Trouble With Baptist History

When the Baptists in England first won the toleration of the government they quickly began to position themselves as mainstream Christians and gain more than toleration. They wanted respect and the approbation of their neighbors. 

Among their efforts to gain this new position were:

A strongly Calvinistic doctrinal statement.

It made them sound like not much more than immersing Presbyterians

A denial of any connection with Anabaptists, especially those of the continent.

English Baptists, along with most of the British Isles, had a distasteful view of the Anabaptists. It seems obvious to me that their view was because of the tainted representation they had received from the Catholics and more recently the continental

Protestants who had long experience with them. Theirs was almost a cultural disgust of the Anabaptists. They had refused to accept the authority of the baptisms of the Catholic and Protestant churches for centuries. That they had always existed was not contested. What was contested was whether they were a unifying factor within all of Christendom. Anabaptists had always been schismatic in their view, insisting on a different sort of church than mainstream Christianity had ever held. Anabaptists had also been noted for their insistence on a different sort of Christianity. They preached a converting kind of faith. They preached that those who were believers were to be born again and that this new birth would result in a growing sanctification and a life of purity. This tenacious distinction between the Anabaptists and the catholic church, whether the Roman version or the Protestant one, had given the world of Christendom a bad taste for the Anabaptists.

Today we still find that this bad taste exists. 

Oftentimes in the writings of those who still dislike them and their history, choosing to believe that they were never a genuine form of Christian faith, frequently by those who would like to know our Baptist roots but find that the Anabaptists were not just like we wished them to be. I find that many modern Baptists, even those who claim to trace their roots back through the Anabaptists have a limited view of who the Anabaptists were. A lot of the reason is because it is a lot of work to read primary and secondary sources to discover as much as is possible about them. Most of us only know what we have read in summary type works like that of Robert Sergeant, Phil Stringer and others like them. 

Books of this nature, while giving us a general outline of Baptist History, don’t allow us to tackle some of the more challenging problems with Anabaptist history. When we do delve into the works of those whose work provides some detail we come face to face with the hard to swallow truth that

One, we are not much like most of them

Two, they were broadly different among themselves

This is readily understandable:

• They had no common way to be trained
• They generally only had portions of the New Testament
• They believed strongly in soul liberty - the right and responsibility of each believer to study the Scriptures and worship God according to the dictates of his or her own conscience

Our true heritage from the ancient Anabaptists is not really a set of doctrinal distinctives, although those distinctives , in a general way exist; what we inherited from our Anabaptist forefathers is

• A conviction that Christ alone saves through faith alone
• A conviction that the Bible is true, without error and profitable in every Word
• A conviction that the gates of hell have not prevailed against the Church Jesus built and
• A conviction that each human being must be given the liberty to know the Scriptures and stand before God as he or she believes the Bible tells them to.

Marvin McKenzie
In the Fields