Who is Not a Baptist?

Discussions of Baptist identity inevitably lead to an acknowledgment of the diversity that characterizes today’s Baptist family. When your faith family includes the Westboro Baptist clan and Jesse Jackson, Tom Delay and Bill Moyers, and Tim LaHaye and John Grisham – how do you define “Baptist identity”?

Even if one backs away from persons who explicitly embrace the Baptist label, questions remain. Elements of Baptistness – including but not limited to voluntary faith, freedom of conscience, and congregational church autonomy – are now diffused throughout much of contemporary Christendom. In a recent Baptist History & Heritage Society workshop entitled “A Future Without Baptists? Who Cares?” (watch the video), presenters discussed the democratization of Baptist distinctives founded upon individual freedom of conscience. A consensus seemed to be that should the Baptist name become rare or disappear, Baptist freedom distinctives need to be preserved for the vitality of the Christian Church at large.

On the flip side, workshop attendee Curtis Freeman, professor of Theology at Duke Divinity School and a leader in the Bapto-Catholic movement that dismisses the Baptist heritage of freedom of individual conscience and advocates creedal faith, offered a different perspective. Highlighting his close ties with the Vatican and downplaying Baptist dinstinctives, Freeman argued that the modern Roman Catholic Church embraces believer’s baptism as the “proper mode of baptism.”

Positing the RCC as advocating the primacy of believer’s baptism stretches credibility. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is clear that while the Catholic Church has long made accommodations for adult baptism of new converts, infant baptism is the standard and preferred mode of baptism, is foundational to the RCC, and is a salvific rite – rather than an act of faith on the part of one who is already a believer, hence “believer’s baptism” – that  “cannot be repeated” as an adult.

Nonetheless, attempts to deny Baptist distinctives and re-image Catholics as Baptists-in-essence encapsulate the elasticity of contemporary Baptistness. Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger) and the contemporary RCC insist that the only true “Church of Christ” is the Roman Catholic Church, and that any spiritual validity found in other Christian sects is derived “from the very fullness of grace and truth entrusted to the (Roman) Catholic Church.” (Dominus Iesus, IV, 16) If Catholics are Baptists, and Baptists are Catholics, are there no boundaries in the Baptist family? Can anyone fit under the Baptist (or baptist) umbrella?

Conversely, can we as contemporary Baptists speak in terms of who is not a Baptist, and why? In the spirit of Christian generosity, while acknowledging that Baptist identity is larger (and maybe sometimes smaller) than the Baptist label proper, and risking no shortage of criticism, I offer the following non-authoritative suggestions of who is not a Baptist:

* One who does not have a personal faith in Christ and who is not voluntarily a follower of Christ cannot be a Baptist.

* One whose Christian faith is externally imposed, rather than personally owned, cannot be a Baptist.

* One who does not embrace, in some sense, the unique, God-imbued nature of written scripture may not be a Baptist.

* One who has not been baptized as a believer cannot be a Baptist in the fullest sense.

* One who has no connection to a local congregation cannot be a Baptist in the fullest sense.

* A congregation that is not autonomous and is not comprised of voluntary believers cannot be a Baptist church.