The Gospel and Baptist Identity: Four Categories of Baptist Beliefs

In my last post, I outlined two different ways of discussing Baptist identity. I also tried to make clear that in this series I’m offering a constructive proposal about what I think is the best way to think about Baptist identity in the twenty-first century. In this post, I want to suggest a paradigm for understanding Baptist identity that recognizes four categories of Baptist beliefs.

The first category of Baptist beliefs includes what I call catholic beliefs (note the lower-case “C”). These are convictions that are (at least in theory) shared by all Christians everywhere. These include doctrines such as the Trinity, the full deity and humanity of Christ, the inspiration of Scripture, salvation through Christ, and the afterlife. (You might say this is the “mere Christianity” category of beliefs.) 

The second category includes reformational beliefs. These are doctrines shared by most other Protestants. Convictions in this category include the sole authority and sufficiency of Scripture, justification by grace alone through faith alone, a rejection of sacerdotalism, and the priesthood of all believers. (I’m assuming Baptists are a type of Protestant.)

The third category includes evangelical beliefs—convictions Baptists share with other types of evangelical Protestants. This category includes the full truthfulness of Scripture, a close relationship between conversion and regeneration, penal substitutionary atonement, the exclusivity of Christ, and a commitment to evangelism and missions. (I admit I’m also being prescriptive in my understanding of evangelical beliefs and priorities.)

The final category of Baptist beliefs includes what I call radical beliefs. This is where the proverbial rubber meets the road when it comes to Baptist identity. This category includes a group of beliefs that up until fairly recently most non-Baptist believers considered to be radical because they set Baptists apart from other Christian traditions. This category includes a handful of uniquely emphasized Baptist distinctives or principles.

Simply put, I argue that we Baptists are at our best when we understand ourselves to be simultaneously catholic, reformational, evangelical, and radical. This helps us to know where we ought to stand with other types of Christians and where we ought to offer humble correction to other professing believers with whom we disagree. Balancing the two is one of the hardest aspects of being Baptist.

I think it’s important to understand that all of the “radical” beliefs that have been historically understood to be Baptist distinctives are ecclesiological in nature. In fact, I argue that what makes Baptists unique from other Christians is our view of the church, particularly local churches. The earliest Baptists were an ecclesiological renewal movement within English Protestantism that began when some seventeenth-century Separatists in England and New England “reformed the Reformation” by arguing for a view of the church they believed to be more in line with the New Testament than that advocated by Lutherans and Reformed pedobaptists.

But I also argue Baptist identity, particularly our radical ecclesiology, should be about more than simply trying to conform to the New Testament, though certainly never less. Baptist Christianity, when believed rightly and practiced properly, is nothing more or less than the consistent application of the gospel to ecclesiological matters. To say it another way, we Baptists do what we do because we think Jesus is Lord and his gospel should shape all of life, including the way we order our churches.

To be fair, we need to admit there are non-Baptist Christians who affirm every one of our Baptist distinctives. Baptists don’t have a monopoly on these principles because we think they are New Testament beliefs! Nevertheless, I agree with Oklahoma Baptist University theologian Stan Norman that when you find all of the Baptist ecclesiological priorities held together as a coherent vision for a church, you have a congregation that is theologically or convictionally Baptist, even if that church is not part of a Baptist denomination and/or doesn’t use the word “Baptist” in its name. In other words, there are theologically baptistic churches that aren’t “capital B” Baptist churches. The theological convictions matter more than the name, though I personally think the name is worth owning because it reflects the convictions.

In my next post, I’ll begin to tease out those convictions that have historically been identified with Baptist Christians. I’ll attempt to demonstrate that each of them are not only based upon New Testament example, but they are also ecclesiological reflections of the gospel.

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Note: This is the third post in an ongoing series on the relationship between the gospel and Baptist identity. Earlier posts in this series include:

The Gospel and Baptist Identity: Introduction

The Gospel and Baptist Identity: What is the Gospel?

The Gospel and Baptist Identity: Pondering Baptist Identity

One Response to “The Gospel and Baptist Identity: Four Categories of Baptist Beliefs”

1. James Willingham says:

   July 22, 2011 at 5:19 pm

   I would add a note on spiritual egalitarianism to the radical identity aspect. Just down the road from where I live is Mt. Pisgah Church from whence came the first Southern Baptist missionary to China, the justly noted Matthew T. Yates. On past the church about a quarter of a mile is family grave plot. On the tombstone of one member who died of disease in the time of Second Manassas was the statement to the effect that he had been excommunicated from Mt. Pisgah Church due to his opposition to treating African American Members of the Congregation as equals in the church. That is a remarkable action for the period (he was excluded just before the War). The basic Baptist beliefs on salvation and spiritual brotherhood in the church along with other teachings on the Christian Faith produced some tremendous examples of Christian believers among the Black folks during that terrible period of slavery. They evidently picked upon the nature of these teachings. When they were sold from one part of the country to the other, they moved their church membership just as if they were free. In the records they are often referred to as Black brother so and so, Black Sister so and so, and their singing was noticed and remembered as one lady who remembered hearing, when she was a child, the Blacks from James and John Islands singing in the Sunday Morning Service of the First Baptist Church of Charleston in, I think it was, the 1820s.

   Interestingly enough, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was inspired by the Negro Spirituals and by their preaching of Scriptures to take both the music and their approach back to Germany and his struggles with Nazism. Recently I read in a biography of Martin Luther King where he cited the prominent historian of Great Britain in the 20th century, Dr. Arnold Toynbee, to the effect that the renewal of Western Civilization would probably come through the African American community.

   In the Summer of ’71 I wrote a Prospectus for a Doctoral Dissertation at Colmbia University on the subject The Baptists and Slavery. My point was to show how God had produced some truly great Christians as the records of the churches of the South indicated according to what I had seen.

   Such examples stand as answers to our present day crop of New Atheists, to wit, there mut be something to the Christian Faith, if it can give people in the lowest and most degraded of situations a bright sense of Hope and even Joy. Having been an Atheist and knowing the awful grayness of skepticism, I do appreciate the happiness of an answer that defies human logic – not as illogical but as supralogical. And that from the Baptist identity comes the begnnings of the greatest advances in recognizing the rights of liberty for human beings.

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