The Authority of the Church in the World:  A United Church of Christ Perspective, Rev. Dr. Susan E. Davies
 

Baptist Views on the Authority of the Church in the World

Rev. Dr. John M. Finley
Senior Minister, First Baptist Church, Savannah, GA 

Baptists emerged as a distinctive group of churches in the first decade of the seventeenth century and the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation.  Heavily influenced by the earlier Reformers Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, and John Calvin, the first Baptists were shaped by a variety of theologies including those of the Anabaptist movement, English Separatism, strict Calvinism, as well as Arminianism.  Consequently, Baptists as a denomination developed with a striking degree of theological diversity, which may explain, at least in part, both the development and application of a concept of the authority of the Church in the world. 

Today, Baptists comprise a global denominational family with a half million or more members in each of at least eight different countries, including the United States, Nigeria, India, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Brazil, Korea, Myanmar, and Kenya.[1]  The total world-wide Baptist population is nearly fifty million baptized believers, more than half of whom live in North America.  This essay focuses primarily upon Baptists in England and the United States.  

                                                                            I

Baptists consistently have emphasized that ultimate spiritual authority is to be found in Jesus Christ the Lord.[2]  This is to say that Baptists affirm Jesus of Nazareth as God’s anointed One, the incarnate Son of God, and the second person of the Holy Trinity.  For Baptists to testify in the act of believer’s baptism that “Jesus is Lord” is to state that God is the supreme authority and that their desire is to allow Christ to reign in their lives.  

While most Baptists embrace the affirmations of the larger Church’s historic creeds, they have tended to express their own theological convictions through confessions of faith.  In one of the earliest English Baptist confessional statements entitled A Short Confession of Faith (1610), Thomas Helwys and others acknowledged Jesus Christ to be “the only Mediator, King, Priest and Prophet, Lawgiver and Teacher, which God hath promised to send into the world, whom we must trust, believe, and follow.”[3]  Similarly, The London Confession (1644) declared that all human beings “stand in need of the power of Christ in his Kingly Office to assist and govern them.”[4]  Baptists in America and elsewhere likewise adopted confessional statements which indicate that the authority of the Church rests preeminently in the Lordship of Jesus Christ. 

II

If it can be said that Baptists have contended for ultimate authority in Jesus Christ, then without question, penultimate authority has been vested in the canon of holy scripture. While nearly every Baptist group recognizes the sixty-six books of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, many Baptists would claim special authority for the twenty-seven books of the New Testament.  In the view of Church historian Walter B. Shurden, “Because Christ is Lord, Christ is the lens through whom Baptists read the entire Bible (Mt. 5:21ff).[5] 

The Second London Confession (1677), closely modeled after the Presbyterian Westminster Confession (1648) in an effort to show that Baptists were in doctrinal agreement with other Dissenters in England, stated: “The authority of the Holy Scripture for which it ought to be believed dependeth not upon the testimony of any man, or Church; but wholly upon God (who is truth it self) the Author thereof; therefore it is to be received, because it is the Word of God.”[6]  The New Hampshire Confession (1833) likewise affirms the authority of the scriptures by placing it first among eighteen articles and declaring: “We believe [that] the Holy Bible was written by men divinely inspired, and is a perfect treasure of heavenly instruction; that it has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter; that it reveals the principles by which God will judge us; and therefore is, and shall remain to the end of the world, the true centre of Christian union, and the supreme standard by which all human conduct, creeds, and opinions should be tried.”[7] 

The Baptist Faith and Message confessional statement adopted by the Southern Baptist Convention in 1925 and the Articles of Faith approved by the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A. in 1929, both borrowed language from The New Hampshire Confession in describing the authority of holy scripture.[8]    

III

As part of the Free Church tradition, Baptists have understood the rule of Christ as defined by local congregations of believers as they attempt to interpret scripture under the leadership of the Holy Spirit.  In this sense, each Baptist church strives to become a spiritual democracy in itself, instead of relying upon the authority of priests, bishops, or councils of the Church.  Baptists often refer to the “autonomy of the local church,” rather than the authority of any one person, denomination, ecumenical organization, or civil government to define the life of an individual body of Christian believers.  In this sense, Baptist churches are free to determine their own membership, to ordain their own ministers and deacons, to choose their own leadership, as well as to decide matters relating to worship styles, finances, programs of mission and outreach, and practically every other relationship beyond the local congregation. 

The Second London Confession (1677), later adopted and amended by the first district association of Baptists in America as The Philadelphia Confession (1742), declared that God had given to each “gathered” congregation of believers “all that power and authority, which is in any way needful, for their carrying on that order in worship, and discipline, which he hath instituted for them to observe....  A particular Church gathered, and completely Organized, according to the mind of Christ, consists of Officers, and Members.”[9]  Ideally, each Baptist church would operate as a Christocracy. 

IV

Closely related to the emphasis upon the autonomy of the local church is a fourth aspect of authority, namely, the freedom of individual conscience.  In 1646, an Anglican priest named Daniel Featley published a treatise in which he described a number of subversive beliefs held by the so-called “Dippers,” just one of several second-generation Protestant sects proliferating throughout seventeenth-century England:               

                “First, that none are rightly baptized but those who are dipt.

                Secondly, that no children ought to be baptized.

Thirdly, that there ought to be no set form of Liturgy or prayer by the Book, but only by the Spirit.

Fourthly, that there ought to be no distinctions by the Word of God between the Clergy and the Laity but that all who are gifted may preach the Word, and administer the Sacraments.

Fifthly, that it is not lawful to take an oath at all, no, not though it be demanded by the magistrate.

Sixthly, that no Christian may with good conscience execute the office of civil magistrate.”[10]                         

                Featley clearly despised these early Baptists for their non-conformist ways, yet contemporary Baptists will recognize in his criticism a number of similarities with their own practice of the Christian faith.  Historically, Baptists have contended for a “regenerate” church membership with each individual believer having experienced God’s grace.  Flowing from this concept is the conviction that personal experience is authoritative and that each person is both free and responsible: to read and interpret the Bible, to follow the leading of the Holy Spirit, to follow the dictates of one’s conscience, and to ascertain God’s will for one’s life.                

                Walter Rauschenbusch, while pastor in Rochester, New York, published a series of articles in his local newspaper entitled, “Why I Am a Baptist.”  In the first of those articles, Rauschenbusch declared:

“The Christian faith as Baptists hold it, sets spiritual experience boldly to the front as the one great thing in religion.  It aims at experiential religion.... 

                When we Baptists insist on personal experience as the only essential thing in religion, we are hewing our way back to original Christianity.”[11] 

Drawing upon Reformation principles of justification by faith and the priesthood of all believers, as well as the ideas of individual conscience, soul freedom, and the separation of Church and State, Edgar Young Mullins similarly argued:  “The doctrine of the soul’s competency in religion under God is the distinctive historical significance of the Baptists.”[12] 

V

Finally, while Baptists historically have viewed authority as residing in the Lordship of Jesus Christ, the Bible, the autonomy of the local church, and the importance of individual conscience, they also have placed significant authority in their ordained ministers and deacons, theologians, and denominational leaders.  Because of the centrality of the pulpit within the life of most Baptist churches, often these personalities are preachers and local parish ministers.  Baptists often distinguish themselves from other Christians by the absence of an official “magisterium,” and yet the powerful personalities and persuasive voices of individual pastors, evangelists, and theologians often carry considerable authority among Baptists.  This especially has been true of more-fundamentalist Baptist congregations as well as Baptist churches within the African-American tradition. 

Daniel D. Williams, a Congregationalist and professor of systematic theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York, writing in the very first issue of the Baptist history and theology journal, Foundations, offered these words regarding “the mystery of the Baptists”:

“Here is a form of the Christian community which rests upon an experience of the Gospel which is personal, rather easily intelligible, vividly symbolized, calling for personal dedication, and open to the promptings of the Spirit.  The Baptists seem to prove that the Christian church can live and grow as a personal fellowship based on a directly shared experience, provided it is interpreted through a commonly accepted language of Scriptural symbols.  Other forms of the Christian church which depend more upon creed, liturgy or a highly articulated ecclesiastical organization are not the only sources of the unity of Christian groups.  The power of the Spirit can produce the fellowship.”[13] 

VI

Baptists historically have expressed the authority of the Church in the world in a variety of ways, foremost among them, through the proclamation of the Gospel, the ministry of the Word, the ordinances of baptism and holy communion, and benevolence toward the poor and needy.  As early as the first decade of the seventeenth century, Thomas Helwys and other English Baptists declared in A Short Confession (1610): “In this holy church hath God ordained the ministers of the Gospel, the doctrines of the holy Word, the use of the holy sacraments, the oversight of the poor, and the ministers of the same offices.”[14]  The Somerset Confession (1656) of Particular Baptist churches in western England argued “That as it is an ordinance of Christ, so it is the duty of his church in his authority, to send forth such brethren as are fitly gifted and qualified through the Spirit of Christ to preach the gospel to the world (Acts 13:1,2,3; 11:22; 8:14).”[15]  Similarly, The Orthodox Creed (1678) of General Baptists in England affirmed:               

                “[W]e believe the visible church of Christ on earth, is made up of several distinct congregations, which make up that one catholic church, or mystical body of Christ.  And the marks by which she is known to be the true spouse of Christ are these, viz.  Where the word of God is rightly preached, and the sacraments truly administered, according to Christ’s institution, and the practice of the primitive church; having discipline and government duly executed, by ministers or pastors of God’s appointing, and the church’s election, that is a true constituted church.”[16] 

Bill J. Leonard has observed that English Baptist notions of individualism in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries contributed to changing views on the nature of the church in the world.  Citing English Baptist historian J. H. Y. Briggs, Leonard suggests that many Baptists of this period avoided traditional Puritan approaches to the church in favor of a more Enlightenment-based emphasis on voluntarism: “Baptist leader Joseph Angus (d. 1902) utilized John Locke’s description of the church as ‘a voluntary society of men, joining themselves together of their own accord, in order of the worshipping of God, in such a manner as they judge acceptable to him and effectual to the salvation of their souls.’  Yet Angus was quick to assert that the voluntary principle did not mean ‘the authority of the self-will’ but ‘submission of the heart and of the life to Christ.’”[17] 

In the United States, something of the same individualistic spirit may be seen in The Baptist Faith and Message confessional statement adopted by the Southern Baptist Convention (1925, reaffirmed 1963 and 2000): “A New Testament church of the Lord Jesus Christ is a local body of baptized believers who are associated by covenant in the faith and fellowship of the gospel, observing the two ordinances of Christ, committed to His teachings, exercising the gifts, rights, and privileges invested in them by His Word, and seeking to extend the gospel to the ends of the earth....  It is the duty and privilege of every follower of Christ and of every church of the Lord Jesus Christ to endeavor to make disciples of all nations....  Missionary effort on the part of all rests thus upon a spiritual necessity of the regenerate life, and is expressly and repeatedly commanded in the teachings of Christ.”[18] 

Aside from Primitive Baptist churches and a few groups adhering to a hyper-Calvinistic view of election, most Baptist denominations in North America and the world place a strong emphasis upon missionary outreach as one of the hallmarks of the Church’s authority in the world.  This emphasis among Baptists necessarily takes on a wide variety of methodologies, including preaching the Gospel, witnessing to one’s faith in Christ, baptizing new converts, establishing new congregations, as well as extending the Good News of God’s Kingdom by establishing schools, hospitals, child welfare agencies, agricultural missions, and other ministries to those in need.  Many Baptists would follow in the steps of Billy Graham by identifying personal witnessing and evangelism as the preeminent tasks of the Church in the world today.  Many other Baptists, following the example of Social Gospel proponent Walter Rauschenbusch, would argue that the Church should demonstrate its Christly authority by advocating for a variety of much-needed social reforms, including human rights, disease prevention, water purification projects, educational programs, the care of the environment, and the elimination of global poverty.  To those outside the denominational family, the Baptist agenda for the Church in the world – which literally can range from personal evangelistic efforts to HIV/AIDS awareness to micro-lending for the poor – may prove to be a maddening array of seemingly contradictory social, economic, political, and theological points of view.  And yet to many Baptists, that same broad agenda is seen as nothing less than the Church’s authority expressed through the freedom and the diversity of Baptist congregations in the world.