P.S. not sure what will be coming next on Wednesdays. Kent

Article by              Michael A.G. Haykin         Professor, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

Baptists were birthed in the matrix of Puritanism, that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century movement of reform and renewal. The genesis of Puritanism between the 1560s and the 1580s was deeply intertwined with questions of worship and polity. In fact, Puritanism, in its various ecclesial manifestations, was confident that there was a blueprint for polity and worship in the New Testament. As we will see, these concerns were bequeathed to their Baptist offspring.

‘Apostolic Primitive Purity’

Baptists began their existence in the first half of the seventeenth century — the General (Arminian) Baptists emerging in the 1610s and the Particular (Calvinistic) Baptists appearing some 25 years later — with a passion for going back to the apostolic model that they believed was taught in the Scriptures.

One of the major architects of the Particular Baptist cause, William Kiffen (1616–1701), explained in 1681 why he became a Baptist in the late 1630s/early 1640s:

[I] concluded that the safest way [for me spiritually] was to follow the footsteps of the flock (namely that order laid down by Christ and his Apostles, and practiced by the primitive Christians in their times) which I found to be that after conversion they were baptized, added to the church, and continued in the apostles’ doctrine, fellowship, breaking of bread, and prayer; according to which I thought myself bound to be conformable.1

In other words, Kiffen became a Baptist because he was convinced that believer’s baptism and congregational church governance were indisputably part of the blueprint of New Testament polity.

Ten years later, Hercules Collins (d. 1702), a key Baptist leader in London, made the exact same point in a polemical piece on baptism when he stated that his intent was “to display this sacrament in its Apostolic primitive purity, free from the adulterations of men.”2 In fact, he asserted, it would violate his conscience were he to baptize an infant.3

The Believer’s ‘Great Pattern’

Given the uniqueness of believer’s baptism on the ecclesial scene of Stuart England — of the various church groups, only the Baptists restricted baptism to believers — it is not surprising that they had to defend the biblical legitimacy of their position time and again in this era. One scholar reckons the number of tracts and treatises written on this subject during the seventeenth century to be more than a hundred.4

“In being baptized as believers, Christians are following the example of Christ, their ‘great pattern.’”

One of the most popular of these tracts was John Norcott’s (d. 1676) Baptism Discovered Plainly & Faithfully, According to the Word of God (1672). In the relatively small compass of 56 pages, Norcott’s tract sets forth the standard seventeenth-century Baptist positions on the proper subjects of baptism (believers), the correct mode (immersion), and the meaning of baptism (primarily identification with Christ in his death, burial, and resurrection).5 Among his arguments in favor of believer’s baptism is his emphasis that in being baptized as believers, Christians are following the example of Christ, their “great pattern.”