The Baptist Calling

by Bruce T. Gourley
Published September 2013 – February 2014
(Baptist Studies Bulletin Archives Index)

PART ONE: Introduction

“What do you do?” It is a question all of us have fielded multiple times, often from a new acquaintance who is seeking to get a handle on who we are. The initial reply typically points the inquirer to one’s professional occupation or job title, perhaps involving a brief description of one’s work. Sometimes the answer solicits no further queries, while at other times the questioner prods his or her subject to further unpack the brief response, a foray into which the one quizzed may or may not wish to journey too deeply at that moment in time.

I oftentimes listen with interest (and/or amusement) to how such conversations unfold in the (ever more cramped) confines of an airplane. Some persons are quite reluctant to reveal much about themselves to their seat mate, while others wax at length about their jobs with seemingly no inhibitions (sometimes to the dismay of those seated nearby).

Although personal identity is often equated with the activity by which one earns financial income, what we do is really a much broader dynamic. Faith is vocational for both professional clergy and active laypersons. Whether clergy or laity, how do you talk about what you do as a Baptist? Communicating who we (as a faith group) are to strangers is enough of a challenge in our 21st century world; explaining what we do requires digging a little deeper.

In addition, younger generations in our contemporary Western world value action over rhetorical principles. Beliefs and identity in the abstract are fine, but what do we do as Baptists?

Where to start? Historically, Baptists are a people of action. At a time when Christians were typically defined by doctrinal statements that mandated identity and beliefs, early Baptists were known more for what they did, public actions that were daring, heretical and often endangered their very lives. They defied kings and religious authorities by fighting for freedom of conscience and religious liberty for all persons, and by resisting church state entanglement. They formed communities on the basis of voluntary public confessions of faith and believer’s baptism. They championed the dignity of the lowly and despised. They devoted themselves to redeeming the world as representatives of a Christ of love, rather than as purveyors of creeds enforced by synods, law and sword.

The actions of the early Baptists oftentimes evoked strong reactions from civil and ecclesial authorities: beatings, whippings, jailings, stonings, waterboarding, confiscation of lands, forced removal of children from their homes, and many other forms of persecution were deployed in efforts to thwart and silence the Baptist witness. And yet these brave Baptists continued living out their faith, willingly accepting the persecution brought about by their actions.

In the Western world, the days of Baptist persecution are long past; our pluralistic society and secular government welcomes and tolerates a multiplicity of religious beliefs and behavior. In some other nations of the world, however, the living out of one’s Baptist faith is an invitation to persecution from governments and state churches. And yet Baptists around the world, despite varied circumstances, broadly share some general commonalities in terms of what they do, from generation to generation having generally lived and acted in certain ways that cut across theological variety, ecclesial differences and geographical boundaries to publicly define a diverse faith group that harbors an elasticity of beliefs.

PART TWO: Fighting for Freedom for all Persons

The depths of the convictions of the Baptist calling can be found in Newgate Prison in 1612. Newgate was the Alcatraz of its day, a forbidding place of inevitable death for many unfortunate enough to be sentenced to its dark, dank confines. Home to England’s most notorious criminals, Newgate–opened in the 12th century and rebuilt several times–had a notoriety second to none. It was, in short, the largest and nastiest of the 150 or so London prisons of the era.

Into this hellhole, King James I–the very king who changed the course of Christian history in 1611 with the publication of the Authorized Bible, commonly known as the King James Bible–condemned one of the most dangerous criminals in his empire. The prisoner’s misdeed, however, was neither that of murder nor theft. Rather, for the crime of freedom Thomas Helwys, he of a well-connected and well-to-do family, had been cast into Newgate. Yet not just any freedom. Helwy’s crime, arising from his faith in Christ and the biblical New Testament, was demanding that the king grant liberty of conscience not merely to him, but to everyone in the kingdom. The co-founder of the Baptist faith, in short, was imprisoned for advocating for freedom of conscience for all people, including persons of other faiths and no faith.

For the early Baptists, an individual’s conscience was from God, and thus sacred. Writing on behalf of the first Baptist congregation, which he then led, Helwys had made the Baptist community’s convictions clear in a book he published earlier in 1612–A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity–in which he demanded freedom of conscience for all: “For we do freely profess that our lord the king has no more power over their [Roman Catholics’] consciences than over ours, and that is none at all. For our lord the king is but an earthly king, and he has no authority as a king but in earthly causes. And if the king’s people be obedient and true subjects, obeying all human laws made by the king, our lord the king can require no more. For men’s religion to God is between God and themselves. The king shall not answer for it. Neither may the king be judge between God and man. Let them be heretics, Turks, Jews, or whatsoever, it appertains not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure. This is made evident to our lord the king by the scriptures.”

Treasonous though Helwys’ published words were, he further acted upon his convictions by sending a copy of the book to James, complete with a personally-written reprimand of the king. “The King,” Helwys said, “is a mortal man, and not God, therefore he hath no power over the mortal soul of his subjects to make laws and ordinances for them and to set spiritual Lords over them.”

For his treason, James immediately had Helwys thrown into Newgate Prison, from which he did not emerge alive, his death occurring about the year 1616.

Helwy’s treason has been the hallmark calling of the Baptist faith ever since: Baptists have publicly been known as champions of freedom of conscience and religious liberty for all persons, no matter the cost. And the cost has been great: in their 404 years of existence, Baptists numbering in the tens–and perhaps hundreds–of thousands have been persecuted by Christian, Muslim and other religious state authorities for their advocacy of freedom for all.

In the United States, the 1791 addition of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, granting religious liberty to all and separating church from state, ended the persecution of American Baptists and marked a high point in the Baptist calling, even as Baptists’ freedom work on behalf of all persons continued.

For Baptists faithful to their heritage, freedom of conscience for everyone trumps kings, political parties, ecclesiastical authorities and religious creeds. This calling yet continues in the 21st century, a contemporary task facing challenging headwinds old and new. Theocracies remain in today’s world. Religious liberty is unknown or limited in many nations. Religious persecution is a daily reality for hundreds of millions of persons. Governments, churches and creeds disallow freedom of conscience to billions. And even in America, many evangelical Christians insist on using the power of government to force their religious beliefs upon others.

Of the latter, too many Baptists, disconnected from the calling of their faith heritage, are among the tens of millions of majoritarian evangelicals redefining religious liberty in order to privilege their beliefs over the consciouses of persons of other faiths or no faith.

What are Baptists who are true to their faith heritage called to do in today’s world? As did Helwys, we are called to fight for freedom of conscience and religious liberty for all, rather than merely for ourselves. The “other” of whom we are to be advocates includes heretics and Muslims, as our early faith forebears insisted. (Lest we dismiss advocating for Muslims because some Muslims are terrorists, let us not forget that for generations many white Baptists terrorized African Americans through beatings, whippings, lynchings, bombings and other violent and murderous acts). Our freedom calling remains dangerous even in America. While we may not face imprisonment, spending our energies standing up for the rights of the “other” may lead to public condemnation by persons from within our own Baptist faith family who scorn our common faith heritage of freedom for all.

Yet freedom work is merely the starting point of the Baptist calling that demands action on our part. Beginning with freedom of conscience and religious liberty for all persons, the Baptist calling compels us to live in community, strive for human equality, and work for the redemption of the world.

PART THREE: Living in Community

The Baptist story began in 1609 with the conviction that God alone is lord of the conscience and therefore freedom of conscience and religious liberty for all persons is a God-given right that neither governmental nor ecclesiastical authorities may violate. As such, the Baptist calling begins with the essence of the God-created human being, the conscience.

Focused on the other from their beginnings, early Baptists scandalized Christendom by demanding freedom of conscience and religion for everyone, including Muslims and atheists, a stance for which Baptist co-founder Thomas Helwys was imprisoned by King James I and died while incarcerated.

Yet the Baptist calling did not, and does not, stop with freedom. While freedom of conscience and religion was due all, not all could be Baptists. Being Baptist involved living in a voluntary community of faith defined by, but not confined to, certain core biblical convictions and practices. Personal faith in Christ as Lord, believer’s baptism, belief in the Bible as spiritually authoritative, a commitment to basic individual freedoms, the spiritual equality and priesthood of all believers, and the autonomous, democratically-governed local church as the fundamental expression of corporate faith collectively characterized Baptist community.

The concept of a voluntary personal profession of faith in Christ as Lord and Savior prior to baptism and central to salvation countered a long-held orthodox narrative of baptism as salvific grace, to be administered upon infants by law. The Roman Catholic Church, in collaboration with the Roman Empire and its successors, had for over a millennia taught, demanded and enforced infant baptism. In turn, the Reformers and the Church of England retained infant baptism, associating infant baptism with salvation, but not as the means of salvation. Nonetheless, they demanded and enforced infant baptism by law. The early Baptists, discarding orthodoxy and focusing on scripture in rejecting infant baptism and requiring a profession of faith before baptism, taught that baptism was available only to voluntary believers, and that Christian community was comprised only of baptized believers. To Baptists, Christian community was separate from earthly citizenship and admission was voluntary, rather than coerced by ecclesiastical or governmental authorities. For their unacceptable form of religious community, Baptists were severely persecuted by Christian governments on both sides of the Atlantic, the persecution in colonial America lasting into the 1770s.

Early Baptist communities, comprised of baptized believers, also held in common a belief in the spiritual authority of scripture. Only in the past two centuries had scripture become accessible to common folk, a development that made possible both the birth of Baptists and their commitment to the primacy of scripture. Ancient church creeds, politically-facilitated documents to which Christians historically were required to submit and that abetted church state alliances (and were historically used as tools to persecute and even execute those deemed as heretics by the church state alliances), lacked authority in Baptist communities, were intentionally absent in the worship and functioning of local congregations, and little utilized by individual Baptists. The Bible alone was deemed sufficient in Baptist life, and individuals (and groups of individuals) were allowed to interpret scripture and even compose their own statements of faith, typically known as confessions (defined, in essence, as a non-binding statement of faith that spoke only for those who had composed it, and was a reflection of the circumstances and time during which it had been written). Some Baptist communities encouraged the study of commentaries and other peripheral material in order to better interpret scripture, while others discouraged such practices. Regardless, Baptist communities understood the Bible as their only authoritative written guide to spiritual faith and practice.

A commitment to basic individual freedoms of professing Baptist Christians also characterized early Baptist communities. Joining the community was voluntary, as was leaving the Baptist family: that is, a given Baptist congregation could vote to expel a member, but could not decree the offender to be not of the Baptist faith. The voluntary nature of community participation reflected Jesus’ emphasis on voluntary faith. Within the Baptist family at large, individuals were allowed to think, speak, live and interpret the Bible according to their own conscience. Baptists of like mind and doctrine, not surprisingly, often coalesced into local communities reflective, and sometimes protective, of certain beliefs and/or practices. The earliest Baptists were Arminian in theology, with Calvinist Baptist congregations emerging three decades later. Since that time, Baptist theology has become increasingly diverse. With individual freedom foundational to the Baptist family, all manner of theological, social, cultural and political thought and practice has been and remains evident within Baptist life. Today’s Baptist family is represented by some 250 different groups of Baptists, some of which are so different in terms of belief-systems that they seem barely related to one another. It may well be true that Baptists are the most diverse religious group in the world.

In addition, Baptist belief in the Reformation concept of the priesthood of all believers (see 1 Peter 2:5-9) was foundational to spiritual equality in early Baptist communities. Among the earliest Baptists this commitment found expression in the acceptance of women deacons and the placement of the preacher on equal footing, literally, with the remainder of the congregation during worship services. As late as the second half of the 19th century, many Baptist congregations in America selected their preachers on an annual basis by congregational vote, often choosing someone from within their midst to serve for the year. In practice, however, Baptists’ belief in spiritual equality has advanced haltingly over their four hundred-plus years of existence. Historically in America, women preachers were uncommon while black believers were often viewed to be inferior by dominate white believers. Today, spiritual equality is more pronounced in most, but not all, of the Baptist family.

Finally, early Baptists’ commitment to individual freedom translated directly into autonomous local congregations governed by democratic polity under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, a New Testament model of community. Community autonomy and democracy, to be sure, was messy from the beginning. Rejecting outside ecclesial and civil authority in church governance, each Baptist congregation governed internally by democratic processes. For purposes of governance, the pastor was allowed the same one vote as every other church member. Baptist congregations thus modeled an early form of modern democracy in which–spiritually aside–personalities, powers of persuasion, clearness of arguments and the context of the times collectively impacted community direction and decisions. But unlike secular democracy, faith and scripture provided the foundation of Baptist community decision-making. Also, in the course of time many Baptist individuals and congregations created external structures–such as associations, societies and conventions–that expanded Baptist community through collaboration, while yet maintaining the primacy of the local congregation.

In short, the early Baptist commitment to God-endowed individual freedom of conscience led Baptists to redefine and shape Christian community in a powerful way that underscored biblical commitment over and above common historical practice. While it was far from clear in their early days as to whether Baptists would long survive alongside the historically coercive, dominant forms of Christian community, in time their freedom-centric model of community transformed Christendom and the world.

Note: For a historical primer on the story of Baptists as pertains to community, see Bill Leonard’s Baptist Ways: A History or C. Douglas Weaver’s In Search of the New Testament Church: The Baptist Story.

PART FOUR: Striving for Human Equality

The late Stephen Jay Gould, influential American paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, in a 1984 paper in Natural History argued that human equality emerged as a byproduct of human history that did not have to be, but rather “it just worked out that way.”

According to Gould, “The history of Western views on race is a tale of denial–a long series of progressive retreats from initial claims for strict separation and ranking by intrinsic worth toward an admission of the trivial differences revealed by this contingent history.” This description could also apply to gender and sexual orientation differences, both of which modern humanity has struggled to absorb within the sphere of human equality.

Biblically speaking, the creation narratives of Judaism / Christianity and Islam offer hints of human equality at the level of gender. In the Genesis account, God creates earthlings out of earth and makes them male and female in His own image. Al-Hujurat 49:13 of the Quran parallels this broad motif. Yet in both the Old Testament and the Quran males dominate females, tribalism separates people groups, the social strata starkly separates citizens, lepers are quarantined outside city gates, and even worship is segregated.

Robert Wright–who was raised in Oklahoma in a Southern Baptist family and studied sociobiology at Princeton, where he now teaches religion and science–in The Evolution of God points to Jesus as a pivot point at which religion began turning away from being a zero-sum affair and turning toward a non-zero-sum dynamic. In short, Wright argues that Jesus’ teachings and his followers created a faith that transcended tribalism and other artificial human differences, in the process steering monotheistic religion on a path toward shaping a world of harmony, inclusiveness, compassion and, ultimately, synthesis.

In the biblical New Testament, the Apostle Paul in Galatians 3:28 offers a forward-looking glimpse of human harmony founded upon equality that transcends religious creeds, ethnicity, socio-economic status, gender and geographical boundaries: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (NIV).

Yet some fifteen hundred-plus years passed before the stream that would become human equality swelled upward in tandem with the maturing of representative democracy and the birth of Baptists in the 17th century. The earliest Baptists adopted the Reformation principle of the priesthood of all believers (spiritual equality among the faithful) to which they added freedom of conscience for all persons (in effect, an equality of the human soul that transcended religion and was based on all of humanity as God’s creation) and, as an extension of their freedom and equality convictions, embraced democracy ecclesiologically and (in America) politically. Late 17th century English philosopher John Locke, influenced by Baptists (Roger Williams in particular) and the Bible (Genesis 1), followed Baptists in advocating freedom of conscience on the basis of human equality, from which he moved the conversation into the realm of natural and moral philosophy. From this provenance came America’s 1776 Declaration of Independence declaring, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, that “all men are created equal.”

Although the United States Constitution limited functional equality to land-owning white males, the founding of America on the theoretical principle of human equality created a lofty expectation that future generations slowly but steadily pressed forward toward. According to Google’s Ngram database, the phrase “human equality” began appearing in English volumes around the turn of the 19th century, its usage spiking in correspondence to clearly-defined chapters in the story of the advance of human equality in America: the Civil War years (1860-1865), the pinnacle of the women’s suffrage (1917-1921), the early civil rights years (1950-1955), the women’s rights movement (1970s), and the early years of the gay right’s movement (1990s).

The Baptist story as it relates to human equality can be told alongside the larger narrative in the Western world. Leading the way for (believer’s) spiritual and (universal) soul equality (soul freedom) in the 17th and 18th centuries, Baptists thereafter vividly fractured over issues of racial (19th century) and gender (early 20th century) equality, fissures which have yet to be fully resolved. The civil rights era in America revealed that many, certainly most in the South, white Baptists a century after black Emancipation remained resolutely unwilling to grant equality to African Americans. The story of the late 20th century is one in which black Baptists, through tremendous sacrifice and persecution, led white Baptists to reluctantly embrace racial equality, while gender equality among Baptists gradually advanced among some Baptist groups. The early 21st century has witnessed a slow Baptist advance toward equality of sexual orientation, with persons under the age of 35, regardless of theological convictions, more readily embracive than older Baptists.

In summary, the narrative of the march of human equality in Baptist thought and life has been fueled by the 17th century Baptist conviction that human beings, as the creation of God, are inherently equal. The story of the Baptist striving for human equality is one of halting, albeit measurable progress in the face of ongoing conflict concerning the extent of the definition of “equality.”

In the midst of historical and present struggles, the movement toward human equality is part of the DNA of Baptists. The four-centuries-old Baptist journey of retreating from pre-modern “claims for strict separation and ranking by intrinsic worth toward an admission of the trivial differences” among humans (both within and without the Church), although uneven and far from over, continues. As the technologically-enabled, knowledge-driven 21st century world quickens the pace of the advance of human equality, the manner in which Baptists navigate the human dynamic in coming decades may be critical for the future vitality of the people called Baptists.

PART FIVE: Redeeming the World