Baptists

History

Baptist beginnings are associated with John Smyth (1554–1612), a Separatist Puritan minister in England. As a Separatist, Smyth was convinced that the Church should be separate from the English Crown. As a Puritan, he believed that the Church of England needed further purification from the remaining vestiges of Catholicism. His views were contrary to the Anglican Church of that time, and rather than face persecution, he fled to Holland with his London congregation. While there, he was influenced by Mennonites, who converted him to their view of believer's baptism. Believer's baptism is the belief that infant baptism is not biblical, and therefore should be discontinued. In its place they argued for what they believed was the biblical model for baptism in which a new convert first professed his or her new faith and then was baptized. In practice, this meant that usually only adults or teens would be baptized, never infants. This was a radical notion since infant baptism had been practiced almost exclusively for at least a thousand years. Smyth is responsible for articulating two core Baptist principles—this idea of believer's baptism, and the idea of religious liberty. He also founded the first Baptist church while in Holland.

Thomas Helwys (1550–1616), another minister who fled to Holland with Smyth, helped in the founding of the first Baptist church. When Smyth decided to join this Baptist church with the Mennonites, Helwys decided that he did not want to participate and wanted to remain separate. So, in 1611, Helwys returned to England where he founded the first Baptist Church in East London. In 1612, his work A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity was published. In this work Helwys articulates the first claim in English for absolute religious freedom. He stated that King James had no authority over the spiritual matter of persons' souls. Because of his views, Helwys was eventually imprisoned where he died in 1616. His associate John Murton continued the work of Helwys, and by 1644 there were forty-seven Baptist churches in England preaching believer's baptism and religious liberty.

Henry Jacob began another strain of Baptist life (1563–1624) in 1616. Jacob was pastor of a Puritan church. He did not want to completely separate from the Anglican Church, but he did begin to embrace believer's baptism. His theological background, like that of many Puritans, was greatly influenced by the [Page 31]theology of John Calvin. Referred to as Reformed theology, these Puritans embraced such theological ideas as predestination (all human destinies, in this life and the next, are predetermined by God) and limited atonement (the atoning work of Christ is limited to only the elect, those predetermined before the beginning of time). These views were not acceptable to the earlier Baptist churches started by Smyth and Helwys, who were more influenced by Arminian theology (named after Jacob Arminius who argued against Calvinism and for the place of human free will). This disagreement over free will or predestination is the first division among Baptists. While they agreed on such things as religious liberty, and especially on believer's baptism, they disagreed about the idea of free will and how deterministic God was.

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