Michael A.G. Azad Haykin
Baptists comprise one of the largest denominational bodies in the Christian world. But what do Baptists believe?
In this article, we’ll seek to answer that question, first, by exploring Baptist origins in the renewal movement of Puritanism with roots in the Reformation. We will then consider those marks that have been central to their identity, in particular, their emphasis on the local church as a body of believers and the congregation as the final locus of authority under Christ.
Table of contents
Baptist origins
With access to DNA testing, tracing one’s parentage has become big business in the Western world. The desire to know one’s roots, though, has a much older vintage.
Since Thomas Crosby’s The History of the Baptists (1738–1740), for instance, Baptists have sought time and again to understand where they have come from. Over the years, people have proposed three possible origins for Baptist life:
- Baptists are the only true New Testament believers and their roots go back organically to the apostolic era.
- Baptists are a product of the continental sixteenth-century Anabaptist wing of the Reformation.
- Baptists come out of the renewal movement of Puritanism within the state Church of England in the late-sixteenth century.
Modern historians of the Baptist story favor one of the latter two options since the historical evidence for the first is all but non-existent. As for the latter two options, no doubt links exist between the Puritans and the early English Baptist movement, while we can explain the similarities between the Anabaptists and the Baptists by the fact that they read the same source-book; namely, the New Testament.1
Interested in Christianity’s “family tree”? See our Definitive Guide to Christian Denominations.
Baptist Protestantism
The Puritan origins of the English Baptists, as well as those in Wales and Ireland, also means that the Baptist tradition is a stream within Protestantism.
The solas of the Reformation
As such, the nascent Baptist movement inherited the classic distinctives (often presented as five solas) of the Reformation:
- justification by faith alone;
- grace alone as the cause of our salvation;
- Christ alone, not the saints or Mary, as the sole mediator between God and man;
- and sola scriptura as the authoritative guide to the Christian life.
Thus, for example, William Kiffen (1616–1701), one of the leading figures in the Baptist community from the 1640s onwards, wrote a foreword for the third edition of Baptism Discovered Plainly & Faithfully, According to the Word of God by his fellow Baptist John Norcott (d. 1676). Kiffen noted that Norcott was a man who
steered his whole course by the compass of the Word, making Scripture-precept, or example, his constant rule in matters of religion. Other men’s opinions or interpretations were not the standard by which he went. But through the assistance of the Holy Spirit, he laboured to find out what the Lord himself had said in his Word.2
Sacramentology
Given their origins in the matrix of Puritanism, unsurprisingly Baptists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also held to a richer understanding of the Lord’s Supper than their modern counterparts.3 By and large, these early Baptists were confident that, as they came to the Lord’s Table with faith, they had communion with the risen Lord by his Spirit.
As the Baptist hymn writer Edward Trivett (1712–1792) put it: “When Faith a dying Christ doth meet, / We taste his Blood divinely Sweet.”4 Trivett’s older contemporary Anne Dutton (1692–1765), the most-widely published female Baptist in the eighteenth century, similarly argued, “As our Lord is spiritually present in his own ordinance, so he therein and thereby doth actually communicate, or give himself, his body broken, and his blood shed, with all the benefits of his death, to the worthy receivers.”5 As Dutton further stated: in the Lord’s Supper “the King is pleas’d to sit with us, at his Table.”6 The Second London Confession (1677/1688), the confessional standard for the Particular Baptists down to the early nineteenth century, upheld this sacramental meaning of the Lord’s Supper (see 2LBC 30).
Baptist diversity
William Kiffen and Edward Trivett belonged to that stream of Baptist life that has come to be denominated as Particular, i.e., Calvinist Baptist.
In the seventeenth century, though, two other streams emerged: the General (or Arminian) Baptists and the Seventh-Day Baptists, who believed that the gathering for worship should take place on the seventh day of the week, Saturday, the Old Testament Sabbath, and not on Sunday. This last-named group remained quite small in comparison with the other two bodies of Baptists, but they have persisted down to the present day.
The existence of three distinct streams of Baptist life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries anticipated the present scene, where we continue to see diversity among Baptists, from the highly organized Southern Baptist Convention to Independent Fundamental Baptist churches. What Baptists share in common, though, is a commitment to a distinctive ecclesiology.
Baptist distinctives
We can group this distinctive ecclesiology by the following two convictions, along with their corollaries:
- Regenerate membership
- Congregationalism
The nature of the church: regenerate and baptized membership
Central to early Baptist witness was a firm conviction that membership in the local church should be comprised of believers exclusively who have borne witness to their faith in Christ in the waters of baptism.
Believers’ baptism (credobaptism) by immersion
Unlike the sixteenth-century Anabaptists, the English Baptists came to argue that the only proper mode of baptism was immersion. For example, John Norcott, in the above-mentioned defense of believers’ baptism, argued that the use of the Greek verb βαπτίζω (baptizō) and its cognates entail immersion since properly translated the verb means “to plunge, to overwhelm.”7
To explore the biblical typology of water immersion, read
Saved through Baptism: A Typology of Immersion Starting with the Flood by James Hamilton
A second argument was based on the meaning of baptism. Since baptism signifies burial with Christ—Norcott cited Romans 6:4 and Colossians 2:12 as proof—Norcott maintained that the proper mode has to be immersion, since “we do not reckon a man buried, when a little earth is sprinkled on his face; but he is buried when covered.”8 For Norcott, this is the chief meaning of baptism: “if there be not a burial under water to shew Christ’s burial, the great end of the ordinance is lost.”9
Third, Baptists argued that baptism by immersion has been commanded by Christ, and Christ’s servants do not have the freedom to change their Lord’s commands. Since “baptism is dipping or plunging,” sprinkling simply will not “serve, because it is not what God hath appointed. … Is not God wise enough to appoint his own worship how it shall be performed?”10
Separation of church and state (disestablishmentarianism)
This vision of the church, composed solely of believers, clearly ran counter to a major aspect of the mentalité of both seventeenth-century Roman Catholicism and English-speaking Protestantism, in both its Anglican and Puritan varieties; namely, the idea of an ecclesio-political (church-state) establishment, where religious uniformity was maintained by the arm of the state and infant baptism required for both church membership and citizenship.
Baptists, in contrast, were convinced that the church is ultimately a fellowship of those who have personally embraced the salvation freely offered in the gospel of Christ, not an army of conscripted men and women who have no choice in the matter.
Baptists were convinced that the church is ultimately a fellowship of those who have personally embraced the salvation freely offered in the gospel of Christ.
Freedom of conscience
Flowing out from this early Baptist vision of the church was a principle of freedom that would have been considered quite radical in the early seventeenth century: The state has no right to dictate to individuals how they ought to order their spiritual lives. When it comes to religious convictions, men and women are to be free to develop these as they see fit. As the General Baptist pioneer Thomas Helwys (c. 1575–1615) reasoned in a much-cited text from his major work, A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity, that he sent to James I, king of England:
our lord the King is but an earthly King, and he hath no authority as a King, but in earthly causes, and if the King’s people be obedient & 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 betwixt 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.11
Religious liberty
In civil matters, Helwys, along with other early Baptists, was quite willing to obey the laws enacted by the government. But earthly governments, in this case the English monarch, had no God-given right to pass laws that regulated the religious conduct of the subjects under them.12 Here, Helwys was enunciating what would become a key principle of Baptist life: the separation of church and state and the right of religious liberty that should be the possession of all men and women.
Importantly, the liberty for which Helwys was pleading was the freedom to follow Christ wholly. As he stated in the work cited above, his desire and that of his fellow Baptists was for “blessed liberty, to understand the Scriptures with their own understanding, & pray in their public worship with their own spirits.”13
Explore Baptist thought as well as key Baptist figures using Logos’s Factbook.
The organization of the church: congregational polity
A second critical element of the Baptist ecclesiology is its congregationalism.
Congregational autonomy
Baptists believe that each church is an independent, self-governing body under the lordship of Christ. The English Baptist historian B. R. White has pointed out that this jealous concern for congregational autonomy was motivated by a deep desire to be free to obey Christ and not to be bound by the dictates of men and human traditions.14 Undergirding this concern for congregational autonomy also appears to have been a profound concern for God’s freedom to be Lord of his church. Baptists saw human religious traditions that were not sanctioned by God’s Word as an affront to God’s sovereign freedom and a violation of his prerogatives.15
Baptists saw human religious traditions that were not sanctioned by God’s Word as an affront to God’s sovereign freedom and a violation of his prerogatives.
Church offices: elder and deacon
Each church should have two levels of leadership: elders/pastors (these two terms are used interchangeably in the Baptist tradition) and deacons.
In the seventeenth century in Britain, most churches had a plurality of elders. By the early eighteenth century, a movement towards one elder, the pastor, was clearly underway. A plurality of leaders persisted for a longer period of time in America. By the twentieth century, the vast majority of Baptist churches had a single pastor with a deacons’ board. In recent years, though, leadership in many local Baptist churches has begun to revert to the older model of a number of co-elders with a body of deacons.
Congregational government
Although Baptist churches are led by elders (pastors), Baptists have consistently emphasized across the centuries that the final locus of authority in the local church, under Christ, is the congregation.
Since every member of a local church is indwelt by the Spirit, ideally they have the spiritual resources to discern the mind of Christ and the will of God for their church. These early Baptists were confident that as they prayerfully sought the will of God with their brothers and sisters, the Holy Spirit would enable them to discern that will and experience that oneness of heart and mind which had marked the apostolic church in Jerusalem (Acts 4:32).
Baptist associationalism
Balancing this strong affirmation of congregational autonomy, which could easily lead to isolationism, was a commitment to the importance of gathering together with like-minded Baptist churches in local associations. As Article 47 of the First London Confession of Faith—the first major Particular Baptist confession of faith, which was published in 1644 and then again in 1646—declared:
although the particular congregations be distinct and several bodies, every one a compact and knit city in itself; yet are they all to walk by one and the same rule, and by all means convenient to have the counsel and help of one another in all needful affairs of the Church, as members of one body in the common faith under Christ their only head.16
The architects of this confession recognized the autonomy of each local congregation as a biblical given, but so too the fact that each congregation ultimately belongs to only one Body and each shares the same head, the Lord Christ. It was incumbent upon local congregations, therefore, to help one another.
One can discern the sort of inter-congregational help the authors of this confession envisaged by the proof texts they placed alongside this article in both its editions. The first edition cited, among others, 1 Corinthians 16:1, which refers to the collection of money that Paul gathered from congregations in Greece and Asia Minor for the poor in the church at Jerusalem, and Colossians 4:16, in which Paul urges the church at Colossae to share his letter to them with the church at Laodicea, and vice versa. In the 1646 edition, they dropped some proof texts and added others. Among those added were Acts 15:2–3, which deals with the Jerusalem Council, and 2 Corinthians 8:1, 4, which also has to do with the collection of money for the church at Jerusalem. In other words, the authors of this confession envisioned the churches helping one another in areas of financial need as well as giving advice with regard to doctrinal and ethical matters.
Ultimately the churches’ determination to walk according to the “one and the same Rule,” that is, the Scriptures, bound them together.17 As Benjmain Keach (1640–1704), the most significant Particular Baptist theologian at the close of the seventeenth century, once observed, “Live coals separated, soon die,”18 a truth applicable to both individual believers and individual churches.
Baptist catholicity
Finally, it is vital to recognize that Baptists were, above all things, a people committed to those two great truths hammered out in the ancient church: that God has revealed himself in the Holy Scriptures as a triune being—“three coessential, coequal, and coeternal persons in one eternal and undivided Godhead,” as the Norfolk Suffolk Association of Baptist Churches expressed it in 177119—and that the Lord Jesus Christ is both fully God and fully man. One sees this also in the way that the early Baptists were quite prepared to declare their commitment to the great credal statements of the early church, such as the Nicene Creed.20
In other words, while Baptists certainly differ from many other Christian bodies with regard to their ecclesial convictions and practices, when it comes to those first-order truths that all true Christians have held, Baptists are one with this great tradition of Christian belief.
Immerse yourself in Baptist theology with these resources
Ed. Mark Dever, Polity: Biblical Arguments on How to Conduct Church Life
Biblical Foundations for Baptist Churches: A Contemporary Ecclesiology, 2nd ed.
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Baptist Foundations: Church Government for an Anti-Institutional Age
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Sojourners and Strangers: The Doctrine of the Church (Foundations of Evangelical Theology)
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Amidst Us Our Belovèd Stands: Recovering Sacrament in the Baptist Tradition
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Baptists and the Christian Tradition: Toward an Evangelical Baptist Catholicity
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- For a more detailed exploration, see Michael A. G. Haykin, Kiffen, Knollys, and Keach: Rediscovering Our English Baptist Heritage, 2nd ed. (Peterborough, ON: H&E Publishing, 2019); Anthony L. Chute, Nathan A. Finn, and Michael A. G. Haykin, The Baptist Story: From English Sect to Global Movement (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing, 2015).
- William Kiffen, “Foreword,” in John Norcott, Baptism Discovered Plainly & Faithfully, 3rd ed. (London, 1694). On Norcott, see Geoffrey F. Nuttall, “Another Baptist Ejection (1662): The Case of John Norcott,” in Pilgrim Pathways: Essays in Baptist History in Honour of B. R. White, ed. William H. Brackney and Paul S. Fiddes with John H. Y. Briggs (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1999), 185–88.
- For a detailed exploration of early Baptist sacramentology, see Michael A. G. Haykin, Amidst Us Our Belovèd Stands: Recovering Sacrament in the Baptist Tradition (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2022).
- Edward Trivett, Hymns and Spiritual Songs in Two Books, 2nd ed. (Norwich: R. Beatniffe, 1772), 349, II.XXXIX.3.
- Anne Dutton, Thoughts on the Lord’s Supper, Relating to the Nature, Subjects, and right Partaking of this Solemn Ordinance (London, 1748), 3–4.
- Dutton, Thoughts on the Lord’s Supper, 21.
- Norcott, Baptism Discovered, 17. See the similar arguments by Hercules Collins, Believers-Baptism from Heaven, and of Divine Institution: Infants-Baptism from Earth, and Human Invention (London, 1691), 12–14.
- Norcott, Baptism Discovered, 17–18.
- Norcott, Baptism Discovered, 19. Similarly, for Hercules Collins, “they lose one great end of this ordinance, who rantize [i.e., sprinkle] instead of baptize.” Believers-Baptism from Heaven, 15.
- Norcott, Baptism Discovered, 20.
- Thomas Helwys, A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity (1612), 69. The spelling has been modernized. For a modern edition of this work, see A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity, ed. Richard Groves, Classics of Religious Liberty 1 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1998). For some details of Helwys’s life, see W. T. Whitley, “Thomas Helwys of Gray’s Inn and of Broxtowe Hall, Nottingham,” Baptist Quarterly 12 (1934–1935): 241–55.
- See H. Leon McBeth, English Religious Literature on Religious Liberty to 1689 (New York: Arno Press, 1980), 29–38.
- Helwys, Mystery of Iniquity, 56–57. The spelling has been modernized. Baptist adherence to religious liberty continues down to this day, as expressed in Baptist denominational statements of faith like “Religious Liberty” in Converge’s (formerly the Baptist General Conference) “Statement of Faith,” Accessed August 29, 2024. https://www.converge.org/docs/librariesprovider12/document-policies/converge-statement-of-faith.pdf?sfvrsn=ae44f145_0; and “XVII. Religious Liberty,” in the Southern Baptist’s “Baptist Faith & Message 2000—The Baptist Faith and Message.” Accessed August 29, 2024. https://bfm.sbc.net/bfm2000/.
- B. R. White, “The Doctrine of the Church in the Particular Baptist Confession of 1644,” Journal of Theological Studies 19 (1968): 584.
- Philip E. Thompson, “People of the Free God: The Passion of Seventeenth-Century Baptists,” American Baptist Quarterly 15 (1996): 226–31.
- The First London Confession of Faith XLVII, in William L. Lumpkin, Baptist Confessions of Faith, rev. ed. (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1969), 168–69. The spelling and punctuation have been modernized.
- See further White, “Doctrine of the Church,” 583–84.
- Benjamin Keach, The Glory of a True Church, and Its Discipline Display’d (London, 1697), 67.
- The Circular Letter of the Elders and Messengers Of the several Baptist Churches Meeting … in the Counties of Suffolk and Norfolk (London: J. Gurney, 1771), title page.
- For example, see Hercules Collins’s preface in An Orthodox Catechism (London, 1689), A4 verso-A5 recto, and his inclusion of the Creed of Nicaea (325) and the Athanasian Creed in his Orthodox Catechism.
Michael Horton
Mark Brians
Jake Meador
Steven Wedgeworth