ORTHODOX RADICALS
Baptist identity in the English Revolution
By Matthew Bingham
Oxford University Press. 234 pages. £64.00
ISBN 978 0 190 912 369
This is an academic work which makes an important case about the early Calvinistic (or Particular) Baptists in England.
Matthew Bingham, now lecturer in systematic theology and church history, argues that Baptists were not clearly identified as a separate denomination or group of ‘Baptists’ until at least the later part of the 17th century. Before that, a ‘Baptist’ would probably not have used that description. It is later historians who have imposed a label on those from that period who rejected infant baptism.
Mainstream
Bingham argues that we should consider these people as a branch of the mainstream congregationalism of their day. They emerged from congregationalist churches in the early 17th century and for quite some while were considered to be still part of that denomination, albeit with a different view of who should be baptised. To make this connection clear, the author suggests that we should refer to them as ‘baptistic congregationalists’, not ‘Baptists’.
His case is made in the first two chapters, by carefully examining the primary sources relating to the emergence from congregationalism of a group questioning the biblical legitimacy of infant baptism.
In the meaty third chapter, Bingham explores why this question should have arisen at that moment in history and connects it convincingly with the logic of the move to congregationalism itself: the rejection of the idea of a state church led many to question infant baptism, which seemed to them to be intimately and necessarily connected with the mixed body that was the Church of England.
Favoured
Chapters 4 and 5 explore the intriguing question why Calvinistic Baptists were favoured during the Cromwellian regime alongside Presbyterians and Congregationlists, when so many other groups were not.
Bingham’s book makes an important contribution to the wider argument about the identity of early Particular Baptists and their links with the Reformed movement more generally. Baptists, even those of a Calvinistic persuasion, have too often seen themselves and been seen by others as separate from the Reformed and Puritan movements of the 16th and 17th centuries. They have often felt at liberty to take little notice of the theological heritage of the Reformation, being content rather with a biblicism uninformed by the fruits of the debates which led to the great confessions of the middle of the 17th century. This tendency is made worse when we use a separate label to identify them.
Bingham’s case helps identify the ‘baptistic congregationalists’ of the 17th century much more closely with the historic Reformed movement. This should in turn lead Baptists with Calvinistic convictions today to recognise more clearly that they are part of a wider Reformed movement and to delve more deeply and thoroughly into that movement’s rich theological heritage.
