Books At a Glance (Fred Zaspel):
Hi this is Fred Zaspel executive editor here at books at a glance. Today we are talking with three authors Tony Chute, Nathan Finn and Michael Haykin about their new book The Baptist Story: From English Sect to Global Movement, a new textbook on Baptist history. We’re glad for the book. Were glad for them to be with us. Welcome you guys. Thanks for coming.
All guests:
Thank you.
Zaspel:
Alright. Three authors, one book. First off, whose idea was this and how did this project get underway in the first place? How did you divvy up responsibilities? How did this project work from beginning to end?
Tony Chute:
Well, I’ll chime in on that. It’s kind of like Baptist beginnings themselves we have two different beginnings to this Baptist storybook. Michael and I met at SBC conference and were just becoming acquainted and talking about current projects we’re working on. In the process of that conversation we both discovered that we didn’t have a Baptist textbook that we really enjoyed. We had several we were using and could use but nothing that we actually thought fit our particular teaching style or perspective. So we started a conversation there and in that conversation we mentioned the possibility of Nathan being a co-author but I think is Nathan can testify I think that he also had other plans about writing a Baptist textbook as well.
Nathan Finn:
I don’t know that I originally had plans on writing a Baptist textbook but separate from that conversation that Tony and Michael had B&H Academic actually approached me and Michael and originally and a couple of other men as well about having a four authored textbook and we couldn’t get the two other men on the same page. Then Tony’s name came into the mix so it ended up being a three authored textbook, a tri-authored textbook, so there is very much a poly genetic origin to the textbook. It doesn’t date back to AD 30 or 1525 or 1609 (laughing in background) but I do think there’s a sense in which it dates to 2008 and 2009 and 2011 before it finally evolved into what it is now.
Zaspel:
Okay, and how did you divvy up responsibilities?
Michael Haykin:
I think that was fairly easy in one sense. We all have areas of different specialities so mine would be definitely 18th and I could handle the 17th and Tony’s expertise was definitely focused on the 19th and Nathan’s was the 20th so it was very easy in that sense.
Zaspel:
Okay that worked out very well. Tell us about the book in broad strokes. What can the reader expect? And here are some other things: what did you set out to accomplish, how is your book filling a niche if any, what parameters have you set for yourself, those kinds of things.
Finn:
So I think one of the things that definitively sets this book apart from other, similar books, and I think this was very intentional from the beginning is that we wanted to write a true textbook. We did not what to write, what is often the case with books in this genre, a sort of a magnum opus that is written near the end of one person’s career where they collate everything their doctoral students have ever done and claim it as their own with lots of footnotes. That was not our goal.
What we did was sort of thought about the very best undergraduate history textbooks that we were familiar with whether it is American history Western civilization English history whatever the case might be, and we asked ourselves, what are the sorts of qualities in those textbooks? They tend to be grand narrative type books. They tend to focus on major figures, themes, controversies, ideas. They tend to be broader in scope rather than more narrow in scope. And they tend to have minimal footnotes if any and instead they refer people to further reading a word that’s more technical and scholarly, or they have information boxes that zero in on particular stories and figures.
We decided from the very beginning that was what we wanted to do for Baptist history. So whether it’s an upper level undergraduate student or whether it’s a first or second year seminary student, or whether it’s a Baptist pastor who wants to be familiar with the Baptist story, we wanted to give that individual that sort of resource. And so our mantra from the very beginning has been we’re not writing this book primarily with scholars in mind, we are writing with students in mind. And we don’t want the textbook that a student has in Baptist history class to be a hindrance to him or her enjoying that class and learning more about what it means to be a Baptist in the class.
Zaspel:
Could your book be applicable for use in the local church?
Finn:
Yeah we like to think that. Not just saying that, but we did write as Nathan said with students in mind and just because a person’s not enrolled in a college class doesn’t mean they’re not a student of some sort. So of course we would love for Baptist churches and even churches outside the Baptist tradition to consider it for small group study. Again we’re not writing it to show off our scholarly credentials. We’re trying to communicate a story, and that word story was important to us all. We wanted to have a narrative not just a list of facts and things were people to memorize but to bring some flesh and blood to the story itself and talk about the very people who formed the Baptist movement which were in large part local church members.
Zaspel:
Okay you mentioned that there are basically three approaches to Baptist identity. Let’s go with that for just a second. What is a Baptist as you use the term in the book and what’s essential to being a Baptist? Is that title useful for some who don’t necessarily have the label on their door?
Chute:
Well this isn’t opening up a can of worms at all is it? (laughing) So we definitely see that different people sort of come into their Baptistness differently and so some people have been raised as Baptists. I think we call that Baptist by conditioning. And then there are some that just move around from church to church and they land in a Baptist church not because it’s a Baptist church but because they like the preacher, or the music, or the youth ministry, or it’s close to home, or whatever, and they might be a Baptist by convenience but they might be a Methodist if they moved to a new town and they like the same thing there.
Then there are Baptists by conviction. Their theological conviction puts them there. So we value those first two categories but ideally we want people to be Baptist by conviction or whatever sort of Christian they are by convictions. And I think we would also recognize that especially in the last hundred to hundred and 25 years in many ways directly related to the modern missionary movement as well as just some of the general ambience of the American culture, there’s been a great proliferation of what might be called Baptistic or Baptist-ish Christianity. These are folks who would self identify as Baptists frankly even some conviction all Baptist don’t self identify as Baptists, but when you look at their understanding of the Christian life and especially how that plays out in the context of the local church, they quack like Baptists and walk like Baptists and so we don’t have to call them Baptists but we recognize that they are theological and ecclesiastical kindreds and so in that way Baptists are perhaps maybe a victim of their own success. We’ve spread our identity abroad so much so that many people don’t recognize it as Baptist identity anymore it’s just sort of low church evangelical identity in many ways..
Zaspel:
Okay let’s talk about Baptist origins. Your subtitle reads: “from English sect to global movement.” Tell us about the English sect: how, when, where did Baptist come about as a distinct group historically?
Haykin:
You have probably a couple of origins that you need to recognize. One is the group that has come to be called the General Baptists. Theologically, as they develop a kind of modified Arminianism, they stem out of Puritanism. Both groups do. I think it’s very critical to see the historical matrix out of which Baptist origins lie is that of Puritanism and the key name that is associated with that first group the general Baptist is John Smith.
Originally would have been part of the Puritan mainstream in the Church of England seeking to reform the Church of England, in the first decade of the 17th century comes to the convictions of the need for separation of church and state; that the idea of state church has no foundation in Scripture and because of persecution he and his congregation that he had established in Lincolnshire moved to Holland which was going through a kind of golden age of toleration.
It is there that he came to Baptist convictions that believers baptism is the New Testament norm for entry into the church. Smith has an interesting career and that within a couple of years of his becoming a Baptist he comes to a Mennonite conviction and disappears into a kind of Mennonite group. It’s left up to one of his coworkers there Thomas Helwys to lead the congregation back to England to plant the first Baptist Church on English soil around 1612 to 1613.
The second group is the Particular Baptists so called because of their Calvinism and their commitment to particular redemption or limited atonement as it has been sometimes called. They emerge in the 1630s again out of the Puritan context and come to Baptistic convictions, both Congregationalism and Baptistic convictions by 1638 the first church being founded in London by man named John Spilsbury.
Zaspel:
They arise independently of the general Baptists?
Haykin:
Yes, although there is significant interplay the General Baptists and the Particular Baptists in those early years. There is a degree of fluidity that Baptist historians have not always recognized and that partly because of a lack of knowledge of some of the primary sources, but yes they come to those convictions independently but once they have come to those convictions there are links made and connections made. Although the particular Baptists do seek to eventually by 1644, identify themselves as part of that kind of Calvinist international, to use a Marxist term, that is that body of Calvinist churches spread throughout Europe. They know that they are not Arminian and that the general theological position of the general Baptists is not theirs.
Zaspel:
Right. Jason Duesing has written a good review of your book for us here at Books At a Glance and he offers a really strong endorsement, but he also mentions that you could have explored possible connections with the Anabaptists. What about that? Were there any connections historically, any observable links, any kind of influence from the Anabaptists? What place does the study of Anabaptism have in the study of Baptist history?
Haykin:
Well this is a contentious issue among Baptist historians regarding our origins. To what degree are the Anabaptists our roots rather than the Puritans–and nobody debates the Puritan origins. That’s their writ and the factual evidence is very very clear. The question is to what degree are Baptists linked to the Anabaptists of the 16th century who emerged in the wake of the magisterial Reformation in Germany, Switzerland, Holland and spread to other countries.
The Anabaptists – the challenge of the term is that it is so broad it encompasses a significant number of groups ranging from Unitarians to revolutionaries who are like the people at Münster who took over the town and compelled everybody to be immersed as an adult, authorized polygamy, and eventually had to be put down with significant violence, and then to various pacifist groups like the Mennonites led by Menno Simons and so on. To what degree are English Baptist linked to them? The one position that has historically been enunciated in the 20th century by people like E.A. Payne and Dr. Estep who was at Southwestern for many years is that our roots lie in the Anabaptists and therefore that connection needs to be made very loud and clear.
It was our contention and we did treat the Anabaptists in the earliest chapter of the book because there are similarities. Those similarities I think are more because the Baptist and the Anabaptists are both reading the same Scriptures, it’s not necessarily because there are organic links of influence. There are links that are made, John Smith after he had come to clear Baptist convictions finds out that there is a group in Amsterdam who baptized believers and they are the Mennonites and he makes links with them. The particular Baptists in 1642 -1643 rediscover immersion and that through a Mennonite group in Holland, but these are connections that are made after the hard work of theological reflection and scriptural digging. The digging into the Scriptures has already been done. It would be our contention that there is no distinct organic influence in other words John Smith is not reading Mennonite authors prior to his coming to Baptist convictions. But it is a very contentious issue and it is bound up not only with history but it is also bound up with politics. So I think that’s what makes it to some degree contentious.
Chute:
Let me add Fred if I can part of what Michael is sharing is that we’re trying to go to connectedness. Where do Baptists come from and this is not to say that we are not indebted to other people before the Baptist movement, certainly we are. We’ve also again writing for students we decided we can’t give every reason for every position and go into great detail about our decisions. Our convictions are there on the pages, we believe what we wrote, but giving a long defense of why we decide this and how we decide that would have made this not student friendly but for the professors so there couple of other things going on there as well.
Zaspel:
Good point. When was the first Baptist Church in the US? Tony is that your domain?
Haykin:
No, no it’s mine. I had just done so much talking there I wondered if one of the others wanted to chime in.
The first Baptist Church technically is the First Baptist Church of America in Providence, Rhode Island which is linked to the very famous name of Roger Williams. Williams, when he comes over to New England in the 1630s is reading scriptures as all of the Puritans obviously are but comes to the conviction that the state has no role in enforcing theological orthodoxy. This gets him into trouble in New England and he is ordered out of the colonies but instead goes to what becomes Rhode Island, plants what will become a new colony there and within a year or two has been involved in the founding of a Baptist congregation. He is baptized as a believer and there is a small nucleus of Baptists but within less than a year he like John Smith has also moved on.
He becomes concvinced that there is no proper administrator who can perform believers baptism. One of the questions that is floating around the 17th century, that rarely ever comes up today, in many Baptist circles is not simply the mode of baptism or the subject of baptism but who can baptize? That’s a very important question in the 17th century and Williams becomes convinced that unless there is a restoration of the apostles there is no valid baptism at all and therefore there are no valid churches. So Williams comes to this convention that unless there is a proper administrator and those administrators can only be appointed by the apostles, and the office of apostle has to be restored, therefore there are no valid baptisms, no valid churches and he becomes a seeker; he becomes one who is waiting for the restoration of that office.
In England similar people believed that they find that restoration in the Quaker movement and people like George Fox who they believe are apostolic figures. Williams rejects that completely and has a number of attacks on the Quakers. So Williams spends his life after a brief interlude is a Baptist and founding this Baptist Church as a seeker. In some ways the first Baptist Church is the one in Newport Rhode Island founded by John Clark in about 1640. That has a continuous history; it is the most important Baptist congregation therefore from that period of time. The one that Williams founds goes to a period of numerous ups and downs and is not really established in many respects until the 18th century.
Zaspel:
You mentioned immersion. Baptists have always held to baptizing professing believers only but has immersion always with all of them especially in the early years been the practice?
Haykin:
No.
Zaspel:
When did immersion win out then? And do I understand rightly that Clark baptized his entire congregation with one pail of water or something like that?
Haykin:
No, I’m not aware of the details regarding Clark’s, you’re talking about the one in Newport Rhode Island, Clark’s baptism there of his congregation.
Chute:
Sounds like a Presbyterian argument to me. (laughing) One pail of water for whole congregation.
Zaspel:
I heard it from a Baptist historian.
Chute:
But pouring effusion was the first method and John Smith baptizing himself that was odd enough as it was but also immersion doesn’t come into play until the particular Baptists define it as such.
Finn:
So it’s probably around 1641 or 1642, it is entirely possible that there was immersion here and there prior to that time. We know at least a couple of different individuals John Merton and Edward Barber had argued for immersion but had not taken that step so the idea was in the air but importance here is the paper trail and the earliest we can go on the paper trail is about 1641. If it happened prior to that time it was certainly anomalous. The standard practice as near as we could tell would have been pouring over the head.
Zaspel:
Okay. The purview of your book is bigger than just the United States but let’s talk about that for a second. Baptists in the early years of the United States had a big influence on religious liberty. Can you talk to us about that maybe the likes of Isaac Backus or John Leland?
Haykin:
Obviously one of the things that is critical to Baptist thinking right from the very beginning is Congregationalism. Congregationalism obviously necessitates the separation of church and state and the other two major models of the time of the Reformation and then into the Puritan era would be Episcopalian and Presbyterian and both of them really in the classic forms are deeply rooted in a kind of a church state mindset or a Christendom mindset or the heritage from the Constantinian settlement way back in the early church.
The earliest defense of religious liberty would be that of Thomas Helwys. Almost coincidental with the rise of Baptists in their first appearance within two or three years you have this defense of religious liberty. Thomas Helwys’s writing a tract which he sends to the king which probably leads to his imprisonment and the king being James I in which he pleads for the recognition by the monarch that he does not have a purview or right to enforce religion over anybody be they one of their various Protestant groups in Britain at the time or be they Jew, Turk or whatever. Turk being a kind of a code word for Muslim.
This becomes central to the whole Baptist tradition, this defense of religious liberty. Bacchus finds himself in the very difficult position of being in New England with men that he agrees with theologically in many areas, their fellow Puritans, but who had embraced very oddly, very oddly for their Congregationalism, and this is criticized by people like John Owen, the English Congregationalists, but they had embraced a kind of a church-state model in New England.
And when Bacchus starts to write in the mid-to-late 18th century there has already been a history of close to hundred years of persecution of Baptists in New England going back to the whipping of people like Obadiah Holmes on the Boston Common in the 1650s and the defense of Baptists of their right to exist and broadening that to argue that the state has no right to compel belief, but in doing so people like Bacchus did not therefore believe that their religious views were simply to be held in private. They didn’t believe in an interrelationship and that the church and Christians did have a role to play in the larger context of society and I think that part is sometimes lost today. So Bacchus saw this kind of sweet harmony as he could describe it between the church and the state in which the church could have a beneficent influence upon society, but the state was restricted as it were a controlling belief etc.
Zaspel:
Is there an easy way to summarize the means and the process of growth of Baptists in the United States?
Chute:
Well if you talk about United States it goes back to this idea of religious liberty when you have churches basically realizing when they have to stand on their own to gain converts and to get people, of course they want to do this anyway because of the commandment from the Lord, but there’s no state support for the churches in the middle of the 19th century and you have a situation in which if Baptists wish to grow or participate or cooperate together then they are on their own.
So one of the great things about the story that we talk about is how the Baptist missionary movement takes place, in large part overcoming some theological obstacles but also getting free of the political shackles that would’ve hindered them in the process. So you do have a situation in which several things are coming together. Baptists are free to worship as they please in America. They are also energized to do to do evangelism, and they are also discovering in the 19th century cooperative efforts forming local associations in addition to the work of the local churches but also broadening out considerably into having state conventions and ultimately in many cases a nationalized organization like the Southern Baptist convention.
Zaspel:
Back when you guys writing this book, Michael, you wrote to me here in the Philadelphia area and asked if I could get a picture of Pennepak Baptist Church for your book, which is the first I had heard of the church and by the way it was my son who got the picture for you not me, so it was really easy (laughing). It was the first I’d heard of the church and its fascinating 17th-century pastor. Can you tell us that story briefly?
Haykin:
This would be Elias Keach I assume you’re referring to.
Zaspel:
Yes!
Haykin:
Elias Keatch was the son of a very well-known Baptist in England, Benjamin Keach. Benjamin Keach, born 1640 died 1704, was probably the leading Baptist theologian in Baptist circles on both sides of the Atlantic in the last quarter of the 17th century. Voluminous writer, his work called Travels of True Godliness, which is an allegory cast in the kind of mode of Pilgrim’s Progress, in its day was probably as big a seller as Pilgrim’s Progress. Its lack of substantial literary value meant that in the 18th century it kind of disappeared.
Elias Keach was his son who came to the colonies masquerading as a minister. He was not even converted and what exactly was going through his mind is not clear that he comes over pretending to be a minister and begins actually preaching and is in the course of this deception is brought to his senses and is genuinely converted and spends about 10 years here in the Philadelphia area, the Pennsylvania area, planting a number of churches, really functioning Morrison itinerant evangelist than a pastor but was involved in pastoring a church you mentioned but would eventually go back to Britain before the close of the 17th century. So it’s unusual.
Zaspel:
Yes, converted under his own preaching.
Haykin:
Yes that sort of thing was very very unusual. It’s never been clear to me why he adopted this masquerade but obviously he had grown up in the church, had heard his father preach and was able to fool his hearers initially.
Fred Zaspel:
Interesting. Baptists and slavery, the good the bad and the ugly. What do we have to look at in that regard?
Chute:
Well that goes back to before Baptists. The practice of slavery. And Baptists are part of the problem in American history and also throughout the world. In our case in the 19th century specifically it is highlighted by the formation of the Southern Baptist Convention. So you do have Baptists who owned slaves prior to 1845, you have Baptists who are in favor of slavery, some without even questioning it. The idea of slavery being an evil becomes more prominent in the 19th century and Baptists respond to that in different ways, some who see the light early and recognize that it is wrong to own another person and that biblical injunctions about slavery are not the same as American slavery, and there are other Baptists who don’t see the light quite so early and they become defenders of the practice. Also it’s highlighted because of the role of the Triennial Convention which refuses to send out slave owning Baptists as missionaries. So we have a brutal history there in terms of our (I say my our – my own denomination, Southern Baptists) our beginnings there because it was found on the basis of permitting slave owners to be missionaries but also in that process defending the right of persons to own slaves.
Zaspel:
Nathan, we haven’t heard much from you today.
Finn:
Well, you keep talking about all the stuff that they wrote about (laughing).
Zaspel:
Okay let’s talk about 20th century Baptists. I don’t think most of us think of anything in terms of significance in recent history, but tell us about the 20th century. What’s significant for Baptists in the most recent century?
Finn:
Baptists wrote at a really high rate from about time after the Civil War through about the 1980s. So there’s significant growth among Baptists in America. It’s around 1962 or 1963 that Southern Baptists in particular pass what becomes the United Methodist Church is the largest denomination in America at least one of you count all the dead people that were on the roles as well. (laughing) And that’s not counting all the other kinds of Baptists who are out there, so there’s just a tremendous amount of growth. And some of that happens because by that time Baptists, Southern Baptist in particular, Independent Baptists as well, just have an emphasis on personal evangelism in their DNA.
So there’s all kinds of, at the time, innovative programs to try and reach new people and lift new members, assimilate them into the churches and so there’s a lot of good with that but then there’s also some things that, maybe they’re not bad, but let’s say they are not as purely good as sharing the gospel. An increasing emphasis on pragmatism, often influenced by modern business trends kind of making their way into the church.
You also have a growth of sort of a revivalistic outlook. In many ways Baptist worship services and Southern Baptist and Independent Baptists, and some Free Will Baptist circles, become attempts to kind of bottle up the revival experience in a 60 or 75 minute spot of time every single Sunday. And not all of that is bad, some of it’s a little weird, and so there’s all kinds of different factors that contribute to Baptist growth.
Then as we really begin to move into a post-denominational age, whenever many of the Baptist groups again perhaps the SBC become characterized by controversy over theology and politics and personalities, you begin to see the beginnings of plateau and then decline among at least a larger Baptist groups by the 1980s. But really for much of the 20th century in America it’s a fascinating and in many ways fantastic success story of growth, and I think there’s a lot of reasons for that.
Zaspel:
Well, my background is Independent Baptist, Fundamentalist Baptist, so I grew up hearing lots about our history and the breaking away from the American Baptists and so on in the fundamentalist controversy of the early part of the century. What’s fascinating to me is that despite the fact that they broke away so often, still the Baptist grew at such a phenomenal rate.
Finn:
Yeah, I used to joke with my students and my Baptist history classes at Southeastern seminary that there’s this peculiar thing called Baptist math. And it doesn’t work anywhere else in the world that I know of (laughing in background). Inexplicably, Baptist multiply through division. (laughter). Now my Presbyterian friend Sean Lucas assures me that there’s a Presbyterian version of this is well.(laughter)
Chute:
Nathan, am I correct in saying that there was a saying in Baptist life for years wasn’t there, that you have to divide to multiply?
Finn:
I’ve not heard that before but I can affirm it. (laughter).
Chute:
I think that was actually a slogan. Not bad math but a slogan based on bad math.
Finn:
That wouldn’t surprise me at all.
The interesting thing about Baptists is the emphasis on individual liberty of conscience because of the emphasis on local church autonomy and congregational rule. I mean that allows for a wide diversity of opinions especially in the 20th century. Some of the most fundamentalist and most liberal religious leaders in the 20th century were Baptist. So you have that sort of diversity and I think because of that diversity it really shouldn’t surprise us that there is this tendency toward disagreement and division and growth at times because of those things. It’s just one of the oddities being the type of group that Baptists are in the type of setting like America.
Zaspel:
Well, this is fascinating. I could talk to you guys all day. I love your subject and I love your new book and I hope many will pick it up and read it. It’s a great read. Thank you guys for being with us, I appreciate it a lot.
Buy the books
The Baptist Story: From English Sect To Global Movement