THE HISTORY OF REFORMED BAPTISTS IN AMERICA
by Steve Martin, Pastor, Heritage Church, Evangelical-Reformed-Baptist,
Fayetteville, Georgia
“Isaac unstopped the wells the Philistines had stopped up …” Genesis 26:18
The 17th and 18th Century Explosion of Calvinistic Baptists
America was settled by Europeans seeking religious freedom, political freedom,
economic opportunities, wealth, adventure and frequently an admixture of more
than one ingredient. Apart from the Calvinist radical Roger Williams, who was
briefly a Baptist, Baptists had scant representation in the 17th century colonies. But
by the 18th century “Evangelical Awakening” (called the Great Awakening in the
colonies), Baptists, especially Calvinistic Baptists, began to make their mark. The
revival not only brought many of the unchurched into the Kingdom of God, but it
also split many Congregational, Anglican and Presbyterian churches. Some of the
resulting “Separatist Churches” became Baptists en masse. Baptist churches grew
from 96 to 457 in forty years. Most of them were Calvinistic Baptists. Pastors and
itinerant evangelists whose names are almost forgotten saw a multitude of souls
come into the Kingdom through their preaching and an equal number of revived
Christians becoming Baptists: Isaac Backus, Hezekiah Smith and Morgan
Edwards from the northern colonies; Shubal Stearns, Daniel Marshall, Oliver Hart
and Richard Furman in the southern colonies. Like mushrooms after a summer
rain, Baptist churches sprang up all over the 13 original colonies. While observing
the hard-won Baptist doctrine of the independency of each local congregation,
Colonial Baptists also associated with other like-minded churches in local and
regional associations. The earliest and most famous associations, Rhode Island,
Philadelphia and Charleston, each adopted the 2nd London Confession of 1689.
[e.g. Elias Keach, son of Baptist patriarch Benjamin Keach, helped the
Philadelphia Association adopt the 2nd London Confession, with an appendix on
singing hymns – hence the Philadelphia Confession of Faith.] By the early 1800s,
there were 128 Baptist associations. Baptists had come to outnumber Anglicans
who had a century and a half start on them.
The 19th Century Consolidation, Division and Splintering
With their numbers rising, Baptists entered the 19th Century with some confidence.
Though religious freedom for Baptists would not yet be a full reality in some states
of what was formerly Puritan New England, Baptists could point with pride to
Adoniram Judson, the first Baptist foreign missionary from America. Though
Calvinistic and Arminian Baptist churches were divided, there was much else to
encourage Calvinistic Baptist leaders. Numerical and financial growth gave
impetus to an on-again, off-again vision for missions: to the Native American
Indians, black slaves and migrating white settlers who were on their way to the
churchless frontiers of the West. In the South, the “West” was Alabama,
Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas. In the North, the “West” was what is
now called the Midwest (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, etc.). Recent studies
have shown that Calvinistic orthodoxy was the predominant doctrinal position
among Baptists in the Carolinas and Georgia. Baptist leader Jesse Mercer would
serialize the 1689 Baptist Confession in his state Baptist newspaper, THE
CHRISTIAN INDEX of Georgia; his assistant editor noted that all regular Baptists
in the South used the 1689 Confession or their own local adaption of it. More than
one local association in the South debated the question: ”Could a pastor be
considered orthodox who claimed to believe in the five points of Calvinism but did
not preach it?” The resounding vote of the association was “No!”
By mid-century, the issues of slavery, how to view Native American Indian
missions, eastern establishment versus western settlers, the Finney-inspired “new
measures” and “revivalism” of the 2nd Great Awakening (1790-1830) versus
historic Calvinism and the normal means of grace, local fears over loss of
autonomy, voluntary societies (19th century “para-church ministries”) versus local
church-based ministries, financial concerns about the equitable distribution of
mission funds, the rise of hyper-Calvinism and anti-missions associations,
Alexander Campbell and the rise of Restoration Churches (Churches of Christ;
“Christian” churches), questions about ministerial training, et al would further
divide then splinter Calvinistic Baptist churches. The Civil War (1861-1865) killed
more men than all our other wars combined, and divided the nation into two
halves, North and South, including the churches. Besides the decimation of a
whole generation of young men in the war, moral and social unrest soon followed
as it does most other wars. Though retarded to some degree by the 1858-59 revival
(which spilled over into the armies of the North and the South during the Civil
War), the young nation and its Baptist churches were further weakened and
becoming easy prey for yet more vicious forces at work.
The last third of the 19th century saw virulent forces at work which preyed upon
the weakened body of the Protestant and Baptist churches. The nation would grow
by 40 percent through the immigration of millions of baptized unbelievers from
Roman Catholic Ireland, Italy, southern Germany and Poland. Cities in the North
were overrun with immigrants hungry for the jobs rumored to exist in the steel
mills, factories and stockyards. Once overrun, they were quickly overwhelmed
with problems the young nation and its Protestant establishment had not seen
before. Baptists struggled how to evangelize and plant churches in the teeming
slums of European immigrants, many of whom could not speak English. The new
scientism of Darwin and Lyell brought into question the long understood biblical
world view of both Christendom and European civilization in favor of naturalistic
evolution. Unbelievers and skeptics found the leverage they had previously lacked
to attack the Protestant intellectual consensus. German higher criticism of the
Bible, adding its subtle attacks on the authority of the Bible and Christian doctrine,
brought intellectual pressure to bear upon the growing dominance of
Enlightenment rationalism. Baptists, especially in the northern states, were not
immune from such widespread cultural struggles. Baptist pulpits and seminaries
capitulated to the spirit of the age, rushing to jump on the bandwagon of
intellectual respectability. The rise of prophetic speculation and Dispensational
theology were red herrings that drew the energy and focus of many Baptist
churches and pastors away from the historic faith and further weakened the
churches.
Ironically, the South, so ravaged by the war and the harsh realities of
Reconstruction afterwards, was spared many of the social problems of the North.
The shattered southern economy did not generate industries and the jobs which
immigrants would travel far to fill. The Protestant and Reformed churches,
including the Baptists, were never overwhelmed by foreign immigration. They
still had to deal with the millions of freed slaves in their midst and would fail for
another century to offer social political and economic freedom to the emancipated
slaves and their descendants. But their universities and seminaries did not look to
New England or European trained academics for its professors. The acid corrosion
of unbelief would not impact the South for another half century. However, the
growing acceptance of Charles Finny’s “new measures” and Pelagian theology
along with the explosive growth of Wesleyan Arminianism would further weaken
the Calvinistic heritage of Baptists in the South.
The 20th Century and the Present State of Reformed Baptists
Resurgent Calvinism began in the 1950s. The 1920s/1930/s saw the rise of
Dispensational theology, alongside the vicious Modernist-Fundamentalist battles
and the loss of northern denominations to theological liberalism. World War II
brought horror to the world and finished off the giddy optimism of Liberalism still
struggling to recover from World War I. But Baptists were struggling like other
denominations to find their way. Theology was in disarray. The Bible was suspect.
Presbyterian scholar/Reformer J. Gresham Machen, when asked why he did not
call himself a fundamentalist, though he was a hero to many fundamentalists,
responded to the effect that fundamentalism was too small a ledge to stand upon as
the waves of modernity swept over the shores of America. He stood for full-blooded, confessional Protestantism of the Westminster type. By the 1950s, some
Baptists, disillusioned with Dispensational theology and fundamentalism’s “easy
believism”, refusing to believe that Barthian theology was an improvement over
liberalism, began to see in scripture and history the old wells of theology from
which their ancestors had drunk deeply and which changed their lives and their
nations. They wanted both the doctrines of grace of the Protestant Reformation, but
also the evangelical and Baptistic doctrines of their Puritan Baptist forefathers.
In the 1960s, Baptists began to adopt the 2nd London Confession of 1689 as their
understanding of the Bible and its theology. Baptist churches in the Mid-Atlantic
States of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York began to form around the 1689
Confession, holding family conferences, pastors’ conferences and publishing
materials consistent with their theology. The Banner of Truth placed its North
American headquarters in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, largely through the impetus of
Reformed Baptist Ernie Reisinger and Grace Baptist Church of Carlisle. By the
1970s, conferences and influence were growing just as Calvinistic Baptists began
to struggle to understand their own theology in greater depth and how it related to
other Protestant Reformation theologies and the Word of God. What was the place
of the law of God in the New Testament? How did the Old and New Covenants
inter-relate? Was Dispensational theology compatible with Reformed theology?
Did one need to be covenantal to be Reformed? Could one be covenantal and a
Baptist? What, if anything should be retained from Fundamentalism? Was
Fundamentalism’s practice of seeing the local pastor as the Baptist Pope biblical?
Was the Kingdom of God shaped like the USA? How was American Civil
Religion intertwined with Baptist understanding of Christianity in the late 20th
century? What was the place of associations of churches? What was “hyper autonomy” and were some Baptists guilty of it? Were all Elders also Pastors? What
was the authority of Elders? What was “authoritarianism” and what was it like to
be infected with it? And as before, whenever true Calvinism is recovered, hyper Calvinism arises as a plague to confuse the saints and give fodder to the Truth’s
enemies. What’s more, the moral crisis of the West which followed the demise of
Protestantism and confidence in the Word of God also plagued Reformed churches
of Baptist persuasion. Prominent Baptist leaders fell into immorality and spoiled
not only their own testimonies but also the credibility of the doctrines they were
called to adorn and defend.
In 1997, the first national association of confessional Baptists was formed in Mesa,
Arizona. Delegates from across the U.S. and Canada gathered to formally adopt
the 2nd London Confession of Faith of 1689 as their organizing document and
secondary authority, after the authority of the Word of God. This group is called
the Association of Reformed Baptist Churches of America (ARBCA). [It arose out
of cooperation among 1689 confessional Baptists in foreign missions, the
Reformed Baptist Missions Services (RBMS) which was formed in 1985 and
sought to honor the local church autonomy of Baptist polity while cooperating
together to better accomplish foreign missions.] ARBCA churches work together
in foreign missions, stateside church planting, ministerial training and literature
production. Though small in number and growing in their own understanding of
the Word of God and the 2nd London Confession, Reformed Baptists greatly need
your prayers to live humble and holy lives as an adornment to the Savior they
confess and to preach the glorious doctrines of Christ recovered at the Reformation
and heralded by our Puritan Baptist forefathers in the 2nd London Baptist
Confession of 1689. Our God and Savior has seen fit to unstop the wells of
salvation which the Philistines had stopped up. Like Isaac, we must drink deeply,
and give to others this precious water of life.
