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How English Baptists Changed the Early Modern Toleration Debate

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How English Baptists Changed the Early Modern Toleration Debate RADICALLY [IN]TOLERANT: HOW ENGLISH BAPTISTS CHANGED THE EARLY MODERN TOLERATION DEBATE Caleb Morell Dr. Amy Leonard Dr. Jo Ann Moran Cruz This research was undertaken under the auspices of Georgetown University and was submitted in partial fulfillment for Honors in History at Georgetown University. MAY 2016 I give permission to Lauinger Library to make this thesis available to the public. ABSTRACT The argument of this thesis is that the contrasting visions of church, state, and religious toleration among the Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists in seventeenth-century England, can best be explained only in terms of their differences over Covenant Theology. That is, their disagreements on the ecclesiological and political levels were rooted in more fundamental disagreements over the nature of and relationship between the biblical covenants. The Baptists developed a Covenant Theology that diverged from the dominant Reformed model of the time in order to justify their practice of believer’s baptism. This precluded the possibility of a national church by making baptism, upon profession of faith, the chief pre- requisite for inclusion in the covenant community of the church. Church membership would be conferred not upon birth but re-birth, thereby severing the links between infant baptism, church membership, and the nation. Furthermore, Baptist Covenant Theology undermined the dominating arguments for state-sponsored religious persecution, which relied upon Old Testament precedents and the laws given to kings of Israel. These practices, the Baptists argued, solely applied to Israel in the Old Testament in a unique way that was not applicable to any other nation. Rather in the New Testament age, Christ has willed for his kingdom to go forth not by the power of the sword but through the preaching of the Word. These changes in Covenant Theology challenged the foundation on which religious persecution had been grounded in Early Modern Europe and had important implications in making the idea of toleration more plausible and also, in fact, biblically justified. 2 The idea of predestination basically prevented the state, through its intolerance, from actually promoting religion... The state's intolerance did not enable it to save a single soul; only the idea of God's honor induced the church to request the state's assistance in suppressing heresy. However, the more the emphasis was placed on the necessity for the minister and all participants in the communion to be members of the elect, all the more unacceptable was (a) every instance of the state's intervention in the processes to appoint new clergy, (b) every appointment to the ministry of students from the university made simply on the basis of completed theological training (which might include someone who perhaps did not belong among the elect), and in general (c) every intervention in the congregation's concerns by the political powers (whose conduct was often not above reproach)… Calvinist Baptism... drew the consequences from this line of thought with greater consistency than did other congregations... [and] supported even the separation of church and state, because its members were devout Pietists. That is, religious reasons were effective in providing their motivation to uphold the freedom of conscience and, hence, the idea of tolerance… From the beginning of their existence, the Baptizing sects... have continuously upheld the basic principle that only the elect can be taken into the community of the church. (They have done so more forcefully and with greater internal consistency that the other ascetic Protestant congregations.) For this reason, they (a) repudiated the idea of the church as an institution (Anstalt) offering salvation to all... and (b) opposed every intervention by secular powers. Hence, it was an effective religious reason also in this case that produced the demand for unconditional tolerance… The first who for these reasons upheld an unconditional tolerance and the separation of church and state was surely [the English theologian and opponent of the Anglican Church] Robert Browne [1550-1663]. He was almost a generation before the Baptists and two generations before Roger Williams [1628-80], the Puritan founder of the colony of Rhode Island and pioneer of religious liberty. The first declaration of a church community in this regard appears to have been the resolution of the English Baptists in Amsterdam in 1612 or 1613: ‘The magistrate is not to meddle with religion or matters of conscience... because Christ is the King and lawgiver of the Church and conscience.’ The first official document of a church community that demanded the effective protection of freedom of conscience from the state as a right was surely Article 44 of the Confession of the (Particular) Baptists of 1644.1 – Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) 1 Max Weber and Stephen Kalberg, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 210-211 n. 129. Italics in the original. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................................... 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS ..................................................................................................................... 4 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ..................................................................................................................... 6 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................... 8 The Whig History of Toleration .................................................................................... 12 The Revisionist School of Toleration ............................................................................ 15 A Middle-Way: The Post-Revisionist School ................................................................ 20 A Covenantal Approach to Toleration .......................................................................... 21 The Contesting Parties .................................................................................................. 26 Roadmap for Thesis ...................................................................................................... 31 CHAPTER I: THE PROTESTANT THEORY AND PRACTICE OF PERSECUTION IN ENGLAND (1534-1641) – AN OVERVIEW ........................................................................... 33 The Protestant Theory of Persecution ....................................................................................... 34 From Defender to Defector of the Faith: Henry VIII’s Sordid Affair ....................................... 39 Henry’s Religious Reforms ........................................................................................................ 41 Edward’s Short-Lived Reforms ................................................................................................. 43 Mary’s Quest to Extirpate Protestantism .................................................................................. 44 Elizabeth’s Not-So-Moderate “Middle Way” ........................................................................... 46 The Disappointment of James I and the Policy of “Persuasion and Compulsion” .................. 57 The Brutality of Charles I .......................................................................................................... 60 The Social Disruption of the English Revolution and the Proliferation of Sects ...................... 67 CHAPTER II: “A TURBULENT, SEDITIOUS, AND FACTITIOUS PEOPLE:” PERCEPTIONS AND PERSECUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH BAPTISTS ................................. 69 Perceptions and Persecution ..................................................................................................... 71 The Separatist Origins of the early English Baptists ................................................................ 77 John Smyth and Thomas Helwys ............................................................................................... 80 Murton’s Prison Treatises ......................................................................................................... 83 Leonard Busher ......................................................................................................................... 85 Later Baptist Churches .............................................................................................................. 88 Outbreak of the Civil War ......................................................................................................... 91 The Westminster Assembly and the “Committee for Plundered Ministers” ............................. 94 4 CHAPTER III: COVENANTS, CONSCIENCE, CIRCUMCISION AND THE THEOLOGICAL ROOTS OF [IN]TOLERANCE .................................................................... 100 Puritan Covenant Theology ..................................................................................................... 102 Infant Baptism and the Covenant of Grace ............................................................................. 108 The Church and the Covenant of Grace .................................................................................. 109 Baptist Covenant Theology ...................................................................................................... 111 Differences in Baptist Covenant Theology .............................................................................
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