Mirrors and Microscopes: Historical Perceptions of Baptists

By C. Douglas Weaver

The book is a collection of essays from the International Conference of Baptist Studies VI that was held at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Wake Forest, North Carolina in July 2012. The topic of Baptist Identity remains important for Baptists across the globe. This collection of essays reveals the richness and the diversity of conceptions about Baptist identity that have been shared by and about Baptists. The essays, written by an international set of authors, examine issues of Baptist origins and questions of identity up to the present. Written with attention to historical context and grounded in primary source research, the essays will contribute to current and future debates about Baptist history and identity past and present.
-Publisher

• Language: English
• Publisher: Authentic Publishers
• Release date: Sep 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781842279120

C. Douglas Weaver

C. Douglas Weaver is Director of Undergraduate Studies in C. Douglas Weaver is Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Religion and Associate Professor of Relig the Department of Religion and Associate Professor of Religion at Baylor University. He is the author or editor of seveion at Baylor University. He is the author or editor of several books, including The Acts of the Apostles: Four Centurieral books, including The Acts of the Apostles: Four Centuries of Baptist Interpretation. s of Baptist Interpretation.

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USA.

1. Baptists in Great Britain

CHAPTER 1

From Marginal to Mainstream: How Anabaptists Became Baptists

¹

John Coffey

One night, in New Year 1650, Richard Baxter had a dream. The day before, he had participated in a marathon public disputation in the chapel of Bewdley, Worcestershire, with a fellow clergyman, John Tombes. Bewdley was the parish of Tombes’ birth, and he was now its curate; but remarkably, he had also gathered a Baptist congregation in the town, and was well known as England’s most learned critic of infant baptism. Hundreds thronged together to listen to the debate, which proved to be a rowdy affair with the atmosphere of a heavyweight boxing bout. Many felt that Tombes had the better of his younger opponent. (In a reversal of the norm, the Presbyterian had missed out on a university education, while the Baptist had graduated from Oxford).² With the day’s arguments churning in his mind, Baxter slept fitfully, and as he slept, he dreamed a dream:

I dreamed in a farre more impressive affecting manner than any of my ordinary dreames are, that as I was in my chamber studying, a Hen & chickens would needs come in at the doore; & that I was much offended at the Chickens, as unmeet company for my chamber; & angrily stroue to driue them out; but the Hen fled at me & resisted me: At last having stroue long in vaine, I was so angry that I trod one or two of the chickens to death: And as soone as they were dead, they turned into the similitude of most illuminated eyes, which gazed in my face: And immediately these words were spoken to me, [O Hierusalem, Hierusalem, how oft would I haue gathered thy children together, as the Hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, & yee would not …]³

It is tempting to see the chickens as the Baptists (or their arguments) swarming in on the chamber of Baxter’s troubled mind. The dreamer himself, however, offered a very different interpretation. The mother hen was Christ, who longed to gather the infants (the chicks) into Gospel churches. Baxter himself, trampling the chickens underfoot, had played the role of the Anabaptists, who drove children out of the church. The eerie illuminated eyes which had gazed into his face were the dead infants who would behold the glory of God. And when Baxter woke, he pondered Christ’s words in Matthew 23, concluding that ‘it afforded a very cleare evidence for Infants Church membership under the Gospell … it plainly signifyeth that as Hierusalem entirely (aged & Infants) were members of the Iewish Church so Christ would haue gathered them into his Gospell Church’.⁴

We know about Baxter’s dream because he recorded it in his famous memoir, the Reliquiae Baxterianae. But this passage from the manuscript was omitted in the printed edition of 1696, and has never been published (though soon will be).⁵ The seventeenth-century editors were probably embarrassed by Baxter’s nightmare; it would have made their subject look like a gullible enthusiast. But Baxter’s dream, or his interpretation of it, is rather revealing. With the majority of mainstream Puritan divines, he believed passionately in a church that embraced the whole of the parish community and the entire nation. The ungodly might be subject to church discipline and excluded from the sacrament of communion, but their children should not be refused the sacrament of baptism.⁶

What astonished Baxter was the willingness of the Anabaptists to bet against the overwhelming consensus of the Christian church down the ages and across the world. He himself had experienced a crisis of faith about the scriptural basis of infant baptism, but he concluded that ‘the former and present customs of the holiest Saints and Churches should be great weight with humble moderate Christians in cases controverted and beyond their reach’. He was incredulous to hear John Tombes tell him that the debate over baptism ‘was an easie point’. Baxter prayed that God would never allow him to become so arrogant as to say that ‘almost all the Divines on earth, except my self, are through wilfulness or negligence, ignorant of those easie things which I understand’. Tombes surely knew that the great Reformed and Lutheran divines had unanimously condemned the Anabaptists in unequivocal terms. Luther, Zwingli, Bullinger, Farel, Calvin, Beza, Peter Martyr, Zanchius, Bucer, Gerhard, ‘with multitudes more, do all give the like testimony of the Anabaptists, giving them commonly the titles of Furies, Fanaticks, Perjured, Filthy, Tumultuous, Seditious &c. And the business of Munster I need not relate: Sleidan, Spanheimus, and late Mr Baily and others have said enough of it.’ To join the Anabaptists was to go out on a limb and to break with the mainstream Reformation tradition.⁷

Moreover, Baxter was adamant that the English Anabaptists of the 1640s (and he always called them ‘Anabaptists’) were no better than their sixteenth-century forebears. He had four things against them. First, they were a major hindrance to the salvation of souls. Instead of evangelizing the unsaved, they devoted themselves to poaching the godly. They systematically denigrated the Puritan parish clergy, who were trying to reach the unconverted, thus confusing ordinary parishioners, who were bewildered at these internecine feuds. According to Baxter, Tombes had little spiritual fruit to show for his ministry – all he had done was to turn five or six godly people into ‘meer talking, censorious Opinionatists’. ‘I never knew the Labors of any zealous Anabaptist’, declared Baxter, ‘that ever God blessed to the true conversion of many souls.’⁸

Second, Anabaptism was the doorway to ‘the most horrid Opinions’. Baxter had known scores of Anabaptists, but not one had stopped at the mere rejection of infant baptism. They had gone on to become Separatists, Arminians or Antinomians (even finding a way to join these extremes!); others had become Socinians, Libertines, Seekers or Familists. The Particular Baptist, Thomas Collier, had taught ‘horrible things’, and denied the necessity of ordinances; Paul Hobson had taught a Socinian doctrine of atonement; Roger Williams had become ‘the Father of the Seekers’ in London. Most notorious was Abiezer Coppe, who had rebaptized more than anyone in Warwickshire, Oxfordshire and Worcestershire, before falling into a trance and receiving blasphemous revelations. Coppe was now in Coventry gaol, and he had taught the Ranters ‘to place their Religion in revelling, roaring, drinking, whoring, open full-mouthed swearing ordinarily by the Wounds and Blood of God, and the fearfullest Cursing that hath ever been heard’; in London ‘he hath abundance of followers’. ‘Doth not God testify from Heaven against Anabaptism through these things?’ asked Baxter.⁹

Third, the Anabaptists were ‘the Authors or Approvers of the horrible wickednesses of these times’. Writing in the wake of the regicide of King Charles I, Baxter had no doubt who was responsible. The killing of the king and the destruction of the monarchy had been condemned by ‘orthodox godly Protestants’, including the whole of the Presbyterian clergy. ‘The Orthodox Party’ was at odds with ‘the Church-destroying Sects’, whose military coups and rebellions surpassed the madness of Münster a century before. The General Baptist, Henry Denne, had just been executed as a ringleader of the Leveller rebellion; the Diggers on St George’s Hill (led by former General Baptist Gerrard Winstanley) were practicing primitive communism like their sixteenth-century ancestors. Still others (the Particular Baptists) were in cahoots with the regicidal regime. The Anabaptists of Münster had only tried to take over a single town; the Anabaptists of England had set their sights on the overthrow of an entire nation.¹⁰

Baxter’s final charge against the Anabaptists was this: ‘they have withred every where’. The Reformation had flourished across Europe; but wherever the Anabaptists arose, they created a short stir, produced sedition and misery, and ‘so die in disgrace, and go out with a stink’. The Anabaptists could be terrible troublemakers, but they lacked spiritual vitality, and they had no future as a dynamic force for godliness.¹¹

On this point, of course, Baxter proved a poor prophet. In retrospect, when hundreds of millions of churchgoing Protestants worship in congregations that practice believer’s baptism instead of infant baptism, it is tempting to dismiss him out of hand.¹² But Baxter was a serious figure who represented mainstream Protestant opinion. He was already emerging as England’s most dynamic and mission-minded Puritan pastor. His popular evangelistic and apologetic works were bestsellers and he had a growing reputation as a man with a plan for the conversion of England. At Kidderminster, his ministry was transforming the town into a model of godliness, as hundreds were converted to serious religion. On a Sabbath afternoon, no one was playing sports or dancing; instead, scores of families were indoors, reading Scripture, singing psalms, and reviewing the morning sermon. And unlike many towns across England, Kidderminster was a sect-free environment. Baxter gloried in the fact that there were no Anabaptists in his parish – there had been one, a journeyman shoemaker, but he soon left town in frustration.¹³

Far from being eccentric, Baxter’s sweeping condemnation of the Anabaptists was typical of mainstream Reformed opinion. For Lutherans and Calvinists alike, Anabaptists were beyond the pale. Of course, the Reformed and the ‘evangelical’ Anabaptists shared some things in common.¹⁴ Both could trace their origins to Zurich in the 1520s, either to Ulrich Zwingli or to Conrad Grebel. Both agreed that the Lutheran Reformation had not gone far enough; both rejected the Lutheran doctrine of Christ’s physical presence in the Eucharist; both placed a powerful emphasis on moral discipline of their members; and both insisted on plain worship without images.¹⁵ In some communities, they lived side-by-side. Mennonites in the north German town of Wesel even subjected themselves to the authority of the Calvinist consistory while privately attending illegal conventicles.¹⁶ In the Dutch republic, the primarily Mennonite Anabaptists constituted around five per cent of the population (around 75,000 people by the 1640s). The Reformed state tolerated their semi-clandestine worship and they coexisted peacefully with their Calvinist neighbours. In one case, a Mennonite carpenter was hired to repair the Calvinist minister’s parsonage.¹⁷

Yet to tolerate and coexist was not to embrace in fellowship. The confessional identities of both the Reformed and the Anabaptists hardened early, leaving little room for ambiguity. In 1525, the Anabaptists were banned from the territory of Zurich, and in the following year a law was passed decreeing the death penalty for anyone who re-baptized another person. ‘Henceforward,’ explains Philip Benedict, ‘Anabaptism would always be one of the negative poles on the left against which the Reformed would define themselves.’¹⁸ Zwingli, Bullinger, Calvin and Beza anathematized the Anabaptists repeatedly and at length, and almost invariably, the Reformed confessions included clauses condemning Anabaptist heresies.¹⁹ The Dutch Reformed divine, Adrian van Haemstede, ‘meticulously excluded executed Anabaptists’ from his account of Protestant martyrdom, and although the occasional Anabaptist did creep into Reformed martyrologies, they were never acknowledged as such. ²⁰ In the Protestant Netherlands, orthodox Calvinist clergy maintained a staunch opposition to religious freedom for Mennonites or other minorities.²¹ They regarded the Anabaptists as heretical sectaries; their very name carried the stigma of rebaptising. The concept of a Calvinistic Baptist was yet to be invented, and would have caused utter bemusement. A Reformed Anabaptist was a contradiction in terms.

Yet something quite astonishing happened in England. By the 1650s, ‘Anabaptists’ were being embraced by Reformed Protestants as brethren, with some of them operating within the national Church. Even the Presbyterians would soften towards the Baptists, and Baxter himself would give much thought to how Baptists could be accommodated within a unified Protestantism. In the rest of this essay, I want to investigate this remarkable development. I want to reflect on what it was about English Protestant culture that allowed the Baptists to flourish and gain recognition in a way that was not possible among Reformed Protestants elsewhere in Europe. I will highlight two major factors: 1) the unique phenomenon that was English Puritanism which itself was a product of the distinctive character of the Church of England, and 2) the political contingency of the Puritan Revolution, an event with no direct parallel elsewhere in the European Reformed world. This was the Baptists’ breakthrough moment – the moment when despised ‘Anabaptists’ began to become respectable ‘Baptists’, when they were first embraced within a coalition of evangelical Protestants. From this point on, Baptists would be a prominent feature on the religious landscape of the English-speaking world.

English Puritanism and the Birth of the Baptists

The Church of England under Queen Elizabeth I and King James I was a Reformed Church – its Thirty-Nine Articles taught a broadly Calvinist theology and its leading bishops and theologians identified strongly with the continental Reformed churches, even sending a delegation to the Synod of Dort to vote against the Dutch Arminians.²² But the English church was also unusual among Europe’s Reformed churches in retaining many vestiges of the medieval past. It had an ecclesiastical hierarchy headed by bishops and archbishops; its services were conducted according to a formal liturgy; its priests wore (or were supposed to wear) vestments; its cathedrals boasted choirs; and a growing number of its clergy revelled in those things that set it apart from the Calvinists abroad. It was ‘but halfly reformed’.

As a result, there arose a reform movement within the Church of England, the movement we call Puritanism.²³ In the Elizabethan years, Puritans assaulted both the ceremonies and the hierarchy of the English Church, only to be blocked at every turn. The frustrations of the godly had two major consequences. First, they led some towards increasingly radical ecclesiologies. By the 1590s, a small but growing number of Puritan pastors became convinced that the prospects for systematic reform of the church’s government and worship were poor. Presbyterian visions of national reformation did survive, but for five decades between 1590 and 1640, there was little opportunity to put them into practice. Others now decided that it was not worth ‘tarrying for the magistrate’. Instead, they took matters into their own hands, breaking with the parish churches and establishing separatist congregations. In the 1610s, Henry Jacob adopted a different approach, forming a semi-separatist gathered church. These were developments of seminal importance, for it was from these separatist and semi-separatist churches that the Baptists would emerge. Given the radical potentialities within English Puritanism, it was capable of conceiving Baptists without the aid of artificial insemination from continental Anabaptists.²⁴

Of course, the Dutch Mennonites did have a shaping influence on John Smyth and (to a lesser degree) Thomas Helwys, but even these men had been bred within the subculture of Puritan Separatism.²⁵ It is revealing that Helwys held firmly to that distinctive feature of English (and Scottish) Reformed Protestantism – strict sabbatarianism – complaining that Mennonites (like the Dutch Reformed) were lax in their observance of the Lord’s Day.²⁶ The vast majority of the later Baptists had little or no direct contact with continental Anabaptists, but almost without exception they had been immersed in the subculture of English Puritanism. Their ecclesiastical trajectory can be explained by reference to its internal dynamics. It is for this reason that the long-running debate about the origins of the Baptists has come to lay more stress on Puritanism and Separatism than on Anabaptism.²⁷ One reason that Reformed Protestants anathematized Anabaptists was that they had a long history of generating baptistic off-shoots, even without the fertile modifications introduced by radical English Puritanism. As Philip Benedict puts it, the London separatists of 1633 ‘replicated the act of many preceding groups of Anabaptists from within a Reformed theological outlook when they instituted the practice of adult baptism. The practice fit well with the early Congregationalists’ restriction of full church membership to those who could claim the possession of saving grace.’²⁸

But if radical ecclesiologies were one by-product of Puritan and Reformed frustration, it also produced what Dwight Bozeman has called ‘the first Protestant pietism’.²⁹ Thwarted in their drive for structural change, Puritan pastors concentrated their energies elsewhere – in the development of a new style of fervent Reformed devotion. Divines like Richard Greenham and William Perkins became renowned as ‘physicians of the soul’, writing works of practical divinity that analyzed the morphology of conversion in forensic detail. They prescribed an intense regime of strict sabbatarianism, godly reading, psalm-singing, prayer, fasting, meditation and writing spiritual journals. Other Puritan divines like Richard Sibbes and John Cotton placed powerful emphasis on the work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer and urged their readers to seek mystical union with Christ. As a result of this new pietism, English Puritans cut a distinctive profile, both within the Church of England and across Reformed Europe, where they quickly gained fame as ‘affectionate’ and practical theologians.³⁰

Despite the unreformed structures of their church, Puritan pastors found plenty of space to promote the cause of godliness. As parish ministers, they could come to shape whole communities with the gospel; as lecturers, they could preach the word on Sunday afternoons and market days; as chaplains, they could shape the ethos of gentry and aristocratic households; as academics, they could train the next generation of pastors. While many Puritan clergy were harassed for refusal to conform to ceremonies, the vast majority learned to live with bishops.³¹

The flourishing of this first Protestant pietism within an episcopal church had important consequences. Firstly, it meant that a growing number of English Puritans prized piety above ecclesiology. Ecclesiastical forms had divided Protestants; the goal was to reunite them around a few fundamentals and experiential (called ‘experimental’) religion. Puritans who embraced this anti-formalist spirituality were naturally sceptical of the dogmatic and exclusive ecclesiology of the Particular and General Baptists – but they were also inclined to discern authentic piety under different forms. Indeed, the devotional intensity of English Puritanism created strong bonds of fellowship among the godly, bonds that could withstand serious disagreements about church government. Anti-formalists might not join Baptist congregations, but they would look past their forms to their piety.³²

Second, Puritan Pietism created a hot Protestantism that proved unstable and combustible. Puritans are often considered solid, sound and sober, but this misses the remarkable capacity of English Puritanism to foster religious innovation. In comparison with continental Reformed Protestantism, Puritanism was to prove unusually restless and fissiparous. The sheer intensity of Puritan religious experience produced unpredictable effects, spawning a remarkable array of lay preachers and prophets, judaizers and antinomians, exorcists and sectaries. By energizing and empowering the laity, the Puritan clergy had unleashed potent forces that they could not always control. Within this simmering subculture, Baptists stood out less sharply than they would do within the more orderly Reformed churches of France or Switzerland.³³

Before the 1640s, Puritan pastors managed to contain the radical potentialities of their movement. The English Baptists remained a tiny, persecuted sect with a vanishingly low profile. Thomas Helwys had planted the first Baptist church in English soil in the London suburb of Spitalfields in 1612, but the General Baptists of the early seventeenth century can never have numbered more than a few hundred people, and by the 1630s they were practically invisible. The Laudian crackdown of that decade radicalized Puritans, and led to the emergence of Calvinistic Baptists, but they too were a marginal group with a precarious existence. No one in their wildest dreams could have predicted that this minute sect would rise to become a worldwide religious community of 100 million people.

The Puritan Revolution and the Embrace of the Baptists

The Puritan Revolution secured the Baptist future. Archbishop Laud’s campaign to realign the British churches, relocating them midway between Rome and Geneva, provoked a ferocious backlash, beginning in Calvinist Scotland, which rose up in rebellion.³⁴ By 1640, the Scottish crisis had forced King Charles I to recall the English Parliament; within months, the archbishop himself was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Suddenly, English Puritans had the chance to reform the church from top to bottom. The English Revolution had some of the hallmarks of a Calvinist revolt, but as one historian has suggested, it morphed into ‘the last and greatest triumph of the European radical reformation’.³⁵ In the two decades between 1640 and 1660 Baptists burgeoned from a handful of tiny congregations to a movement of around 240 churches across the British Isles. They may have had up to 25,000 members, a huge increase over 1640, and thousands more had undergone believer’s baptism without joining or remaining in a Baptist church.³⁶ To use a suitably watery metaphor, what had once been a trickle of converts had become a flood. In the 1630s, just a single book was published with the word ‘Anabaptist’ in its title; during the next two decades, the total of such works rose to around 150.³⁷

This was a dramatic moment fuelled by eschatological excitement. The political and religious upheaval of these years had much in common with the turmoil in Europe during the first decade of the Reformation. The outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642 was followed by the overthrow of episcopacy and the Book of Common Prayer. Many of the godly believed that they were living in the last days, that God was about to restore the church to its primitive purity in order to prepare the world for the conversion of the Jews, the overthrow of the Papacy (the Antichrist of Revelation), and the latter day glory.³⁸ If the bitter frustrations of the 1590s had fostered radical ecclesiologies, the same was true of the dazzling opportunities of the 1640s. The majority of the godly gravitated towards Presbyterianism, but biblicism and primitivism led others to contemplate the idea of self-governing gathered churches, and even to question the validity of infant baptism.³⁹

The spiritual ferment of these years was reinforced by the opening of the presses. London, in particular, was flooded by a tsunami of broadsides and pamphlets. Over the course of the Revolution, the London bookseller George Thomason collected 15,000 titles (and another 7,000 periodicals).⁴⁰ Print was fully exploited by religious conservatives, but the Baptists too took full advantage. They seized their chance to make their case before a wider public, often using print alongside public disputations. At one level, the Baptist campaign was belligerent, involving a frontal assault on traditional Reformed positions on baptism and church membership. At the same time, however, the Baptists used print to distance themselves from the notorious continental Anabaptists, and to establish their credentials as bona fide Protestants.⁴¹

Above all, this was done in confessions of faith. According to the London Confession of the Particular Baptists in 1644, they were ‘those CHURCHES which are commonly (though falsly) called ANABAPTISTS’. In the 1646 Confession they were ‘seven Congregations or Churches of Christ in LONDON, which are commonly (but unjustly) called Anabaptists’. The ‘Standard Confession’ of the General Baptists in 1660 concurred – they were the people ‘(falsely) called Ana-Baptists’.⁴² The confessions were designed to show that the Baptists were not an exotic and dangerous foreign import, but a home-grown variety of English Protestantism. Both branches of the movement emphasised their orthodoxy, with the Particular Baptists stressing their staunch Calvinism. For the first time in the history of the Reformed tradition, significant numbers of predestinarian Protestants were now advocating and practicing believer’s baptism. This was in contrast to the situation in the Dutch republic, where a doctrinal gulf still separated Mennonites from Reformed. Even the General Baptists shared common ground with Reformed orthodoxy, especially as leaders like Thomas Lambe stopped short of Arminianism.⁴³

The confessions also sought to show that Anabaptism was not a package deal – the doctrine of believer’s baptism could be easily detached from other positions on magistracy, property and oaths. Distancing Baptists from Anabaptist politics, they insisted that the English congregations were neither a theocratic cult (like the Münsterites) nor a pacifist sect (like the Mennonites). Far from wishing to overthrow the state or refusing to serve as magistrates, they were enthusiastic supporters of the English Parliament. During the English Civil War, Baptists eagerly took up arms, a telling indication of how far they were removed from Mennonites and Hutterites. Indeed, one could say that Anabaptists became Baptists in the Parliamentary armies. Like the Reformed, they were quite clear that Christians could hold military and political office.⁴⁴

Where Baptists still differed from traditional Reformed political theology was over the question of the magistrate’s role in religion. For many, the magistrate had no coercive power in matters of religion. In the 1610s and 1620s, this view was yet another Baptist eccentricity. By the 1640s, however, it was being widely canvassed by a variety of other radical Puritans – the leading London congregational divine, John Goodwin; the merchant and intellectual, Henry Robinson; the former Baptist, Roger Williams; and the Leveller movement. This tolerationist coalition left the Baptists much less isolated.⁴⁵

More importantly, they now had powerful allies. The revolt against King Charles I catapulted Puritan politicians into positions of power, and some of the new grandees proved to be unusually tolerant of Protestant sects. This was partly a matter of practical politics. The Parliamentarians needed allies and foot soldiers, and they were not keen to alienate zealous supporters. Yet more than mere pragmatism was involved. In 1642, the King pointedly asked if ‘the Cherishing and Countenancing of Brownists, Anabaptists, and all Manner of Sectaries, be the Way to defend and maintain the true reformed Protestant Religion?’⁴⁶ In response, many Parliamentarians were keen to assert their orthodox Protestant credentials. In the Grand Remonstrance, John Pym and other MPs asserted that they had no intention to ‘loose the reins of discipline’ in the church.⁴⁷ Most Parliamentarians believed firmly in religious uniformity, and had no wish to see London turn into Amsterdam, a city notorious for its lax attitudes towards Anabaptists and other minorities.

But some had other ideas. Among the leaders of the aristocratic plot against Charles I’s Personal Rule was Sir Robert Greville, Lord Brooke, a powerful Puritan nobleman who had promoted colonization in the Caribbean and New England. Brooke admitted that the overthrow of the ‘Tyrannicall, Antichristian Prelates’ might open the door to Anabaptism, Separatism and lay preaching, but he thought this a risk well worth taking. Dutch liberty was preferable to Spanish Inquisition. He distinguished between heretical and dangerous Anabaptists (who held ‘Freewill; Community of all things; deny Magistracy’), and those who merely differed with the Church of England over infant baptism. When Brooke raised a regiment of horse in 1642, one of its captains was the separatist John Lilburne, and when Lilburne’s friend William Kiffin was prosecuted for his separatist activities, the peer sprang to his defense. Baxter thought Brooke a ‘gross Sectary’.⁴⁸

Brooke was killed in battle in 1643, but his friend, Sir Henry Vane the younger quickly emerged as a defender of the sects. Vane had been governor of Massachusetts Bay during the Antinomian crisis, and had lost his post because of his sympathy with the ‘free grace’ theology of Anne Hutchinson. Back in England, he was a leading MP throughout the 1640s, a firm believer in toleration, a friend and patron of Roger Williams. In the eyes of Baxter, Vane was public enemy number one, the leader of ‘the Sectarian party’. Within the House of Commons and on powerful parliamentary committees, he was a force to be reckoned with. And like Brooke, his was an anti-formalist piety. He belonged to no particular church, preaching instead to believers who gathered in his house on Charing Cross Road. And he sought to unite radical Puritans, regardless of their ecclesiology.⁴⁹ Both he and Brooke were much admired by John Milton.

The most important figure, however, was Oliver Cromwell. A relatively minor MP when the Long Parliament met in November 1640, Cromwell was among the first to raise a cavalry troop for Parliament, and he quickly emerged as one of the army’s most effective commanders. He also acquired a reputation as ‘the darling of the sectaries’. Cromwell too was a proponent of anti-formalist pietism. He appears never to have joined a gathered church and he lamented the tendency of the godly to split into rival churches which overvalued forms. What Cromwell sought in his recruits was ideological commitment to the Parliamentarian cause and personal godliness – what he called ‘the root of the matter’.

In 1643, Cromwell was keen to reassure other Puritan Parliamentarians that his troops were simply ‘honest, sober Christians’. ‘They are no Anabaptists,’ he explained. Although ‘some have stigmatized them with the name of Anabaptists’, they were ‘honest men, such as fear God’.⁵⁰ But by 1644, such protests started to wear thin. This was a crucial year for the Baptists – they experienced real growth in the Parliamentary armies, issued a Confession, and faced calls from the Westminster Assembly for their suppression.⁵¹ When a Baptist officer was threatened with expulsion from the army, Cromwell publicly defended him in a famous letter:

Ay, but the man is an Anabaptist. Are you sure of that? Admit he is, shall that render him incapable to serve the public. He is indiscreet. It may be so, in some things, we have all human infirmities.… Sir, the State, in choosing men to serve them, takes no notice of opinions, if they be willing faithfully to serve them, that satisfies.… Take heed of being sharp … against those to whom you can object little but that they square not with you in every opinion concerning matters of religion.⁵²

At one level, Cromwell was simply acting as a hard-headed military commander who did not want to lose a good soldier. But his relaxed attitude to Anabaptists was startling in the England of 1644, and completely unacceptable to many of his fellows Calvinists.

The rift over the sects now served to divide Parliamentarians into two factions. The political Presbyterians supported religious uniformity and the Scots Covenanters, while being increasingly suspicious of the army. The political Independents – led by Vane and Cromwell – favored religious toleration and placed their trust in a remodelled and centralized army commanded by men zealous to prosecute the war.⁵³ In order to counter the Presbyterians, they assembled a remarkably diverse coalition. Their inclusion of the Baptists stood in sharp contrast to Scotland’s ‘Second Reformation’ under the Covenanters, which was resolutely hostile to sectarian religion.

When the New Model Army won the Civil War in 1646, Independents claimed the credit, and the army emerged as a major political force, publishing its own declarations and flouting orders from its Presbyterian paymasters in Parliament. By now, even Episcopal divines had to reckon with the sects. In Liberty of Prophesying, a tract published during negotiations between the King and the Army, the future bishop Jeremy Taylor included a remarkably sympathetic treatment of those who rejected infant baptism.⁵⁴ This would have been unthinkable a decade earlier and reflected how far the Baptists had come. When the King turned against the army and launched the Second Civil War in 1648, he was once again defeated. The Independent party now purged Parliament of Presbyterian MPs, put the king on trial, executed him, abolished the monarchy and House of Lords, and declared England a ‘free commonwealth’.

By this point, Cromwell was the most powerful man in the land, and uniting the godly was his fondest hope. As he explained in a private letter, ‘I profess to thee I desire it in my heart, I have prayed for it, I have waited for the day to see union and right understanding between the godly people (Scots, English, Jews, Gentiles, Presbyterians, Independents, Anabaptists, and all).’⁵⁵ After becoming Lord Protector (England’s first non-royal head of state) in 1653, he continued to embrace the Baptists. In January 1655, he delivered a speech to his first Protectorate Parliament, urging English Puritans to accept ‘Godly men of different judgements’, including ‘many under the form of Baptism, who are sound in the Faith’, ‘looking at salvation only by faith in the blood of Christ’.⁵⁶ What was essential for Cromwell was a basic grasp of Reformation soteriology and Puritan practical divinity – salvation by grace through faith in the blood of Christ and a passion for affectionate religion and godly fellowship. With these fundamentals in place, all else was secondary, including views on baptism.⁵⁷ In a heated exchange with the Fifth Monarchist, John Rogers, in 1654, Cromwell explained that his job was ‘to keep all the godly of several judgments in peace’, including ‘the re-baptized persons’.⁵⁸ In his 1656 speech to Parliament, Cromwell referred sympathetically to ‘those of the Independent judgement’, those ‘of the Presbyterian judgement’, and ‘those under Baptism’.⁵⁹ Here was highly diplomatic language, according the Baptists a place as one of the three recognized groupings of the godly, putting them on a par with the Congregationalists and the mainstream Presbyterians. As Blair Worden puts it, ‘Repeatedly in the 1650s his words suggest that God’s peculiar were to be found exclusively, or almost exclusively, within [these] three groups.’⁶⁰

Under Cromwell, Baptists rose to occupy high military and civilian office. In Ireland, they played a major role in the colonial regime of the early 1650s, supplying no fewer than seven military governors.⁶¹ In England and Wales, two of the regional Major-Generals of 1655-56 were Baptists – Robert Lilburne and William Packer.⁶² Packer was the Baptist officer Cromwell had defended in 1644. He had fought at Marston Moor, the siege of Colchester and the battle of Dunbar, becoming a major in 1652. As a Baptist layman, he had more influence on religious policy than many eminent clergymen. In 1652, the council of state licensed him as a lay preacher; in 1654, he was appointed one of the Triers to vet clerical candidates for the parochial ministry; and he also served on the commission to promote the Gospel in Wales. As well as sitting on the Hale commission for law reform, he was an MP. He even commanded the Lord Protector’s own regiment of horse, where all five of his captains were also Baptists.⁶³ Another Baptist, Colonel Robert Bennett, also sat in parliament and even on the council of state in 1653.⁶⁴

Other eminent military figures rejected infant baptism without necessarily joining a Baptist congregation, including the regicides Colonel John Hutchinson, Colonel John Okey, Lieutenant-General Edmund Ludlow and Major-General Thomas Harrison. ‘Nothing be more express in Scripture’, wrote Ludlow, ‘then that none but believers were subjects of water baptisme’. Hutchinson and his wife refused to have their infant child baptized and were reviled as ‘anabaptists’.⁶⁵ Harrison was the main promoter of the Nominated Assembly, the so-called ‘parliament of saints’ chosen from the gathered churches. With six Baptist MPs, it marked the high point for Baptist political influence, though others were elected later in the decade, including the merchant-preacher William Kiffin.⁶⁶ The republic’s Latin Secretary and its most distinguished apologist, John Milton, emphatically endorsed believer’s baptism by immersion in his unpublished systematic theology, and expressed amazement at the ‘futile arguments’ of paedobaptist theologians.⁶⁷ The President of Cromwell’s Council of State, Henry Lawrence, had published one of the major defenses of believer’s baptism in the 1640s, though he seems to have identified with Thomas Goodwin’s Congregational church.⁶⁸ Nowhere else in contemporary Europe were credobaptists on such close terms with power.

This mainstreaming of baptistic Protestants owed everything to their active role within the Independent coalition and to the open-membership policy of the Congregationalists. As Joel Halcomb has recently argued, ‘Historians have overlooked the ubiquitous presence of Baptists within revolutionary congregationalism.’ Almost all congregational churches for which we have any evidence seem to have admitted Calvinistic Baptists to membership. Thomas Goodwin, the leading Congregationalist in the Westminster Assembly, admitted Baptists to his gathered church, and the Bedford congregation to which John Bunyan belonged operated the same policy. In a letter to the church at Hexham, Henry Jessey claimed to have visited no fewer than thirty open communion churches in East Anglia. Other sources from Norfolk and Suffolk confirm that almost all the gathered churches contained Baptists, with only ‘rigid’ Baptists being excluded because of their tendency to divide the fellowship. In Wales too, the leading Congregationalists like Walter Cradock and Vavasour Powell were in favour of open communion, and Powell himself underwent believer’s baptism. Open communion congregations also existed in Scotland and Ireland.⁶⁹ After the Restoration, one Congregationalist could testify that ‘we do love and honor them [the Baptists], hold familiarity with them and take sweet council together.… In a word, we freely admit them into our churches; few of our churches but many of our members are Anabaptist.’⁷⁰

The inclusiveness of the English Congregationalists caused some tension with their brethren in Massachusetts, where Baptist itinerants were literally whipped out of the colony. But even in New England, Congregationalists were wavering. In 1654, the President of Harvard College, Henry Dunster, was forced to resign after he admitted that he no longer believed in infant baptism. He was not subjected to any other punishment, and continued to minister in a church in Plymouth colony. Massachusetts Puritans would take longer than their English brethren to come to terms with the Baptists, but eventually did so.⁷¹ In continental Europe, Reformed Protestants remained immoveable in their insistence on infant baptism – Anabaptism’ had no place within the Reformed churches. In the British Atlantic world, that was changing. The Baptists were being brought in from the cold.

In sixteenth-century Zurich, Anabaptists had once been banished and even executed; in seventeenth-century England they were now welcomed by the Puritan state. With official approval, Baptist congregations assembled in prestigious public buildings – Edmund Chillenden’s church worshipped in the Stone Chapel of what had been St Paul’s Cathedral; another London group met in the Glazier’s Hall; in Exeter, the Baptist church was granted use of ‘the best repaired public meeting place in the city’; in Chard, Somerset, a new congregation met in the town’s shire hall; the Council of State ordered the mayor of Dartmouth to give John Pendarves free access to the church of St Saviour’s when it was not required by the parish minister.⁷² In Dublin, the city’s first Baptist congregation met in St Patrick’s Cathedral.⁷³

Baptists even occupied positions of power within the established church. A number of Particular Baptist ministers held parish livings at the same time as pastoring a gathered church. The former army chaplain, Paul Hobson, was chaplain of Eton College. Several open-membership Baptists – John Tombes, Henry Jessey and William Packer – sat on the national committee of Triers who examined candidates for the parish ministry.⁷⁴ When an ejected episcopal minister appealed to Cromwell for another living, he was able to produce certificates and letters from Archbishop Ussher, the Congregationalist Thomas Goodwin and the Presbyterian Thomas Manton, and the Baptist lay preacher Packer.⁷⁵ Baptists were now helping to run the state church, and in 1655, Jessey, Lawrence, Kiffin and Collier all played an active role in promoting the Whitehall Conference, which led to the unofficial readmission of the Jews to England.⁷⁶

The Cromwellian church settlement was a remarkable experiment in inter-denominational Protestant ecumenism, one that prefigured the ethos of later Evangelicalism. Oliver Cromwell, as much as George Whitefield, sought to unite evangelical Protestants around basic scriptural doctrines, regardless of whether they were Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Baptist or (more problematically) Episcopal. And already in the 1650s, we find the language of denominationalism. Henry Jessey warned against invidious generalizations about ‘persons that are of the same Opinion, or Denomination’ – including those of the ‘Presbyterian way’, ‘the way of the Independents’, and ‘the Anabaptists, so tearmed’.⁷⁷ This was a new style of Protestant irenicism, one with a bright future.

Even Presbyterians had to admit