Origin of the Baptists in America

What is now the Baptist denomination emerged from English Puritanism around the dawn of the seventeenth century. Similar to the sixteenth-century Anabaptists on the continent of Europe, English Baptists insisted on the immersion of penitent believers, as opposed to the sprinkling of infants.[1] True to their Puritan ancestry, the early sect took up the motifs of restoration. For example, early Baptist leader John Smyth (1570-1612), a radical dissenter from the Church of England, said he was seeking to restore "the worship and ministry of the Church, to the primitive Apostolic institution from which as yet it is so far distant."[2] Thomas Helwys (1550-1616), another leader among the early English Baptists, claimed that baptizing believers by immersion was the practice of the first-century church and, therefore, met the standard of apostolic Christianity, a conviction that led to the group's name.[3]

Early Baptists divided into two distinct groups. Particular (sometimes called Regular) Baptists upheld a Calvinist doctrine of salvation according to which God chose and predestined certain people to be saved and all others to be damned. By contrast, General Baptists embraced an Arminian doctrine of salvation according to which Christ died for all people, and individuals determined for themselves whether they would be saved or lost. The same distinction can be described from the standpoint of Christ's atoning sacrifice on the cross. Particular Baptists subscribed to a doctrine of limited atonement; the saving power of Christ's death was reserved for those predestined to be saved. General Baptists subscribed to the doctrine of general atonement; Christ died for everyone, so all could be saved.[4]

Through the seventeenth-century, the Baptist movement remained weak in America. Puritanism dominated New England, and Anglicanism controlled most of the colonies further south.[5] There were notable exceptions. In 1639, Roger Williams (1603-83), rejected by the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony, established the first Baptist congregation in America at Providence, Rhode Island. Also, in the early 1650s, Henry Dunster (1609-59), the first president of Harvard College, adopted Baptist beliefs about the ordinance of baptism. His change of mind led to his removal from office.[6]

Around the turn of the eighteenth century, Baptist destiny in America began to change. In 1707, five Particular or Regular Baptist congregations representing the colonies of New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania came together to form the Philadelphia Baptist Association.[7]  As Baptist historian Harry L. McBeth explains, an association "is a regional grouping of churches designed for fellowship, mutual guidance and cooperation in missions and other endeavors," and forming one is a Baptist tradition that reaches back to in England in the 1640s.[8] The association at Philadelphia, which still meets to this day, was not the first in America. Yet, it was significant for three reasons. First, it enabled American Baptists "to launch a vigorous missionary effort."[9] It also gave definition to the Baptist movement in America by publishing its Philadelphia Confession of Faith, "a modified version of the Westminster Confession, along with A Short Treatise of Church Discipline."[10] Finally, in 1764, the association sponsored the founding of a Baptist college in Rhode Island, today's Brown University.[11]. By then, the riveting sermons, ecstatic revivals, and published works of what was later called the Great Awakening had long since sparked incredible growth among Baptists in America so that congregations in the Philadelphia Association reached from southern New England all the way to Virginia.[12]

Notes

[1] Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 171-72; Richard T. Hughes and C. Leonard Allen, Illusions of Innocence: Protestant Primitivism in America, 1630-1875 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 82; Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (New York: Viking, 2009), 653.

[2] Hughes and Allen, Illusions of Innocence, 82. See also B. L. Shelley, "Baptist Churches in U.S.A." in Dictionary of Christianity in America, ed. Daniel G. Reid (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1990), 110.

[3] Hughes and Allen, Illusions of Innocence, 82; Shelley, "Baptist Churches in U.S.A.," 110.

[4] Ahlstrom, Religious History of the American People, 171-73; Hughes and Allen, Illusions of Innocence, 82. Although Calvinism held sway in seventeenth-century France, Switzerland, and Scotland, the picture was different in the Netherlands and England. In England, according to Philip Benedict, Christ's Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 314, Arminianism had been anticipated by Peter Baro who “left behind at Cambridge a number of loyal, if cautious, disciples, notably Lancelot Andrewes and the Regius professor of divinity John Overall.” As time went on, “positions . . . bearing the labels Arminian and Calvinist would wage a continuing and roughly equal struggle for supremacy within English theology” (316). This helps to explain the competing positions among early English Baptists.

[5] Edwin Scott Gaustad and Philip L. Barlow, New Historical Atlas of Religion in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 357.

[6] Shelley, "Baptist Churches in U.S.A," 110-11; Ahlstrom, Religious History, 174. On Roger Williams, see Henry Warner Bowden, Dictionary of American Religious Biography, 2nd ed. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), 155-56. On Henry Dunster, see Ibid., 155-56.

[7] Hughes and Allen, Illusions of Innocence, 83; Shelley, "Baptist Churches in U.S.A.," 111.

[8] H. L. McBeth, "Philadelphia Baptist Association," in Dictionary of Christianity in America, ed. Daniel G. Reid (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1990), 895.

[9] Shelley, "Baptist Churches in U.S.A.," 111.

[10] Hughes and Allen, Illusions of Innocence, 83. See also McBeth, "Philadelphia Baptist Association," 895.

[11] McBeth, "Philadelphia Baptist Association," 895.

[12] Shelley, "Baptist Churches in U.S.A," 111.