Some Baptists believe that there has been an unbroken succession of Baptist churches from the days of John the Baptist and the Apostles of Jesus Christ. Others trace their origin to the Anabaptists, a 16th-century Protestant movement on the European continent. Most scholars, however, agree that Baptists, as an English-speaking denomination, originated within 17th-century Puritanism as an offshoot of Congregationalism.
There were two groups in early Baptist life: the Particular Baptists and the General Baptists. The Particular Baptists adhered to the doctrine of a particular atonement—that Christ died only for an elect—and were strongly Calvinist (following the Reformation teachings of John Calvin) in orientation; the General Baptists held to the doctrine of a general atonement—that Christ died for all people and not only for an elect—and represented the more moderate Calvinism of Jacobus Arminius, a 17th-century Dutch theologian. The two currents were also distinguished by a difference in churchmanship related to their respective points of origin. The General Baptists had emerged from the English Separatists, whereas the Particular Baptists had their roots in non-Separatist independency.
Both the Separatists and the non-Separatists were congregationalist. They shared the same convictions with regard to the nature and government of the church. They believed that church life should be ordered according to the pattern of the New Testament churches, and to them this meant that churches should be self-governing bodies composed of believers only.
They differed, however, in their attitude toward the Church of England. The Separatists contended that the Church of England was a false church and insisted that the break with it must be complete. The non-Separatists, more ecumenical in spirit, sought to maintain some bond of unity among Christians. While they believed that it was necessary to separate themselves from the corruption of parish churches, they also believed that it would be a breach of Christian charity to refuse all forms of communication and fellowship. While many non-Separatists withdrew and established a worship of their own, they would not go so far as to assert that the parish churches were devoid of all marks of a true church.
Growth in England and abroad
Although the Particular Baptists were to represent the major continuing Baptist tradition, the General Baptists were first to appear. In 1608 religious persecution induced a group of Lincolnshire Separatists to seek asylum in Holland. A contingent settled in Amsterdam with John Smyth (or Smith), a Cambridge graduate, as their minister; another group moved to Leiden under the leadership of John Robinson. When the question of baptism arose during a debate on the meaning of church membership, Smyth concluded that, if the Separatist contention that “churches of the apostolic constitution consisted of saints only” was correct, then baptism should be restricted to believers only. This, he contended, was the practice of the New Testament churches, for he could find no scriptural support for baptizing infants. Smyth published his views in The Character of the Beast (1609) and in the same year proceeded to baptize first himself and then 36 others, who joined him in forming a Baptist church. Shortly thereafter Smyth became aware of a Mennonite (Anabaptist) community in Amsterdam and began to question his act of baptizing himself. This could be justified, he concluded, only if there was no true church from which a valid baptism could be obtained. After some investigation Smyth recommended union with them. This was resisted by Thomas Helwys and other members of the group, who returned to England in 1611 or 1612 and established a Baptist church in London. The parent group in Amsterdam soon disappeared.
The Particular Baptists stemmed from a non-Separatist church that was established in 1616 by Henry Jacob at Southwark, across the Thames from London. In 1638 a number of its members withdrew under the leadership of John Spilsbury to form the first Particular Baptist Church.
The two decades from 1640 to 1660 constituted the great period of early Baptist growth. Baptist preachers won many adherents around the campfires of the Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell’s army. The greatest gains were made by the Particular Baptists, while the General Baptists suffered defections to the Quakers. After the Restoration of the Stuarts in 1660 both groups were subjected to severe disabilities until these were somewhat relaxed by the Act of Toleration of 1689.
During the following decades the vitality of the General Baptists was drained by the inroads of skepticism, and their churches generally dwindled and died or became Unitarian. The Particular Baptists retreated into a defensive, rigid hyper-Calvinism. Among the Particular Baptists in England renewal came as a result of the influence of the Evangelical Revival, with a new surge of growth initiated by the activity of the English Baptist clergymen Andrew Fuller, Robert Hall, and William Carey. Carey, in 1792, formed the English Baptist Missionary Society—the beginning of the modern foreign missionary movement in the English-speaking world—and became its first missionary to India. A New Connection General Baptist group, Wesleyan in theology, was formed in 1770, and a century later, in 1891, it united with the Particular Baptists to form the Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland.
By the end of the 19th century Baptists, together with the other Nonconformist churches, were reaching the peak of their influence in Great Britain, numbering among their preachers several men with international reputations. Baptist influence was closely tied to the fortunes of the Liberal Party, of which the Baptist David Lloyd George was a conspicuous leader. After World War I English Baptists began to decline in influence and numbers.
Baptist churches were established in Australia (1831) and New Zealand (1854) by missionaries of the English Baptist Missionary Society. In Canada, Baptist beginnings date from the activity of Ebenezer Moulton, a Baptist immigrant from Massachusetts who organized a church in Nova Scotia in 1763. In Ontario the earliest Baptist churches were formed by loyalists who crossed the border after the American Revolution, while other churches were established by immigrant Baptists from Scotland and by missionaries from Vermont and New York.
Development in the United States
Baptist churches in the English colonies of North America were largely indigenous in origin, being the product of the leftward movement that was occurring among the colonial Puritans at the same time as it was in England. While some emigrants went to the New World as Baptists, it was more typical for them to adopt Baptist views after their arrival in the colonies, as happened in the case of Henry Dunster, the first president of Harvard College, and Roger Williams.
The First Baptist Church in America was established at Providence (in present-day Rhode Island) in 1638 by Roger Williams shortly after his banishment from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Although Williams’s general Calvinist theological position was roughly analogous to that of Spilsbury, prior to becoming a Baptist he had adopted the narrower Separatist view of the church. Williams soon came to the conclusion that all churches, including the newly established church at Providence, lacked a proper foundation, and that this defect could be remedied only by a new apostolic dispensation, when new apostles would appear to reestablish the true church.
The defection of Williams left the church with no strong leadership and thus made it possible for it to be reorganized on a General Baptist platform in 1652. There was scattered General Baptist activity throughout the colonies, but the only large cluster of General Baptists was in Rhode Island, where the churches were united into an association in 1670. The early General Baptists never gained great strength. Most of their churches decayed, and some, including the Providence church, were reorganized as Particular Baptist churches. The half dozen churches that survived never entered the mainstream of American Baptist life and exerted little influence upon its development.
The earliest strong Particular Baptist centre in the colonies was at Newport, Rhode Island, where, between 1641 and 1648, a church that had been gathered by the physician and minister John Clarke adopted Baptist views. Except for a church that had a brief existence at Kittery, Maine, there were only two other Particular Baptist churches in New England for the better part of a century. One was at Swansea, Massachusetts; the other was organized at Boston in 1665. Another Particular Baptist church was established at Charleston, South Carolina, in 1683 or 1684.
The centre of Particular Baptist activity in early America was in the Middle Colonies. In 1707 five churches in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware were united to form the Philadelphia Baptist Association, and through the association they embarked upon vigorous missionary activity. By 1760 the Philadelphia association included churches located in the present states of Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, and West Virginia; and by 1767 further multiplication of churches had necessitated the formation of two subsidiary associations, the Warren in New England and the Ketochton in Virginia. The Philadelphia association also provided leadership in organizing the Charleston Association in the Carolinas in 1751.
Although this intercolonial Particular Baptist body provided leadership for the growth that characterized American Baptist life during the decades immediately preceding the American Revolution, that growth was largely a product of an 18th-century religious revival known as the Great Awakening. Though they participated directly in the Awakening only during its last phase in the South, Baptists attracted large numbers of recruits from among those who had been “awakened” by the preaching of others. In addition to strengthening and multiplying the “regular” Baptist churches, the Awakening in New England produced a group of revivalistic Baptists, known as Separate Baptists, who soon coalesced with the older New England Baptist churches. In the South, however, they maintained a separate existence for a longer period of time. Shubael Stearns, a New England Separate Baptist, migrated to Sandy Creek, North Carolina, in 1755 and initiated a revival that quickly penetrated the entire Piedmont region. The churches he organized were brought together in 1758 to form the Sandy Creek Association. Doctrinally these churches did not differ from the older “regular” Baptist churches, but what the older churches saw as their emotional excesses and ecclesiastical irregularities created considerable tension between the two groups. By 1787, however, a reconciliation had been effected.
In several of the colonies, Baptists laboured under legal disabilities. The public whipping of Obadiah Holmes in 1651 for his refusal to pay a fine that had been imposed for holding an unlawful meeting in Lynn, Massachusetts, caused John Clarke to write his Ill News from New England (1652). Fourteen years later Baptists of Boston were fined, imprisoned, and denied the use of a meetinghouse they had erected. Payment of taxes for support of the established church was a cause of continuing controversy in New England, while the necessity to secure licenses to preach became an inflammatory issue in Virginia.
In the 19th century
The problem of travel had made it difficult for the Philadelphia association to serve as a bond uniting Baptists, and the rapid multiplication of churches made it impossible. It has been estimated that immediately before the American Revolution there were 494 Baptist congregations; 20 years later, in 1795, Isaac Backus estimated the number at 1,152. The initial expedient of the Philadelphia association had been to organize subsidiary associations, but during the war the churches, left to their own devices, proceeded to organize independent associations. By 1800 there were at least 48 local associations, and the main problem was to fashion a national body to unite the churches. The final impetus in this direction came from an interest in foreign missions. Among the first missionaries of the newly organized Congregational mission board were Adoniram Judson and Luther Rice, who had been sent to India. On shipboard they became convinced by a study of the Scriptures that only believers should be baptized. Upon arrival at Calcutta, Judson went on to Burma, while Rice returned home to enlist support among American Baptists. As a result of Rice’s efforts a General Convention of the Baptist denomination was formed in 1814. Its scope was almost immediately broadened to include, in addition to the foreign mission interest, a concern for home missions, education, and the publication of religious periodicals. In 1826 the General Convention once again was restricted to foreign mission activities, and in the course of time it became known as the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society. Other denominational interests were served by the formation of additional societies with similar specialized concerns, such as the American Baptist Home Mission Society and the American Baptist Publication Society.
The unity achieved through these societies was disrupted by the slavery controversy. During the decade prior to 1845 various compromises between the proslavery and antislavery parties in the denomination were attempted, but they proved to be unsatisfactory. As a result a Southern Baptist Convention was organized at Augusta, Georgia, in 1845. Although its constitution provided for boards of home and foreign missions, education, and publication, its energies were devoted largely to foreign missions. Consequently, the American Baptist Home Mission Society and the American Baptist Publication Society continued to operate in the South after the Civil War. Later the Southern Baptist Convention began to develop its own home mission and publication work and to protest the intrusion of the older societies in the South. The final separation between Baptists of South and North was formalized in 1907 by the organization of the Northern Baptist Convention (in 1950 renamed the American Baptist Convention and after 1972 called the American Baptist Churches in the U.S.A.), which brought together the older societies and accepted a regional allocation of territory between the Northern and Southern conventions.
Development of Black churches
Black churches constitute a major segment of American Baptist life. Many slaves were converted and became members of Baptist churches during the Great Awakening (1720s to ’40s). While there were Black Baptist churches prior to the Civil War, they rapidly multiplied following the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), an edict that freed the slaves of the Confederate states in rebellion against the Union. State and regional conventions were formed, and the National Baptist Convention was organized in 1880. By 1900 Black Baptists outnumbered Black adherents of all other denominations. Throughout the Jim Crow years of segregation and exclusion from most aspects of American life, Black churches were the focal point of Black communal life. In the civil rights struggle of the 1960s the major leadership, including that provided by Martin Luther King, Jr., came out of Black churches.
Developments in education
From the beginning, American Baptists displayed an interest in an educated ministry. The Philadelphia association in the 18th century collected funds to help finance the education of ministerial candidates. Hopewell Academy was established in 1756, and in 1764 Brown University was founded in Rhode Island. After 1800, educational institutions multiplied rapidly. The educational advance culminated in 1891 in the founding of the University of Chicago.
During the 20th century
After 1900, Baptists were troubled by theological controversies that led to the formation of several new Baptist groups. Some of the tensions arose over questions of structure of church organization, some arose over refusals to adopt an authoritative creedal statement, some were created by converts among new immigrants, and some were the product of dissatisfaction with the affiliation of the American Baptist Convention with interdenominational and ecumenical bodies. Questions of organizational structure were involved in the formation of the American Baptist Association in 1905 by churches located primarily in Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas. Two other groups were products of the Fundamentalist controversy: the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches, organized in 1932, and the Conservative Baptist Association of America (1947).
During the post-World War II period, the Southern Baptist Convention abandoned its regional limitations. Because of increasing mobility of population, it became necessary for the convention to follow its members to the growing urban centres of the North and West. By the second half of the 20th century Southern Baptists had become the largest Protestant body in the United States, and their churches were located in every part of the country.
Following World War II, Southern Baptists increasingly isolated themselves from other Christian churches, feeling no need to cooperate with them in common enterprises. During these years they also developed centralized operations through the boards and agencies of the Convention. Participation in the “Cooperative (mission) Program” and utilization of the materials and activities supplied by the Sunday School Board became badges of loyalty. These programs were carefully devised and eminently successful in promoting numerical growth.
Meanwhile, dissident Southern Baptists, based initially in the old southwest of Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and especially Texas, began to become influential elsewhere. They were heirs of an older isolationism that had long been kept in check but gained major new impetus from a radical fundamentalism developing strength in the South after World War II. Led by a small coterie of Texas strategists, the dissidents put a plan into operation in 1979 by which they gained control of and imposed their views on the bureaucracy and theological seminaries of the Southern Baptist Convention. No room for a difference of opinion was left except at the local level.
Growth outside the United States
While Baptists were troubled by divisive tendencies during the 20th century, there was also a tendency toward greater unity and cohesiveness through the Baptist World Alliance. The 19th century was a period of great Baptist missionary activity. The endeavour in Asia was led by William Carey in India, Adoniram Judson in Burma, and Timothy Richard and Lottie (Charlotte) Moon in China. The initial Baptist presence in Africa began in 1793 when David George, a former slave from South Carolina, reached Sierra Leone by way of Halifax, Nova Scotia. More organized activity was initiated in 1819 by Black Baptists of Richmond, Virginia, who sent Lott Cary to Sierra Leone in 1821 and then shifted his base of operations to Liberia in 1824. By the late 20th century there were major concentrations of Baptists in Congo (Kinshasa), Nigeria, and Cameroon. Of later origin is the Baptist community in Latin America.
The pioneer Baptist in Europe was Johann Gerhardt Oncken, who organized a church at Hamburg in 1834. Oncken had become acquainted with Barnas Sears of Colgate Theological Seminary, who was studying in Germany, and with six others he was baptized by Sears. From this centre, evangelistic activity was extended throughout Germany, and missions were established elsewhere in eastern Europe. Baptist activity was initiated independently in France, Italy, and Spain. Swedish Baptist beginnings date from the conversion of Gustaf W. Schroeder, a sailor baptized in New York in 1844, and Frederick O. Nilsson, also a sailor, who was baptized by Oncken in 1847.
The expansion of the Baptist community in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe led to the formation of the Baptist World Alliance in London in 1905. The purpose of the alliance is to provide mutual encouragement, exchange of information, coordination of activities, and consciousness of the larger Baptist fellowship.
The most notable growth occurred in Russia, where a Russian Baptist Union was formed in 1884 as the result of influences stemming from Oncken. Another Baptist body, the Union of Evangelical Christians, was organized in 1908 by a Russian who had come under the influence of English Baptists. Persecution of Baptists, which had been severe, was relaxed in 1905, and within the remaining disabilities a moderate growth occurred. The Revolution of 1917, with its proclamation of liberty of conscience, marked the beginning of a period of astonishing advance: by 1927 the Russian Baptist Union numbered some 500,000 adherents, while the Union of Evangelical Christians embraced more than 4,000,000. The Soviet constitution of 1929 subjected them to pressure once again, however. Membership in the two groups, which combined in 1944 to form the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians–Baptists in the U.S.S.R., declined sharply, but an estimated membership of more than 500,000 in the 1980s testified to the tenacity with which these believers held their faith.