Theology and History in the Methodology of Herman Bavinck: Revelation, Confession, and Christian Consciousness (Oxford Studies in Historical Theology) Cameron D. Clausing
Gerhard Sauter, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn
Susan E. Schreiner, University of Chicago
John Van Engen, University of Notre Dame
Geoffrey Wainwright, Duke University
Robert L Wilken, University of Virginia
READING AUGUSTINE IN THE REFORMATION
The Flexibility of Intellectual Authority in Europe, 1500–1620
Arnoud S. Q. Visser
SHAPERS OF ENGLISH CALVINISM, 1660–1714
Variety, Persistence, and Transformation
Dewey D. Wallace, Jr.
THE BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION OF WILLIAM OF ALTON
Timothy Bellamah, OP
Miracles and the Protestant Imagination
The Evangelical Wonder Book in Reformation Germany
Philip M Soergel
THE REFORMATION OF SUFFERING
Pastoral Theology and Lay Piety in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany
Ronald K Rittgers
CHRIST MEETS ME EVERYWHERE
Augustine’s Early Figurative Exegesis
Michael Cameron
MYSTERY UNVEILED
The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England
Paul C H Lim
GOING DUTCH IN THE MODERN AGE
Abraham Kuyper’s Struggle for a Free Church in the Netherlands
John Halsey Wood Jr
CALVIN’S COMPANY OF PASTORS
Pastoral Care and the Emerging Reformed Church, 1536–1609
Scott M. Manetsch
THE SOTERIOLOGY OF JAMES USSHER
The Act and Object of Saving Faith
Richard Snoddy
HARTFORD PURITANISM
Thomas Hooker, Samuel Stone, and Their Terrifying God
Baird Tipson
AUGUSTINE, THE TRINITY, AND THE CHURCH
A Reading of the Anti-Donatist Sermons
Adam Ployd
AUGUSTINE’S EARLY THEOLOGY OF IMAGE
A Study in the Development of Pro-Nicene Theology
Gerald Boersma
PATRON SAINT AND PROPHET
Jan Hus in the Bohemian and German Reformations
Phillip N. Haberkern
JOHN OWEN AND ENGLISH PURITANISM
Experiences of Defeat
Crawford Gribben
MORALITY AFTER CALVIN
Theodore Beza’s Christian Censor and Reformed Ethics
Kirk M Summers
THE PAPACY AND THE CHRISTIAN EAST
A History of Reception and Rejection
Edward Siecienski
RICHARD BAXTER AND THE MECHANICAL PHILOSOPHERS
David S. Sytsma
DEBATING PERSEVERANCE
The Augustinian Heritage in Post-Reformation England
Jay T. Collier
THE REFORMATION OF PROPHECY
Early Modern Interpretations of the Prophet & Old Testament Prophecy
G Sujin Pak
ANTOINE de CHANDIEU
The Silver Horn of Geneva’s Reformed Triumvirate
Theodore Van Raalte
ORTHODOX RADICALS
Baptist Identity in the English Revolution
Matthew C. Bingham
Orthodox Radicals
Baptist Identity in the English Revolution
MATTHEW C. BINGHAM
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bingham, Matthew C., 1983– author.
Title: Orthodox radicals : Baptist identity in the English revolution / Matthew C Bingham
Description: New York, NY, United States of America : Oxford University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018016553 (print) | LCCN 2018041640 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190912376 (updf) | ISBN 9780190912383 (epub) | ISBN 9780190912390 (online content) | ISBN 9780190912369 (cloth : acid-free paper) |
Subjects: LCSH: Baptists Great Britain History 17th century. | Great Britain History Puritan Revolution, 1642–1660 | Great Britain Church history 17th century. | Identification (Religion) Classification: LCC BX6276 (ebook) | LCC BX6276 B56 2019 (print) | DDC 286/.14209032 dc23
LC record available at https://lccn loc gov/2018016553
For Shelley
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations Used in the Notes
Introduction
1. The Jessey Circle and the Invention of Baptist Identity
2. Baptists Along the Congregational Way
3. “Between Us and the Compleat Anabaptists”: Reframing Sacramentology in Light of Ecclesiology
4. “Opposite to the Honour of God” No Longer: Rehabilitating “Anabaptism” in Cromwellian England
5. “Years of Freedome, by God’s Blessing Restored”: Baptistic Self-Identity during the Interregnum
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
It is a great joy to be able to thank the many individuals and institutions that have made the completion of this book possible. Pride of place must go to Crawford Gribben, a superlative doctoral adviser and a continual source of guidance and encouragement. For his generous investment of time, expertise, and enthusiasm, I am deeply appreciative. I am also most grateful to Alec Ryrie and Chris Marsh, for their perceptive observations on the work’s argument and scope. Likewise, I am grateful to the anonymous readers commissioned by Oxford University Press for their insightful feedback on the manuscript. For their incisive comments on portions of the text, I would like to thank Scott Dixon, Ian Campbell, Andrew Holmes, Jim Davison, Daniel Ritchie, Colin Armstrong, and Sam Manning. My thinking has also been stimulated and sharpened through conversations with Larry Kreitzer, Joel Halcomb, Jim Renihan, Sam Renihan, Michael Haykin, Ariel Hessayon, Robert Strivens, Austin Walker, Alan Argent, Robert Oliver, Kathleen Lynch, Jeremy Walker, Scott Spurlock, Tim Somers, Reagan Marsh, Harrison Perkins, David Whitla, and Todd Rester.
I am grateful to Queen’s University Belfast and the School of History, Anthropology, Politics and Philosophy for both helping to fund the research that led to this monograph and providing an intellectual atmosphere congenial to its completion. For their generous assistance, I am grateful to the staff at the Angus Library, Dr. Williams’s Library, the McClay Library, the library of the Irish Baptist College, and the Gamble Library. Many thanks are also due to Cynthia Read, Drew Anderla, and all at OUP who have supported this book and have helped bring it to fruition.
Finally, I would like to thank the many colleagues, friends, and family members whose encouragement and warmth has ensured that the years spent working on this project will be remembered with fondness. I am particularly grateful to my colleagues in #11 University Square for their fun and good humor, and to Gareth Burke for his unflagging support and wisdom. An incalculable debt is owed to my parents, Gordon and Lisa Bingham, for a lifetime of love and nurture. It is also with great affection that I thank for their
support my sister Jamie Gleason, my father and mother-in-law, Gary and Nancy Campbell, and, of course, my children, Amelia, John, and James. But above all others, I am grateful to my wife, Shelley, whose company is a delight and to whom this book is dedicated.
Abbreviations Used in the Notes
NB: Unless otherwise indicated, the place of publication is London, and biblical references correspond to the Authorized Version of 1611.
BHH Baptist History and Heritage
BQ Baptist Quarterly
CH Church History
CJ Commons’ Journals
CSPD Calendar of State Papers, Domestic
DWL Dr Williams’s Library, London
EED Champlin Burrage, The Early English Dissenters in the Light of Recent Research (1550–1641) (2 vols., Cambridge, 1912)
EHR English Historical Review
HJ Historical Journal
HLQ Huntington Library Quarterly
JEH Journal of Ecclesiastical History
LJ Lords’ Journals
ODNB H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, eds., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004)
P&P Past & Present
RSTC W. A. Jackson, J. F. Ferguson, and F. F. Pantzer, eds., A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475–1640 (2nd ed , 1986–1991)
TBHS Transactions of the Baptist Historical Society
Wing Donald G. Wing, ed., Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America . . . 1641–1700 (2nd ed , 5 vols , New York, 1972–1994)
Introduction
MID-SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND was a theological hothouse. As rapidly escalating political and religious tension during the early 1640s weakened and eventually collapsed the protective bulwarks of episcopacy and print censorship, a host of innovators seized upon the opportunity to introduce new religious ideas and movements. Many of these novelties died along with the revolutionary fervor out of which they grew. But some of the new groups persisted, and of those more hearty species, arguably the most successful has been the Baptists. In 2009, for instance, an international gathering of self-identified Baptists involved representatives from 214 organizations spread across 120 nations.1 According to one recent estimate, the United States alone boasts some 37 million people claiming membership in Baptist churches.2 This impressive international expansion contrasts sharply with many of the other religious groups that developed out of the same mid-seventeenth-century English milieu but withered rapidly thereafter.
And yet, it would seem that this very success has obscured key aspects of the group’s early modern origins: for by enduring and expanding, Baptists were able to write their own history and to control and shape their historiographical legacy in a way that more ephemeral early modern contemporaries were not. Diggers, Muggletonians, and Ranters still await their denominational champions, but selfconscious Baptist-historians, by contrast, have been writing their own story for some three hundred years. As a result, historians whose ostensible aim is to better understand seventeenth-century England have often been unduly and unknowingly influenced by a legacy of denominational historians whose desire to tell their own “Baptist story” has sometimes been pursued at the expense of fidelity to the early modern record. Historical accounts of early English Baptists have thus struggled to accurately locate their subjects within the wider cultural and religious landscape of revolutionary England. This book will clarify this confusion and reconfigure our understanding of both early modern English Baptists and the multilayered seventeenth-century contexts out of which they
emerged. For when such careful attention is paid to interpreting early English Baptists in their own historical context, rather than that of later denominational writers, one finds that the seventeenth-century “Baptist story” is not nearly as neat and tidy as some authors would suggest. Indeed, Baptist identity during the mid-seventeenth century was contested, confused, and deeply vexed, a contention perhaps best introduced through an incident that occurred late in 1645.
On December 3, 1645, a “Publike Dispute” was scheduled to take place at the St. Mary Aldermanbury parish church in London. Several months before, a prominent local merchant had begun to have “some doubts . . . arise in his minde” regarding the “different doctrines and Administrations of Baptisme” then being “publickely held forth both in preaching and practice,” finding himself torn between the long-standing orthodox opinion that baptism could rightly be administered to infants, and the new idea then being spread that the sacrament should be reserved exclusively for “believers, who made profession of faith, and manifest the fruits of repentance.” Which view, he wondered, was “more agreeable to the Scriptures?” For the merchant, the question was freighted with a sense of personal urgency his wife was “great with childe” and the couple would soon need to decide whether to present the infant at the parish font.3
The fact that the merchant was able to consider this question reflected wider cultural and political changes that had swept across the entire nation. Before the 1640s, almost no one in his position would have asked such questions, and had the odd eccentric managed to do so, he would have been forcefully and even violently suppressed.4 But the merchant’s world had dramatically changed. By the mid-1640s, the established church had effectively collapsed and the state was riven by civil war. One consequence was the transformation of London’s once well-ordered religious life into a “jungle of Protestant exotica.”5 It was a space in which laypeople could challenge clerical authority in unprecedented ways, and in which many aspects of the old religious order were abruptly made subject to renegotiation and change. To the self-perceived guardians of orthodoxy, such developments were deeply menacing. Contemporary chroniclers of heresy and error described the “very miserable times” in which they lived, times in which “so many of all conditions” were “given over to beleeve lies” and “to be inveigled with the hypocrisie of seducing spirits.”6
But for the London merchant, and others like him, the new opportunity for laypeople to question received dogma was justified by the divinely ordained mandate “to try all things, and hold fast that which is good.”7 So, like the noble Bereans, he “searched the Scriptures daily,” looking for an answer to his
question about baptism.8 After reaching the end of his own resources, “he earnestly desired, and at length . . . obtained a conference and private disputation” between a group of paedobaptist presbyterian ministers led by Edmund Callamy and a group of three baptistic ministers, Benjamin Coxe, William Kiffen, and Hanserd Knollys. During the private meeting, the two sides discussed the issue “at the Merchants own house” for some time, but he did not “receiv[e] satisfaction touching the lawfulnesse of baptizing the Infants of Believers.” This led to the scheduling of another, more formal confrontation, now at the parish church, in which the presbyterians were to publicly debate the three baptistic ministers.9 As it happens, concern over potentially unruly crowds ensured that the debate never actually took place. But despite the cancellation, the incident captures a sense of the possibility and vitality with which the religious milieu of revolutionary England had been rapidly infused. As formal constraints were lifted, theological experimentation proliferated and the result was a growing number of individuals who became public champions of novel ideas and movements.
The baptistic participants in the Aldermanbury debate, Benjamin Coxe, William Kiffen, and Hanserd Knollys, were three such individuals. Their involvement in the disputation both reflected and furthered an ongoing public reevaluation of baptism, and subsequent historians have been quick to cite the incident as an example of “Baptists” promoting their distinctive views. When scholars mention the debate, the unstated assumption is that Coxe, Kiffen, and Knollys represented an imagined community of “Baptists” that is to say, a group of religious fellow-travelers who would have identified one another as such on the basis of a shared set of distinctive beliefs and practices.10 But this standard interpretation is not convincing. For despite the ubiquitous assertion that the participants were clearly “Baptists,” it is not at all clear that Kiffen, Knollys, and Coxe would have self-identified as being included within this category. Instead, the three men struggled to settle on a consistent, coherent selfdescriptor. In the Declaration, the three “Baptists” never referred to themselves by that or any other name, but instead defined themselves only in terms of what they were not, as in as “we (who are falsely called Anabaptists)” or “us, and our Brethren, called Anabaptists.” Although they vehemently rejected the “Anabaptist” label as a scurrilous term of abuse foisted upon them by their opponents, they apparently felt compelled to use it, again and again, perhaps worrying that if they failed to do so, they would not be recognized at all. Kiffen, Coxe, and Knollys believed they had rediscovered important truths and were eager to “to publish [their ideas] to the view of the world,” but they were far less
sure about how, exactly, to describe them.11
Such linguistic ambiguity reflected an inherently tenuous, contested, awkward sense of self-identity among the group that historians have recognized as midseventeenth-century “Particular Baptists.” In the early 1640s, and for some time thereafter, members of this group did not know what to call themselves because they were not quite sure what they were. Yet, much of the secondary literature that purports to describe and explain this group expresses no such diffidence. The relevant historiography portrays those attacking paedobaptism at the disputation unambiguously as “Baptists.” These Baptists and the churches they represented are often viewed reflexively as links in a denominational chain, stretching back to at least the early seventeenth-century and winding its way forward into the present day. This book challenges that understanding by presenting a significant reinterpretation of the group known by historians as Particular or Calvinistic Baptists during the English Revolution and the Interregnum. As we explore their origins, ideas, and development, I will argue that many of those presently described in the literature as “Baptists” were actually far closer in their theological affinities and relational networks to the more mainstream paedobaptistic congregationalists or independents. The label “Baptist,” as we shall see, is unhelpful and obscures rather than clarifies. “We have repeatedly been warned against the dangers and potential anachronism of denominational labeling,” cautions J. C. Davis, “but we find it hard to give the practice up.”12 He is correct, and nowhere more so than with respect to early English Baptists. As the proceeding chapters will demonstrate, by projecting later denominational categories on to early modern actors, we distort our understanding of both the individuals we study and the period as a whole. This book will both consider the ways in which these distortions have unfolded and point toward a more helpful interpretation of Baptists during the midseventeenth century. Along the way, it will contribute not only to the historiography of early modern “Baptists,” but also to the literature documenting religious and cultural change during England’s calamitous mid-seventeenth century.
IThe historiography of religion during England’s Revolution and Interregnum is vast. This abundance of scholarly output reflects the striking degree to which religious ideas and practices both permeated the whole of early modern society and catalyzed the mid-seventeenth century’s larger political and social
changes.13 “The English Revolution,” writes John Coffey, “was a theological crisis, a struggle over the identity of British Protestantism.”14 Thus, in addition to the work of scholars directly studying religious expression, the student of Stuart history quickly discovers that the interpenetration of religion, culture, and politics during this period was so thoroughgoing that whatever subject one examines, doctrine and piety are always close at hand. Indeed, just as Peter Lake has said that “to review the historiography of Puritanism is to review the history of early modern England,” surely the reverse is true as well: one cannot grasp the historiography of early modern England without also taking hold of England’s religion along the way.15
Yet, amid this historiographical profusion, seventeenth-century Baptist groups that is, those dissenting sects operating outside of the established Church of England and practicing believer’s baptism have not received the attention one might expect. In 1984, Barry Reay and J. F. McGregor observed that despite the “considerable literature” on so-called radical religion16 in revolutionary England, Baptists remained “a group curiously neglected by historians.”17 Two decades later, David Como offered a remarkably similar assessment, listing controversy over infant baptism as an area “of intra-puritan conflict” that has “not been properly explored in the existing literature.”18 In the decade following Como’s evaluation, some historians have begun to investigate that territory, but vast swathes remain uncharted.19
For much of the modern period, those looking for sustained historical analysis of seventeenth-century English Baptists had to content themselves with either broader studies of radical religion or narrative histories that spoke on behalf of the tradition they described. This latter method has been termed denominational history, and its first practitioner among Baptist writers was the London historian and Baptist deacon Thomas Crosby (d. in or after 1749).20 In his four-volume History of the English Baptists (1738–1740), Crosby self-consciously positioned himself as both an heir to and a guardian of the theological tradition about which he wrote. As a result, he often presented apologetic readings of historical events and hagiographical treatments of major figures.21 Crosby’s successors adopted a similar posture and deliberately used their historical labors to encourage their contemporary ecclesiastical communities. Joseph Ivimey, for example, began his own History of the English Baptists (1811) by declaring his desire to be “useful to the denomination to which he considers it an honor to belong, by exciting them to a zealous imitation of the virtues of their ancestors.”22
Beyond such denominational histories, early and mid-twentieth-century scholarship often considered seventeenth-century Baptists only insofar as they impinged upon broader narratives of early modern English dissent. A common thread linking such studies is their willingness to amalgamate under a single conceptual category all religious expression that stood outside of the national church. By using generic labels such as “dissent,” “separatism,” and “radical religion,” a variety of different movements, congregations, and individuals can be treated in aggregate as a coherent object of historical inquiry.23
More recent work has considered English Baptists directly, and scholars such as Murray Tolmie, Michael Watts, J. F. McGregor, and B. R. White have provided helpful, although sometimes derivative, narrative histories of Baptist activity during the 1640s and 1650s.24 But the most important contribution to the field has easily been Stephen Wright’s study of The Early English Baptists, 1603–49 (2006).25 The historiographic significance of Wright’s work is twofold. First, over the past three decades, Wright’s has been the only substantial, critical, overarching, monograph-length account to focus exclusively on seventeenthcentury English Baptists. Second, Wright’s analysis challenges longstanding assumptions regarding the relationship between the Calvinistic Particular Baptists and the Arminian-influenced General Baptists. Historians prior to Wright had largely maintained that “General Baptists had no sense of common purpose with the Particular Baptists and their Calvinist predestinarian orthodoxy.”26 Yet, Wright argues that Particular and General Baptists did not, in fact, begin as separate and distinct groups, but rather grew apart in response to political circumstances beyond their control. In advancing this argument, Wright calls into question many of the most basic interpretive assumptions that had framed the earlier accounts of Tolmie, McGregor, and White.
The first chapter of this book will examine key aspects of Wright’s work in greater depth, but for our present purpose, we must simply note that despite the significance of Wright’s research, he has still left many relevant areas unexplored. First, Wright’s challenge to previous historiography only affects how Particular Baptist self-identity ought to be understood prior to the 1644 confession. He affirms that after the document’s publication “the seven London churches emerged as a self-conscious Particular Baptist denomination,” leaving to future historians the analysis of that “self-conscious” group. Second, the narrative history presented in The Early English Baptists concerns itself far more with diachronic progression than with any sort of holistic, theologically, and culturally nuanced analysis of the Particular Baptists as such. And third, Wright ends his narrative in 1649, leaving unaddressed Particular Baptist
activity and identity during the Interregnum. But beyond those areas that Wright left unexplored, it is also significant that no subsequent scholarship has yet attempted to critique or challenge Wright’s provocative thesis, a silence which the present volume intends to fill.
III
Given its important place within the relevant historiography, it is surprising that Wright’s book has gone almost completely unanswered and unchallenged.27 This lack of substantive interaction reflects, in part, the fact that most scholarly attention given to seventeenth-century English Baptists, both before and after the publication of Wright’s book, has been directed toward quite specific studies rather than overarching, holistic analysis. Much recent work has been organized thematically, investigating either individual personalities or specific cultural and theological issues. Examples in the first category include significant biographies of the Particular Baptists Hanserd Knollys28 , Benjamin Keach,29 and Hercules Collins,30 the General Baptist Thomas Grantham,31 and the more well-known, but less easily categorized, John Bunyan.32 Other works more overtly blend biography and historical theology by researching an individual’s thought and influence on specific doctrinal debates.33 In his innovative five-volume project entitled William Kiffen and His World (2010–2015), Larry Kreitzer offers close-readings and critical editions of key primary sources relating to the life of the Particular Baptist leader William Kiffen.34 In addition to these more extensive projects, numerous articles and shorter pieces have examined the history of seventeenth-century Baptists through a biographical lens.35 While these often rigorously researched studies do provide useful insights into larger questions of group identity, their central preoccupation with specific lives necessarily limits and qualifies their contribution to that debate.
Other studies of seventeenth-century Baptists have been organized thematically rather than biographically. The role of women in Baptist churches, for example, has received significant attention, most notably from Rachel Adcock in her historical and literary analysis of Baptist Women’s Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640–1680 (2015).36 Many of these thematic studies have focused on specific doctrinal issues and theological controversies, and during the past two decades, historians have examined how Baptists approached worship,37 Christology,38 ecclesiology,39 covenantal theology,40 and eschatology41 . T. L. Underwood’s Primitivism, Radicalism and the Lamb’s
War (1997) exemplifies this doctrinal approach through an innovative analysis of mid-seventeenth-century doctrinal debates between Baptists and Quakers.42 Thus, despite this wide-ranging research, there is still no holistic, theologically sensitive yet historically rigorous study of mid-seventeenth-century Particular Baptists. Although aspects of their history and thought have been treated, the overarching question of their theological and religious self-identity in regards to other contemporary religious groups has not been subject to sustained, critical inquiry. Existing scholarship disproportionately attends to events prior to the Interregnum and dilutes the corporate-focus on Particular Baptists by either splitting attention among various other separatist groups, or looking so closely at specific personalities and controversies that one can no longer appreciate the entire picture. Furthermore, much work done on English Baptists suffers from a failure to balance historical and theological concern and a tendency to conflate and thus distort the distinct identities of various baptistic groups operating in seventeenth-century England. The present volume will challenge long-standing assumptions within Baptist historiography and offer a major reinterpretation of Particular or Calvinistic Baptist self-identity during the English Revolution and Interregnum.
IV
This book explores the lives and ideas of English Calvinistic Baptists through a series of interlocking, thematic studies. And although I have not attempted a traditional narrative history of early modern English Baptists, the chapters do progress, roughly, in chronological order, beginning in the first three chapters with the origins of Baptist groups during the 1630s and 1640s, and then proceeding in chapters 4 and 5 to examine how those same groups responded to the rather different political and cultural environment of the 1650s. In this way, I hope to have conveyed a sense of change and development over time despite having eschewed a standard, diachronic narrative account. These structural decisions reflect my judgment that a coherent narrative of English Baptists as such during the mid-seventeenth century is neither possible nor desirable, and that any attempt to tell such a story will inevitably distort both the individuals under investigation and the wider historical context in which they lived. Chapter 1 introduces the men and women commonly described in standard histories as “Particular Baptists,” surveying their origins, formation, and early attempts at ecclesiastical organization. But, more importantly, the chapter also examines in some depth the development of Baptist historiography and the ways
in which the deliberate distortions of early Baptist historians continue to influence present scholarship. While helpful in many respects, much of this early historiography was written, to paraphrase Herbert Butterfield, with one eye very much fixed upon the present.43 The result was the construction of an unhelpful historiographical paradigm that continues to surreptitiously function as the normative framework within which early modern English Baptists are considered.
After deconstructing this rarely examined history of Baptist history, chapter 2 will advance a more helpful way of viewing the subject. It suggests that socalled Particular Baptists during the mid-seventeenth century can be more helpfully regarded as a baptistic variation on the more mainstream congregational movement then developing on both sides of the Atlantic. To this end, the chapter introduces the term “baptistic congregationalists,” a neologism that serves both to avoid anachronistic projection and to more closely connect “Baptists” during the English Revolution with the congregational religious culture out of which they emerged. The chapter will substantiate this link by demonstrating the manifold relational ties that bound baptistic congregationalists to their mainstream paedobaptistic counterparts.
All of this, however, leaves a fundamental question unaddressed: why did so many congregationalists begin to reject paedobaptism during the late 1630s and early 1640s? Chapter 3 addresses this question directly. Most standard accounts of English Baptists either dismiss this inquiry as unhelpful speculation or as a question that finds an obvious and rather uninteresting answer in an appeal to Baptist biblicism. But chapter 3 argues that while such explanations contain elements of truth, they are superficial and ultimately unsatisfying. Instead, one must reconstruct the shifting ideological context in which the rejection of paedobaptism rather abruptly became intellectually plausible for many otherwise orthodox puritan-types, and, in so doing, provide a more nuanced explanation of why these changes occurred when and how they did. The chapter will root the rejection of paedobaptism in the prior embrace of a congregational ecclesiology, thus serving to both explain the emergence of baptistic congregationalists while also reinforcing the historical connection drawn in chapter 2 between “Baptists” and more mainstream congregationalists.
Chapter 4 begins the second major movement of this book and thus represents a shift in both chronology and thematic emphasis. Chronologically, our study moves, broadly, from the 1640s to the 1650s from Revolution to Interregnum. Thematically, the latter two chapters attempt to take the interpretive framework developed in the first three and use it as a lens through which to better understand historical developments during the Interregnum. In other words,
chapters 1 to 3 function as a unit, the purpose of which is to explain and defend the decision to reclassify mid-seventeenth-century “Particular Baptists” as “baptistic congregationalists.” Chapters 4 and 5 then assume the legitimacy of that reclassification project and test its validity by applying its insights to baptistic activity during the 1650s.
Chapter 4 serves this end by re-examining the position of Baptists in relation to the Cromwellian regime. Historians often note that Cromwell extended religious liberty to Baptists, but, I argue, the significance of this fact has been obscured by an unacknowledged sense of denominational teleology. By recognizing this and viewing Baptists within the more nuanced framework developed in chapters 1 through 3, we are able to better understand both the extent of religious liberty under Cromwell and why it took the particular shape that it did.
If chapter 4 is concerned, broadly, with how baptistic congregationalists were viewed from without that is, how they were understood by the Cromwellian regime then chapter 5 considers, broadly, how baptistic congregationalists during the same period were viewed from within that is, how they understood themselves. The 1650s provided space for baptistic congregationalists to pursue their ecclesiastical agenda relatively free from the state persecution that had trailed them prior to the Interregnum. Although standard histories portray 1650s “Particular Baptists” as a more-or-less unified movement, chapter 5 will demonstrate that the reality was far more complicated, and that so-called Particular Baptists were actually evolving along two rather divergent, mutually exclusive paths. Such reflections both complicate our understanding of Interregnum religion and further undermine the too-hasty application of denominational labels during the period.
Finally, a brief concluding section will consider how the book’s central argument might impinge more broadly upon the widespread historiographical assumption that one can appropriately and coherently describe a distinctive “Baptist” identity during the English Revolution and Interregnum.
Many readers will perhaps be surprised that this book does not contain a chapter devoted to the so-called General Baptists. These Arminian-influenced baptistic separatists also developed and grew during the English Revolution and it would seem eminently reasonable for a book like Orthodox Radicals to consider them in some detail. But while the present volume does closely analyze the relationship between soteriology and baptistic identity, it does not contain an extended treatment of the “General Baptists” as such. This omission is intentional. First, to adequately locate the “General Baptists” within their social, relational, and theological contexts would require a far longer book and rather
different book.44 But second, and more importantly, to consider “General Baptists” alongside “Particular Baptists” would be incongruent with the basic argument presented in this book.
One of the primary tasks of Orthodox Radicals is to discourage the reflexive assumption that a book on mid-seventeenth century “Baptists” should naturally contain descriptions of all the various “kinds of Baptists” much in the way that a book on cake should be sure to treat carrot, sponge, and Lemon Chiffon. This book does not treat the various “kinds of Baptists” during the English Revolution because, as I argue throughout what follows, at that time, there were not any “kinds of Baptists.” The very category “Baptist” was an eighteenth-century development and to impose it upon the mid-seventeenth century is to think anachronistically about the past. The habit of describing any and all who reject paedobaptism as “Baptists” may or may not be a coherent way to taxonomize believers in later periods, but, as this book will demonstrate, it does not help us to better understand debates over baptism during the English Revolution. Were the present volume to include a chapter on the “General Baptists,” it would thus serve only to undermine the work’s overarching thesis by implying that so-called General and Particular Baptists were really just two species of the same genus.
The labels with which we describe the past inevitably presuppose and project an interpretation of that past. But these embedded interpretations are almost always implicit rather than explicit and often inherited from historiographical predecessors rather than chosen with intention and care. “Religious labels,” as Alec Ryrie has observed, can create especially acute difficulties, “because they imply the coherence or even existence of a particular group when that may not be obvious.”45 It is not at all obvious that the labels affixed to mid-seventeenthcentury “Baptists” have helped to clarify the self-identity of the men and women they purport to describe. This book will explain how this mislabeling occurred, how it has skewed our understanding of the period, and how we might begin to think differently.
The Jessey Circle and the Invention
of Baptist Identity
UPON ENTERING THE House of Commons on January 29, 1646, Members of Parliament were greeted by an unwelcome surprise. Two men, Samuel Richardson and Benjamin Cox, stood outside the door, accosting entrants and handing each one a small pamphlet. Inside the assembly room, after morning prayers were said and thanks offered for two sermons recently delivered, the disrupting pamphleteers were brought to the attention of the house. The Sergeant at Arms was called upon to arrest Richardson and Cox and state censors were ordered to “take diligent Care to suppress” the little book distributed earlier that morning.1 The cause of the uproar was titled “A Confession of Faith of Seven Congregations or Churches of Christ in London, Which Are Commonly, but Unjustly, Called Anabaptists.”2 This confession was an explicit act of selfpromotion, its authors keenly aware of their need to “unfainedly declare . . . what wee teach” so as to rebut the “many hainous accusations unjustly and falsly laid against us.”3 Indeed, the pages distributed in January 1646 represented a “corrected and enlarged” edition of a confession published two years earlier under a similar name.4 Revisions had been made, at least in part, in an attempt to impress the more zealous defenders of religious orthodoxy among the Parliament and Assembly of Divines, the hope being that perhaps the confession’s signatories might be tolerated by the establishment if only the reasonableness of their doctrine was more fully known. Reconciliation, however, was not forthcoming. The hard-line Presbyterian clergy were not impressed by the document’s attempt to conform to acceptable theological standards, a reception cynically summarized by Daniel Featley: “they cover a little rats-bane in a great quantity of sugar, that it may not be discerned.”5 The image of Richardson and Cox standing outside the door looking in thus becomes a picture of the movement they represented: the signatories of the “Anabaptist” confession standing outside of a theological mainstream from which they felt wrongly excluded, grasping at a legitimacy that was not to be granted.
If Richardson and Cox had hoped to win a sympathetic hearing from parliament that morning, they were surely disappointed. But the document they distributed did not go away, nor did the ideas championed within its pages. This chapter will review the events that preceded the initial publication of the 1644 “Anabaptist” confession, and then consider one of the most vexing complications that inevitably surfaces when later interpreters have attempted to explain those events. Namely, this chapter will analyze the self-identity of the 1644/1646 signatories by re-evaluating the most common label affixed to them by historians, “Particular Baptists.” But before arriving there, we must first attend to the events that led to the controversy outside the assembly hall.
IHad a curious member of parliament leafed through the papers thrust into his palm, he might have been struck by a common thread linking several of the more prominent names which appeared at the end of the document: a large number of the signatories were connected with the semi-separatist London church founded by Henry Jacob in 1616. Under the successive leadership of Jacob (c. 1563–1624),6 John Lothropp (1584–1653),7 and Henry Jessey (1601–1663),8 this church dominated London independency and “appears to have accounted for most of the organized separatist activity in London before the revolution.”9 Given this high profile, it is perhaps unsurprising that the Jacob church was also remarkably fecund, spawning multiple offshoots, including most of London’s leading Calvinistic, baptistic churches.10 Of the thirteen 1644 signatories, at least five William Kiffen, John Spilsbery, Thomas Shepherd, Thomas Munden, and Thomas Kilcop can be directly connected to the Jacob church and its offshoots.11 To these five, one can add Hanserd Knollys, who had clear links to the Jacob-Lothropp-Jessey circle but only signed the revised version of the confession in 1646.12 Given how few traces remain from what was, for much of its history, an illegal movement, the strength of this association becomes both an impressive testimony to the influence of Jacob’s congregation on London separatism, and an important clue as to the theological orientation of the seven London “Anabaptist” churches.
Knowledge of the splits and realignments within the Jacob church was preserved through the historical labors of Benjamin Stinton (1676–1719).13 Stinton was the son-in-law of prominent Particular Baptist minister and author Benjamin Keach (1640–1704).14 After Keach’s death, Stinton succeeded him as minister of the congregation in Horselydown, Southwark, and began in 1711 to
assemble materials for an eventual history of Baptists in England. Stinton died before he could complete his historical project, but his transcriptions of otherwise unavailable source documents survived him and have become the standard source for reconstructing the key events of the period.15
Three of these documents are relevant to our present purpose. First, a text which has come to be known as the “Jessey Memoranda” describes the origin and growth through 1641 of the Jacob-Lothropp-Jessey church, an “Antient Congregation of Dissenters from w[hi]ch many of ye Independant & Baptist churches in London took their first rise.”16 Secondly, there is the so-called Kiffen Manuscript,17 a record that B. R. White has described as “the most important single document now in existence relating to the origins of the English Particular or Calvinistic Baptists.”18 The Kiffen Manuscript briefly narrates how some fifty-three members of the Jacob church, by then under the leadership of Henry Jessey, were baptized by immersion. Thirdly, Stinton’s repository contains “An Account of divers Conferences, held in ye Congregation of w[hi]ch Mr Henry Jessey was Pastor, about Infant baptism.” Allegedly transcribed from Henry Jessey’s journal, this document narrates a 1643 debate among members and friends of Jessey’s church, a debate that began with Hanserd Knollys’ hesitation to baptize his own child and ended with Knollys and some thirty-two others leaving the church to worship in baptistic congregations.19
Largely on the strength of these documents, a generation of historians have reconstructed the emergence of the seven London churches, chronicling how the various divisions and splits within the Jacob-Lothropp-Jessey church evidenced increasing radicalism and a diminishing appetite for the compromising semiseparatist attitude upon which Jacob had founded the church after returning from the Netherlands in 1616.20 Unlike the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean separatists who “separated from puritanism as well as from the Church of England,” Jacob’s church strengthened its position within the London separatist movement by offering disaffected puritans an alternative to the national church that was relatively untainted by the more colorful and heretical elements of English radical religion.21 This mediating stance between radical separatism and full capitulation to the demands of an increasingly aggressive national church was an ecclesial innovation which helped Jacob’s church avoid the isolation that beset a previous generation of English separatists and in time became “the model for the Independent gathered churches of the future,” including the seven London churches of 1644.22
As elucidated in a 1616 confession of faith, Jacob’s new London church was not determined to sever all links with the parish churches and their ministers.
Instead, Jacob drew a clear distinction between the national church as such and the individual congregations operating within it. By distinguishing the whole from its constituent parts, Jacob and his followers could condemn the unbiblical nature of the former while recognizing the essential legitimacy of the latter. With respect to the idea of the national church, or indeed any national church considered as such, Jacob and his followers were clear that “no such church . . . is found in all the new Testament.” And yet, the people worshipping within the parish structure were “true visible Christians with us” and their assemblies were “true visible politicall [i.e. institutional] Churches in some respect and degree.”23 This grant of legitimacy flowed from Jacob’s recognition that although local parish churches were embedded within an overarching episcopal framework that he repudiated, many of them often operated to a large extent according to the congregational principles that Jacob identified as biblically normative. Insofar as the local parish church could be considered as an individual entity, conceptually separated from the overarching parish structure, these local congregations met Jacob’s definition of a true church:
Wee believe that the nature & essence of Christs true visible (that is, politicall) Church under the Gospell is a free congregation of Christians for the service of God, or a true spirituall bodie politike coteyning no more ordinary Congregations but one, and that independent 24
The parish churches did not, of course, meet this definition in every respect hence, in part, the need for separating from them in the first place and yet, they were not so far removed from what Jacob identified as the biblical pattern as to require a complete repudiation.25 To completely break from what remained essentially true churches was neither required nor desirable, and those who did so would be guilty of sinful schism. In this way, by refusing to completely deny ecclesial validity to the parish churches, Jacob created the possibility and even the obligation for his followers to “communicate also with them on occasion,” the understood caveat being that “in such communicating wee countenance out no evill thing in them.”26 By the time of the English revolution, some were using the term “semi-separatism” to describe the various attempts at reaching a via media between complete separation and full parish communion.27 This novel descriptor can help explain both Jacob’s hostile reception among more zealous dissenters, and the otherwise confusing preface to Jacob’s 1616 confession of faith which described the document, even as it outlined twenty-eight objections to remaining within the Church of England, as intending to free his congregation “from the slaunder of Schisme, and Noveltie, and also of Separation.”28
Jacob’s arrangement was attractive to many, but it proved to be inherently
