The very
main thing that makes Baptists different from the rest of the
Christian followings is the way they baptise people. Not just anyone
and not just a quick dab of holy water either. This is REAL baptism -
total immersion and the thing that makes it work for them is that
those that go in for the full water treatment are actually supposed
know what they are doing. Conscious acceptance is the way they see it
and voluntarily jumping into a freezing river is the way they join.
The roots of The Baptists go back to the time of King Henry VIII and
Queen Elizabeth 1st in the late 1500's. Which was a time when England
was divided between the Catholics and the Don't-Knows. The Catholics
on the one hand were led by Henry VIII, he of the many wives. The Don't-Knows
on the other were also led by Henry VIII. The reason was that good
King Henry, due to his well publicised marriage difficulties, decided
he had had enough of being told who he could and could not marry by
some chap in far away Rome, even if this chap did call himself The
Pope. So now, royally upset, Henry decided that it was high time to
put an end to pope power and start a little reforming. Henry started
the Reformation, the Catholics were on their way out, the Protestants
were on their way in and just when everything was looking good for
Henry, he died. It was then left to his children, son Edward and
daughter Elizabeth to finish the job. Which they did.
In
Speyer, a small town in Germany, in 1529, the reformers had their Big
Day. They may have been small in numbers but they were big in the
protesting department and it was a short step in the mixture of
languages of the day to get from the 'protesters' to Protestantism.
Even the Baptists of the sixteen hundreds cannot claim any
originality, they only had to look back a few thousand years to find
the best known Baptist was a man with the rather ordinary name of
John. This particular John was a keen self-employed baptiser and had
been working on the banks of the River Jordan for many a long year
without much recognition or time off. But one day in AD 30 he had his
big break in the baptising business when much to his surprise the
next in line for a ducking was none other than Jesus Christ himself -
and lucky John could not have had a better client than The Son Of God
himself. Sadly in those days reporting and record keeping were still
in their infancy and although John went on to become an Apostle and
the future popularity of Jesus was already divinely assured, the idea
of baptism stayed firmly down by the riverside and no one else really
took up the idea.
But busy
John was not only a baptiser and a preacher of repentance, he was
also an outspoken critic of illicit marriages. He could not resist
pointing out to anyone that listened that it was wrong to divorce you
wife and then marry your own niece, as the local governor of that
part of the world had just done. Now all this would have gone
unnoticed if it were not for the names of the main players. The
governor was one of the Herods. The niece was Herodias and her
daughter was Solome. The sad moral of the story is that the poor guys
get poorer and the rich guys get handed every thing on a plate. In
this case the head of John the Baptist.
Things
remained fairly quiet for the next fifteen hundred years or so, but
the idea of throwing people into the river was just too good to let
go. So back to the Reformation, King Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth I
and Mr John Smythe. J. Smythe was a protestant looking to make an
impression on the faithful and get his name into the history books
and it was 1609 in the then small town of Amsterdam, Holland John
Smythe had his Good Idea. He formed his own church and as a novel
initiation ceremony, first completely immersed himself, then an
increasingly number of consenting adults, in large amounts of cold
water and simply told them they were baptised. Although he is
credited with being the father of Baptism his hope of the everlasting
recognition thwarted by his own name. With John-the-Baptist already a
household name, Smythe-the-Baptist never had a chance. He was however
not the only one with reforming ideas and two other men with ideas of
their own were about to make their respective marks: Jacobus Arminius
and John Calvin. Whether or not John Calvin was sitting in on the
meeting in Speyer is not known but as soon as it was safe to call
yourself a Protestant he wasted no time in putting pen to parchment.
Monsignor Calvin was French, bright, literate and increasingly
influential and he wrote himself into the history books by creating a
new form of Christian teaching. With one eye on immortality coupled
with the usual lack of modesty he called it Calvinism. He had an
obsessive desire to get all his ideas down on paper and spent many
happy hours locked away in a small room with quill and ink and when
he eventually published The Institutes in 1536 John Calvin became an
instant best seller. Calvin's idea was that God had sorted everything
out a long time ago (predestination) and all that was left was to
live the good life. He did not mean the Good Life, as some people
will try and interpret the meaning, he meant a good life. Man, he
said, had no free will and could only achieve salvation by rigidly
following the Scriptures. According to John (Calvin) there were those
(the few) who were going to heaven and there were those (the
majority) that were definitely not.
Although
this hard line approach appealed to the newly emerging Baptists thing
got a bit confusing in the naming department. The Baptists called the
Calvinists, Particular Baptists and the Calvinists, naturally, called
themselves, The Calvinists.
Jacobus
Arminius was a man proud of his name. So proud in fact that when
casting round for a name for his new protestant interpretations of
old ideas, he followed the usual course of calling his faith after
his own name. Arminianism. Jacobus was a Dutchman and whether he did
not like the French in general or just well connected French
Reformists in particular, he had no time for John and his Calvinists.
He preferred to believe that man had at least some free will and
choice over his destiny, and just by doing what he did, proved it.
Some of the Baptists liked what they saw and called the Arminianism
followers General Baptists. The Arminians, naturally, called
themselves The Arminians. John Calvin died in 1564 but he certainly
made a big impression on the reformers. A good part of Scotland took
up Presbyterianism as an almost direct result of Calvinism.
Congregationalism, from the same roots, became a big hit in North
America and writings of J. Calvin can be found in many a Baptist
library. Jacobus Arminius was forty nine when he died in 1609 and
whether he knew it or not, his main mistake was that he tried to
adapt an existing faith without giving anyone anything new to believe
in. The Arminians did not last very long. The Dutch struck them off
the approved list as early as 1618, just eighteen years after the
death of Jacobus. Those that were left got into the Unitarianism team
and are these days - hard to find.
The First
Baptist Church in America was founded in Rhode Island in the aptly
named town of Providence in 1639 by a 32 year old Englishman, Roger
Williams. Roger came out from England on a one-way ticket. He settled
in Boston but was soon thrown out of the town by the ruling
church-based government for loudly criticising all church-based
governments. Taking what was to become Interstate Highway 95 he left
town, turned south-west, continued on for about eighty kilometres and
found Rhode Island and founded The First Baptist Church.. Which kept
him out of any other sort of trouble for the following three years.
In 1891
The Baptists realised that they had to get their combined act
together and put on a united front to the world. What they were
(rightly) concerned with was the difference between the Generals and
the Particulars. The Particulars still believed that salvation was
only for the particular few while the Generals had what can only be
described as a more general outlook. This, they all decided, had to
be unified and after a decisive poll in 1891 The Generals came out as
the winners and after what must have been a very short meeting the
sub-committee-in-charge-of-names decided on the somewhat predictable
title of The Baptist Union. The Baptists have survived and even
prospered through the revivals and continue to make the most of the
liberal-alternative attitudes of the modern world. They are liberal
enough in an almost endless verity of trivia with their ideological
differences being emphasised as the real alternative to all the other
real alternatives. The fact that these alternatives are so hard to
define is undoubtedly one of their main philosophical strengths.
Anabaptists
was a name given to the Baptists who, in the days even before the
Reformation, realised that babies were not really in the position to
make an informed choice about baptism and that real baptism should
only be available for consenting adults. They were very happy with
the idea of the church being separated from the state but a lot less
happy with the promise of persecution and extermination by both the
Catholic and Protestant departments of the merciful Christian faith
around the middle of the 1500's.