Baptist History and Denominational Development — Unit 2: Roots: Anabaptists, English Separatists, and the Question of Origins

Key Verse

"And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it." (Matthew 16:18, NKJV)

Learning Objectives

When you finish this unit, you should be able to:

1. Explain why the question of Baptist origins matters and why Baptists disagree about it.

2. Describe the successionist, or "trail of blood," view and give the Baptist reasons for answering it.

3. Describe the Anabaptist movement and name three places where Baptists and Anabaptists agree and differ.

4. Explain the English Separatist movement and why most historians place the origin of Baptists there.

5. Explain how a Baptist can hold the historians' account and still say that Baptist convictions come from the New Testament.

Why the Question of Origins Matters

Every Baptist student sooner or later asks, "Where did we come from?" The answer seems simple, but it is not. Baptist historians have given different answers for almost two hundred years, and honest Baptists still disagree.

The question matters because of two challenges. A Roman Catholic or Orthodox neighbor may say, "Your church began in the 1600s. Ours goes back to the apostles. Where were the Baptists for the first sixteen hundred years?" And a Baptist who is proud of his tradition may want to prove that Baptist churches have always existed. Both challenges deserve a clear answer.

This unit looks at three main accounts of Baptist origins. Each one stresses something real. We then show how a conservative Baptist can receive the facts of history and keep the convictions of faith.

Account One: Baptist Succession

The oldest Baptist answer says that true Baptist churches have existed in an unbroken line from the time of Christ. The line begins with John the Baptist and the churches of the New Testament, and runs through groups that the Roman church persecuted. Some writers call this the "Jerusalem-Jordan" view, because it begins with Christ's work in Jerusalem and John's baptizing at the Jordan.

The idea was taught in the 1800s by writers such as G. H. Orchard, who wrote a history of foreign Baptists in 1838. It became the teaching of Landmarkism, a movement we will study in Unit 7, led by J. R. Graves and supported by J. M. Pendleton. It became widely known in the twentieth century through a booklet by J. M. Carroll called The Trail of Blood (1931). Carroll traced a chain of churches through the centuries, naming groups such as the Montanists, Novatianists, Donatists, Paulicians, Waldensians and others.

The main support for this view is the promise of Christ in the key verse. He said the gates of Hades would not prevail against His church. Successionists reason that if the true church never died, there must always have been churches like Baptist churches. Their view also honors the persecuted believers of earlier centuries, who suffered for the gospel.

The Baptist answer

We respect the faith of those who hold this view, and we honor the suffering of the groups they name. But most Baptist historians, and this course, do not accept it, for four reasons.

First, the promise of Matthew 16:18 is that the church of Christ will not be destroyed. It does not promise that a visible chain of churches with a Baptist name and Baptist beliefs can be traced from one century to the next. The Lord's church lives wherever people truly believe in Him and gather around His Word.

Second, the evidence is not there. The groups on the list lived in different centuries and places, and the links between them are guessed more than proved. Many of the groups held beliefs that Baptists reject. Some of them, for example, claimed new revelations from the Spirit alongside Scripture. Others we know mostly from what their enemies wrote about them, and a historian cannot be sure what they really taught.

Third, the argument places authority in the wrong place. If a Baptist church is true because it can prove its family tree, then the Bible is not the foundation. But Baptists have always said that a church is true because it follows the Scriptures. The people of Berea are praised because they "searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so" (Acts 17:11).

Fourth, honesty matters. To claim a chain we cannot prove gives a gift to our critics. Truth does not need a false defense.

Account Two: Anabaptist Roots

A second account says that Baptists descend from, or are closely related to, the Anabaptists of the sixteenth century.

Who were the Anabaptists?

The Reformation began in 1517. In Zurich, Switzerland, the reformer Ulrich Zwingli led the city away from Roman Catholic practice. Some of his own students, among them Conrad Grebel and Felix Manz, believed that he stopped too soon. They taught that baptism belongs only to those who believe, and that the church should be a gathering of believers, not everyone in the city. In January 1525 in Zurich, they and others baptized one another as believers. This is usually seen as the start of the Anabaptist movement.

The movement was fiercely opposed, by Catholics and Protestants alike. The Zurich authorities made believer's baptism a crime. Felix Manz was drowned in 1527, a cruel use of the very water that stood for his faith. In the same year Michael Sattler was executed. The Schleitheim Confession (1527), associated with Sattler, set out the movement's main teachings, including baptism for believers, a pure church kept by discipline, the Lord's Supper for the baptized, separation from the world, and refusing to swear oaths or to use the sword. In the Netherlands, a former priest named Menno Simons became a leader in the 1530s, and his followers were called Mennonites.

There was also a violent episode. In the German city of Munster in 1534 and 1535, a group calling themselves Anabaptists set up a kingdom by force, and it ended in bloodshed. Most Anabaptists rejected this. But the event damaged their name for generations.

Where Baptists and Anabaptists agree and differ

They agree that baptism is for believers, that the church is made up of the converted, that Scripture is above tradition, and that the government has no right to force conscience.

They differ in important ways. Many Anabaptists taught that Christians should not use force or serve as magistrates, and should not swear oaths. Most Baptists later accepted that a believer may serve in government and may take an oath. Anabaptists often practiced a stricter separation from the world. The early Anabaptists often baptized by pouring water, while Baptists came by the 1640s to insist on immersion. These differences are real, and a student should not say that Baptists and Mennonites are the same people under two names.

The question of direct descent

Some Baptist historians, such as William Estep, have stressed what Baptists owe to the Anabaptists. There is a real link. John Smyth, the first Baptist leader, lived among Dutch Mennonites in Amsterdam, and they influenced him (Unit 3). But the historians' broad agreement is that the first Baptists did not simply come from the Anabaptists. Baptists arose in England, in a different setting, and they developed their own teachings, including their views on salvation and the Lord's Supper. Most scholars therefore speak of a spiritual kinship and some influence, and not of a direct line.

Account Three: English Separatist Origins

The third account is the most widely held among historians, including Baptist historians such as H. Leon McBeth, Bill Leonard and David Bebbington. It says that the first Baptists came out of the English Separatist movement, itself a branch of English Puritanism.

The English Reformation

England broke with the pope under King Henry VIII in the 1530s. Under Queen Elizabeth the church was settled again, and the Act of Uniformity of 1559 required everyone to use the same prayer book. Many believers thought the English church was still not fully reformed. They wanted preaching, simpler worship, and church life based on the Bible. These people were called Puritans.

Most Puritans stayed in the Church of England and hoped to reform it from within. Some decided that they could not. These were the Separatists. They taught that a true church is a gathering of believers who covenant with one another, that Christ is the only Head, and that the state should not rule the church. Robert Browne was an early Separatist leader, and his followers were called Brownists. Henry Barrow and John Greenwood were executed in 1593 for their Separatist writings and activities. The Separatists suffered fines, prison and exile.

From Separatist to Baptist

Separatist churches in the early 1600s, such as the one at Gainsborough that John Smyth led, held to a covenant church, congregational government and freedom from state control. At that point they had not yet taken up believer's baptism. Within a few years some of them did. When they studied the New Testament carefully and applied the principle that the church must be made of believers, they concluded that infants should not be baptized. This is why historians say that the first Baptists were Separatists who went one step further.

Another feature supports this view. The earliest Baptist churches in England, both General and Particular, were Congregational in government, as the Separatists had been. The step from Separatism to Baptist convictions was a short one, and historians can follow it in surviving records.

The historians' objection

Some say that this account makes Baptists a human invention of the seventeenth century. If Baptists came from a Puritan quarrel in England, why should we claim that they hold the truth of the New Testament?

How a Baptist Can Hold Both History and Faith

The Baptist answer is clear. A church's origin in time is one thing, and the source of its authority is another. Baptists never claimed that their authority comes from a pedigree. We claim that our convictions come from the New Testament, which is older than every church tradition, including Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions. When the Separatists and the first Baptists studied the Bible, they did not invent a new church. They recovered the pattern of the church that the apostles had planted.

Consider the Reformation itself. Luther and Calvin did not claim a chain of Protestant churches back to the apostles. They claimed to return to Scripture. In the same way, Baptists say that the way to the apostolic church is through the apostolic book.

This also answers the Catholic and Orthodox neighbor. The question is not, "Where was your denomination in the year 800?" The question is, "Where does the Bible teach what you teach?" The church of Christ has existed wherever believers have followed Him, even where they had no Baptist name. A new label does not make a new faith.

Finally, the Lord's promise in Matthew 16:18 is kept without a visible chain. He builds His church, and He has never stopped. Some of the persecuted groups of earlier centuries may well have had true believers among them. We honor them as brothers and sisters in Christ without claiming them as a Baptist line.

Many historians today combine the second and third accounts. They say that Baptists arose among English Separatists, with real contact with Dutch Anabaptists, and that all of this was a recovery of New Testament teaching under the hand of God. This is the view of this course.

Pastoral Application

Pastor Samuel preaches in a growing church. A man from a visiting church tells him, "I read a booklet that says Baptists go all the way back to John the Baptist, and any Baptist who denies it has lost his faith." A deacon in Samuel's church, who loves that booklet, agrees.

Samuel does not attack the deacon or the book. First, he thanks him for his love of Baptist history and his zeal. Second, he gently asks, "What is the evidence for each link? What do these groups believe?" He opens Acts 17:11 and says, "Let us do as the Bereans did." Third, he explains the Separatist origin as most historians describe it, and says that Baptist authority is the Bible, not the age of our name. Fourth, he affirms what both views share: that Christ is building His church, that earlier believers suffered for the gospel, and that we are grateful to them. He invites the deacon to study the question with him in the coming weeks. He wants the church to hold its convictions with truth and love.

Summary

Baptists disagree about their origins. The successionist view, taught in The Trail of Blood, says Baptist churches have existed in an unbroken line since Christ. It rests on Matthew 16:18, but it lacks evidence, and it places authority in a pedigree and not in Scripture. The Anabaptist view notes the Zurich baptisms of 1525, the Schleitheim Confession and Menno Simons. Baptists share real convictions with the Anabaptists, but they differ on issues such as government and oaths, and the first Baptists did not simply descend from them. The Separatist view, held by most historians, traces the first Baptists to English Separatists, who came out of Puritanism after the Act of Uniformity of 1559. A conservative Baptist can accept this account because the authority of Baptist teaching is the New Testament and not a human chain of churches. Baptists are a recovery, not an invention.

Further Reading

• H. Leon McBeth, The Baptist Heritage (1987).

• Bill J. Leonard, Baptist Ways: A History (2003).

• David W. Bebbington, Baptists Through the Centuries (2010).

• Chute, Finn and Haykin, The Baptist Story (2015).

• J. M. Carroll, The Trail of Blood (1931), the best-known successionist booklet.

• The Schleitheim Confession (1527), a primary Anabaptist source.

• J. M. Pendleton, Church Manual (1867).

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