurring now in the current conservative
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renaissance (or fundamentalist takeover, depending on one’s viewpoint) in the SBC.22 If
individual autonomy is curtailed in favour of institutional authority23 (be it hierarchical or
communitarian), is the Lord followed any more closely or heard any more clearly? If this
modification is done poorly, it may cause the foundation simply to shift from an inerrant
individual to an inerrant community!24 Are the perceived roots of this dilemma, the
influence of Enlightenment thought on Baptist belief and practice, sufficiently well-
identified? Beyond this, does the proposed restriction of individualism risk curtailing
individuality, which is inseparable from the people we are whom Christ has called? Does
the proposed solution, comfortable with a theology that has its emphasis on a narrative
reading of the Scripture, risk losing crucial aspects of Baptist faith and practice that are
linked to the individuality of the believer and his place in the priesthood of men and
women in the Body of Christ?
RBI’s observations about the quest for self-reliance having Enlightenment influences are
valid. Their proposed solutions are bold and represent theological thinking of a breadth
that challenges much that is dearly held by Baptists. However, both the foundations of
their approach – that of a small-“b” baptist ethos that is perceived to have existed from
the beginning of the movement; and the tenor of the solutions – espousing a narrative
theology that draws upon Baptist practices regarding the Word, sacrament, and
community life, which privileges a communitarian reading – are somewhat foreign to a
good part of the Baptist movement, both past and present. This is not to say that the
solutions are not well thought out or do not represent a necessary correction to Baptist
ecclesiology. But are they consistent with the origins of the movement, and can they be
implemented by means native to Baptist faith and practice? If so, by what vehicle can
they best be introduced and reinforced? It is feared that the well-argued solutions
22 Freeman, “Can Baptist Theology Be Revisioned?”: 273. 23 Shurden asks, “…one seriously wonders what "community of believers" the Manifesto would authorize to "check" the individual's interpretation. Frankly, I hope it is the local congregation of believers and that the Manifesto is not suggesting an authoritarian connectionalism in Baptist life that our Congregationalism will not support.” WB Shurden, “The Baptist Identity and the Baptist Manifesto”: 328. 24 Those proposing a “non-foundational” approach to resolving this problem are certainly not ignorant of such concerns, or of accusations of relativism. See Stanley Hauerwas, Nancey Murphy, and Mark Nation, Theology Without Foundations: Religious Practice and the Future of Theological Truth (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), 28-9.
13
proposed by the supporters of RBI may pass over the root problems that have brought us
to our present straits in the first place by focusing on elements present, yet not dominant,
in early Baptist faith and practice, even as they fail to gain support or address current
problems for want of a form of application amenable to Baptist faith and practice.
The problem must be addressed by revisiting the past, seeing where the current skewed
focus on individualism developed, seeking to redress this, and plotting a course for the
future. This, the present project aims to accomplish, drawing on a great deal of the
comprehensive work already done by those behind RBI. In focusing on the concern for
holiness in the community of the first Baptists, on their concern, coming from Puritan
roots, for the assurance of their election, the problems which RBI and others have
identified can be given a solution in a form congenial to Baptist faith and practice,
incorporating the important concerns the document reflects. This solution must address
the holiness of the gathered community in the service of Christ, concern for which was a
key motivation of the first Baptists.
It is proposed that the doctrine of the priesthood of the believer, a central element of the
model for the Baptist understanding of the church, is the vehicle by which this is best
accomplished. Where this has been insufficiently emphasised in the past, as a key
Reformation doctrine it can provide fitting material for constructive ecclesiology. There
is no need to send to Hiram for cedar when we have native building material with which
to form up our spiritual house of living stones, within which and among whom we can
“show forth the praises of him who hath called (us) out of darkness into his marvellous
light” (1 Pe 2.9). It is this dissertation’s thesis that the exaggerated individualism in
Baptist faith and practice stems from a distorted quest for personal sanctification which
exalts the individual at the expense of the church which must form him and is best
addressed by the recovery and rehabilitation of the Reformed Baptist understanding of
the priesthood of all believers as practised within a holy, gathered and covenanted
community formed by Word, sacrament, and discipline.
14
1.1.2 In the Beginning
In addressing this problem, the soil of the oft-tilled field of Baptist identity will need once
more to be turned. This is not to return the movement to its 17th century origins but to
uncover what was and still remains the defining characteristic(s) of Baptist faith and
practice in order that this might be returned to prominence as a touchstone for the future.
In a movement of such disparate origins and diverse expressions as the Baptists this is not
an easy task, as has been admitted by the many who have sought to establish this essence
and as is reflected in the variety of answers arrived at. It is possible, though, to define
with qualifications the original motivation of the particular Baptist understanding of the
faith. At the very least, much of what is today claimed as their ethos can be eliminated,
which should pave the way for defining a more biblically faithful role for the individual
in the gathered community.
The earliest Baptist documents reflect a particular understanding of the individual, the
individual’s freedoms and obligations, and the church. Indeed, the ability of the believer
to exercise religion voluntarily was foundational to the movement. The concern was not
so much for the dignity of the individual as for the meaningfulness of the church’s
worship of God and for the soul of the believer: for religion not exercised freely, but
coerced, is not true religion at all, leaving the soul in peril and mocking the sovereignty
of God. The role of the individual was clearly at the forefront of Baptist thought in the
development of their early polity, as expressed in the importance accorded to the gathered
church, believers’ baptism, freedom of religion, and the separation of Church and State.
State religion and infant baptism had placed the Church in the position of God, imposing
belief on individuals and robbing them of the genuineness of response to which both God
and they were entitled.
15
Voluntarism in religion was perceived as vital out of concern for the holiness of the
Church as a prerequisite for her ability to function as a means of the sanctification of the
individual, for the blessing of the nation, and for the honour of God, not from the concern
for individual rights per se with which it would come to be associated. The freedom of
the individual sought was thus both real and derivative, being predicated on the priority
of the freedom of God. The best model for understanding the primitive Baptist vision of
the church is not that of a platform for the pursuit of individual liberty but of a walled
garden for the cultivation of a holy priesthood of believers.
In this regard, the work of Eric Ohlmann,25 who identifies the essence of Baptist identity
as a concern for holiness, is important. A work which explores similar themes and which
has been important in the development of this dissertation is that of Philip Thompson,
who addresses the pneumatological emphasis in the Baptist identity in his constructive
work on Baptist ecclesiology.26 He concurs with Ohlmann’s analysis to a point but finds
rather the Baptist concern for the two-fold freedom of God – both from ecclesiastical,
State, or other control, and for the use of whatever means he has elected – to have been at
the heart of Baptist faith and practice. Thompson makes excellent points upon which this
project will draw in analysing the development of the Baptist understanding of the
individual, particularly in his attention to the withering of sacramental understanding in
Baptist faith and practice. However, the particular expression of the concern for God’s
freedom in the focus upon sanctification, and its pursuit within the gathered community,
seems a better fit for the Baptist way. The dispute over covenant and baptism, the
ambiguous effects of experimental predestinarianism, all point to the subjective
experience of holiness, safety, and delight in God as being of more immediate concern in
the distinctive Baptist expression of Reformed Protestantism than the admittedly central
and inseparable concern for God’s freedom in his Church. Personal and corporate
holiness is seen to be the key to the Baptist question. Addressing the form of the applied
holiness of this people is thus judged to be a necessary component in rectifying the
25 Eric H. Ohlmann, “The Essence of the Baptists: A Re-examination,” PRSt 13 (1986): 83-104. 26 Philip E. Thompson, Towards Baptist Ecclesiology in Pneumatological Perspective (PhD Thesis, Emory University, 1995). (Henceforth, Towards Baptist Ecclesiology)
16
problem of individualism. The priesthood of all believers is felt to supply the requisite
form and expression.
1.1.3 The Journey into the Far Country
The dissertation will next investigate the development of the Baptist view of the
individual and its impact on the movement’s ecclesiology over the succeeding centuries
as it has evolved to become today an understanding often little differentiable from that
espoused by a quickly receding modernity. Using ground well prepared by Thompson
and others it will be shown that whatever influence Enlightenment thought may have had,
this was not isolated in its impact on the Baptists from theological developments within
Calvinism itself, or from the effects of often being a harried minority. The aim will be to
determine where and why contemporary Baptist faith and practice seems to have departed
from its roots.
The battleground of New England, where Calvinism lost its grasp on Protestant thinking
in the 18th century, the influence of such men as Jonathan Edwards and Isaac Backus as
influenced by and as interpreters of John Locke, and the rise in pietism and the alliance
with an emerging Evangelicalism, are examined. While Thompson would situate the rot
as beginning after the first third of the 19th century (in the United States), the theological,
as well as cultural, soil seems to have been prepared well before this. It is only in that
century that, aided by much fertilisation, we begin to see the distressing harvest.
The view of sanctification as it was held and applied within a Calvinistic gathered
community both characterised the early Baptists and must count as perhaps the distinctive
essence of Baptists within the universal Church as a whole. It also appears to be that
which laid the ground for the distortions in the Baptist understanding of the individual
that would follow in successive centuries. As sanctification became the means of assuring
one’s salvation, displacing the early Calvinistic emphasis on God’s sovereign and
17
gracious justification of the individual, a salvation which in its Baptist understanding was
less mediated by the church and more subject to the direct dealings of the individual with
the Lord, the responsibility for salvation was increasingly laid in the lap of the believer
and less with God who elected to work in the freedom of the Spirit through the
ordinances and the church. When allied with a progressively more positive view of
humanity and its native goodness, especially as it came to be seen as most clearly
displayed through developing liberal democratic society, salvation was then pursued
alongside and not in the church, and in and not alongside society.
While Thompson identifies causes both cultural and academic for the drift in Baptist
piety, in common with many examinations of the transformation in Baptist faith and
practice he pays relatively little attention to the Puritan roots of covenant understanding
and sanctification and the excesses associated with them that Kendall has identified. This
is odd, for his work elsewhere provides, in my view, very useful insights as to
distinctions between Baptists and other Puritans in the perception and application of the
covenant in ecclesiology.27 The footprints left by these distortions seem to lead into the
lion’s den of individualism but never emerge. Is it here that the stage was set for the
ready drift of Baptist practice into individualism? The evidence, it appears, is rather
ambiguous. However, this concern for sanctification as a reflection of individual angst
regarding one’s election certainly contributed to the retreat from perceiving holiness as
having to be pursued within the corporate worship and discipline of the local church,
especially in the environment of the drastic social changes sweeping the late 18th century
Unites States. Such concern for holiness and assurance before God and the deviations it
has produced are best addressed, I hope to show, by an application of a biblical model of
priesthood to the Baptist understanding of the church as the arena in which holiness is
proved and developed.
27 See Philip E. Thompson, “Seventeenth Century Baptist Confessions in Context,” PRSt 29, (2002), to cite but one example.
18
1.1.4 Plainly Seeking Our Country
We next attempt to develop a solution that incorporates our insights and applies them to
the modern Baptist movement. The fourth and central chapter of the dissertation seeks to
prescribe a role and understanding of the individual that is biblical and faithful to the
Baptist tradition, both in its origin and its development. It is here that the Reformation
doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, the recovery and development of an
understanding extant from the beginning of the Church, will be applied to the problem of
individualism in Baptist faith and practice.
I will seek to construct and develop a Baptist understanding of the local church that re-
introduces an older understanding of the church and her sacraments in the context of the
priesthood of Christ’s people. This is admittedly an approach that shares with the analysis
of RBI a degree of unfamiliarity for most modern Baptists in its focus on the marks of
Word, sacrament, and discipline as formative of the People of God. However, this
concept, which pre-dates the Reformation but re-surfaces during it, is a natural for a
gathered church, particularly one born from a high regard for the sovereignty of God and
his freedom in election and the use of means in salvation and formation of his people.
The concept of the church as the priesthood of all believers in the Scriptures, in the
broader Christian tradition and in Reformation thinking, is examined and modified as
needed to correspond to the Baptist expression of the Christian way. This is seen as
crucial in turning the tide on individualism, for to the degree that the church and her
sacraments, as well as the objective standing of the priesthood of all believers in the local
church, are re-established, must the tendency and opportunity for individuals to
appropriate their faith and salvation to themselves and their own efforts be reduced.
This solution will apply the earlier Baptist understanding of the need for individual
holiness as inseparable from the church and situate it firmly within the Spirit-gathered
community entered voluntarily but formed by God’s sovereign calling of individuals into
a priestly people. It will do so in the context of the Reformed marks of Word, sacrament,
19
and discipline as both objectively forming the priestly people while being subjectively
made effective by them. In doing so it will draw on the insights of many of those
sympathetic to RBI while seeking to implement these through a vehicle more convenient
to Baptist faith and practice and to the society in which the Western Church ministers.
The priesthood will be demonstrated to be the best vehicle by which the gathered church
can properly address the modern concept of soul competency and the place of the church
in forming the individual as a means of reducing the ability of the Christian to privatise
God intellectually and bring him captive into the House of Dagon of individualism, in
isolation from the nourishment of the church and her worship. The importance of God’s
free use of the sacraments in imparting the gospel of Christ to his people, shown by
Stanley Fowler to be an important element of early Baptist soteriology,28 will figure in
restoring the church to her central place in the formation of the believer.
The contributions of the current debate over the place of the individual in the modern
Baptist movement are examined, paying particular attention to the attempt to redress the
perceived imbalance by those influenced by post-liberal thought, such as JH Yoder and
James McClendon, Jr. These discussions have much of value to say to the situation,
particularly in bringing a balance between individual and corporate reading of the
Scriptures and in the identification of foundationalism as a problem for both liberal and
conservative factions, and their insights play a role in the definition of the formation of
the priesthood of the faithful as a formative vision for the local church.
The pastoral application of this solution in the congregation, a prime motivation behind
this project, seeks to give Baptists, an anti-clerical and anti-sacramental people, a biblical
and Reformed vehicle for understanding who they are as Christians in the Church of
Christ. It will encourage the restoration of the exercise of biblical discipline, a pillar of
the Free Church understanding of the sanctification of the individual and the church. This
should have the double effect of better equipping Baptists to praise and serve the God of
28 Stanley K. Fowler, More Than a Symbol: The British Baptist Recovery of Baptismal Sacramentalism (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2002).
20
grace, as well as cultivating a Christ-centred and Spirit-nourished assurance for the
individual. To paraphrase Yoder, such a re-orientation should serve as well to bring to the
fore the primary motivation of the first Baptists: to serve our Christ as he rules in his
church.29
1.1.5 What Manner of Persons Ought We to Be?
Equipped with such an understanding Baptists will be able to present a more credible
witness to the Church at large, and to the world needing to hear the gospel. The concept
of the People of God as commissioned priesthood which God himself forms and prepares
in Word, sacrament, and discipline in the church will maintain a balance in mission,
giving the practice of the faith a sound theological and christocentric basis. The concept
of the church as not existing apart from individuals while at the same time being that
without which the individual Christian cannot function will provide a key element in the
Baptist understanding of catholicity. This will necessarily imply the need for changes in
both the self-perception and the practice of the Baptist church, but more importantly, in
the understanding of the nature and manageability of God and revelation itself. Some of
these implications are explored in this final chapter.
In these ways, this project aims to contribute to the development of a Baptist ecclesiology
that is at once faithful to the apostolic witness, an orthodox expression of the faith once
delivered to the saints, while being a truly contemporary, living testimony to the coming
Kingdom of our Christ. It will better place the believing Church in the context of the
post-Christendom western world: a missionary priesthood sent out under authority of a
sovereign Lord, instead of a holy club or a gathering of autonomous saints. As those who
serve the Risen Lord, Jesus the “man for others,” is this not surely a laudable goal?
29 Yoder, 132.
21
Chapter 2
In the Beginning
2.1 Origins
There is no one uncontested view on the subject of Baptist beginnings. Theories
regarding the movement’s origins fall into three broad categories. The first, characterised
more by sound and fury than substance or fact, is the Successionist (or “Trail of Blood”)
view, which argues for an “organic succession of Baptist churches going all the way back
to either the ministry of John the Baptist on the banks of the Jordan river on the day of
Pentecost,”1 an unbroken trail from then to this day of those who have composed the
“true church” – which is, of course, Baptist. There is little to commend this theory in
terms beyond that of wishful thinking on the part of some, and it has little support outside
the rather heated circles in which it is unchallenged orthodoxy.2 Michael Haykin notes
that this view only became popular among Baptists in the nineteenth century, and is not
to be found in Baptist writings at any earlier date.3
A second view finds Baptist origins to lie, in whole or in part, in the Radical Reformers
who emerged during the Reformation. The emphases they shared with the first Baptists
regarding gathered churches, the practice of believers’ baptism, the competency of the
local church to elect her own officers, and the desire for religious liberty and separation
of Church and State, make this view an appealing one. The frequent contact between
English separatists and Mennonites in Holland in the late 1500s and the attractiveness of
the latter to John Smyth, and his later defection to them, seem to lend the view some
1 Michael AG Haykin, Kiffin, Knollys and Keach (Durham: Evangelical Press, 1996), 15. 2 This does, however, have the irony of introducing a species of apostolic succession to a wing of the Baptist movement that would hardly hold the Roman Catholic Church, which establishes its episcopal authority thus, in high esteem! 3 Haykin, 15. Durnbaugh mentions, without expressing approval, a number of sources, Baptist and otherwise, who would also hold to a variation of this view of Free Church beginnings, Donald Durnbaugh, The Believers’ Church, (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1968), 15.
22
credibility. However, there is no hard evidence to support it. Stephen Wright finds
Smyth’s form of separatism to have arisen from his own personal progression within the
Puritan tradition, a sentiment echoed by Stephen Brachlow in the case of the non-
separating Congregationalism of Henry Jacob.4 Indeed, Smyth’s adoption of believers’
baptism stems from those roots as well, not from the Mennonites.5 From the mouths and
pens of the earliest Baptists themselves comes a formal rejection of any ties to the
Anabaptists of the continent and a formal identification with the Protestant Reformation.6
The third view, and that held by most scholars in this area, is that the Baptists emerged
from the English Reformation. Not only is there lacking any concrete evidence to back up
the Anabaptist theory of origins but there is positive evidence that the Baptist form of the
church developed during the Puritan struggle for reformation and control of the Church
of England, the failure of which saw the formation of the Presbyterian and Independent
churches in the 1600s. The majority of the London Calvinistic Baptist churches had split
from the Jacob-Lathrop-Jessey (JLJ, after the names of its pastors) Independent church
over the issue of baptism,7 though it is difficult to discern which of these should have
pride of place as the first – some evidence points to the Spilsbury church in 1638, but this
is hardly conclusive.8 The General Baptists, led initially by Thomas Helwys on their
return to England from Holland following the split from Smyth’s group, while Arminian
in their soteriology, still discussed the Christian life in the language of Reformed
theology – their arguments with other Puritans, whether in the State Church or in
separated churches, concerned common theological emphases: for whom did Christ die,
how does the election of God function, what is the relative role of human freedom in
receiving salvation? The Anabaptist view of justification was qualitatively different in its
focus on human contribution and on discipleship and emulation of Christ in place of the
4 Stephen Brachlow, “The Elizabethan Roots of Henry Jacob’s Churchmanship: Refocusing the Historiographical Lens,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 36, No. 2, (Apr 85): 230-232. 5 Stephen Wright, The Early English Baptists, 1603-1649 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), 8. 6 For example, the cover page of the 1st London Confession, which denies any link to the Anabaptists. William L Lumpkin, Baptist Confessions of Faith (Philadelphia: Judson Press, 1959), 153. 7 Dennis Bustin, “Hanserd Knollys and the Formation of Particular Baptist Identity,” in Baptist Identities: International Studies from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries, eds. Ian M Randall, Toivo Pilli, and Anthony R Cross, (Milton Keynes, UK: Paternoster Press, 2006), 8. 8 David Bebbington, Baptists Through the Centuries (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010), 46.
23
alien, imputed righteousness and forensic justification favoured by the Reformers.
Beyond this, the Christology common among the Anabaptists departed significantly from
the orthodox view of the Western Church and did not find acceptance among the non-
Church of England Puritans.9
As Thompson points out, the General Baptists rejected many Anabaptist positions
explicitly while affirming by confession a more Reformed stance, especially in the areas
of original sin and the will.10 Lumpkin notes that in his “Declaration of Faith of English
People Remaining at Amsterdam in Holland” (1611), Helwys aims to distance his group
from the Mennonites and from the Smyth group that would stay behind, later to join
them.11
On the Calvinistic side, one of the leading lights of the movement, Hanserd Knollys,
expended a great deal of energy in emphasising the ties between them and the other
Calvinistic Dissenters, the Presbyterians and Independents.12 Glen Stassen makes a well-
formulated, but to this author unconvincing, argument that the First London Confession
(1644) takes as its pattern the language and structure of Menno Simons’ Foundation
Book.13 However, the particular elements of this confession which differ from other
Reformed statements are just as likely to express the outcome of the Particular Baptists’
own theological development as it moved forward with that of other Puritans.14 Certainly
their understanding of the significance of baptism is not patterned on the followers of
Simons, despite those theological points held in common. The subsequent Second
London Confession (1677) of the Calvinistic Baptists, perhaps more apologetic in nature
as it was issued in the midst of the persecution that followed the Restoration, would echo
9 Barrington R White, The English Separatist Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 162. 10 Thompson, Towards Baptist Ecclesiology, 39. 11 Lumpkin, 115. 12 Bustin, 7. 13 Glen H Stassen, “Anabaptist Influence in the Origin of the Particular Baptists,” The Mennonite Quarterly Review 6, No 4, (Oct 1962): 329. 14 Bebbington, Baptists Through the Centuries, 134, n80. See also James M Renihan, “An Examination of the Possible Influence of Menno Simons’ Foundation Book upon the Particular Baptist Confession of 1644,” American Baptist Quarterly, 15, No 3 (Sept, 1996): 190-207.
24
large portions of the Westminster Confession, seeking common ground with fellow
Reformed Dissenters.
In exploring the question of Baptist origins, the Puritan contribution must have pride of
place. The movement’s leaders were educated at Church of England institutions; its
quarrels with the Established Church and other Dissenters about ecclesiology and
baptism stemmed from a shared foundation with the Puritans concerning soteriology and
the basic concept of the sanctified life. Without examining the particular concerns of the
Puritans for holiness of society, church, and the individual, and the way in which
Calvinistic understanding of salvation, predestination, and assurance dominated much of
religious thought, the origin of the Baptists and their subsequent development makes little
sense. When the Baptists are seen as a subset of the Puritan problem and their challenge
to the English Church, the modern understanding of religious and personal liberty taken
for granted by most Baptists can be seen as having perhaps its seeds in the beginning of
the Baptist movement, but was certainly not its sole motivation.
The above brief summary does not of course make a conclusive case for the theory of
Puritan origins, reflecting only a few of the more convincing pieces of evidence. Many
scholars have argued forcefully for the possibility of an Anabaptist genesis for the
movement, ably enough that, while not proving the case, do not allow its absolute
dismissal.15 There is, for instance, an interesting overlap in the areas of England in which
the Lollards had been active in preceding centuries and those in which early Independent
and General Baptist works first arose,16 though no firm connection has been established
with the earlier movement, nor did the Lollards show any particular interest in some key
Reformation doctrines, such as justification by faith.17 However, this would perhaps
15 For example, Glen Stassen, “Anabaptist Influence in the Origin of the Particular Baptists,”: 322-348; William Estep, “Anabaptists, Baptists, and the Free Church Movement,” Criswell Theological Journal 6 (Spr 1993): 303-317. 16 Driver mentions this activity in connection with the emergence of dissident Anabaptist groups in the 16th century, John Driver, Radical Faith: An Alternative History of the Christian Church, (Kitchener: Pandora Press, 1999), 123. 17 Bebbington, Baptists Through the Centuries, 13; Wright, The Early English Baptists, 1603-1649, 6-7.
25
further reinforce that the emergence of the Baptists is a particularly English phenomenon.
The general, if not specific, influence of the Anabaptists, who were most likely present in
England in some numbers at the time of the emergence of the Baptists,18 on the religious
environment, the transfer of “packets” of thought not reflected in formal documents, are
indeed possible means by which the Baptists might have been affected in their infancy by
the Radical Reformers19 – but evidence of this remains elusive.
2.2 Particulars and Puritans
The question of origins is pertinent to addressing weaknesses in Baptist ecclesiology, if
we hold that both the seeds of the problem and its solution were sown together in the
beginning, to some degree. While many traditions in Protestantism (e.g., Lutheranism,
Wesleyanism) can point to one person or specific event as their foundation, the Baptist
movement was quite diverse from the beginning, as was the Puritan movement that
spawned it.20 However, Puritan concerns were key to its beginnings – even in the case of
the General (Arminian) Baptists, who would not have shared their Calvinism.21 The
covenant basis of the Particular Baptists’ life together even in the 18th century reflects
this, as it also expresses their understanding that one was not a believer alone, church life
being seen as the combination of a profession of individual faith with identification with
the covenanted, gathered church. One walked with Christ as one walked together with
others.22
18 Lumpkin, 14. 19 Martyn J Whittock, “Baptist Roots: The Use of Models in Tracing Baptist Origins,” The Evangelical Quarterly, 57 (Oct, 1985): 319. 20 John Spurr, English Puritanism, 1603-1689 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998), 65. 21 Steven Brachlow, “Puritan Theology and General Baptist Origins,” The Baptist Quarterly, XXX: 179. 22 Karen Smith, “Preparation as a Discipline of Devotion,” in Baptist Identities: Studies in Baptist History and Thought 19, eds. Ian M Randall, Toivo Pilli, and Anthony R Cross, (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2006), 22.
26
As both Brachlow and Grenz23 point out, there was a deep conservatism in Puritanism,
particularly in that stream that sought reformation within the Church of England (the
Radical Puritans) rather than separation from it (the Separatists). This is not an
uncontested assertion, as some find Puritanism to be a revolutionary movement – though
on the balance this does not seem to figure.24 Christopher Hill’s observations on Puritan
attempts to bring social responsibility and economic viability to their communities by
dispensing with Saints’ Days and festivals would support the argument for a deep
conservatism being at the heart of the movement.25 The sharp reaction by those within
(Daniel Featley, The Dippers Dipt) and outside of the Church (Thomas Edwards,
Gangraena) to the practice of believers’ baptism,26 with its disruptive social implications,
appears as much sociologically as theologically motivated. A similar reaction was
evidenced in the New England colonies.
Preservation of the Calvinist tradition either within or outside of the Established Church
was the objective of both radicals and separatists, that the Church might be a God-
honouring and salvation-promoting institution. Overall, democratic reform and the
freeing of the individual conscience were not high on the Puritan agenda. The place of
freedom of conscience and practice would be divisive issues27 – and contrary to the
conservative instincts of the movement, the emphasis of the role of the Holy Spirit in the
individual, the questioning of the place of formal institutions that would arise in a day in
which the monarch was first rebelled against and then executed, the emphasis on
individual knowledge of the Bible, all served to encourage an individualism that was not
in view originally.
23 Stanley Grenz, Isaac Backus: Puritan and Baptist, NABPR Dissertation Series No. 4 (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1983), 17. 24 Richard Greaves, “The Puritan-Noncomformist Tradition in England, 1560-1700: Historiographical Reflections,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Winter, 1995): 478-479. 25 Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (New York: Schoken Books, 1967). 26 Bebbington, Baptists Through the Centuries, 48. 27 Spurr, 110.
27
Calvinism itself, however, also had in it the roots of individualism and radical change.
Richard Hooker’s objections to Calvin’s ecclesiology centred on its promotion of rapid
change, often led by individual parties. While not comfortable with a presbyterian system
of government, his objection was voiced principally in terms of how one arrived at that
system,28 what functioned as authority within it, and whom it served and excluded.
Calvin’s location of the work of the Spirit through the Word in the conscience opened the
door to an individualism in religion of which he himself would have hardly approved.29
While the Puritans sought to preserve the Calvinistic theological stance of the Established
Church – the Articles of Religion certainly reflect this stance in their soteriology,
Cardinal Newman’s later objections notwithstanding - by swaddling it within a matching
ecclesiology, such an approach was distinctly at odds with the English understanding of
the Church serving the commonwealth of the people. The arguments within arguments
which would emerge within Puritanism and which would divide the Dissenters perhaps
reflected this inherent instability of Calvinist ecclesiology within the English Church
landscape. Bebbington may cite Collinson to state that Calvinism itself appears a far
more comfortable fit for clergy and people than many would hold,30 but reconciling a
church of the godly with the existence of an established State Church was not so
comfortable.
The Particular Baptists were more sympathetic to the Radical (or Church) Puritans than
were many of the Separatists. The JLJ church sought for the longest time to maintain
communion, or at least strained relations, with the Established Church.31 There was a
general resistance to separatism in this group, at least in the early years. As well, the gulf
between the two Puritan streams, radical and separatist, is not as wide or as sharply
28 “That which Calvin did for the establishment of his Discipline, seemeth more commendable than that which he taught for the countenancing of it established.” Richard Hooker, Preface, Reformation of the Laws and Orders Ecclesiastical in the Church of England, http://www.archive.org/stream/worksofthatlearn00hook (accessed June 2011), 139. 29 Lee associates the introspection and self-examination integral to Calvinist piety to produce, ironically, a strong narcissism, “wavering between self-adoration and self-contempt.” This he would find to come to the fore in 18th century New England, with corrosive effects. Against the Protestant Gnostics, 141-142. 30 Bebbington, Baptists Through the Centuries, 16. 31 Spurr, 65.
28
demarcated as many would hold.32 Radical Puritans did not all become Presbyterians, nor
did all Separatists become Independents. However, the ecclesiology of the various
Puritan groups was not always clearly defined, nor was it always consistent with their
theological concerns. Many did not pursue their objections to the Established Church to
their logical conclusion, that of disestablishment. Those who did may not have followed
their objections to popish rituals through to a repudiation of infant baptism – and the
reasons for which they must abandon the former were turned on their head to justify
keeping the latter.
2.3 Baptist Broadness – General and Particular
As Brachlow holds for the Puritans, so Wright maintains for the English Baptists
themselves – the Particular and General Baptists did not divide as neatly or as early as
later denominational historiography would dictate. There is little evidence of a distinct
Particular Baptist association before the publication of the 1644 London Confession,33
and whether this division obtained outside of the City is an open question.
The answer to this question influences how we understand Baptist motivations and
outlook, as it is tempting to read back later denominational distinctives and priorities into
the Puritan struggles of the 17th century. However, the Particular Baptists were Reformed
and English before they were a distinct denomination. There was a sense of kinship
between them and other Reformed Dissenters – the Second London Confession’s
similarity to the Westminster Confession and the First London Confession’s similarity to
the Savoy Declaration were not merely for purposes of self-preservation. The final
separation from the Church of England, even after its government and baptism had been
deemed faulty, was a difficult step for the semi-separatists and itself a point of division.
The General Baptists were far less sympathetic to the State Church. Further differences
32 Stephen Brachlow, Communion of Saints: Radical Puritan and Separatist Ecclesiology, 1570-1625 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 7. 33 Wright, The Early English Baptists, 1603-1649, 110.
29
include the practice of laying on of hands at baptism, the role and authority of the
association over against the local church, and the orders of ministry. Notwithstanding,
there was considerable movement between the two bodies, and defections from both to
the Quakers.
It would seem to be unclear, however, how close the two streams actually were. Wright
finds it a mistake to make too early a division34 while Bebbington finds the groups to be
quite distinct, later crossing of the lines notwithstanding.35 That those of the JLJ church
who sought believers’ baptism sent to Holland for direction instead of seeking out their
General Baptist countrymen would seem to speak either to their ignorance of the latter’s
existence or to their disdain for them.
This merely to state that clarity in the situation that pertained among the Baptists in terms
of theology and practice may be impossible to establish, so transitory were the times and
even the religious priorities of individuals over time. Wright paints a picture of constantly
shifting alliances and positions as Dissent struggled both to obtain more local direction of
churches while seeking to distance itself from the more radical elements of these locally-
directed groups. This should further serve to situate the Particular Baptists, in whom we
will find the roots of modern Baptists, closer to the mainstream of English Church life,
and permit us to see them less as a sect than as an expression of the diversity of English
Protestantism during this period.
2.4 Ecclesiology as Essential: Church and Salvation for the Puritans
The inconsistencies and blurring of boundaries among them notwithstanding,
ecclesiology was a foremost concern of the Puritan movement. They sought a pure
34 Wright, The Early English Baptists, 1603-1649, 11. 35 Bebbington, Baptists Through the Centuries, 52ff.
30
Church in which to worship and to find safety before God in Christ, and in which Christ
would rule as Lord. This should discourage one from seeing them as individualists – it
may well have been incumbent on the individual to worship with a properly ordered
church, but the order of that church was not at the individual’s discretion, nor was the
individual seen as existing apart from the corporate. The form or the membership and
practices of the church, depending on who one listened to, were crucial soteriological
matters: salvation was not an individual project. The wrong constitution of the English
Church, for the Separatists, prevented Christ from ruling as King: matters of church
government (episcopacy) and discipline were not adiaphora. For such as Walter Travers,
doctrine and discipline were seen as two twin sisters, one of which could not stand
without the other.36
Indeed, directions concerning church discipline were seen by some as having been laid
down by Christ himself during the interval between his Resurrection and Ascension.37 In
this role, Christ functioned as a lawgiver not inferior to Moses, who had himself received
the Law from God, particularly that concerning the right ordering and worship of the Old
Covenant Church, during his forty days on Mt. Sinai (Exodus 25-31). In Brachlow’s
view38 this emphasis on the form of the church represents a departure from Calvin’s
teachings, who would go no further than to assert that membership in a true church was
ordinarily required for salvation,39 discipline as a mark of the church being formally
introduced by second and third generation reformers, though perhaps assumed by Calvin.
He finds this focus on ecclesiology a component in the quest for assurance that so
typified the Puritans, representing a departure from Calvin’s emphasis on Christ as the
believer’s assurance rather than as another law-giver. However, given Calvin’s efforts to
re-organise the church in Geneva in the mid-1500s and John Knox’s flights of ecstasy in
commending the results, emphasis on the importance of a properly ordered church seems
36 Brachlow, Communion of Saints, 23. 37 Ibid., 24. That this mandate had considerable weight even though its particulars are not recorded by Scripture must strike one as somewhat odd, considering the Reformers’ ongoing disagreement with Rome over the authority of Tradition. 38 Ibid., 114; “Puritan Theology and General Baptist Origins”: 182. 39 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, IV.1.7-8 (London: James Clarke & Co., 1962), in which Calvin emphasises the Church invisible over the visible, 288.
31
to be present already with Calvin – thus perhaps the Puritans were not misreading him
here.
Dudley Fenner (A brief treatise on the first table of the lawe) interpreted the 2nd
commandment as relating to the church – where she was accorded any authority apart
from the rule of Christ was where she became idolatrous.40 Contravention of this
commandment through improper church government was a breach of the covenant and
thus a threat to one’s salvation. That Church and State were not seen as separable entities
meant that proper Church structure also had implications for the State as well; this
certainly weighed as heavily on the Puritan mind as did the implications for personal
salvation. While one might argue that here the Church Puritans had concerns different
from those who would become Baptists, the terms of the argument are similar.
Prior to 1588 or so, when the Radical Puritans still seemed to have a real chance of
reforming the Church of England according to their wishes, matters such as church
government, ritual, and discipline were considered as essential to her work of salvation
and thus central to the drive for reform. However, with the triumph of the episcopal party
their stance changed – these were subsequently designated adiaphora by those Puritans
who were on the losing side of the struggle and yet wished to stay in the Church, not jure
divino as was claimed by the victors.41 This concession was forced on the Church
Puritans in part by the claims of the left wing of the Puritan party, which sought
separation from the Church, and from those who, yet more extreme, held the Church’s
baptism - and infant baptism period - to be unbiblical and thus to undo her. Arguing with
the Established Church on the one hand for the need to change church structure to bring it
into conformity with Scripture, they must counter on the other the Separatists’ claims that
lack of proper structure vitiated the Church’s claim to be a true church.
40 Brachlow, Communion of Saints, 35. 41 Ibid., 38.
32
What emerges from this is that the various parties, with varying degrees of consistency,
were arguing the importance of the Church in God’s salvific work. Various aspects of the
Church’s practice may or may not have been adiaphora: what definitely was not a matter
of indifference was the Church herself, and the individual’s salvation in and through her
ministry. In this view, the Church was not so much the arena for the expression of God’s
freedom as the instrument by which God saves his people.
Without denying Thompson’s emphasis on God’s freedom from and for,42 there existed a
significant anthropocentric focus in the Puritan understanding of the role of the Church –
perhaps more so than with Calvin. Ecclesiology was crucial because it was what enabled
obedience and sanctification – perhaps not so much a matter of set form as of
effectiveness. There is a particularly English aspect to this in seeing God’s work as a field
in which Church and society overlap. The same William Tyndale, whose translation of
the Scriptures underlay the Puritan-led translation that would become the Bible of the
English Church and English Christendom, was he whose theological view of the use of
God’s law for moulding both Church and society would be the ethos of English
Christianity, and that which the Puritans basically picked up.43 There is less of a dialectic
in this interpretation than one would find in Luther, for example; there is also less scope
for a believers’ church than one would find on the continent among the Anabaptists, who
emerged in a much more decentralised and fragmented society. The Puritans might hold
that the communion of the saints must be restricted to the godly in order that one’s
salvation might be worked out and one’s election made sure. But there still is the sense
that the Church – even the gathered church - existed for the sake of the broader society, to
purify it. This, in part, must underlie the resistance to separation among many Puritans,
both radical and separatist.44
42 Thompson, Towards Baptist Ecclesiology, 20. 43 Grenz, Isaac Backus, Puritan and Baptist, 17. 44 While there is debate about the closeness of the radical and separatist Puritans - their closeness is supported by White's depiction of the latter as "hasty Puritans" and by Brachlow’s analysis of the careers of Henry Jacob and John Robinson while disputed by such as Timothy George (John Robinson and the English Separatist Tradition (Macon, Ga., 1982), p. 242) - even George rejects the thought that, with the “radical rejection of the basic premise of the Elizabethan Settlement,” namely the “coextension of church
33
It is possible that having lost the battle to reform the Established Church the Puritans who
could not remain turned more inward. The Church was certainly seen as necessary to
salvation; however, how that was seen to play out was perhaps shifting. She was in the
view of many not so much the institution through which God spoke as that through which
the individual was formed in Christ. The concern for the honour of God was coloured by
the individual’s concern for salvation and assurance of election. These are not
contradictory – however, they tilt the significance of the church in the Puritan mind,
especially the Puritan outside the Established Church, to the individual – but the
individual in the midst of the community. This is a pre-Enlightenment move toward the
individual, but one that Enlightenment thought would certainly come to encourage.
Ironically, such an approach was what Calvin explicitly disdained in his dispute with
Cardinal Sadoleto as a basis of proper ecclesiology.45 The glory of God must be the first
and foremost concern of the believer, not the security of one’s own soul. However, it is
inherent in Calvin’s approach that the believer need become to some degree the court of
final judgement not just of the church but of her effectiveness in salvation. This requires
an individualism that must at some level set the believer against the church in what would
later become effectively a consumer-vendor relationship, and a degree of mutuality and
correspondence in the relationship between God and the believer, a mutuality that
addresses the concerns of the individual who has some degree of suspicion about the
church.46 If according to a Cardinal Sadoleto the Church somehow functioned as an ally
in the search by the believer for safety with God, there could be found in Reformed
Protestantism the same quest, yet now the Church herself came to be weighed in the
balance by the individual as to her effectiveness in this search.
and commonwealth,” the Separatists were advocates of “the creation or restitution of a totally alien, select Christian society.” Greaves: 466-7. 45 John C Olin, ed., A Reformation Debate: John Calvin and Jacopo Sadoleto (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1976), 58. 46 This suspicion on a global scale Ellul finds to have undermined any rational evaluation of the merits and drawbacks of Christendom in modern society. Ellul, Les nouveaux possédés, 20.
34
Thompson emphasises the degree to which early Baptist catechisms reflect a balance
between the sovereignty of God, the authority of the church, and the responsibility of the
individual to exercise freedom of conscience.47 Whereas contemporary Protestant
confessions would open with the establishment of what theology was to be based on - the
Bible, the order of Creation – Baptist confessions (e.g., First London Confession,
Somerset Confession, Midland Confession, Standard Confession, Orthodox Creed)
typically began with a declaration of who God is, focusing on the distinctness of God
from his creation and his unmediated prerogative to relate to humanity in sovereign
freedom, unconstrained by the order of creation or the Bible, followed by a description of
the dire state of humanity.48 Baptists first confessed God in his perfection and then
humanity in its dire, sinful state. Absent is any idea of the ability of men and women to
objectively analyse God and ourselves – the tools (the Scriptures) are not provided here
first, as in the Westminster Confession and in the Second London Confession. There is in
this earlier document an immediacy that does not so much give men and women
unmediated access to God, nor first focus on the tools by which one might come to know
God (Scripture), but gives to him the absolute freedom of definition and action.
Indeed, there is even less of a common point of contact between God and humanity, of
natural human competency for the knowledge of God as mediated through the Scripture
and creation, than one finds in some other Reformed confessions. Even here we see the
foundation for the place of the church: if men and women are unable to close with God
because of this vast gap then to see the Christian religion as an individual pursuit either of
God or of one’s personal fulfilment outside of God’s gracious action and initiative is out
of the question. He is not knowable apart from his means of grace – the church being one,
and that completely an expression of God’s active, undelegated grace. However, this
church does not mediate salvation but provides the arena in which the Triune God is
encountered by believers – who are active in the apprehension of “so great salvation.”
One can perhaps see even here a tension between the church that is necessary and the
47 Thompson, Towards Baptist Ecclesiology, 42. 48 “…(Adam) abode not in this honour but…did wittingly and willingly fall into disobedience” (1st London Confession, Art. IV); “All mankind being thus fallen, and...subject to the eternall wrath of the great God by transgression…” (Art. V), in Lumpkin, 157-8.
35
believer whom she must serve, who is not passive or detached from that service but plays
an integral part in it.
This would be established in subsequent statements about the church and her role. As
Thompson points out, God’s freedom from control, with which Baptists were concerned
from the beginning and have remained so, is not detached from his freedom to use any
means in working his gracious purpose.49 The early Baptists saw the church in this
manner. Far from being bound by rites and forms, God in his freedom would employ
these in the salvation of his people through the church. She was the gracious means by
which God formed believers in Christ making them safe from the penalty of sin, “a
walled garden” in which the Lord’s planting was nurtured. Christ’s work was in the
individual within and through the church, “…and (he) ruleth over all things for his church
and by the power of love ruleth by his Spirit in us” (Somerset Confession, Art. XVIII).
Keach would write, “God loves the Gates of Sion more than all the dwelling places of
Jacob: Therefore, the publick worship of God is to be preferred before the private.”50 The
Somerset Confession concludes with an ode to the church as the bride, both as a group of
individuals but more as a collective individual, as the Beloved of the Canticles and the
Israel of God (Art. XLVI).
Her means of grace – preaching, reading the Scriptures, the sacraments, discipline,
fellowship – had no power apart from the Holy Spirit who enabled their working in
God’s people. “Diligent use of all the outward and ordinary means whereby Christ
communicates to us the benefits of redemption” was pressed upon Christians. Scripture
(or any other discipline of the church) could not be separated from the Spirit who applied
it; neither was his work seen apart from the men and women in whom he worked. In
Thompson’s analysis, he sees the objection of some such as Helwys to the episcopal
office to also condemn private interpretation of the Bible, as both limited God’s freedom
to declare himself by the Spirit in the church.
49 Thompson, Towards Baptist Ecclesiology, 47ff. 50 Ibid., 69.
36
Scripture was to be read and heard in the assembly.51 Public worship was seen as the
primary locus of God’s work and the church’s teaching, worship, and discipline as the
primary safety for the sinner from God’s wrath – “to which church, and not elsewhere, all
persons that seek for eternal life, should gladly join themselves” (Orthodox Creed, Art.
XXX). However, the freedom of God was met and responded to by accountable, Spirit-
enabled individuals; there is a marked turning away from the perception of the corporate
as institution, seeing it instead as the gathering of individuals.
Notwithstanding, the early Baptist movement did not display the modern aversion to
recognising the authority under Christ of the local church. The ministry was seen as a gift
of God (as was the secular magistracy), having an authority under God that was not
common to all believers.52 “Christ…hath given to his visible church, a subordinate
power, or authority, for the well-being, ordering, and governing of it…committed to his
ministers” (Orthodox Creed, Art. XXXIV); “the authority of Christ in an orderly ministry
in his church, is to be submitted unto” (Somerset Confession, Art. XXXIII). As regards
the sacraments, William Kiffin declared that “he who cares not for Christ sacramental
cares not for Christ God, for in the former the latter comes near.”53 The Second London
Confession picked up essentially unchanged the Calvinistic Eucharistic theology of the
Westminster Confession.54 The Lord’s Table was seen also to testify to the unity of the
church.55 Even where a Zwinglian memorial interpretation would be picked up, the
presence of Christ in the midst of his people better describes their understanding than the
bare individual remembrance that defines most Baptists’ understanding today. As
Brachlow points out, there was a communal conscience required in discipline in
51 Thompson, Toward Baptist Ecclesiology, 66. 52 Ibid., 67. 53 Ibid., 71. 54 “Worthy receivers…do then also inwardly by faith, really and indeed, yet not carnally, and corporally, but spiritually receive, and feed upon Christ crucified & all the benefits of his death: the Body and Blood of Christ, being then not corporally, or carnally, but spiritually present to the faith of Believers…” (Art. XXX.7), in Lumpkin, 293. 55 Thompson, Toward Baptist Ecclesiology, 77.
37
Separatist ecclesiology – this was necessary for Christ to be present, whose mind was
found in the shared fellowship of covenanted believers.56
This accords to the church a central role in the preservation and formation of the People
of God. However, even here it is not the church per se, as institution, as much as the
church as meeting place between God and believers. There is a drawing back from
according her or her ministers independent authority. This being stated, the Somerset
Confession emphasises that the Spirit’s work of sanctification occurs within the church.
The writings of the General Baptist Thomas Grantham (1634-92) bear out this distrust of
any innate ability on the part of the individual to close with God apart from the religion
of the church.57 As Elizabeth Newman points out, Grantham held that worship and the
gathered community give shape to our priesthood, though he doesn’t use the term here.58
The freedom of the believer lies in the proper worship of God – and worship is a priestly
undertaking - for which the church is essential.
At the same time, these confessions evidently are addressing a contemporary concern,
one which the opening statement of the First London Confession on God’s aseity may
reflect. If God is so apart from the human being, is even the church to be trusted with
providing safety? The concern that “means” must rely on the work of the Spirit can itself
encourage the abandonment of these means, if the Spirit’s work is discerned by the
individual. In the regard for God’s freedom from and for that Thompson so highlights
there is couched a difficulty that reproduces an earlier conundrum of medieval realism:
that God is free “for” – i.e., can decide to use what means he desires, even to the point of 56 Stephen Brachlow, “The Social Bond of Separatist Ecclesiology,” in Pilgrim Pathways: Essays in Baptist History in Honour of BR White, eds. William H. Brackney and Paul S. Fiddes, with John H. Y. Briggs, (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1999), 117. 57…“where the form of godliness (baptism with imposition of hands and the Lord’s Table, among other forms) is neglected, religion will in a little time either vanish, or become an unknown conceit, every man being at liberty to follow what he supposes to be the motions of the Spirit of god (sic), in which there is so great a probability of being mistaken, as in nothing more; for man’s ignorance being very great, and Satan very subtle, and the way of the Lord neglected, men lie open to every fancy which pleaseth best…” Elizabeth Newman, “The Priesthood of All Believers and the Necessity of the Church,” in Recycling the Past or Researching History? eds. Philip E. Thompson and Anthony R. Cross, (Milton Keynes: Paternoster Press, 2005), 59. 58 Ibid., 60.
38
an almost Scotist understanding of these means that accords them a delegated, but real,
power in themselves – does not necessarily imply that in his freedom he does so decide.
If the Spirit operates on the conscience, the means become that: means to an end, an end
perhaps better and more directly attained by the individual’s own piety. Unconsciously
following Ockham, the door would be opened for the Baptists to see the freedom of God
from church control also to render optional the way in which his freedom for the use of
means is employed. The experimental religion so central to Puritan piety would
eventually come to see itself perceiving God more purely outside of these means.
However, the tension present in the early Baptist confessions, more than those which
reflected a greater confluence with other Reformed bodies (First London Confession
versus the Second), reflects the awareness of the utter otherness of God and the depravity
of the race. It casts humanity entirely upon God’s grace without thought to any value of
our own efforts. In this the church was seen as a gift, the arena for the formation of Christ
by the Spirit in the heart of the community, essential, indispensible, not as institution but
as dynamic work of the Spirit; not a field of testing but a garden wherein the harvest of
God was cultivated. This required, graciously, the competence and activity of believers
under Christ. God was not retained by the church for her use but neither was the
individual free to pursue salvation outside of her. It was an equilibrium that would not
abide.
2.5 Holiness as a Hallmark
As even our brief survey of Baptist origins reflects, the movement has never at heart been
about baptism, which has served rather as an expression of a more important, distinctive
element of the Baptist understanding of the Christian faith. In the oft-contested field of
Baptist distinctives, believers’ baptism can claim only a contingent place. But neither did
the movement distinguish itself by its Reformed soteriology, which the Particular
Baptists shared with other Dissidents and much of the Established Church itself. It was
39
not even a concern for holiness per se that set it apart – for what Christian body would
decry holiness as being central to the Christian life?
At the heart of the beginnings of the Baptist movement was the centrality of the
voluntarily gathered church and her practices as the vehicle by which the visible people
of God must cultivate holiness. This understanding of the church did not find holiness an
institutional quality; it did, however, hold holiness of the believer and of the church as
essential to the faith. This individual holiness lived out in the gathered holy church,
separated unto Christ by personal faith as evidenced in believers’ baptism, was the
hallmark of the Baptist movement, that which particularly distinguished it from the other
Puritan assemblies of its day and from the Church of England as a whole.
This distinctive view of the church - that of holy individuals within a holy congregation,
sanctified both by God’s election as realised in the new birth and by ongoing
sanctification of believers as witnessed in their conduct,59 holiness which witnessed to the
lordship and freedom of Christ over his church and the freedom in his service of the
individual, holiness marked and enabled by the gathering of the faithful in churches
separated by baptism - was both the genius of the movement and that which planted the
seeds of its declension. The elevation of the pursuit of this individual holiness at the
expense of submission to Christ within the visible church, the shifting of the burden to
the individual to evaluate independently the holiness of the church and determine when to
declare ichabod on it, the achievement of holiness as being the expression of an essence
possessed of the individual, and the marked shift it encouraged from objectivism to
subjectivism in the Baptist understanding of salvation, is what has brought the Baptist
movement to the straits in which it finds itself today. This is a distortion of a distinctive
of the early church: the responsibility and ability of the individual to pursue his or her
own holiness within, but not apart from, the gathered people of God.
59 “The Members of these Churches are Saints by calling, visibly manifesting and evidencing (in and by their profession and walking) their obedience unto that call of Christ…,” 2nd London Confession, Art. XXVI.6, in Lumpkin, 286.
40
This distinctive understanding of holiness which distinguished the Baptists, however, is
reflected in their understanding of baptism, if not contained by it. The holy church was
composed of holy individuals; the holiness of these individuals could only be ascertained,
as accurately as possible, by their being received into the church on confession of being
set apart for Christ, testified to in believers’ baptism. The horror of seeing the church
usurping the prerogative of Christ reflected the understanding that the Christian’s
holiness was contingent upon an objective reality, Christ, unmediated by the church even
while he was formed and cultivated in the midst of the body by her ordinances and
fellowship. The church provided the wall and furnished the soil that enclosed the garden;
she was herself neither the gardener nor the flowers.
The covenant, a distinguishing mark of the Separate churches, would reflect the
understanding that this holiness was personal but not exclusively individual, as individual
conduct affected other believers both negatively and positively. It would also express the
understanding that salvation was entirely a work of God’s sovereign electing grace
independent of the merit of the individual, but that it must be responded to by individual
faith and obedience. In certain cases, some Puritans would hold this obedience to
constitute the grounds of assurance of the believer, and even, for some, a preparative to
salvation for those not yet saved. Brachlow and RT Kendall hold that this concern with
holiness both for its own sake, as well as for the honour of God and the safety of the
believer, shifted to become a means of proof of election. From Calvin’s emphasis on the
knowledge of Christ, assurance of salvation turns to a more subjective emphasis on one’s
personal faith (and thus election) as evidenced by sanctification, the objective and
gracious aspects of the covenant under Calvin being eclipsed by the Puritans’ concern for
the ethical requirements of salvation.60
Among the Baptists, the emphasis on believers’ baptism as protecting the holiness of the
church also served to emphasise the individual focus of that corporate holiness, perhaps
60 Brachlow, Communion of Saints, 31; RT Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 3.
41
more so than in other Reformed traditions. This was on top of the burden on the
individual to discern whether that church was indeed properly ordered and thus Christ-
honouring and effective as a vehicle of salvation. The concern for conductual holiness is
certainly in plain evidence in the Baptist confessions of the 17th century.61 Moral
discipline and actual practice are emphasised.
Believers’ baptism also picked up a trait of Puritan piety, that of mutuality and its
correlate, activism, in a way the practice of other Puritan bodies did not. Believers’
baptism stressed the responsibility of the individual to respond to God’s work of saving
faith. In this, many have seen the same shift in emphasis from objective justification to a
more subjective sanctification in Baptist theology that seems already present in
contemporary Puritan thought, one that in many ways reflects the trajectory in the
Reformers’ thought from Luther’s emphasis on justification to Calvin’s re-emphasis of
sanctification as essential in soteriology.62 However, separation from the State Church
combined with believers’ baptism, perhaps fertilised by persecution and exclusion,
shifted the emphasis in the pursuit of holiness to the individual believer in the Baptist
case beyond the degree to which it had already developed in Reformed thought.63
Puritanism’s distinctive view of salvation, which emphasised the personal apprehension,
enjoyment, and protection of its privileges, appears to have been taken on by the Baptists
and emphasised in its individual aspect, along with an increased subjectivism in their
understanding of salvation.64
This would seem to have coexisted with the concern Thompson finds among Baptists for
God’s freedom for and from that Baptist ecclesiology was seen to address. Yet at the
same time they shared with their Puritan brethren a concern for assurance. Holiness
would become for many a vehicle for seeking to secure this assurance, as good works
increasingly became seen as the evidence of regeneration and thus of election. However 61 For example, Faith and Practise of 30 Congregations, Art 52; Somerset Confession’s emphasis on Christ’s commandments (Art XXV); 2nd London Confession, Preface, in Lumpkin, 183; 210-211; 246-248. 62 Ohlmann, 99. 63 Ibid., 93. 64 Ibid., 94.
42
sincere and without guile the enjoyment of God could be in the Puritan mind, there is
present at the same time an unmistakable concern with making one’s calling and election
sure that increasingly came to be seen as the work of the individual; roots and flowers
needed to be seen to blossom in the garden which was the church. The emphasis on the
individual, portrayed in believers’ baptism and expressed in covenant theology, would
among the Baptists sow the seeds of the encouragement of a subjective understanding
that would eventually pit the believer against God apart from the church in the struggle
for assurance to a degree that exceeded that of other Calvinist bodies. We will see this
evident in the High-Calvinists of the 18th century. This, perhaps more than the
aforementioned emphasis noted by Thompson, characterises the Baptist movement.
The Baptist pursuit of holiness is distinguished from that cultivated by the Puritans by
their distinctive aspects of ecclesial practice - believers’ baptism, local church
independence, and locally selected ministers - as well as by larger cultural circumstances,
such as the exclusion of members of believers’ churches from the larger concourse of
society. Both of these would encourage a more individualistic and subjective
understanding of salvation and the Christian life. Thompson points out as well that the
turbulent circumstances of the mid-17th century and the precarious situation Calvinistic
Baptists found themselves in tended to mean that the eschatological outlook expressed in
Separatist Confessions (e.g., The True Confession), in which the true church was arrayed
with godly magistrates against anti-Christian ministry in ungodly churches (i.e., the
Church of England), shifted to focus more upon the Triune God’s operation among
believers in his Church without the sense of alliance of Church and godly magistrate. The
local church was the location, rather than the instrument, of God’s reign.65 While not full-
blown anti-Constantinianism, it certainly injected coldness into the warm relationship
between Church and State that Reformed theology tended to favour.
This further privileges the individual’s place coram Deo in the assembly. Held in tension
with the high view of God and his sovereignty, and the calling of believers to active life
65 Thompson, “Seventeenth Century Baptist Confessions in Context”: 339-340.
43
together within that vocation, this did not present a problem.66 But with the later collapse
of this high view of God, the growing estimation of men’s and women’s capabilities, and
the demise of the covenant understanding and practice in the gathering of the church, this
privilege would have a corrosive effect. When these elements began to separate, it would
result in structural weakness.
2.6 Covenant and Confidence
Unlike other Separatist churches, for Baptists baptism and not the covenant came to be
the means by which one joined the church. This may be seen perhaps as a walking back
from the mutuality – especially as it privileged the church as the arena of that mutuality -
that was becoming commonplace in other Puritan churches, even as it might also
represent a tilting in emphasis toward the individual at the expense of his responsibility to
the group in covenant. However, Fiddes points out that the concept of covenant
understood by the Separatists still prevailed among Baptists to a great degree, even while
many seemed to turn instead to baptism as the expressed means of forming the church
during the 17th century.67 Covenant, explicitly or implicitly, was the framework in which
Baptists gathered together. That this was not so explicitly, at least in the beginning – by
the end of the 17th century Baptist churches were picking up the covenant as a governing
document, like their Dissenting brethren68 - may have something to say about the Baptist
view of the place of the church in the economy of salvation, but doesn’t necessarily
repudiate the concept of covenant in their eyes.
Fiddes identifies four different levels on which the covenant was seen to work in early
Baptist thought. Firstly, from Calvin, it referred to the eternal covenant of grace which
66 Thompson summarises the broad constants of the Baptists in their first century to be “the absolute otherness of God that relativises all things human, and the church as the community in and through which God works for salvation.” Thompson, “Seventeenth Century Baptist Confessions in Context”: 348. 67 Paul Fiddes, Tracks and Traces: Baptist Identity in Church and Theology (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2003), 31. 68 Grenz, Isaac Backus, Puritan and Baptist, 30.
44
God has made with elect persons and angels. Secondly, it was seen as a divine transaction
between the Persons of the Trinity in which the Son covenants to undertake the salvation
of the elect according to the will of the Father. The third application was with reference
to the agreement God makes corporately with his church and the fourth sense of
covenant, with that agreement between the members of the local church.69 These four
aspects were not readily separable, expressing the perceived confluence of God’s and the
church’s activities in effecting salvation. Their later separation in the 18th century in the
theology of such as John Gill is seen by some to reflect the marked tilting of the balance
away from the practice of the Christian life in the gathered church and toward a centrality
of the doctrine of election and the invisible Church in Calvinist understanding – further
separating the individual from the integral necessity of the church in his dealings with
God.
So while the concept of covenant was seen to operate at levels divine, ecclesial, and
individual, initially in practice these were not differentiated to any particular degree.
God’s eternal covenant of grace with his elect as implemented by the Son’s pledged
obedience to the Father was reflected in his covenant with the church and was seen to be
worked out in the believer’s individual faith and adherence to the covenanted, gathered
community. There was perhaps not mutuality in the sense of a clear reciprocity but in a
human and ecclesial outworking of God’s eternal decree – perhaps a gracious, divinely
permitted and accepted cooperation would be a better description. The place of the local
church was central in the outworking of the eternal counsel not only for believers but in
the very life of the Triune God, reflecting the closeness of the church to the heart of
God’s work in Christ in Baptist understanding.
What this does introduce as well, as Fiddes points out, is a conditional aspect to God’s
dealing with his people difficult to reconcile consistently with Reformed soteriology. The
Old Testament covenants which mould Reformed understanding are both unconditional
(Abrahamic, Davidic) and conditional (Mosaic). This is reflected in Puritan covenant
69 Fiddes, 26-29.
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theology. God’s covenant of grace established with his elect is unconditional – however,
it was possible for many to see his covenant with the church as conditional, in that a false
church broke it. However, Church Puritans such as Cartwright held the covenant to be
unconditional and thus to validate even the broken governance and practice of the Church
of England. He would hold here, with later Reformed orthodoxy, that the covenant was
unconditional in Christ and conditional only upon faith. Even Calvin, in his reticence to
declare the Roman churches unchristian70 and in his magnanimity toward Lutherans and
Zwinglians on other matters, may be reflecting a similar resistance to any conditionality
in the dealings of God with his elect. In any case, the covenant understood as above does
potentially introduce a degree of mutuality to the believer’s dealings with a sovereign
God: election may not be secured by the covenant, but it is validated by it and, evidently,
can be annulled by it as well. Here, too, the Baptists, in breaking with the practice of
infant baptism while holding to an implicit covenant understanding of the church, seem to
come down on the mutualist, activist side of the scale. Believers’ baptism introduces a
mutuality and conditionality, and emphasises a personal activism, that infant baptism did
not.
What the covenant did introduce in the Separatist churches and what believers’ baptism
would perhaps even further emphasise is the importance of the individual and the
individual’s faith in the saving work of God. This can be seen to privilege the place of the
church as the gathered assembly of saints in God’s work of salvation; but not without
also introducing an aspect of mutuality that, if given much sway, fit rather poorly with
the Reformed understanding of the monergism of God in salvation. In necessitating the
active, engaged participation of the believer it made necessary the priesthood as a
companion understanding, even while opening significant room for questions of
assurance and the growth of individualism. The covenant view of the church and the
believer’s place in her, whether expressed explicitly or merely implicitly understood,
tended to put greater confidence in men and women, which if not situated in the context
70 Olin, 75.
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of God’s gracious call to salvation in company and recumbency on the work of the Holy
Spirit in effecting and maintaining the believer’s union with Christ, risked much.
2.7 Experimental Predestinarianism: Problem or Perc eption?
Kendall and Brachlow pick up on the implications of this conditionality for Puritan
soteriology, in which they would claim, with considerable support, that for the Puritan
one’s life was looked to for confirmation of one’s elect status. According to Kendall,
Puritan theologian Perkins would focus on the necessity of a true church for the
maintenance of the covenant – a matter of assurance on the corporate level. Separatists
such as Barrow and Helwys found church government to be crucial to salvation and to
assurance of the same – Barrow rejected an emphasis on personal sanctification which
ignored ecclesial purity, which was seen to be required both by the 2nd commandment
and for soteriological assurance.71 Proper church order was seen by Henry Jacob to be a
duty of faith. Both Robinson and Jacob argued that saving faith does not make a true
church,72 but rather (Robinson) a true constitution – thus radical Puritan experience in an
indifferently governed parish church was not sufficient for assurance.
The above sentiments are consistent with the action of establishing a Separate church,
especially in an age when religious conformity and loyalty to the State and Crown went
together. To do so spoke not merely of a concern for personal holiness but of the
understanding that such holiness could not be pursued outside a congregation that was,
itself, holy and obedient. To form a church apart is to reject private piety as sufficient for
salvation or assurance. Thus the church must, to some degree, provide the security of soul
and assurance sought after by the Puritan believer. Indeed, one could state that
withdrawing to form a Separate church spoke of a higher regard for the importance of the
gathered assembly and a correspondingly lower estimation of the individual than did
remaining as one of the godly in the midst of an assembly one felt to have false
71 Brachlow, Communion of Saints, 53. 72 Ibid., 69.
47
discipline. To feel one could pursue individual holiness in the midst of a church which
one found to be of dubious validity rather promoted individualism than attenuated it.
The case for experimental predestinarianism – that proof of one’s election must be
furnished by means of testing and experimental religion - may not necessarily revolve
merely around a quest for assurance. Greaves argues that the desire for a properly ordered
church was not the cause of Puritan angst, but rather flowed from their fervour and
warmth for God.73 The descriptions of preparation for and experience in taking the
sacraments and hearing preaching certainly testify to more than merely fear for one’s
security. There is true love and comfort expressed and obtained through these church
ordinances.74 There appears to be an easy interplay of predestination, the church, and the
individual experience of the Christian life within the church that would contradict the
familiar stereotype of the anxious, dour Puritan saint. Any anxiety would seem to drive
the believer to the assembly not merely to establish his salvation but to be comforted in it.
The dogmas of Puritan faith expressed a deep piety,75 not mere legalism. However,
inseparable from this understanding that true faith cannot be bare knowledge but must
also move the heart is the awareness that this faith must also be expressed in obedience.
This, too, became a ground of assurance, from which the pure structure of the church
could not be separated. Thus experimental predestination understood in the sense of a
quest for assurance is consistent with statements made by many Puritans, and certainly
may have been the experience of many, but it appears to have been by no means
universal or consistent, nor universally or consistently to have expressed a fear for one’s
73 “The intimate link between theology and religious experience is underscored in the works of Wallace and Kendall. ‘There was,’ the former argues, ‘a fervour, intensity, and warmly personal character to the Puritan use of this theology of grace that must not be overlooked in any attempt to understand the mainsprings of the Puritan consciousness.’ Such Puritan concerns as strict morality, discipline, further reforms in the church, and-for some-changes in polity, stemmed from this experience. As I have argued elsewhere, this experience entailed a deep-rooted spiritual reorientation which manifested itself to those of like persuasion as an infectious warmth, and involved a keen striving for purity of heart, mind, and worship. At the heart of this experience was not only an ‘experimental’ approach to predestination but, as Geoffrey Nuttall has demonstrated, an acute sense of the inner working of the Holy Spirit.” Greaves: 461-2 74 See Smith, 22-44. 75 Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939), 6ff.
48
elect status without at the same time being combined with the experience of delight from
the heart in one’s salvation.
At the same time, the dynamic equilibrium between the individual basis and expression
of this corporate life appears not to have persisted. What was originally seen as being
received through the corporate expression of the faith, by means of preaching, the
sacraments, and the discipline of the assembly, while assessed, manifested, and even
enjoyed individually, would come to be seen as the right of the individual over time, it
would appear. The tension between the individual experience and reception of the
working of the Spirit and the corporate expression and enabling of the same, in the end,
could not be sustained. The strengths of the gathered church which assured one of a
believing ministry and of a believing membership where individuals were received by the
church by baptism and shared discernment of Christ’s working in them were strengths
which, if not continually watched, could also render the church and her ordinances
somewhat redundant. The ecclesiological understanding that lay behind this balance need
not have produced this outcome, but the stage was set whereby the course of events
would produce such ends. The pursuit of holiness, directed by the individual within the
church, might just as well be prosecuted by that individual without the church. And
indeed, if the individual increasingly became the standard by which the suitability of the
church was measured, it might just be safer to pursue that holiness without the risk of
being slowed down or diverted by others.
It is perhaps rather an echo of the causes of experimental predestinarianism than this
phenomenon itself that, when combined with the emerging changes in the understanding
of the individual and society, would break the individual away from the corporate in
Baptist understanding. Not self-doubt but rather self-assurance may have caused the
individual to feel free to drift from the requirement for the gathered body. If the latter
indeed were weighed and evaluated by an individual seen less and less in need of
salvation as of development, and well-capable, with the rest of the Enlightenment society,
of proceeding in this based on one’s own inherent merits, the tie of individual to church
49
as it was in the beginning could not stand, especially when this alienated one from the
surrounding society. The focus on the individual conscience inherent in Calvinism, by
which one was to evaluate oneself and one’s church, was not the cause of this breakup –
but it did prepare the soil for it. The church became less the necessary garden in which
the plants must be protected, nurtured, and fed, than the showcase in which flowers might
be best displayed in their own, natural beauty – or not, as the soil outside of the wall
came to be perceived as increasingly hospitable and suitable to the purpose.
Notwithstanding, holiness and assurance would remain a foremost concern – that these
were now beginning to be pursued and defined by the individual who sought God rather
than merely being sought by him, and who would redefine both God and humanity under
the imperceptible influence of the surrounding society, would become the source of the
problem of individualism.
2.8 Priesthood: A Priority?
Priesthood is perhaps more assumed than an explicit understanding in the Baptist way,
even in the beginning.76 However, it is implicit in the way in which the early Baptists
formed and understood the local church, and indeed, at times, is explicitly put forward as
what the church is to be. A chief benefit of the priestly office of Christ is described in the
First London Confession as being the making of his people into “a spirituall house, an
holy Priesthood, to offer up spirituall sacrifice acceptable to God through him” (Art.
XVII). 77 Barrington White points out in that same confession a commensurate
diminishing of the perceived importance of the pastoral ministry in favour of the
76 Pitts states that the priesthood of all Christians is “so pervasive in Baptist thought that it works as an assumption or presupposition, and that it is impossible to isolate it from other ideas.” William L Pitts, Jr., “The Priesthood of All Christians in the Baptist Heritage,” Southwestern Journal of Theology, 30, No. 2, (Spring 1988): 34. 77 Lumpkin,161.
50
immediate authority of the covenanted community, at least in contrast to the 1596 True
Confession, from which it largely drew.78
Indeed, while the Confessions do not go into great detail about the role (as opposed to the
eligibility) of the congregation in the sacraments, the objective nature of their efficacy is
nested within the congregation. The memorial aspect of the Lord’s Table, which would
come to dominate Baptist understanding, in the early Calvinist view reflected the
unseemliness of the church presuming to administer God’s grace even as it stressed the
function of the participants, distinguishing worthy from unworthy (ignorant and ungodly)
in terms of the sin against God the participation of the latter would represent. The People
of God had a material role in God’s working through the sacraments. These worked for
and with, but not without or upon, the saints.
The balance between the objective understanding of God and the tightly circumscribed
mediation the church could provide required Spirit-filled individuals to be active in
working out their salvation. This only functioned when they saw themselves as part of a
gathered group – gathered by the sovereign will of Christ, serving willingly together. The
horizontal tension between individual and community, tilted more to the individual in the
Baptist application, was held in place by the vertical tension between the objective
sovereign work of God in Christ and the subjective reception of and response to the Spirit
working in the individual gathered to the church. Priesthood held these components in
place.
This understanding is not only necessary for the proper functioning of the Baptist
fellowship but is prerequisite to its formation in the first place. When one examines some
of the reasoning behind the rejection of the Church of England’s administration and
sacraments and the place of the individual in the economy of salvation, what emerges is
the concept of priesthood. Smyth argued that the power to administer the sacraments 78 Barrington White, The English Baptists of the Seventeenth Century (Didcot: Baptist Historical Society, 1996), 63.
51
rested in the people, not in the church officers who were appointed by the people and
whose authority lay in the people they ruled.79 Among the Calvinist semi-separatists,
Henry Jacob would insist on the exercise by the congregation of the “means of
salvation,” directly from Christ.80 Among the Puritan Separatists, a true church was seen
to require the voluntary commitment of her people;81 she was built on the people, not the
elders. The Church of England was thus false not only in practice – surplices, crossing at
baptism, and Prayer Book worship among other things – but in government, specifically
in the place (or lack of the same) given the saints in the life of the church. The
participation of a called people assembling voluntarily was not democracy in action: it
was integral to the genuineness of the church and to salvation. And this participation is
priesthood.
Seeing the Baptist movement as a particularly English phenomenon, whose adherents
shared a great deal in common with their co-religionists, who sought not just individual,
personal renewal and safety but that of their entire Church and society, reflects the
centrality of the priestly idea of the church to the underlying ethos of the Baptist way.
They sought the freedom of God in the freedom of the individual, but not the individual
apart from the church, society, or God. They sought to be a holy institution not for
themselves alone, but for the sake of the Church as a whole. The Baptists emerged in an
era when the perception of the individual and his place in society was undergoing rapid
change. But the society itself, its governance and religion, was also changing
dramatically. The participation of the Baptists in the Parliamentary cause during the Civil
War and its aftermath was not simply a matter of crude pragmatism. Theirs was a concern
to affect the course the country and her Church was taking. Baptists participated in the
New Model Army both as soldiers and chaplains, planting churches where the army was
garrisoned even as, according to some, their understanding of church associational life
79 Grenz, Isaac Backus, Puritan and Baptist, 26. 80 Brachlow, Communion of Saints, 136. 81 Grenz, Isaac Backus, Puritan and Baptist, 20.
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was in turn formed by the structure of that army.82 In this respect, in war as well as in
peace, their concern was a priestly one, to represent Christ and his ways in the midst of a
Church striving for renewal and a country that appeared to be on the cusp of the same.
The concerns expressed by the Separatists in general and the Baptists in particular speak
loudly of an understanding of the People of God as a priesthood, particularly in the
context of the local church. The Baptists would take this the furthest in their attenuated
emphasis on the place of the ministry, on the separation of the church from the State, in
the expressed and risky openness to the further leading of the Spirit. Where this
understanding has waned in place of a more individualistic or hierarchical interpretation
is where the Baptist cause departed from the magnificent tension held by its founders.
2.9 Summary: The Conclusion of the Matter
Baptists almost certainly trace their origins to the Puritan struggle with the Established
Church following the English Reformation, with any continental Anabaptist influence
being impossible to prove. They are but a part of the English religious landscape, similar
to other Calvinist Dissenters in so many ways but differing in a few significant areas. The
movement was characterised from its inception by its regard for holiness as practised
within the gathered church, a holiness both of situation and conduct, which emphasised
perhaps to a greater degree than other separated churches the individual’s role and
responsibility, as expressed by believers’ baptism. Their churchmanship, more than that
of other bodies, permitted and encouraged the working of the Holy Spirit among their
members, relying upon the priesthood of all believers to provide the sacramental holiness,
hierarchy, or confession upon which other traditions leaned more heavily.
82 This theory is contested by BR White, who finds the term (association) to have come into use much later, and the concept to have pre-dated the conflict. Barrington White, “The Doctrine of the Church in the Particular Baptist Confession of 1644,” in Journal of Theological Studies, Vol. XIX, Pt 2, Oct, 1968: 584-6.
53
The pursuit of holiness by the individual within and not apart from the gathered body set
up a particular tension that would prove very difficult to sustain. Requiring on the one
hand the personal experience of salvation and the individual’s confession and study of the
faith, it was balanced on the other by the understanding that such a pursuit was to be
exercised within the body gathered by the Spirit. The degree of mutuality in the
synergistic understanding of the functioning of the covenant between God and the
church, and thus contemporaneously with the believer, always held the threat of its
requirements lapsing into a means of proving one’s election. This was kept in balance by
the genuine warmth of Puritan worship which sought experimental concourse with God
for its own sake while being reinforced by the Baptist emphasis on the individual’s role,
in faith and obedience, all the while finding the necessity of this expression within a
properly ordered congregation.
The priesthood of believers, while perhaps not an explicitly promoted doctrine,
undergirded the whole understanding and practice of Baptist ecclesiology during their
first century. The enterprise would never have been undertaken without such an implicit
understanding – it was not only prerequisite but was a driving force in the unique Baptist
development - and could not survive in practice in its absence. It was vital to holding in
tension the place of the individual within the corporate, and the reception of the sovereign
exercise of God’s electing grace by the believer who took up, within the assembly, the
response in faith and obedience which was understood to be part and parcel of that saving
work of God in Christ.
We are left, as we leave the formative years of the Baptist movement and move into the
18th century both in the Home Country and the colonies, with a movement heading for
rough waters. The Calvinists will survive the onslaught of Socinianism, but at the cost of
a considerable inward turning. It will be a move of the Spirit in the Evangelical
Awakenings that will blow fresh life, and new problems, into the movement; problems to
which its origins left it somewhat susceptible, but which origins also furnished the
material for their solution. The priesthood of believers, an unspoken yet ever-present
54
ethos of Baptist ecclesiology, will, while distorted, survive in the understanding of the
people and be that resource from which roots can be set down once more. But first, the
intervening time must bring both its blessings and its curses.
55
Chapter 3
The Journey into the Far Country
Dewey Wallace, commenting on Puritanism in general, could also accurately have been
describing the Baptist project at the end of the 17th century when he stated that “Puritan
concern with discipline and church polity was a way of realising in community the
consequences of a gracious election and the joys and demands of holiness,” and that
“vital experience of ecclesial fellowship infused the whole enterprise with a sense of
spiritual life, (and) preserved ecclesiology from decaying into moribund legalism.”1
The Baptists of the late 1600s were not the private interpreters of the Bible that they later
would come to be seen (and to see themselves) to be. Theirs was a movement heavily
centred in the local church and a shared walk together according to the appointment of
Christ. However, this would change over the course of the next centuries. We will see
parallels and differences in the journeys that Baptists on both sides of the Atlantic took
into the far country. Their respective situations meant that deviations from the original
vision were expressed differently; their common plight of gathered, Free churches
confronting a State Church establishment made for many similarities, especially with the
coming of the Evangelical revivals and awakenings that brought so many supra-
denominational relationships among those illuminated by the New Light.
3.1 England and Wales
The peace for dissenting churches in England brought about by the accession of William
to the throne and the subsequent Act of Toleration (1689), along with the relaxation of
many of the restrictions of the Clarendon Code (although prohibition of university
1 Brachlow, Communion of Saints, 19.
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education at Oxford and Cambridge for Dissenters would continue for quite some time),
presented unexpected problems for the Baptists, both General and Particular. Initially, the
Particular Baptist Benjamin Keach (1640-1704) saw this toleration as having “opened a
great door for the gospel and sent us blessed harvest weather.”2 The Particular Baptists
took on a progressively Presbyterian outlook in terms of theology and ecclesiology – a
comparison of the 1st (1644) and 2nd (1677) Baptist confessions will reflect this – and to a
large degree tended toward “High-Calvinism.” This preserved a core of theological
orthodoxy, saving these churches from lapsing into the Socinianism that plagued their
Arminian (General) brethren, but tended to subdue the original regard for the individual’s
place in determining the mind of Christ in the church and discourage evangelism and thus
growth.
3.1.1 High-Calvinism
The theological emphasis upon the covenant of redemption between the Father and the
Son, and with the elect in the Son, a touchstone of the influential Calvinist Baptist pastor
and theologian John Gill (1697-1771) in particular, would tend as well to diminish the
importance of the local church in the understanding of many. The Church was seen
primarily as “the elect of God, the general assembly and church of the first-born, whose
names are written in heaven.”3 Salvation tending to be seen as rather pre-determined, to
insist upon the importance of the church in this would appear out of place. The local
church seemed little needed from a logical point of view but existed rather because
mandated by the New Testament. As Thompson points out, this emphasis on God’s will
rather than on his actions moves the centre of gravity in salvation to the predestination
and election of the individual and somewhat away from the necessary life of corporate
2 Michael AG Haykin, One Heart, One Soul: John Sutcliff of Olney, His Friends and His Times (Durham: Evangelical Press, 1994), 17. 3 JW Bush quoting John Gill’s An Exposition of the New Testament in his “John Gill’s Doctrine of the Church,” in WS Hudson, Baptist Concepts of the Church (Philadelphia: Judson Press, 1959), 57.
57
holiness lived out in the community in her fellowship and sacraments. She becomes very
much subsequent and subordinate to the universal church.4
As Paul Fiddes observes, this view of the covenant as being focused particularly on the
dealings of the Father with the Son certainly protected a high view of the sovereignty of
God. It also resisted Socianism by rooting salvation in the Godhead, particularly in the
Father’s sending of the Son. However, by removing God’s dealings with the elect from
the church it promoted a secularisation of the church as a voluntary society, and of the
covenant as merely a civil agreement, encouraging the demise of the concept of covenant
altogether.5
The accuracy of the term “High-Calvinism” to describe the theology of Gill and other
Particular Baptists of this era has been challenged, as occasionally Gill would call sinners
to faith and salvation.6 On the whole, however, this spirit seems to have settled firmly on
the Calvinistic Baptists of England.7 Toleration by the Established Church and by the
State muted the emphasis on the priesthood of the believer in the assembly, even as the
social restrictions still extant caused these churches to become increasingly inward
looking. Baptists remained “in their warm rooms,” generally content to practise religion
within State-imposed restrictions. This tendency was of course not universal – in
Lancashire and Yorkshire, Calvinists William Mitchel (1662-1705) and David Crosley
(1669-1744) were notable exceptions – but generally, the restrictions imposed upon
Dissenting ministers concerning preaching out of their buildings were abided by.8
4 Thompson, Towards Baptist Ecclesiology, 141-2. 5 Fiddes, 43. 6 Clive Jarvis, “The Myth of High-Calvinism?,” in Recycling the Past or Researching History?, 234. Jarvis finds the easy acceptance of certain aspects of evangelical preaching in Calvinist Baptist circles to be inconsistent with a predominantly High-Calvinistic soteriology – or at least with the perception that such a soteriology produced “decline and stagnation.” His appears to be a minority view, however. 7 Haykin, One Heart, One Soul, 18. 8 Ibid., 21.
58
All these factors were reflected in the slow decline in numbers of Calvinistic Baptists
over the course of the 18th century in Britain. Michael Haykin cites estimates that some
220 churches existed in England and Wales during the 1710s; by the 1750s, this number
had shrunk to around 150. As he quotes Andrew Fuller, “had matters gone on but for a
few years, the Baptists would have become a perfect dunghill in society.”9 The answer of
the movement’s leading lights, Gill and Wallin, centred on a renewed commitment to
Calvinist Baptist distinctives – particularly believers’ baptism and congregational
government.10 This high-ecclesiological response sought to address the perceived
internalisation and spiritualisation of the faith by an appeal to the importance of proper
government.
The linkage of love for God and communion with him to proper church order explains
why many of the Calvinistic Baptists did not enthusiastically receive the Evangelical
Revival, which emphasised the need for salvation and the new birth and downplayed such
matters as baptism and church government. Their high estimation of those distinctives
which had served the movement so well in the previous century but which now seemed to
close Baptists in upon themselves would result in them initially standing largely aloof
from the movement of the Holy Spirit that would sweep the country.
High-Calvinism also encouraged a high degree of subjectivism in the believer’s
conviction of salvation. It would be false to simply view Calvinistic religion as practised
by the Baptists in 18th century England and Wales as cold and dead, though this is
certainly the common perception.11 Puritans, they manifested the same desire to know
peace and communion with God. Indeed, there are many similarities between this desire
for a felt warm communion with God among the High-Calvinists and that which would
follow among the Evangelicals of the coming revival. But if Evangelicalism is accused of
having a shallow and facile view of assurance of salvation, High-Calvinism was quite the 9 Haykin, One Heart, One Soul, 25. 10 Ibid., 26. 11 D. Densil Morgan, “Calvinistic Methodism and the Origins of Evangelicalism in England” in The Emergence of Evangelicalism: Exploring Historical Continuities, eds. MAG Haykin and KJ Stewart, (Nottingham: Apollos, 2008), 86.
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opposite. The Christian was to look within for a conviction of sin – the deep mental
anguish that would accompany this was warrant of one’s acceptance with God. Less
emphasised was the predominant fixing on Christ and his work that had been Calvin’s
focus.
It is thus not surprising that the High-Calvinists battled internalisation and spiritualisation
of the faith; however, unless Christ and his church are seen as offering something
objective that cannot be found by the believer alone it is unlikely that the church would
come to serve as any more than a means appropriated as perceived necessary to assist in
the inward journey. It is perhaps here that experimental predestinarianism rears its head.
However, whatever ill effects an increasingly rigorous theological orthodoxy may have
had on evangelism, it would be false to state that a desire to close with God was lacking
amongst the Particular Baptists.
3.1.2 Welsh Ways
In Wales, the Evangelical Revival did not so much change doctrine (with the notable
exception of the Wesleys and their followers) as it tended to ground it in experientialism
and the feelings. Such a foundation, of course, was not dependent on the local assembly,
which could even come to be perceived as inhibiting such expression. Experience, being
subjective, can feed on many sources; the previously accepted ones - preaching in the
chapel, the sacraments, the fellowship of believers – were now joined by field preaching
and religious societies. This experientialism and heart religion in its Methodist expression
in the 18th no longer relied on the rigid ecclesiological forms of the Puritans, being more
“pragmatically individualist.”12
A perceived difference between earlier Puritan Dissent and the Evangelical religion that
swept Wales in the 1700s concerns the understanding of regeneration. As Bebbington
12 Morgan, 92.
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points out, the former tended to see regeneration as beginning, not complete, in
conversion. The rather protracted and difficult self-examination that could characterise
Puritan piety came to yield to a more easy assurance of salvation. Of course, with ease of
salvation came an easing of the perceived need of the church in cultivating the believer’s
growth in salvation and in assurance. Older Dissent in Wales, as in England, held the
right ordering of the church to be essential to the gospel. The church was not a “chance
gathering of pious souls,” but God’s specific ordinance for the perpetuation of his saving
presence in the world. In the words of 18th century Welsh Baptist Enoch Francis, this
ordering was seen in “a true discipline and faithful discipleship.”13
Theologically, the Reformed understanding of the cardinal doctrine of justification by
faith continued to dominate Baptist soteriology into the mid-18th century. However, this
was being eclipsed in the later years of that century by the Evangelicals’ focus on the
need of the new birth. While the source of justification would continue to be seen as
objective, a work of God that did not depend upon the believer, this work was seen as
effected in the new birth – potentially a largely subjective experience resident in the
individual Christian. Thus the focus shifted more to the individual’s response in
salvation. As well, the perception that the new birth as salvation effected something in the
heart of believers rather than accounting them righteous and orienting them toward a
necessary and dearly accomplished sanctification – a departure from Reformed orthodoxy
- opened the door for a separation of justification from sanctification, even as it would
separate sanctification from the church.
In the century following 1770, Evangelicalism pushed out church-centred
confessionalism in dissenting churches.14 In the Welsh experience, it was the populist
preacher, such as Baptist Christmas Evans (1766-1838) and Calvinist Methodist John
Elias (1774-1841), with few ties “either to decorum or tradition, but exceedingly skilled
in gaining the confidence and commitment of the common folk,” who brought the people
13 Morgan, 96. 14 Ibid., 97.
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into the chapels. Here again, the existing forms were being filled by a new substance,
new wine poured into old wineskins.15
The situation for Baptists in Wales differed significantly from that in England. While the
Established Church was not detested, the preponderant flavour of Protestantism in Wales
was evangelical after 1800. That the Established Church was foreign in origin and
language was also a factor in the growth of Evangelical Dissent. In any case, Dissent was
not perceived as an oppressed or tolerated minority but rather the expression of national
religion. If it was outside of the Established Church, it was no more a stranger in its own
land than were the people of Wales as a whole. Dissent married well into the national
myth and was a capable expression of it, religion providing a vehicle to express
“Welshness,” whose voice and songs would later move from chapel to pub. There are, of
course, parallels here to contemporary and later American experience, where evangelical
religion practically took on airs of a state or national religion. To the cultural disaffection
experienced by Baptists in the American South one can add linguistic isolation in the case
of the Welsh.
3.1.3 England and the Evangelicals
The English experience brings a cautionary note to the concept of religious tolerance, one
which the American Isaac Backus would later come to understand: Toleration without
either persecution or full acceptance can neuter a church’s faith as it allows for its private
practice but not for its public exercise. The priesthood of the faithful can theoretically be
practised within the “garden enclosed,” that favourite image of the Calvinistic Baptists,
but it cannot thrive under an effective dhimmitude which, unlike persecution, is not a soil
in which a church can grow. It may be that it permits the rocky soil of social disapproval
to be impregnated with the weeds of religious tolerance, which together strangle the fruit
15 Though even here, as BH Carroll points out, Evans ministered in the context of church associations, preaching to them some 163 times. BH Carroll, Baptists and Their Doctrines, eds. Timothy and Denise George (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1999), 37-38.
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of the seed springing up. Toleration, in a way persecution could not, seemed to snuff out
the outward movement of the faithful. Both theologically and circumstantially, this was
the situation of much of the Calvinistic Baptist movement in the early 18th century.
Isolation of the Calvinistic Baptist churches was also a problem. Communication and
correspondence between the far-flung corners of the expanding Evangelical movement
aided its growth even as it diminished the footprint of the local church. The English
Calvinists were so centred on the local church, a facet of their ecclesiology emphasised in
the 2nd London Confession, that there was often little cooperation between churches. It
was thus not difficult for Evangelicalism, especially as expressed by its leading lights, to
become the glue that held Christians together, bypassing to a great extent the local church
and her relations with her sister assemblies.
The Evangelical Awakening of the mid-eighteenth century, feared and despised by many
in the Calvinistic Baptist camp, would bring winds of change that would blow through
the Baptist movement in Great Britain. It would gain new life and churches from the
conversion of thousands. Common cause would be found with Evangelicals from outside
the Calvinistic Baptist camp. A foreign missions movement would be launched by a
denomination that had just previously been uncertain even about the permissibility of
offering the gospel to unbelievers in its own meeting houses. The driving force behind
this revival in Calvinistic Baptist circles appears to be men such as Andrew Fuller, John
Ryland, Jr., and John Sutcliff, along with missionary William Carey, whose Calvinism
softened to combine a concern for the doctrines of grace with the liberty to call the lost to
salvation by the free offer of the gospel.
Unlike the High-Calvinists, Fuller would emphasise that faith to be true must be fixed on
an external object, not internally subjective. He would make use of Jonathan Edwards’
distinction between the moral inability of man to respond in faith and his natural ability
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to do so to call unbelievers to faith, stressing the duty of all to believe.16 The call for
conversion was consonant with Evangelical theology as the call to faith in an external
object, Christ and his work, was faithful to the heart of Reformed soteriology. Fuller’s
theology shared much of the Calvinistic foundation of Gill’s. However, in his
understanding and application he moved somewhat away from the more strict regulative
use of the Bible that would characterise many of his predecessors. He found the Bible to
contain both information about God and his works, but this was introduced incidentally –
it was always applied, never mere proposition. Presaging more modern Baptist critics, he
recognised the dangers inherent in interpretation: “Who can justly pretend to be free from
the influences which surround him…We are sensibly, and almost irresistibly, assimilated
by the books we read, and the company with which we associate.”17
Like Gill, Fuller took for granted the importance of the Universal Church. Fuller is
somewhat different in his more ecumenical stance: he sought the good of the Church
catholic, condemning as sectarian a focus on differences rather than on “the desire to
impart a common salvation.” In his outlook Fuller seems to have traversed the rapids and
eddies of the rejection of Dissent by the Established Church. He saw the purpose of the
Church as becoming a focal point of God’s drive to reunite the broken creation, forming a
People of God: “The true churches (plural) travail in birth for the salvation of men. They
are the armies of the Lamb, the grand object of whose existence is to extend the
Redeemer’s kingdom.”18 However, like his 17th century predecessors, there is still in
Fuller the sense that it is God who draws the church together, not the voluntary
preference of believers. “The primitive churches were not mere assemblies of men who
agreed to meet together…They were men gathered out of the world by the preaching of
the cross, and formed into society for the promotion of Christ’s kingdom in the own souls
and in the world around them.”19
16 Haykin, One Heart, One Soul, 145. 17 Andrew Fuller, The Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, with a Memorial of His Life, p737, quoted by NM Maring in “Andrew Fuller’s Doctrine of the Church,” in Baptist Concepts of the Church, 76. 18 Ibid., 85. 19 Ibid., 86.
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The structure of these churches, however, was less precisely prescribed in the New
Testament than in the Old, and must be determined from general principles. The Apostles
took a functional approach, based on the nature and purpose of the church. The imagery
Fuller uses is that of an army. Maring finds in Fuller’s ecclesiology the influence of his
view of missions;20 thus while orthodox in his view of the origin of the local church, one
could argue his understanding of her function to be influenced by pragmatism. Baptism
was analogous to a soldier putting on a uniform – situating this firmly within the local
church. For Fuller, to join a local church was to covenant with God and with other
brethren to watch over each other. There is still present the emphasis that salvation is not
a point function of justification but that the Christian life was more an ongoing walk.21
However, the synergistic understanding of the covenant seems to have vanished, replaced
by a more pragmatic one. And while everyone was to aspire to develop a systematic
theology of his own – “truth learned at second-hand will be to us what Saul’s armour was
to David” – Fuller did not hold to the right of private judgement. He labelled this future
purported distinguishing characteristic of Baptists “highly extravagant.” Though one
could not force belief on anyone, it was not right for every individual to avow his own
thoughts without being subject to exclusion or admonition.
Fuller and his fellow travellers were preaching a softened form of Calvinism. They were
sympathetic to other Protestants in a way the post-Restoration Baptists had not been. As
well, they were heavily influenced by the American Divinity of the mid-18th century – the
re-imaging and revitalisation of Calvinism by Jonathan Edwards and others in the
movement of the Spirit that produced the Great Awakenings in the American colonies.
Edwards’ writings on the religious affections and the freedom of the will, addressing the
difference between man’s moral inability and his natural ability to respond to the gospel,
opened the door for Calvinists in good conscience to reconcile the dominical command to
preach the gospel to all with their understanding of election and the particularity of the
atonement. His understanding of the disinterestedness of human love for God would
20 Maring, 88. 21 Ibid., 97.
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minimise the subjective nature of the faith while emphasising its experimental nature,
with the object being the beauty of God as he has revealed himself.
Despite his use of Enlightenment terms and categories, Jonathan Edwards did not hold
out much hope for the supposed progress this light and freedom had brought humanity.
He lamented the descent of religion to a low ebb and sought that all Christians should
pray for revival. This was reflected in England in the beginning of the prayer concert for
revival in 1784. Again, in typical Calvinist Baptist terms, the outpouring of the Spirit
upon ministers and churches foremost was sought.22 Corporate prayer sought “the
advancement of the Redeemer’s kingdom.” Church and religion were seen to have a vital
role in the progression not merely of civil society but of the City of God.
What this does mean for the British Baptist movement is that it was essentially revitalised
from the outside – concerns that would arise subsequently may not reflect elements of
earlier Baptist practice, but those which the new influx brought in. John Ryland was
influenced by John Gill and John Brine, High-Calvinists, but also looked back to the
Scottish Presbyterian Covenanter Samuel Rutherford (1600-1661) and across the ocean to
the Congregationalist Jonathan Edwards. Sutcliff ministered in the same town as the
evangelical Anglican, John Newton, and had considerable dealings with him. While
expressed in Baptist terms and most certainly a continuation of the Puritanism that
spawned the movement, the driving force appears to be something new.
Thus caution is called for in extrapolating concerns in the 1600s that may either have
contributed to an excessive individualism or inoculated against it. Concerns about
covenant, experiential predestinarianism, liberty of conscience – how much can one take
into the 1700s in the Baptist movement in England and America, at least in the form they
were argued and understood in the 17th century?
22 Haykin, One Heart, One Soul, 164.
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3.2 The American Colonies: 18 th century – Individuality Not Yet Individualism
3.2.1 Pariahs in a Pilgrim Land
The various Puritan churches established in the American colonies sought to establish
worship free from the oversight of the State-sanctioned Church of England. However,
they would in short order become established Churches themselves, more sensitive to
dissent than was even the Church of England in the mother country. A new orthodoxy
raised its head, supported by the taxes of the people – those not of this disposition found
themselves to have fled the Scylla of the Church of England back home to come hard
against the Charybdis of another State Church in the New World. Whereas in England the
exigencies of the English Revolution and the threat of powerful Roman Catholic
adversaries on the continent and even in the home islands would make allies of many of
the different groups of Dissenters during the 17th century, in the American colonies the
common enemies of first French Roman Catholicism then the British Crown would not
similarly win for Baptists a place in the fold.
In the colonies, the Church of England was not established as she was in the home
country, thus in each colony the local church form, often Congregationalist, came to
dominate. These immigrants, having themselves been subject to religious persecution in
England and ever vigilant against a return to dominance of the Established Church, were
in their turn unwilling to extend tolerance to others. The development of the American
Baptist ethos would henceforth be far more influenced by Church-State concerns and by
the ongoing threat of persecution than was that of the English Baptists, who were able
after 1689 to make peace, to a degree, with their co-religionists.
The early 1700s found in the colonies only a small Baptist movement. It shared the
theological controversies of other Protestant denominations, not dissimilar to the situation
pertaining among the Calvinistic Baptists in England, and was kept small by the
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surrounding Church-State accommodation. Perhaps the largest and most dynamic group
of Baptists in the colonies prior to the Great Awakening was that associated with the
Philadelphia Association, which was organised in 1707.23 This Calvinistic group held to a
theology consistent with the Westminster Confession. Their defining Confession, that of
1742, was effectively a reproduction of the 2nd London Confession with articles added
permitting the singing of hymns in the vernacular and prescribing the laying on of hands
for the baptised. The Discipline of 1743, written by Benjamin Griffith, was issued in
response to the Great Awakening.24 These documents echoed the Calvinistic Baptist
ethos of the English churches of the previous century, setting them apart from many of
the Old Baptists prior to 1756, amongst whom Arminianism was prevalent.25
Churches of the Philadelphia Association and the many others that formed associations
on this model exercised a pronounced connexionalism. The association did a great deal to
defend Baptist interests against government and State Church interference, especially
under the auspices of the Warren Association, formed among former Congregationalists
become Baptists in Massachusetts, and aided local churches in doctrinal matters and the
supply of men for the pulpit. John Gano from the Philadelphia Association visited the
Separate Sandy Creek Association to seek to adjust their Calvinism somewhat.26 On the
whole, however, before the mid-1750s Baptists remained a small minority in the
colonies.
The Philadelphia Confession of Faith and Discipline (1743, revised in 1798) reflected a
movement explicitly Calvinistic in its understanding of the gathered church. It maintained
the emphasis on the balance between pastor/elder and people in the church even as it
balanced the authority of the local church with the responsibility to listen to the Church at
large as represented by the local association. The church exercised power of the keys in
admission to membership, in ordination, and in excommunication. In the Discipline of 23 RT Handy, “The Philadephia Tradition,” in Winthrop S Hudson, Baptist Concepts of the Church, 30. 24 Ibid., 32. 25 William McGloughlin, Isaac Backus and the American Pietistic Tradition (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), 90. 26 Leon McBeth, The Baptist Heritage (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1987), 229.
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1743, church discipline followed the dominical instruction of Mt 18.15-20: final
disposition was by the church members as a whole. Individuals were forbidden even to
exercise the power of the keys upon themselves by absenting themselves from worship.27
Thus to the end of the 18th century, churches of the Philadelphia tradition maintained the
early practice of Baptists in exercising discipline on a congregational level. BH Carroll
could describe the Philadephia Association at that point, even after the Awakenings of the
18th century, as the “Mother Eve” of American associations.28
3.2.1.1 Revival Realignments
Parallel to this, however, was the first of the Great Awakenings, occurring in the 1740s.
This had been preceded by a certain degree of dissatisfaction regarding the spiritual
torpor some saw to prevail in the colonies. From the 1670s, Puritan ministers had begun
to inveigh against the decline of the Godly experiment. Revival was sought to turn
matters around. However, the antecedents to the Great Awakenings took the form in the
1720s to 1740s of periodic covenant renewals.29 These were intermittent and generally
seemed to fit well in the existing church structure. Corresponding renewals in Scotland
were tied largely to preparation for quarterly attendance at the Lord’s Table. What
followed in the 1740s started out similarly, with revivals in spiritual concern being
encouraged by Standing clergy (i.e., those of the State-supported Church, be it
Congregational or Presbyterian), who invited itinerant evangelists to preach to stoke the
flames of spiritual fervour. However, it was not long before the proceedings took a
distinctly novel twist, with new converts and those revived seeking this out as the
preferred means of worship. Indeed, Standing clergy were being cast into disrepute as
being cold, formalistic, and in many cases, unconverted. Thus these New Lights
challenged those who would soon come to reject the Awakening and its fruits, styled the
Old Lights.
27 Handy, 44. 28 BH Connell, Baptists and Their Doctrines, 39-40. 29 Thomas S. Kidd, “'Prayer for a Saving Issue': Evangelical Development in New England before the Great Awakening,” in The Emergence of Evangelicalism, 132.
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This was to shake the Protestant establishment in the colonies at the same time as
increasing resentment toward dictates from the mother country was breeding a suspicion
of authority that combined with the growing suspicion of the educated ministry. Both
these bode ill for the established churches, who were poorly equipped to respond to the
religious fervour that was sweeping the colonies. Instead of energising the dominant
churches as the concurrent Evangelical Revival did in England, the Awakening brought
rapid growth to hitherto marginal groups – Methodists and Baptists. Fissures developed
in established Presbyterian and Congregational churches along the lines of those
favouring and those rejecting the emphases of the Awakening.
Out of some of these splits would come an influx into Baptist churches. These voluntarist
assemblies promoted the individual’s personal relationship with God and were far more
accommodating to the changes sweeping the religious landscape. The immediacy of the
Baptist experience, both in terms of pastoral oversight and lay involvement, was far more
conformable to the spirit of the times. This influx of new believers into existing Baptist
assemblies was reinforced by those groups that had either first separated from the
Standing churches in the Old/New Light dispute to form new churches, or which formed
spontaneously.
In the New England experience, the New Lights who came out of the Standing churches
first tended to form Separate Congregational churches. However, the matter of infant
baptism became a battleground for many. Attempts were made to include both
paedobaptists and anti-paedobaptists in open communion churches. The strain of this
became too great however, as in most cases neither side could treat the matter as
adiaphora for long. As a consequence, most of those who found infant baptism to be
either biblically mandated or socially necessary (or both) returned to the Standing
churches, many of which were being swayed by the New Lights. Those who favoured
believers’ baptism tended to go all the way and either join existing Baptist churches or
form new assemblies. Thus the Separate Congregational movement arising from the First
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Great Awakening was squeezed out and by the mid-1750s did not constitute much of a
force.
The transition to the Baptist movement presented difficulties for those coming out of
Separate Congregationalist churches, particularly in the New England colonies. A
relatively large group of Puritan, Calvinistic separatists, fired by the movement of the
Spirit in the Awakening, were entering what had been a relatively small, rather moribund
movement, the efforts of the Philadelphia Association churches notwithstanding. This
could not but drastically alter the status quo ante: there was a wild branch being grafted
onto the existing root, a branch which would soon come to be of greater girth than that
root. As well, the establishment was loath to extend rights of exemption from religious
taxation to those Baptists who had come out of Congregationalism. In the case of
Congregationalist Isaac Backus, for example, his church suffered from persecution over
leaving the Standing institution and abandoning the covenant, in a way the existing
Baptists who had been excused the payment of taxes did not. This would come to give a
harder edge to their discontent with the Standing order. They continued to be seen as
schismatics first and Baptists second, not a sect to be tolerated but covenant breakers
either to be punished or re-integrated.
Again, this introduces a dislocation in any trail of succession in the Baptist movement. As
in Britain, new wine was being poured into old wineskins – however, with too few
containers to go around and many of these viewed as unsuitable, many new wineskins
had to be sewn up. While many Baptist churches viewed the excesses of the revivals
askance and with as marked a disdain as did the Old Lights of the Standing church,
converts from these experiences were settling in these churches. The Philadelphia
Association continued its activities in parallel with these developments, but after 1800 its
influence and that of the conventional Calvinistic Baptist outlook would wane.
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John Asplund’s Annual Register of the Baptist Denomination (1790) showed that in the
late eighteenth century, of thirty-five associations in the United States and frontier
territories, seventeen formally subscribed to the Westminster Calvinism of the
Philadelphia Confession, and nine more held to the “Calvinistic system” or “Calvinistic
sentiment.”30 However, there was a fair variety – for example, the influential southern
Sandy Creek Association, founded by Shubal Strearns and Daniel Marshall in North
Carolina in the mid 1750s,31 seemed to hold to a mix of Calvinism and Arminianism.
Such a mixture would become far more typical of the emerging American Baptist
landscape. Overall, most colonial Baptists identified as Calvinists largely rejected High-
Calvinism and adopted the New Light Calvinism of Jonathan Edwards and, subsequently,
the modified Calvinism of English Baptist leader Andrew Fuller, though the writings of
Benjamin Keach and John Gill also circulated among churches of the Philadelphia
Association.32
It must be noted that at this point revival came from local church life and led back to
local churches. While preachers tended to be favoured on the basis of their perceived
spirituality, revivalist religion was expressed in the context of bodies of believers.
Further, those coming into Baptist churches would have either come out of Puritan
churches or have been converted from a society still conversant with Puritan priorities.
As such, Great Awakening or no, the Puritan influence in Baptist development in the
1700s colonies cannot be ignored. There is an ongoing argument as to what degree - if
any - Evangelicalism is a movement with origins in Puritanism and Reformed piety.
David Bebbington holds Evangelicalism to be a movement originating in the 1730s,
essentially novel in its emphases on Biblicism, conversionism, crucicentrism, and
30 Philip E. Thompson, “Baptists and Calvinism: Discerning the Shape of the Question,” Baptist History and Heritage, 39 no 2 Spr 2004: 62. 31 McBeth, 228. 32 Winthrop S Hudson, Baptists in Transition: Individualism and Christian Responsibility (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1979), 45.
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activism.33 This is challenged by many who see it as a development of earlier strains in
Puritanism and Reformed theology.
As was the case in Britain, the argument is important to the discussion of the Baptist
dilemma and its proposed solution in the recovery of the priesthood of all believers. If
modern Baptists, as Evangelicals, effectively originate in the 1730s revivalism, there is
no real tradition of the priesthood of the believer to draw on or return to, certainly not in
the Reformed understanding of the concept. The emphases of the revival were hardly
those of the 1600s Baptists, as the English High-Calvinist reaction to its emergence there
reflects. The distinctive ecclesiology of the Baptists was not the main motivating factor in
bringing people into the fold, beyond a certain correspondence in their model of
governance to the emerging democratic ideal. The prime ecclesiological element in
Baptist practice that seems to have attracted the converts and transfers of the Great
Awakening was the priority given to individual expression of faith. The soteriological
significance of ecclesiological form no longer was as prominent as in the previous
century in England for the radical Puritans and Separatists.
While such an emphasis was certainly not foreign to the ethos of the first Baptists, in 18th
century America - now in the Enlightenment and in the midst of a society rebelling
against established social structures - the priorities were set to be easily skewed. To
maintain that the priesthood of all believers is a long-standing, carried-over priority of the
Baptist people must be shown, not assumed. As well, if the Evangelical movement
originates in the 1730s, it has thus always been one with Enlightenment emphases and
thus its current form is probably quite consistent with its founding ethos – to seek to
rectify this using Reformed emphases is to mend a new garment with an old patch. If,
however, Bebbington’s thesis is mistaken – and I believe it is, in good part – the faith and
practice of Baptists and their fellow Evangelicals represent a development of the Puritan
and Reformed movement, albeit with a different emphasis from their predecessors. Thus
33 Timothy Larsen, “Evangelicalism and the Enlightenment: A Reassessment,” in The Emergence of Evangelicalism, 25.
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it is still feasible to argue that the concept of priesthood is a legitimate and native vehicle
by which to recover Baptist practice.
The converts of the Great Awakening were, by and large, nominally Calvinistic;
Arminianism was still viewed with suspicion by both sides of the Old/New Light
controversy, at least in the Congregationalist and Presbyterian camps. What would
change was the influence that this soteriology would exercise on ecclesiology. Baptist
ecclesiology and Calvinistic soteriology had always been an interference fit, with tight
tolerances. The Great Awakening brought an experimental religion into Baptist churches
that swayed emphasis toward the individual’s experience and away from both abstract
theological systems and clergy that had not undergone a similar experience. It brought
those who were Puritan and Calvinistic in their understanding of soteriology into a
movement possessed of a markedly different ecclesiology. The Great Awakening, the
influence of the Enlightenment, and the growing democratic movement that would lead
to the secession of the American colonies – all these contributed to the emergence of a
dominant individualism in Baptist circles. However, this is a theological phenomenon
which cannot be understood without certain key influences of the 18th century. Isaac
Backus’ struggle for religious liberty for a Calvinistic Baptist people is illustrative.
3.2.2 The Plunder of the Egyptians or Greeks Bearin g Gifts?
Backus, born in 1724 in Norwich, Connecticut, attended his mother’s Congregational
church. He experienced the new birth in 1741 during the Great Awakening that was
sweeping the colonies. Despite reservations about its formalism and lack of proper
discipline he joined the local Congregational church hoping, as did many awakened or
converted at this time, to see it reformed from within. This was not to be. Coming out of
the Standing Church subsequent to the Great Awakening and then having become anti-
paedobaptist as a Separate, he eventually found himself as a Baptist in a movement that
was still only partially tolerated.
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3.2.2.1 The Self and Society
Backus came into the Baptist fold at a time when many philosophers – Thomas Hobbes
(1588-1679), John Locke (1632-1704), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), to name a few –
were espousing an understanding of society and its relationships based on the priority of
the individual, in whom knowledge, value, and action found their source.34 The
arguments Backus would press home for religious liberty for the individual borrowed
conceptually from Locke and bore much resemblance to Jeffersonian rationalism;
however, they differed in key aspects. His pre-suppositions, circumstances, priorities, and
objectives were significantly different. In many senses, Backus belonged far less to the
modern age than Locke or Jefferson: he was a Puritan at heart. Augustine and Aristotle
were more likely fellow travellers in his thought; and they would have viewed, as did
Baptists of the previous century, the voluntary acts of the individual as being formed by
the community.35 Backus’ emphasis on the individual’s right and responsibility to deal
with God arose more from the same concerns as had that of the first Baptists, however
little he may have borrowed directly from them, than from any desire for Enlightenment
humanism. It is clothed in the language of Locke and Jefferson to a large extent because
that was the currency of the Church-State debate. But he used the terms and concepts in
significantly different ways.
Backus applied the concepts of individual liberty in a tightly controlled manner focused
on the rule of Christ, God’s right of government, and the safety of the soul. He did so in a
theological environment that was generally post-millennial and which did not share our
modern understanding of a secular society. This view had an underlying optimism
particular to the Christian hope, one too easily confused with the general growing
optimism about America as God’s land and her people as God’s chosen which combined
with, and was perhaps sourced in, a growing anthropocentrism and high view of the
34 Michael Broadway, “The Roots of Baptists in Community, and therefore, Voluntary Membership not Individualism, or, the High-Flying Modernist, Stripped of his Ontological Assumptions, Appears to Hold the Ecclesiology of a Yaho,” in Recycling the Past or Researching History?, 70. 35 Ibid., 71.
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human being. However, this reflected the Puritan view of God’s relationship with society
more than an Enlightenment view focused on his relationship with the individual. While a
growing secular eschatology would soon eclipse the theological post-millennialism of the
18th century Baptists, Backus’ arguments, his priorities, and his hope remained more
particularly Christian than generically American. If Backus’ motivation for individual
religious autonomy was religious freedom, he certainly did not seek freedom from
Christian society. His desire for religious freedom for Baptists stood in the context of his
view of God’s overall program for the Church. Like Edwards before him and many other
leaders of the Great Awakenings and Evangelical Revival, Backus was optimistic about
the role of the Church. This was not a simple optimism born of the Enlightenment view
of humanity – it was a certain hope in the victory of God in his Church. Backus and the
Church were participating in the final push to the millennium, after which would come
the return of Christ.
3.2.2.2 Eschatology Essential
But this would not arrive before the Church was released from the clutches of Antichrist,
who was no longer the Pope as the Westminster divines would have judged, nor had he
yet become a mythic future figure as modern Baptists generally hold. For Backus,
Antichrist was rather the system of Church-State union. The Baptist movement was
bringing Christendom out of this subjugation; the struggle for religious liberty took place
in this context. This was not only for the sake of the individual believer but of Christ, his
Church, and (his) society. This Puritan and Reformed emphasis on the union of the
prosperity and hope of the State with the obedience of the Church has largely been lost by
modern Evangelicals. Backus, and his fellow Baptists, are pre-secularists.
Gribben points out that the millenarianism of the Puritans is hard to categorise simply.36
However, it could hold to the blessed hope even while disagreeing on its contours. In this
36 Crawford Gribben, “The Evangelical Doctrine of Scripture, 1650-1850: A Re-examination of David Bebbington's Theory,” in The Emergence of Evangelicalism, 380.
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it is both broader and narrower than modern Evangelical eschatology. The foundational
optimism of the millenarianism of the 18th century Puritans, which combined a biblical
distrust of humanity with a trust in God’s ability to bring good from it through the
Church, has long since vanished from Baptist circles while the concern for the individual
that was such a part of Backus’ project yet remains.
What Puritan eschatology did include is a providential historicism that reads Revelation
in particular as the history of the Church and that, while seeing most of the millennial
events in Scripture as being future (this being the view of many of the later Puritans –
Owen, Milton, Bunyan), allowed for reference to current events affecting the Church.37
Unlike modern date fixing, though, God’s eschatological work was not delaminated from
his work in the Church. Backus, whose ideas appear to echo modern Baptist views of
individual liberty, actually saw this liberty as the means, not the end, of God’s work: his
concept of the priesthood of the believer would of necessity have been at considerable
variance with the modern view that upholds soul competency.
3.2.2.3 The Goodness of Government
In his quest for individual liberty, Backus argued not for an absence of government but
for its necessity in its proper sphere. He felt government to be a prerequisite for proper
liberty – a true Calvinist, he distrusted any notion of the innate goodness of humanity and
saw Adam’s rebellion in the Garden as one against God’s government – “man first lost
his freedom by breaking over the rules of government.”38 True liberty could only be had
when one ceded some of one’s liberty to the government. Thus the basis of government
was not any inalienable natural right of the individual but our bondage to Satan; it was a
necessary constraint. In this, Backus differs significantly from Locke and from the
Baptists of succeeding generations. 37 John Coffey, “Jonathan Edwards: Continuator or Pioneer of Evangelical History?,” in The Emergence of Evangelicalism, 281. Edwards interpreted the fifth vial of Rev 16.10-11 as being the Reformation, the sixth as being the Great Awakening. 38 McLoughlin, ed., Isaac Backus: Pamphlets on Church, State, and Calvinism, 42.
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However, government must have limitations: it could not interfere in ecclesiastical
matters in which it had no God-given competence. As with his English Baptist
predecessors, Backus claimed liberty of the individual before God to enable the believer
to be ruled unhindered by the true Lord of the Church, Jesus Christ. Consistent with his
view of government as a necessary limitation and protection for society he did not seek
freedom in a libertarian sense – “the general notion of liberty”39 - or even in a
Jeffersonian sense which released individuals to find through reason the way to serve the
Creator.40 No deist, Backus sought freedom under Christ for the individual to respond to
God’s revealed will. Both he and Jefferson promoted individual rights; but the
individualism for which Backus pressed was one submissive to Revelation. His view that
everyone had an “inalienable right to act in all religious affairs according to the full
persuasion of his own mind”41 is not a cry for absolute freedom but for the mind to be
liberated by civil government in the realm of religion to respond in freedom to God.
3.2.2.4 Looking to Locke
Backus would certainly use Locke, if not frequently in direct quotation, to support his call
for religious liberty. He did, however, go beyond Locke’s call for tolerance, seeking not
merely to eke out room for persecuted minorities within an established Church, but
demanding the equality of all sects: a freedom necessary for God to exert his free rule.
Locke’s view made the local church dependent upon the State for her legitimacy; Backus
found the church’s legitimacy in Christ alone. To seek the approbation of the State denied
this.
39 McLoughlin, ed., Isaac Backus: Pamphlets on Church, State, and Calvinism, 42. 40 Ibid., 47. 41 Ibid.
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Backus would use Locke’s concepts of inherent rights, but with the qualification that they
were contingent upon right use.42 As such, human beings were not dignified creatures
over against God who in their own inherent worth through reason confronted the Creator
– as Jefferson would reason - but those who had inherent rights vis-à-vis others, that each
might be able to respond freely to God’s will. This still echoes the original Baptist
motivation for the creation of the gathered, voluntary church. His plunder of the
Egyptians was far more selective than those who would follow. He was Bezaleel in
skilfully working the material before allowing its incorporation into the tabernacle,
whereas later Aarons would find emerging from the dominant philosophies of their day a
golden calf.
Further indication of how selectively Backus used Locke’s concepts is reflected in his
support for open communion during the dispute between paedobaptists and anti-
paedobaptists, even at the point at which he had come to embrace the view of the latter as
biblical. This was founded not on pragmatism, nor even the right of individuals to hold
their own beliefs, but on his view that one “can’t shut out one whom Christ receives.”43 It
was Christ who builds his Church by calling believers into fellowship. What can seem on
the surface to modern ears to be theology based on experience is in Backus’ application
theology that submits to God’s election in Christ and which reposes on a primitive
Baptist understanding of the gathered voluntary church, echoing the nuances in the
Baptist interpretation of the covenant we noted in the previous chapter. None of this is a
straight appeal to natural reason or the dignity of the individual. Even in his emphasis on
the individual’s right of determination in matters of religion, Christ’s calling and forming
of believers into the church had priority.
To see Backus’ promotion of individual responsibility in worship properly, one must
examine it in its context. Certainly, the Great Awakening promoted an expression of 42 Grenz notes that Backus opposes Locke in several areas even while using his categories. For example, while Locke would see ideas as the result of direct sense experience, Backus insists that spiritual truths are discovered by the direct teaching ministry of the Holy Spirit. Grenz, Isaac Backus: Puritan and Baptist, 225. 43 McLoughlin, Isaac Backus and the American Pietistic Tradition, 84.
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religion that encouraged focus on the individual’s response and access to God over
against systems and institutions. But it also exposed the inflexibility of the Puritan
Commonwealth to diversity in religious thought. It was the limitations imposed by the
Church-State accommodation in the colonies which prevented other expressions from
being seen as legitimate that motivated Backus to push for individual liberty in religion.
He certainly did not desire a secular society.
The theology of Jonathan Edwards, upon which Backus and his English cousins leaned,
reflects a similar ambivalence to the categories of John Locke. Bebbington, consistent
with such authorities on Edwards as Perry Miller, claims that Evangelical confidence in
their spiritual knowledge, especially in the realm of assurance of salvation, came from a
borrowed Enlightenment epistemology which made experience the means by which
human reason judges truth. In this understanding, Edwards merely extended the senses to
include a spiritual one by means of which spiritual knowledge is derived, enabling
divinity to be susceptible to determination by reason. This gave one a means of
evaluating one’s own salvation and providing a self-generated assurance.44
While conceding Bebbington’s point, Sweeney and Withrow challenge the assertion that
Edwards made this extension uncritically and without adaptation, pointing out that
spiritual sense in his conception was not a stand-alone instrument but only a function of
the believer’s union with Christ. The use of such terminology by Edwards as the “new
simple idea” in his Religious Affections served to satisfy empiricist critics even while it
gave Evangelicals a tool to critically appraise the excesses of enthusiasm displayed by
many during the Great Awakening. Locke may have provided the building blocks and
even the schema for Edwards’ reasoning on this point, but what the latter built with that
44 Douglas A. Sweeney and Brandon G. Withrow, “The Evangelical Revival through the Eyes of the ‘Evangelical Century’: Nineteenth-century Perceptions of the Origins of Evangelicalism,” in The Emergence of Evangelicalism, 348ff.
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material was beyond where Locke would venture.45 Like Backus, he plundered the
Egyptians cautiously.
An earlier analysis of Evangelicalism and the Enlightenment by Walsh saw not
confluence but divergence, which in effect challenged with Tertullian any dealings with
Athens on the part of Jerusalem. According to this view, English Christianity feared the
atheistic premises of the Enlightenment and reacted against the trend by focusing on heart
religion, faith, and experience, which certainly placed Christianity beyond rationalistic
critique for a time.46 This does seem at best an incomplete thesis in light of Edwards’
wide-ranging influence and the way in which he appropriated elements of Enlightenment
thought for his own use.
However, both Edwards’ and Backus’ cautious borrowing of Locke’s categories provided
believers with both a means external to the Church of evaluating their situation and the
authority to do so. The self-examination for assurance of salvation so central to Puritan
piety took place in the context of the Church, nourished by the means of grace, a Church
that fit inextricably as a keystone in the arch of society. It was hardly obtained and
required constant exercise. By contrast, the new self-analysis could be separated from
practice within the fellowship of believers, though initially such was not the norm. This is
a distinct departure from Puritanism and its understanding of the place of the covenanted
gathering of believers. What was legitimate in the skilful and careful hands of Edwards
and Backus, in their particular application, could go quite wrong when later employed in
a far less critical manner.
One could argue that this tectonic shift in Puritan theology and anthropology was simply
a pietistic reflection of what was occurring concurrently in the secular and political realm,
as dissatisfaction both with a distant motherland and with a stratified and immobile
society grew toward the crisis of the American Revolution. But remembering that the 45 Coffey, 287. 46 DC Jones, 110.
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American colonies were themselves in large part a religious endeavour in both perception
and reality, one could just as easily, and perhaps less anachronistically, argue that the
movement of the Spirit as expressed in the Great Awakenings is what gave the American
rebellion its particular form. Just as the Evangelical Revival in England gave that
country’s response to the same influences of the Enlightenment a far more salutary
expression than did the bloody French Revolution across the Channel, so the American
religious landscape – Puritan and pietistic, with a vision of God’s intent for his American
people, frustrated by social stratification, formalism, and quenching of the Spirit which
many feared would bring down God’s wrath instead of his blessing – steered the response
in the colonies on a unique and particularly American course. This singularity was as
much or more a function of the spiritual winds and currents in the colonies and of the
way in which the Spirit of God moved there as of any other influence. Backus’
ecclesiological concerns were not so much a reflection as an active expression of this
uniqueness. He remained in many ways a Puritan - conservative, Calvinistic - while
rebelling against the structure of Puritanism.
3.2.2.5 The Perils of Pietism
A word needs to be said at this point about the much-maligned influence of pietism in the
changes to Baptist faith and practice in the 1700s. Many of the distinctives of
Evangelicalism – field preaching, heart religion, camp meetings – were present in the
pietistic movement of central and south Germany and elsewhere at the end of the 1600s
among groups such as the Moravians and the Huguenots. David Ceri Jones notes that
pietistic practices were picked up by Anglicans in England after the Glorious Revolution
of 1688 removed many of the restrictions on Dissent, curtailing the Established Church’s
monopoly.47 These would go on to inform such lights of the Evangelical Revival as John
and Charles Wesley, and George Whitefield. Drummond would see these, as influenced
by the Moravians, recovering from the Continent for English Protestantism a pietistic
influence that had itself started in England with the Puritan William Perkins the previous
47 DC Jones, 108.
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century.48 This in turn made its way to America through Whitefield’s preaching, the
writings of the pietists, and the influence of Jonathan Edwards.
Indeed, some maintain that Pietism and Puritan-Pietism cannot really be separated:49 the
latter is simply the marriage of the desire for Christian heart submission and service with
Calvinistic soteriology. What pietism sought to combat was an over-emphasis on
theological orthodoxy at the cost of experimental religion. As theological orthodoxy
buttressed the Church-State accommodation and an educated ministry in place of a
converted one and was, in turn, upheld by these, it is not surprising that Baptists in
particular found a resonance in pietism.
The inward focus of this movement presented a potential danger in an ecclesiology based
on voluntary submission to Christ – it could too easily be separated from the Church
herself. But traditional pietism, as Drummond points out, has as its foundation both the
Scriptures and the Holy Spirit, who would commend the truth to believers.50 Its focus on
the disciplined life need not inevitably lead to individualism; in Wesley’s application it
drove believers to bands and groups both to study and to enforce discipline, encouraging
the practice of the priesthood of believers. Broadway, citing Mathews (Religion in the
Old South), challenges the assumption that the Great Awakening was completely
individualistic in the southern colonies.51 The elements of intense introspection,
illumination of the Holy Spirit, and voluntary church membership need not play the
individual against the church, but rather properly pit the Church against the world. These
elements were part of the Puritan communal experience of the previous century and while
they could encourage an overly-individualistic practice of religion, the experience of
evangelist Asahel Nettleton (1783-1844) in the New England states in the early 1800s
reflects that the intense self-examination associated with the Awakening and with
pietistic religion was not merely individual but took place in context of the church, often 48 Lewis A Drummond, “Puritan-Pietist Tradition: Its Meaning, History, and Influence in Baptist Life,” Review and Expositor 77, No 4 (Fall 1980): 489. 49 Ibid.: 483. 50 Drummond: 485. 51 Broadway, 79.
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accompanied by an evangelist with the support of the minister.52 Its converts were often
nominal church-goers. The conversions were referred to as “hopeful” – a sign that the
Puritan quest for assurance had not yet been supplanted by Evangelicalism’s more
punctilinear view of conversion. Inseparable from Puritanism, pietism at this stage
continued to be church-based, thus perhaps needs not be examined apart from the
influence of Puritanism as a source of the development of Baptist thought.53
3.3 Implications of Individualism
The blanket accusation which uncritically identifies leading Baptist lights of the late 18th
century with humanistic rationalists is not supportable. In Backus’ thought we find not so
much modern individualism as a rather disciplined and cautious borrowing of
Enlightenment categories to present the faith in a changing era. He certainly promoted
individual responsibility and freedom; but this in his conception does not lead to anarchy
or rationalistic individualism, nor does it require secularism.
What we do find is an increasing emphasis on the individual, above that starting to be
found in other traditions – colonial Roman Catholicism included.54 It is perhaps most
marked among the Baptists, as the push for soul liberty and its concomitant emphasis on
individualism grew up in Baptist circles in the context of persecution. Thus the survival
and prospering of the movement is seen in the light of a focus on the individual that was
necessary for survival.
This arose also as at just the moment when the Baptist movement experienced explosive
growth, and at a time that is foundational to the self-perception of the American people.
52 See, for example, Bennett Tyler, Nettleton and His Labours, (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1975). 53 There is an interesting parallel to this, perhaps no more directly related to pietism than were the Lollards to the Dissenters, in the priorities of the practitioners of the Devotio Moderna in early 15th century Germany. 54 At one point in the late 1700s, the Roman Catholic diocese of Maryland even sought the authority to select their bishop themselves, a permission denied by Rome.
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Her great heroes emerged during this time, during which to all appearances a gentle civil
religion was held in common by all, while being a nation was still an idealistic adventure
unencumbered by the responsibilities and realities of international engagements - before
the country was riven by a destructive civil war, before the evils of slavery clamoured so
stridently for resolution and full application to all races of the noble statements of her
founding documents. She was a nation pushing outward, whose soul was that of a
frontiersman, not of a lawyer. R Handy points out that while the “frontier thesis” may not
fully explain American development, it does play a role in the rise of individualism.55
Survival in an environment made hostile both by climate and enemy action - French,
Indian, or British – asked much of men and women. Individuals needed both
independence and resourcefulness to survive in these conditions. In fact and myth, the
frontier experience played an important role in fostering the admiration and promotion of
individualism. Especially among the people from whom the Baptists drew their
membership, such a virtue was prized and safe-guarded, and would come to play a role in
the self-understanding of the movement.
Individualism is woven into the warp and woof of the Baptist project, a fundamental
ingredient in the alloy that is the Reformed gathered church. However, once the casting is
removed that gave the church its form - the persecution of a Christian people by a
Christianised society, the common vision of a nation based not on political manifest
destiny but on one that was spiritual, the view of God’s redemption being given voice and
form in local churches - this ingredient begins to distort, a catalyst left in the process too
long. Once the sought-after liberty was accorded, the structure against which the Baptists
had protested began to crumble, not only under their onslaught but as the result of
political and philosophical movements sweeping the western world. The desire for soul
liberty that was so crucial and which was kept to its bounds by the restrictions of a
Church-State alliance against which it protested was now let loose by the demise of that
alliance. The Baptists, desiring to sow the wind of the Spirit, inadvertently reaped the
whirlwind.
55 Handy, 12.
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As Harvey points out,56 later generations (he has John Leland in mind) embraced not only
freedom of conscience but the liberation of religion from all political entanglements. This
he attributes to Leland’s adoption of Lockean and Madisonian language. While
attributing Leland’s thought to the same sources,57 Broadway notes that he remained
orthodox and stood apart from secular individualists. Authority of conscience for him
does not derive from an innate or native sense, but the conscience must be formed
through training in the church and by the Word of God. As for the church, she is “a
congregation of faithful persons, called out of the world by divine grace, who mutually
agree to live together, and execute gospel discipline among them…”58 However, Harvey
accurately notes that the degree of freedom Leland sought and the disestablishment of the
Church which followed not only separated Church from State but the individual disciple
from the church and faith from the physical body. As Newman points out,59 church piety
that becomes religious in the modern sense, in that it privatises theology, comes to exist
separately from public loyalty to the State. The fellowship of like-minded people does not
necessarily make for orthodox ecclesial practice.
The resulting Church would fit quite nicely into the society that was developing at the
beginning of the 19th century. The classical liberal political economy, understanding each
citizen as an “individual economic person,”60 would come to be the model by which other
human interactions were interpreted, church fellowship being one. The church was seen
to function along similar lines to the economy and society. This would have marked
effects on the Church’s and the Christian’s self-understanding. The individuals attached
to the Church had their freedoms guaranteed by the State – a new sort of bondage, for
they now individually affirmed the State which would increasingly dictate their
worldview. Without knowing it, they began to sing the songs of Zion camped out in a
56 Harvey, “Re-membering the Body” in Baptist Sacramentalism, Studies in Baptist History and Thought, Vol. 5, eds. Anthony R. Cross and Philip E. Thompson (Colorado Springs: Paternoster, 2003), 107. 57 Broadway, 78. 58 Ibid., 79. 59 Newman, 58. 60 Handy, 12.
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strange land by the rivers of Babylon, but State and culture increasingly played the tune.
As individuals, they forgot Jerusalem, and Babylon became indistinguishable from home.
Broadway observes that the abdication of the churches’ authority over public life –
slavery in particular – was the lever that separated private piety from public practice,
leading to spiritualisation and privatisation of religion.61
There are other distortions that Backus’ work unwittingly encouraged. Those on both
sides of the Great Awakening and of the struggle for religious liberty were, by and large,
Calvinistic in their soteriology and, on a broad scale, in their ecclesiology. The Great
Awakening injected a reliance on experientialism in religion and directness of access to
God that went ill with Calvinism as it had existed. A system that emphasises the
depravity of the individual cannot long maintain this in the face of the thousands whom
God has found fit to address personally. A doctrine that holds to the perspicuity of
Scripture cannot maintain the authority of the Church and her ministers and teaching, or
even of the Scripture itself and its reception by the Church catholic, in a society which
increasingly saw the individual as an autonomous, impartial searcher, able unaided to
determine truth by experience and reason. This combined with the general humanistic
optimism of the day to result in a swift demise of the Calvinism Edwards and Backus had
championed. The Romanticism that Handy cites as a reaction against the rationalism of
Enlightenment thought also weakened the position of Calvinism. Characterised by an
awareness of the infinite in the finite,62 it freed one’s interaction with the infinite or the
divine from any constraints that outside authority – the church included – might dare to
impose upon it. The restriction Reformed theology had placed on the capacity of the
finite to express the infinite was incompatible with such an anthropology.
As well, the Awakening that swelled the ranks of the Baptist churches, though it may
have done so with those whose worldview would generally have been Calvinistic, did so
by and large outside of those churches that received its fruit. Converts were not formed
61 Broadway, 82. 62 Handy, 12.
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through the ministry of the local Baptist church but came as those already believing, with
a greater or lesser understanding of the Calvinist faith, into the Church. The discipline of
the church in the formation of the believer, a hallmark of the movement in the 17th
century, was now easy to see as a layer, sometimes helpful, sometimes not, imposed on
the individual’s already vibrant faith. Acceptance of God’s sovereignty is fine at a level;
but Calvinism applied to ecclesiology introduces “class” distinction, the one thing
anathema to a growing republic. Broadway notes that the Separate Baptists were initially
quite concerned about church discipline. It may be that cultural aspects, in particular the
emphasis on traditionalism in the South, were of influence here. However, the church as
an expression of American liberty cannot sustain Calvinistic exclusivism as expressed in
the believers’ church.
However much separation of Church and State may be foundational to a Church born, in
its American expression, in the fires of persecution, the actuality would soon become a
marriage of Church and State, but only as the latter embodied an idea, not a governing
structure – the Church as wed to America the concept, not the actual State apparatus that
gives the concept form. Any church that would distinguish between Americans was
foreign, especially at a time when they were defining themselves as a new post-colonial
country. Thus what crippled Episcopalianism, Presbyterianism, and Congregationalism
(old-line) served to inhibit the continuation of a robust ecclesiology in the burgeoning
Baptist movement. Church communities that restricted on the basis of an experience of
God were acceptable – such experience was accessible to all; churches that restricted on
the basis of election as realised in the body of the church, as Calvinist Baptists churches
had, were not. In a sense, when the Puritan view of society dissolved, atomised Puritan
communities could not survive – not even those Puritan communities that had played
such a role in pushing over the social compact in the first place.
In a sense, Backus’ victory over the covenant theology that backed the Puritan Church-
State accommodation was pyrrhic. Even as this understanding was being undone, thanks
in no small part to Backus’ arguments both theological and civil, the Calvinism which
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undergirded it was disintegrating as well – the substance could not hold up without the
form, it would appear.
3.3.1 Perish the Priesthood?
One cannot say the increasing regard for the individual was merely incidental to that view
of the church that emerged out of the Great Awakenings among Baptists. As Thompson
points out,63 Backus viewed the covenant of grace as being between two individuals, God
and the human being, not between God and the church(es), which represents a narrowing
of the understanding of covenant of the previous century. This placed the church
subsequent to God’s direct dealing with elect individuals. Here already the emphasis is
shifting to conversion, not sanctification. The formerly perceived indispensability of the
church in salvation was diminishing. Notwithstanding, the changes brought about in the
wake of the Great Awakenings certainly had the potential to strengthen, not diminish, the
practice of the priesthood of all believers. If rights entail responsibility, the “right” of the
common people to judge in matters of religion behoved them to take responsibility in the
practice of that religion; the atmosphere was ripe not for libertarian individualism but
individuality that expressed itself in service in the church, both responsible and capable
under the Spirit.
What we do observe in both Backus’ and the English Baptists’ reception of the Great
Awakening is not so much a disregard for the church and the priesthood of believers in
the face of the rise of the concept of the sovereign individual as a difficulty holding their
importance in the face of enormous societal and religious changes. The American
Revolution would bring to the fore the importance of both the individual and the nation;
other loyalties were seen as somewhat subversive. This sense of unity, both with the
society and with other Evangelicals, brought into serious question the place and function
of the local church. Many of the leading lights of the Awakenings such as George
63 Thompson, Towards Baptist Ecclesiology, 151.
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Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards seemed to have little concern about ecclesiology; those
such as the Wesleys who did were rather outside of the mainstream, Arminian as they
were, and were renowned not primarily as churchmen but as field preachers – with at best
grudging support from the Church establishment.
The trans-Atlantic unity between Evangelicals moved between countries and
denominations – there was nothing particularly Baptist about the revivals that brought
such great growth to the Baptists. All these factors made the Evangelical Awakenings an
uneasy fit with a distinct ecclesiology, especially one that distinguished so markedly
between State and church. Thus, Enlightenment thought aside, it is not hard to see how
the movement that brought the Baptists such growth could also be quite destructive to
their distinctive ecclesiology, a major component of which was the priesthood of the
believer. It was all too easy, as would happen in subsequent years, for this distinguishing
feature to distorted and made to stand alone as a virtue of the individual, particularly of
the American individual, so easily did its attributes seem to fit once its context had been
stripped away.
While in the 18th century the priesthood of the believer is certainly far from being an
explicit distinctive of their ecclesiology, how Baptists described the church and her
stance vis-à-vis the individual demonstrate that they still saw the Christian life as being
lived out in the assembly of believers. Both Gill and Backus defined religious freedom in
terms of freedom to use the ordinances in the church. The good of the individual was to
be sought in that of the whole. Thus the church, neither as dispenser of sacraments nor as
instrument for the individual’s personal spiritual quest, but as the fellowship of believers,
is seen as crucial in salvation.
Nor was this purely a spiritual endeavour: the ordinances and sacraments of the church –
and her people - played a crucial part. Thompson stresses the identification of the Church
with Israel by Baptists, which can be seen in the hymnal of Dr. John Rippon (1751-1836),
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John Gill’s successor at New Park Street Chapel.64 Far more than crude supersessionism,
this was essential to understanding the Church as priesthood. The Church less replaces
Israel than she is called to continue and replicate that people’s calling. Israel was to
present and represent God and his ways in the world, finally to bring the Messiah into
that world; the Church was to announce his reign and return. Though perhaps not named
as such, Baptist thinking at this time could not be separated from the understanding of the
church as a priesthood of believers.
Baptist hymnody and liturgy of the time emphasise a sacramental nature of baptism and
the Lord’s Table.65 There is continued emphasis on the need for sanctification and
formation of the Christian, with a fine balance between the individual and the
community. The good of the former is unobtainable without the latter. Fuller and
Abraham Booth (1734-1806) both emphasised the corporate nature of sanctification. As
Fuller wrote, “the interest of the one is the interest of all; and the interest of all extends to
everyone.”66 Booth observed concerning the means of grace in the church that God,
“when he decreed the ends, appointed the means, and the application of them to their
respective objects.”67 To declare the use of these means as optional was to partake of “an
inglorious liberty.”
Again, the idea of the church and her ordinances is not that of an instrument or agent of
salvation and sanctification but more the necessary means by which God in his freedom
accomplishes these through the obedience of believers. The life of holiness is rooted in
formed habit – there seems little of the romanticism that sees the transformation of the
individual into a spiritual free agent. This is in accord with the Reformed understanding
of sanctification, which saw not a human heart gradually transformed into a new semi-
divine creation, but old habits extirpated and new ones impressed according to the new
affections and intent of the heart.
64 Thompson, Towards Baptist Ecclesiology, 131-2. 65 Ibid., 131. 66 Ibid., 133. 67 Ibid., 126.
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The above notwithstanding, there are signs from some of these same 18th century
theologians who stressed the necessity of the local church that it was starting to be
understood in a somewhat different light than previously. John Gill, who stressed the
universal, invisible Church of all the elect as having priority over the local church, tended
to see the latter as being joined voluntarily, based on one’s belonging to the former.
Andrew Fuller contended that social religion begins with the individual, whose religion
itself begins with coming to Christ. Thus the church in both these views is subsequent to
God’s dealing with the individual, external to Booth’s “appointed” means, a
subsequentialism more pronounced than in the 1600s. However, it need not necessarily
imply rampant individualism in terms of soteriology. Separating the church from the
justification of the individual does not mean that she is not essentially involved in the
believer’s salvation: for beginning without finishing is not salvation – at least not in the
Reformed understanding. Gill’s and Fuller’s views are not necessarily those of
individualists but of those who see the church as essential to the formation of believers in
Christ, if not in their justification.
3.4 The 19th Century: The Tares in the Ear, the Church of the Hat
If the 1700s see the seeds of the problem of individualism being scattered, while not
deliberately planted, into soil prepared to a degree in the 1600s, the fruit seems to come
into bloom in the 1800s.68 Backus and others promoted ideas which, in their support for
the prominence of the individual as expressed in Enlightenment philosophical terms, may
have further prepared the soil for its rampant growth in Baptist circles.
68 Yarnell resists efforts to situate the beginning of the corrosive manifestation of individualism in the understanding of priesthood in the Baptist context prior to the 1800s. “McNeal finds the diversion into individualism to have occurred as soon as Baptists crossed the Atlantic; however, he cites only secondary sources, sources that blindly repeat an historiographical tradition that does not adequately deal with the primary materials. Among academics, this should have been declared inappropriate, but for too long, this historiography has been unwittingly repeated by successive generations of graduate students.” Yarnell, “Congregational Priesthood”: 127.
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3.4.1 Theological Tides and Trends
In addressing the Baptist view of tradition as a hermeneutical category, Thompson points
out that the focus on the individual that we have found perhaps nascent or potential in
Backus’ and Leland’s writings becomes overt, dominant, and unwavering in the writing
of many 19th century Baptist theologians. Writing in the mid-19th century in Notes on the
Principles and Practices of Baptist Churches, Francis Wayland (1796-1865) declares that
God speaks in the Bible to every individual “as much as though that individual was the
only being whom it addressed.”69 In the following century, WT Conner (1877-1952)
would remark that, “The authority of the church is repressive and oppressive in its
nature…Man’s mind and conscience are enslaved.”70 Broadway points to 19th and 20th
century Baptist theologians such as EY Mullins (1860-1928) who would argue that “The
gospel rests on the infinite worth of individual men,” and WR McNutt who, proceeding
from the primacy of soul liberty, found ecclesiology to be but a derivative concept:
Christians could freely associate for utilitarian reasons, but only according to the supreme
judgement of the individual believer.71 Such statements reflect the loss of the nuance
early Baptists had shown in the interplay between God’s freedom and that of the
individual.72
Thompson attributes this change to Baptists’ (and others’) being caught up in the
identification of American democratic principles with Christian practice and the
subsequent accommodation of that practice to those principles. At the popular level this is
true, but in the academe there is additionally or even primarily the influence of growing
confidence in scientific method. Certainly the psychological understanding of humanity
and the religious experience had an influence at both these levels; but faith in technical
69 Philip E Thompson, “As It Was in the Beginning,” in Recycling the Past or Researching History?, 187. 70 Ibid., 188. 71 Broadway, 69. 72 Against this, White argues for a significant presence among 20th century Southern Baptist Theologians who would seek to preserve an earlier strain of sacramental understanding relating to the Lord’s Table, for example. S White, “Southern Baptists, Sacramentalism, and Soul Competency,” 200-213.
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method allied with faith in humanity itself, resident in a burgeoning, successful liberal
democracy, was fostering in both conservatives and liberals an aversion to traditional
confessional, church-based theology.
Tradition was becoming far less important than destiny – the Church must look forward.
Implicit was the understanding that tradition was corporate and imposed while destiny
was individual and developed from within. However, the hope and ground of this
optimism was rapidly shifting, the coming paradise “wherein dwelleth righteousness”
looking more and more like the American State. This constant focus on the assumed
future muted any examination of the past or even serious introspection of the present state
of the Church. The past came to be assumed to reflect the present, things always having
been as they were now perceived to be. The identity of the Church was not so much
linked with the past and seen to stand on its shoulders as to share with it only that, like
believers of the past, its individual members have faith in Christ.73
This turn of events is not surprising in an age that came increasingly to see the individual
as the subject and authority of knowledge, particularly in the United States, which both
philosophically and in terms of governance was rapidly overthrowing the past.
Americans, to a far greater degree than those in other Anglo-Saxon countries - the
principal centres of the Baptist movement in the 19th century - were truly pushing out into
a far country, geographically, governmentally, and in terms of religion. The age
characterised by tremendous growth and movement, immigration, technical progress and
uprootedness would be one that would throw the onus on the individual.
Thompson observes that in the 1800s populism as a cultural movement served to
diminish the influence of tradition in theology. Thomas Reid’s Scottish common sense
philosophy was the intellectual force that undergirded this. To the common man was
ascribed a pure wisdom, unsullied by the taint of the past. All truth is unitive and thus
73 Thompson, “As It Was in the Beginning,”citing Henry Vedder’s A Short History of the Baptists, 188.
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accessible to all through nature by reason, immediate and resident in the knower.74
Human reason was seen as the “normal prolegomenon, the proof and corollary of
Scriptural revelation.”75 This was a far cry from Jonathan Edwards’ attempts a century
earlier, with his innate distrust of human religion and native spiritual ability, to quantify
the religious affections and a marked departure from the Puritan roots of the Baptist
movement, whose piety had a cosmic optimism in the midst of a sometimes grim view of
the realities of life.76 They found the unity of reality in the counsels and purposes of God,
not in human understanding.
However, the newer approach effectively gave everyone equal individual access to the
truth and the ability to be addressed personally by the Scriptures. Truth came almost to
have a life of its own, described by Thompson as almost “in hypostatic union with the
Word.”77 The Bible became for the conservative believer more a repository of theological
facts to be assembled by the reader, in pursuit of this truth; the perspicuity of Scripture, a
hallmark Reformation belief, was increasingly identified with the individual’s ability and
right to have access to knowledge. For the liberal believer, this perspicuity lay in the
human heart, not in the Scripture.
The softening of Calvinism discussed in Backus’ context continued in the latter parts of
the 19th century in the wake of the revivals earlier in the century. The point at issue,
according to N.O. Hatch, was one of authority. While God’s freedom and sovereignty
were still upheld, the balance was shifting toward the freedom of the individual
conscience in its dealings with God. While salvation truly was of the Lord, it was
effected through the innate capacity of the human being for God. This came to mean that
it was unconscionable that any means, be they church or material, should ever serve as
intermediary between the individual and God.78 While more or less orthodox Calvinism
still held sway in the academe, in populist writings the avowals of absolute human liberty 74 Thompson, Towards Baptist Ecclesiology, 176. 75 Ibid., 177. 76 Miller, 36. 77 Thompson, Towards Baptist Ecclesiology, 188. 78 Ibid., 180.
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became less and less guarded. The liberty and competency of the soul became not only
doctrines to be defended but the very defining characteristic of Baptists. This soon
became commonly espoused by the academe as well.
This is seen among more academic theologians from major universities at the turn of the
20th century. Whether conservative on matters of biblical authority, such as Augustus H
Strong, Elias H Johnson, and Henry G Weston, or liberal, such as William Newton
Clarke and Shailer Mathews, these well-educated men had to contend with the scientific
and socio-political upheavals of the 19th century in attempting to define the Baptist
understanding of the Church and her role. Hudson points out that outwardly, little had
changed in Baptist life; but the theological underpinnings had been badly eroded.79 The
attempts to preserve the vitality of the Christian faith in a modern society varied.
Conservatives such as Strong and Alvah Hovey sought guardedly to dovetail biblical
exegesis with scientific method, maintaining that the two need not be at odds; the more
liberal Clarke and Mathews, on the other hand, sought validation of the message of the
gospel in the individual’s reception of it, in the response seen in one’s life.80
These approaches may appear on the surface quite different; but what they share is an
appeal to outside authority – either scientific/historical method or that of the individual –
and not to Christ and his Church. Strong was very guarded about the merits of historical
criticism: “The historical method of Scripture interpretation, as it is often employed, ends
without Christ because it begins without him.” Yet his response to this was that “Any
honest Christian has the right to interpret Jonah and Daniel as allegories….”81 In other
words, the Church’s message is to be proved outside of the church, by the individual.
One sees another approach to this focus on the individual in the writings of Mullins, who
found the Baptist contribution to world religious thought to be the concept of individual
79 Winthrop S Hudson, “Shifting Patterns of Church Order,” in Baptist Concepts of the Church, 200. 80 Ibid., 202. 81 Ibid.
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soul competency. He saw democracy in the State as well as the Church as an “inevitable
corollary” of soul competency.82 The outworking of this understanding in the realm of the
State, according to Thompson, was more a priority for Mullins than was its fruit in the
Church.83 While superficially resembling Backus’ view of the Church as the hope of the
nation, it was by this point no longer a cohesive vision but rather a composite atomised
view. Society is defined by the freedom of its individuals, with little organic
understanding which would see the individual in society, only over against it.
However, even these theologians were casting back to an earlier time, seeking a
rootedness in the past. Their increasingly novel interpretations of what distinguished
Baptists – invariably expressed in terms of soul liberty, individualism, and moral law –
drew for support on the self-evident rightness of the Baptist project from the beginning.
“Dismissals of tradition notwithstanding, invocations of tradition, most often implicit,
have been numerous”84 in Baptist theology and ecclesiology. Baptist tradition had come
to hold that there is no tradition, and certainly no church, by which the individual’s free
exercise of religion is to be bound.
There has ever been a longing glance back to what is supposed to have been, even as the
course to brave new worlds ahead is being charted. As Thompson points out, however,
the capacity to properly remember is not only corrupted, but corrupted unawares, when
such remembering is not done by the community. As he and others have maintained, the
practice of the faith in the community of believers enables memory. Absent this,
syncretism inevitably creeps in; traditions are not so much handed down as brought
forward selectively – whence the appearance and acceptance of soul competency as a
traditional distinctive. For Baptists, who have no founding theologian or saint to whom
we can look back, the succession not of people but of principles promotes a disembodied,
82 He was not alone in this. BH Carroll would write: “…soul liberty in these United States means soul liberty one day for the whole world…It was the struggle for civil and religious liberty that brought about that voluntary Baptist cooperation…When they learned to cooperate voluntarily…they settled the question of the ages.” BH Carroll, Baptists and Their Doctrines, 50. 83 Thompson, “As It Was in the Beginning,” 52. 84 Ibid., 190.
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spiritual view of the content of the faith, disconnected from people and practice. A
community of ideas, not of the saints, is the result. And these ideas, free radicals in a way
that individuals living and worshipping together are not, tend to attach themselves to
whatever host happens along. Increasingly in the 19th century and afterward, this host was
liberal democracy and modernity.
Thompson identifies the 19th century quest for roots as ‘pseudo-traditionalism,’ in which
a stock of comforting and familiar symbols and images is provided and applied to the
changing conditions of the day, all the while their actual content is rapidly changing to
accommodate the contemporary surroundings. EY Mullins is a (in some ways)
commendable example in the 20th century of pseudo-traditionalism in his efforts to steer
between rank liberalism and a stiff fundamentalism. The espousal of soul competency
appealed to the supposed roots of Baptist faith and practice, a foundation beyond both
these extremes. Mullins, unlike some of his less careful imitators, maintained that this
competency was under God’s control,85 and according to Thompson sought to combat
radical individualism and answer the question of authority with this concept. However, it
remains that individual capability was the starting point for Mullins, which left his
approach subject to individualistic relativising86 – much as the conservative and liberal
approaches to the authority of Scripture discussed above. It also seems to have played on
an implicit ontological similarity between the human being and God. The institution of
the church was supported by Mullins, but seemed to have no concrete role, corporately,
serving more the needs of the individual.87
3.4.2 Peculiar Priesthood
The view of the priesthood of believers was in this period experiencing redefinition as
well. As Broadway points out, in the 19th century the concern for this Reformation
85 Hammett, “From Church Competence to Soul Competence”: 156-157. 86 Thompson, Towards Baptist Ecclesiology, 225. 87 Ibid., 227.
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concept had changed so that it was no longer seen as important in making the church
effective in the sanctification (salvation) of the believer, but was becoming more a
vehicle for personal expression and empowerment. The Baptist Manual of Polity and
Practice, an important if unofficial 20th century document describing Baptist
churchmanship, defined priesthood as the “right of everybody to approach God.” In the
church during this period, “Discipline was relaxed, the covenant fell into disuse, the
pastoral office was obscured, the deacons were shunted to one side, while boards and
committees proliferated.”88 The older conception of covenanting with the Lord and one
another to walk together had been partially displaced by the view of the church as
evangelistic centre, an ecclesiological understanding defined almost exclusively in
instrumental terms, primarily those of mission. This rendered the church derivative and
subsequential in salvation or sanctification, and contributed to the neglect of the concept
of priesthood in the church. Priesthood and service tended to be exercised primarily
outside of the formal worship of the church, particularly as evangelism.89
Broadway credits a powerful wave of individualistic thought in US politics in the 19th
century to have led to the belief among Baptists that any supra-congregational dealings
must be done by individuals on the ‘society’ model.90 This is not merely a peculiarity in
governance; it reflects a growing understanding that the individual had no obligation to
the church, nor could she govern the conscience. Missions societies represented not
churches or associations but gatherings of Christian individuals from these churches, who
spoke for their own interests as messengers, not delegates. These were not spiritual or
biblical entities but transient groupings of qualified individuals.
As the 19th century progressed, the understanding of sanctification and the Holy Spirit’s
role in it was also undergoing a sea change. As Thompson points out, the understanding
of sanctification in the mid-19th century was focused on the individual, though in the
context of the congregation. The Holy Spirit was increasingly seen as working in the
88 Hudson, Baptists in Transition, 131. 89 Pitts: 40. 90 Broadway, 74.
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individual, illuminating through means, though as time progressed doing so more
directly, apart from means. Later on, it appears that even the Spirit was seen to be to a
degree optional, the individual being deemed able to lay hold of the truth unaided.91
Corporate worship also came increasingly to focus on the individual, a means not of
enabling but of assisting the believer to experience of God. The focus was still on
sanctification, an echo of what it had been in the beginning, but more as personal growth
than as salvation. Ecclesiology’s place in the academe reflected this reduced importance,
becoming in systematic theology less a facet of salvation than of church administration.92
In what was perhaps a reaction against Landmarkism, with its high-ecclesiology at the
local church level that at the same time rejected any organic understanding of the Church
catholic, and its almost direct identification of the local church with the present kingdom
of God, Mullins came to perceive the kingdom as apart from the Church, represented
more in the individual at the personal level. It was seen in the spiritual experience of
individuals, of which the Church was the conglomerate.93 In this sense, the local church
merely reflects, not forms, the reality of Christ already present in the believer. Her role
became the extension of the kingdom of God as it gathers saved individuals together, an
Ark in which believers find direction, perhaps shelter, but certainly not salvation, as all
are able to float on their own! To paraphrase Hudson, “Every man’s hat had become his
own church.”
This understanding dovetailed nicely with the contemporary understanding of human
nature as existing primarily in the individual. The danger that resulted was a separation of
private devotional practice and public life. One finishes with Moral Man in an Immoral
Society: the individual seen as independent of both society and the church. In effect, the
priesthood of the faithful as exercised in the church was coming to be defined by the free
91 Thompson, Towards Baptist Ecclesiology, 211. 92 Ibid., 218. 93 Ibid., 232.
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agency and right to self-expression the individual had in liberal society rather than
defining and directing the use of this privilege in submission to Christ, a meaning far
different from that of the Early Church and the Reformers: the priesthood of the believer,
not the priesthood of all believers, perceived now to function primarily in the individual
sense.
3.5 Strangers in a Strange Land
To understand the declension in the understanding of the individual vis-à-vis the church
in its particular manifestation among the Baptists over the past few centuries, one must
reckon with a theme that runs throughout the Baptist experience, in Britain but most
particularly in America: that of disaffection. Baptists have found themselves again and
again with torn loyalties. Reformed Protestants, they did not hold to a State Church;
Calvinistic in theology in large part, they could not condone the dominant Puritan
covenant theology nor would they baptise infants; dissidents from the State Church, they
were not Presbyterian or Congregationalist; citizens of an increasingly restive colonial
establishment, their insistence on religious liberty brought them into conflict with their
fellow colonists, whom they opposed ecclesiologically in the same terms as their
opponents opposed the Crown politically. The Baptists were never at ease in their own
country, but like Abraham seemed always to be looking for another. This theme would
continue after the American Revolution, even as Baptists began to fit quite comfortably
into the American religious landscape, with the disaffection of the southern Baptist
churches, first over slavery, an issue that separated them from their northern brethren,
then over national economic policy, and finally over the humiliating and devastating
defeat of the American Civil War. It would see subsequent growth in the controversies
over Darwinism and modernism.
One might have thought persecution and exclusion would cause Baptists to circle the
wagons and cleave closely to the local church. It did show signs of doing so among the
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Separatist Baptists following the first Great Awakening, as men such as Isaac Backus
(despite his early misgivings) and James Manning of the influential Philadelphia
Association cooperated both in the founding of Brown College in Rhode Island to train
Baptist ministers, and the Warren Association was established to aid Baptists of New
England in resisting taxation for Church support. In their case, at least, voluntarism and
individualism, far from promoting independence and autonomy, encouraged cooperative
ventures. However, on the whole, isolation in these many aspects from the mainstream of
religious and social society seems rather to have produced a people hesitant to give their
allegiance to any organisation. In the 19th century, changing eschatology (becoming
progressively pre-millennial and dispensationalist), changing politics (slavery and the
Civil War), changing society (the influx of Roman Catholic immigrants from Europe),
changing theology (modernism), and changing science (Darwinism) would constantly
present Baptists with a foe to distrust. Combined with the emphasis on individual
experience as validating doctrinal theory this did not so much produce tightly knit
churches as individuals hesitant to bow to any authority not regulated by their own
experience. There were certainly other factors at work outside of those mentioned above,
factors which affected all religious movements in the United States. But the emphasis on
the individual in Baptist circles is the product of circumstances that affected them
particularly.
One sees a constant tension in the Baptist experience. The populism which came to
define the movement and made for its easy acceptance in post-revolutionary America
emphasised a conformist society whose authority, paradoxically, was determined by the
ostensibly autonomous individual. Whether liberal or conservative in theology, popular
or academic, Baptists borrowed ideas from the world – the plunder of the Egyptians – but
then determined on an individual, not a corporate basis, how to fashion them to provide
shelter for the journey in the wilderness.
This sense of alienation is important to remember when examining the Baptists’
understanding of the individual, the Church, and the State. At the turn of the 19th century,
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the Standing churches themselves were beginning to veer off into Unitarianism and
Arminianism; their understanding of the union of Church and State meant that religion
served a general civil purpose far beyond that acknowledged by Backus, whose instincts
on this were good. The Jeffersonian concept of truth being great and destined to prevail
had a different meaning in Backus’ and Edwards’ thought. However, this truth had
always been seen by the Puritans as serving the Commonwealth in a corporate sense, not
just in the aggregate of its individual effects on believers, bringing with it the danger that
the truth must always be amenable to conformity to the service of the State and its
Church.
In the beginning of the American story, the truth tended to dictate what form this State
would take.94 However, over time, the story of the State began to mould the truth to its
needs. A Unitarian faith must almost certainly follow as the progress which one saw as
the inevitable end of the American experiment, the optimism about its outcome, and the
human goodness that must make it possible made a particular faith dependent not on
discovery by human reason but on the revelation of God in Christ a distinct
embarrassment. Human beings who can reason and are capable of discovering and
evaluating truth on their own are increasingly placed in an adversarial role against God,
competent to know good and evil, the same power offered to and sought by Adam and
Eve in the Garden so long ago.
This removes God from our midst and sets him apart: alone, aloof, unitary. He now
stands in the way of our projects, having power that must be wrested from him. Like the
vast natural frontier that was falling before the onslaught of a burgeoning population and
developing technology, God came to stand against humanity. His sovereign power is his,
for him and not for us. Ironically, even as this power is seen as being for him, not for us,
it is power that we define by our own norms, abstract and general, not in the particular
94 Richard Rorty expressed the aim of the proponents of American “civil religion” as wanting “Americans to take pride in what America might, all by itself and by its own lights, make of itself, rather than in America’s obedience to any authority – even the authority of God.”, Barry Harvey, Can These Bones Live? (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2008), 39.
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form shown by God alone in Jesus Christ. The God who came into creation in Jesus
Christ to save those lost and unable to know truth is not such a god. It is not hard to see
how Unitarianism and Deism prosper in a situation where the individual and individual
potential are so esteemed.
Torn as they were between allegiance to the newly developing American State and to
their voluntary, gathered churches, a compromise seems to have developed among the
Baptists. Continuing to hold to the practice of the gathered church, the Calvinism which
fit so poorly a modern, forward-looking state was rapidly done away with, except perhaps
in the personal, subjective sense of election. Such a view of the surrounding society
makes the call to come apart as a people incomprehensible. One could individually and
spiritually answer the call to live unto God; but to see oneself as part of a particular
people apart from the particular American people grew increasingly untenable.
Arminianism, with its more cheerful optimism about humanity’s ability to conform to the
law of God, would dominate the understanding of the place of the church in society and
her call to evangelise.
Baptists looked inward. The inner soul’s journey, undertaken alone in parallel with a
group of believers, progressed with a superficially orthodox understanding of the
Reformed faith. The external journey, though, was taken in the context of the American
experience, through which God must certainly be speaking, given the evidence of
progress and material blessing - however little this society may have answered to
traditional Christian orthodoxy or conventional Baptist ecclesiology. The idea of being a
people who would labour to bring in the millennium was abandoned, to shortly be
replaced by a pessimistic pre-millennialism which saw God rescuing believers from the
tribulation to come, paradoxically juxtaposed with optimism about the society in which
they lived, distrusted as it continued to be. There developed a sort of voluntary,
unconscious, self-administered dhimmitude in which the practice of the faith was allowed
by the civil power while the substance of that faith was not so much held privately as
individually, and subordinated voluntarily not to the collective judgement of the church
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but to the collective ethos of the American society, all the while masquerading as the soul
competency of free individuals to determine their own dealings with God.
This is not dissimilar to the High-Calvinists’ experience in Britain during the previous
century. However, in this case it was voluntary. The State no longer imposed the
restrictions, they were self-imposed. The theological doubts about identifying the project
of the kingdom of God with that of America were internalised; one could remain loyal to
the Lord internally while joining the parade externally – even if, in the soul, it was felt
that it might be going nowhere.
The end of persecution and of toleration, bringing instead in the 19th century full
acceptance in most circles of the Baptists, largely removed the need for a distinctive
ecclesiology. As painful as it had been at times over the preceding two centuries,
persecution and exclusion served both to highlight the distinctive nature of the Baptist
church with its focus on the role of the individual in the assembly and to make it a rock of
refuge in the storms of affliction. Acceptance having come and religious fellow-travellers
having been found in the Evangelical movement, there became increasingly less reason to
hold to the distinctives of Baptist faith and practice. They neither seemed so distinctive
nor so necessary. What remained was a particular form of piety – which could be
practised in the church but which did not depend upon her – and a regard for the worth of
the individual increasingly little different from that held by the surrounding society.
In this context, the local church and the priesthood of believers would become the
excluded middle. Originally seen as the pillar and ground of the truth God was bringing
to the American people, revealing and rebelling against the Antichrist of state religion, it
became a gathering place for those making their way to heaven, soteriologically orthodox
but ecclesiologically ambivalent, citizens of the earthly city in the flesh and citizens of
the City of God in spirit. Backus’ repeated defence against establishment, the
proclamation of the Lord that “my kingdom is not of this world,” came to be applied in
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strange ways by his successors. The kingdom retreated both inwardly to the realm of the
soul even as it migrated externally to the government; not only was the church
disconnected from the State, as Backus would have had it, but from the soul as well. Here
the soul would be safe, apparently, from the storms to come.
Perhaps the experientially gained doctrines were indistinguishable from the experience of
participating in the American experiment. Perhaps the strain of being strangers in a
strange land became too great to bear, relieved by continuing to live spiritually apart from
Babylon while practically living largely within it. The end of persecution in England in
the 17th century with the Restoration let much of the wind out of the Baptists’ sails there;
perhaps joining in body, if not always in spirit, the American body politic at the end of
the 18th century brought both relief and weakness for American Baptists. In any case, the
church became somewhat of a question mark: not necessary for a salvation realised
through personal experience and direct connection with God, an impediment to fitting
into the society which God was so evidently blessing, she was left in theological limbo.
The Baptists had not been at ease in their own country, but like Abraham seemed always
to be looking for another; however, unlike Abraham, they would come to find it in the
land they had wandered previously as strangers, settling for tents instead of the city
whose maker and builder was God. Exile would not so much end as would the inhabitants
of Babylon go on to seek the good of the city, settle down and raise children, and forget
the Promised Land that called them back, the place the Lord had prepared for them – the
church. The tents would become buildings and the buildings would come to dominate the
landscape, even as they took the shape of that landscape.
It may well be that however important their theological distinctives may have been, more
important still was the general secularisation of society. It is not so much that theology
took on Enlightenment modes of thinking as it was sidetracked completely, made a
handmaid to the juggernaut of social progress. Theology and the Scriptures came to serve
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the individual’s quest for salvation, to provide the language and some isolated concepts, a
salvation itself which needn’t be theologically defined. The sacred was preserved by
secularisation, kept safe from doing any harm.
So the initial premise remains – that exaggerated individualism is a result of a distorted
quest for sanctification. It is merely that the question is not framed at all as our 17th
century forebears would have done. For modern Baptists, the question may still be
clothed in theological language; however, the purely theological strain of the problem
may be relatively minor. It does remain that the solution is theological in nature;
however, it is not a matter of replacing an irrelevant faulty ecclesiology with an irrelevant
sound one – it is more one of defining an ecclesiology, a self-understanding, in which
Christ and his Church are not side issues but foundational. Who is Christ, how does one
learn him, how is one savingly conformed to him? The faulty bifurcation that has
developed between Christ as Saviour and Christ as Lord95 in the soteriology of some
streams of antinomian Evangelicalism can no longer be allowed to be reflected in Baptist
ecclesiology. Christ is Lord of the Church through which he commands a priesthood of
believers in his service, not a personal Saviour who hesitantly encourages believers to
show up to Bible studies as long as their personal freedom is not compromised.
The solution to this faulty soteriology lies in the doctrine of the priesthood of all
believers. It must address this epistemology of salvation, which is at the root of the
Baptist project. The view of the human being as a reasoning being, liberated by the Holy
Spirit in conversion to emerge from the chrysalis of sin and limitation as a beautiful
butterfly now able to reason aright, to learn Christ on an individual and personal level and
thus to be enabled to appreciate and love the beautiful (God) as one now similarly
beautiful, must be replaced. In its place we must understand the Christian as the person
liberated - not empowered - by Christ to learn Christ through love, who must be formed
in the church in which the Holy Spirit who sanctified continues to save in the priesthood.
95 John F. MacArthur, Jr., Faith Works: The Gospel According to the Apostles (Word Publishing: Dallas, 1993).
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Chapter 4
The Search for a Country
4.1 Crisis
4.1.1 What’s At Stake
As we’ve seen in the preceding chapter, the Baptist project had begun to veer
considerably off course during the 19th and 20th centuries. Great growth, missions
activities, and social service notwithstanding, through a complicated combination of
sociological and theological influences Baptist churches came increasingly to resemble
not so much bodies of believers as clouds of individual witnesses, each taking a bearing
not from the cross as understood in the midst of the community but steering by privately
discerned lights, lights unwittingly kindled by the society in which the church lived. As
the fires lit by plunderers once lured ships onto the rocks to loot their cargoes, so these
secular lights, though not lit with the same malign motivation, risk making shipwreck of
the church.
What is needed is a reorientation that returns the faith not to organisation or individual
but to the community as the Spirit speaks in its midst: An active discipleship as lived out
in the priestly community, holy because Christ reigns by his Spirit in its midst as he
sovereignly calls individuals together into the household of faith. What is required is that
household whose stones are not holy of themselves but only as they are built up together
and given form by Christ, who is lord over the house, stones whose testimony of Christ
must be formed by the building that gives them shape, the church.
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However much individualism may be a societal problem, the church must address it as
church, hopefully to begin to heal it not only among Baptists but in the wider Church and
society. “Man never attains to a true self-knowledge until he (has) contemplated the face
of God”1: even sociological problems have a theological response. This in itself presents
a problem for Baptists, as we are not a people given to deep theological reflection. The
very pragmatism that has produced such rapid expansion of the Baptist movement is one
of the obstacles that now make it difficult for us to consider our ways.
The problem is not one of abstract theology. Baptist roots are Reformed, leavened with a
good dose of modern Evangelicalism. Conceptual change at the theological level, while
necessary, is unlikely to be effective without concrete implementation that reflects in a
recognisable form this necessary change. This is all the more crucial for a people without
a theology markedly distinct from other Protestants, but which is not only reflected in but
sourced from the form of the church, apples of gold in settings of silver. The holy,
gathered community is no add-on to Baptist faith and practice. To lose this is to mortally
wound the Baptist expression of the obedience of faith. However, it is precisely this that
current Baptist practice is encouraging.
The answer to the plague of hyper-individualism must locate salvation within the work of
Christ in the local church. If salvation has become for many Baptists primarily located in
the individual, alone or in society, in one’s understanding of the Bible, or in the
understanding of God one’s experience brings, it must be centred anew in Christ – his
work, both on the cross, and in his people, the church. Man and woman must be seen as
having proper meaning only in Christ, as God has taken them to himself together in
priestly service to Christ in the church.2 Only then can salvation be Christian, sufficiently
narrow to be the strait gate yet broad enough to glorify God in the liberation of the whole
human person, as part of his incipient redemption of all creation.
1 Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Vol. 1, 38. 2 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1, (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961), 98.
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4.1.1.1 How Great Salvation?
In the quest for salvation the question, “What must I do to be saved?”, and the quest have
come to be seen in individualistic terms, defined by the human subject who is now the
object of the faith. Salvation is now described popularly as a “personal relationship with
Jesus Christ” in which sincerity seems to have trumped substance in importance – how
one feels about having found one’s own answer to this eternal question is more important
than the correctness of the answer or even the matter of who posed the question to us in
the first place.
This means that salvation as understood by many modern Baptists is at once too broad
and too narrow. It has become defined too broadly in that it no longer merely deals with
one’s righteousness before God, with restoration to fellowship with him in union with
Christ, with freedom from fear of sin, death, and hell, with our release to participate in
God’s broader work of redeeming creation (Ro 8.19-21). It is now broadened to include
all of life - which in a sense is as it should be - but life as the modern self-directed
individual sees it, into which Christ is now judiciously incorporated where space and time
permit. Where Jesus Christ defines himself as “the life” (Jn 14.6), modern Baptists have
come to focus on the “more abundant” life (Jn 10.10) Jesus promised, all the while
presuming that our life outside of Christ has its own value prior to the improvement that
he pledges to bring.3
Salvation, in terms that the Scripture teaches and in which, until fairly recently, the
Church has taught it, defined by God’s requirements and actions, finding meaning in God
as he has taken men and women to himself in Christ, and in the eschatological
3 Strangely (and unknowingly, for certain), this thought echoes a strain of 17th century Puritan thought (e.g., Thomas Hooker (1586-1647), ‘Christ is marvellously ready to come, only he watcheth the time till your heart be ready to receive and entertain him’), William A. Speck and L. Billington, “Calvinism in Colonial North America, 1630-1715, in International Calvinism 1541-1715, ed. Menna Prestwich, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 260.
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significance of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, has become more modern
and far-reaching. It is more another investment in the individual’s overall wellness
portfolio, to be managed as seen fit. To be “justified by faith” is still the credo, but one
suspects that the modern articulus stantis aut cadensis is rather more whether I believe
Jesus can help me, not whether I cling to him as both question and answer of life and
righteousness before God. The individual is at the centre of the modern definition of the
work of God in Christ, as is perceived to be the case in all our other dealings in modern
society.
At the same time, salvation is viewed too narrowly. To fit into the portfolio so as not to
crowd out the other investments, salvation must be trimmed so it comprises only the
spiritual – its demands on conduct and of submission in service to others and to God
above all make it unwieldy and unmanageable as well as distressingly mundane. Thus
salvation is transformed into the inner renovation of the individual, perhaps even the
release of the divine within. Now quite reasonably adjusted to fit while remaining
suitably inspiring, it can contribute to all else that we find important in life and yield that
more abundant life. The work of God in Christ, so appropriate to my situation, is divested
of any cosmic significance that surpasses the individual. A too narrow salvation is
matched to a too broadly defined existence.
Thompson identifies the main theological problem underlying this as a shift to
anthropocentrism in Baptist thought, a major result of which is individualism.4 This
manifests itself in a largely unspoken “ontotheology” which sees God and his creation
univocally, an underlying similarity, a “metaphysical monism” existing by which God
becomes a “presence,” somehow controllable.5 Such anthropology emphasises the “God-
like” part of the person. In this, modern thought eerily resembles the pre-Reformation
medieval anthropology against which Luther reacted so vigorously. Thompson’s analysis
4 Thompson, Toward Baptist Ecclesiology, 330. 5 Ibid., 332.
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echoes that of Bloom and Lee,6 who see in Protestantism in general (and for Bloom, in
Baptist practice in particular) a strong Gnosticism in which God and man are united on
the spiritual continuum.
4.1.1.2 Blind Guides of the Blind
Dominating such a view is the individual, the centre and self-locating reference of God’s
work. This would seem merely to reflect the classic Enlightenment focus on the self, and
certainly does owe much to its influence. However, Harvey has identified the root of this
problem as a long-standing false disestablishment of the Church – the settlement in
Babylon which we developed in the previous chapter - which, while liberating it from
political control, has isolated religion from the world, giving it freedom in a gilded cage
while isolating the individual from the Church. It is society that now calls the tune – the
Church is helpless to confront it, for it now exists as a gathering of semi-autonomous
individuals, not an organic whole, and its stories and definition of reality are taken
uncritically from the world. Liberated from political and ecclesial control, our only
narrative becomes that of liberal, Western democracy defined by the norms of modern
technique, which we no longer have means to critique.7
As galling as it may be for Baptists who see ourselves as radically different from State
Churches, the problem of establishment may have caught up to even this Free Church; for
ironically, the aforementioned disestablishment leads to a de facto re-establishment, with
the Church as the ideological hand-maid to the secular society. Backus’ view of the
Church-State compact as Anti-Christ may represent a truth come into its own, for culture
6 Bloom, 195, and Philip J. Lee. 7 Barry Harvey notes, “Broadly put, the aim of the modern project has been to liberate us from any story that we did not choose for ourselves, whether it came from family, country, village, or church. We were to be set free from the authority of any shared past to author our own individual stories...Proponents of this social order failed to see, however, "that this also is a story ... imposed upon us by the culture into which we were born." Barry Harvey, “Where Then Do We Stand? Baptists, History, and Authority,” PRSt 29.4 (Winter 2002): 364-5.
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is certainly not neutral or innocent of spiritual malice. It, too, is among the principalities
and powers that the Church is to address with the manifold wisdom of God (Eph 3.10).
Yoder’s view that after Constantine Christians had to “believe against the evidence,” not
experience, “that there existed a believing church,” 8 now may be replicated amongst
modern Christians who believe neither the State nor the Church, but only the self.
Reformation secularisation and the implicit identification of objective power and
meaning with the State combine to permit each vocation to become its own norm.
Extended, this encourages individuals to become their own norm – but as dictated by
society. Even the apparent withdrawal of conservative Baptists from participation in
society is just that: apparent. Inwardly, one declares oneself apart from society;
outwardly, where one’s treasure is truly laid up, one identifies with the society – its
myths and stories. This cripples the Church, as we are hobbled by hypocrisy – we are
neither for the Church nor for our society and are forced, in a sense, to live a lie.
This is not a function of any particular political system – all are inherently similar in
seeking to determine the worth of the individual and to construct a seamless worldview.9
Modern society, all-encompassing whatever the flavour of its political philosophy, brooks
no pretenders to this particular magisterial throne, and a church of individuals no longer
has the language to question why this is wrong, for as individuals what they now share is
the narrative constructed by society. That this narrative appears to favour the autonomous
individual only exacerbates the problem.
8 Yoder, 57. 9 “Essentially, for instance, Communist society is based on the same facts as Capitalist society: and at bottom, the USSR obey the same rules as the USA. Man is no more free on the one side than the other; he is simply used for production in different ways.” Jacques Ellul, Presence of the Kingdom (New York: Seabury Press, 1967), 36.
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4.1.1.3 Rest in Pieces
The church must view herself and our world differently if she is to speak for Christ to the
world. This is a world that dismembers people: we as individuals have been fooled into
thinking that as reasoning beings we can assess in a detached manner what is right and
what is wrong, what is profitable and what is not. However, it is the world which has
been doing this for us and to us – and we are now weighed and measured on the basis of
our usefulness, our profitability, even as we’ve come to weigh life on the basis of its
usefulness. Detached from any grander meaning we permit ourselves to be re-inserted
where we might best serve, and there our worth is measured, based on our performance.
Thus we have sought to distinguish good from evil on our own as our parents first sought
to do in the Garden. This is not unrelated to modern thought – but it is not individualism
on its own that has brought this to pass, rather a spiritual blindness and accommodation to
the spirit of the age; we are, in Jacques Ellul’s words, Les nouveaux possédés. The god of
this age acts not only to blind us to Christ, but to our own state; we consequently are
content to pursue a lesser glory, which ultimately is no glory at all.
This dismemberment rules out of bounds any work of Christ beyond the individual, for as
dictated by society each individual’s priorities, dreams, and goals vary from another’s –
not in content, today less so than ever - but in application. We compete, life being a zero-
sum gain. One can almost see oneself standing in the Garden as Adam and Eve are
confronted by God and responding as they have acted, selfishly and individualistically.
Facing God, they see themselves atomistically, both masters and victims, alone. Sicut
Deus, the individual sees God as competition – as we are two beings on the same spiritual
continuum his gain must be my loss. The concept of Christ having renewed creation,
having made one new person in himself in terms of forming a people, not an individual,
after his image, a spiritual house and dwelling for the Spirit instead of individual spiritual
rocks in which the Spirit dwells to their individual benefit, is lost. With it also fades the
objective nature of the reconciliation wrought in Christ’s death and resurrection: the
individual’s subjective understanding of salvation, given its form and language by
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society, has priority over God’s redemption of the creation by the death and resurrection
of the One through whom he created it.
We are taught to establish our own individual needs and goals, all the while really having
them dictated to us. But these are not cooperative goals; or where they are, they require
the subjugation of all individuality to the goal of production and consumption, in
whatever coin these may be defined.10 This does not eliminate spirituality, Christ, or
salvation from our language – they simply become additional elements, re-defined so as
to fit into the total person we seek and are being directed to build. This is a complete re-
imaging of the language of Zion. Religion has its own sphere, properly protected from
society and exercised freely, within bounds; it has its own worldview which one may
hold, in the place and form assigned to it. But it must know that place and keep to it, and
we are happy to do so, rendering its language impotent. Ironically, such individualism
serves to snuff out true individuality.
The concern for personal salvation abides. However, this becomes merely a type of a
generic salvation – personal self-realisation enabled by some outward power we’ve
managed to internalise. Its effects are kept properly contextualised; any belief being
acceptable as long as it does not insist that the believer reject the accommodation society
has demanded or deny the fealty it is owed. The new birth becomes a heart transplant
which can grow and prosper within the individual rather than a translation of that
individual into the kingdom of the Son (Col 1.13), which has a people visibly manifest as
the church. The kingdom is in our midst because it is an internal, personal transformation
rather than the presence of the reigning Christ in the midst of his people. The candlestick
is not that placed by the Lord of the Church, but is held by individuals, “you in your
small corner, and I in mine.”
10 B Harvey, “Where, Then, Do We Stand?”: 367.
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Thus while one might surmise that personal sanctification no longer has the same priority
in an age where God is no longer viewed as being particularly menacing but rather more
benevolent and concerned with our personal happiness while refraining from judgement,
where the concept of condemnation to hell for unrighteousness and unbelief is seen not to
be so much horrific as unfair, undemocratic, and thus largely unfathomable - we remain
nonetheless very concerned about our progress, happiness, and security as individuals.
That the content may have shifted does not mean that individuals do not still seek
security and self-actualisation. Our “heart is (still) restless, until it repose in Thee.”11 We
can thus argue that sanctification is still very much on the minds of individual Christians
– it has simply been redefined. Its quest, however, isolates.
It is not so much the voluntarism integral to Baptist ecclesiology per se, the obedient
reflection and expression in the individual of the sovereign election of God in salvation,
that has brought us to this pass – it is voluntarism as perceived as the legitimate
expression of self-directed reasoning individuals finding themselves in God and God in
them that is strangling the expression of the faith, which is seen to be a good in itself. The
gospel and its life-giving power in Christ become reinterpreted in individual terms,
whether we realise it or not – God narrows to the scope of the individual, or is dictated to
and channelled by the society in which we live. Either way, this is no longer the faith
once delivered to the saints, for either I or society determines what faith is, and what
makes a saint.
Freeman and the others who would critique the foundationalism of both liberal and
conservative make a strong point here.12 There is no negative feedback loop, only a
forward positive loop that accentuates the wildly gyrating orbit of a soteriology that’s
departed from its centre, Christ – “Turning and turning in the widening gyre the falcon
cannot hear the falconer; things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”13
11 Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine (London: Dent, 1939), 1. 12 Freeman, “Can Baptist Theology be Revisioned?,” 290. 13 William B Yeats, quoted by David Wells, No Place for Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 95.
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4.2 The Answer
The answer to the problem of sin and what I must do to be saved must come from the
community that forms its members even as they form it. Yet in order not to become
simply a subset of a greater secular society, this community must be one drawn together
intentionally from the outside by an objective Saviour for an objective purpose (Jn 15.16;
Eph 2.10; Tt 2.14). Any solution must be faithful to the calling of the church to represent
the Lord in his world, to form the saints, and to proclaim repentance and salvation in
Jesus Christ. It must not simply address the problem of effectiveness – it must start with
God in Christ, with reality and humanity as defined by God’s Word and sovereign action.
Salvation as the accomplished work of God in Christ and not a theory of deliverance
requires that its outworking and our conformity to Christ take on physical manifestation –
it is not enough to study salvation, it must be lived. A reconnection must be made
between voluntarism and individual spirituality on the one hand and the gathered church
and her ordinances on the other – the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers is key in
establishing this.
This is the emphasis behind the re-membering that Thompson and Harvey advocate.
Remembering through re-enactment in Word, sacrament, and discipline brings to the
present God’s works of the past. But this must move beyond mere liturgical exercise – it
must encompass the entire life of the individual in community, not just personal piety but
corporate practice with structure, which relies upon others, serves others, and above all
moves in and from Christ. This is crucial in a movement where the focus has come to rest
on individual study of God’s past and finished acts of yesterday as recorded in the Bible
for personal enlightenment and advancement today. God is dangerously inactive now,
save in a tamed Holy Spirit who resonates with our enlightened souls. Jesus has
accomplished a past payment and is now available as life guide, somehow present in each
of us by his Spirit, detached and individual. To counteract this approach the church must
instead re-member people as she remembers God. She must give them a place where their
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value is that determined by God our Creator, who has sent his Son to redeem his creation;
where individuality is prized as the expression of the image of God in each, even as each
is joined in the high calling of participating in God’s ongoing redemption of creation;
where God is still active in his people, God not only of past or future but of today.
The human concern for salvation is at the root of the problem. It is not merely that it is
now viewed too individualistically and thus in an atomised fashion, but that it is no
longer “so great salvation” (Heb 2.3). It is not only defined in individualistic pietistic
terms and thus amenable to a spiritualising that has no effect on conduct, but in being so
restricted it is no longer believable. The god it reflects is too small to be God and the
world and the people in which it is lived out far too benign to be in need of his salvation.
To see God’s great work of redemption and his new creation in the individual alone is to
damn with faint praise. The offence of the race is not just individual but has brought the
entire creation to ruin – thus salvation will encompass not just the individual, or
individuals, but the creation. The offence of the race is not merely in the past, and been
dealt with in the past, but is ongoing – and so is our salvation. Salvation is Christ’s
making of the one new person (Ga 3.28; Eph 2.14-16), not just new individuals, for
which the entire creation groans (Ro 8.19-22). It is this that the Church must convey –
else our God is too small, for us and for the world that yet opposes him and his people. It
is this that priesthood must – and can - recover for the Church.
4.3 Priesthood: Principles
For Baptists as for most other Protestants, the concept of the “priesthood of all believers”
is rooted largely in a reaction against the institutional priesthood of the Roman Catholic
Church and not in a disinterested interpretation of the Scriptures.14 Luther led the way in
the Protestant understanding of this doctrine in declaring that every Christian was a priest
14 Bulley argues that a similar reaction against Judaism may account for the lack of emphasis on the general priesthood in the Apostolic Fathers. Colin J Bulley, The Priesthood of Some Believers (Waynesboro: Paternoster, 2000), 150.
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unto God by virtue of baptism,15 picking up an idea found in the early Fathers.16 Central
to his concern was not individual expression as much as the salvific efficacy of the
Church, which Luther feared was depriving Christians of grace, not offering it to them.
But if all are priests, all have access to grace, for God offers it to all, any person’s work
being an acceptable vehicle through which God could work.17
Though perhaps not as prominent in Calvin’s thought as it was in Luther’s, priesthood
was an important element in his understanding of how the Christian was to serve and
glorify God. Christ was the sole Priest; however, as joined with him in his death, all
believers are admitted to the priesthood. It is in Christ alone that we, “being polluted,”
can exercise this ministry.18 As Eastwood points out, Calvin sees priesthood as a function
of election.19
The English Puritan Thomas Cartwright expressed his understanding of the believer’s
priesthood in similar terms, stressing the Headship of Christ as the source of a Christian’s
priestly ministry. Eastwood points out that, far from what would follow in the
understanding of priesthood as expressive of the individual’s dignity, Cartwright found
priesthood as a function of Christ’s Headship to reduce all to the same guiltiness before
God, the same need of salvation. The Church’s role was to render believers obedient to
him.20
Yarnell points out that when the Second London Confession adopted the Westminster
Confession as the basis of its proclamation and ecclesiology, Calvin’s triplex munus
Christi (present also in the First London Confession) was added, by which Christ was
15 Martin Luther, Babylonian Captivity of the Church, http://www.lutherdansk.dk/Web-Babylonian Captivitate/Martin Luther.htm (accessed 16 August 2011), 7.9. 16 John H Elliott, The Elect and the Holy: An Exegetical Examination of 1 Peter 2:4-10 and the Phrase βασίλειον ἱεράτευµα (Leiden: EJ Brill, 1966), 3. 17 Cyril Eastwood, The Priesthood of All Believers (Minneapolis: Augsburg Press, 1962), 12. 18 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, II.xv.6. 19 Eastwood, The Priesthood of All Believers, 72. 20 Ibid., 134-135.
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acknowledged as Prophet, Priest, and King of his spiritual kingdom, the Church.21 This
linked the congregation’s priesthood to Christ, not to the Church or clergy as institution.
What these conceptions did share, however, was an understanding of the contingent,
corporate nature of priesthood. That the concept of the priesthood of all believers does
not have as much renown among the Reformed, for example, is no doubt due to their
understanding that it pointed to Christ, and its power resided in him. It was not a stand-
alone doctrine, nor did it say near as much about the believer as it did about Christ. With
Eastwood, Yarnell identifies this ecclesiology as being a function of the Reformed
understanding of election.
However, the concept has come to be seen in Baptist circles primarily as an honorific – a
way of expressing and re-inforcing that truth held to be self-evident, the soul competency
of the believer, the authority of the individual to represent God and to approach him on
one’s own. Indeed, former SBC president Herschel Hobbs, in defending the preamble to
the 2000 revision of the Baptist Faith and Message (BF&M), appealed to the priesthood
of believers as establishing soul competency in asserting that the “faith statement” could
not function as a creed as this would violate individual conscience.22 When thought of at
all in modern Baptist circles, priesthood is often viewed in individual terms – the
priesthood of the believer, instead of all believers, as Newton points out.23 However, the
references in the New Testament are always to a corporate priesthood, as the Reformers
also understood:24 the word priest (ἱερεύs) is used nowhere in the New Testament to refer
to officers – thus individuals - in the church.25 Citing Althaus’s The Theology of Martin
Luther, George points out that the current focus on the individual’s soul competency (he
would find Calvin to hold to a soul incompetency) is quite unlike what Luther
21 Yarnell, “Congregational Priesthood”: 135. 22 Pitts: 41. 23 Newton, 152. 24 Timothy George, “The Priesthood of All Believers and The Quest for Theological Integrity,” Criswell Theological Review 3.2 (1989): 291. 25 Hans Küng, The Church (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1965), 364.
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envisaged.26 He also highlights the difference between “soul competency” and the
priesthood of all believers,27 the former dealing with a universal human condition and
related to our creation in the image of God28 – more responsibility than right – the latter,
with the calling of the elect of God.
In the New Testament texts dealing with priesthood, both Christ’s and that of his people,
his priestly service is significantly differentiated from ours, in type as well as in value. It
is not only for its undemocratic spirit or even its questionable scriptural underpinnings
that Baptists condemn an institutional understanding of the Church and its priesthood; it
is also because it is seen to make of itself an idol, appropriating the rights and privileges
which alone are Christ’s in presuming a likeness between Christ and the Church. Oddly
enough, this is an institutional version of what many modern Baptists presume of the
individual level: that, to quote the Conciliarist theologian Jean Gerson, “Our becoming
like God is the cause of our union with him.”29 Institutional priesthood may seek to infuse
the grace which “qualitatively conforms human to divine being;”30 but modern
individualism presumes this conformity by right of being. Thus one suspects in objecting
to priesthood as a concept on this basis, Baptist protest rather too much.
26 “Luther never understands the priesthood of all believers merely in the sense of the Christian's freedom to stand in a direct relationship to God without a human mediator. Rather he constantly emphasizes the Christian's evangelical authority to come before God on behalf of the brethren and also of the world. The universal priesthood expresses not religious individualism but its exact opposite, the reality of the congregation as a community.” T George, “The Priesthood of All Believers and the Quest for Theological Integrity”: 292. 27 “Soul compentency means thus that every individual is responsible to God…Priesthood applies only to those who, through repentance and faith, have been admitted into the covenant of grace and, consequently, have been made participants in the priestly ministry of their Mediator, Jesus Christ.” T George, “The Priesthood of All Believers,” in The People of God: Essays on the Believers’ Church, P Bardon and DS Dockery, Eds. (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1991), 86. 28 John S Hammett, Biblical Foundations for Baptist Churches: A Contemporary Ecclesiology (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2005), 46. 29 Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform, 1250-1550 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 242. 30 Ibid.
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4.3.1 Principal Passages
The term “priesthood” is common in the Old Testament, being found over 700 times. It
refers primarily to the office of the priest (kōhēn). The etymology of the term is obscure,
though it signifies “priest” in several Ancient Near Eastern languages.31 The concept of
the priestly office developed gradually. There was no explicit priesthood in the
patriarchal period, the heads of families or tribal elders having performed the ritual
functions. With the coming of sanctuaries came the establishment of a group to “guard”
or “keep” them. Early on, the primary function of the priests was oracular (Jdg 18.15; 1
Sa 23.2; 1 Kg 20.13ff),32 as seen in the use of Urim and Thummim (Nu 27.21). From the
time of the establishment of the monarchy the priests function as teachers, and are
castigated for failing to do so properly (Jer 2.8; Hos 8.12; Mic 3.11). “The various
priestly duties share the common basis of mediation: in oracles and instruction, the priest
represents God to the people; in sacrifice and intercession, he represents the people to
God.”33 Constant holiness and purity were important requirements of the priest (Lev
21.6ff). The relationship between kings and the priesthood is distinguished in Israel’s
practice. Unique in this among its neighbours, Israel’s king never claimed to be a priest.34
Though predating the monarchy, the priesthood served it, establishing and supporting the
monarch,35 and in turn being promoted by godly kings. The priesthood served to pass on
the tradition and to bear witness to God’s dealings with Israel.36
The key text for the understanding of priesthood that came to the fore in the Reformation
was 1 Pe 2.5-9, echoing Ex 19.6. Priesthood here is more office and ministry - the
proclamation and administration of the means of grace - than an essence or status.37 In his
examination, Elliott challenges the widely held understanding that Christian priesthood
31 Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, eds. G. Johannes Botterweck, Helmer Ringgren, and Heinz-Josef Fabry, Vol VII, (Grand Rapids: Wm B Eerdmans, 1995), s.v. “kōhēn.” 32 Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, s.v. “kōhēn.” 33 Ibid. 34 Where the king presumed to do so, such conduct was harshly punished, 1 Sa 13.9-14; 2 Chr 26.16-23. 35 Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, s.v. “kōhēn.” 36 Ibid. 37 Elliott, 2.
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devolves from Christ’s priesthood38 – the Church participating in the priesthood of her
head. He maintains that Christ’s priesthood is developed according to the Levitical model
whereas the priesthood of the believer relates to Ex 19.6, the “Exodus formula” (EF).
Disputing the oft-cited support found in 1 Pe 2.4-10 he finds the Apostle to make no
connection between Christ’s priesthood and the general priesthood of believers.39
However, it should be noted that these verses incorporate Psa 118.22, Isa 28.16, Ex 19.6,
Ho 2.23, and refer the living stones to the one stone. This is a reflection of Christ and an
association with him as the cornerstone (Eph 2.20), thus one cannot rule out a degree of
identification in this passage. The broader implications of priesthood for the Church as
members of the Body of Christ must also imply their relationship, in some organic sense,
to their head (Ro 12.4ff; 1 Co 12.1ff; Eph 4.1-8); however, this does not imply a share in
the actual priestly efficacy of Christ’s work or Person. Examination of the Letter to the
Hebrews seems to make clear that the exercise, if not the institution of the priesthood of
believers, is defined by Christ’s priesthood, while not an extension of it. The early
Church understanding of the disciples as “Levitical” stemmed from their utter
dependence upon God,40 not from any sacrificial role they were seen to share with Christ.
This notwithstanding, Elliott’s analysis brings an important perspective to the assumed
understanding of priesthood derived from the 1 Peter passage and brings to the fore the
dominant aspect of the Christian’s priesthood, that of the eschatological proclamation of
the kingdom. The identification of Christians with Israel (1 Pe 2.10) represents the
unfolding of an eschatological event.41 “Spiritual sacrifices” refers to the Church’s
responsibility towards the world, the one-way mediation of God’s will to all that is not
Church42 - not to Levitical activity by the Church. This reflects God’s election of a people
to represent him in the world and the significance of the existence of that people – the
coming of the end of the ages. It provides a corporate and eschatological significance to
the existence of the Church often absent in Baptist thought.
38 Elliott, 5. 39 Ibid., 220. 40 Bulley, 157. 41 Elliott, 220. 42 Ibid., 221.
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Far from speaking with one uniform voice, Elliott finds the New Testament to view
priesthood in two primary modes – that of Levitical sacrificer and that of the People of
God.43 Comparing 1 Peter to Hebrews, the latter focuses far more on the priesthood of the
believer as expressed in cultic imagery, in which Christ is the High Priest leading the
priestly people in approach and worship, while the former depicts it as a reflection of the
election of the People of God. Passages from Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12, and
Ephesians 4 seem rather to bridge the gap between the two, and reflect not a priestly
status shared between Christ and the Church but a Spirit-enabled ministry of service that
has its cohesiveness in the Church’s head.
Elliott’s conclusion about the teachings of 1 Pe 2.4-10 is that priesthood is not the central
idea of the text but an expression of the election of the People of God for service. The
focus, as in other NT passages such as Rev 1.5 and 5.10, is on the extent of the
significance of salvation in Christ, not on the rights and privileges of the believer. Indeed,
drawing on the principal passage that informs these, Ex 19.6, he finds to be key the
proper interpretation of the terms found in both there and 1 Pe 2.5,9, priesthood
(ἱεράτευµα) and kingdom (βασίλειον). Examining their use in both biblical and
contemporary Greek writing, he maintains that there is in these passages, unlike in Isa
61.6, no understanding of the believer’s priesthood as at all mediatory or sacerdotal –
though even there, a hierarchical priesthood is not in view.44
4.3.2 Priesthood as Particular Peoplehood
The EF had particular significance in the inter-testamental period during the occupation
of Israel and dispersion of the Jews, who found in it the concern for the historical
43 Elliott, 3. 44 Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Vol III, eds. G Kittel and G Friedrich (Grand Rapids: Wm B Eerdmans, 1976), s.v. “ἱεράτευµα.”
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continuum and for their continuing relationship with God.45 This Elliott finds echoed in 1
Peter 2, and in Rev 1.6 and 5.10. As the text form was adapted as required by the
situation to emphasise this aspect, it is in this context that the concept of priesthood must
be understood. Their election defines “the character and responsibility of the
eschatological People of God, her bond with Jesus Christ, her infusion with the Spirit, her
holiness, and her task of witness…;” the derivative concept of priesthood serves to
express this.46
The term used to describe the priesthood, ἱεράτευµα, designates Israel as a corporate
body of people, the private and special possession of God. The two basic characteristics
of this community are its electedness (1 Pe 1.1-2) and holiness (1 Pe 1.15-16), as seen by
its use in Ex 19.6 (LXX). The term βασίλειον, translated often as an adjective, royal,
which defines the priesthood, in fact designates the people not so much as royalty -
having right to rule - but as a royal residence. The people are neither an independent
priesthood nor gifted with royal status but are a priesthood serving God and royal only
insomuch as they represent the dwelling place of the Almighty. It is in this context that
the call to holiness is situated.
In his two volumes on the topic of the priesthood of the believer, Eastwood echoes many
of the same themes as Elliott. A people, Israel, are chosen to be a priesthood
characterised by sacrificial service, to be presented in the consummation before God as a
kingdom of priests.47 Election, servanthood, and eschatology are central elements in the
Old Testament presentation of the concept of priesthood. The election of grace
determines the priesthood, setting the context for its service. It is the means, not the
meaning, of revelation: “I shall be to you a God” (Ex 6.7) precedes logically “Ye shall be
to me a peculiar treasure…a kingdom of priests” (Ex 19.5-6). God’s election of his
people is the means by which he will reveal himself in the world – even in their rebellion
45 Elliott, 127. 46 Ibid., 219. 47 Cyril Eastwood, The Priesthood of the Faithful: An Investigation of the Doctrine from Biblical times to the Reformation (London: Epworth Press, 1963), 1.
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– and not the end goal of the salvation of a particular group. Consequently, the Old
Testament recounts the history of Israel realising her election, or perhaps more
accurately, failing to do so. Election involved and implied sanctification48 – separation
from the surrounding cultures unto God.
As the elect of God, Israel was called into a conditional covenant, participation in which
is contingent upon obedience to the Ten Words (Jer 7.21-23). Here we witness the ground
of the tension between unconditionality and conditionality evident in the Puritan
understanding of salvation in the early 1600s, between Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants
as the template of God’s dealing with his elect, which entered so prominently into their
understanding of the church covenant as both reflecting and working out God’s
election.49 The Old Covenant as expressed in the Ten Words is no individualistic spiritual
checklist but the way of God with his people, and their way with him and one another.
The elect as a priesthood – Elliott prefers the term “body of priests” or those engaged
together in priestly activity – and a royal residence are not royalty themselves or priests
individually. Their priesthood reflects no competency or independence of the soul. Nor is
their priesthood to be seen primarily in the Old Testament sense of a sacrificing
company, though Hebrews will bring out this element in a particular New Testament
sense. Emphasised rather is the subordination of the People of God to their electing and
reigning Sovereign. As a royal residence, chosen to be holy and to serve in a priestly
manner, the people’s priesthood cannot be understood in mere individual terms. As for
Israel, so for Peter the “formation, salvation, and sanctification of this community is an
eschatological salvific event.”50
The focal point is Jesus Christ – those who believe in and confess him as the elect and
precious one (1 Pe 2.4) are gathered as his elect people, becoming the possession of his
48 Eastwood, The Priesthood of the Faithful, 4. 49 Fiddes, Tracks and Traces, 25ff. 50 Elliott, 221.
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Spirit who transfigures the βασίλειον and the ἱεράτευµα into a household, a body of
priests in which he resides. The church is not such because it is a group of people, but
because it is a group elected to serve God as a priesthood. It is the purpose and the
service, not the people and their status, that makes the priesthood.
On election, Elliott cites Krister Stendahl: “Election in Christ not only constitutes a new
society; its meaning is to be found in the new society and not in the status of
individuals.”51 Election is collective and corporate, applicable only to a people. One
could even say that seeing its significance primarily in an individual sense refutes the true
meaning of election in its eschatological and redemptive guises. Elliott finds this
corporate sense consistent with the use of the terms ἱεράτευµα and βασίλειον found in
Ex 19.6 and in contemporary Greek literature. Both are substantives in his understanding,
not adjectives, and are applicable only to the community. Each believer is therefore not a
king or priest, but functions as part of the aggregate, the body of priests and royal
residence of God.
Ιεράτευµα connotes activity as well as corporateness – that of offering spiritual
sacrifices through Christ. These sacrifices are not sacramental in nature – they are the
activity of bearing witness to the world (1 Pe 2.9-10), the proclamation of the word of
salvation and mercy. As activity, the term points to the holiness of the community’s life.
Ιεράτευµα is not priesthood as a guild, but more “a body of functioning priests.”52
Where perhaps Elliott’s interpretation misses somewhat is in his rejection of any regal
role for the priesthood as it is presented in Rev 1.5-6 and 5.10. There is there a sense in
which the People of God as a royal priesthood is to rule – not on their own dignity, but as
representatives of Christ and as a foretaste of the coming kingdom. This also brings Isa
61.6 and other Old Testament passages to bear in prophesying the Church’s priesthood,
not as a separate caste but as a people. This rule is to be absolutely different from rule in
the world – but it is rule nonetheless. In rejecting the elevation of the Church to a position
51 Elliott, 222. 52 Ibid., 69.
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of dignity and power one goes too far in rejecting the responsibility to portray the reign of
Christ in the Church’s activity. We are hid with God in Christ (Col 3.4) and shall reign
with him (2 Tm 2.10ff). The portrayal of the vindication of the martyrs in the Book of
Revelation (Rev 6.10-11; 19.1-2; 20.4), which cannot be separated from the presentation
of the kingdom of priests (Rev 1.6; 5.10), makes it clear that the exercise of the
priesthood must entail a form of rule. It is a royal priesthood, not merely in the sense of
being a dwelling for the King – it exercises in him, for his glory and for the sake of
others, kingdom rule. This is integral to the image of God in humanity (Gen 1.28-30) and
is the inheritance of the saints (Psa 149.9).
4.3.3 Priesthood as Presenters
Scholer makes the case that Hebrews, while teaching about the priesthood of Christ in
Levitical terms as the One who is sufficient to displace the Old Covenant priesthood, also
describes how that relates to the Church. The term “approach,” which occurs so
frequently in this letter, designates worshippers as a priestly gathering whose approach to
God is enabled by the work of the High Priest who has entered into the Holy of Holies. It
is worship and prayer that are the spiritual offerings of the priesthood.
We approach the throne of grace (Heb 4.16) with the offering of a “sacrifice of praise to
God…,” that is, “the fruit of our lips giving thanks to his name (Heb 13.15),” though
“reconciliation with God and access to his heavenly throne do not depend on such
activities.”53 These are not “sacrifices of external gifts,” however, but “sacrifices of
oneself…sacrifice is a concrete act of witness and confession of faith, as well as a service
of love.”54 This echoes similar statements in the Didache,55 and situates priesthood in
both the assembly as exercised in corporate worship, in the world in terms of
53 John M Scholer, Proleptic Priests – Priesthood in the Epistle to the Hebrews (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1991), 205. 54 Küng, 369. 55 Bulley, 144.
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proclamation and witness, and as service to others in both. Confession of the faith, which
resides in “the Apostle and High Priest of our profession,” is made both individually and
in the assembly. The people are strictly differentiated from Christ in that he is the High
Priest who alone gives and is our access to the Holy of Holies. However, the church is
seen to function as a worshipping priesthood, exercising the “sacerdotal service to which
the consecrated of the new covenant are exhorted.”56
Important here is the view of the church as a worshipping community, not holy
individuals or wholly individual! The portrayal of the church as an assembly that
approaches in worship distances the concept of priesthood from one of individualism and
soul-sufficiency. This is a people who are enabled to draw near to God because the High
Priest, Jesus Christ, has entered the Holy of Holies. The church is a worshipping body
that does so by virtue of her Head.57 The church’s worship is properly and utterly
dependent on the merits and work of her Great High Priest, while at the same time the
practice of priesthood is situated in the sanctuary, in the worship of the assembly.
There is an important distinction to be made between the Old Covenant understanding of
a sacrificing priesthood in the Levitical sense and that priestly ministry accomplished by
Christ then reflected in the church. While 1 Peter 2 presents a central aspect of the New
Testament understanding of priesthood, in which no thought of objective sacrifice is
present, so does Hebrews – and the motifs both of the EF and of Levitical sacrificer must
be incorporated if Christian priesthood is to reflect accurately the biblical description of
our calling in Christ. In the single offering of Christ, the priesthood as an institution is
finished (Heb 10.14). There is no further atoning sacrifice to be offered and no priests to
offer them, both having been fulfilled in the one sacrifice of the Great High Priest.
56 Scholer, 108. 57 2nd London Confession: “The Lord Jesus Christ is the Head of the Church, in whom by the appointment of the Father, all power for the calling, institution, order, of Government of the Church, is invested in a supream & soveraigne manner…the Lord Jesus calleth out of the World unto himself…those that are given unto him by his Father…Those thus called he commandeth to walk together in…Churches; (they) do willingly consent to walk together according to the appointment of Christ…” (Ch XXVI.4-6), Lumpkin, 286.
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Neither does this New Testament priesthood have any mediatory role,58 the only mediator
between God and man being the man Christ Jesus (1 Tm 2.5), one greater than angels,
Moses, and the Levitical priesthood. “Since Christ is the unique high priest and mediator
between God and all men, all men who believe in him have immediate access to God
through him.”59
Thus the sacrifices of this priesthood of all believers must be defined quite carefully to
avoid either replicating an Old Covenant priesthood that has ended in Christ or seeking to
replace Christ in his sole effective atonement and mediation. The ministry given the
Church is that of pleading with others to be reconciled to God (2 Co 5.18b, 20) – but
Christ alone reconciles (2 Co 5.18a, 19, 21). These sacrifices can only emulate that of
Christ’s to the degree given us to emulate – the sacrifice of self, first to God then to
others, in the service of the life we now live in Christ, acceptable to God only in him.
While the Old Covenant priesthood offered something outside of itself, Christ the Great
High Priest offered not something, but himself. In following this, the priesthood’s
sacrifice is act, not object, and self. Priesthood is the exercise of a ministry of active
service, not a dignity conferred on an individual or people by virtue of their ability to
mediate through the offering of an object.
This means that the care must be exercised in identifying the church’s priesthood as an
extension of Christ’s. It certainly is legitimate to do so, and its ministry points to Christ;
but if his self-offering is all sufficient, the priesthood of believers has nothing to offer that
accomplishes anything before God. The sacrifice is of self, for whom Christ has already
paid in his own self-sacrifice. Its goal is doxological and kerygmatic.
That the priestly function as portrayed in Hebrews cannot be separated from the imagery
of tabernacle worship and of secular life should reinforce that while the Father seeks
those who will worship him in spirit and in truth (Jn 4.24), spiritual worship without form 58 Küng, 368. 59 Ibid., 369.
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– and without Christ and others - is not acceptable and is indeed dangerous.60 Priesthood
ties the believer’s obedience both to formal worship and to the body. However, the
Lord’s presentation of his ministry as recorded in the Gospels centres not on the cult but
has a more prophetic aspect. Christ’s dealings with the religious establishment were
hardly complimentary; its purification or reform was not his aim, contrary to the goals of
other contemporary movements. The cleansing of the Temple court aimed not to restore
proper worship but to announce the beginning of the age in which the Gentiles would
come into the kingdom. The teaching on the tearing down of the Temple, to be replaced
with the resurrected Christ (Jn 2.13-21), does not promote an institutional priesthood or
the cult of the age but the drawing near of the kingdom of God (Mk 1.15). The Book of
Acts is similarly ambivalent toward cultic worship. The Church’s ministry must
reproduce this balance – prophetic over cultic.
4.3.4 Priesthood as Peripatetic: People of the Wild erness
The Letter to the Hebrews emphasises another aspect of the priestly people of God: they
persevere in the wilderness.61 The two contrasting images are those who disobeyed in the
wilderness (Heb 3.7ff) and those faithful who pressed on, even though they had not
received the promises (Hebrews 11). The church is those who continue to seek that city
“whose builder and maker is God,” who do not disobey but persevere. This people as
bearer of revelation are characterised by wandering and by “incorporation into the
fellowship of the People of God.”62
Ernst Käsemann uses Hebrews to point to the priestly nature of the church’s vocation
within the priesthood of our great High Priest, Christ. There, faith seizes on the promise,
the basis and the goal of the wandering of God’s people. The New Jerusalem of Hebrews
60 Thomas Grantham’s warning about the need for the “form of godliness” applies here as well, see Newman, 59. 61 Ernst Käsemann, The Wandering People of God (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing, 1984), 19. 62 Ibid., 20.
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12 is both the “primal datum” of their wandering and the “final datum” of their
inheritance.63 1 Peter describes the priestly calling of those “elect exiles of the
dispersion” (1 Pe 1.1, ESV). The wandering church is those who are in the priesthood.
Their spiritual house no more has earthly foundations than does Abraham’s continuing
city, certainly not in the surrounding society.
4.3.5 Law Before Liturgy
In its Old Testament origin, TF Torrance points out that priesthood is a whole body and
every member exercise, even when referred to in the breach, as it were (Nu 16.3). Each
head of family was to be a priest – to exercise individual responsibility within the
corporate body. Any sacerdotal elements were exercised at the lay level, initially. In its
eschatological fulfilment, the priesthood is seen as of the people and not hierarchical (Isa
61.6). Initially, it was conceived of as a didactic ministry; in Israel’s case only gradually
over time did it assume a sacrificial and mediatory function.64 However, the function of
the priesthood initially was to reveal God’s will to his elect people - to repeat what God
had said.65 The liturgy of the priesthood always pointed beyond itself to God – it never
acted upon him. The service of the tabernacle or Temple answers to God’s Word.
The manifestation of God’s glorious presence to Moses (Ex 34.1ff) was preceded by the
detailed instructions on the building of the tabernacle in which the priestly service was to
be undertaken. But the centrepiece of this service, given prior to the revelation of the
pattern for the construction of the tabernacle, lay inside the Ark of the Covenant: the
tables of the Law. Even the Temple would be constructed around the significance of
God’s dynamic Word – the priesthood only functioned within the covenant, in relation to
this Word. The Law of the God who had elected his people and then demanded of them
obedience lay at the centre of their worship. His gracious compassion and faithfulness are 63 Käsemann, 51. 64 TF Torrance, Royal Priesthood: A Theology of Ordained Ministry, 2nd Ed. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993), 22-23. 65 Ibid., 21.
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shown in the forgiveness of a stiff-necked people to whom he’d already given his Law
(Exodus 20). Forgiving, he shows his glory and proclaims his name, then again gives the
words of his covenant, the new tables, to Moses. Only then can a chastened Aaron, the
priest, serve – no tabernacle or anointing oil can supplant obedience to God’s Word and
presence. So the church as priesthood must have her Lord’s presence and his Word; the
priesthood cannot take it upon itself to offer to God according to its own lights, lest it
worship an idol. The Lord calls by his Word (Exodus 19), informs by his Law (Exodus
20), then anoints the priesthood (Exodus 30) so it can serve.
It is important in formulating a doctrine for the practice of the priesthood of all believers
in the church that the Old Testament foundation of the service be properly understood. It
is not desired to introduce a professional religious class into the local (or global) church.
Remembering how the institutional priesthood of the Old Covenant went so repeatedly
astray, becoming a class unto itself constantly prone to wander away from the Word of
God and become centred around ceremony and sanctuary, should direct the priesthood in
the Church to be Word-centred, responding to the leading of the Spirit. The priesthood as
an expression of peoplehood, not of professionalism, is what is required. The paucity of
references to the People of Israel as a priesthood, in contrast to the emphasis on the
Levitical priesthood in its distinct role and function, may be a reflection of how quickly
and thoroughly Israel failed to live up to its calling as a priestly people. Idolatry in the
Promised Land was certainly not limited to the forms and practices of native worship, the
Baals and groves and Asherah poles, but extended to the pagan understanding of religion
as well. The professionalization of the priesthood mirrors on the religious level what the
nations practised, just as the appointment of a king in place of God did on the political
level.66
66 McClendon points out, ‘All nations had priests – a class of sacral figures…Israel would not qualify herself by having these. Rather, her distinctive would be to serve as a priest-people, God’s mediator nation, a people in the interest of all peoples and in that regard holy…’, JW McClendon, Jr, Systematic Theology: Doctrine, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), 368. On the error of ascribing normative status to the monarchy in the OT and the role of such a hermeneutic to the later accommodation by the Church of the State’s role in her governance, see for example B Harvey, Can These Bones Live?, 97-101.
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Indeed, such professionalization may exacerbate the very problem of individualism that it
might be thought to diminish. People who find they have little voice in the fellowship
will in their disaffection turn to the private and inward practice of religion. This provides
the basis of the fears of such as Glenn Hinson, who finds professionalization as much or
more of a menace than the atomisation of the Church by individualism.67 The errors of
Israel regarding her priestly calling he would find echoed in modern Baptist practice,
leadership and interpreting the Word of God having been delegated to the professionals –
the theologians and the pastors. In his view this is itself an effect of individualism, as
there is no counterweight to the institution, disconnected individuals being unable to
balance its influence. The same professionalization, interpreted differently, is a major
theme in David Wells’ definition of modern Evangelical clergy as “disablers.”68
The identity of the Church presented in the New Testament portrays her as the
continuation of the People of God in the Old.69 The Church is the new community: she is
Israel (Ga 6.16), risen from dead (Ezk 37.1-14, cf. Eph 2.4-10). Even more in Eph 2.11ff
is the Church seen as a saved people, brought into the one new person, the one body
(2.17), the household of God (2.19), built together a Temple (2.21), a habitation (2.22) –
these all shape the church in the form of Christ. To be “in Christ” is not just mystical but
eschatological.70
On the ground of the New Covenant, the priesthood of believers idealised in the Old
Testament, seen there as being in the future (Ex 19.6; Psa 132.16; Isa 61.6), becomes
realised (1 Pe 2.9; Rev 1.6). 1 Peter 2, accumulating the kingly and priestly titles as the
description of the Church, sees eschatological realisation in the Church of Christ of the
prophecies of the people of God becoming “a priestly and kingly free nation” (Isa 61.6;
62.3).71 There is continuity in the New Covenant priesthood of the People of God with
67 E. Glenn Hinson, “Seeking a Suitable Spirituality in a Sect Becoming Catholic,” in Theological Educator, No 28 (Spr 1984): p 33-50. 68 Wells, 218f. 69 Eastwood, The Priesthood of the Faithful, 32. 70 Ibid., 33. 71 Küng, 372.
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that of the Old.72 Israel’s heritage and priesthood can only be claimed in the Redeemer
(Rev 1.6). Their failure to see him was linked with their failure to understand the purpose
of their election (Ro 9.32-33; 11.7-10). The elect People of God become, in Christ, by his
Incarnation and Atonement, the redeemed People of God. Israel as the Servant People of
God is recapitulated in Christ, who is at once the Suffering Servant and the anticipated
Messiah and Priest. The Church takes on this service as it has been transformed in Christ,
the people of the New Covenant emerging as a servant people, a kingdom and a
priesthood.73
All Christians are included in the rule and priesthood of Christ,74 a priesthood (Rev 5.9-
14) in that redemption by sacrifice has fashioned us as such, a kingdom as we exercise
rule over dominions under heaven. The slain Lamb reigns – thus as a kingdom and priests
we live and rule through self-sacrifice, not taking his power but his example. The
priesthood of all believers applies in concrete terms what God has already declared in
Christ to exist.
4.4 Priesthood: Implications and Applications
If the principle of priesthood is solidly rooted, Old Testament and New, in the biblical
call of God’s people to faithful service, what are the conceptual implications for Baptist
faith and understanding? What are the concrete applications of the Bible’s direction on
this concept in Baptist practice? We will proceed to attempt to answer these questions,
before dealing in our final chapter with those corrective manifestations that this should
produce in Baptist faith and obedience.
On the basis of the preceding, we may assert the following: The priesthood of all
believers can be defined as the congregation of the faithful as viewed in their vocation 72 Eastwood, The Priesthood of the Faithful, 26. 73 Ibid., 54. 74 Ibid., 36.
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from Christ to reveal God’s will to his elect people (2 Co 5.18-20; 1 Pe 2.9-10) and in
turn to present the sacrifice of praise and obedience to God from his grateful children (Ro
12.1; Heb 13.15). It is a corporate exercise (1 Co 12.7, 12-13) driven by and rooted in the
communal reception of the gospel in Word, sacrament, and discipline (1 Thess 2.13; 1 Co
10.16-17; Mt 18.15ff), yet undertaken by every individual together (1 Pe 2.4). It is an
extension of Christ’s priestly ministry (Mt 28.19-20; Jn 20.21), yet not a replacement for
it (Ex 33.15-16; Jn 15.5) or even particularly a continuation in type. It is exercised with
authority by those who reign (Rev 5.10), yet it is reigning with Christ based on his
sacrifice and victory (Rev 5.9, 12). It is pursued in view of the eschaton by those who
shall reign with Christ forever (2 Tm 2.12), yet entered into today by those whom he has
already made a kingdom and priests, who even now rule (Eph 2.6; Rev 1.6).
The priesthood is an organisation into which one is enrolled, constituted by external
authority for purposes greater than the organisation or the individual (Jn 15.16). It
requires that there be those set aside to have a distinct role and status in the community (2
Tm 2.2; Tt 1.5; 1 Pe 5.1-4). Constituted by and under authority, it is not a community
merely by the choice of its members, nor does the act of their corporate assembling give
it its essence (1 Co 11.17-20). Of itself, it offers nothing material to God nor does it
manipulate him – rather, it presents thank offerings to God. These constitute both its
worship and its formation. Its power lies not in its sacrifices or whatever gifts it may
bring but in its interpretation, presentation, and application of the Word of God under the
direction of the Spirit of Christ; in this, it is utterly dependent upon the God who is utterly
other.
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4.4.1 Conceptual Implications
4.4.1.1 Propriety
As has been argued above, Baptists essentially began as and in most part have remained
Reformed Protestants, with the exception of their ecclesiology – this ecclesiology,
expressive of the particular Baptist understanding of Reformed theology, is their
contribution to the life of the Church catholic, and where individualism in its abuse must
be confronted.
The characteristics that express the particular anthropology of the Baptists – the
importance of the individual, concern for human voluntarism, soul liberty, religious
freedom – were advanced to make possible a particular ecclesiology. The view that the
church was the arena for the expression of the freedom of the Lord Jesus Christ to save
and to rule, not so much for the individual, characterised the movement at its inception.
But as Baptists recognise the church far more as believers following Christ in the Spirit
than as institution, the definition of the local church must centre on the people who
compose it.
This understanding makes the priesthood the logical model to correspond to and to form
the Baptist understanding of the church. It minimises any sense of opera operandi, so
abhorrent to Protestantism;75 it emphasises the prior dynamic action of the Word of God
and the subservience of the church to God’s direction; it removes the possibility that God
75 Fiddes would argue that this concept needs to be re-visited by Protestants, its rejection being largely based on a misconception of the Roman Catholic use of the doctrine, Paul Fiddes, “Ex Opere Operato: Re-thinking a Historic Baptist Rejection,” in Baptist Sacramentalism 2, 219-238.
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is acted upon by the church; it maintains a clear demarcation between God and his
children.
The concept of priesthood plays to strength: the activism typical of Evangelicals and
Baptists alike and the ease – often untroubled by much profound reflection or self-
examination - with which they take on the ideas and ways of contemporary culture. This
advancing army knows its terrain and lives close to it. The theology of priesthood ties the
church to action, even as it is action that points away from itself. The priesthood is not a
holy society in itself, nor is it a contemplative society, but one of service.
But priesthood makes this an activism not of achievement but of involvement. It militates
against the Gnostic tendencies so near to the surface of Free Church piety.76 Our
reticence to situate God’s action in any material acts or substance, strange in a people that
confess so whole-heartedly the Incarnation, whose understanding of God is so axed upon
the personality of Christ, whose roots lie on farms and in tinker’s shops and not in the
manor or the academe, is met not with acts of sacramental manipulation or of good works
but of corporate involvement with body and presence as well as contemplative spirit in
the worship of the local church.
Priesthood addresses weakness: the egocentric nature of much of Baptist piety, a
distortion of a proper concern for the individual at the heart of the movement that,
improperly cultivated, has gone to seed. Dependent for its practice upon others and for its
order upon that which is external to us, it bids us look around at others, upward to Christ,
and outward to how Christ’s Church has interpreted her calling yesterday and today. It
situates the Christian way within the People of God and the Body of Christ. Authority is
contingent upon Christ, not the individual. Priesthood ties believers to an entity and
tradition greater than themselves, but not so much greater that it becomes abstract and
76 Curtis W Freeman, “To Feed Upon By Faith: Nourishment from the Lord’s Table,” in Baptist Sacramentalism, 204. Also, Steven R Harmon, “Why Baptist Catholicity, and By What Authority?,” Pro Ecclesia Vol XVIII, No 4: 386-7.
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theoretical. In laying the emphasis on service to Christ, not self-expression, the locus of
authority is placed outside of the individual believer, individual church, or pastor. This
requires a ressourcement that plumbs not only the past but the surrounding present.
Priesthood also firmly circumscribes the sphere of Christian action. Believers are holy
not for their own sake. Rather, they are holy because of Christ and live as such for him,
seeing holiness as a prerequisite for and result of corporate service, not as an individual
achievement or ticket into heaven. This holiness is not achieved but is both given
positionally and grown into conductually, as the Spirit according to the election by the
Father of those he foreknew sanctifies the church for obedience – service in holiness -
and sprinkling by the blood – salvation in Christ (1 Pe 1.2), forming believers in that for
which they were predestined – conformity to Christ (Ro 8.29).
Priesthood also establishes that the church has never arrived. As the priesthood in the
wilderness and in the Promised Land was to look forward, so the church, always on the
move, looks forward to the ultimate consummation of the reign of Christ. The preaching
of the Word presents a God who is not static, who must be followed “by faith, not by
sight” (2 Co 5.7). As manna in the wilderness, not as the final banqueting table of the
Lord, and especially not as the flesh pots of Egypt, the sacraments feed us that we might
move on. The Last Supper was not an end but a beginning, a departure and not an arrival;
the Lord and the disciples moved out to their appointed tasks, service in the New
Covenant struck in the blood of Christ. That the first act of service was one of betrayal
should remind us that it is by grace that God remains faithful (Jn 21.17; 2 Tm 2.12-13).
Our fellowship is a sign of that perfect communion which awaits God’s people in heaven,
but which has been inaugurated with far from perfect sinners – but each participation in
the hearing of the Word, the receiving of the sacraments, and the discipline of the
fellowship serves as a re-commissioning to service and mission.
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At the same time, priesthood establishes that the church is never lost. Evangelicals in
general and Baptists in particular are constantly on the lookout for the next new thing.
Reflecting a strength – the desire to know and interact with our culture – it also reflects
the perception that we trail the world, even as we tell ourselves we are above it. But the
priesthood that responds to her Master’s call is never lost. Though not having arrived, it
is never without the Shepherd to lead, and knows that the things of this world are passing
away.
As such, priesthood reinforces the idea that we must always be breaking camp. The pillar
of cloud has not settled over our land or economic and political system, not even over our
particular local fellowship or distinctive way of being the church, but leads us forward.
Those who did not accept God’s provision of the Promised Land were turned about and
fell in the wilderness (Heb 3.7ff). Neither that wilderness nor the land from which we’ve
emerged dictates reality: God can set a table in the wilderness even as he can part the
surging River Jordan. We must go forward with Christ, unwilling to proceed unless his
presence goes with us (Ex 33.15). There is no intermediate point of arrival that is itself
home, yet home does lie certainly ahead.
It is the tabernacle, not the temple, which is fashioned upon the pattern of heavenly things
(Heb 9.23) and thus could function as a type of Christ; transient, its construction is
always dependent on the Word of the living God. We hear the command to strike camp
and move forward in the order which the Lord has set forth (Nu 2.34), as we seek that
City “whose maker and builder is God”, from whence “we have received the pledge of
our faith, in that we sigh for her beauty while on our pilgrimage.”77 Knowing ourselves
not to be lost but in transit we will not be content to pitch the tabernacle at the nearest
convenient spot or to heed in hopelessness the reports of the disobedient spies in the land.
77 Augustine, City of God, Bk V, Ch 16 (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 205.
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4.4.1.2 Peoplehood and Priesthood
There exist a variety of images of the Church in the Scriptures: the Church as bride, Body
of Christ, servant, building, new Israel, flock, vine, field, priesthood. None of these alone
encompasses the complex relationship of the People of God with their Lord. Over the
centuries individual models have been separated out and held up as the sole form which
the church’s correspondence to Christ is to have, resulting in a church that progressively
needs less of Christ as she forms her own independent structure based upon whichever
model is the template for her development.78 The church can become a Procrustean bed
in which the Holy Spirit plays Theseus, only a guest and not Lord, and to which he is
expected to conform himself. As was the case with Procrustes, such an approach is
deadly to the living church.79
Perhaps the broadest term which describes the church is the People of God. This
continues an Old Covenant understanding of the congregation of believers, defining them
by virtue of God’s gracious election in Christ, not by what they do. The church seen as
the Body of Christ “gives expression in a pregnant and special manner to the peculiar
character and newness of the eschatological people of God revealing itself in the
church,”80 focusing on her mission to represent Christ even as she represents that one
body reconciled to God through the Cross,81 joined to Christ as a statement of the
eschatological significance of his life, death, Resurrection, and reign.
78 Avery Dulles, Models of the Church, 2nd Ed. (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1987), 28-29. 79 Concerning such abuse in the area of the doctrine of priesthood in particular, Yarnell writes, “The assumption is that if one can confine the presence of Jesus, one can access the power of Jesus. This confined power, more often than not, whatever the original intent, has been used in an inappropriate manner, in spite of the fact that true spiritual power was lost at the moment the agenda of Jesus was forgotten.” Yarnell, “Congregational Priesthood”: 124. 80 Herman Ridderbos, Paul: An Outline of His Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), 100. 81 WCC/Faith and Order, The Nature and Purpose of the Church, (Bialystok, Poland: Orthdruk Orthodox Printing House, 1998), 13.
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An early self-understanding, as the People of God the Church sees her origin and course
through history in God’s election,82 which in itself gives her eschatological significance.
Her mode of existence, concrete being, and inner substance in this pilgrimage are
emphasised in the image of the Body of Christ.83 Of importance is the visibility this
image implies. Peoplehood can be amorphous but the Body must manifest its unity
visibly and concretely in a location. In the Body, election becomes effective, salvation
becomes service, and the people take on a purpose in a particular place.
Despite the relative paucity of specific references, priesthood is a major underlying
concept expressive of the election of the people of Israel, and of God’s New Covenant
people, his seed according to the promise (Ga 3.14; 4.28). It informs a crucial
understanding of who God’s people are as individuals and as a church, and of what they
are called to do. Priesthood will not define the essence of the Church but rather guide
how she functions in her existence as the People of God, particularly in her local
manifestation. In essence, by election, the church is the People of God – in service, by
election, this people serves as the Body of Christ by functioning as a priesthood.
4.4.1.3 Eschatology Essential
Priesthood cannot be seen simply in pragmatic ecclesiological terms – the model of the
church which best fits Baptists and works for us in our time – but must be understood
eschatologically. The service of the church to her Lord is to make manifest his kingdom
by reflecting its presence and power today. We are those who by grace have seen in
Christ the coming of the fulness of time (Ga 4.4) at the end of the ages (1 Co 10.11; Heb
9.26). Our coming to faith is in answer to the command to repent and believe the gospel,
for the kingdom of God is at hand (Mk 1.15) in this, the favourable time, the day of
salvation (2 Co 6.2). Thus the church is to present King Jesus as Lord of all (Ac 10.36)
82 The Nature and Purpose of the Church, 12. 83 Ridderbos, 100.
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and by her godly life and service to show the reality of his reign even as she warns of the
judgement to come (2 Co 5.10-11) and pleads with sinners to be reconciled in light of it
(2 Co 5.20). The “peculiar people, zealous of good works” whom Christ has purified in
light of his (coming) glorious appearance (Tt 2.11-14) is to make visible and tangible the
God of the universe.
This was a dominant self-understanding of the early Church, one in which the church was
“the earthly arena in which the reign of Christ was embodied, and as such was an
interruption and de-legitimization of the false politics of the state.”84 The early Christian
community took to itself the term ekklesia, recognising itself as the eschatological
expression of the fulfilment of what took place at Mt Sinai, when the People of God were
labelled thus (Dt 9.10, LXX). The church thereby ascribed to herself the title of the OT
people of God as the Qehal-Yahweh as witnessed by Paul’s frequent use of the
expression, “the church of God.”85 This community would see all of history finding its
meaning in the story of the man Jesus and the events surrounding his life to inaugurate
the beginning of the reign of God and the new covenant.86
The church’s gathering is itself a reflection of the breaking of Christ and his kingdom
into history; she is not merely new individuals but the one new person made of two in
Christ (Eph 2.14-15) – the reflection of his dominion of the new age. Priesthood
expresses the realised eschatology of the New Testament. This contrasts with the pre-
millennial, dispensational eschatological stance of the majority of modern Baptists,
especially in the influential United States, which has sapped this crucial understanding of
the Church of much of its power, an overly future-oriented eschatology encouraging
individualism by placing the reign of Christ, his kingdom, the new creation, entirely in
the yet to come. If we seek only to rescue “brands from the burning” before the Church is
whisked away in a secret rapture, leaving the rest of the world in tribulation, the idea of
corporate service as representing Christ in his ruling priesthood – a kingdom and priests –
84 Harvey, “Re-membering the Body,” 96. 85 Ridderbos, 328. 86 Harvey, “Re-membering the Body,” 100.
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is muted, as is the idea of our required ministry to the world. We await the return of the
Lord, who is absent – except internally, where we possess him. We are a group of
individuals each awaiting transport, the “already” of our translation into the kingdom of
his Son (Col 1.13) muted, working out our own salvation so as to be found individuals
acceptable in that day, which is “not yet.”
Yet at the same time, we know we are not separate – our worldview and concerns mirror
those of the world which does not confess Christ. The voluntary community to which we
belong voluntarily cannot model the difference that election realises, for we’ve given it
no authority to do so. Without a priesthood rooted in the broader scope of the already but
not yet realised purposes of redemption of God we are a schizophrenic people, decrying
the ways of the world, proclaiming a hope but living and thinking little differently than
those who do not follow Christ. In the war of ideas, a doctrine of Christ not rooted in the
life of his priestly people is outgunned in volume, calibre, and number; though the flawed
aim modernity gives their weaponry makes these deficiencies moot.
Priesthood must restore the Church’s self-understanding of her continuity with Israel as
the people, servant, and kingly priesthood of God. Christ is the fulfilment of the Law (Mt
5.17; Ro 10.4; Ga 4.4), the recapitulation of Israel as the Suffering Servant and obedient
Jew. As Israel failed in not realising its election, its founding upon this rock (Psa 118.22),
so will the Church fail if we do not realise that our calling is shared with God’s Old
Covenant people. Our grafting in is by virtue of having been called to confess the
Messiah (Ro 11.17) even as their rejection, for a season, was by virtue of being hardened
to reject him, which hardening was for our good and that of the world (Ro 11.12). We
both share, in rejection and in belief, this dependency on Jesus the Messiah.
In distancing the understanding of the Church from both that of institution and that of
locus of spiritual self-realisation, priesthood may further emphasis the provisional nature
of the community inherent in this self-understanding of continuity with Israel.
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Acknowledging this continuity may in turn save the Church, as she realises that, like the
Jews, she is a pilgrim in a strange land. She should not seek to rebuild a theocracy along
Davidic lines, but seek instead the model of the Jews of the diaspora, from Jeremiah’s
time onward, who sought the true kingship of God in exile, not in the Promised Land,
who even against their own will became God’s witnesses among the nations, precisely
because they did not conform to them.87
But priesthood must also express future eschatology: the Church is not the kingdom,
though Christ reigns now and the kingdom is in our midst. His reign is not consummated
nor has the kingdom come. Indeed, in this age the Church is at once the “locus of
judgement and the locus of revelation,” both answering to the gospel yet opposed to it.88
Such awareness serves as a redoubt against triumphalism and identification of the Church
with Christ himself and against a purely social gospel that would see the goal of the
Church as the building of “Jerusalem in this green and pleasant land.” An overly-realised
eschatology risks us thinking far too highly of ourselves and of our potential, of seeing
the Church as ontologically self-sufficient. It gives us no means but saying, “We have not
sinned,” (1 Jn 1.8) to account for the all too real ongoing sins of the People of God. It
also mutes our prophetic voice, encouraging too close an identification with the society
around us and the temptation to complete its transformation by means of its power.
As Harvey states, priesthood conceptually must express realised eschatology, based on
the past work of God, while looking to future consummation. As such, the eschatological
stance of priesthood is neither realised nor future but brings forward the life of God as
lived out in his people. Seeing the Lord as the centre of history and the church as the
reflection of this reality means his story must be reflected in ours. Our day-to-day life and
our eternity find their meaning in the contours of biblical revelation. If God shows
himself truly in the God-man, the second Adam, and our old self has been planted in
baptism with Christ’s death and raised to new life with him (Ro 6.4ff) – the new creature
87 JW McClendon, Jr., Systematic Theology: Doctrine, 355ff. 88 James J Buckley, “Christian Community, Baptism, and the Lord’s Supper,” in Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, ed. John Webster, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 197-8.
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in an inceptive new creation, not merely a new spiritual individual – salvation must be the
ordering of all of life around and in Jesus Christ. His life must become “the immediate
norm of every individual’s existence.”89
Citing Alexander Schmemann, Harvey gives the raison d’être of the Church as being not
mere existence in itself but that of “sacrament of the new creation.”90 This maintains a
safe distance between the One who is Creator and Redeemer and his redeemed creation
while seeing the completion of that work as in the future and as the prerogative of the
Saviour. At the same time, it emphasises our inclusion in the creation to which we
proclaim salvation and the wideness of the work of God’s redemption, which transcends
the individual. It also means, for Harvey, that the church must rehearse that story: her
ordinances become “performative links” between the new creation and the hope found in
the resurrection.
The withering of this eschatological understanding of the kingdom work of Christ,
finished and yet to be consummated, is perhaps one of the principal bitter fruits to be
harvested from the planting of faith and obedience a field apart from the congregation of
God’s people. But detached from God’s overall work with creation and his people the
salvation story makes no sense. Heaven and hell cannot reasonably be seen as the
consequences merely of a personal decision, the less so in a day that exalts the freedom to
decide above the rightness of the decision itself. Even the call to repent sounds an
uncertain note, as deprived of a church-based, Christ-centred eschatology we no longer
believe the sound of our own voices.
89 Harvey, “Re-membering the Body,”101. 90 Ibid., 102.
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4.4.1.4 Remembering and Re-membering
Harvey identifies “religion” as a relatively recent term that sought neither to differentiate
private spirituality from public, nor to designate some universal human impulse.91 Rather,
it presupposed a context of ecclesial practices embodied in the communal life of the
church. Doctrine was inseparable from communal practice. “These teachings are like
threads in the complex weave of a garment. If they are removed from that piece of cloth
they lose all pattern and texture.”92 It is thus that priesthood as expressive of the applied
obedience of faith of a people, and the preaching of the Word, the keeping of the
sacraments, and the discipline of the faithful in the life of the church, are to be seen. Their
ends are not merely informative or inspirational but are the ordained means of God for
the formation of his people.
The priesthood is the locus in which Christ upholds his people, forming them in order to
send them out. Priesthood, if one will, is the lockstitch that prevents the garment from
unravelling, which binds Christians together into the three-fold cord that is not quickly
broken, the context for the practice and reception of Word, sacrament, and discipline. It is
prerequisite for the exercise of the performative tasks by which doctrine is learned and
Christ formed, enabling the church accurately to remember the works and words of God
who continually re-members her as individuals into a body (1 Co 12.12ff; Eph 4.15-16).
Priesthood as the means by which Christ is learned even as his people are formed after
him, and he in them, functions in an almost liturgical way. It is the means by which the
church “narrates their own lives as both distinct from and yet at the same time, a
continuation of (Jesus’s) story.”93 Such a balance preserves the individuality of the
believer, while ensuring that it is an individuality that is contoured to the normative
humanity of our Lord. The church as priesthood acts out, in its subordination to Scripture,
in its shared reception of the sacraments, and in its mutual service and discipline, the rule
of Christ as the normative existence for humankind. 91 Harvey, “Re-membering the Body,” 104. 92 Ibid., 98. 93 Harvey, Can These Bones Live?, 84.
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There is risk here. If the church is to be more than a gathering of spiritually self-
motivated individuals the Spirit must be given free reign. Remembering and re-
membering take on different understandings from their commonly accepted application
of looking back and joining together. Remembering is a dangerous bringing forward, not
nostalgic recollection; re-membering gives us over to God and each other, rather than
having us organise ourselves as we see fit.
Thompson describes memory in the church in the context of the Holy Spirit who brings
to mind the things of Christ (Jn 14.26), teaching by bringing these forward.94 This is
integral to McClendon’s view of the church being simultaneously the primitive Church
and the Church yet to come.95 Not by study or rite but by the dynamic work of the Spirit
are we made one with the Church past and future, not just at rest and triumphant but
visible in the fellowship. Openness to God’s dealing with the world is also a principal
theme.96 Confronting the current understanding of church as arena for personal encounter
in which she is effectively closed to God’s continuing work of redemption, having really
nothing to do for God in the world aside from housing those whom he gathers, no part to
play in displaying his wisdom or in working for him in his work of redemption of
creation, priesthood enrols the church in God’s great work.
Memory as a means of realising the presence of God minimises the temptation of
idolatry, in that the church is continually dependent upon the Spirit’s action in
remembering the things of Christ.97 The Holy Spirit is not the corporate soul of the
church,98 formed by our gathering, but is active in directing her life. The church does not
94 Thompson, Towards Baptist Ecclesiology, 373. 95 James W McClendon, Jr., Systematic Theology: Ethics, 2nd Ed. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002), 30-1. 96 While acknowledging the power of McClendon’s hermeneutic key, Harvey would correct it by recognizing that the age in which the church lives is not that of the Apostles or of the Messianic age, the idenfication of the church as at once the primitive and future church notwithstanding, B Harvey, “Can These Bones Live?,” 54-55. 97 Thompson, Towards Baptist Ecclesiology, 391. 98 “The reality of sin makes it clear that it is impossible to equate the objective spirit of the church as collective person with the Holy Spirit.” Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio, 214.
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make for herself a conceptual image of Christ that he might be present at her invocation,
present as he was while in the flesh. Were this possible, the church would require
nothing, having Christ in his completeness. Timothy George’s concern with the language
of sacrament as applied to the church, in which the visible and tangible is overly-
privileged, resonates here.99 There remains a difference, as Christ is now ascended – the
Spirit must supply his presence to an ever-needy people, another rider to be applied to
McClendon’s view (see above). Neither can the individual apprehend Christ merely from
the truths of Scripture. The Spirit as the active agent by whom Christ is given to the
church in worship requires both that Christians meet together and that they do so in
submission to and dependent upon God whose prerogative it is to reveal himself. We turn
to the object that cannot be possessed, whose presence, the subject of his church, makes
the church at once ancient, modern, and future.
In Thompson’s understanding, the problem of the Baptist movement today is not so much
amnesia – forgetting who we are, where we have come from – as paramnesia, a more
dangerous manifestation. We don’t even realise that we have forgotten, as we fabricate a
sepia-toned past constructed from the present seen through hazy, romantic eyes. The
homelessness of modern society and faith causes us to seek roots, the “chain of memory”
foundational to faith, according to Hervieu-Léger. Ironically, the ordering of life that
“exalts the self as a private project” gropes “for tradition to give it content beyond the
self.”100
The problem of spiritual and historical dementia with which modern Western society and
the Baptist movement in particular are beset is both a root cause and bitter fruit of the
individualism from which we suffer. As the Word remembers by repeating the words and
works of God and the participation of his people in these, preached in the Spirit so that he
brings these forward as our story today and tomorrow, as the sacraments remember, even
when only understood in the barest commemorative sense, the action of Christ, as
99 Timothy George, “The Sacramentality of the Church: An Evangelical Baptist Perspective,” Pro Ecclesia, Vol. XII, No 3 (Sum 2003): 318. 100 Thompson, “As It Was in the Beginning?,”193.
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discipline moulds us and directs us first to Christ and then to each other, preventing us
from remembering the former without concern for the latter, these form an essential part
of the recovery of memory.
The locating of our incorporation, individually, into the remembering of God must itself
be situated in the context of God’s remembering a people and that people being called to
remember God.101 Memory is structured by the shared language of community: the
hymns, even our individual prayers and testimonies, by which we express our faith are
community constructs – as well is the Bible a community possession. As Thompson
points out, both Old and New Testaments anchor God’s work in histories of
communities.102 The language is shaped by the community even as it shapes its host. This
is operative even in the most individualistic communities, as there is an unconscious
conformity to the community standards and practices.
This remembering and its consequent re-membering is not a merely human activity.
Rather, the Holy Spirit brings to memory the way of God with his people and makes him
present in the worship of his people, the free activity of God the Spirit, not the invoking
of his presence by the priesthood. Indeed, in so doing, it is the Spirit who brings the
church into the story of God, forming her therein.103 It is an expression of the love of God
for his creation, a love ultimately reflected in the Incarnation, that the Spirit deigns and
desires to make God’s dwelling with us in the assembly. The atomised spiritualisation of
the presence of God in the individual, seen particularly in the Baptist understanding of
the sacraments but generally in our understanding of the act of worship, resists this. But
gathering physically, present at the behest of the Spirit, under authority, the worship of
the priesthood is a physical, corporate application of memory. It does not reproduce God
or replace him, but neither does it merely meditate upon past deeds, present feelings, or
future hopes. It becomes the means by which God truly makes himself present,
remembering his people.
101 Thompson, Toward Baptist Ecclesiology, 426. 102 Ibid., 428. 103 Ibid., 436.
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For the church to be faithful in being brought into this relation to God’s memory, she
needs the Holy Spirit – epiclesis (Jn 14.25-26).104 The Spirit conforms the church to the
pattern of God’s redemptive work in Christ.105 He works to extend the story of God’s
saving work into the midst of his people in a specific time. This doesn’t render the church
either a metaphor for or an extension of Christ but forms her as the locus of God’s work
in the Spirit by forming his people as a fit instrument for his use and love. This keeps the
finite from defining the infinite, discouraging the church (or individual) from imagining
herself as like unto God ontologically and thus able to approach him of her own dignity.
This remembering is physical and visible. “The relation of Christ to the church by the
Holy Spirit has an irreducibly physical, bodily component, both in the work of the Spirit
and in the result.”106 This should come as no surprise, though it may be a shock given our
free-floating, individual conception of the Spirit. However, he was present at creation,
involved in the ordering of the chaos (Ge 1.2); by his power God became man “of the
Virgin Mary” (Lk 1.35); he was present at the baptism of our Lord (Mt 3.13ff); in him the
Lord offered himself on the cross (Heb 9.13-14) and by him the Lord was raised from the
dead and declared the Son of God with power (Ro 1.4). All these are central acts of God
in our creation and redemption; all these are indisputably physical acts. Thus we should
expect the manifestation of the Spirit in his church to be reflected in a physical manner.
This corporeal aspect is required on our part, for as Thompson points out memory is not
only inner and mental, but physical. Touch, smell, taste: all affect the emotions and
health.107 To worship God in the congregation – each participating in singing, eating,
praying, service, hearing Scripture read and proclaimed – is an essentially corporeal act,
not merely a theological one. The effects of these corporeal actions abide long after
mental processes recede – one need only see the effect of congregational hymn singing in
104 Thompson, Towards Baptist Ecclesiology, 446. 105 Ibid., 452. 106 Ibid., 439. 107 Ibid., 442.
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chapel services on patients whose minds had long before receded into the back alleys and
dead ends of the maze of dementia. They bring back memory of events and people and
ideas. It is in the formation of habits that we remember. Such formation requires a people,
a priesthood, which practises and receives them intentionally, understanding that it is
through them that Christ is formed in us.
This understanding of memory is consistent with the earliest Baptist practice. As memory
gives content to sanctification and functions in formation so the early Baptists saw the
worship and life together of the church as a formation of the affections.108 This
sanctification, neither the infusion of some second blessing nor the ongoing work of
growing one’s holiness, seeks to orient life to that which is prayed for and given thanks
for. The practice of the Christian life aimed at mortification, cutting off those things not
conformed to the memory of God, and at vivification, the habituation of living life before
God – prayer, confession, thanksgiving.
This further reminds the church that she is an eschatological phenomenon. Her life is
ongoing, her hope not just based on past events or future happenings but on the visible
work of God in her present. Thus can the experience of individuals be given significance
– not subdued by dry dogma or played off against others’ more charismatic gushings but
as the corporate work of the Spirit in forming Christ’s body, individually experienced,
given to everyone “to profit withal.” (1 Co 12.4)
Such an understanding does not remove the individual from the picture. The individual
cannot be subordinated to the community,109 the Baptist distinctive emphasis on the
individual’s dealing with God being integral to this corporate remembering. The
resistance of early Baptists (e.g., Helwys) to the concept of baptism as a seal of the
covenant sought to preserve the priority of the inner presence of God with the believer,110
108 Thompson, Towards Baptist Ecclesiology, 445. 109 Ibid., 435. 110 Ibid., 438.
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that God’s freedom not be co-opted by a mere external form. Priesthood requires the
inner individual relationship with God in order to make the outer corporate relationship
significant, and to preserve the free action of God in both.
4.4.1.5 Gathered and Gathering
Central to the concept of priesthood is its contingency on God’s election of a people, to
its answering that call; it is not constitutive of an essence or ontological status of the
church. In its application to contemporary Baptist ecclesiology the understanding of this
contingency on election situates one’s priesthood – the vocation to belief in and obedient
service to Jesus Christ – firmly in the context of the community. It discourages the
abstraction of salvation and holiness from this body. What must be preserved in applying
this understanding, however, is the corresponding value of and place for the individual in
this church. If the individual cannot know the election of God and the call to priestly
service outside of the royal priesthood, neither can this priesthood exist without the elect
individual. The same Lord who identifies his disciples as the group he has chosen also
proclaims his knowledge of each as an individual, with very different gifts and menace to
bring to his ministry (Jn 6.70).
What is never in question in the biblical portrayal is that the church is a visible, organic
conglomerate; no mere assemblage of independent parts, she neither falls together by
accident (Jn 15.16) nor is she an optional assembly (1 Co 12.13ff). She is certainly not a
theoretical body, invisible to the eye. As noted above, Yoder finds the invisibility of the
Church to have emerged as a doctrine out of Constantinianism, as believers were called
merely to believe the Church which was invisible, the visible Church’s lack of holiness
and distinctiveness having rendered belief in her untenable.111 This invisibility, this
impalpability, makes a fine foil for the individual, who needs see no concrete reality
111 Yoder, 57.
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beyond personal faith. It also vitiates the need for action in the world and in the assembly,
allowing the Way of Jesus to become concept, not command.
The term congregation, which emphasises the church as people and not institution, can
connote both a group of people and the act of gathering that group, as priesthood can
describe the group itself while also addressing its function. The tent of meeting (Ex
33.7ff) was such because God had appointed it as the place to which people came to
witness him present with Moses. Similarly, congregation is both complete and
indispensable while ongoing and driven from without. The church is a distinct group of
people assembled together by Christ for a purpose, stepping apart from others and
moving toward each other by means of their assembly. Encounter with God, she is also
the calling and gathering of his people in Christ. She exists visibly and concretely at
points in time yet is an ongoing process. An act of obedient submission to God and to
others even in gathering, she gathers in order to be upheld, and is upheld in order to be
sent out.
Perhaps in this word congregation lies the genius of the Baptist project. The People of
God are distinct – a peculiar people, an entity set apart. Yet the setting and the apartness
cannot be set apart – “the LORD hath set apart him that is godly (hasid – set apart) for
himself” (Psa 4.3a). As such, God’s people are continuously being gathered to him – like
all of creation, they have no dignity in themselves and no sense apart from him, save
absurdity. Both in act and being the priesthood is entirely derivative from God. The
worship of the church is her presence at the tent of meeting. This people, elect though
they are, are sinful and rebellious. They neither embody nor do they possess God but
need to know his name and receive his Word. This tent, this presence, this name, this
Word, is none other than the Word of God made flesh, Jesus Christ, full of grace and
truth (Jn 1.14).112
112 Donald A Carson, The Gospel According to John (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 127-129.
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The ongoing dynamic act of priestly service forms the basis of the definition of
priesthood as we will apply it to the Baptist church. As the tribes in the wilderness must
advance in formation when the pillar of cloud moved, so must Christians move together
at the leading of God discerned not primarily individually but in his leading in the church.
The tribes had to be gathered repeatedly, by command and by order, as the Lord required
(Nu 1.50-51; 9.21ff). They must persevere in following in the wilderness. Looking back
to Egypt meant destruction. So must the church be continuously gathered, by the
command of the Word, under the order of holiness, as the Lord requires.
4.4.1.6 Priesthood and Palpability
The concept of priesthood returns to the Baptist understanding of the church the role of
Word, sacrament, and discipline in gathering, upholding, and sending out the People of
God. It addresses additional lacunae in Baptist practice by emphasising the concrete,
physical nature of God’s work in the world and of our response in faith.
As our understanding of the Fall must include its effects on all of creation, as Paul
portrays God’s work of redemption to include the renewal of that creation, so must we
see God’s intent as surpassing the individual and more concrete than the spiritual. The
Church is the primary means by which God fulfils his prior commitment to his creation
(Eph 3.9ff; Col 1.15-20),113 expressing a concern in the divine heart for what he has
created. As confessed in the first article of the Nicene Creed, God is Father before he is
Creator, even as he created in the Son in view of redemption.114
This means that God deals with and has saved what is palpable – not a detached spiritual
individual but flesh and blood people and the world which he loves. It must be so with
113 Thompson, Towards Baptist Ecclesiology, 364. 114 TF Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith: The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Church (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 87.
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the God who came into the world as a man, who commanded that we remember him in
the bread and the cup, whose bloody death on the cross was the means of our atonement,
whose taking up again of that body, resurrected, was the pronouncement of our
righteousness, whose ascension took humanity to the bosom of God in Christ. The scope
of his eternal counsel extends beyond elect individuals to the elect people of God and the
world into which he came to effect reconciliation. This world exists prior to the faith of
the individual, as does God’s intent for it, whose Son the Lamb was slain before its
foundation (Rev 13.8). The Church herself exists prior to the faith of the individual, by
virtue of this work in creation (Col 1.16-18).
Priesthood ties our discipleship to ministry with others and insists that our understanding
and response to the Word of God be lived in the context of the gathered community of
saints, reminding us of this Church and world that existed before we did in God’s intent.
We are reminded that we are not saved to be taken out of the world but to bring Christ to
pre-eminence in it. And we are reminded that we are not saved alone. Priesthood
proclaims what is, not what we imagine or see the potential to be: God with us. It
manifests the presence of Christ in the world and turns us outward, which we must do to
be truly apostolic – sent out. Priesthood helps establish, as Yoder points out, that the
world has no intrinsic ontological dignity;115 but neither does the individual. The church’s
otherness rejects the ontological priority of both.
Priesthood, in giving palpability and location to the church, designates it as the place
where apostolic practices are maintained. The church must be concrete and visible. It
cannot be based on an invisible Church, undefined or subordinate to other principalities
and powers and indistinguishable from them. This would render the faith a theoretical
exercise in an unreal body that exists in no particular place and exerts no particular
discipline – which obtains at present in many a Baptist church. Rather, the church visible
is fully representative of and at the same but a part of the Church invisible composed of
the elect both alive and glorified.
115 Yoder, 56.
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4.4.2 Concrete Applications
We will now proceed to examine how the concept of priesthood enables and effects the
practice of the faith of the gathered church in Word, sacrament, and discipline – how is
this applied?
4.4.2.1 Word: Preaching in the Priesthood
The Bible stresses the pre-eminence of the Word of God in creation and redemption. In
Jn 1.1 the Word is at the beginning. Through him and for him creation is brought into
being, and through him and for him God’s people are redeemed (Col 1.15ff). Thus the
Word must speak first in gathering the church, and he does so as he gathers her into an
intentional priesthood. The God who speaks does not just talk, but his word is action,
creating (Ge 1.2) and saving (2 Co 4.6). The Word is the dynamic expression of God’s
will, expressing the dynamism and eloquence inherent to his nature116 that needs be
reflected in our reception of and response to the Word spoken.
The priesthood is those gathered by God’s express will, by the proclamation of free grace
and mercy in Jesus Christ. Its contingency upon God’s calling encourages the church to
see herself as individuals gathered to a people by the proclamation of the Word. Our faith
in this Word is the answer God supplies us (Eph 2.8-9; 2 Pe 1.1) to the call of mercy in
Christ: the realisation that God is for us in Christ, giving himself to us in him (Ro 8.32; 1
Co 3.21-23). In the beginning, not just of creation but of salvation, is the Word – and the
priesthood connects that Word with God’s salvation by his will, for himself, of a people
of his creation.
116 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 131.
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Käsemann points out that the phrase ὁ λόγοs τῆs ἀκοῆs in Hebrews (4.1ff) is the spoken
summons heard by the congregation to be on the move.117 This is an expression of the
eschatological nature of the church, for “the Logos grants no final revelation. It calls to a
way…”118 which requires reliance upon the promise. The Word gathers, for simply to
hear and concur is insufficient for salvation: one must follow, for more is to follow.
Priesthood as it hears the word of the gospel interprets it as both command and comfort.
The Word in gathering is preached both in the imperative and in the indicative mode. We
who are heavy laden are commanded to come (Mt 11.28ff) even as we are comforted as
the easy yoke and light burden are shouldered. The Word as the sword of the Spirit first
cuts the sinner, dividing joint from marrow (Heb 4.12), but then encourages (Ro 15.4). It
is wielded by the Spirit in his convicting work as he gathers sinners to his service. The
Word continually gathers God’s people, who were those going astray, but have now
returned to the Shepherd and Bishop of our souls (1 Pe 2.25). Priesthood is the form of
our answer to the continual call of God to move toward him.
As such, priesthood throws the Christian on the mercy of the action of the Word preached
in the assembly. As gathered by God, not just gathering, the church as priesthood divests
believers of any sense of sufficiency or ability to sit in detached judgement of the Word.
They are not spiritual beings coming to encounter a somewhat more powerful yet
analogous spiritual being, but those who in utter dependency must have and be
continually formed by the Word of life.
Voluntarism requires, by definition, an exercise of will. But the will is not transformed by
rational understanding, obtained by the individual disinterestedly approaching the Word
of grace in study, to embrace Christ, until it first is freed by the Spirit in the new birth
from that blindness that prevents it from seeing in the first place. The Reformed
understanding of human inability – prevalent among even the early General Baptists -
ensures that the voluntarism is God’s, not the individual’s. The free exercise of God’s
117 Käsemann, 18. 118 Ibid., 19.
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will in freeing the sinner enables the exercise of that freed will to choose for God. The
Word preached functions in this way, commanding with the voice of the Spirit that one
turn to Christ. We come as beggars who have found bread, but bread that, like the manna,
cannot be stored up but must be collected daily as God provides. The priesthood is the
location where the bread is broken, distributed, then taken to those outside.
4.4.2.1.1 Preaching and Eschatology
The modern Evangelical focus on preaching and evangelism as needing to accomplish
something removes the acts of God, and the church they form and to which they give
expression, from the realm of God’s eschatological purpose for his people. The
understanding is at once individualistic and pragmatic, failing to see God as operative
through his Church. Such preaching does not gather, uphold, and send out – it seeks to
convince one to seek one’s own salvation, to achieve a different, better understanding of
God, to proceed from point A to point B in one’s own conception rather than to come
from darkness to light, from ignorance to the awareness of the new age into which the
church is to function and witness. Eschatology in such a presentation is almost
exclusively future and its implications are primarily individual.
Priesthood, as a heralding band, preaches the message of the gospel as a present
eschatological function, not just in attending upon a future eschaton, removing
eschatology from the rather wacky realm it has reached, where Old Testament prophecies
are cut and pasted to foretell the future of Israel and the Church, with application to the
individual in terms of challenge and reassurance, given the knowledge of the inside scoop
on God’s program. Priesthood as enacted hearing proclaims the wisdom of God not as
individual solution to life’s problems but as the governing reality of all of life. The
church as such is not just the company of the saved but those who, formed by the Word
as applied to the congregation by the Spirit, demonstrate in a prototypical fashion what
the kingdom is to be. Serving the reigning King Jesus in obedience and in service to
others in response to the preached Word it thus fills an eschatological function both by
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example and by enactment and plays its part in God’s bringing in of the eschaton. The
priesthood proclaims and follows Christ as King now, not just as absent and coming
soon.
4.4.2.1.2 Preaching and Performative Links
Thus can preaching act as a performative link, seeking not to move people to do
something or be convinced of some fact, but effective of itself. Priesthood serves to
remove the option of the individual sitting in detached judgement upon the interpretation
of the Word, linking instead the act of the Word with the people as priesthood in forming
and giving them meaning; we are made to receive that Word even as it makes us what we
are. It is in the presentation of the gospel of the kingdom in Jesus Christ that the ministry
of the priesthood originates. As with the Church triumphant, where the presentation of
the Lamb is before the assembled saints and every creature in heaven and on earth who
give their amen (Rev 5.11-14) and with the masses who proclaim God and his glory so
that the angels and elders fall on their faces (Rev 7.11-12), so must the Word be preached
and received corporately in the assembly. The church as priesthood gives the Word its
place as both constitutive and the context of the People of God. Preaching is an objective
work, not situated in the preacher while not done without him, not even situated in the
congregation, though not without them. It is the work of the Spirit who communicates
Christ and makes him understood by the body. It is not detached from Christ, or
detachable from him, for it ceases to be the story of God with his people if so, becoming
something we seek to offer to God, either to placate him or by which to learn to do
without him.
But neither can preaching be abstracted from the community. Priesthood permits the
reading of the Word and its proclamation to move from lecture – enacted by the
individual – to effective work of God. The Church confesses that in Jesus the Word has
become flesh and dwelt among us (Jn 1.14), maintaining with Ignatius of Antioch that
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Christ “is the mouth…by which the Father has spoken.”119 Preaching the story of this
Christ as formative for the new humanity shapes a people for survival and service in a
world misshapen by sin and death.
Harmon points out that the essence of Christian worship is “the participatory rehearsal of
the biblical story of the triune God.”120 The Baptist view of the use of Scripture, in
particular in worship, places the movement in the line of the ancient Christian tradition.
Such reading not only informs but incorporates the congregation into the account of
God’s work, even as it presents that account and that work as normative.
McClendon deals with the subject of preaching, and how it might be conceived of
analogously to the sacraments.121 Examining the authority of the preaching and its ability
to make Christ present in a similar manner as do the sacraments, he situates this authority
in part in the character and personality of the preacher, citing Phillips Brooks’ definition
of preaching as ‘the communication of truth through personality.’122 This necessarily ties
the effectiveness of the ordinance of preaching to the priesthood that receives it, not only
as they exercise that sensus fidelium which is the Spirit-given discernment which
acknowledges the substance of such preaching as ‘an authentic echo of the voice of
Christ’123 by responding to it, but also as they interpret and influence the character and
personality of the preacher, who is but another member of that local church whose
ministry and he himself must be received by the discernment of the church. The
priesthood as it forms and upholds the preacher, as it responds to the preached word,
supplies that element of human response that in Protestant thought must remove the
sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Table from the realm of ex opera operato.
119 Harvey, “Re-membering the Body,”100. 120 Steven Harmon, ‘‘Scripture in the Life of the Baptist Churches”: 191. 121 On this, see also Steven Harmon, “The Sacramentality of the Word in Gregory of Nyssa,” in Baptist Sacramentalism 2, 252-3. 122 JW McClendon, Jr., Systematic Theology: Doctrine, 400. 123 The Nature and Purpose of the Church, 50.
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In more conservative Evangelical churches, the focus in preaching tends to fall on the
explanation of the meaning and application of Christ’s life and death; in more liberal
churches, on the presentation of Christ’s life as exemplar. But the righteous life of Christ,
which points to his atoning death, is itself effective, in that as the second Adam he fulfils
the Law, not just passively but actively, and he does so for a race, not just individuals. He
stands for us not just in his death, but in his life. Similarly, the contours of that life must
define our newness of life. The preaching of the gospel is both a living recollection of
Christ’s story and his active presence, forming two sides of the same coin.124 The church
as priesthood promotes gospel preaching that is not just invitation but application of the
form of the life of Christ to the moulding of his people.
Indeed, this priestly community formed by the reception of preaching is not only
necessary to the cultivation of proper conduct, but prerequisite to the correct
apprehension of doctrine itself,125 as if these could ever be separated. Doctrine learned
thus “serves to orchestrate our bodily actions and affections as members joined to one
another in the Body of Christ.”126 We then receive the preaching of the gospel not as
spiritual precept but as a call to Christ-like service (Mk 10.45), and can then offer proper
priestly service to one another.
Käsemann notes that the phrase µέτοχοι τοῦ Χριστοῦ (Heb 3.14) makes clear that the
People of God are not defined by structure but as a fellowship of Christ established by
revelation. They bear and are a creature of that revelation.127 “The Logos points the
individual to the fellowship established by Christ, and only in this fellowship does the
individual persist in bearing and hearing the Logos.”128 Torrance points out that it is
Moses, representing the Word, whom God selects as mediator, not Aaron, representing
124 A Schillebecx as quoted by Thompson, Towards Baptist Ecclesiology, 374. 125 “It is only as we are caught up in these story-formed communities, cultivating shared (and from time to time contested) convictions about human life as lived in relation to some set of goals, that we learn what it means ‘to make a move in the human situation in which we along with others are engaged’”, B Harvey, Can These Bones Live?, 177. 126 Ibid., 171. 127 Käsemann, 21. 128 Ibid.
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the cult and the sacrificial priesthood.129 It is Moses, the recipient of the Law, who
ordains Aaron (Numbers 8). Even Christ is prophet (the Word of God) before he is priest
(atonement).130 The Word is made flesh, incarnate, before the glory of God is
demonstrated in showing compassion (Jn 1.14; cp, Ex 33.19-20; Ro 3.25-26), full of
grace and truth – Christ teaches authoritatively before he offers himself as sacrifice. This
sacrifice itself is not merely functional but brings to fulness the Word of God. It serves
not just to propitiate for the sins of the world but to show God as glorious specifically in
being compassionate – willingly and according to his eternal counsel and purpose. One
can say that the atonement is the enactment of the Word – that God’s promise and self-
revelation is finally actualised in the atonement; this is the ultimate instance of his Word
becoming action. Thus the atonement is a type of enacted Word, as is the priestly service
of God’s people.
Drawing on the revivalist tradition that saw the hearers as individuals in need of salvation
or re-dedication and not the People of God, modern Evangelical preaching has sought to
move – either to salvation or to action. But preaching that forms and upholds the
priesthood is indicative before it is imperative. The greatness and mercy of God, the
sufficiency of his works in Christ, the power of his Holy Spirit to gather, to sustain, to
send out, is proclaimed first. We are salt, we are not merely called to become salt.131 The
moralism that would by human effort gather, uphold, and send out the church is
idolatrous – it seeks to usurp the place of God who elects, saves, sends out. It also
promotes the individualism we are seeking to avoid, by putting salvation on individual
believers’ shoulders – they must work their way toward God. It separates doctrine from
response, as if the individual stood as a competent arbiter, alone and unformed, of the
gospel and its required response. Priesthood vitiates the piety that would see the gospel as
that which is heard and understood and then subsequently acted upon. Rather, the acting
upon by the believer is done in the hearing fellowship, even as preaching is the means by
129 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 3. 130 Ibid., 6. 131 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (London: SCM Press, 1969), 105.
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which the Spirit acts upon those who hear – God is already present in the assembly.
Priestly hearing of the Word re-integrates the faith.
In the priesthood, Word and life integrated can centre on this and reflect it in place of
seeking to study it or enforce it. Torrance sees the church as incorporated into Christ
through Word and baptism to become his body.132 Preaching must reflect this. The
church, fully formed individuals, doesn’t come together to learn biblical facts. Rather, she
is formed by the preaching of the Word, bent and moulded to Christ as he is presented.
Priesthood, as the audience and the beneficiary of the preached Word, provides the soil in
which such a Word can bring forth much fruit.
Preaching to and by the priesthood incorporates it into God’s story, not vice-versa. A
dangerous approach, it requires that we let go of what is familiar to throw ourselves into
the arms of the God who is so often not familiar. He does not fit into our stories nor see
them as terribly pertinent outside of Christ, but graciously replaces them with his own.
An understanding of the Bible as exclusively precept allows me as an individual to first
detach myself from the church – for I am the effective agent who follows the rules; and
then to detach the precepts from God – God said it, I believe it, I have but to do it.
Pelagianism at its finest, this represents a return to the Garden, where Adam and Eve
sought to know good from evil, not being content with communion with God.133 It brings
the individual and the church hard against legalism, with the alternative reactions either
of a smug complacency or a hopelessness that leads to antinomianism.
Priesthood counters this by functioning as the means by which the Word is both taught
and learned in a form that prohibits the separation of the objective truth of Christ from the
context of God’s people in which this truth was revealed. Truth is communicated and
received dynamically, not as static, ready to be assembled facts. The individual or 132 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 63. 133 Ellul emphasises the idolatry inherent in seeking to determine good apart from God, and the faith it puts in potential – “possibility thinking” – and not in the actual work of God, a flaw common to both conservative and liberal thought. Jacques Ellul, To Will and To Do (Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press, 1969), 6.
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hierarchy cannot appropriate the story when it is nested in the bosom of the obedient
community that learns it as it lives it with the One who teaches it.
As such, priesthood is formed by both Old and New Covenant understandings of the
People of God. The Old Testament draws much more on a narrative understanding of
God’s way with his people; these are an elect people needing to be convinced of
obedience, not individuals needing to be convinced to be elect. They are reminded as
much of who they are as of who they must strive to be. The church as priesthood will
encourage that type of preaching, and be nourished by it.
However, in this, caution is to be exercised. The narrative approach is susceptible to
several dangers. In crediting the community as the recipient of the message, who is
formed by it, too often that very community can become the subject of revelation.
Scripture can once more be wrenched from its context and read as the story of our
particular community in our particular age. We do not wish to replace an individualistic
reading of Scripture based on a selective view of history by a communitarian view with a
similarly myopic focus! In an age that resists meta-narrative and continually redefines its
past, care is required.134 We are particularly adept in our age of appropriating in place of
being appropriated, drawing the meaning we see fit from the story of Jesus. This risks
giving us the human Jesus we must have as the One who identifies with sinners at the
expense of the God we must have if this identification is to save us.135 The current
experience of the Emergent Church must provide a caution.136 While we don’t want
simply to derive a better means of coming up with an infallible, rational interpretation of
biblical events that does away with the mystery of God, neither do we want Scripture
134 On the possible benefits of post-modernism’s rejection of meta-narrative, and the need instead for a less ambitious mega-narrative, which seeks more to proclaim than to explain, and which is more comfortable with understanding as ‘second-order’ discourse and liable to error, see D Striver, “Baptists: Modern or Postmodern?,” Review & Expositor, 100, Fall 2003: 525f. 135 In differentiating Christ’s vicarious representation from that of Adam, Bonhoeffer warns of it as solidarity and not that of a Stellvertreter: “Not solidarity, which is never possible between Christ and man, but vicarious action is the life-principle of the new humanity.” Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio, 146-7. 136 On one example of the danger of this exemplary view and its self-application to the individual, see Donald A Carson, Becoming Conversant with the Emergent Church (Grand Rapids: Zonderan, 2005), 166-8.
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reduced to having nothing authoritative and objective to declare about God and his works
that is not merely a function of the community, a reading of ourselves back onto God.
Yet where preaching makes God the subject of his work, the objective reality of his
Church yet the One who wills not to be God without that Church, we have a story to
bring to the nations. Preaching that presents Christ, proclaiming not moralism but the
revelation of God in him and thus the revelation and relevance of the human being in
God, will root this belonging in the fact Christ is in the midst of us. The submission of the
individual is not to be achieved by quashing individuality but by presenting the Christ in
whose presence individuality comes into its own in God’s people – individuality defined
by God. If the apostolicity of the church lies in her being a remembering community it is
thus, not by physical succession, that we hold to the faith once delivered to the saints.
This prevents the gospel from being mere repetition of past events to which we strain to
bring some personal relevance. Nor is it permitted to become an infallible,
unchallengeable interpretation of reality that satisfies both the curiosity and the
existential angst of the individual. Priesthood as the disciple community charged with
hearing, interpreting, and living out Scripture is formed by that reality as God’s Word is
heard in the assembly. McClendon stresses that the narrative of Christian preaching must
be that of Christ, not ours. His presence is to the end that “the story continues.” As he
points out, “this holy presence cannot be reduced to our awareness or ‘experience’ of the
presence.”137
4.4.2.1.3 Word and Tradition
The priesthood also serves in preserving balance in our reception of and obedience to the
Scriptures in a diachronic sense. We cannot be members of the universal Church without
being members of a local church; nor can we learn from those who’ve gone before, doing
137 JW McClendon, Jr., Systematic Theology: Doctrine, 378.
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theology with them, correcting and being corrected by them, unless we are at the same
time doing theology with the believers with whom we worship.138
We need esteem not so much tradition which, whether we capitalise the first letter or not,
remains badly received (at least avowedly) by Baptists, but rather, as Jaroslav Pelikan
would express it, “the living faith of the dead.” It is not passed on so much as handed off,
the baton still warm from the hands of those who’ve directed it to our trembling and
tenuous grasp. Their authority is not one of hierarchical standing or even of temporal
priority but resides in our expressed preference for the thinking of others before our own
and in our confession that they, too, have the Spirit of God. Not only does this again
express the submission required in obedient service but confesses our distrust of our own
conscience.
But we cannot arbitrarily select our counsellors based on romantic notions and personal
preference. The primacy of the local church in providing the priesthood which will
counsel, correct, and challenge reminds us that one may pick one’s friends but not one’s
family. To do otherwise by excluding the present in favour of the past is to lapse into a
romantic Gnosticism, where the ghosts of Christians past float by, blowing sweet
nothings in our spiritual ears, concurring, interestingly enough, with what we already
believe and never correcting us beyond what we already wish to bear. Too many Baptists
uncritically borrow from the theologians of the past in this way, seeking to be Baptist in
practice yet Catholic or Reformed or Anabaptist in theology, with their own patron saints
from the past, conjured up as if for King Saul by the witch of Endor and similarly
incorporeal, to tell us what we want to hear.
138 Barth states, “Before I myself make a confession I must myself have heard the confession of the Church, i.e., the confession of the rest of the Church…I recognise an authority, a superiority in the Church: namely, that the confession of others who were before me in the Church and are beside me in the Church is superior to my confession if this really is an accounting and responding in relation to my hearing and receiving of the Word of God, if it really is my confession as that of a member of the body of Christ.” Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol I/2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956), 589.
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Pelikan warns of “the danger of exaggerating the significance of the idiosyncratic thought
of individual theologians at the expense of the common faith of the church,”139 one which
we are often unable to discern, for our satisfaction with our own powers of discernment.
We thus isolate ourselves as did the son of Kish, and become kings unto ourselves, not
“kings…unto God.” This danger is especially acute when we select these theologians
according to our preference and read them in our modern context, supposedly innocent of
any bias, for this ensures that these individuals and their Church do not speak with their
own voices but with ours, as they imbue our views with an authority bestowed by
antiquity and fame. Lest we think this purely a problem for conservative Evangelicals, it
also characterises the approach espoused by some Emergent Church leaders.140
This form of “tradition” is dangerous, for it is individualism clothed as catholic
Christianity. We selectively choose whom we will hear, all the while only listening when
they speak our language – we will hear Augustine on the sovereignty of God our Father
but not on the Church, our mother; Calvin on election but not on baptism; Luther on
justification by faith but not on the Lord’s Table. Proudly, we can then ignore those
around us who speak our language and know our sins but who aren’t saying what we
want to hear. Such a narrow traditionalism is the antithesis of any regard for the
priesthood of believers.
Catholicity must be formed in people by worship in the congregation,142 where to do
theology is to face our own flesh and blood, to confess the orthodox doctrine of human
depravity – for we know that salvation does not remove our tendency to sin, thus we still
139 Stephen R Harmon, Towards Baptist Catholicity: Essays on Tradition and the Baptist Vision (Waynesboro: Paternoster Press, 2006), 147. As Yarnell notes on the care required in appropriating individual insights from the past, “we speak communally of the Church, for the doctrines of individual theologians, though often brilliant, genuinely creative, and instrumental in inventio, are not to be confused with the dogmas of the Church. The Church as a community may and often does provide a corrective to the limitations of the individual.” Yarnell, “Congregational Priesthood”: 116. 140 See in particular Brian McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004). 142 Harmon, Towards Baptist Catholicity, 150.
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desperately require assistance. This, God sends this in the form of fellow believers.143
And in this, recourse to the liturgy of the church must not be excluded as an instrument of
teaching doctrine.144 The particular form of Baptist worship must also function as a
vehicle for both communicating doctrine and receiving it from our predecessors.
We face a challenge here, as the Baptist approach to form in worship has been generally
negative. The focus has been more on removing what is perceived unbiblical from other
traditions than on emphasising the distinctive Baptist conception of worship in simplicity,
Christ-centredness, submission to the Word, and openness to the Spirit. There is a
negative attitude to catholicity, a fear of contamination rather than a desire to contribute
positively to the worship of the Church. This is coupled with an almost universal
ignorance of what in the past has constituted worship in Baptist churches. Modern Baptist
assemblies tend either to emulate non-denominational mega-community church worship
or to hold on to the traditional early-20th century pattern, this latter option dying out with
its aging practitioners; in any case, either pragmatism or passion is the canon.
Unfortunately, here too lex orendi est lex credendi, to use Schmemann’s paraphrase of
Prosper145 – but what we believe is no longer particularly distinctive, thus neither is our
worship, joining the adiaphora of any doctrine that does not emanate from the self.
Thus Harmon proposes the use of tradition in doing theology in a catholic manner.146 The
community functions as the normative authority in interpreting doctrine. Tradition is
done by argument and dissent is permitted. This requires discussion among the
community and draws on the faith of other communities past and present. Priesthood is
essential – involved, Spirit-indwelt believers hearing Scripture, praying, singing together,
143 Citing Westphal, Striver notes in a similar vein that post-modernism ‘offers a new opportunity for making sin a significant epistemological variable.’, D Striver, “Baptists: Modern or Postmodern?”: 537. 144 Ellis cites approvingly, with qualifications, A Schmemann’s view that worship should “gain its own theological voice,” and that “worship comes before doctrine,” theologically as well as historically. Christopher J Ellis, Gathering: A Theology and Spirituality of Worship in the Free Church Tradition (London: SCM Press, 2004), 17. 145 Ellis, 17. 146 Harmon, Towards Baptist Catholicity, 60ff.
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arguing together. The community becomes a vehicle for tradition, with Scripture as the
normative authority forming and being formed by tradition.
Yarnell brings in the concept of inventio in understanding the means by which the
priesthood of believers serves to communicate and develop tradition. A second-order
authority that may adjust, but not over-ride Scripture, seeking rather to reach up to it,147 it
can serve to correct or adjust previous dogma arrived at by the Church. As he writes,
“Inventio is a messy business, and must remain provisional.”148 This messiness is at times
unpleasant, but it is unavoidable if the preaching of the Word is to awaken congregational
response and transformation.
4.4.2.1.4 Word and Mission
The preaching of the Word as it reminds the church of her priestly calling to proclaim the
kingdom to the world unsettles – prohibiting her from resting comfortably in her enclosed
garden or heading out under her own authority and auspices. A priesthood that hears the
Word cannot simply meditate inwardly upon it, but knows itself to have been gathered in
order to be sent out – the Word has a mission, which is mission, the proclamation of the
gospel to the world.
What we’ve seen in the genesis and heart of the institutional priesthood in the Old
Testament and what we encounter foremost in priesthood of the faithful in the New
Testament is its preaching ministry. As Torrance points out, in the Old Testament the
Word preceded the sacrifice as the function of the priesthood.149 In 1 Peter the
presentation of God’s marvellous works in the Church and in the world is at the heart of
the calling of the priestly body (1 Pe 2.9), which has been born again by the imperishable
147 Yarnell, “Congregational Priesthood”: 114. 148 Ibid.: 116. 149 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 2-6.
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seed of the Word (1 Pe 1.23) and fed by its pure milk (1 Pe 2.2). The centre of the
application of priesthood to the church lies in the way in which the gospel is preached
and received. It gathers then nourishes in order to send out, that others might also be
gathered. The gifts of the triumphant Christ to the Church (Ephesians 4, cf. Psalm 68)
include that of giving the knowledge of himself both to the world (Eph 4.10) and to the
Church (Eph 4.11).150
The Book of Acts has as a recurring theme the growth of the Word of God.151 The
measure of the faithfulness of the Church was not simply numerical increase but growth
announced at each stage by the recognition that the Word had increased (Ac 6.7; 12.24;
19.20). Paul’s ministry, while depicted in almost sacrificial terms as a self-pouring out
(Php 2.17; 2 Tm 4.6), is not sacramental: it is first and foremost a preaching ministry (1
Co 1.5; 2.5).
In this, we find the historic strength and ethos of the Baptist people. Baptists may have
had little truck with formal liturgy or hierarchy and over-emphasised the importance of
the individual, but they have always maintained the centrality of preaching the Word of
God “to those without.” As such, priesthood as described in the New Testament, the
service of the elect in proclaiming to the world the praises of God, should come readily.
That this Word cannot be tamed and subjugated to the needs of the times or of the
individual must be re-learned; but that Christ must be preached, and preached from the
Scriptures, not offered in formal liturgy or sacrament, is not new to Baptists.
Eschatologically, priesthood practised as missional preaching places the church clearly in
the end times – the days in which “every man will be a scribe by trade,” when none of
God’s people will have to be taught for we will all know him (Jer 31.34). The implicit
tendency in Evangelicalism toward an informal clericism where authority, responsibility,
and activity are delegated to those who by dint of personality, not position, show 150 Eastwood, The Royal Priesthood of the Faithful, 35. 151 Dr. Michael Haykin, Ajax Alliance Church, Ajax, ON, November, 2010.
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themselves worthy, cannot long survive the command for all to preach the gospel and the
realisation that it is in the authority of the Word himself that we are sent out. As Küng
writes, “Every believer can and must, having been taught by God, teach others; can and
must, having received the word of God, be its herald in some form or another.”152
Priesthood provides the best context, especially in our day, for proper reception of the
Word in order that it might then be passed on while forming a people fit to do so. It
removes proclamation and study from the realm of the individual, both at the level of
reception and application, and returns it to the activity of the community. It places the
efficacy of the Word in the hands of the Spirit, not in the lips of the talented expositor or
ears of the attentive hearer. Priesthood in view of the Word preached most easily
conforms to the existing Baptist self-understanding while affording the greatest
opportunity for that status quo to be properly upset.
4.4.2.2 Sacrament: Food for the Faithful
Both baptism and the Lord’s Table, at present regularly observed yet irregularly
understood in Baptist circles, are foundational to our recovery of biblical worship from
the privatisation of the faith, and are best re-integrated by the application of priesthood as
an understanding of the church.
In examining the privatisation of religion Harvey finds it not merely an expression of
Enlightenment thinking but situates its origins in an ecclesial understanding of the
sacraments that pre-dates even the Baptist movement. The church’s participation in the
Eucharist as sacrament was initially predicated on its own underlying sacrificial
obedience as the Body of Christ,153 the offering of holy lives and minds by all,154 the
152 Küng, 377. 153 Harvey, “Re-membering the Body,”105. 154 Richard P.C. Hanson, Studies in Christian Antiquity (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1985), 83-85.
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ongoing work of the Spirit being not just in the past but active in the present and
promised in the future. The Eucharist was not something done to the church or something
offered by her, but a participation in Christ’s sacrifice itself. The thanksgiving and
prayers over the gifts were perceived as sacrificial elements.155 Over time and with the
establishment of the Church the transformation of the sacrament into something the priest
offered diminished the church’s role to one of assembled individual contemplatives with
observer status. Her disciplines came to serve the cultivation of the inner soul, an
atomisation that made the Church an ideal instrument for the State by which to control
social discipline while reducing her ability to speak prophetically against the State.
Harvey finds early Baptist theology and practice to address, not to exacerbate, this
problem. The sacraments as communal expressions of the Lord’s work among his people
were part of a reaction against the idolatrous and servile role the Church had come to
play. The primary objective was not the freeing of the individual’s conscience, or the
enabling of private meditation, but the liberation of the Church and the restoration of the
freedom of the Lord to form, nourish, and govern his Church. Priesthood is a necessary
means by which this primitive Baptist understanding of the sacraments can aid the church
to “acquire and nurture the many skills and virtues that transpose simple seeing into
discernment and mere existing into holy habitation”156 – a school of Christ, for the
transformation of its students into real human beings able to critique the world and speak
love from its Lord into a system that perceives itself as self-governing. Such a
community declares as unreal the claims of the world and lives to prove those of God to
be good and acceptable and perfect (Ro 12.1-2).
Maranatha was an early declaration of the Church expressing both the desire for the Lord
to be finally present and the realisation that he was already in their midst. The priesthood
seeks to make a royal dwelling fit for the King who is there. The sacraments find their
significance not in validating our private experiences or even as an individual testimony
155 Bulley, 153, citing Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.18. 156 Harvey, “Re-membering the Body,”110.
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to a private belief and allegiance, but in “the reconfiguring of language and life which
God’s utterance of the Word in history and breathing forth of the Spirit upon the church
set into motion.” This is not a mechanical view of the real presence in the sacraments, nor
a real absence which we attempt to fill by our own faith. Rather, the sacraments serve as
a reflection and echo of what God has said and done in Christ, and of what he continues
to do by his Spirit in transforming the people he has translated into the kingdom of his
Son. They bring the action of Christ into the present, remembering the Lord in
acknowledging and enabling his re-membering of the body.
Baptism and the Lord’s Table have functioned as means of making visible the church in
the practice of the Baptists, and from the beginning were understood in communal terms.
Baptism identified one as gathered not only to the Lord but to a visible, local body of
believers. Portraying the work of God – the washing of the Holy Spirit, the identification
with and participation in Christ’s resurrection and all its benefits - baptism was not so
much an expression of personal faith as of submission to Christ and service to the
gathered body. It designated the believer as one of the household of faith. The Lord’s
Table was the nourishment of the church on the way157 – again, identified with the
gathered people, though not so much involved in their gathering, rather that by which
they were upheld.
The church as priesthood provides the active body which receives the sacraments as
performative links that enable her to do the business of the kingdom. They form then
send out the church to be the Lord’s body in his world. It is hardly accidental that in 1
Peter 2, preceding the definition of the church as a priesthood, vv1-3 couch her holiness
in terms that resonate with baptism and the Lord’s Table.158 Yoder describes the reality of
the presence of Christ in the sacraments in that they are operative: they form the people
of God in an economic sense, making each individual a member (or, re-membering).159
157 “for…the confirmation of the faith of believers in all the benefits thereof, their spiritual nourishment, and growth in him…” - Art. XXX, 2nd London Confession, Lumpkin, 291-3. 158 William Barclay, The Letters of James and Peter (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1976), 192. 159 Yoder, 366.
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Christ is seen not in the elements or in the individual but in his formation of a people for
service in the world, the objective power of the sacraments lying not in anything one can
possess but in their forming the priesthood to launch out in the power of Christ to rule
and to serve the world, a priesthood who has met spiritually with its great High Priest at
the Table. The subjective power is in their accusation of the individual, in their driving
the Christian to the grace of Christ, to the fellowship of believers and to love of the
outsider. Paul’s injunction for self-examination (1 Co 11.20-28) was not to work on one’s
individual purity but to remember the poor and thus discern the body of the Lord.
It is for this in part that baptism has been linked to church membership and discipline in
Baptist practice. It identifies those whom the Lord has set aside for himself. It has been
prerequisite for church membership and until recently in most churches for participation
at the Lord’s Table, in that it reflects the conversion and thirst for obedience of a believer.
It is in this light that the individual’s response in this church ordinance must be seen. It is
not individual holiness for its own sake that is sought merely, but that this holiness is
toward that of the church, sustaining and being sustained by it. The churches signing the
Somerset confession (1656) would hold that as a condition of baptism tokens were
required “to the satisfaction of the administrator and brethren or church concerned” – the
church has a role in baptism.160 This identified believers “not as passive recipients of
ecclesiastical grace, but as active recipients of divine grace who had banded together to
be faithful followers of Christ…”161 The sacraments as signs of membership in the local
church reflect the authority and place of that church in forming the walk together.
4.4.2.2.1 Baptism
Baptism as the mark of the disciple gathered to the body to be taught the faith (Mt 28.19-
20) emphasises the role of the church in forming the individual. The portrayal of baptism
160 Ellis, 216. 161 Ibid., 217.
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as the crossing of the Red Sea, not into paradise or the Promised Land but into the
wilderness (1 Co 10.1-5), posits the need of the believer for a people with which to walk
to safety even as it does the need to complete the journey and not turn back. The
wilderness is a dangerous place, as is the world; we need the safety of the People of God,
in the midst of whom we are nourished with manna, to survive the journey and to know
the presence of God in the cloud and fiery pillar. The epicletic prayer at baptism for the
presence of the Spirit is our call for the Angel of the Lord’s Presence not to abandon us.
Not the conferral of an objective holiness to the individual, baptism is the entry of the
individual into the protection and presence of the objective holiness of God, pledged to
remain with his people where this presence is subjectively known. To be cut off from the
people was the punishment of death; the believer is gathered to God’s people by the
command of the Word through baptism and marked as one of his, dependent for life on
remaining with that people.
Grenz identifies baptism as the act of the church that “entails the incorporation of the
baptismal candidate into the life of the community.”162 Its objective role in accomplishing
this is the linking of the individual’s story with that of God’s past action in Christ, as
narrated by the community, who are not passive observers in the sacrament. The limit of
the authority of the community in the sacrament – ‘Who can forbid water?’ (Ac 10.47) -
meets the privilege of Christian initiation for the individual. The church does not save,
but must receive163 through baptism one who has been saved (Ro 15.7). This further ties
the sacrament to the Word and our words to God’s Word, giving the testimony of the
candidate a theological place beyond that of merely moving speech. As Grenz also points
out, this enforces the understanding that the believer’s story does not end with the new
birth but joins that of the community, even as Jesus’ resurrection was not the end but
pointed toward his Parousia. Baptism is ordination into the priesthood, which recognises
162 Stanley Grenz, “Baptism and the Lord's Supper as Community Acts: Toward a Sacramental Understanding of the Ordinances,” in Baptist Sacramentalism, 93. 163 JW McClendon, Jr., Systematic Theology: Doctrine, 391.
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Christ’s work in the new believer; it is not mere self-validation. For Tertullian, baptism
was seen to parallel Moses’ anointing of Aaron to the priesthood.164
Baptism has always had a strong individualistic component in Baptist understanding.
This individual application was from the first identified with the objective work of Christ
as appropriated by the believer by faith, a far cry from the modern emphasis on one’s
personal faith. Baptism was seen to represent the cleansing of the believer from sin, the
believer’s death and resurrection to new life with Christ, and our portion in the
Resurrection, its power situated in Christ’s work.165 Each of these, while perhaps not seen
as being accomplished by baptism, is signed by it in the earliest Baptist views. The
individual priest was discerned in the midst of the priesthood.
CH Spurgeon felt baptism belonged at the centre of the life of the local church – it served
a similar function to preaching and its efficacy in communicating the gospel was the best
argument for its importance, “next to the Word of God.”166 Ellis describes baptism as an
anamnesis of the baptism, burial, and Resurrection of Christ,167 like Spurgeon
understanding the sacrament as a means of communicating the gospel, serving a parallel
function to preaching. As well, baptism causes us to look forward to our own
resurrection. In this it mirrors the Lord’s Table. Both are memorials - but not mere
reminders or guides to pious reflection, else why the attention to the form of each,
especially of baptism, among Baptists? They point not inward, but outward.
This, as a minimum, must be conceded in terms of the objective nature of these
sacraments. But neither are they effective in themselves in a literal sense, in that the
elements themselves either change or confer grace in a mechanistic fashion. Instead, both
164 Bulley, 163, citing Tertullian, On Baptism, 7.1-2. 165 “…it being a signe, must answer the thing signified, which are these: first, the washing the whole soule in the bloud of Christ; Secondly, that interest the Saints have in the death, buriall, and resurrection; thirdly, together with a confirmation of our faith…shall the bodies of the Saints be raised by the power of Christ, in the day of the resurrection, to reigne with Christ.” - Art. XL, 1st London Confession, Lumpkin, 167. 166 Tim Grass and Ian Randall, “C.H. Spurgeon on the Sacraments,” in Baptist Sacramentalism, 62. 167 Ellis, 220.
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draw the community into rehearsing the acts of Christ which are themselves effective in
the action of that community. Salvation and present and future hope are given Christ’s
definition in baptism, as the community again and again rehearses it. Water remains
water, but cleansing, death, and resurrection are transformed and given particular
meaning by the understanding given them by the water in Christ. H Wheeler Robinson
saw baptism as recalling believers to the foundation of the gospel in Christ.168
Baptism is that act in which God reveals his way with the church in Christ’s life, death,
and resurrection, and in which he again invites the church – not just the candidate – to
pledge anew commitment to that way and plead for his continued direction in the Spirit.
Baptism requires the individual, who pledges obedience based on the confession of faith
in Christ’s saving work of death and resurrection, and the church into which one is
received, who also bear witness to their mutual basis in the life and action of the Son of
God. The sounds and sensations of baptism – the splashing, the spluttering of the believer
emerging from beneath the water, often the tears, congregational and individual, upon the
hearing of the testimony – all require an individual who requires a people to hear these
and give them meaning. The prayer for the presence of the Holy Spirit is not invocation
for him to work magic on the water but a plea that he continue to bind his church
together, to protect the candidate and the church as he leads them now together out into
service in the wilderness, following the Lord.
The water, so full of menace and chaos (Gen 1.2), is made no longer the enemy but the
means through which one passes from death to life. In the baptismal pool is the darkness
upon the face of the deep at creation, the Noahic Flood, the sea against which the hosts of
the Egyptians trapped the children of Israel, and the Jordan that barred the way to the
Promised Land. It is the menacing waves which the Lord once stilled. The Lord, in his
baptism and thus in his death and resurrection, leads his church through all of these.
While very much an active expression of our individual faith and obedience – “as many
168 “The baptism of believers by immersion has not only emphasised conscious faith as essential to the Church, but it has also, by its symbolism, constantly recalled men to the foundation of the Gospel in history, the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ…”. Ibid., 219.
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of you as have been baptised have put on Christ” (Ga 3.27) – it is dependent upon the
Lord’s prior act as presented in the church. Baptism signs our submission to our common
Lord and is the form of our response.
Baptism is formative not only of the individual but of the church. It draws our piety back
to the shared narrative of Christ. It continually redefines who we are as individuals and as
a people, the sign of God’s election and our obedient response, and thus of our vocation
to the priesthood of believers. The priesthood provides those who recognise and receive
in the baptisand one whom Christ has received, even as they are instructed by the
testimony of that very candidate. They are drawn into the working of the sacrament,
integral to its efficacy even as they are beneficiaries of its grace.169
Evelyn Underhill, no Baptist herself, emphasises the connection between believer’s
baptism and the priesthood of believers.170 The insistence on such baptism marks it as a
“crucial act of surrender” – radical individualism, but one in which each takes on the full
burden of moral responsibility in approaching God. It rests on a “passion for spiritual
liberty,” which the priesthood moulds to a liberty to serve. The same individuals who
could otherwise see themselves as self-sufficient assume voluntarily, publicly, and
personally, responsibility to follow and serve Christ. In this sense it is truly radical, for it
takes men and women back to the radix of what it is to be human – to be defined by God
in Jesus Christ.
Priesthood both benefits from this understanding and makes it possible. One is not a lone
Christian, the spiritual pilgrim using whatever means might aid to individual progression
toward a goal - as McClendon points out, the Spirit in individuals may come to nothing
apart from the Spirit in the community171 - nor is one absorbed into a mass or an
169 This reflects the need of the church, not merely the individual, to be given the spiritual gift of discernment, a required element for the church to be the ‘Community of the Spirit.’, JM McClendon, Jr., Systematic Theology: Doctrine, 343. 170 Pitts: 38. 171 JM McClendon, Jr., Systematic Theology: Doctrine, 343
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institution. Instead, the individual is released to serve with intent; to be that spiritual
individual, not generally but particularly saved in Christ for service in the body. This is
perhaps a Baptist answer to baptismal sacramentalism – baptism releases and equips the
believer to be a priest in the priesthood. It is tied to service, as was the Lord’s baptism at
start of his ministry, with the descent of the Holy Spirit who filled him not to make him
the Son of God but to send him into the world. It is about others, as was the Lord’s
baptism, to fulfil all righteousness for our sake, not his own. So should we also see
baptism not as that which makes a Christian but that in which believers confess in the
midst of others the need for the filling of the Spirit who has brought the new birth, and
the need to do so in the midst of those others if they are to serve in obedience.
Ellis points out that baptism relates to evangelism.172 Current practice too easily breaks
off the branch of individual response from the root that nourishes this response, the body
of believers. The whole response of believers and the church to the announcement of the
kingdom in Christ is that of repentance, baptism, the experience of forgiveness, then life
together – including the breaking of bread (Ac 2.38-48). This corporate response of
individuals before the world brings baptism back into the service not of the individual’s
faith journey, but of the Word: the proclamation of the kingdom.
Such an understanding requires a priesthood both to effect it and to receive it. The
corporate ministry of the body in the local church is required, lest baptism lapse into a
mere individual expression of faith which only tangentially relates to Christ or veer into a
poor cousin to the opera operandi of Roman theology. It gives an orthodox sacramental
understanding of the ordinance that both requires and forms the church, that both requires
the objective work of Christ as applied by the Holy Spirit and yet does not suffer that
work to take place without those whom it blesses.
172 Ellis, 213.
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4.4.2.2.2 The Lord’s Table
The Lord’s Table is perhaps more evidently a performative link in the formation of the
church than is baptism. It is there that we more plainly declare ourselves the people of the
New Covenant, sealed by the blood of Christ. This death “constitutes the identity of the
community.”173 Grenz points out that eating and drinking “metaphorically represent the
character of faith as the ongoing reception of God’s gracious provision in Christ.”174 But
the past, present, and future aspects of the rite also tie Christ’s past act with his future
promise. More than simply aiding in private contemplation, the Lord’s Table identifies us
corporately with these acts and promises. Grenz identifies the sharing of the one loaf as a
communal act of belonging, the symbol of fellowship with Christ and with each other.
Once again, one needs the community both to remember and to be nourished by Christ in
this manner.
As discussed above in the case of baptism, the Lord’s Table is a memorial; not a thing in
itself but an anamnesis, an act of memorialisation. As Freeman points to Thurian’s
examination of the imagery of remembrance, memorialisation “recalls God’s past
redemption as historically paradigmatic, God’s present deliverance as sacramentally
signified, and God’s coming salvation as eschatologically anticipated.”175 As such, the
Lord’s Table forms the church’s common prayers (Ac 2.42), reflects her charitable
service (1 Co 11.20-22), and places God’s covenant and promises before him. The
priesthood is the vehicle in which this occurs. It honours the Lord by reminding him of
and expressing confidence in his faithfulness to the covenant. The Lord’s Table as a
function of the worship of the priestly people, not of private meditation, discourages the
disordered appropriation of Christ’s work and places the church in the realm of
eschatological hope, a community defined by Christ’s past act, his ongoing support, and
the blessed hope of his glorious appearing (1 Co 11.26; Tt 2.13). In this way, the Lord’s
173 Grenz, “Baptism and the Lord’s Supper as Community Acts,” 94. 174 Ibid. 175 Freeman, “'To Feed Upon by Faith': Nourishment from the Lord's Table,” 199.
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Table forms the church in a revolutionary rebuttal of the priorities and timetable of this
present age.
Freeman points out that the emphasis among early Baptists was not so much on
“remembrance” as on the command to “take, eat”, to “do this”, in the dominical words of
institution (Mt 26.26-28).176 Christian remembrance lies in the doing, as our salvation lies
in the self-giving of Christ, in the act of the Cross and not merely in the intention of God.
Our doing re-enacts the self-giving of God as the Father yielded up the Son in the power
of the eternal Spirit (Ro 8.32; Heb 9.14); it is a prayed act that shows before God our
acknowledgement of the utter significance and formative power of his life-giving act. It
prescribes the acceptable worship of individuals as a church, drawing the legitimate
expression of obedience into the practice of the community.
He also, among others, cites Alistair McIntyre’s understanding of practice as a shared
community activity whose internal goods are realised in the doing. This gives a
communitarian emphasis to what has been abused as either a sacerdotal act or an exercise
in individual piety. However – and here it reflects the danger of communitarianism –
there is the risk that the community can come to determine the meaning and effectiveness
of the act. As with the narrative reading of Scripture that requires a community to echo in
its life the narrative of Scripture, so too in this understanding of the Lord’s Table the
community can come to dictate what goods are to be achieved and how this is to be
measured.
Freeman is suitably cautious in delineating what is to be expected from such an
understanding of the Lord’s Table, which must be dictated in terms of the act itself. There
remains, however, the danger of a subjectivisation in terms of the community, which can
be just as vulnerable to the siren call of its age as the individual. As well, with McIntyre’s
definition, the pendulum can swing over-much to the anthropological aspect of the Lord’s
176 Freeman, “'To Feed Upon by Faith': Nourishment from the Lord's Table,” p202n.
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Table, with “the human powers to achieve excellence” dominating over the promised
presence of the Lord with his people as being the chief good of the sacrament. As Barth
points out, it is “the passion of Jesus Christ itself and as such which has to be believed
and proclaimed as the act of God for us”: the Lord’s Table is exemplary in its simplicity
in declaring this. The words of institution and the action of giving the bread simply point
to the event itself, presupposing this event to be self-explanatory. “Faith only needs to
confess that it has happened. It happened for us, but it happened without us, without our
cooperating or contributing.”177
In seeking to involve the community in preaching and the sacraments in a way that
shapes it in the doing, this objective effectiveness of the word and act of God must be
maintained. As Haykin surmises regarding the adoption of the language of ordinance in
the Second London Confession in place of sacrament,178 the divine institution of the rite
has been a central concern to Baptists – it finds its origin and power in Christ, not in the
assembled action of the community. We must avoid an understanding that sees the
community by their mere presence in some sense making the sacrament, or which defines
it outside of Christ. Nevertheless, Freeman provides a salutary reminder of the need of
the people to be present and active in this aspect of the formation of the church.179
It is perhaps in the self-understanding of the church as not merely community but
priesthood that the preceding may be more safely established. The priesthood is defined
by the One who gathers it and the purpose for which it is gathered. Contrasted with
community, which is often hyphenated so that the emphasis falls on the act of gathering
together and the desire to do so, and not the reason for it (there even exists, apparently, an
“Adult Entertainment Community”!), priesthood ceases to have a raison d’être without its
Lord and his calling. The priesthood comes to the Lord to be sent out by and for him.
Individuals find their meaning in this calling and community, even as it does not exist
177 Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol IV/1, 249. 178 Michael Haykin, “'His soul-refreshing presence': The Lord's Supper in Calvinistic Baptist Thought and Experience in the 'Long' Eighteenth Century,” in Baptist Sacramentalism, 179. 179 Freeman writes here in the context of ecumenical consensus on the presence of Christ in the sacrament.
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apart from them. There is a synergism that functions in an interlocking fashion at many
levels in priesthood, which preserves them in place, keeping the gathering a particular
Christian endeavour.
Harvey, like Torrance, takes the understanding of the formative, upholding nature of the
Lord’s Table somewhat further when he assigns the bread and cup a causal role in
forming the body, as he interprets 1 Co 10.17.180 While the understanding in many
traditions, this would seem to overstate the case. This passage, like Ga 3.27-8, is more
descriptive than prescriptive. It is Christ by his Spirit who has sanctified us for obedience
to the Son and sprinkling by his blood (1 Pe 1.2). When Paul pleads his labours in the
formation of Christ in the Galatians (Ga 4.19), he makes no reference to the sacraments,
emphasising rather the “hearing of faith,” (Ga 3.2) the reception of the gospel by the
work of the Spirit. The sacraments are the marks of the community drawn apart then
assembled together by Christ by which he identifies and nourishes her; causal they are
not, though contributory and formative they are. Thus in hearing this critique, we must
circumscribe to some degree the performative function of the sacraments, that they do not
run too far ahead of the objective work of the One in whom they nourish faith of his
people, even as they should not be separated from that ongoing work as expressed in the
sanctification of the believer.
Ellis also sees the Eucharist as participatory remembering.181 The congregation enters
into the action of the upper room, as disciples, as in McClendon’s previously discussed
hermeneutic of the “shared awareness of the present Christian community as the
primitive community and the eschatological community.”182 The sacrament is not a
mechanical invocation but another enacted means by which we express the historical
significance of the church today as contiguous with that of the primitive Church and the
Church yet to come. Her quest for holiness is neither restorationist – seeking to reproduce
180 Harvey, “Re-membering the Body,” 111. He also refers to Ga 3.28 in support of this. 181 Ellis, 192ff. 182 McClendon, Systematic Theology: Ethics, 31. See also the discussion in ‘Remembering and Re-membering,’ above.
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some primitive, pristine church; nor progressive - always trying to transform, to become
the church of tomorrow. Instead, such acted out obedience proclaims our catholicity,
confessing both the Church that preceded us and which is to come as we acknowledge
ourselves as both debtors to the past and contributors today to the future. McClendon
reminds us that anamnesis is not merely a past memorialisation, but looks back, around,
and forward.183
McClendon finds this to cut the Gordian knot of a self-understanding that seems to oblige
us to choose either a “naïve biblicism” or a reliance on historical-critical method; an
individualistic soul-competency or an institutionally mediated religion; a fixed,
unchanging body of tradition or an ever-shifting, amorphous collection of doctrines. The
christocentric focus that declares the church today to be one with – indeed to be - the
Church that always has been184 serves to protect from these excesses. It also provides
another hedge against the aforementioned dangers of myopic communitarianism. The
Lord’s Table as community act, but not just of our particular community, reflects the
understanding that establishes its effectiveness outside of the local community while
within the local community. The activity of the priesthood serves to give believers a
prescribed order not just in the local church but in the Church catholic – for the corporate
worship participates in the essence of the ancient and present worship of the Church,
even when offered in the local assembly. Indeed, priesthood as the legitimate expression
of the church’s worship makes the catholic Church believable, for its presence is
perceived in the visible worship of the local church.
The conduct and significance of the sacraments are regulated by Scripture – they are
directed remembrance, even in their individual devotional application. In terms of
priesthood, the sacrament is neither offered nor received but enacted. The priestly
community forms an essential, active part of sacramental action. This is crucial in 183 “God’s future is immediately, presently relevant to this community. If Jesus’ preaching was proclamation of the inbreaking of God’s reign now (Mark 1.15), Jesus’ supper was a kingdom meal already, this ‘blessed assurance’ a ‘foretaste of glory divine.’” McClendon, Systematic Theology: Doctrine, 405. 184 McClendon, Systematic Theology: Ethics, 31.
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addressing the problem of secularism observed by Harvey, one he noted to originate in
this objectification of the Eucharist. The church is not just a gathering of individual
disciples but an ordered cultic assembly, remembering by their collective action in the
Spirit. Believers participate at a corporate level in a physical act – eating and drinking –
even as they undertake a spiritual act – remembering. It is an ordinance – a dominical
command of the Lord, responded to in obedience, while a sacrament – a vow of his
continued faithfulness to his church, even as his church vows her continued service to
him.
This again emphasises and does not diminish the requirement for individual participation
and responsibility. Objectively, while each remembers individually, we remember similar
particular and concrete acts of God external to the individual: Christ’s sacrificial death,
Resurrection, and future return. Thus our remembering must be corporate, even as we
take the one bread and drink the cup as one (1 Co 10.16-17). It is perhaps here that the
argument over closed or open communion should situate itself. In baptism we remember
our calling into and being made members of the People of God in the Body of Christ, a
necessary step to being able to remember corporately with thanksgiving the shared
benefits of the acts of God in Christ and his ongoing remembrance of himself in the
church, by which we are shown to be members of one body at the Table. To come to the
Table without having first been gathered to the church in baptism and sustained in her
discipleship is not so much forbidden as absurd.
Torrance links the Eucharist and the gifts given the church to enable her ministry, as 1
Corinthians 12 follows Ch. 11.185 The church is ordered into priesthood at the Supper, its
worthiness defined by its discerning of the Body of Christ in the needs of its various
members, love being operative in the esse of the church (1 Corinthians 13). The gifts are
received in the Spirit, upon whom the Church remains dependent even as individual
churches are dependent upon, because one with them, other local bodies (1 Co 14.33, 36).
185 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 65.
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Christian life must flow out of the corporate observance of the sacrament just as it ties the
community to the People of God (1 Co 10.1-5).
Sacramental life in the church should show her essence to transcend the subjective,
rooted in God’s gracious action. It is somewhat ironic in Free Church practice that these
sacraments become the vehicle hors pair of subjective expression. In life, the church
must always be pointing to the death of Christ, both the past act and the present bearing
of that dying in our own body (2 Co 4.10-11). Grenz identifies baptism and the Lord’s
Table as pointing both backward and forward, joining our narratives to that of the gospel,
identifying ourselves with Christ’s death and resurrection.186 Unlike personal testimony
or even preaching, the corporate and corporeal aspect of baptism and Eucharist, as they
are seen to form the priesthood, are more resistant to being severed from the defining
narrative of the life, death, and resurrection of the Lord.
4.4.2.3 Discipline: Order for the Ordained
Discipline is that which orders this gathered people. Not a means of judging who’s in and
who’s out, it serves to keep the ranks even and the body progressing in order and in the
right direction. In the fellowship, discipline ensures that profane fire is not kindled (Lev
10.1-2) and places us around the tabernacle when the time comes to move, that none run
too far ahead, lag too far behind, or become scattered in the wilderness.
Far from excluding, discipline is that which draws together God’s people. Discerning in
one another those whom Christ has received, exercising mutual forgiveness and
edification, the church is the family and people with whom one proceeds in the
wilderness. Discipline is an encouragement, parental correction that indicates at heart the
love and concern of a father for his children, reflecting in the actions of the priesthood the
186 Grenz, “Baptism and the Lord’s Table as Community Acts,” 91-92.
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concern of Christ for the holiness and salvation of his people. It is the concrete expression
of the particular concern of the Lord for his people in gathering them.
The priesthood of believers ensures that discipline strikes a balance between
individualism on the one hand and tyranny on the other. Indeed, discipline is absurd
without a committed body who submit to order while finding it to be formative; it builds,
it does not beat down. It was typical of Baptists from the beginning.187 Unlike their
Reformed brethren of the magisterial churches, Baptists separated church discipline from
the secular, seeking to achieve in practice what Calvin desired in theory at Geneva and
what Luther earlier mused upon in writing. This was in large part because the State
Church was seen to be usurping the role of the Lord in guarding and keeping the body of
the saints. However, it also placed the discipline of the church in the church’s hands, to
whom Christ had given the requisite gifts. This not only safe-guarded the liberty of Christ
in drawing together his church but also promoted the dignity and safety of the church and
of believers in their appointed role in defining her boundaries and maintaining her purity.
As such, discipline is a major element in the upholding of the body, and is the
responsibility of the priesthood. Unlike those early English Separatists who saw the
essence of the church to reside in her elders, Baptists came early on to see the church as
the gathered saints themselves. Thus it is a function of the priesthood of believers to
exercise the power of the keys, following the dominical teaching of Mt 18.15-20.188
Priesthood is necessary to the proper exercise of this discipline – the responsibility of
every member together – as this discipline is necessary for the maintenance of the
priesthood. Without the co-inherence of priesthood and discipline in the community,
priesthood can become the purview of the self-righteous, self-defining holy individual,
and discipline the means by which we outdo the other in righteousness, in order to be
187 BR White points out that this is clearly seen in the church meeting, which needs be understood not merely as an administrative exercise but a continuation of the worship of the church. Alan PF Sell, “Doctrine, Polity, Liberty: What Do Baptists Stand For?” in Pilgrim Pathways: Essays in Honour of BR White, 30-31; see also Yoder, Royal Priesthood, 363-4. 188 Hammett, “From Church Competence to Soul Competence”: 150-1.
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able to judge both our progress and our neighbour’s as we jostle with each other to take
the gates of the kingdom by violence and achievement, not service.189
4.5 Priesthood: Appropriateness
The concept of priesthood is advanced as the best model with which to define and
construct Baptist ecclesiology. It most closely fits the ethos of a people called out
together to live in conductual holiness before the Lord, separated from the world for
service to it, while at the same time ensuring that he leads, not they; conformed to Christ,
but never seeking independence from him or to do anything more than to represent, not
replace him, in his world. It addresses that principal distinctive and distinctive concern of
the Baptists, the quest for individual holiness.
The priesthood of all believers preserves, in its best expression, the call of the church to
represent Christ with authority yet not to usurp that authority – to be joined with Christ
yet neither to be divinised nor to have the individuality of her members abolished in the
process; to find service to Christ in the proclamation of his Word, a service which at the
same time demands a personal holiness. It is a corporate call that joins one to a body of
believers defined by service, not self, and makes this identification essential to the
individual’s identity. It preserves the sacramental practice of the church from being
commandeered either by those who lead, being transformed into absolutely objective
instruments of salvation; or by those who follow, being transformed into absolutely
subjective instruments for the cultivation of personal piety. The freedom of God and our
dependence on him in his dynamic visitation of grace in the sacramental practice of the
fellowship is preserved.
189 George quotes Carlisle Marney (Priests to Each Other) on this community responsibility: "There, where you and they are—you, all of you, are the ministry of the Word. This does not mean that you are competent to deal with God for yourself. It means rather than you are competent and responsible to deal with God and for the neighbor. It was a gross perversion of the gospel that inserted a bastard individualism here and then taught us that the believer's priesthood meant that 'every tub must set on its own bottom.” T George, “The Priesthood of All Believers and the Quest for Theological Integrity”: n25.
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Priesthood is the model perhaps most faithful to the diverse history and past practice of
the Baptists. It maintains a balance between the individual and the body, between God
and believers, between the Spirit’s charismatic moving and the institutional requirements
of the church, incorporating and encouraging the spontaneity and communal participation
that has characterised Baptist worship, to a greater or lesser extent, over the past 400
years.190 Priesthood is externally oriented, both in source and direction, answering to the
Lord’s direction while responding in mission and witness.191 So Baptists have been led by
Scripture and preaching; as a people they have always esteemed the preaching of the
Scriptures and their reception by the individual above form or institution. They have
consistently been a missional people.
Priesthood serves to secure the understanding and practice of the church as a voluntary,
gathered, covenanted community. It cannot be practised outside of a formally organised
community but is applied in the midst of a people, drawing one into the service of others
even as it protects and forms one and one’s understanding of the gospel, that the
individual is able to be of service to the Lord and others. Entered into voluntarily, it
requires the commitment in covenant to the Lord and others.
Priesthood is most suitable to the Baptist people because it represents a dynamic concept
of contingent service, not a making of the church, its sacraments - or the believer -
objects unto themselves. Priesthood as activity, a people defined not so much by who or
what they are as by whom they serve and how and why, is faithful to the activism that has
characterised Baptists and distances the church from the institutional status of which
Baptists have been suspicious over the ages. Activism in the sufficiency of Christ for the
190 Ellis, 70. 191 “The priesthood of believers is not a prerogative on which we can rest; it is a commission which sends us forth into the world to exercise a priestly ministry not for ourselves, but for others—"the outsiders," not instead of Christ, but for the sake of Christ and at His behest.” T George, “The Priesthood of All Believers and the Quest for Theological Integrity”: 293.
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sake of others defeats passivity, a function of the individual’s disengagement from the
church.
Focusing on this contingent description, which describes how the church is body, people,
and spiritual house rather than what they are, should in turn prevent this understanding
from becoming a self-standing definition, susceptible to being co-opted or being
transformed into an idol itself. In tying this activity into a corporate service to the Lord, it
should serve to discourage the separation of spirituality – and holiness - from the
congregation and Christ and to inhibit our tendency to see Christianity as in some sense a
reflection of our inner dignity. Dynamic priesthood serves in the midst of the people
whom God has chosen, to whom he’s given his commandments, of whom he’s required
obedience and faithfulness. Currently, our priesthood has its literal forms: adherence to
the Bible, to believer’s baptism, to the autonomy and in some cases particular
governmental structure of the local church, to the soul competency of the believer.
Focusing on them, we risk deafening ourselves to the God who speaks. The more the
literal forms are turned into idols the less we are disturbed by a speaking God.
Priesthood in the Baptist context hearkens back to and reinforces the Calvinist
understanding of finitus incapax infinitum. While the Roman Church in the days of the
Reformers could be accused of in many ways seeing the infinite as tied to and enclosed
within the finite structure and sacraments of the Church, the Baptist problem is far
different. The foundationalist understanding of the authority of the Scriptures which
obtains in many circles certainly makes the Bible function in a similar fashion for many
Baptists, the Word in which God is perhaps not transfigured but inscripturated. Though in
actuality, here it is in the finite individual that Baptists have finally managed to
encapsulate the infinite – a self-standing inerrant Bible can mask what is in fact the
understanding that the individual believer is autonomous and inerrant, whose experience
and spiritual nature are the template through which the Word is understood.
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RBI quite properly seeks to address this sort of rampant individualism, which blindly
looses the lone soul to attempt to function as a competent and unimpeachable interpreter
of the Scriptures and thus of God. Priesthood, in making the people and at the same time
the individual contingent upon service to the Lord, reinforces the understanding that the
Lord cannot be contained within the church or the individual – nor can his holiness.
Holiness is not positional, nor is it granted as reward, but is dynamically sustained and
cultivated by the working of God’s grace. Here is holiness that must be lived and
sustained, and which cannot be lived and sustained alone – it must be cultivated in the
community.
If the Lord does not dwell in houses made with hands (Ac 7.48; 17.24), priesthood
ensures that neither is he ever thought to dwell in the spiritual authority of the individual,
however that may be expressed. He instead dwells in that holy dwelling, the spiritual
house formed of the stones made living by the work of his grace. Thus is removed the
ambition to conceive of as infinite either church, ordinances, people, or individual,
seeking rather that God be all in all. This God is gracious and is for us in Christ, not a god
who must be bought and brought on side with us by our achievement of individual
holiness, but the one whose mercy is reflected as he works to conform us to the holiness
that reflects his. We are led by priestly mutual service to be sure of the God who saves in
Christ, and not of ourselves.
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Chapter 5
What Manner of Persons Ought We to Be?
Manifestations and Conclusions
5.1 Manifestations
The application of the concept of priesthood as a corrective to how Baptists view the
basis of the Church should result in some salutary changes in belief and conduct,
restoring the balance between the individual and the community within the election of
God to service while encouraging the communication of a vision of the kingdom which
will be of benefit both to the Church and the world.
5.1.1 Corrective Manifestations
5.1.1.1 Priesthood and Perspective
Theologically, priesthood provides the Church with a timely confession of the utter
otherness of God while confessing and demanding recognition of the accountability and
the significance of men and women. It maintains the objective distinction between God
and humanity, resisting our constant temptation to worship whatever construct we fashion
by which we approach God. It emphasises that we serve in utter dependence the God who
has gathered us, who upholds us, and who sends us out.
Priesthood reduces the ease with which we associate Christianity with either the State or
the individual, which as we discussed above at the end of the day often means the same
thing. State and society serve to actualise and enable the individual – as such, the union
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of Church and State means the church is compelled and expected to do the same.1
Individualism as expressed within a liberal democracy results in the ethos of the
secularum bearing revelation, not the Church. Priesthood should serve to shake this – to
tie us to our duty to God and to each other in the context of the ancient and present
Church. It gives structure and an objective purpose to our faith, as well as an objective
substance.
Oddly enough, at the same time that it relativises the objective essence of the church as
contingent upon God’s uncontingent and absolute aseity and objectivity, the concept of
priesthood encourages the subjective participation of her people not in the singular
holiness of God but in the only holiness one can attain to – the emulation of Christ in our
participation in him. Set aside by the gathering work of the Spirit in the objective
upholding work of the Saviour (1 Pe 1.2), we set ourselves aside to be sent out in the
obedience to which we are called (1 Pe 1.22). Priesthood promotes a holiness that is
dependent, active, obedient – “Be ye holy; for I am holy.” (1 Pe 1.16) Holiness is not
limited to the few in institutional positions but becomes the pursuit of the many (Heb
12.14), whose holiness is never sicut Deus but a gracious working of God with the
believer.
It also dignifies the individual even in relativising the individual’s importance. The man
or woman of God finds significance in the service rendered first to God and then to
others. This dignity is neither implicit in the individual as a function of being created in
the image of God nor is it accorded either by inner transformation or State sanction, but is
lived into in the imitation of the Son of Man, the Elect Servant of the Lord, as enabled by
his election and enabling grace. Such an understanding can only encourage a properly
1 Jacques Ellul points out the singularity of Christianity, among other religions, in this not originally being the case. Early Christianity sought rather to express itself in, not from, society – « la conduite de la vie sera l’expression volontaire et tendue de la foi du Christ », Les nouveaux possédés, 11-12. In this it repudiates the appropriation by culture of the right to define the significance of the created order, claiming, as Harvey writes, that “The meaning of all other figures, events, and institutions no longer resides in themselves. They are now derivative signs, the significance of which can be followed only in their relationship to this one Jewish man and the body politic of the church, over which he rules as head.”, B Harvey, Can These Bones Live?, 78.
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high anthropology which views the merits of the human being not to lie in any innate
inner virtue, but as the consequence of that gracious choice (Psa 8.4). It is in acting truly
human, in obeying God’s law in Christ, that one sees oneself as truly human, with a
dignity that has its origin both in the new life in Christ as well as in the obedient service
one renders.
5.1.1.2 Mystery, not Management
Priesthood serves to retain in our understanding the sense of the Church as mystery, in
the loss of which AW Tozer would situate the Church’s loss of power.2 The discipline
and self-understanding of believers as a priesthood removes the Scriptures, the local
church, and God himself from the category of the manageable and the remote, making
our encounter with him uncontrollable. We must hear the Spirit speak and see him work
in the midst of others and respond. Our faith becomes risky, keeping us ever open to
being challenged in our own conceits. The conforming of the shape of Christian piety,
obedient service to others, to the nature of God revealed in Christ, further ensures that the
mystery of godliness – God manifest in the flesh (1 Tm 3.16) - regulates our exercise of
the faith. It is no accident that Paul’s direction concerning the requisite character of
bishop and deacon (vv1-13), underlined by the declaration that the church is the pillar
and ground of the truth (v15), is backstopped by this doxological assertion of the work of
God in Christ.
Rowan Williams notes that the sacraments serve to drive the Christian to engage with the
questioning that lies at the heart of faith. As with Jesus whom they reflect, they don’t
make the things of God plainer, but darker – they point to promise, not solely to past
achievement or present reality. But far from being our interrogation of a mystery
concerning which we withhold or grant assent, they interrogate us.3 Like the Magi who
2 AW Tozer, Paths to Power (Harrisburg: Christian Publications, 1911), 14. 3 Harvey, “Re-membering the Body,” 111.
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journeyed from the East, we come seeking the One whose Name we know but about
whom we are still very much in the dark. Hearing Scripture and preaching together,
receiving the sacraments as objectively effective within the subjective reception of the
assembly, walking together in discipline, subjects us to questioning of a degree that does
not occur when the knowing individual seeks religious knowledge. So should the
understanding of our salvation as vocation to priesthood reduce the danger of presuming
upon the finite to contain the infinite; rather, in signing the gracious presence of the
infinite, it directs our attention to our finiteness in the face of the mystery and infinity of
God.
This means that preaching, the sacraments, and discipline as heard, observed, and
practised by the local church should be approached with trembling, not pat explanations.
Preaching should focus on hearing Scripture before explaining and applying it; baptism
and the Lord’s Table should not be prefaced by a disclaimer of how little is actually
occurring in the sacraments, or by explanations of what is not meant by them, but kept as
pointers to Christ in which he acts by grace.4 Discipline must not so much be enforced
and applied as enacted within the priesthood. We must await expectantly what the Lord
will accomplish in our mutual submission to one another, in our submission to the
wisdom of the church (1 Co 6.1ff). This will require accepting the messiness of human
existence, being willing to hear the Spirit speak through the actions of those society
would otherwise deem not worth listening to. We so dread any uncertainty and lack of
control over God’s actions that we smother his ordained means of worship to the point
that they are hard pressed to give light and life. We would almost prefer the deadness and
certainty of the sealed tomb on the Friday to the alarm and uncertainty and hope of it
opened on the Sunday.
This sense of mystery and inadequacy must remain in the very attempt to model the
church as priesthood. There is a sense in which this approach only points to the truth,
4 As CS Lewis wrote, “The command, after all, was Take, eat: not Take, understand”, CS Lewis, The Joyful Christian (New York: Macmillan, 1977), 82.
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relying on grace, but does not comprehend it - as Dulles states, models are explanatory
and exploratory.5 It can at best be asymptotic, a pleading to see the glory of God in his
church even as he hides us in the cleft of the rock. A degree of reverent agnosticism
concerning ecclesiology will here ensure both humility and reliance on grace and one
another. It emphasises the importance of the local, visible church while not overly
privileging it.6 Far from dictating a brittle, restrictive, static model, priesthood as the
means of describing and prescribing ecclesiology necessitates we be open to the ongoing
involvement of God with his church. Thus can we discover aspects of the gospel not new,
but of which the church was not earlier conscious.7
5.1.1.3 Safety in the Multitude of Counsellors: Tradition
Priesthood provides that guild within which tradition can function dynamically in the
apprehension of doctrine. This means, to quote GK Chesterton, “giving votes to the most
obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead”8 as well as of the
living. This protects the church from autocracy by appealing to an authority beyond reach
of any hierarchy or institution. Such use of tradition has an ecumenical appeal of a type
consistent with our history, for it finds unity with others outside of institutions, seeking
faithfulness to intent, not form. We enlist believers of all types in service, making appeal
both to the learned and the simple, giving an outlet for both the learned study that marked
our beginnings and the experientially-based religion native to Baptists. This also provides
potential to do a truly Canadian Baptist reading of the Scripture. Baptist theology and
hymnody are largely borrowed, especially in the Canadian context, even as we also now
import our worship models. If forced to confront and embrace the great tradition as we
contribute to it, our life before Christ becomes truer to whom he has made us. We do not
confront the massive Evangelical media complex or borrow uncritically from our
5 Dulles, 24. 6 T George, “Sacramentality of the Church: An Evangelical Baptist Perspective”: 313. 7 Dulles, 26. 8 GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Colorado Springs: Waterbrook Press, 2001), 64.
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successful cousins to the south, but instead see ourselves as one with and a modern
manifestation of the ancient Church, no less ancient or faithful for our Canadian context.
This can use constructively McClendon’s afore-mentioned concept of the church being at
once the primitive and contemporary community, not by slavishly copying or being
dogmatically bound by the practices of the past but, while recognising the Spirit at work
in believers before us, bowing to and recognising his ministry today in making of our
present church both that of the past and that which is to come. This is certainly consistent
with early Baptists’ insistence on being open to further light from the Scriptures, in John
Robinson’s words. The exercise of tradition with a focus on the process and the people
involved in handing on as much as the thing itself that is handed on, as the dynamic
process of forming “the Church’s confession of faith as it comes to me from other
members of the church,”9 is a practice consistent with Baptist tradition! It balances the
competency of the believer, such as it is, with that of the community present and past,
expressing proper scepticism about the former and humble confidence in the latter,
reminding us in humility of our sin and tendency to promote and to delude ourselves.
Again, particularly in the Canadian Baptist context, this provides a place for the small
church which, while lacking the polish and programs of larger assemblies, is still the
ancient and future church in her contemporary application and employs the gifts of Christ
in representing him faithfully, whatever her size.
Such an understanding will not only give us a firm foundation upon which to build (Psa
118.22; Eph 2.20), but will ensure that it is we who “rise up and build” (Neh 2.18). It
prevents flaccidness and promotes the engaged deployment of our talents (Mt 22.1ff). It
requires a priesthood – one that requires every member to intentionally learn our roots,
both biblical and Baptist, and grow from them in faithfulness to what is best of that past
and to what is required in our generation.
9 Harmon, Towards Baptist Catholicity, 149.
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5.1.1.4 Priesthood and the Recovery of Trinitarian Understanding
The current Baptist understanding of the church has rendered her form independent of the
God she serves even as it has detached the individuals from the community that forms
them. Küng points out that the form and the essence of the church, while not identical,
cannot be separated.10 This separation results too often in a rank pragmatism that, as long
as it pays lip service to Jesus, is seen as biblically faithful, when oftentimes it is no more
than an ecclesial application of Western business models whose priorities and metrics
soon overwhelm even the best of intentions and distort or suffocate the message.
Priesthood enforces and develops an obedience in the church that reflects that which
defines the relationship of the Son to the Father within the triune godhead. Jesus Christ
the Son is revealed in the Scriptures as the Obedient One (Jn 4.34), the One with
authority who is under authority. As Barth points out, this is not an affectation but
reflects the true nature of God. The Son learned obedience by the things he suffered (Heb
5.8), by which he is made able to save (Heb 5.9) and after which in the Resurrection he is
declared the Son of God (Ac 13.33). His glorification follows not only his humiliation but
his obedience (Php 2.8; Heb 5.5). This obedience, the submission to the Father of the Son
in the Spirit, is intrinsic to who God has revealed himself to be. It is not merely the
“forecourt of the divine being” but “the true and proper and non-worldly being of God.”11
Priesthood calls believers not only into a learning relationship with God in Christ, but to
obedience to Christ and to one another as a means of revealing the manifold wisdom of
God (Eph 3.10; 5.20) and reflecting his presence in our midst. Not simply a Christianised
version of a generic team ethos purloined from the secular world, it seeks to reflect the
godhead within the church even as that church proclaims God in word and action. The
obedience of the Son to the Father as essential to his dignity and sonship is
communicated within the fellowship of believers by their mutual submission and service
10 Küng, 37. 11 Barth, Church Dogmatics Vol. IV/1, 196.
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in dignity. This dignity does not contain God but is the result of his ongoing indwelling
and provision in the Spirit. In this sense the church is upheld by the discipline of service.
As the Spirit is the One who in love binds the Son to the Father in submission and
obedience, so it is in the Spirit that we submit one to another (Eph 5.21) even as we purge
our conscience to submit to the living God, making the church a living and learning
corporate sign of the life of God in the world, for the world.
It is in the unity of that Spirit, the bond of peace, that we reflect the one Lord and one
God and Father of all (Eph 4.3-6). This is the context in which church ministry is to be
offered (Eph 4.11ff). As the Son was the dwelling of God in bodily form (Jn 1.14; Col
2.9) so the church as the living house of spiritual stones shows the presence of God in his
world not in individual transformation into divinised beings but in the dynamic life of
mutual service in emulation of Christ to the glory of the Father. This service, not so much
her structure or even rituals, is the form of the church, which form - not that relating to
governance or orders of ministry - will permit the essence of the church to be expressed
in the world. It is in this reflection of the Triune God that our ministry has authority.
That this form represent the essence of God is crucial to the proclamation of the gospel
by the Baptist people if the message of salvation is not to be abstracted from the Person
of Jesus. In many Baptist circles he is seen as the agent or means by which we get to
heaven, have access to God, and are put right with the Almighty. There is, however, often
little particularly Christian said about this Saviour and rarely any reflection of the Triune
God in his Person and works in this understanding. Jesus the Son of God is merely
consequential to the essence of the god many seek to worship, a sort of jimmy to pry
open the unyielding gates of heaven, as it were. An orthodox understanding of the Son of
God and his works cannot long survive his abstraction from the heart of the godhead.
Such an understanding cannot merely be mouthed but must be reflected in the actions of
his people. Their lives, religious and otherwise, need reflect God and his way with the
world. Priesthood as it reflects the obedience of the Son to the Father in the Spirit
inherent in God himself does so.
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This priestly obedience, as it reflects God ontologically and economically, teaches both
the church and the world about God. It is the way in which believers carry the cross. The
cross is central not only to one’s salvation but to God himself and his way with the world
– the “proper being of the one true God in Jesus Christ the crucified...we cannot refuse to
accept the humiliation and lowness and supremely the obedience of Christ as the
dominating moment in our conception of God.”12 The expression of this in our lives is at
the core of Christian obedience and proclamation, evidence that the Lord is among us. It
is in submissive service – even in leading – that the priesthood demands of us before God
and each other that we take up the cross. The dying to self that is central to the new life in
Christ, to freedom from sin, is lived out in the disciplined mutual submission of the
priesthood.
As a royal priesthood, the Church rules on earth for our God (Rev 5.9-10) – but in the
way of Jesus, who “activates and reveals the unconditional royal power of God by living
it out unconditionally as man…to be a reconciliation of the world with God.”13 The
Church, powerless, proclaims and reflects the kingdom rule of the reconciling Christ by
defeating the rulers of this present age by loving service and unfailing obedience to God.
Priesthood brings the form of the local church into conformity with the God who saved
her to serve and rule the world in Christ’s name. The obedience requisite for the
priesthood and the mutual service and love in the corporate assembly of Christians that it
requires and nurtures both reflects the nature of the triune God while it serves as his
ambassadors on earth.
12 Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol. IV/1, 198. 13 Ibid., 208.
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5.1.1.5 Priesthood and Pneumatology
In the Nicene Creed, the article expressing that one “believes the Church” follows
logically confession of belief in the Holy Spirit. Yet these two cannot be connected if the
work of the Spirit is seen on a primarily individual level, as has been the case for modern
Baptists. In analysing this situation, Thompson describes the general perception of the
Holy Spirit as being “another Jesus,” who as an individual deals with us on an individual
basis.14 However, the ministry of the Spirit is to make Christ manifest in the Church and
in the world (Jn 16.9ff) – pneumatology must have Christology, not anthropology, as its
basis. Such pneumatology discourages corporatism, which displaces the Holy Spirit and
the Lord of the church and sees the institutional church as a directed mass. It should also
discourage the overly individualistic focus now obtaining, where the Holy Spirit is
subordinated to the human spirit.
Priesthood here gives a truly Baptist vehicle for addressing pneumatology as applied not
just in concept but as given flesh in the body of the church. The early Baptist view of the
Holy Spirit perceived his work as in, yet not restricted to, the individual, while avoiding
any magical sacramental view that bound him to the church or her functions.15 In the
function of the priesthood, emphasis is placed on the individual having a primary role in
work of Holy Spirit in the church, which Thompson cautions must obtain,16 while not
restricting his role to the individual, or legitimising it without the body.
While neither the individual nor the aggregate has the pre-eminence, God’s work of
salvation is concretised in the former. In our concern to address individualism this must
never be lost. There is no substituting the faith of the church for that of the individual, an
understanding that has distinguished the Baptist view of the faith and of the holiness of
the Christian from the beginning. As Thompson observes, while placing so much weight
14 Thompson, Towards Baptist Ecclesiology, 361. 15 Ibid., 368. 16 Ibid., 417.
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on the corporate in the place of our accustomed focus on the individual is risky, to honour
God’s freedom from ecclesial control (or individual control) we must also ensure that the
church is given no absolute authority, in God’s place, over the believer. However, the
church is the primary arena where God’s freedom to act for the believer is seen – else our
freedom risks being seen as superfluous, resting upon human nature and commonality.17
A more intentional, foundational view of the work of the Spirit in the church must
accompany any attempt to remedy the plague of individualism. The work of the Spirit is
within and for the church, even among individuals (1 Co 12.4ff; Eph 4.1-8).18 He makes
the church open to those on the outside, and to all of creation, while being her bond of
unity.19 Only thus can the church risk being open to others, for the wind of the Spirit
blows individuals in to join the congregation even as he binds those already there
together in Christ. He is the active agent who gathers this voluntary church – her
members do not join of their own unconstrained free will, nor can they be coerced to do
so. The Spirit equips her with the gifts of Christ even as he knits the members together to
grow into the one head (Eph 4.8-16). Neither mere glue nor the aggregate spirit of the
members of the church, he is the active agent who gathers and organises. It is within his
ministry that the church has her corporate life, in which sociality and individual
priesthood condition each other.20 The Spirit assembles the church, a spiritual house of
living stones (Eph 2.19-22; 1 Pe 2.4-5) and not a pile of spiritual stones with the Holy
Spirit as parging on the outside.
5.1.1.6 Priesthood and Practices
In his examination of Baptist origins, when looking at how the movement might
contribute on the ecumenical scene, Kenneth Manley cites Daniel Day Williams:
17 Thompson, Towards Baptist Ecclesiology, 419. 18 Ibid., 420. 19 Ibid., 422. 20 Ibid., 423.
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“Here is a form of the Christian community which rests upon an
experience of the Gospel which is personal, rather easily intelligible,
vividly symbolized, calling for personal dedication, and open to the
promptings of the Spirit. The Baptists seem to prove that the Christian
church can live and grow as a personal fellowship based on a directly
shared experience, provided it is interpreted through a commonly accepted
language of Scripture symbols.”21
In our definition and development of the concept of the priesthood of believers in the
previous chapter, a foremost theme is the re-definition of the balance between the
objective and the subjective in Baptist ecclesiology that this doctrine can bring to the
movement. As evidenced in Williams’ statement above, personal experience and
openness to the Spirit are two hallmarks of Baptist ecclesial piety. Situating this personal
experience and openness within the context of the disciplined and active priesthood
called, formed, and ruled objectively by Christ in the Spirit should give the subjective
Christian experience an objectively defined form and substance; the changes in
perceptions must be reflected in practice.
Thompson’s concern for God’s “freedom from and for”22 must be a watchword here. God
must be seen as free from control by the church – that she or her ministry or sacraments
do not make of God an object, subservient to the church - even while he is free to work
through institutions, sacraments, people. The understanding of both the obligation and
ability of every believer to serve the Spirit in the church encourages directness of access
and of obedience that is not of the church, even while it is not without the church. This
should discourage the over-identification of God with either the ministry or the church
that would be destructive in its idolatry to that very ministry even as it renders God
unbelievable to many.
21 Kenneth Manley, “Origins of the Baptists: The Case for Development from Puritanism-Separatism,” Baptist History and Heritage 22, No 4, Oct 1987: 44. 22 Thompson, Towards Baptist Ecclesiology, 46.
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The Baptist understanding of the priority of the local church cannot be isolated and
idolised to the degree it is at present; the practical absolute autonomy defended in many
circles as biblical may find its only support, ironically, from the closing verse of Book of
Judges (Jdg 21.25)! However, the local church does remain the primary locus of God’s
work in Christ, equipped by the Spirit to competently be a self-governing witness under
Christ. This necessitates an active, engaged priesthood of believers, without which the
local church is effectively a non-entity, either subservient to a strong-willed pastor or
elder (effectively episcopal rule) or so individually focused that there is no visibility.
The particular balance of objective and subjective plays out in the understanding that the
church is less institution than a people on the move – the priesthood in the wilderness.
Everyone has a task and must contribute, moving only as the cloud and fiery pillar
dictate. The subjectivity places an onus on the individual to bear witness in obedience;
the objectivity ensures that the church within which this is done is not the object of that
witness, but that God is both its subject and object.
5.1.1.6.1 Strength in the Subjective
In autocratic and isolated pronouncements, in open sin and shameful conduct somehow
excused by a modern right of clergy, in authoritatively blessing in Christ’s name and
placing the Church in subservience to the cause of governments and movements right and
left which manifestly repudiate his teachings, in disengagement and self-centred pursuit
of spiritual enlightenment while neglecting the poor and the lost, the Church has opened
herself up to withering and justified rebuke and ridicule by the world, through which the
Lord must be heard to speak. The application of the priesthood of all believers can
diminish such a temptation to make the Church another Christ, another Caesar, or even
another Oprah, even as it should make her more sensitive to proper criticism.
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This subjectivity, the apprehension of the practice and pursuit of the faith by all believers,
will render the Church more believable. It is more evident that Christ is not the Church,
nor the Church Christ, when believers take upon themselves their response to the Spirit.
Blame for the Church’s fallenness will be assigned where it belongs: not to God, but to
his people. The mission of the Church will be made more evident: to bring men and
women to salvation and completion in Christ, of whom the Church is only witness and
servant. Priesthood obliges the People of God to lay claim to that for which they are
claimed, to repent for that sin which is our responsibility, to receive forgiveness by grace,
and to enter into Christ’s service actively. Thus will we claim responsibility for what is
proper even as we renounce that over which we should never have attempted hegemony
in the first place.
The emphasis on directed, dependent subjectivity that the application of the priesthood of
all believers brings to the Church requires that believers engage their faith on all levels,
and this, for the good of both clergy and laity. In shifting the balance to the body of the
faithful the ordained have lifted from them an unbearable burden, to be borne in common
by the faithful while in obliging the faithful to take personal responsibility for the
ministry, to by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil, for
working out their salvation with fear and trembling. Such subjectivity in practice, the
releasing of ministry to the laity and their obligation to take it up, is necessary that the
whole Church might properly be the ekklesia.
In its subjective emphasis, priesthood reflects in the life of God’s people the realised
eschatology of a Church still in this present evil age. The call to corporate conductual
holiness as a priesthood displays that while the kingdom is not of this world, it is in it.
The presence of Christ may thereby be made more evidently manifest in his people as
they live in the community and the world, Christ in them, the hope of glory seen today.
The power of the Spirit is shown in the weakness that holiness of life espouses –
weakness toward the world – while eschewing its institutional power structures and
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pronouncements. The kingdom of Christ is not of this world, or its forms, even while it is
represented in the world in the Church, his people.
The remembering so central to the formation of the church as a priesthood, as described
in the previous chapter, leads to a corresponding re-membering of the church – believers
find their subjective experience of God’s grace and service to him in the community, not
apart from it or received from it. This encourages the church to stand against the
atomising, soul-gutting dismemberment of society, giving the practice of Word,
sacrament, and discipline a context, permitting them in turn to give God’s people their
context. The role of the priesthood is to live as a reminder that we are not mere atomised
individuals whose significance is determined by society and by self, but rather that all of
life as created is a sign of Christ. Thus as his creation, we are not free to have meaning
assigned to us, but only honestly exist when expressly pointing to him. The community of
the priesthood points to what is, not to what the world seeks to impose.
5.1.1.6.2 Opportunity in the Objective
Situating the objective reality of the priesthood of the faithful in the vocation of God,
wresting it from the hands of individuals either lay or ordained to be given over to the
body of believers in their corporate vocation to be a royal, priestly people, renders the
Church yet again more believable. We are relieved of the need to see ourselves sicut
Deus, little Christs unto ourselves, growing in god-likeness. Doubt about the faith or
one’s salvation finds its answer not in the church or in oneself but in God, the objective
source of the believer’s hope and power and the objective reality of the priesthood of the
faithful. The church is not burdened with expectations she is not able to meet, as it is God
who directs through the body of believers. She is the bride, not the bridegroom, who is
the head; she is being cleansed, being made spotless – she is not expected to do so
herself, or to seek to live as though she had no husband. At the same time, the members
of the church are seen not for how valuable or consistent their individual spirituality is,
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but are seen in Christ, who is our righteousness, who makes us as an army terrible in
banners, which is what the Church truly is.
This objectivity has in turn the potential to render society and her imperatives less
believable. It must be said that the Roman Church has had better success with this than
Protestant bodies have had, overall; there is a sense in which the tradition to which she
makes appeal is less malleable and subject to current fads and whims. However, there is
the accompanying danger that the Church come to be seen as irrelevant by her
remoteness, an agelessness indistinguishable from senility, even as she seeks to declare
modern society’s priorities at times irrelevant to God’s purposes and human dignity. It
must be said that, too often, Baptist churches in the West have shown themselves equally
irrelevant to society, not by remoteness but by proximity and identification. Oddly
enough, this identification can be with either contemporary or past eras; what is
noteworthy here is that whatever the era, the ethos embraced is secular and culturally
defined, and it is embraced uncritically. Priesthood in the objective sense espoused in
these pages seeks recourse to the dynamic tradition of the Church catholic while
contributing to it, seeing it as alive and responsive to the true direction of God in our day.
Rooted in the congregation and not in institution or static tradition, it joins Church and
society where they need to be joined, and in the needful manner; the spiritual house of the
church is formed from stones which are living not only in worship but in the world.
Priesthood is pursued in both arenas.
At the same time, the objective nature of the Church as priesthood resists the temptation
for the Church to see herself as an order similar to the secular order, power competing
against power. While such a conception has had in the past both advantages in
maintaining an otherness of the Church in terms of governance and universality,23 it has
also been a snare. It limited the effectiveness of the magisterial Reformation, whose
reforms took on the same governing paradigm as the Roman Church it sought to reform,
save that it lacked the latter’s universal scope, thus drew Reformation churches even
23 Yoder, 58.
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closer to their national governments and consequently to the secular. It has occasionally
placed even Baptist churches, if not on the wrong side of evident social justice issues, in a
position of seeming to speak to issues from an assumed bastion of power and privilege,
and not from the place of forgiven servants seeking the obedience to God of their fellow
citizens.
However, priesthood moulds the Church to a form that cannot compete institutionally
with the world and so will not. Her strength must be found outside herself, in her Lord
who rules his Church by his Spirit, delegitimizing the governing structures and ethos
where they refuse similarly to take their place under Christ. At the same time, while she
must differ from the world in affections and conduct, she does so even while being in the
world; her otherness is not detached, but engaged. The world is repudiated, but only as it
serves the prince of the power of the air. Flat in hierarchy and having rejected the
divisiveness of the secular powers and philosophies, such a priestly defined Church is
universal, varying only in flavour, not dignity, around the world.
In rejecting secularisation while insisting on the worldliness of the Church, the priesthood
asserts the lordship of Christ where it is inconvenient. This returns to the Church her
prophetic voice, but one that is a broad, multi-toned chorus, more the still, small voice
than the single, booming projection of the whirlwind. She will be better able to speak into
situations that vary from place to place and time to time, and that from within the culture,
even as her guiding light is without.
Priesthood also expresses future eschatology: the Church is not the kingdom. That the
objective reality of the priesthood is defined by God even while manifested in his Spirit-
indwelt people prevents us seeing the Church as ontologically self-sufficient. It maintains
our prophetic voice, to address first the all too real sins of the Church, then those of
society. It discourages too close an identification of the Church as Christ, or the Church
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with society, and the temptation to complete the latter’s transformation by means of
power.
5.1.1.6.3 Locality and Visibility
Locality incorporates the present church with the primitive Church by integrating her not
just in structure or liturgy, but by the Spirit integrating her into the ongoing story of
God’s work with his people and the world. A viable local church is not then defined by
who she is in communion with, nor by governance or liturgical forms; rather, her
catholicity – and thus viability as a local church – is defined by her openness to the
Spirit’s remembering her as she dynamically obeys and serves Christ by the performative
functions of Word, sacrament, and discipline. Unity can then be expressed not so much
by institutional recognition or by allegiance to a temporal figure, ecclesiastical or not, but
by obedience to Christ as his Spirit draws this church into his ongoing work and story.
Proper locality also requires openness to and a confessed need of other churches.24 In this
regard, the priesthood of believers can force open doors often held shut by ecclesiastical
authorities. Sharing community ties and relationships with those of other churches and
denominations that leadership may avoid, the men and women of the local assembly can
encourage a bottom-up ecumenism that may be resisted from the top.
The application of the priesthood of all believers to the church will bring to the fore its
locality and visibility. In an age characterised by globalisation this is an essential move in
order to bring the gospel to the West. However, the answer does not lie in the radical
localisation and autonomy that characterises many Evangelical assemblies. Often centred
about a strong, charismatic leader or a narrow theological emphasis, these local churches
are isolated. They become localised, not local, as in the whole enterprise the community
is really tangential and the Church catholic irrelevant. A variation of this is the franchise
mentality emerging in Western Evangelicalism, where mega-churches or mega-
24 The Nature and Purpose of the Church, 33.
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personalities form mini-denominations of their own, often within established bodies,
somewhat ironically echoing the proliferation of orders with which the Western Church
was confronted in the Middle Ages, but lacking the higher sense of accountability and
common faith that characterised those movements.
Rather, proper locality is enacted in the priesthood of the gathered church, trusting the
Spirit to work within both the officers and people of the church, and the sufficiency of
Christ to ensure the competency of the local church for the work to which she is gathered.
This requires a suspicion of the modern paradigm of success that is driven by freedom of
choice and secular metrics. As the priesthood emphasises the responsibility of God’s
people gathered locally to make Christ manifest locally, so the local church is gathered
locally – the priesthood of believers are those Christians resident locally to the assembly.
The drive-past mentality of Evangelical church-goers who desire to attend a church
which serves one’s self-determined needs with one’s self-selected peers must be subdued.
The church as priesthood will see herself as successful when obedient in that place where
God has selected that the apostolic practices be enacted to build the house of the living
God, his royal residence. The church as local, properly equipped within from without, is
competent to launch outward, to be the place of God’s dwelling whose gates he loves
more than all other places on earth. She exists not merely for her people, but for her Lord,
and thus for those who do not yet show forth his praises.
For such localism to be valid the church must be visible, requiring that the local
community be visibly holy: holiness of conduct that reflects the sanctification of the
Spirit by which the church is set apart for obedience to Christ (1 Pe 1.2). Priesthood
makes that holiness a subjective experience to match her objective reality in Christ. It is
here that the Baptist movement has much to contribute, if it will hear its own past. The
holiness of the priesthood may lie in that of our Lord Jesus, be signed by the sacraments
of baptism and the Lord’s Table, and be cultivated within a regularly governed assembly.
But these are reflected by the subjective experience of the holy life, not only internally
but in conduct.
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Visibility as applied individual and collective holiness is the hallmark of the local church
in the priesthood of believers. As God made himself manifest ultimately in the man Jesus
Christ, who proclaimed the kingdom not only in word and concept but in his sinless life,
so must his church be real in her visible holiness in the world. This means that the
hearing of the Word must be seen as effective only when it results in amendment of life,
not merely of thought; that the sacraments serve the cultivation of holy individuals within
and for the holy community; that discipline seeks to purify the church so she is fit to
listen to, to obey, and thus to represent Christ; and that these three strands of Christian
practice cannot be separated, but are ultimately only effective when practised together.
Such local visibility means that holiness cannot be outsourced, as the medieval Church
sought to do in the monastery and convent and in the institutional priesthood: it must be
brought back in-house. Neither can it be up-sourced, spiritualised so that it exists only
objectively in Christ whom, not having seen, we love, or inwardly sourced so that it is
practised in splendid individual isolation, free from the fear of contamination or the
impositions of others. The preaching, sacraments, and discipline of the community are
essential not as elements unto themselves but as the means by which the Spirit forms a
people in Christ, visibly holy.
This again serves to make the Church and the faith believable, both to Christians and
others. The Church invisible has for too long been truly that, in its conformity to society
or its structures. The localisation of the practice of the faith in the visible priesthood
should encourage the return of the Way of Jesus to visibility and thus believability. The
Church, following the preaching at Pentecost, was known by its visible practices which
reflected its internal fellowship (Ac 2.42ff); Christians were first called such at Antioch
(Ac 11.26) because of something tangible their opponents saw.
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Such visibility at the local level will make Christians accountable to those with whom
they interact, both in word (1 Pe 3.15) and in deed (1 Pe 4.12). This requires of the
church a priestly ministry on the part of all; all need know the Scriptures and be formed
by them; all need regular recourse to the sacraments, understanding their indispensability
in the formation of Christ in the body; all need be subject to and exercise a discipline that
forms Christ in the men and women for whom he died.
Priesthood enables the church to manifest this needed concreteness, locality, and
visibility. Otherwise, participation in the faith is a theoretical exercise in an unreal body
that exists in no particular place and exerts no particular discipline. Rather, the church
visible is fully representative of and at the same but a part of the Church invisible
composed of the elect both alive and glorified. Its bona fides must lie outside itself, even
as it must be made visible in its assembly and life.
5.1.1.6.4 Covenant as Crucial
The concept of covenant, ever-present for the early Baptists even when lurking in the
background, must form an element of the discipline of the church as a biblical priesthood
if a balance is to be struck between establishing that mutual dependence and commitment
which binds us together to aid in the formation of Christ in us and the avoidance of any
thought that we actually form community ourselves and not as those gathered by the Holy
Spirit in Christ, who gives the covenant its meaningfulness.
Returning to the centrality of covenant emphasises that we worship and serve the God
who is present. As God would not save except by coming in the midst of humanity as the
man Christ Jesus, so we must return this humanity, the Church, to its proper place in
God’s work of salvation. Covenant binds us to the community of the elect through which
God commands the world to repent. It expresses both the commitment of God to his
children as well as the renewed bonds between people that Christ restores, undoing the
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separation brought on by sin. It provides the instrument for the accountability and applied
love that must undergird any attempt to form a gathered church disciplined in holiness.
Covenant keeping also ensures that doctrine is both confessed and practised. The
statement of faith as the instrument by which both believer and church profess orthodoxy
becomes increasingly irrelevant, both to the Church as a whole as to individual believers,
as belief is separated from actual worship and practice. That one cannot be acknowledged
to hold the orthodox faith unless one do so actively in the company of a local church
binds orthodoxy to orthopraxis, ensuring that what we claim to believe directs how we
worship and act, and vice-versa. The covenant is not just an instrument of church
government but a means of ensuring orthodox belief, as it ties this belief to the
community in which it is taught and received.
Without the concept of covenant at the heart of the church’s role in God’s dealings there
is the constant danger of piety degenerating into either rampant antinomianism or
repressive legalism. The church covenant as the vehicle by which the election of God is
enacted needs to be re-introduced, to restore the balance between the unconditional
election of grace and the demands of obedience as mediated in the church. Thus can
Christian service be rendered not meritorious but of gratitude, effective yet not
determinative, and God’s grace in election seen as unconditional and sovereign, yet not
as license to slavery to sin.
But covenant cannot be properly undertaken without the concept of priesthood
undergirding it. It will otherwise either become the means for an autocratic leadership to
enforce discipline or its terms become completely self-defined, removed from the need to
submit to the lordship of Christ and the approval of fellow churches. Priesthood, in seeing
the individual’s calling within the church to originate in God’s election for the purpose of
serving Christ, encourages believers to undertake an active role in determining the terms
of the covenant and in living within them.
214
Baptism and covenant need to be reunited in our understanding of what constitutes the
church. Baptism is commonly seen today as having no instrumental effect and thus no
objective importance, the right of the believer and expression of one’s individual
subjective faith. But as we have seen, baptism is a performative link that teaches and
forms the individual and the church. It is prerequisite to participation in the church that
naturally leads to participation in the covenant. Andrew Fuller saw baptism as a parallel
to enlistment in an army. However, the recruit is untrained and has not been assigned to a
regiment, in which training in the traditions both of the larger service and of the home
unit take place. Covenant ties the individual soldier to the regiment and lays out the
regulations, requirements, and rights associated with one’s service. It provides the
structure between the ordinary private and the Queen, the necessary people to whom a
soldier must first show loyalty and obedience if such will be shown ultimately to her
Majesty. Otherwise, we risk having armed mercenaries, undisciplined and untrained,
roaming the ecclesiastical streets, as it were. Covenant becomes not a means of checking
up on defaulters but rather of enforcing the commission of soldiers in the army of God. It
expresses both the command of God in election and the requirement of service in
response.
This has implications on the physical necessity of gathering together and on the size of
that gathering. Modern technology has facilitated the flight into interiority and from the
gathering of the people of God. Electronic media provide avenues of escape from the
necessity to rely on others and bear their correction. The growing trend to enormous
churches also provides a degree of anonymity and solitude in the crowd, in the midst of
which one can be ministered to by preachers and performers of magnificent genius. The
insistence by some early Separatists that the church be small enough for the entire
congregation to meet in one room and for all to have mutual knowledge of the others25
promoted the freedom of the Spirit and the importance both of the individual and of the
25 Steven Brachlow, “Life Together in Exile: The Social Bond of Separatist Ecclesiology,” 119.
215
community in forming that individual. The physical gathering of the church necessitates
that proximity.26
As the body of Christ, all members are to serve, whatever their attributes. In that spiritual
building all are filled with the Spirit, all are built around Christ.27 Free Church
ecclesiology risks being crushed by personalities and oligarchs as much as being
scattered by rampant individualism. No believer has the right to yield the individual
responsibility of sacrifice to any one person. Neither has any believer the authority or
right to withdraw from the corporate priesthood of the people which is the church, or to
restrict discipleship to individual study and self-fulfilment. The sacrifices we are required
to bring as a New Covenant priesthood must be offered in the context of the congregation
to be valid. For Bonhoeffer, the self-offering of the Christian for the community, for
others, was at the centre of ecclesiology; he saw in der Stellvertretung - not of Christ, but
of the church - ihre Wesensstruktur.28 Priesthood aids in enforcing these truths, as it
inextricably links our individual spiritual self-understanding and practice to the
congregation and its service, and thus is of the essence of the form of the church.
5.2 Conclusion
The priesthood of believers ties together in an inter-penetrating nexus the marks of Word,
sacrament, and discipline in the work of the Spirit in his Church. Emphasising the
centrality of the Word as the revelation of Jesus Christ and the Spirit’s means of salvation
and formation, it brings both sacrament and discipline under the Word’s authority. Yet
the Word is not apart from these ordained means of grace. The sacraments further feed us
in the mysteries of Christ, yet these mysteries are not given their meaning apart from the
Word and the disciplined community in which they are received. He who opened the
26 Thompson, Towards Baptist Ecclesiology, 440. 27 Küng, 371. 28 Hans Christoph von Hase, “Begriff und Wirklichkeit der Kirche in der Theologie Dietrich Bonhoeffers,” in Die Mündige Welt - dem Andenken Dietrich Bonhoeffers, 3.Aufl. (München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1955), 31.
216
Scriptures to the disciples on the Emmaus road was not known until encountered in the
breaking of bread; he who ate with the disciples in the Upper Room did not give the
Spirit until they had waited together as he, the Lord, commanded (Lk 24.27-31, 42-49).
Discipline is not a stand-alone means of ensuring a holy community, but guides and
obliges the community in her service together to Christ. It delineates the bounds of the
local assembly, while giving that assembly a locus to which to invite others for salvation.
The priestly People of God holds the legs of this three-legged stool in place; they are the
lockstitch securing the three-fold cord of Word, sacrament, and doctrine together in the
garment which is the Church of Christ. Such does the priesthood of believers, as practised
in the Baptist church in faithfulness to Scripture and to her own roots, but all in Christ,
have to offer the Church and the world. And as these legs stand together, as these strands
band together, so is the Christian life integrated: the believer into the local church, the
local church in the face of the Church catholic, and the Christian into the world in which
but not according to which we must testify to Jesus Christ as Lord.
The imagery of the stool further demonstrates the vision that priesthood emphasises for
the church: that of witness. A stool is not ornamental, nor does it stand for the sake of the
seat or of the legs but holds up the one who sits on it. So has the church been called not to
exist for her own members but rather to bear witness to Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory.
Christ declared that when he was lifted up, he would draw all people to himself (Jn
12.32). In the priesthood of the church he does so, as he draws us together to lift him up
by being joined to him in service, holding him up as he draws us together. A witnessing,
missionary people, the church as priestly company does not reproduce Christ but reflects
him and holds him up before the world. Her objective reality is not within, but without:
Jesus Christ. Her subjective strength is not for herself but to hold together in the Spirit as
a people called for their Lord. The church’s locality and visibility serve not her own ends
but those of making Christ present and evident for his glory and for the sake of those for
whom he died.
217
As practice within the local church is integrated, in terms of believers and the church, of
the subjective experience of the individual and the objective rule of Christ in the Spirit, of
worship in Word, sacrament, and discipline together, by seeing the Christian life in the
context of priesthood, so perhaps can this concept function towards that unity of believers
for which Christ prayed (Jn 17.21). Unity not in organisation, in ecclesial positions or
personalities, even in doctrinal understanding at all levels, but rather in the practice of the
faith at the local church level, may be what we are to seek. Certainly, contrary to how it is
often seen, the unity of the early church in Acts 1 as they awaited in prayer with one
accord the promise of the Father is itself fulfilment of Christ’s petition to the Father; this
must be seen in the local church before it will be seen on a broader scale. The priesthood
of believers, integrating and situating the living stones in the spiritual household of the
local church of Christ to pursue holiness and the obedience of faith not as mere
individuals but as a whole people, may also be the vehicle for bringing spiritual, living
unity to these households of faith within the one Church catholic.
The ecclesiological concept of the priesthood of all believers can provide a promising
arena in which to pursue ecumenical dialogue. Discussions about ordination, sacraments,
authorities pursued to date have proceeded along fairly predictable lines. They tend to
assume the answer before asking the question; the Church and churches are defined by
these quantities and many are excluded at the outset by the terms in which the question is
put.29 Priesthood presents a vehicle faithful to Scripture and to Baptist practice by which
such discussions may be pursued, both in the context of and language of forms currently
held by other bodies, but now addressed by a somewhat more balanced approach from
the Baptist quarter. We may then perhaps not answer but address, point by point, the
areas of sacrament, organisation, and ministry that presently give structure to the
ecumenical discussion. Or we may see that this is not fruitful – but it may also cause all
to pause to give thought to what sort of unity Christ would desire for his Church.
29 See Yoder, Royal Priesthood, for a summary of the difficulties facing Free Churches in entering into ecumenical dialogue with more hierarchical bodies, particularly Section III, Ecumenical Responses (219ff).
218
Jesus’ high priestly prayer, “That they may be one,” was not the hope for a unity defined
by the Church as she organised and governed herself: it pre-dated any such organisation,
any such definition of hierarchical lines of authority, any such definition of the working
of the sacraments. It was offered on the eve of the self-giving of the Son of God for those
whose preconceptions he had shattered in order to save. No, his prayer was that the unity
of believers might reflect that of the Triune God himself. For this to be the case, as the
Son was sent by the Father as the man filled with the Spirit for the sake of the world, so
must the Church be indwelt and governed in essence by the Spirit of Christ in the service
of the Father for the sake of the world. Priesthood is seen as essential in presenting a
Church and churches submitted to such a rule of Christ.
If this is the case, she will have unity – if never institutional, in terms of point-by-point
confession, even if never in terms of theology or sacraments or inter-communion – unity
in being open to and bowing before the rule of Christ in the midst of his priestly people, a
house of living, spiritual stones who both compose the building while being held in place
by it, who live to show forth the praises of him who called us out of darkness and into his
marvellous light. Such a unity is perhaps all we should seek this side of eternity – to rest
content with this, a common love of the Saviour in submission to his Word which seeks
progressively to see a common love between believers. We may learn obedience by this
thing that we suffer, the disunity that at some level will persist in a sinful world. This
cross of disunity may be one of the trials that God, in his wisdom, will continue to use to
form us in Christ, until the day of his appearing.
219
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