What might inspire a family to move across the world for the sake of the gospel? I live with my wife and two children in Cameroon, where we planted a church and established an extension site for Bethlehem College and Seminary. Before leaving the Western world, we consistently returned to Psalm 22:27–28 as the primary motivation for our relocation:

All the ends of the earth shall remember     and turn to the Lord,and all the families of the nations     shall worship before you.For kingship belongs to the Lord,     and he rules over the nations.

We moved to a challenging place because we believe in the God who owns all the kingdoms of the earth, and who has promised that all the families of the nations will worship before him.

Missionaries, church planters, and all who labor among the nations for the sake of the gospel can find great hope in Psalm 22. You might wonder, How can a psalm of lament be a source of hope? We often remember this psalm on Good Friday, the darkest day in history, but this is not just a Good Friday psalm. The concluding verses of Psalm 22 take us beyond the horrors of Calvary to a glorious hope for world missions, especially in our darker seasons: “All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord.”

The Dark Valley

The first part of Psalm 22 captures David’s confusion. By all appearances, God has forsaken him even though he has prayed tirelessly. Despite his circumstances, however, he confesses what is always true of God: “You are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel” (Psalm 22:3). He also confesses that Israel’s history is a history of God’s faithfulness (Psalm 22:4–5). So even though he feels confused about why God would forsake him, he says, “You are he who took me from the womb; you made me trust you at my mother’s breasts” (Psalm 22:9). Trusting his God, David cries for rescue.

“The hardest heart of the highest earthly king is in the hand of the Most High.”

Then David ushers us deeper into his pain. He is surrounded by deadly enemies who gloat over him. They pierce his hands and feet, and God seems to aggravate his woes: “You lay me in the dust of death” (Psalm 22:15). God appears to have joined the camp of his enemies. But even when he feels God’s hand against him, David cries, “Deliver my soul from the sword. . . . Save me from the mouth of the lion” (Psalm 22:20–21).

Jesus took this psalm on his lips in the deepest darkness. Dying under God’s wrath, Jesus cried to God with David’s words. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” His voice echoed the sound of silence. Did God hear David? Did he hear Jesus, the true Song of Israel?

Remember and Return

Just as God raised David from the “dust of death” (Psalm 22:15), God raised Jesus our Savior from the tomb. And just as David was raised so that he could tell of God’s name to his brothers, Jesus was raised to do the same (Hebrews 2:10–12).

Even as God saved David for Israel’s sake, his purposes extended beyond their borders. David says, “All the ends of the earth shall remember and return to the Lord, and all the families of the nations shall worship before you” (Psalm 22:27). What will they remember, and to what or whom will they return? The context of the psalm shows that they will remember that God delivered his servant to his enemies to die an innocent death, that God raised him to lead the congregation of his people in worship, and that the dominion belongs to God alone. They will remember and return to the God who alone is King.

Here we find power for missions. Because kingship belongs to God and he rules over the nations, all the families of the earth will come to him. The tribes among whom you minister the gospel will remember and return. God will draw people to himself for worship. No war, political leader, constitutional amendments, electoral outcome, or regime change can redirect his eternal purpose of reconciling the world to himself. Because he commands the fate of nations, no cultural shift can derail his mission to unite all people in the adoration of his glory.

David groans in the first part of Psalm 22 and glories in the second. The structure of the psalm teaches us that grief, no matter how deep, is temporal; it will give way to glory. After darkness comes light; after pain comes praise. This was true for David and for the new David, Jesus — and it will be true for his body, the church.

Perhaps you are serving on the mission field, and your family is in a season of trial. Do not think that this darkness means God’s words will fail. Do not lose heart. God’s mission cannot fail. Kingship belongs to him. In your darkest days, let the nations see your resurrection hope.

Light for Your Labors

Psalm 22 has significantly shaped my missionary work. Not only did God use the psalm to move our family to the field, but he now uses it to keep us here. In the pains of ministry, God has reminded me repeatedly through Psalm 22 that our darkest moments in ministry are not the end of the story. Just as the sufferings described in the first part of the psalm give way to praise and the promise of global worship, our trials in the mission field can lead to the fulfillment of God’s promise that all nations will worship him.

Swallowed by darkness, the Light of salvation burst forth to bring the nations back to God.

The anguish of the Messiah was for the adoration of the nations.
The death of the Messiah was for the dance of the nations.
The pain of the Messiah was for the praise of the nations.
The ruin of the Messiah was for the rejoicing of the nations.
The suffering of the Messiah was for the salvation of the nations.
The woe of the Messiah was for the worship of the nations.

Because of the darkness of the Messiah’s death, God will establish his reign over all nations, who will all come to him for worship and rejoicing. May we long with Charles Wesley,

Oh, for a thousand tongues to singMy great Redeemer’s praise,The glories of my God and King,The triumphs of his grace.

And may we pray with Wesley and the saints of old,

My gracious Master and my God,Assist me to proclaim,To spread through all the earth abroadThe honors of thy name.

Missions Under God’s Kingship

We pray, we long, we suffer, we endure, we labor, we cast off discouragement, we lay aside sin — we work tirelessly and abundantly because we know that our God rules over the nations. He will see to it that our labor is not in vain. He will cause the nations that oppose and hate him to remember and return.

We labor because we know our God holds the hearts of kings in his hands and directs them like streams of water. The hardest heart of the highest earthly king is in the hand of the Most High, and he directs that heart to do whatever he wants whenever he wants. If God did not rule over the kingdom of men, I would not have hope for life and ministry. But because he does, we can labor in the hope of certain success.

One day, “all the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord.” For King Jesus “rules over the nations.”

Of the multitude of feasts celebrated in the popular culture of medieval Europe — wherein lie some of the key roots of the modern West — only two remain in popular North American culture today: Saint Patrick’s Day (March 17) and Saint Valentine’s Day (February 14). With Saint Patrick, we have two important texts by Patrick himself that reveal the true man. But who was Saint Valentine?

The name was a popular one in the Roman world, for the adjective valens expressed the idea of being vigorous and robust. In fact, we know of about a dozen early Christians who bore this name. Our Saint Valentine was an Italian bishop who was martyred on February 14, 269, after a trial before the Roman emperor Claudius Gothicus (reign 268–270). According to the meager accounts that we have, Valentine’s body was hastily buried, but a few nights later some of his associates retrieved it and returned it to his home town of Terni in central Italy. Other accounts list him as an elder in Rome. One embellishment has him writing a letter before his death and signing it, “your Valentine.”

“Saint Valentine was a martyr — yes, a lover, but one who loved the Lord Jesus to the point of giving his life.”

What seems clear, though, from all that we can determine, is that Saint Valentine was a martyr — yes, a lover, but one who loved the Lord Jesus to the point of giving his life for his commitment to Christ. For Christians to adequately remember Saint Valentine, then, we would do well to consider what it meant to be a martyr in the early church.

Witnesses and Martyrs

Our word martyr is derived from the Greek martys, originally a juridical term that was used of a witness in a court of law. Such a person was one “who has direct knowledge or experience of certain persons, events or circumstances and is therefore in a position to speak out and does so.”1 In the New Testament, the term and its cognates are frequently applied to Christians, who bear witness to Christ, often in real courts of law, when his claims are disputed and their fidelity is tested by persecution.

The transition of this word within the early Christian communities from witness to what the English term martyr” entails serves as an excellent gauge of what was happening to Christians as they bore witness to Christ. In Acts 1:8, Jesus tells the apostles that they are to be his “witnesses” (martyres) in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the end of the earth. At this point, the word does not have the association of death, although in Acts 22:20 we do read of the “blood of Stephen,” the Lord’s “witness” (Greek martyros), being shed. But it is really not until the end of the writing of the New Testament canon that the term martys acquires the association with death.2

At the very close of the apostolic era, the risen Christ in Revelation 2 commends his servant Antipas, his “faithful witness,” who was slain for his faith at Pergamum, “where Satan dwells” (Revelation 2:12–13). Pergamum, it should be noted, was a key center of emperor worship in Asia Minor, and the first town in that area to build a temple to a Roman emperor, Augustus Caesar. It may well have been Antipas’s refusal to confess Caesar as Lord and worship him that led to his martyrdom.3 It has been estimated that by the mid-first century, eighty or so cities in Asia Minor had erected temples devoted to the cult of the emperor.4

The word martys seems thus to have acquired its future meaning first in the Christian communities in Asia Minor, where the violent encounter between church and empire was particularly intense.5 In this regard, it was certainly not fortuitous that Asia Minor was “unusually fond” of the violent entertainment of the gladiatorial shows. There was, in fact, a training school for gladiators at Pergamum. Along with fascination with such violence, there would have been a demand for victims over and above the requisite gladiators. Thus, recourse was had to Christians, among others.6

And so, the word martys became restricted in its usage to a single signification: bearing witness to the person and work of Christ to the point of death. Stephen and Antipas were the first of many such martyrs in the Roman Empire.

Neronian Persecution

One of the most memorable clashes between church and empire was what has come to be called the Neronian persecution. In mid-July 64, a fire began in the heart of Rome that raged out of control for nearly a week and gutted most of the city. After it had been extinguished, it was rumored that the emperor Nero (reign 54–68) himself had started it, for it was common knowledge that Nero wanted to level the capital of the empire in order to rebuild the city in a style in keeping with his conception of his own greatness. Conscious that he had to allay suspicions against him, Nero fixed the blame on the Christians.

The fullest description that we have of this violence against the church is from the Roman historian Tacitus (about 55–117), who describes the execution of these Christians as follows:

To scotch the rumour [that he had started the fire], Nero substituted as culprits, and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians. Christus, from whom they got their name, had been executed by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate when Tiberius was emperor; and the pernicious superstition was checked for a short time, only to break out afresh, not only in Judaea, the home of the plague, but in Rome itself, where all the horrible and shameful things in the world collect and find a home.

First of all, those who confessed were arrested; then, on their information, a huge multitude was convicted, not so much on the ground of incendiarism as for hatred of the human race. Their execution was made a matter of sport: some were sewn up in the skins of wild beasts and savaged to death by dogs; others were fastened to crosses as living torches, to serve as lights when daylight failed. Nero made his gardens available for the show and held games in the Circus, mingling with the crowd or standing in his chariot in charioteer’s uniform. Hence, although the victims were criminals deserving the severest punishment, pity began to be felt for them because it seemed that they were being sacrificed to gratify one man’s lust for cruelty rather than for the public weal.7

A number of Christians — including the apostle Peter, according to an early Christian tradition that seems to be genuine8 — were arrested and executed. Their crime was ostensibly arson. Tacitus seems to doubt the reality of this accusation, though he does believe that Christians are rightly “loathed for their vices.” Tacitus’s text mentions only one vice explicitly: “hatred of the human race.” Why would Christians, who preached a message of divine love and who were commanded to love even their enemies, be accused of such a vice?

Well, if one looks at it through the eyes of Roman paganism, the logic seems irrefutable. It was, after all, the Roman gods who kept the empire secure. But the Christians refused to worship these gods — thus the charge of “atheism” that was sometimes leveled at them.9 Therefore, many of their pagan neighbors reasoned, they cannot love the emperor or the empire’s inhabitants. Christians thus were viewed as fundamentally anti-Roman and so a positive danger to the empire.10

‘Blood of Christians Is Seed’

This attack on the church was a turning-point in the relationship between the church and the Roman state in these early years. It set an important precedent. Christianity was now considered illegal, and over the next 140 years the Roman state had recourse to sporadic persecution of the church. It is noteworthy, though, that no emperor initiated an empire-wide persecution until the beginning of the third century, and that with Septimius Severus (reign 193–211).11 Nonetheless, martyrdom was a reality that believers had to constantly bear in mind during this period of the ancient church.

“Instead of stamping out Christianity, persecution often caused it to flourish.”

But persecution did not always have the effect the Romans hoped for. Instead of stamping out Christianity, persecution often caused it to flourish. As Tertullian (born about 155), the first Christian theologian to write in Latin, put it, “The more you mow us down, the more we grow: the blood of Christians is seed.”12 And as he said on another occasion: “whoever beholds such noble endurance [of the martyrs] will first, as though struck by some kind of uneasiness, be driven to enquire what is the matter in question, and, then, when he knows the truth, immediately follow the same way.”13

Surpassing All Earthly Loves

It was during the Middle Ages that the various stories of Saint Valentine circulated and were embellished, solidifying the remembrance of him as a martyr. But it was a medieval writer, Geoffrey Chaucer (1340s–1400), who explicitly linked romantic love to Saint Valentine in a poem entitled “Parliament of Fowls” that described the gathering of a group of birds on “seynt valentynes day” to choose their mates.

To what degree Chaucer influenced the later link between Saint Valentine’s Day and lovers is not exactly clear, but as early as the fifteenth century lovers were sending each other love notes on Saint Valentine’s Day. Of course, with the rise of the commercial cultures of the West in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this practice was commodified and became an important part of the commercial world we see today. There is nothing inherently wrong with modern commercial traditions, but Saint Valentine’s Day is a good day to also remember that there is a love that surpasses all earthly loves: our love for our great God and our Savior, his dear divine Son, Jesus.

ABSTRACT: Ever since credobaptists began promoting their views in the emerging Reformation, the terms “Baptist” and “Reformed” have lived in tension. On the one hand, Particular Baptists embraced Calvinist soteriology and championed the five solas; on the other hand, Baptists differed from the Reformers in baptismal practice, ecclesiology, and the relationship between church and state. Despite these differences, however, these canonical, covenantal, congregational, Calvinistic Baptists belong to the broad Reformed family of faith — and at their best, they have not only drawn from that tradition but made singular contributions to it.

For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors, leaders, and teachers, we asked Timothy George, distinguished professor of divinity at Beeson Divinity School, to explore the nature of Reformed Baptist identity.

In October 1654, Henry Dunster, the first president of Harvard College, was forced to resign. His offense was neither sexual immorality nor fiscal impropriety. Rather, he had withheld from baptism his fourth child, a baby boy named Jonathan — and when his daughter Elizabeth came along, he refused to have her baptized as well. Dunster was a learned and pious leader of Puritan New England, and he possibly could have gotten away with his baptismal irregularities — if he had been willing to keep his mouth shut. But when he openly proclaimed that baptism was not for infants but only for penitent believers, he crossed a line that the authorities of Massachusetts Bay Colony could not ignore. Already, Obadiah Holmes, a Baptist preacher from Rhode Island, had been publicly beaten with thirty lashes on the streets of Boston for his religious views.

Henry Dunster not only lost his job, he was forced into exile because of his challenge to the baptismal practice of the Puritan established church. Though he himself was never rebaptized, his story connects to the saga of Baptist beginnings in New England and raises several important questions for Baptist identity today.

What’s in a Name?

Matthew C. Bingham, a Baptist scholar from America who teaches now in England, has written an important book: Orthodox Radicals: Baptist Identity in the English Revolution.1 He argues against the wholesale and generic use of Baptist for those seventeenth-century Puritan Christians who gathered churches and began to practice believer’s baptism. It is not as though a group of congregationally minded, hot Protestants gathered in a coffeehouse in London in 1640 and said, “Brothers, let’s start a new denomination and call ourselves Baptists!” The word Baptist was not a term of self-designation you might stamp on your stationary or paint on a church sign outside the house of worship, partly because, as Dunster’s case shows, to challenge the baptismal practice of the established church in London, no less than in Boston, was to invite reprisals. Baptist was a kind of nickname, a byword, used first by Quakers and others as a sneer or term of abuse. Bingham’s preferred moniker is “baptistic congregationalists,” a more precise but no less anachronistic term. In this way, Baptists is like the word christianoi, which the New Testament uses three times to refer to the followers of Jesus — a derogatory name that stuck because it fit (Acts 11:26; 26:28; 1 Peter 4:16).

“‘Baptist’ was a kind of nickname, a byword, used first by Quakers and others as a sneer or term of abuse.”

The first Baptists were not overly concerned about which word other people used to describe them. But they could get huffy about what they did not want to be called. Thus, the 1644 edition of the London Baptist Confession was put forth in the name of seven congregations “which are commonly, but unjustly, called Anabaptists.” For more than a century, Anabaptism had connoted mayhem and violent revolution associated with the polygamous kingdom of Münster in 1534. “We are not like that!” the Baptists wanted to say clearly. When such Christians of the seventeenth century did refer to themselves in a positive manner, it was as “sister churches in London of the baptized persuasion,” or “the baptized people and churches in Lincolnshire,” or simply “the company of Christ’s friends.”

The framers of the 1644 Confession also rebuffed another charge leveled against them — namely, that of “holding free will, falling away from grace, denying original sin.”2 Such views could be found within the “Arminianized” Church of England led by Archbishop William Laud, as well as among some baptistic Christians who had broken with the strong Augustinian consensus of mainline Protestantism. This latter group would later become known as “General” Baptists, from their belief that Christ had provided a general redemption for all, as opposed to the “Particular” Baptists, who held that “Christ Jesus by his death did bring forth salvation and reconciliation only for the elect,” God’s chosen people.3 In their early years, Generals and Particulars had little to do with one another, and each group declined during the 1700s: Generals largely lapsed into unitarianism, while many Particulars were drawn toward a kind of hyper-Calvinism that squelched the free offer of the gospel for all. Both groups, by God’s grace, were touched by the fires of evangelical awakening in the later eighteenth century and played a role in the rise of the modern missionary movement.

John Bunyan, the “immortal dreamer,” was a Particular Baptist with a Luther-like passion for the gospel. He knew that labels can be libels, and he gave us wise words for a post-denominational world like ours no less than for his own pre-denominational one:

And since you would know by what name I would be distinguished from others; I tell you, I would be, and hope I am, a CHRISTIAN; and choose, if God should count me worthy, to be called a Christian, a believer, or other such name which is approved by the Holy Ghost. Acts 11:26. And for those factious titles of Anabaptist, Independents, Presbyterians, or the like, I conclude that they came from neither Jerusalem, nor Antioch, but rather from hell and Babylon; for they naturally tend to divisions: “you may know them by their fruits.”4

Which Tradition? Whose Reformed?

To call the baptized Christians who first embraced the 1644 and 1689 London Confessions “Reformed Baptists” is to lapse into anachronese again, for it was not a term they used for themselves. “Reformed Baptist” as a term came into vogue only in the latter half of the twentieth century, apparently originating among some of the followers of D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones. But more broadly, the term does serve a useful purpose to underscore the continuity between the Baptist movement that emerged in the seventeenth century and the earlier renewal of the church spawned by Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Cranmer, and the Puritans. For example, the great Baptist pastor-theologian Andrew Fuller was happy to acknowledge that his own ministry stood in the tradition of “Luther, Calvin, Latimer, Knox . . . and numerous others of our Reformation champions.”5 Fuller and other Baptists like him were grateful for the Reformers, even though they did not look to any of them as a standard of faith. As Samuel Hieron put it in a verse that many other dissenters and non-conformists would have applauded heartily,

We do not hang on Calvin’s sleeveNor yet on Zwingli’s we believe:And Puritans we do defyIf right the name you do apply.6

“The Particular Baptist movement took shape as both a continuation and a pruning of the Reformation.”

When we keep this in mind, we can better see how the Particular Baptist movement took shape as a continuation and deepening as well as a pruning of the Reformation of the sixteenth century. This is how those who embraced the 1644 and 1689 confessions saw themselves and how, in retrospect, we should see them too. Four words describe these Baptists who subscribed to the defining confessions of the seventeenth century: canonical, covenantal, congregational, Calvinistic.

Canonical

In the preface to the 1689 London Confession, these Baptists were concerned to show how closely linked they were with other orthodox believers “in all the fundamental articles of the Christian religion.” They had no itch, they said,

to clog religion with new words, but do readily acquiesce in that form of sound words which hath been, in consent with the Holy Scriptures, used by others before us; hereby declaring, before God, angels, and men, our hearty agreement with them in that wholesome Protestant doctrine which, with so clear evidence of Scriptures, they have asserted.7

In other words, Baptists were good Protestants before they were good Baptists — and further, they were good Baptists because they were good Protestants. They affirmed the formal principle of the Reformation and denied church tradition as a second source of authority equal to the canonical Scriptures, the written word of God. The presuppositions of these Baptists echoed the teaching of William Ames, who, in his Marrow of Theology (the first theology textbook used at Harvard College), declared, “All things necessary to salvation are contained in the Scripture and also those things necessary for the institution and edification of the church. Therefore, Scripture is not a partial but a perfect rule of faith and morals.”8

But search the Scriptures as they might, the Baptists could find infant baptism in neither the Old nor New Testament — not in the analogy from circumcision, nor in Jesus’s blessing of the children, nor in household baptisms, nor in the famous prooftext of 1 Corinthians 7:14. In the church of the apostles, baptism had been an adult rite of initiation signifying a committed participation in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Baptism for believers only was simply the liturgical enactment of justification by faith alone.

“Search the Scriptures as they might, the Baptists could find infant baptism in neither the Old nor New Testament.”

And how this act was to be done was vitally important. This is why, beginning in the 1640s, immersion, dipping, or plunging the whole body under water was considered the proper, biblical mode of baptism. The question was not about the amount of water. Rather, the very act itself proclaimed its threefold meaning: the washing of the believer’s sin in the blood of Jesus, his or her interest in Jesus’s own death and resurrection, and the promised resurrection at the return of Christ. In the era before indoor baptistries, immersion was often performed outdoors in the open air, in rivers, lakes, ponds, and sometimes the sea itself — and often under the cover of darkness to prevent discovery and arrest. This led to salacious gossip and rumors of sexual scandal based on reports of women baptized naked in the river and of “young maids . . . baptized about one or two o’clock in the morning.”9 As the early Christians were falsely accused of turning love feasts into orgies and were called cannibals because they ate the “body and blood of Christ,” so too Baptists in this time had to fend off outrageous charges.

Covenantal

No term was more often used in the writings of seventeenth-century Reformed theology than the word covenant — not church, not grace, certainly not baptism. Congregationalists and Presbyterians alike defended infant baptism on the basis of covenant theology. Drawing on the construals of Zwingli and Calvin, their paedobaptist heirs in the seventeenth century found in Scripture one covenant in two administrations: what circumcision was to Abraham and his descendants in the Old Testament, infant baptism has become for Christians in the New.

Baptists agreed with the basic point that God had provided one, and only one, way of salvation throughout history — by grace through faith in the Messiah. But as Paul explained in Galatians, Abraham had a twofold seed — one according to the flesh, and one based on faith. The new covenant promised in Jeremiah 31 was fulfilled at the coming of Christ and the pouring out of the Spirit. As Samuel Renihan has said in his fine study From Shadow to Substance: The Federal Theology of the English Particular Baptists (1642–1704), “The covenant of grace did not run in bloodlines.”10 Nonetheless, the rite of circumcision does have a continuing positive meaning in the New Testament — not as the analogue to infant baptism, but rather as a type of regeneration and the new birth. So, Paul could say that in Christ we have received a “circumcision made without hands.” What counts now is a new creation (Colossians 2:11–12; Galatians 6:15).

Congregational

It was a Baptist pastor William Kiffen who coined the term “the congregational way”11 to describe the design of God for his people to live as “a walled sheepfold and watered garden,” a “company of visible saints, called and separated from the world to the visible profession of faith of the gospel.”12 Henry Dunster’s reflection on this ecclesiology led him not only to withhold his own children from infant baptism but to disown national and provincial churches altogether — he called them “nullities.” Dunster’s decoupling of citizenship and church membership was not far from Roger Williams’s church-state separation, and a precondition for full religious liberty. It is not surprising that, as one observer noted, Dunster’s preaching became bold “against the spirit of persecution.”13

Baptists inherited from their English Separatist forebears a bipolar ecclesiology based on the Augustinian distinction between the invisible church of the elect — all of God’s redeemed people through the ages — and the visible church, a covenantal company of gathered saints separated from the world and knit together into a “living temple” by the work of the Spirit (Ephesians 2:22; 1 Peter 2:4–5). It was also incumbent on such a body to separate back to the world (through congregational discipline) those members whose lives betrayed this profession. Baptists, with other congregationalists, were obsessed with what G.F. Nuttall has called “the passionate desire to recover the inner life of New Testament Christianity.”14

The Christological basis of the Christian life was developed by Calvin, Bucer, and other Reformers and was applied to the church in a distinctive way by early Baptists and other congregationalists. The threefold office of Christ as Prophet, Priest, and King not only secures the salvation of the chosen elect, it also enables the worship and corporate sanctification of the gathered community. Prayer and preaching are sustained by Christ’s priestly and prophetic offices, while his royal office undergirds the governance and disciplinary life of the church.

Calvinistic

Are Baptists Calvinists? This is what the French might call une question mal posée, because, as we have seen, the short answer is this: some are and others are not. Further, if a Calvinist is a person who follows strictly the teaching of the sixteenth-century Reformer of Geneva, then in three important ways Baptists, Generals and Particulars alike, are not and never have been such. Calvin was a paedobaptist; Baptists are credobaptists. In matters of church governance, Calvin was a Presbyterian; Baptists are congregationalists. Calvin believed that the civil magistrate had a religious duty to enforce both tables of the law, punishing heresy and rooting it out by capital punishment, if necessary; Baptists are advocates of religious freedom for all.

But Calvinism is not a monolithic historical entity irrevocably tied to one person. Nor can it be equated with a discrete denomination or an overarching confession with no soft edges. Historian John Balserak has reminded us that “as a living body of doctrines, Calvinism exhibits a great deal of development, diversity, and ambiguity.”15 The same, of course, could be said about Baptists, even if we count only those who claim the name for themselves, much less all the others who hold a baptistic view of the church. Perhaps it is better to listen to Alec Ryrie, who has described Calvinism, and the Reformed tradition more broadly, as “an ecumenical movement for Protestant unity.”16 At the heart of such an ecclesial and spiritual impulse is a heartfelt embrace of the unfettered grace of God set forth in the early church by St. Augustine and expressed with clarity in the five heads of doctrine promulgated at the Synod of Dort (1618–1619) — all of which are embedded in the 1644 and 1689 London Baptist Confessions.

Baptists today, with many pulls and tears and their diverse rivulets and tributaries, belong to this historic Reformed family of faith. When Baptists have forgotten this and obscured their rootedness in the Protestant Reformation, they have lost sight both of their “near agreement with many other Christians”17 as well as the theological basis of their own Baptist distinctives. They have become sectarian, distracted, and doctrinally unserious. But at their best, Baptists have not only drawn from the rich spiritual and theological traditions of the Reformation, they have made singular contributions to it. William Carey did so when he opened up a new era of missionary work by sailing to India. Charles Haddon Spurgeon did so from his pulpit (and in the slums) in Victorian London. George Liele and David George, both former slaves, did so when they proclaimed the great doctrines of grace from Georgia and Nova Scotia to Jamaica and Sierra Leone.

Anne Steele (1717–1778), the daughter of a Particular Baptist lay pastor, was a poet and hymnwriter whose work has blessed the entire church. Her poem “Entreating the Presence of Christ in His Churches” is based on the Old Testament text Haggai 2:7 and closes with a prayer that reflects her strong faith and confidence in the boundless power and grace of God:

Dear Saviour, let thy glory shine,     And fill thy dwellings here,Till life, and love, and joy divine     A heav’n on earth appear.

Then shall our hearts enraptur’d say,     Come, great Redeemer, come,And bring the bright, the glorious day,     That calls thy children home.18