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Reformed Baptist History in America Part 2 By Sam Waldron

 We have come to the chapter on the doctrine of the Church and the confession of faith
held by this congregation of God's people and gotten through the first half of it, dealing
with the universal Church, and then it seemed appropriate to depart from that for a couple
of weeks and deal with the question of historical interest.
So I want those of you who may be visiting with us today to know that normally we concentrate
our attention more specifically upon the Word of God, but we do believe that there's biblical
warrant for studying Church history, and we have come appropriately in the midst of studying
the doctrine of the Church as we hold it here in the London Confession of Faith to deal
with the theme of Reformed Baptists.
I'm sorry that's quite, that's so faint as it is, but it's the best I can do.
Reformed Baptists, their historical backgrounds in America, and we take up that question because
the term at least, Reformed Baptist, is one that's unfamiliar to most evangelical Christians
in the United States.
We began by a definition saying that we're defining as Reformed Baptists those churches
and individuals which have arisen in the last 30 years in the United States which hold to
the London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689, which often but not universally describe
themselves as Reformed Baptists.
I mentioned that the Reformed Baptist movement is not isolated to America, that there are
Reformed Baptists in other places, and most specifically the British Isles, but that as
Americans we have a distinct religious history in America, and therefore there is a propriety
in singling out the theme of Reformed Baptists in America.
And our mission is simply to help you confront the fact that Reformed Baptist Christians,
Christians, evangelical Christians, and especially Reformed Baptist evangelical Christians are
strangers in a strange land, and we need to know how to cope with that fact if we're to
minister to our needy generation.
But now we came to see then that we'll only be dealing with three major headings.
The rise of Particular Baptists in America, the debasement of Particular Baptists in America,
and finally the rise of Reformed Baptists in America.
And last week we were only able to get to the rise of Particular Baptists in America.
Now by the term Particular Baptist, remember we defined that, historically the term Particular
Baptist refers to that line or segment of Baptist who were Calvinistic in their theology.
They believed in particular redemption, they did not believe in general redemption.
They believed in a redemption that saved some specific people, and not in a redemption that
made a general provision for everybody in general.
And for that reason, because they believed in particular redemption, unconditional election,
and irresistible grace, they were known as Particular Baptists.
We looked at their roots in America, first of all, and we saw that Particular Baptists
came to America, like so many others, through the immigration from England.
English immigration brought to America the Particular Baptist tradition, the Philadelphia
Baptist Association was formed in the year 1707 by five churches in the Philadelphia
area, and in 1742, 35 years later, they adopted this confession of faith, the Philadelphia
confession of faith, which with a couple of very minor changes is identical to the confession
of faith we hold as a church, the London Baptist confession of faith.
Now that was the first way in which Particular Baptists got off the ground in America.
The second way was through the Great Awakening.
The Great Awakening had a profound effect on churches that had been founded by Congregationalists
in New England, churches that were actually state churches, state supported, and having
a very close tie to the state, and many of those churches over the years had become dead
and lifeless.
Well, when the Great Awakening hit through the preaching of Edwards and Whitfield and
many other Calvinistic preachers, that Great Awakening had a profound effect on those dead
churches in New England, and many people were converted in them, and many of those people
being newly aware of the importance of being personally converted, the fact that external
church membership couldn't save you, determined that they could no longer be a part of those
state supported congregational churches in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and they separated,
and many of those separating churches ultimately became Baptist, either in whole or in part,
either large portions of the membership withdrawing or sometimes the pastor becoming a Baptist,
and it only made sense because of course when you begin to see that only through being personally
and individually converted to God can you have any claim to salvation, it was only one
more step to say that only such people should be baptized and members of the church.
And so it made sense that there grew up a second group of a particular Baptist out of
those old Calvinistic churches in New England, especially through the Calvinistic preaching
of the Great Awakening, and those Baptists were called the separate Baptists, and they
were to be distinguished from the Baptists who came over from England who were known
as the regular Baptist, and that's where the term that one Baptist denomination bears,
as in its name, gets that name today, although the term regular Baptist originally designated
those who were committed to the London Baptist confession of faith and the strict church
order that it embodies, and now that word regular has been diluted in our day.
And now we came B then, after looking at the roots of particular Baptists in America,
and noting that both the regular Baptist, the regular particular Baptist, and the separate
particular Baptist came out of the English Puritan movement, that Baptists, particular
Baptists at least, are a kind of Puritan. They are not Presbyterian Puritans, they are
not even Congregationalist Puritans, they are Puritans who have come to Baptist convictions
about the nature of the church and the recipients of Baptism, but that brought us to be their
predominance in America. Though there was initial period of suspicion between the regulars
with their doctrinal stability and their emphasis on strict church order, and the separate Baptists
who coming out of the Great Awakening were so enthusiastic that sometimes they transgressed
the bounds of doctrinal stability and strict church order, so although there was for a
time a kind of conflict between these two groups, eventually they were able to join
together, and we saw that there was tremendous growth in America, and that by the year 1780
there were approximately 457 Baptist churches in the newly formed United States of America,
and that the Baptists were on their way to becoming one of the largest Protestant denominations
in the United States, and that remains true to this day. In fact, Baptists are the largest
Protestant denomination in the United States. But now, the point that we wanted to make
was that though in the early years, 1660s, 1700s, the Armenian general Baptists, and
the particular Calvinistic Baptists were about equal in strength, because the Great Awakening
was the revivals that took place that were primarily Calvinistic, and the preachers
that God used to awaken his church, the vast majority of Baptists by the 1780s in the United
States are particular Baptists, and before the great influx of Catholic immigrants began
in the 1850s, the Baptists and the Methodists were the two largest denominations in the
United States. Well, all of that brought us to the whole question of the debasement
of particular Baptists. What I mean by the word debasement is the pollution or the debasing
or polluting of the particular Baptist tradition in America. And before I come to that, I think
maybe I'd better comment a little bit more upon the fact that in the 1780s and for a
number of decades thereafter, the major, in fact the vast majority of Baptists in the
United States were particular Baptists, holding, among other things, to this confession of
faith insofar as they held to any confession of faith. Now, that of course is something
that many people might say in our day is kind of far-fetched, because if there's anything
that's obvious in our day, it's that most Baptists aren't particular Baptists, believing
in the peculiar doctrines that were held by the particular Baptist. And so some people
might question the statement that at any time in the United States, such Baptists were the
major representatives of the Baptist tradition. Now think about something. One of the things
that remains peculiar to Baptist churches, by far and large in our day, is that they
hold to what is called the doctrine of eternal security, or once saved, always saved. Now
therein you have a witness to the fact that Baptists, for the most part in the United
States, were at one day and at one time particular Baptists, because no one originally ever
held to that doctrine that the saints would be preserved in grace to the end of their
lives if they were once saved truly, but Calvinists. And the fact that most Baptist churches still
believe in eternal security, even though they believe in it in a very imbalanced, lopsided
way, which is true, the fact that most Baptist churches have, that is one of their peculiar
doctrines, is even a witness to the present day that Baptist churches were once, but no
longer for the most part, in the United States Calvinistic, because nobody but a Calvinist
would ever have believed in that doctrine, alright? And it's only the last, kind of last
hangover of an eroded Baptist, particular Baptist tradition that causes most Baptist
churches in the United States to still hold to that doctrine. But now, the great question
is, if what you're saying, pastor, is right, if most Baptists were particular Baptists,
there's one thing I know for sure, and that is that most Baptists in the United States
today aren't. The natural question is then, what happened? How did Calvinism, the particular
Baptist heritage, almost totally disappear from Baptist churches in America by, say,
the late 1950s? Well, the answer to that question is not simple. Various factors can
be pointed out. It is always true that there is an innate tendency of the human heart to
defect from the biblical doctrines of grace. So that's always there, and you're always
going to have to expect that wherever you have one generation growing up in some sort
of tradition. There's going to be a tendency to defect from the biblical doctrines, and
especially the biblical doctrines of grace. But we can be more specific, and I want to
point out seven factors today, seven factors which contributed to the debasement and decline
of the particular Baptist heritage in America. Now, I've labored over how to define these
things. The first one, I couldn't get into an ism, but the last six are isms, all right?
But before I come to that first one, Mr. Quakel very kindly had made up, and how many did
you have made up, Carl? All right, I think most everybody in this class can have one.
This is Errol Hulse's charting of the English Baptist history. Now, he's dealing with the
English Baptist more than the American Baptist history, but still, he charts very well the
kind of course of English Baptist history through the last three centuries and a half.
And I think all of you would probably profit from having this and taking a good look at
it, and Carl's made them for us. So I'm going to ask if, Keith, you could take and give
one to everybody on this side of the auditorium. And if, Leonard, you would take and give one
to everyone in those pews over there. You get these pews, Keith, and Leonard will get
those pews. Thank you. And I'll refer to those sheets a little bit later on at one point,
I believe. Now, while they're handing those out, I'm going to go right on because I do
have a number of things I want to cover today. The first thing, in my understanding, that
was responsible for the polluting or debasing of the particular Baptist heritage in the
United States was what I'm calling the American democratic ethos. And I'll define what I mean.
The American democratic ethos, or way of life, or structure of thought. Okay? And that's
number one. And what do I mean? Well, what I'm asserting here is that there was something
in the political philosophy associated with the American Revolution, which was of course
imbibed as part of their heritage by most Americans, which was profoundly antithetical
to the doctrine of the sovereignty of God and therefore to what is known as Calvinism.
Now this really should not surprise us. The ringleaders of the American Revolution, those
who were the first promoters of it, were not Christians. Now, I know that many Christians
joined in with them, but people like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine,
the two men, therefore, who wrote the Declaration of Independence, Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson,
were not evangelical Christians. In fact, in terms of the spectrum of thought in the
United States in that day, they were among the most radicals, radical thinkers in the
United States in that day. Thomas Jefferson went so far as to write his version of the
New Testament with all the miracles taken out, because he was a deist. And being a deist,
he was one of the most radical thinkers in the United States in that day, one of the
people that was most profoundly in terms of his philosophy opposed to evangelical Christianity.
And this philosophy, this philosophy that laid all sorts of emphasis on inalienable
rights and human freedom and had an inveterate hatred for authority, ultimately, even though
this wasn't immediately seen, would have a profoundly negative effect upon the doctrines
taught by evangelical Christianity and Calvinism as it represented those doctrines in that
day. And now I quote from Erdman's Handbook on Christianity in America. This is a lengthy
quote, but I think you find all of it very profitable.
In the years after the American Revolution, the New Republic witnessed a revolt of substantial
proportions against Calvinism. This is an age of freedom, declared one Presbyterian
senator, and men will be free. Abner Jones, a New England itinerant preacher who refused
denominational affiliation, made plain the unsettling effect that popular notions of
equality could have upon Calvinist orthodoxy. In his memoir, written in 1807, he began,
In giving the reader an account of my birth and parentage, I shall not, like the celebrated
Franklin and others, strive to prove that I arose from a family of eminence, believing
that all men are born equal and that every man shall die for his own inequity.
Equality for Jones exploded the notion of original sin, that people were not morally
free to choose for themselves. In this period, one finds evidence of a similar revolt against
each of the so-called five points of Calvinism. Just as notions of total depravity did not
stand up well to the belief that individuals were capable of shaping their own destiny,
so unconditional elections seemed to deny that people were fully capable of determining
the course of their own lives. The anti-democratic tendency of the doctrine of election emerged
even more clearly in the idea of a limited, or particular, atonement that the design of
Christ's death was restricted to those whom God elected to salvation. Similarly, the concept
of irresistible grace seemed to make God a tyrant of uncontrollable power, just that
from which Americans had fought to free themselves. Finally, the focus on volitional commitment
as the primary human obligation made the idea of the perseverance of the saints that Christians
are sustained by the choice of another and preserved in grace to the end of their days
irrelevant, if not contradictory.
Given this potential for revolt against Calvinism, premised on certain self-evident principles
of democracy, what is striking is the number of Calvinists in this period undergoing a
serious crisis of conscience, a reconversion from Calvinism. Barton W. Stone, the founder
of the Christians in Kentucky and Illinois in the wake of the Second Great Awakening,
1840s, began as a Presbyterian, but after great intellectual turmoil came to harmonize
his theology with social experience. Stone confessed that as a Calvinist he had been
embarrassed with many obtrusive doctrines. Scores of objections would continually roll
across my mind. What he called the labyrinth of Calvinism left him distressed, perplexed
and bewildered. He concluded that Calvinism is amongst the most discouraging hindrances
to sinners seeking the kingdom of God. He was relieved from this dissonance of values
when he jettisoned Presbyterianism for what he called the rich pastures of gospel liberty.
The free will Baptist minister, William Smith Babcock, similarly found Calvinism antithetical
to common sense. He spoke of a senseless jargon of election and reprobation and concluded
that it had covered salvation with a mist of absurdities. Its doctrine is denied in
the practice, and this is kind of a funny statement if you think about it, its doctrine
is denied, he said, in the practice of every converted soul in the first exercises of the
mind after receiving liberty. Babcock, an itinerant preacher in rural New England, included
in his diary the poem of a nine year old girl from one of his congregations. The sentiments
of this child capture Babcock's conception of the gospel revolving around the issues
of liberty and bondage. And here's what the little girl wrote. Know then that every soul
is free to choose his life and what he'll be, for this eternal truth is given that God
will force no man to heaven for that, haven't you? He'll draw, persuade, direct him right,
bless him with wisdom, love and light, in nameless ways be good and kind, but never
force the human mind. Now, it's not then just myself, but the writers of the Eerdmans handbook
on Christianity in America that are telling us that there was something profoundly antithetical
to the doctrines of grace and to the doctrines of the sovereignty of God in the Bible in
the political philosophy adopted by the American Revolution. There was an ungodly element,
yes, not one that was seen at first so clearly, as we now see it in the 20th century. But
there was an ungodly element in all the emphasis on inalienable rights, human freedom, and
hatred of authority, which when swallowed by Americans would eventually make them vomit
out Calvinism and the biblical doctrines it embodied. So that's the first thing that I
say is responsible for the decline of the American, of the particular Baptist tradition
in America, and that was the American democratic ethos. The second thing that was responsible
was revivalism. Revivalism. Now, not the original revivalism that touched off the Great Awakening
and brought most of America into the churches. That was Calvinistic in character. But later
on there were those who arose and there were influences that came out of the later revivalism
that made for a very, very devastating effect on the particular Baptist heritage. First
of all, you have to understand that revivalism resulted in what we might call anti-creedalism,
the idea that creeds and confessions of faith are a bunch of bunk and a really a denial
of Christian liberty. You see, what happened was this. Early opponents of the revivals
tended to be very, very strong in their emphasis upon creeds and the church's order and to
attack the revival because of its successes when it transgressed their ideas of what was
proper in terms of church order and the creed. And this caused those who were in favor of
the revival to in turn react against those people. And sadly enough, the separate Baptist
often, remember the two groups of regular, of particular Baptists, the regulars and the
prophets. Well, the separate Baptist, those people that have been profoundly influenced
by the Great Awakening, even though they were basically Calvinistic, often tended to be
anti-creedal, to have a profound suspicion of man-made confessions of faith. This created
a doctrinal looseness within them which would later be exploited by those of Arminian tendency.
And of course that raises the whole question of creeds and confessions and we'll talk about
that perhaps a little bit later on. But a second thing that was associated with the
later revivalism was Arminianism, the great emphasis on the free will of man. Revivalism
in the 1800s began to be dominated by those who were semi-Pelagian or Arminian in theology.
The Wesleyan Methodists and a man like that, he actually came out of the Presbyterian ranks
believe it or not, Charles Finney, with their new measures and their emphasis on the free
will of man, their emphasis that if you simply make up your mind and you have the power to
do that, you can produce a revival by doing the right things. Well, the free offer of
the gospel, which is a genuine, authentic biblical doctrine, was by these people thought
to demand in Arminian theology in the later stages of revivalism that those people began
to take over the revivalistic mentality. And a minimizing mentality also emerged in these
revivalists, which streamlined the gospel and as we've just read, viewed Calvinism as
complicating the simple gospel of human freedom to accept or reject Christ. But there was
a third influence and that was Methodism. The other major Protestant denomination after
the American Revolution that made tremendous progress via their circuit rioting preachers
on the frontiers was the Methodist denomination. In fact, both Methodists and Baptists were
most active on the frontier. But you see, much of what passes for theology in Baptist
churches today is actually a mixture of historical Baptist doctrine and Methodism, especially
Wesleyan Methodism. And in fact, in many cases, even when people joined Baptist churches,
they often had been profoundly influenced by Wesleyan preachers. And so there was a
profound polluting, debasing decline of the particular Baptist tradition because on the
frontier, Baptist and Methodist churches often got very, very mixed up and confused. In fact,
our brother Dave Merrick tells me a story that illustrates that perfectly from his home
church in Iowa. His home church in Iowa is now a Baptist church, but that's only because
40 or 50 years ago, they happened to call a man who was a Baptist. So here were all
these Methodists, they called the Baptist, and so the church becomes Baptist because
they have a Baptist minister. But that doesn't mean that many, many of the things that they
were taught in Wesleyan Methodist teaching have been washed out of their system. It only
means that you have a Methodistic Baptist church. And that happened hundreds and thousands
of times in some kind of mixture on the American frontier. And understandable because, of course,
in many places there simply wasn't even enough people to even think about two churches and
so there had to be a great measure of cooperation between anybody that was evangelical in character.
But now, there was a fourth, a fourth-ism, what I'm calling inclusivism. There was a
tendency for Baptists to accept anybody who said that he was a Baptist and believed in
believers' Baptism and to want to include them in the old state Baptist associations
of churches that were growing up across the United States. The anti-cretalism, which stemmed
from the separate Baptist, and a tendency to embrace all those who were Baptist in their
church polity and their view of Baptism, led to an inclusivism of the Baptist church. And
the anti-cretism led to an inclusivistic mentality among many Baptists and consequently
led to compromise with Arminianism on doctrinal matters. In fact, the Confession of Faith
that was held by many of you who grew up in Baptist churches, and I know many of you did,
and the Confession of Faith that was held by the church that I grew up in, as I recall,
was the New Hampshire Confession of Faith. Now, anyone who believes in the sovereignty
of God and the doctrines of grace as they're taught in the Bible, immediately upon reading
the New Hampshire Confession of Faith will see that it's a Calvinistic document. But
it's a Calvinistic document that's watered down just enough so that Arminians and free-will
Baptist churches, or those with a great deal of emphasis on that, could join these state
Baptist associations. And so that pastors and churches could be included in those state
Baptist associations. And the New Hampshire Confession of Faith is simply a watered-down
version of the Confession of Faith held by this church, the London Confession of Faith.
And it arose in the 1830s in New Hampshire. And across the United States, in the Kentucky
Compromise of 1801 that brought together two groups of Baptist churches in Kentucky, there
was the same tendency to compromise with Arminian thinking in order to include Arminians and
the fellowship of Baptist churches. Well, such inclusivism could only result in the
decline of truth in Baptist churches, and especially in the context of the great doctrinal
ignorance on the frontiers of America. Because, of course, you had a great tendency for people
to be very, very ignorant on the frontiers of America where maybe they'd lived for years
and just gotten converted in one of the revivals on the frontier. They didn't know much. There
was most of the preachers out there were not well educated, were doctrinally ignorant themselves,
and so there was a tendency for this inclusivism to water down historic Baptist doctrine. And
then, fifthly, there was hyper-Calvinism that was responsible for the debasing of the particular
Baptist tradition in America. Hyper-Calvinism. You say, how so? Well, here's what happened.
Especially in the South, the inroads of Arminianism were met by a very conservative Calvinistic
reaction. Some people did begin to see that Arminianism was making too much headway in
Baptist churches, and they began to react. And, in fact, they overreacted. The inroads
of Arminianism were met by a hyper-Calvinistic reaction, particularly in the South. This
was true. And this reaction tended to overcompensate for Arminian tendencies by becoming anti-evangelistic,
anti-effort, anti any kind of effort to reach the lost passive, and in some cases took the
doctrine of predestination to heretical extremes. You see what that did. Such a reaction could
only result in the petrifying of the Calvinistic churches that were left, and bringing the
doctrines of grace into reproach, and justifying Arminian accusations against Calvinists.
And it was this hyper-Calvinistic reaction, especially in the South of the United States,
that was primarily responsible for driving many people in an Arminian direction by their
overreaction. Now, the most extreme of these movements to hyper-Calvinism illustrates what
I'm talking about in terms of saying that some of them took predestination to heretical
extremes. Quoting from Alstrom's A Religious History of the American People, a man by the
name of Daniel Parker, lived 1781 to 1844. Alstrom says, though born in Virginia, Parker
was a product of the Georgia frontier, who later worked in Tennessee, Kentucky, southern
Illinois, and Texas. With a great skill and power, he expounded the chief convictions
of the anti-effort Baptist. Above all, their extreme predestinarian antinomianism, their
belief that God needed neither new-fangled societies nor the corrupting influences of
higher learning, see the anti-intellectual mentality, to advance the gospel in the world,
Parker himself also developed certain doctrinal innovations that made him the chief prophet
of the two-seed predestinarian Baptist sect. And then he has a footnote to tell you what
the two-seed Baptist predestinarian sect believed. Here it is. In 1820, Parker began his attack
on Baptist missionary efforts with the publication of a pamphlet, a public address to the Baptist
Society. In 1826, he stated his Two-Seed in the Spirit, done by the two-seed Baptist
doctrine, in another pamphlet. This two-seed theology was an exaggerated and eccentric
form of predestinarianism. Now get a load of this. Two seeds were planted in Eve, one
by God, the good seed, and the other by Satan, the bad seed. The election of individuals
is determined by their seed, and neither missionary societies nor anything else can do anything
about it. During his two-year stay in Illinois, Parker published The Church Advocate, a monthly
paper. His lifelong efforts led to the founding of churches in several states, chiefly in
the south and in the middle region. In 1890, here's the name of the sect, the old two-seed
in the spirit predestinarian Baptist numbered 12,881, but by 1945 the membership had declined
to 201 and the number of churches to 16. Now what's my point? My point is that not all
of the hyper-Calvinism was that bad. Not all of them actually tended to become what we
can only call, if we know church history, Gnostics in their view of predestination because
he's teaching nothing other than the Gnostics taught in the second century, the same doctrine
that was opposed by the Apostle John. But you see what happened was that there was this
tendency to react into hyper-Calvinism on the part of those who did understand the Bible
doctrines of grace and predestination. And all of that tended to justify, justify the
Armenian accusations and to drive people away from the doctrines of grace. But the
sixth influence is one that should be familiar to most of you. And that sixth influence that
contributed to the debasing and decline of the particular Baptist tradition was modernism,
or what is also called liberalism. Modernism or liberalism, with its attack on the authority
of the Bible, with its teaching that the Bible is simply a document that evolved, recording
some very heightened religious experiences of people, but certainly the Bible wasn't
infallible or an errant word from God. Modernism that taught that, or liberalism, began to
creep into the churches after the Civil War. And by the 1900s it was a flood of heresy.
Much modernism was simply the emphasis of Arminianism on human rights and human freedom
taken to its extreme. Because the idea of human autonomy does lead to the idea that
no one can be our authority, not even God's word. That we must be our own authority. It
saw modernism in Calvinism its deadly enemy. And now this is historically documented. It
was interesting that the people these modernists attacked weren't the moderate evangelical
Christians. The people these people attacked were the Calvinists. They hated Calvinism.
And they were right to hate Calvinism because it was Calvinists, those who were conservative
Bible believers who understood the sovereignty of God, understood the teaching of the Bible
that were the primary opponents of modernism. In fact, in those denominations where there
was little or nothing left of the Calvinistic heritage, modernism took over without a struggle.
The Methodist, the Congregationalist, the Disciples of Christ. But in those denominations
where there was something left of the Calvinistic biblical heritage, in those denominations
ultimately for the most part, well no I can't say that, the Christian Reformed denomination.
When they had modernism come up in the 1920s, they kicked them out of the church and that
was that. No more problem with modernists for another 60 years. And when the Missouri
Synod Lutherans had a problem with modernist teaching in their schools because of their
strongly confessional character, because they were predestinarian Lutherans, they had no
problems and they very soon dealt with the modernists in their ranks. And even in the
Baptist and the Presbyterian denominations, the Northern Baptists, the Northern Presbyterians,
though there was a great deal of decline in those denominations, there was enough of the
old Calvinistic biblical heritage left in those denominations so that there was a battle
royal for 30 years on the subject in them. Even though in those denominations, sadly
to say, modernism really won the day and ultimately the more conservative elements left, both
the Northern Baptist Convention and the old Northern Presbyterians. But you see, what
I'm saying here is that modernism was the arch enemy of the particular Baptist tradition
and of the whole Reformed tradition as it stood in America. And it was only the decline
of that Calvinistic biblical tradition that was able to, that opened the door for modernism.
By the way, this brings us right back to anti-cretalism. I haven't on good authority, I remember being
told by a professor of church history at Baptist College over here when I was in college, that
it was anti-cretalism that really was ultimately responsible for the fall of the old Northern
Baptist Convention. You know what happened? Here is what happened. The fundamentalist
movement was trying to drive through in the old Northern Baptist Convention a document,
a very simple doctrinal statement that would have clearly outlawed modernist teachings
on a number of areas. And they've got it almost brought up for a vote when one of the moderates
or modernists got up and suggested instead that they adopt the New Testament as their
doctrinal statement. And that vote passed and from that year on, fundamentalists were
driven out of the old Northern Baptist Convention. What am I saying? I am saying that, you see,
it was anti-cretalism, this whole gut level feeling that there was something bad about
confessions and creeds that resulted in no small part for the fall of the old Northern
Baptist Convention. And that's why we're not anti-cretal. One smart aleck once said
that Unitarians, those who deny the deity of Christ, have found their doctrine in the
Bible. Now we don't believe that they have legitimately found it there, but they think
they have. They say Unitarians have found their doctrine in the Bible, but no Unitarian
has ever found their doctrine in the Westminster Confession of Faith. And that's the point.
Unitarians of faith are needful for the very purpose of preventing the polluting and deviation
of the truth in churches and their associations. But now the last, the last of these isms that
was responsible in some measure for the debasing of the particular Baptist tradition was fundamentalism.
Now here we have to be careful. The tendency to modernism was countered, as you know, by
the old fundamentalist movement. While the main tenets of fundamentalism regarding the
scriptures were held by Calvinists, in fact A.A. Hodge, Charles Hodge, B.B. Warfield, teachers
at Reformed Princeton Seminary in the late 1800s were the great upholders of the doctrine
of inerrancy against the modernist. In fact, they were so much identified with that that
some people think they invented the doctrine, which is ridiculous, but you see how much
they're associated with the defense of the great doctrine, the authority, the inerrant
authority of God's word. But there were at least three tendencies, even though we agree
with fundamentalists in terms of their high view of the word of God, there were at least
three tendencies which contributed to the debasing of the particular Baptist heritage
among Baptist churches in fundamentalism. Here's what they were. First of all, there
was an emphasis, an exclusive emphasis on the fundamentals, the fundamentals. Now this
is understandable, but it's still dangerous. They were there and they wanted to emphasize
that you had to believe in the inspiration of the Bible, the blood atonement of Christ,
the virgin birth of Christ, the resurrection of Christ and his second coming, the five
fundamentals, as they were called. Well, all those things are true, but they tended
to focus in on those things and regard everything else as unimportant because of the great battle
against modernism. And that, you see, tended to regard the doctrines of grace in many other
parts of the particularist Baptist heritage as unimportant and things that could safely
be ignored. But fundamentalism was also characterized by dispensational premillennialism. Now not
all of it, but a great part of it was. Through the old Niagara conferences in the 1880s,
dispensationalism, which had really been put together as a system only in the 1830s by
J. N. Darby in England, and he got it from several different sources in the years and
decades preceding that, this inevitably tended to distract and deviate from the particular
Baptist heritage. For one thing, the peculiar doctrines of dispensationalism were not taught
in the confession of faith held historically by Baptists. Another thing, the teaching of
dispensationalism tended to actually undermine certain parts of that heritage. For instance,
we've just been studying chapter 26 in the doctrine of the church, which says that the
church consists of all the elect. Well, whatever dispensationalists may say about that, they
certainly don't believe that the church consists of all the elect because they believe it consists
only of those who are saved between the day of Pentecost and the rapture of the church.
And that's a different doctrine that tended to distract people from and deviate from the
particular Baptist heritage, even though the first dispensationalist did tend to be Calvinistic
that later eroded away. But the third aspect of fundamentalism that was responsible for
undermining the particular Baptist tradition in the United States was the old Keswick teaching
of the higher or victorious life. This too had been adopted only in the 1880s and 1890s
by most of the fundamentalists in America, the conservatives. It was brought over by
Dwight Moody from England. And this again was a departure from the Reformed doctrine
of sanctification and the particular Baptist tradition on the whole doctrine of sanctification.
It was a kind of modified perfectionism, a kind of idea that you could, to some extent at least,
free yourself from the struggle with sin in this life. And that was a clear departure from the
particular Baptist tradition, from the whole Reformed tradition of teaching on the Bible.
And perfectionism is always rooted in a sub-biblical and therefore sub-Calvinistic view of sin. Now,
these are the seven influences. The American democratic ethos, revivalism, methodism,
inclusivism, hyper-Calvinism, modernism, and fundamentalism. And that brings us,
in the little time I have left, to the rise of Reformed Baptists in the United States.
Of course, the great question that has arisen now, especially when most people don't recognize the
name Reformed Baptist, is, are Reformed Baptists new? Well, in a sense, of course, I hope you see
that this whole sketch of American church history has gone to show that Reformed Baptists are not
new. Reformed Baptists, insofar as you mean by that, those who hold to the London Baptist
Confession of Faith of 1689 were at one time the major group of Baptists in the United States in
the 1780s and later. And yet I've used the term particular Baptist before, and I used the term
Reformed Baptist now. Why? Well, because Reformed Baptists cannot simply go back to being 17th and
18th century particular Baptists. History moves on. The Spirit continues to lead the church. New
challenges arise. The fact is that Reformed Baptists have arisen as a reaction against
many of those seven-isms that the church had not confronted before that in the same way. And
hopefully we have learned certain lessons from that. Now we, you see, do not need to emphasize
so much in our day, Believer's Baptism. Now the first Baptists in America were the only people
that believed that. There are many denominations in the United States today that practice that,
and the Baptists are the one of the major of those denominations. Believer's Baptism doesn't
have to be an emphasis of our emphasis as much as it did in the 1780s. We don't need to emphasize
the separation of church and state like the early Baptists did, do we? I mean that's emphasized
enough by the ACLU. We don't need to emphasize the priesthood of all believers, because some
people believe so strongly the priesthood of all believers that they don't even think they
need to come to church, because they're a priest, aren't they? We see different emphases are needed
today. Emphasis which counter the errors of our era. There needs to be an emphasis on the authority
of God's law against the dispensational influence. There needs to be an emphasis on the biblical view
of remaining sin against the victorious life influence. There needs to be an emphasis on
biblical authority against modernism, and upon the ecclesiastical authority of the church against
the howling individualism of most Americans. Those are the emphasis more appropriate to our day,
which we will not be faithful to our generation unless we cry out from our pulpits and from our
churches. So are Reformed Baptists new? No, but hopefully we are speaking to the specific needs
of our own generation, and hopefully we see certain issues more clearly now than our forefathers saw
them two centuries ago. So where did these old, new Reformed Baptists come from? Well, I want to
talk about the larger context, and then the specific influences. As modernism took over the
mainline denominations, these denominations began a long decline in numbers and influence,
because modernism killed the churches. And at the same time, something very strange began to happen.
The fundamentalists and evangelicals who had started new churches and new affiliations began
to grow and prosper numerically, till after World War II and by the 1970s and 1980s, they were
challenging the religious supremacy of the old liberal churches and the National Council of
Churches and becoming the more recognized force in American Christianity. It was out of this general
context of the outward evangelical prosperity that Reformed Baptists in America emerged. That
brings me to specific influences. The specific influences. Now this large fundamentalist and
evangelical movement is predominantly evangelical Armenian in its general perspective, with a flavor
of Calvinism, but still generally evangelical Armenian. Several specific influences, therefore,
are responsible for a resurgence of interest in historic Reformed Baptists and particular
Baptist teaching. And this all happened beginning around the 1950s. First of all,
it's likely that a small but sizable minority in the evangelical movement retained their
Calvinistic convictions from the 18th and 19th centuries. You also have to count upon the
influence of Charles Haddon Spurgeon. He was a particular Baptist in England in the latter half
of the 19th century. Someone has called him the last of the Puritans. And his writings and
influence, which continue to be published more and more to our day, did much to popularize the
Reformed Baptist, the particular Baptist tradition. Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia,
even though it's a Presbyterian school, took up the heritage of fallen Princeton when Princeton
was taken over by the Liberals in 1929. J. Gresham Machen started Westminster Seminary and brought
there Cornelius Van Til, and R. B. Kuiper, and Ned Stonehouse, and Ed Young, and John Murray.
And that original faculty did much to restore the Reformed heritage in America and influenced
a number of Baptist students who went to school there. The Banner of Truth Trust, started by a
sizable donation from a wealthy Englishman, was responsible for reprinting many good Puritan
Reformed books under the leadership of Ian Murray. These began to enlighten many in the historic
doctrines of the Christian faith. And finally, dealing now with America specifically, in the
1960s several Reformed Baptist churches emerged in the East, interestingly coming out of Pennsylvania
in the Philadelphia area again. History repeats itself in some ways. In the 1960s several Reformed
Baptist churches and pastors emerged to give leadership. Pastor Walt Chantry of the Grace
Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a witness to the truths of the doctrines of grace,
and published books like Today's Gospel, which he authored. And Pastor A. N. Martin of the Trinity
Baptist Church, first of Essex Falls, then of Montville, New Jersey, through their Tate
ministry influenced many people and are yet being responsible for founding many Reformed Baptist
churches. Well, that's a flying overview of Reformed Baptist and their historical backgrounds
in America. Now let me just quickly give you five practical observations that we should learn
from this. First of all, don't you see the danger of anti-cretalism? Now most Baptists in the United
States are still anti-cretal in their general perspective, but that's dangerous. Not because
they hold to the authority of the Word of God, but because they refuse to say what the Word of God
teaches. And it is important that we rid ourselves of the anti-cretalism of many Baptists in our day.
There's the danger of hyper-Calvinistic overreaction to us. When we see Arminianism
swallowing up the churches in America, we see all this degraded emphasis on man's free will,
and all this detraction from the glorious sovereignty of God. It's very easy to overreact,
and we must not do that. Otherwise we'll drive people into Arminianism and petrify ourselves.
Thirdly, do you see the counter-cultural character of the Reformed Baptist movement?
We are a counterculture, because it was the American democratic ethos that got this whole
thrust against a particular Baptist tradition underway, and it's that ethos that we're going
to have to resist and refuse to be part of in some of its key elements if we're going to remain
faithful to the truth. See, the emphasis of the Bible on the divine sovereignty of God's grace,
the emphasis of the Bible on the divine sovereignty of God's law.
These are emphasis, and I'm going to put it just as bluntly as I know how,
these are emphases which are un-American in our day. People don't want to hear that God chooses
to save who He will. People don't want to hear that God has a law for them that specifies how
they live. Why? Because that infringes upon their human freedom and their human rights,
and they don't want to hear it. And Americans most of all don't want to hear it. But that's
exactly what we must tell them if we're going to be faithful to the truth of God's word.
And there are many other things we could say. How thankful we should be that God has
in an amazing way restored to us such a vast part of the glorious heritage of biblical truth.
How accountable we are, and how encouraging it is. You know, brethren, I tend to believe
that only God can make people believe the things we believe in the context of 20th century America,
because we believe so many things that aren't American to believe,
like in the sovereignty of God in salvation and in His law.
You see, what we must hope and what must be something that encourages us to pray,
that God would use us to bring people to the knowledge of the truth in our day, is that
though the Reformed Baptist movement and others who are holding to many things that we believe is
like the cloud the size of a man's hand on the horizon which the servant of Elijah saw
out there over the Mediterranean, that that cloud the size of the man's hands was what that servant
and Elijah knew it was. It was a first exhibition of God's sovereign purpose to save and to bless.
And may we not hope that even though we are no more than a cloud the size of a man's hand,
that one day that will, that small cloud will be thunderstorms that bring about the
reign of God's truth on America and bring it back, in some measure at least, to its heritage
and to the God that it once worshiped. Well, may that encourage us to pray and to seek God
and to corporately and individually lay hold of the throne of grace that He might cause that
little cloud to become a great outburst of glorious blessing for the United States
and being brought back to the doctrines of historic Christianity. Let's pray together.
Father, we thank you that we are not those who make the arrogant claim that we have only now
20 centuries after your people have been believing in you and worshiping you have discovered God's
truth. But we can lay claim to a long heritage of those who have worshiped you and believed in you
and believe that your Bible taught the same thing we believe it teaches. What a confirming thing
that is for us. Lord, we confess we have a holy suspicion of our new ideas, especially our novel
ideas, and we are thankful that in so many ways we have the added confirmation and confidence
that somebody else has seen these things in your word first, and not just one or two people, but
many people, and that we are not the strange ones, but it is those who have departed from your truth
in our day who are strange, no matter how numerous they may be. We ask that you would bless these
words to our hearts, help us to gather as a holy temple to you in the hour to come. In Jesus' name,
amen.