ABSTRACT: English and American Congregationalists like John Cotton, John Owen, and Jonathan Edwards arrived at considerably Baptist conclusions concerning the regenerate nature of the church and its distinction from the state. As a result of in addition they believed in toddler baptism and state-sponsored faith, nonetheless, they’d a dilemma. The steep decline in Congregationalism because the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries speaks loudly to their incapacity to realize their imaginative and prescient of an infant-baptized, state-wedded, congregationalist, visibly regenerate church, suggesting that the Congregationalist Approach was one thing of a midway place in church historical past between the Anglican and Presbyterian polity of the Outdated World and the Baptists who would come to dominate the New. Baptists actually noticed themselves because the religious descendants of those Puritan theologians, principally as a result of Congregationalist arguments for the purity of the church had been so very comparable in logic to these of their Baptist successors.
As Puritan John Cotton (1585–1652) journeyed throughout the Atlantic towards Boston in 1633, he was headed away from the corruptions of the Church of England, not the Church itself. Not like Plymouth, which had been established in 1620, Massachusetts Bay, settled ten years later, was not a separatist colony. In reality, Cotton was much more leery of separatists who broke away from the state church than he was of bishops who imitated the “popery” of Catholicism. As a Puritan, Cotton believed in “purifying” the Church of England, not leaving it altogether.
Nonetheless, Cotton was a selected type of Puritan:1 he was a Congregationalist, a time period Cotton himself invented just a few years after arriving in Boston. Alongside along with his pal Thomas Hooker, who was additionally on board the Griffin in 1633, Cotton believed that solely autonomous, particular person congregations had been actual church buildings. No greater ecclesiastical energy may train authentic authority over the native church. Therefore, there was no such factor because the collective Church of England.2 Headed westward, Cotton was additionally drifting in a considerably Baptist course.
In some ways, on an English ship certain for America, Cotton was a person crusing between two theological worlds. Whereas nonetheless holding fellowship with the parish congregations within the Church of England, Cotton didn’t acknowledge the standard authority of the Church itself. On the one hand, to Archbishop William Laud in London, Cotton reeked of nonconformity.3 However, within the eyes of Roger Williams in Massachusetts, Cotton was a bedfellow with the antichrist.
Just like the Reformers earlier than them, Congregationalists had been a mirrored image of the very Church they sought to reform. In consequence, particularly for these in America, Congregationalists regularly walked a type of center highway between the extra conservative, high-church sensibilities of Anglicanism and the extra localized, democratic beliefs of English spiritual dissent.4 In time, this center highway got here to be known as a “midway covenant.”
John Cotton and ‘The Puritan Dilemma’
John Cotton’s beliefs in regards to the nature of the church had been put to the check earlier than he ever set foot within the New World. Whereas in passage to Boston, his spouse Sarah gave beginning to a son named Seaborn. Nonetheless, since Cotton believed that the authority to manage sacraments was conferred by explicit congregations and never by a nationwide church, he couldn’t by conscience baptize his toddler son. He was, in impact, a Congregationalist with out a congregation. So, relatively than retroactively acknowledging the validity of the baptism as soon as he had been appointed minister of the First Church of Boston, Cotton selected not to baptize Seaborn till he was obtained into fellowship. Solely an area church may admit members and set up ministers as a result of this authority had been given solely to God’s elect.
Earlier than leaving for America, Cotton had begun to view the church as a regenerate physique. But as a substitute of withdrawing from his native parish church in England, Cotton had gathered routinely with a extra tight-knit circle of believers who had been certified to obtain the sacrament and who wished to keep away from the extra offensive ceremonies of the Church of England. As one historian has famous, “They grew to become, in impact, a congregation throughout the congregation.”5 Inside the accepted bounds of his seventeenth-century English context, Cotton was convening a believer’s church.
As Cotton embraced Congregationalism, his doctrine of the church exhibited a type of Baptistic logic. The church was to not be “commingled . . . with infamous depraved ones: the Church could also be Christs love, yeah, and a aromatic and pure flower in his sight and nostrils, and but reside amongst bryars and thornes.”6 Whereas this pursuit of holiness within the church was certainly not unprecedented, Cotton offered extra systematic kind to views that had been comparatively novel for his or her time and place. Though he believed himself to be an energetic member of the Church of England with some obligation to it, Cotton additionally envisioned a (1) domestically centered, (2) believer-oriented, (3) congregationally ruled, (4) infant-baptized (5) state-tied church.
The discordance between the primary three parts of Cotton’s imaginative and prescient and the final two show what historian Allen Guelzo and others have known as “The Puritan dilemma” — “wanting a purified church, disciplined to incorporate solely the elect, which manages to be on the identical time a church-in-society that embraces and directs the lifetime of all members of a group.”7 In a way, Congregationalists wished to have their ecclesiological cake and eat it too. Whereas pursuing the best of a Christian commonwealth the place all residents had been made to be virtuous, Congregationalists (or “Independents,” as they had been known as by their opponents) additionally believed that every church ought to be “explicit,” based on a covenant formally entered into by its “godly” members, and that it ought to be composed solely of “seen saints.” When the near-apostate Church of England checked out New England’s Congregationalist church buildings, they had been to see genuine believers, not nominal Christians.
The Puritan “errand” to America was predicated not a lot upon geographical as religious and ethical separateness — that their righteous sojourning within the wilderness can be a visual instance to their wayward brothers and sisters again house. As Governor John Winthrop boasted in 1630, Massachusetts Bay was to be a “Metropolis on a Hill” (Matthew 5:14).
Evidenced in former Congregationalist Roger Williams, the founding father of the primary Baptist church in America (established in 1638), believer’s baptism appeared to many to be the logical conclusion of a believer’s church.8 When the primary president of Harvard, Henry Dunster, refused to baptize his toddler son at Cambridge Church in 1653, his primary argument was unmistakably Baptist in logic: Soli visibiliter fideles sunt baptizendi (“Solely seen believers ought to be baptized”).9 Nearly from the start of the American experiment, Congregationalism carried inside it the seeds of a Baptist awakening.
Isaac Backus, Separate Baptist
With this theological DNA within the Congregationalist doctrine of the church, it’s little surprise that their New Mild descendants a century later throughout the Nice Awakening grew to become often called “Separates.” Just like John Cotton, who longed for a purified Church of England, these radical evangelicals longed for “separate” congregations that practiced pure and undefiled faith inside the Congregationalist church. And this impulse to purify solely continued till it inevitably took Baptist kind. A technology later, contending for a extra devoted, godly congregation distinct from the moribund state church, Isaac Backus (1724–1806) embodied the Baptistic evolution of Congregationalism: he was a Congregationalist-turned-Separate-turned-Separate Baptist.
To help his views, Backus invoked his Congregationalist forbears: “For the reason that coming of Christ is solely congregational, due to this fact neither nationwide, provincial nor classical.” Traditionally talking, it was a brief bounce from congregational polity to believer’s baptism. Quoting the Cambridge Platform of 1648, which codified Congregational polity within the colonies in response to the Presbyterianism of Westminster Meeting (1643–1652), Backus declared, “The matter of a visual church are saints by calling.”10 To a lesser diploma, even Backus carried in his pondering the identical church-state tensions that vexed his Congregationalist ancestors. Whereas denouncing the thought of a state church in Massachusetts, Backus insisted that “no man can sit down in our legislature until he solemnly declares, ‘I consider the Christian faith and have a agency persuasion of its reality.’”11
There was all the time a little bit of the Puritan dilemma within the early American Baptists themselves.12 (One may argue that this dilemma continues as we speak.) However, Backus’s strongest arguments for the church-state distinction and the born-again nature of the church had been drawn not from fellow Baptists however from Congregationalists.
John Owen’s View of the New Covenant
Extremely, when Isaac Backus made his case for the Separate Baptists in A Fish Caught in His Personal Internet (1768), he made no point out of Roger Williams. In reality, there have been extra references to Congregationalists John Cotton, Enhance Mather, and Cotton Mather than there have been to the esteemed Baptist theologian John Gill, a near-contemporary of Backus.13 In spite of everything, what may higher illustrate the set-apart-ness of the church than the theological custom of these dedicated to being “seen saints”?
Within the treatise, Backus quoted from Congregationalist theologian Jonathan Edwards’s Some Ideas Regarding the Current Revival of Faith in New England (1742), Edwards’s farewell sermon in Northampton (1750), and his Freedom of the Will (1754), which Backus termed “unanswerable” in its argumentation.14 Nonetheless, for all of his admiration for “our glorious Edwards,” Backus sought most of his proof texts from an much more broadly regarded Congregationalist luminary: John Owen (1616–1683).15 Drawing from the “discovered and famend creator” over a dozen instances, Backus believed that Owen, the preeminent Congregationalist theologian of his century, laid out essentially the most convincing case for a Baptist church.
In New England, the title of John Owen carried appreciable weight. (Cotton Mather as soon as known as the English divine “our Nice Owen.”16) With the assistance of males like Thomas Goodwin, Owen was the chief creator of the Congregationalist assertion of religion often called the Savoy Declaration (1658), a light-weight revision of the Presbyterian Westminster Confession (1647). Owen was a theological authority on each sides of the Atlantic.17 In accordance with Backus, Owen had traced the corruptions of the Church of England to unbelievers being admitted into its communion, and “the letting go this precept, that individual church buildings must include regenerate individuals, introduced within the nice apostasy of the Christian Church.”
Backus’s level was easy: Would New England repeat the declension of the Church of England? As soon as the church was populated with unbelievers, unbelieving clergymen had been positive to observe. Citing Owen’s A Information to Church-fellowship and Order, Backus restated what Owen had established with none obvious controversy: “On the responsibility of believers, or of the church, which is to decide on, name, and solemnly set aside unto the workplace of the ministry such because the Lord Christ by his Spirit hath made meet for it in accordance unto the rule of his phrase.”18 In different phrases, ministers had been known as to their church buildings by actual Christians, not half-Christians or so-called Christian statesmen.
“Traditionally talking, it was a brief bounce from congregational polity to believer’s baptism.”
At instances, Owen’s theology actually had a Baptist ring to it. In spite of everything, didn’t the Savoy Declaration enable members of “much less pure” church buildings to partake of the sacraments offered they had been “credibly testified to be godly”?19 Though he didn’t subscribe to believer’s baptism, Owen believed that true religion ought to be verified, not assumed. He was not alone on this perception. As early as 1636, to substantiate whether or not somebody was certainly a “seen saint,” Congregationalist church buildings required a “conversion narrative,” a public testimony of how one got here to saving religion in Jesus Christ.20 In some methods, this public declaration of religion earlier than the church was the closest factor the Congregationalists ever needed to believer’s baptism. As historian Sydney Ahlstrom explains, “For the primary time in centuries (if not ever), the conversion expertise was made normative for church membership on a large and complete scale.”21 With such a zealous protection of the religious boundaries of the church, it’s little surprise that most of the descendants of Congregationalists grew to become Baptists.
As a number of historians have famous, Owen’s view of the brand new covenant went a step past most Puritan theologians of his period and was noticeably just like that of Baptists. Non-Baptist students Joel R. Beeke and Mark Jones acknowledge, “Owen affirms that the previous and new covenants are completely different in sort, not diploma, in distinction from most of his Reformed orthodox contemporaries. Each positions fall throughout the broader outlines of Reformed covenant theology, however Owen’s place is actually not the bulk view.”22 In consequence, like Isaac Backus, Baptists as we speak have cited Owen to clarify a biblical theology of credobaptism.23 In his exposition of Hebrews 8:6–13, for instance, Owen writes,
The brand new covenant is made with them alone who effectually and ultimately are made partakers of the grace of it. “That is the covenant that I’ll make with them. . . . I shall be merciful to their unrighteousness,” and so forth. These with whom the previous covenant was made had been all of them precise partakers of the advantages of it; and if they don’t seem to be so with whom the brand new is made, it comes wanting the previous in efficacy, and could also be totally annoyed. Neither does the indefinite proposal of the phrases of the covenant show that the covenant is made with them, or any of them, who enjoys not the advantages of it. Certainly that is the excellence of this covenant, and so it’s right here declared, that it does effectually talk all of the grace and mercy contained in it to all and each one with whom it’s made; with whomsoever it’s made, his sins are pardoned.24
Reflecting upon this excerpt from Owen, Reformed Baptist theologian Pascal Denault concludes, “In studying these traces, one asks oneself on what foundation Owen practiced youngster baptism.” In accordance with Denault, Baptists have “the identical understanding” of the covenants as Owen.25 Owen’s view was Baptistic in its logic due to his emphasis upon the fully new nature of the brand new covenant and never upon its continuity with the previous. Baptists used the identical rationale to argue for a baptism by religion in Christ and never by bloodline or ancestry. With Owen, Baptists of all generations have affirmed that the covenant of grace is “a brand new, actual, absolute covenant, and never a reformation of the dispensation of the previous.”26 To the perennial query of whether or not Baptists are really Reformed, John Owen compelled many to as a substitute ask, “Are the Reformed Baptistic?”
Jonathan Edwards and the ‘Midway Covenant’
However, by the late seventeenth century, the Puritan dilemma had launched a contradiction into the Congregationalist church buildings of New England. Historically, church membership and admittance to the Lord’s Supper was reserved for individuals who had undergone a real conversion expertise, and solely the youngsters of church members had been permitted to be baptized. Nonetheless, over time, as toddler baptism grew to become more and more synonymous with citizenship in a non secular state, membership within the church devolved right into a type of hereditary birthright.
By advantage of being born into the native parish, second- and third-generation Congregationalists anticipated that they need to benefit from the privileges of membership with out being transformed. Baptized people who had by no means been reborn had been ultimately allowed to have their very own kids baptized. The Puritan doctrine of “seen sainthood” was being compromised by the Puritan doctrine of a Christian commonwealth. Though opposed by Enhance Mather and different Puritan leaders, this “Midway Covenant” — or “massive Congregationalism,” because it was first termed — was authorized by New England church buildings in 1662.
In Northampton, Massachusetts, Reverend Solomon Stoddard (1643–1729) subscribed totally to this new Midway Covenant. Not lengthy after assuming the pastorate at Northampton, as his church grew to become populated with extra unconverted members than transformed, Stoddard, the successor of Eleazar Mather (the brother of Enhance Mather), went a step additional in innovating his Lord’s Supper coverage. In accordance with Stoddard, the Desk ought to be open to all members, regenerate and unregenerate, excepting those that lived publicly scandalous lives. By 1700, this follow was set in stone on the church. In brief, pure beginning, relatively than the second beginning, had change into the prerequisite for partaking of the Lord’s Communion. The Supper had been remodeled into a method of conversion. Because the so-called “Pope of the Connecticut Valley,” Stoddard solely prolonged his affect by means of this new coverage, together with among the many unregenerate.
Stoddard’s successor at Northampton was additionally his grandson, Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758). Regardless of the household tie, all through the 1730s and 40s, Edwards grew to despise the Midway Covenant (or “Stoddardeanism”). He believed that churchgoers had begun to confuse legislation and gospel, ignoring the truth that honest religion in Christ ought to be “seen” in an individual’s life.27 After experiencing and decoding the revival of faith in Northampton throughout the Nice Awakening, Edwards was extra satisfied than ever of the facility of a Spirit-indwelt coronary heart to present itself in on a regular basis life. In The Distinguishing Marks of the Work of the Spirit of God (1741), Edwards provides 5 constructive indicators of real revival: (1) it raises folks’s esteem of Jesus Christ because the Son of God and Savior, (2) it results in repentance of corruptions and lust and to righteousness, (3) it exalts one’s view of Scripture, (4) it convinces folks of the truths revealed in Scripture, and (5) it compels folks to really love God and neighbor.28
Not surprisingly, Edwards’s faith of the guts carried over into his doctrine of the church. In December 1748, Edwards lastly instructed one among his parishioners that he should profess Christianity earlier than he may take the Lord’s Supper.29 Provided that Edwards was reforming his grandfather’s long-held follow and that a lot of his kin had been beneficiaries of the Stoddard kingdom, this choice didn’t go over properly. As Edwards confided to his pal John Erskine in 1749, “I dared not proceed within the former approach, which has occasioned nice uneasiness amongst my folks, and has stuffed all of the nation with noise.”30
Edwards articulated his view in A Humble Inquiry (1749): “None must be admitted to the communion and privileges of members of the seen church of Christ in full standing, however reminiscent of are in career and within the eye of the church’s Christian judgment godly or gracious individuals.”31 Edwards’s standing suffered further hurt in an issue that concerned disciplining kids over an inappropriate ebook. Even with that controversy in thoughts, nonetheless, it’s not an excessive amount of to counsel that Edwards misplaced his pastorate in 1750 as a result of he believed that the church was for Christians.
Baptists knew the story of Edwards’s dismissal properly and appeared to embrace him as one among their very own. In his work on Baptist polity, James L. Reynolds, professor of theology at Furman Academy, wrote a century later,
Within the well-known controversy between Pres. Edwards, and Solomon Williams, regarding the half-way covenant, the previous took the broad scriptural floor, that none however reminiscent of gave a reputable proof of their religion in Christ ought to be admitted to the Lord’s Supper. However, as a pedobaptist, he was obliged to confess that those that had been baptized in infancy had been “in some kind members of the Church.” On this they had been each agreed. Right here Williams erected his sturdy battery, and managed it with nice impact. He proved that the place of his opponent, if maintained, would annihilate toddler baptism. Both that ordinance have to be given up, or Edwards should give up. He didn’t select to desert toddler baptism, and was vanquished, not by the reality of his opponent, however by his personal error.
Praising Edwards’s “heavenly spirit,” Reynolds concluded that Edwards merely had not adopted the logical conclusions of his personal elegant theology.32 In his Phrases of Communion (1844), R.B.C. Howell, the pastor of First Baptist Church of Nashville, likewise praised Edwards for opposing “Mr. Stoddard’s system” and thus main his church “to a outstanding revival.”33 From the Northeast to the South to the West, Baptists boasted in Edwards as a type of proto-Baptist who by no means fully unshackled himself from his Congregationalist context. However whereas Edwards had failed to unravel the Puritan dilemma, Baptists had a biblical answer. To take care of a believer’s church, one needed to follow believer’s baptism.
Baptists Premature Born
Though it’s true that Jonathan Edwards ended his profession within the Presbyterian denomination and not considered church buildings as fully autonomous, students Michael J. McClymond and Gerald R. McDermott notice that Edwards “doubtless didn’t regard problems with church governance as having the significance that sure different doctrines did.”34 What mattered much more to Edwards than the precise polity of the church was the regenerate nature of the church. In spite of everything, so vital was the latter that it value him his pulpit of twenty years. As George Marsden explains, Edwards “was keen to surrender his personal and his household’s worldly safety for the reason for defending everlasting souls. He pursued that personally disastrous course as a result of he was satisfied that the logic of his conversionist theology demanded it.”35 Edwards’s logic was unwittingly, but strikingly, Baptistic.
To the query of whether or not Edwards and his seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Congregationalist brethren can be Presbyterians or Baptists in the event that they lived within the twenty-first century, one can solely speculate. Simply because the Congregationalist church produced its justifiable share of Separate Baptists within the eighteenth century, it additionally generated plenty of New College Presbyterians within the nineteenth. However, what’s simple is that, with the autumn of the final Congregationalist state church in 1833, the Puritan dilemma seemed very completely different than it had in 1633. Gone had been the times of the so-called Christian commonwealth, however the superb of a church composed of “seen saints” remained. Because the variety of Congregationalist church buildings declined precipitously within the nineteenth century, a group of individuals grew shortly — a lot of them former Congregationalists who had lengthy rejected state-sponsored governments and who nonetheless believed in a (1) domestically centered, (2) believer-oriented, (3) congregationally ruled church. They had been Baptists. Their answer to the Puritan dilemma was easy and surprisingly acquainted to Congregationalist ears: “Solely seen believers ought to be baptized.”
