Reading different theological perspectives. Historical readings express their authors' perspectives, including Arminian and Reformed or Calvinist traditions. Inclusion does not make an author's position settled CTS doctrine. Read with Scripture and the assigned material. A supported answer from another evangelical perspective should be assessed on its reasoning, not penalized simply for differing from the author. If an automated score rejects such an answer, ask CTS for review.

Master’s Assigned Readings (all five)

M.Div. and Th.M. students read all five assigned selections and take their separate exam after activation. The test page states the current rule; valid earlier completions remain valid.

Optional Honors (choose three)

Honors is optional on every track. Certificate and Associate students may read three honors selections without a required-reading exam. Honors does not replace either master’s exam.

The Master's textbook test: read A History of the Baptists (selections) — Thomas Armitage, then take its test: twenty fill-in-the-blank questions, drawn from forty; eighteen right passes. Each answer is marked right or wrong at once. Correct answers and explanations are available after the attempt passes. It is separate from the reading test on the five digests below: passing one does not pass the other. On the M.Div. and Th.M. tracks both tests are being introduced; each test's page says whether it is in force yet. Until then any student may take them, and a pass is kept in your record.

The Master's reading test: separate from the honors invitation below. Honors asks you to read any three of these digests; the Master's test covers all five. It has twenty fill-in-the-blank questions, four from each reading, drawn from forty; eighteen right passes. Each answer is marked right or wrong at once; correct answers and explanations are available after the attempt passes. You may try again after a short wait. The test is being introduced: its page says whether it is in force yet. Until then any student may take it, and a pass is kept in your record.

Honors option: Complete any three of the five readings below. These readings supplement the course and do not replace its units or examinations.

On this site: Each of the five readings is a Chapala Theological Seminary digest, written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French here on the site — every one opens directly from this page, with nothing to download. Each card names the work its digest is made from.

Selected: 0 of 3

Reading 1 · Visible Succession

A Spring in the Sea

A CTS digest of Thomas Armitage, A History of the Baptists (1887), Introductory Chapter, “Have We a Visible Succession of Baptist Churches down from the Apostles?”

Armitage, a New York Baptist pastor, asks whether true churches must trace an unbroken visible line to the apostles. Like a fresh spring rising in the sea off Cuba, he answers, purity can flow without visible succession. This digest sets his view beside the Landmark succession view and the English Separatist evidence of 1609, 1612 and 1644, with charity toward both.

CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here

The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

A Spring in the Sea: Armitage on Visible Succession

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — how a nineteenth-century Baptist pastor answered the question “Can Baptist churches trace an unbroken line back to the apostles?”, and why the question still matters in our churches

A CTS digest of Thomas Armitage, A History of the Baptists (1887), Introductory Chapter, “Have We a Visible Succession of Baptist Churches down from the Apostles?” The original is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it, in modern spelling.

A History of the Baptists, Introductory Chapter
Primary source
1887
Thomas Armitage

A word before you read. This course is written from inside the Baptist family, and it honors every branch of that family. Some of our students come from Missionary Baptist and Landmark churches that teach an unbroken succession of true churches from the time of Christ. Others were taught that Baptists began among English Separatists in the early 1600s. Armitage, a Baptist pastor, takes a third road between them. Read him carefully and charitably, and test every claim, including his and ours, by Scripture and by the evidence.

1.The Pastor Who Wrote the History

Thomas Armitage was born in Pontefract, Yorkshire, England, in 1819. He began as a Methodist preacher, crossed to the United States in 1838, and in 1848 became a Baptist by conviction, after long study of baptism in the New Testament. That same year he became pastor of the church in New York that grew into the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church, and he served it for about forty years. He helped to found the American Bible Union in 1850, which worked for a faithful English translation of the Scriptures. When his large history appeared in 1887, he was one of the best-known Baptist preachers in America. He died in 1896. Armitage wrote as a pastor, not as a university professor. He loved his people, he wrote warmly and sometimes angrily, and he wanted Baptists to know that their convictions were not new inventions but the recovery of New Testament truth. That aim shapes this opening chapter.

2.A Spring of Fresh Water in the Open Sea

Armitage opens with a picture that will interest our Cuban students. Off the southern coast of Cuba, in the Bay of Jagua (he spells it “Xagua”), a spring of fresh water rises from the sea floor and pushes aside the salt water around it, so that sailors could draw drinking water in the middle of the ocean. Elsewhere, he notes, fresh springs flow along the bottom of the sea and never reach the surface at all. From this he draws his thesis. There may be a visible flow without purity, and “there may be continuous purity without a flow of visible succession.” The life of Christ’s church, he argues, does not depend on a line of churches we can trace on a map. It depends on faithfulness to the New Testament. A church that stands on apostolic truth today is apostolic, “without relation to any other church past or present.”

3.Why Succession Matters to So Many Baptists

We must first understand the view Armitage questions, and understand it with respect. In the middle of the nineteenth century, James R. Graves of Tennessee, with James M. Pendleton and Amos C. Dayton, led the movement known as Landmarkism. Its name comes from Proverbs 22:28, “Remove not the ancient landmark.” Pendleton’s booklet An Old Landmark Re-set (1854) argued that only churches holding believer’s baptism by immersion and congregational government are true churches. Graves also republished G. H. Orchard’s history of “foreign Baptists,” which traced faithful congregations through groups such as the Novatians, Paulicians, Albigenses and Waldenses. In 1931 J. M. Carroll’s small book The Trail of Blood carried this account to many thousands of churches. Today the American Baptist Association and the Baptist Missionary Association of America, and many Missionary Baptist churches, hold some form of church succession. Their deepest concern is not pride in age. It is faith in Christ’s promise in Matthew 16:18 that “the gates of hell shall not prevail” against His church. If Christ kept His word, they reason, His true churches must have existed in every century. That conviction deserves honor, and every Baptist shares the faith behind it.

4.Armitage’s Four Arguments

Armitage shares the faith but draws a different conclusion. He gives four reasons. First, Christ never made one church the “mother” of another as a condition of being valid. In the New Testament, believers, and sometimes ordinary Christians who were not apostles, planted new churches with only the gospel in their hands. People are born of God, not of a church. Second, Christ promised that His church would never perish, but He never promised that it would always be visible. Like the woman in Revelation 12, she has often been hidden in the wilderness, and then has come forth again “in the revival of old truths amongst a new people.” Third, Christ never promised to keep any church free from error. To claim an unbroken pure line is to claim a kind of infallibility, which is the very claim Baptists reject in Rome. Fourth, history has been carried forward far more by individual men and women who stood for truth, often alone, than by organized bodies. For all these reasons Armitage says that “pure doctrine, as it is found uncorrupted in the word of God, is the only unbroken line of succession.” He quotes the English Baptist Robert Robinson, who called uninterrupted succession “a specious lure, a snare set by sophistry.” He even quotes Ambrose: those who lack the faith of Peter are not Peter’s successors.

5.What the Evidence Shows

Most historians today, Baptist and non-Baptist, find the clearest historical beginning of the modern Baptist churches among English Separatists, Puritans who gave up hope of reforming the Church of England and formed their own congregations. In 1609, in Amsterdam, the exiled pastor John Smyth and the lawyer Thomas Helwys led their congregation to reject infant baptism and to baptize believers on profession of faith. In 1612 Helwys returned to London and gathered at Spitalfields the first Baptist church on English soil. These were the General Baptists, who held that Christ died for all. A second stream, the Particular Baptists, who held Calvinist views of grace, grew out of the Separatist church of Henry Jacob, John Lathrop and Henry Jessey in London in the 1630s. By 1641 they were practicing baptism by immersion, and in 1644 seven London churches issued the First London Confession, which describes baptism as “dipping or plunging the whole body under water.” When William Whitsitt, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, presented this English evidence in 1896, the outcry was so great that he resigned in 1899. The documents themselves are not in serious dispute. What is debated is what they mean for Baptist identity. Historians also note that many of the medieval groups in the succession lists, such as the Paulicians and Albigenses, held beliefs no Baptist would accept, and that the Waldenses mostly baptized infants. Armitage himself agrees: these groups “held one or more distinctive Baptist principles,” but none was thoroughly Baptist.

6.Three Ways to Tell the Story

Students will meet three main accounts of Baptist beginnings. The successionist view, held by Landmark and many Missionary Baptists, teaches a continuous line of true churches since Christ, sometimes summed up as “Jerusalem, Jordan, John.” The Anabaptist kinship view sees Baptists as close spiritual relatives of the sixteenth-century Anabaptists, who also baptized believers, without claiming a direct line. The English Separatist view dates the organized Baptist movement from 1609 and 1612. Armitage’s own position is a fourth shade: a succession of principles rather than of congregations. He insists that “the antiquity of principles” is “quite another thing from the antiquity of organizations.” In that sense Baptists are as old as the New Testament, even if their present churches are not. Notice that all four views agree on what matters most. The church is built on Christ, it is made up of born-again believers, and its baptism and order must follow Scripture. A Missionary Baptist pastor and a Baptist historian who reads the English records can stand together on that ground.

7.What a Baptist Pastor Takes from It

Armitage asks Baptists to be honest above everything. “The question of veracity,” he writes, is of “vastly more moment in Baptist history than that of antiquity.” He also warns that “no antiquity can sanctify” error “into truth.” A pastor can take three lessons from this chapter. First, our authority is the Bible, not the age of our church. When a Catholic neighbor in Jalisco says, “My church is older,” a Baptist does not need a rival family tree. He needs an open Bible and a congregation that lives what it teaches. Second, we may hold our convictions about succession firmly and still speak kindly of brothers who read the history differently. Armitage disagreed with many Baptist historians, yet he praised their “piety without guile.” Third, Baptist history is the story of ordinary believers who obeyed Christ at great cost. Our churches in Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Nigeria and beyond belong to that story whether or not anyone can trace our line. Armitage closes with this conviction: the right of Baptists to exist comes from their oneness with the truth Christ gave in the first century.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. What did your home church teach you about where Baptists came from, and how has this reading confirmed or challenged it? How would you explain Matthew 16:18 to a member who fears that, without a visible succession, Baptist churches are not true churches? In what ways does your congregation show its “succession” by faithfulness to the New Testament? And how can you speak of other Baptists’ views of history with the same charity you hope they will show you?

Select

Reading 2 · The Reformation and Münster

Peasants, Prophets and Peacemakers

A CTS digest of Thomas Armitage, A History of the Baptists (1887), ch. IV, “The Reformation — Peasants’ War — Mühlhausen and Münster”

Armitage defends the peaceful believers who baptized on confession of faith against blame for the Peasants’ War and the violent kingdom at Münster. The digest tells the story of the Twelve Articles, Müntzer, the Swiss Brethren and the Schleitheim Confession, Münster’s fall and Menno Simons, and weighs Armitage’s fiery counterattack fairly, keeping what holds up and setting aside what does not.

CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here

The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

Peasants, Prophets and Peacemakers: Armitage on Münster

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — how Armitage defended the peaceful baptizing churches of the Reformation from blame for the Peasants’ War and the tragedy of Münster, and how historians judge his defense today

A CTS digest of Thomas Armitage, A History of the Baptists (1887), chapter IV, “The Reformation — Peasants’ War — Mühlhausen and Münster.” The original is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it, in modern spelling.

A History of the Baptists, ch. IV
Primary source
1887
Thomas Armitage

A word before you read. For three hundred years opponents used one word, “Münster,” to frighten people away from Baptists. Armitage wrote this chapter to clear the name of the peaceful believers who baptized on confession of faith. His cause is just, and much of his history has held up. But his tone is hot, and in his counterattack on Luther and Rome he repeats some charges that historians no longer accept. CTS summarizes those charges briefly and does not repeat them. Read for the truth he defends and learn from the way he defends it.

1.A Name Used as a Weapon

In the sixteenth century the word “Anabaptist” meant “re-baptizer.” It was a legal label, and under the old Roman law against rebaptism it could carry a death sentence. Catholic and Protestant rulers alike used it for almost anyone who rejected infant baptism, and sometimes, Armitage notes, for any Protestant they wished to suppress. After 1535 the word was tied forever to the violent kingdom at Münster. When English Baptists appeared a century later, their enemies called them Anabaptists too, and many Baptist confessions, including the London Confession of 1644, opened by rejecting the label as unjust. Armitage’s goal in this chapter is to separate the “honest Baptists,” as he calls the peaceful believers, from the “madmen” of Münster. He uses the older Dutch historians, who called the peaceful brethren “Baptists” and the revolutionaries “Anabaptists.” Modern historians use “Anabaptist” for both, but they agree with his main point: the movement was not one thing, and most of it was peaceful.

2.The Peasants’ War, 1524–1525

Armitage begins with the great rising of the German peasants. He is right that this war was mainly about bread, land and justice, not about baptism. Peasants were bound to their lords’ land, taxed heavily, and forbidden to fish or hunt. In March 1525 their Twelve Articles asked for the right to choose their own pastors, for fair tithes, for an end to serfdom, and for just courts, each demand backed by Scripture. Armitage quotes their plea: “Christ bought and redeemed us by his precious blood, the shepherd as well as the noblest.” The rising spread from the Rhine to Bohemia. Castles and monasteries burned, and the princes crushed the peasants without mercy. Armitage gives a figure near 160,000 dead; modern estimates are often near 100,000. Luther first rebuked the princes, then, when the revolt grew violent, urged them to strike the rebels down. Armitage insists that “it is simply absurd” to call these peasants Anabaptists. They were Catholics and Lutherans, and many of their lords were bishops.

3.Thomas Müntzer

The one religious leader often blamed for the war is Thomas Müntzer, a learned former priest who preached that God would soon destroy the ungodly by the hands of the elect. He led peasants at Mühlhausen and was captured and executed after the defeat at Frankenhausen in May 1525. Armitage says Müntzer was not “in any proper use of the term” an Anabaptist, and that historians had shown he was opposed to the Baptists in the main points. Modern study largely agrees: Müntzer criticized infant baptism but never practiced believer’s baptism. Historians do add one caution. A few later Anabaptist leaders, such as Hans Hut, had been Müntzer’s followers, so his apocalyptic ideas did reach part of the movement. Armitage is also fair enough to say that even Müntzer should not be “blackened from head to foot.”

4.The Peaceful Brethren

The baptizing movement began quietly in Zurich. On 21 January 1525, Conrad Grebel baptized George Blaurock in a home, and Blaurock then baptized others. These Swiss Brethren had been students of the reformer Ulrich Zwingli, but they concluded that the church must be a gathered fellowship of believers. In February 1527, meeting at Schleitheim, they agreed on seven articles, written mainly by the former monk Michael Sattler. The Schleitheim Confession taught believer’s baptism, church discipline, the Lord’s Supper for the baptized, separation from the world, pastors chosen by the church, refusal of the sword, and refusal of oaths. Sattler was burned at Rottenburg that May, and Felix Manz was drowned in Zurich in January 1527. Armitage shows that in Switzerland the brethren supported the peasants morally but “left the sword sheathed for conscience’ sake.” Balthasar Hubmaier at Waldshut is a harder case. Unlike the Swiss Brethren, he believed a Christian could serve as a magistrate, and historians still debate how closely he was tied to the peasant cause. He was burned in Vienna in 1528. His motto, “truth is immortal,” has been loved by Baptists ever since.

5.The Tragedy of Münster, 1534–1535

Münster was a city in northwestern Germany where the Lutheran preacher Bernhard Rothmann had won wide support. In 1534 radical followers of the visionary Melchior Hoffman took control of the city. Under the Dutch baker Jan Matthys, and after his death under the tailor Jan van Leiden (John of Leiden), they expelled those who would not be rebaptized, held all goods in common, and declared a “New Jerusalem.” Jan made himself king and introduced polygamy. The bishop’s army besieged the city, and in June 1535 it fell. The leaders were tortured and executed, and their bodies were hung in iron cages on the tower of St. Lambert’s Church, where the cages still hang. For centuries afterward, any believer who refused infant baptism could be accused of planning another Münster. Most Anabaptists rejected Münster from the start. Menno Simons, a Dutch priest, wrote against its errors, left the Catholic Church in 1536, and gathered the scattered peaceful believers who came to be called Mennonites.

6.Armitage’s Counterattack

In the second half of the chapter Armitage turns to attack. He argues that the Münster leaders learned their violence from teachers who taught that it was a holy duty to burn heretics, and that their errors about marriage were matched by Luther’s secret advice of 1539 allowing Philip of Hesse to take a second wife, and by the corruption of some medieval popes. Some of this is fair. The bigamy advice to Philip is a matter of record, and Armitage draws a real distinction: Münster’s crimes were done in a frenzy, while the state churches put persecution into law “in that icy sublimity” of legislation. But some of his quotations are taken out of context or cannot be confirmed, and his claim that the peaceful Dutch Baptists descended from the medieval Waldenses has not been proven. A Christian historian must not answer slander with slander. The best part of the chapter is the plain evidence he gathers from opponents themselves. Wolfgang Capito of Strasbourg admitted the godliness of the brethren. The church historian Philip Schaff called it “the greatest injustice” to blame Anabaptists as such for Münster.

7.From Anabaptists to Baptists

How are Baptists related to these believers? In 1609 John Smyth’s congregation in Amsterdam met in a bakehouse owned by a Mennonite, and Smyth later sought to join the Waterlander Mennonites. Thomas Helwys refused and led the group that became the first English Baptist church in 1612. So Baptists are not Mennonites, but they are close cousins, sharing believer’s baptism, a church of the regenerate, and liberty of conscience. Today the peaceful Anabaptist family includes Mennonites, Amish and Hutterites, and its largest churches are now in Africa, in Ethiopia and Congo. What does a Baptist pastor take from this chapter? First, guilt by association is a sin against the ninth commandment. Evangelicals in Latin America have often been called a dangerous “sect,” and in parts of southern Mexico families have been driven from their villages for their faith. We should never treat others as we have been treated. Second, Baptists differ among themselves about war and oaths, but the Swiss Brethren remind us that Christ’s kingdom does not advance by the sword. Third, when we defend our people, we must tell the truth even about our opponents.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. Have you or your church ever been judged by the worst examples of a group you were linked with? How did it feel, and how did you answer? Where are you tempted to describe other Christians, or other religions, by their worst members? The Schleitheim brethren chose suffering rather than the sword. What would it look like for your congregation to answer hostility with that same patience? And how can you defend the truth about Baptist history without bitterness toward those who wronged our forebears?

Select

Reading 3 · John Bunyan

The Tinker in the Den

A CTS digest of Thomas Armitage, A History of the Baptists (1887), British Baptists, ch. IV, “John Bunyan”

The tinker of Elstow spent twelve years in Bedford jail for preaching, while his wife pleaded before the judges and his blind daughter brought him food. Armitage tells the story tenderly, then argues like a lawyer from old parish registers that Bunyan never returned to infant baptism. The digest adds the Clarendon Code, Kiffin, Keach and the 1644 and 1689 confessions.

CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here

The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

The Tinker in the Den: Armitage on John Bunyan

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — the life, prison years and lasting witness of John Bunyan, and Armitage’s careful argument that the author of The Pilgrim’s Progress never went back on his convictions about baptism

A CTS digest of Thomas Armitage, A History of the Baptists (1887), British Baptists, chapter IV, “John Bunyan,” to the section “Bunyan’s Relations to the Baptists.” The original is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it, in modern spelling.

A History of the Baptists, British Baptists, ch. IV
Primary source
1887
Thomas Armitage

A word before you read. John Bunyan is loved by Christians of every tradition, and both Baptists and Congregationalists claim him. Armitage writes as a Baptist who wants to show that Bunyan truly stood with the Baptists. The first part of the reading tells Bunyan’s story with great tenderness. The second part is a long, lawyer-like study of old parish registers. Do not lose patience with it. It teaches how a historian weighs evidence, and it shows how much a single entry in a record book can matter.

1.The Tinker of Elstow

Bunyan was born in 1628 at Elstow, near Bedford, the son of a tinker, a man who mended pots and pans. He had only a little schooling. Armitage describes him as a boy with a “warm, light, frolicsome heart,” given to swearing and games, though by his own word never a drunkard. As a teenager he served in Parliament’s army during the English Civil War. After his marriage his young wife brought two Puritan books into the home, and Bunyan began a long and painful struggle for assurance of salvation, which he later described in Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666). Through the counsel of John Gifford, pastor of an independent congregation in Bedford, he found peace in Christ, joined that church in the 1650s, and soon began to preach. Armitage notes that Bunyan’s English, shaped almost entirely by the English Bible, puts him beside Shakespeare and the Bible itself as a guardian of the language.

2.Twelve Years in Bedford Jail

When King Charles II returned to the throne in 1660, he had promised liberty to tender consciences, but Parliament soon passed harsh laws against all worship outside the Church of England. Bunyan was arrested in November 1660 for preaching to a meeting in a farmhouse. Armitage quotes the indictment: he had “devilishly and perniciously abstained from coming to church.” Bunyan refused to promise to stop preaching, and he stayed in the county jail, with short breaks, until 1672. His second wife, Elizabeth, went before the judges in 1661 to plead for him. She told them her husband “dare not leave off preaching so long as he could speak.” When a judge called his teaching the doctrine of the devil, she answered that he “preacheth nothing but the word of God.” Bunyan himself wrote that parting from his family was like “the pulling off my flesh from my bones,” above all from his blind daughter Mary. To feed them he made long tagged laces in his cell. He also preached to fellow prisoners and wrote many books. He was released in 1672 under the King’s Declaration of Indulgence, became pastor of the Bedford church, and preached across England until his death in London in 1688.

3.The Book That Went Round the World

The Pilgrim’s Progress, first published in 1678, tells of Christian, who leaves the City of Destruction with a burden on his back, enters at the Wicket Gate, loses his burden at the cross, and passes through the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair to the Celestial City. Armitage rejoices that, after the Bible, no book had been translated into so many languages. He pictures readers in London streets, in Burma, in Africa, in Jerusalem and in India. Today it is read in Spanish as El progreso del peregrino and in French as Le Voyage du pèlerin, and it has been translated into more than two hundred languages, many of them in Africa. Armitage also notes that the dreaming tinker, once jailed for refusing to attend the parish church, came to be honored among England’s great men in the Houses of Parliament.

4.Baptists in Restoration England

Bunyan’s sufferings belong to a larger story. Between 1661 and 1665 Parliament passed the laws often called the Clarendon Code: the Act of Uniformity of 1662 made the Prayer Book the only lawful form of worship, the Conventicle Act of 1664 punished unlicensed meetings, and the Five Mile Act of 1665 kept dissenting ministers away from towns. Baptists suffered fines, prison and the loss of goods. The Particular Baptist merchant William Kiffin used his wealth to help them, and Benjamin Keach was put in the pillory in 1664 for writing a catechism for children. These Particular Baptists had already published the First London Confession of 1644. In 1677 they quietly prepared a second confession, closely based on the Westminster Confession, and after the Act of Toleration of 1689 they adopted it openly. The Second London Confession of 1689, later adopted in America as the Philadelphia Confession of 1742, is still used by many Baptist churches. Bunyan died in August 1688, only months before the change of rulers that made such toleration possible. Armitage notes he died just as England was about to become a nation “in which Baptists could breathe freely.”

5.Was Bunyan a Baptist?

Bunyan was probably baptized as a believer, by tradition in the River Ouse, and he spoke of himself as going under the name of “Anabaptist.” Yet his church at Bedford received members whether or not they had been baptized as believers. In 1672 and 1673 he debated the London Baptists, including William Kiffin, in books such as Differences in Judgment about Water Baptism No Bar to Communion (1673). Bunyan argued for open communion: faith in Christ, not baptism, is the door to the Lord’s Table. Kiffin and most Particular Baptists held closed communion. Armitage shows that Bunyan still regarded infant baptism as a weakness. When Kiffin accused him of indulging members in “the sin of infant baptism,” Bunyan answered, “We indulge them not,” but bear with “the infirmities of the weak.” Baptists today still discuss this question. Many churches practice closed or close communion, and many follow Bunyan in welcoming all believers to the Table while baptizing only believers.

6.The Case of the Parish Register

Most of this reading is Armitage’s answer to a claim made by Bunyan’s biographer John Brown, minister of the Bedford church. Brown found that Bunyan’s first daughter, Mary, was entered as baptized at Elstow in 1650, and that a Joseph, son of John Bunyan, was christened at St. Cuthbert’s church in Bedford in 1672. Did Bunyan, just out of prison, carry his son to the parish church he had refused for twelve years? Armitage works like a lawyer. He shows that the register of 1654 records only the birth of Bunyan’s daughter Elizabeth. He explains that an Act of Parliament in August 1653 had taken the registers away from the clergy and given them to an elected civil “Parish Register,” who recorded births, not baptisms. So the 1654 entry, he argues, was Bunyan’s quiet protest against infant baptism. He then argues that the Joseph of 1672 was probably Bunyan’s grandson, the son of John Bunyan junior. He points out that the Bedford church, with Bunyan’s support, had just excluded two members for conforming to the Church of England. Modern biographers are divided. Many take the 1672 entry as Bunyan’s own son, perhaps baptized at his wife’s wish, while others accept Armitage’s doubts. The question cannot be settled without new documents. Armitage himself reminds us that “in the absence of documents we are left to conjectural probability.”

7.What a Baptist Pastor Takes from It

Bunyan teaches pastors to keep preaching when the law forbids it, with gentleness and without bitterness. His jailer trusted him so much that he sometimes let him visit his church. He teaches us that a family pays the price of a pastor’s faithfulness, and that we must care for them with tenderness. His debate with Kiffin shows that Baptists can disagree sharply about the Lord’s Table and still honor one another. And Armitage’s study of the registers shows why civil registration of births, marriages and burials mattered so much to dissenters. In many Latin American countries, Baptists and other evangelicals likewise welcomed civil registers and public cemeteries, because they freed them from depending on a state church to prove their children’s birth or to bury their dead. Finally, Armitage models careful use of evidence, even if his conclusions remain uncertain.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. Bunyan said he must “venture all with God,” even though leaving his family went “to the quick.” What has faithfulness to Christ cost you or the leaders you know? How do you care for a pastor’s family in times of pressure? Where do you stand on open and closed communion, and can you explain the other view fairly? And when the evidence about a question in church history is uncertain, how do you hold your conclusion with both conviction and humility?

Select

Reading 4 · Rhode Island

A Shelter for Conscience

A CTS digest of Thomas Armitage, A History of the Baptists (1887), American Baptists, ch. III, “Settlement of Rhode Island”

Banished from Massachusetts in 1635, Roger Williams founded Providence as “a shelter for persons distressed for conscience,” where the majority ruled “only in civil things.” Armitage praises his peacemaking with the Narragansett, his debate with John Cotton and the liberty Rhode Island gave Jews and Catholics. The digest adds the first Baptist church of 1639, John Clarke and a fuller, honest picture.

CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here

The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

A Shelter for Conscience: Armitage on Rhode Island

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — Roger Williams’s exile, the founding of Providence, and the colony that first built a government on full liberty of conscience for Christians, Jews and all others

A CTS digest of Thomas Armitage, A History of the Baptists (1887), American Baptists, chapter III, “Settlement of Rhode Island.” The original is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it, in modern spelling.

A History of the Baptists, American Baptists, ch. III
Primary source
1887
Thomas Armitage

A word before you read. Armitage admires Roger Williams without limit, and much of that admiration is deserved. Williams gave the world its first government founded on soul liberty. But Williams was a Baptist for only a few months, and he was a complicated man. Read Armitage’s praise alongside the fuller picture, and notice how carefully he separates two kinds of liberty: religious freedom, which Rhode Island gave to all, and civil rights such as voting, which it granted more slowly.

1.Banished from Massachusetts

Roger Williams, born in London around 1603, was a Cambridge-educated minister who came to Massachusetts in 1631. He soon troubled its leaders. He taught that the king’s charter could not give away land that belonged to the Native peoples, that magistrates should not punish offenses against the first table of the Ten Commandments, and that the churches should separate completely from the Church of England. In October 1635 the General Court banished him. In January 1636, warned that he would be shipped back to England, he fled south through the snow. Armitage says the people of Salem wept, “for they were much taken with the apprehension of his godliness.” Some writers had said Williams was exiled only for civil offenses. Armitage answers that the government Williams created afterward proves what mattered most to him: liberty of conscience. Today historians agree that his religious and political views were tightly bound together, and both played a part.

2.“What Cheer?” The Founding of Providence

For fourteen weeks Williams wandered in the bitter winter, “without bread or bed,” and was sheltered by the Wampanoag and Narragansett peoples, whose language he had learned. Massasoit, the Wampanoag leader, received him as a brother. When the governor of Plymouth warned him that his first settlement lay inside Plymouth’s boundary, he and a few companions paddled across the river. Narragansett men greeted them with the English words “What cheer?” Near a fresh spring in June 1636, Williams bought land from the Narragansett leaders and named the place Providence, because God had been merciful to him in his distress. He wanted it to be “a shelter for persons distressed for conscience.” The first settlers promised to obey the decisions of the majority “only in civil things.” Those three words mark the birth of a new idea in government. The state would rule bodies, goods and public order, but never the conscience.

3.Williams and the Native Peoples

Armitage tells with admiration how Williams repaid evil with good. In 1636, only months after his exile, he learned that the Pequot were urging the Narragansett to join a war against the English. At the request of Massachusetts, the colony that had banished him, he went alone by canoe through a storm and spent three days among the Pequot envoys, fearing “their bloody knives” at his throat. He broke up the alliance and helped make a league between the English, the Narragansett and the Mohegan. In 1643 he published A Key into the Language of America, a careful study of Narragansett speech and customs that treated the Native peoples as fellow human beings. The fuller story is sadder than Armitage tells it. In the Pequot War of 1637 the English and their allies destroyed a Pequot town, and in King Philip’s War of 1675–1676 Providence was burned and the Narragansett were nearly destroyed. Williams, then an old man, served as a captain of the town’s defense. He was a peacemaker, but he could not stop the tide of colonial violence.

4.The First Baptist Church in America

In March 1639, Williams and about eleven others concluded that their infant baptism was not true baptism. Ezekiel Holliman baptized Williams, and Williams then baptized the rest. So began the First Baptist Church in Providence, the oldest Baptist church in America. Only months later Williams left it. He came to believe that no true church or ministry could exist until God sent new apostles, and he lived the rest of his life as a “Seeker,” still loving Christ and still preaching to the Native peoples. Armitage mentions that Williams moved from the Episcopalians to the Congregationalists, from them to the Baptists, and from them to the Seekers. Meanwhile, at Newport, the physician and pastor John Clarke led a Baptist church that lasted. In 1651 Clarke and Obadiah Holmes were arrested in Massachusetts for holding worship in a private home, and Holmes was publicly whipped in Boston. Clarke told the story in Ill Newes from New-England (1652) and spent twelve years in London working for the colony. In 1663 he obtained a royal charter which declared that no person should be “molested, punished, disquieted, or called in question” for differences of opinion in matters of religion.

5.The Bloody Tenet and the Ship

In London in 1644 Williams published The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience. John Cotton of Boston answered in 1647 with The Bloudy Tenent Washed, and Williams replied in 1652 with The Bloudy Tenent Yet More Bloudy. Cotton said the magistrate could not punish a conscience “rightly informed,” but could punish one that remained “willfully blind” in fundamental matters. Armitage shows that this makes the civil power the judge of truth, which is exactly what Rome had claimed. Williams’s answer is best known from his letter of 1655 to the town of Providence. A commonwealth, he said, is like a ship carrying Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Muslims together. Liberty means that none “be forced to come to the ship’s prayers or worship,” and none be stopped from their own. Yet the captain still commands the ship and punishes those who refuse their duties or mutiny. Liberty of conscience is not lawlessness. The historian George Bancroft called Williams “the first person in modern Christendom” to assert this doctrine in its fullness. That is high praise, but Thomas Helwys had already pleaded for liberty for Jews and Muslims in London in 1612, and Leonard Busher, a Baptist, did the same in 1614, as Armitage himself mentions.

6.Liberty for Jews and Catholics

In 1647 the colony’s first code of laws ended with words Armitage loves to quote: “all men may walk as their consciences persuade them, every one in the name of his God.” Under that law, by tradition, Jewish families organized a congregation at Newport in 1658, when even Holland limited Jewish worship, and in 1763 they dedicated the synagogue now known as the Touro Synagogue, the oldest standing synagogue in the United States. In 1638 Providence even took away the vote of Joshua Verin, who had beaten his wife for attending worship, for “restraining liberty of conscience.” Armitage also defends the colony against two charges. Printed collections of the colony’s laws in the eighteenth century contained a clause keeping Catholics from being freemen, and in 1762 a court refused to naturalize two Jewish merchants, Aaron Lopez and Isaac Elizer. Armitage argues that the Catholic clause was not passed in Williams’s lifetime, and that both cases concerned civil privileges, not religious freedom. He is largely right that the clause was not Williams’s work. Still, an honest reader should admit that later generations in Rhode Island fell short of their founder’s vision.

7.What a Baptist Pastor Takes from It

A Baptist pastor today learns from Rhode Island that soul liberty is for everyone or it is for no one. Williams defended the freedom of people whose faith he believed false, and he did so because he believed the gospel must win hearts by “the sword of the Spirit,” not by the sword of the state. Pastors in Mexico know this lesson well. The Reform laws of the 1850s and 1860s separated church and state and opened the way for evangelical churches, yet evangelicals in some regions still face pressure from their neighbors. Our calling is to defend the rights of others, including Catholics, Jews and those of no faith, as firmly as our own. Williams also reminds us that great Christians are flawed. He changed churches several times and could be stubborn. Yet his kindness, his courage and his peacemaking still shine. Armitage writes that he “gave the same large liberty to all others which he took for himself.”

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. Williams said that in matters of faith the only sword should be the sword of the Spirit. Where are Christians in your country tempted to use law or social pressure to advance the gospel? How would you defend the liberty of a religious group you strongly disagree with? Williams served the colony that banished him. Is there someone who has wronged you whom you could serve? And what can your church learn from Rhode Island about being a community where people with different convictions live in peace?

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Reading 5 · Constitutional Liberty

Free Exercise

A CTS digest of Thomas Armitage, A History of the Baptists (1887), American Baptists, ch. XII, “The American Baptists and Constitutional Liberty”

Jailed preachers in Virginia, Isaac Backus in New England and John Leland beside Madison helped turn “toleration” into the “free exercise” of religion and the First Amendment. Armitage tells the story with patriotic pride; the digest adds an honest word on Richard Furman and slavery, then follows Baptist liberty into mission through the Triennial Convention, Latin America and Africa.

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The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

Free Exercise: Armitage on Baptists and the American Constitution

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — how jailed preachers, patient petitioners and Baptist statesmen helped write religious liberty into the laws of the new United States, and how that liberty became a launching place for world mission

A CTS digest of Thomas Armitage, A History of the Baptists (1887), American Baptists, chapter XII, “The American Baptists and Constitutional Liberty.” The original is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it, in modern spelling.

A History of the Baptists, American Baptists, ch. XII
Primary source
1887
Thomas Armitage

A word before you read. This chapter is Armitage at his most patriotic. He wants American Baptists to know that their fathers suffered and labored for the freedom that all Americans enjoy. He is careful, however, to say that Baptists did not win it alone. Students outside the United States should read it not as national pride but as a case study: how a persecuted minority used petitions, patience and friendship with statesmen to change the law, for the good of everyone.

1.“A Liberty for One Party to Oppress Another”

Armitage opens with a tribute from a Congregationalist, Leonard Bacon, who granted that Baptists had been “always foremost” in defending religious liberty. Until the American Revolution, Baptists had little chance to prove it. In much of New England they were taxed to support the established Congregational churches, and in Virginia they were jailed by the Anglican establishment. When the colonies rose against Britain, Baptists had to decide whether to fight for a freedom that might never include them. Samuel Jones of Pennsylvania put it plainly: it seemed unreasonable to defend liberty “if, after all, it was to be a liberty for one party to oppress another.” Rhode Island, the colony Roger Williams founded, renounced its allegiance to King George III on 4 May 1776, two months before the Declaration of Independence, though it already had a charter so free that it had little to gain. Armitage sees in this the fruit of Williams’s teaching: liberty demanded “as the birthright of all.”

2.Virginia’s Jailed Preachers

In Virginia, the Church of England was established by law. Between 1768 and 1774, dozens of Baptist preachers were jailed for preaching without a license. Some, like John Waller and Lewis Craig at Fredericksburg, preached to crowds through the bars of their cells. Yet in 1776, when Virginia’s convention debated independence, Baptist churches offered their support for military resistance. They also petitioned that they might “worship God in their own way,” support only their own ministers, and be married and buried without paying the clergy of another church. Armitage notes that “the Baptists concealed nothing”: they would give everything for full liberty, but not for less. In June 1776 the Virginia Declaration of Rights included an article on religion first drafted by George Mason. It spoke of “toleration.” The young James Madison saw the danger in that word, because toleration is a favor that the state grants and can take away. His amendment declared instead that “all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion.” In January 1786, after Madison’s leadership and many Baptist petitions, Virginia passed Thomas Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom, and in 1802 the old church lands, the glebes, were sold. Armitage adds that Baptist writers “have never claimed” to have won this alone. Presbyterians and Quakers stood with them.

3.Isaac Backus and New England

In New England the struggle lasted longer. Isaac Backus (1724–1806), converted in the Great Awakening, became a Baptist and served for fifty years as pastor at Middleborough, Massachusetts. He led the grievance committee of the Warren Association, formed in 1767, which collected the stories of Baptists whose cows, tools and lands had been seized for church taxes. In 1773 he published An Appeal to the Public for Religious Liberty, and in 1774 he and James Manning, president of the Baptist college that became Brown University, met the Massachusetts delegates to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia to plead their case. The Massachusetts constitution of 1780 kept religious taxes, though Baptists such as Noah Alden won some relief. When the United States Constitution came before Massachusetts in 1788, Manning and Samuel Stillman of Boston worked hard for it, and it passed by 187 votes to 168. Armitage says Backus shared Patrick Henry’s doubts; the record shows that Backus, a delegate, voted for ratification in the end. Massachusetts did not fully separate church and state until 1833.

4.John Leland, Madison and the First Amendment

John Leland (1754–1841) preached in Virginia from 1776 to 1791 and became a friend of Jefferson and Madison. The Constitution of 1787 said only that no religious test should be required for federal office. In March 1788 the Baptist General Committee of Virginia agreed unanimously that this did not sufficiently secure religious liberty. Leland was nominated to oppose Madison as delegate from Orange County. By the account Armitage repeats, Madison explained his views to Leland, and Leland withdrew in Madison’s favor, though historians debate the details. In 1789 Virginia’s Baptists wrote to President Washington, who promised to help build “effectual barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny.” Madison then led Congress to propose the Bill of Rights. The First Amendment, ratified in 1791, begins: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” In 1791, in The Rights of Conscience Inalienable, Leland wrote that government has no more to do with religious opinions “than it has with the principles of mathematics.” That year he returned to Cheshire, Massachusetts, and in 1802 his congregation sent President Jefferson a huge cheese, the same week Jefferson wrote to the Baptists of Danbury about a “wall of separation” between church and state.

5.Vermont, South Carolina and Richard Furman

Armitage also honors Baptist pastors who served in public life. In Vermont, Aaron Leland was Speaker of the House and lieutenant governor, and Ezra Butler was governor from 1826 to 1828; both were Baptist ministers. When someone in the legislature claimed Christianity would fall without state support, Aaron Leland left the chair to answer that Christ built His church on a rock. In South Carolina the Charleston Association kept a committee working from 1779 for the equality of all religious people before the law. Its leader was Richard Furman (1755–1825), pastor in Charleston for thirty-eight years, a patriot with a price on his head during the Revolution. An honest account must add what Armitage leaves out. Furman owned slaves, and in 1823 he wrote a defense of slavery from Scripture. The same Baptist people who fought for liberty of conscience did not, in the South, extend freedom to the enslaved. In 1995 the Southern Baptist Convention formally repented of its historic defense of slavery. Baptist history calls us to celebrate faithfulness and to confess failure.

6.From Liberty to Mission: The Triennial Convention

Freedom at home soon became mission abroad. In England, William Carey helped form the Baptist Missionary Society in 1792 and sailed for India. In 1812 Adoniram and Ann Judson and Luther Rice, sent to Asia as Congregationalists, became Baptists after studying baptism on the voyage. Rice returned to rally American Baptists. In May 1814, in Philadelphia, delegates formed the General Missionary Convention of the Baptist Denomination, called the Triennial Convention because it met every three years. Richard Furman was its first president. It was the first national body of American Baptists, and the Judsons became its missionaries in Burma. In 1845 the convention divided over whether slaveholders could be appointed as missionaries, and the Southern Baptist Convention was formed in Augusta, Georgia. Black Baptists also carried the gospel. Lott Carey, a former slave from Richmond, sailed for Liberia in 1821 and helped plant the Providence Baptist Church in Monrovia.

7.Baptist Liberty in Latin America and Africa

The principles of this chapter traveled with the missionaries. In Mexico, after Benito Juárez’s Reform laws allowed freedom of worship in 1860, James Hickey and Thomas Westrup organized the first Baptist church in Monterrey in 1864. In Cuba, Alberto J. Díaz led Baptist work in Havana from the 1880s. In Brazil, the First Baptist Church of Salvador, Bahia, was organized in 1882, and the Brazilian Baptist Convention followed in 1907. In Argentina, the Swiss Baptist Pablo Besson worked from 1881 for civil registry, civil marriage and religious liberty. In Nigeria, Thomas Jefferson Bowen began Baptist work among the Yoruba in 1850, and the Nigerian Baptist Convention was formed in 1914. In 1905 Baptists from many nations formed the Baptist World Alliance, which still defends religious freedom for all. A pastor today can take three lessons from this chapter. Work patiently through lawful means. Build friendships with public servants of other faiths. And never seek for our churches a privilege we would deny to others.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. Madison saw that “toleration” is a gift that can be withdrawn, while “free exercise” is a right. What is the difference in your country’s laws, and how does it affect your church? Leland and Backus worked for decades without seeing full success. What long struggle has God given your congregation? Richard Furman fought for liberty yet defended slavery. Where might our own churches today have blind spots about justice? And how can your church use its freedom, as the Triennial Convention did, for the spread of the gospel?

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Further Study: Six Public-Domain Works

These six works are for further study, for the student who wants to go on reading. They are not part of the honors reading above: that stays as it is — the five CTS digests, any three read in full and recorded on your honor. All six are in the public domain; each link opens the work online, and most can also be found in the Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg. Most are in English: the Chrome browser can translate a page (right-click, “Translate to…”; on a phone, the browser menu).

The Whole History · Armitage

1. A History of the Baptists

Thomas Armitage · New York, 1887

Consult the chapters the textbook leaves out, and the bibliography and index. Armitage’s judgments are his own nineteenth-century interpretation; weigh them against modern scholarship.

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An Earlier Historian · Crosby

2. The History of the English Baptists

Thomas Crosby · 1738–1740

Compare Crosby’s eighteenth-century account of the English Baptists with what Armitage says about Britain.

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The American Setting · Haynes

3. The Baptist Denomination

D. C. Haynes · 1857

Read it for the American denominational setting: how Baptists in the United States described their history, doctrine and institutions in the mid-nineteenth century.

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Church Order, Not History · Hiscox

4. The New Directory for Baptist Churches

Edward T. Hiscox · 1894

Use it to tell Baptist church order apart from Armitage’s historical narrative: Hiscox describes how a Baptist church is governed, not how Baptists came to be.

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Confessional Setting · 1644

5. The London Baptist Confession of Faith (1644)

Particular Baptist churches of London · 1644

Read the confession for the doctrinal setting of the English Baptists of Armitage’s narrative, and check which edition the online text follows.

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Confessional Comparison · 1689

6. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689)

Particular Baptists · first printed 1677; adopted 1689

Compare it with the 1644 confession and note what changed in the years between; check which edition the online text follows.

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Honor attestation: By selecting three readings above, you affirm that you have read those three digests in full. The digests are CTS-authored summaries that may include brief excerpts or adaptations of public-domain works.