Protestant Spiritual Traditions, Volume Two

Introduction to Volume 2

Thirty-four years have passed since Protestant Spiritual Traditions, now volume 1 of this two-volume set, appeared in print. If the world was changing in the 1960s and 1970s, it has changed even more rapidly since 1986 when Protestant Spiritual Traditions was first published. Computers and the internet have made instantaneous global communication possible. The world has become more connected economically, politically, and socially while at the same time there is pushback from religious fundamentalists who use the new communications technologies but resist the loss of identity from homogenization.

For Christianity as a whole the center of gravity has moved from Western Europe and North America to the global south or two-thirds world. Interestingly, while the writers of the essays in volume 1 were based in eastern Canada, the eastern United States, and Chicago, all the writers of the essays in Volume 2 circle the Pacific rim: Nathan Nettleton in Melbourne, Australia; Cherice Bock in Oregon; Todd Johnson and Janna Gosselin in California; Connie Au in Hong Kong; and Joung Chul Lee in South Korea. Yours truly still lives in the Chicago area, although since retiring from pastoral work in 2013 I have taught three different courses in three different educational institutions in Southeast Asia. Writers of the essays on Baptists, Quakers, Evangelicals, and Pentecostals in this volume each comment on how the center of gravity for their denominational tradition has moved to the global south or the majority world. This is also true of the denominational traditions discussed in Volume 1.

These two volumes present Protestant spirituality in its distinct confessional and denominational traditions. Each essay discusses the unique spirituality of a particular Protestant tradition. Among those in this volume, Baptists and Quakers emerged in the seventeenth century, in part but not entirely, as offshoots of Puritanism. Evangelicalism as described in the essay by Todd Johnson and Janna Gosselin, emerged in the Great Awakenings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Great Britain and the British North American colonies that became the United States. Pentecostalism was born on January 1, 1901, when Agnes N. Ozman, a student at the Bethel Bible College in Topeka, Kansas, began to speak in tongues—an experience that other students and faculty shared under the school’s director Charles Fox Parham (1873–1929). Parham left Topeka and worked for several years in Houston with a black preacher from the Holiness tradition named William J. Seymour (1870–1922). Seymour moved to Los Angeles and began to conduct services in an old Methodist church on Azusa Street in 1906. The Pentecostal tradition spread like a California wildfire throughout the United States and around the world. Connie Au gives us a glimpse of global Pentecostalism. Both Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism are transdenominational.

Many Protestant churches, from Lutheran to Pentecostal, consider themselves evangelical, sometimes even in their name.¹ In fact, evangelical was a more common term than Protestant (originally considered pejorative) to designate those who protested the papal church for the sake of the gospel at the time of the Reformation. Among the traditions covered in this volume, Baptists and even some Quakers consider themselves evangelical. Most of the nondenominational congregations around the world, including most megachurches, consider themselves evangelical. The major theological difference between evangelicals and pentecostals is that evangelicals are Christ-centered in teaching and spirituality whereas pentecostals emphasize the work and gifts of the Holy Spirit—although neither group denies the works of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Both traditions have had an enormous influence on the rest of Protestant Christianity. Practices begun in evangelical and pentecostal churches, such as singing contemporary Christian music, are embraced in some mainline Protestant churches that offer contemporary worship services. Spontaneously offered prayer bids in the intercessions are encouraged in many Episcopal/Anglican, Lutheran, and Methodist congregations. The practice of communal intercessory prayer, in which prayers are uttered aloud simultaneously by each individual in the assembly—the Korean practice of tong-sung ki-do that Joung Chul Lee discusses in his essay, East Asian Spirituality—has spread to other centers of Asian Protestantism. I witnessed praying aloud together, but for the same prayer petition, in the Reformed Theological Seminary chapel in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Some spiritual practices that emerged in Protestantism transcend distinct traditions and have had an impact on the larger society. Among these contributions of Protestantism to Christian spirituality and Western society are an emphasis on the vocation of marriage over celibacy, a more positive view of human sexuality as a gift of God, and an understanding that the family is a center of devotion. Protestants also introduced the common chest in order to meet needs of the hungry poor and turned vacated monasteries into hospitals and orphanages. In addition, Protestants attended to the physical health and other physical needs of both their missionaries and the missionized. Protestants also led the abolitionist and civil rights movements, and some Protestants (ranging from Pentecostals to Anglicans and Episcopalians) have expressed openness to admitting into fellowship LGBTQI+ people. Through the Indian YMCA Protestants have influenced modern postural yoga, which is practiced by millions. Finally, Protestants have promoted environmental stewardship by intellectually, theologically linking human bodies to the Earth’s body. All these spiritual practices I discuss in the last essay, under the title The Body in Protestant Spirituality. Nathan Nettleton also mentions the inclusion of gays and lesbians in some Baptist churches in his essay, and Cherice Bock highlights Quaker involvement in the environmental movement in her essay.

Other issues dealt with in the academic study of spirituality today include the relationship of spirituality to culture, psychology, the social sciences, the physical sciences, cosmology, dialogue with world religions, and so forth. These broader social and cultural issues transcend Protestantism, and the essays in these volumes concern those practices of spirituality that arise out of uniquely Protestant traditions. This does not mean we are dealing with practices that are observed only by Protestants. For example, all people around the world in all religions and with none get married. But Protestantism’s exaltation of marriage as a spiritual vocation pleasing to God emerged in protest against celibacy as a requirement for ordination in the medieval church; and Protestantism’s location of the spiritual life of ordinary believers within the family countered the high regard for virginity in the ancient and medieval church.

Prophetic protest emerged from what Paul Tillich called the protestant principle, and it only makes sense over and against catholic substance.² Protestantism continued to divide precisely because the prophetic Protestant principle protested against its own catholic or all-embracing state church establishments, producing Puritan separatists and Pietist sects, as well as Baptists, Quakers, Shakers, Methodists, Holiness sects, Pentecostals, and others.

As I have reviewed (as best I could) the vast literature on spirituality in preparation for editing and writing for these combined volumes of Protestant Spiritual Traditions, I have been impressed by how masculine Protestant spirituality seems to be. I counted about a dozen names of women whose contributions as spiritual leaders, activists, and writers have been commented on in the essays in both of these volumes. One wonders: Where are the rest of the women in these Protestant traditions? It seems that their role has been mostly supporting the men. The Protestant Reformers took women out of convents and placed them in households as wives and mothers. In contrast, Catholicism has produced a long line of female saints and mystics, many of whom wrote from within the convents where they had the opportunity not only to develop their own interests, talents, and spiritual insights, but, in a number of cases, to exercise community and spiritual leadership.³

In spite of the male priesthood, or perhaps because of it, femininity pervades Catholicism. Churches are named after women saints (how many Notre Dames or St. Mary’s parishes are there?). These female saints are women who also have their days of commemoration in the sanctoral calendar. Statues of the Virgin Mary and other female saints can be found in every Catholic church building around the world. If there are any statues or pictures at all in Protestant church buildings they are likely to be of

Jesus and his male disciples or the male Protestant Reformers. Otherwise the typical Protestant church building is devoid of church art. The introduction of Reformed worship in various places required the removal of images on walls and in stained glass.⁴ Protestant worship spaces have been preaching halls that project (stereotypically masculine) rationality in religion—even if congregations that gather in these spaces are served by female pastors! Among the notable types of Protestant church architecture are the New England Puritan meeting houses, Sir Christopher Wren’s neoclassical auditory churches, and the auditorium plans influenced by the camp meeting revivals (form follows function).⁵ Even Protestant churches erected in the Gothic revival of the late nineteenth century tend to be bereft of images and statues (opting instead for empty niches) except among Anglo-Catholics and high Lutherans. Bare Protestant churches contrast with the aesthetically rich Catholic and Orthodox churches, so as not to detract from the Word (which could also be the sung word). Sometimes we forget how the sacred spaces we have inhabited for worship over a long period of time have shaped our spirituality.⁶

The names of male reformers, preachers, spiritual writers, and social activists predominate in these essays on Protestant spiritual traditions, as will be evident in the index of names. But Protestantism is not lacking female reformers, preachers, spiritual writers, and activists. They should not be ignored. So I lift up here the names of some of the many Protestant women who contributed importantly to Christian spirituality and Western culture by way of providing a brief introductory overview of Protestant spirituality as a lead-in to this second volume of Protestant Spiritual Traditions and giving a fuller picture of Protestant spirituality.

Those wives and mothers of the Reformation rescued from convents contributed to the Reformation itself.⁷ Among them are Katharina von Bora Luther (1499–1552), the escaped nun who married Martin Luther; supported him in his life and work; mothered their six children; and managed the considerable amount of property and livestock (not to mention the brewery) that came with their living quarters, the Black Cloister.

Katie and Martin became the model parsonage family in Protestantism. The first woman writer of the Reformation was Argula von Grumbach née von Stauff (1492–c. 1554) of Bavaria,⁸ although she was either largely ignored or criticized at the time of the Reformation. Marie Dentière (c. 1495–1561), who was a reformer in her own right (hers is the only woman’s name on the Reformation Wall in Geneva), agitated for a greater role for women in the life and ministry of the Church of Geneva and elsewhere.⁹ Katharina Schütz Zell (1498–1562) was the publishing mother of Strasbourg, whose books were read by Luther.¹⁰ Anne Locke (c. 1530–1590) was an English Protestant exile in Geneva during the reign of Mary Tudor. She was a friend of John Knox and translated the sermons of John Calvin into English.

Martyrdom has been regarded as a high form of spirituality since the early church.¹¹ In the Reformation era there were many women martyrs among the persecuted Anabaptists who were drowned for their beliefs (see Peter Erb’s essay Anabaptist Spirituality in volume 1), English Protestants who were burned for their faith during the reign of Mary Tudor (1553–1558), and French Huguenots who were slaughtered in the streets.¹² The names of some women confessors and martyrs are known. Perhaps the most famous of the female English martyrs is Anne Askew (c. 1521–1546), a young Protestant who was tortured on the rack in the Tower of London to give the names of Protestants and burned as a heretic during the reign of Henry VIII, but who left a striking literary account of her interrogations and torture and a confession of her faith.¹³ The experience of martyrdom in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestantism was sometimes aspired to and even entered into Protestant devotional life, as when John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments became devotional reading and stoked the fires of anti-Catholicism.¹⁴ But Protestants were also made confessors and martyrs by fellow Protestants. Notable in New England are the Puritan midwife, Bible study leader, and promoter of religious freedom Anne Hutchinson (1591–1643), who was expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1538 after a heresy trial and became one of the founders of Rhode Island; and Mary Dyer (c. 1611–1660), who was one of four Quakers hanged for their faith in Boston in 1660.

Women were involved in the founding of churches and religious communities. Susanna Wesley (1669–1742) not only is known as the mother of John and Charles Wesley (and seventeen other children) but has also come to be regarded as the Methodist mother. She took up residence at the Foundry Preaching House, which served as a Methodist movement headquarters, where she influenced early Methodists with her learning and piety. Barbara Ruckle Heck (1734–1804), who is called the mother of American Methodism, organized Methodist societies in New York City in 1766, in the upper Hudson Valley in 1770, and in Canada, to which she relocated after the American Revolution because she had been a loyalist. We have not dealt with the Shakers in these volumes; their theological place within Protestant Christianity is debatable.¹⁵ They were originally a breakaway group from the Quakers in northwest England in 1747. Mother Anne Lee (1736–1784) brought the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing to America, taught its essential practice of celibacy (in anticipation of the coming kingdom of God where there shall be no marrying), and was its leader until her death. Phoebe Worrall Palmer (1807–1874) contributed to the Holiness movement as coeditor of the Path of Holiness, an important Methodist/Holiness magazine. Her influence is discussed in David Watson’s essay, Methodist Spirituality in volume 1. One of the most remarkable women in the history of Protestantism was Aimee Semple McPherson (1890–1944), who was born in Canada to Salvation Army parents; embraced Pentecostalism; went to the United States; married an Irish immigrant named Robert Semple; went with her husband to Hong Kong as a missionary; lost her husband to dysentery and became desperately ill herself; returned to America; married Harold McPherson; heard a call to preach; embarked on the revival trail; divorced her husband, who didn’t want an itinerant life; and settled in Los Angeles where she founded the Angelus Temple, a 5,300 seat Pentecostal church that opened on January 1, 1923, and was filled with followers attracted to her maternal style and narrative preaching. Her disappearance for six weeks in 1926 created national publicity. She married her third husband in 1931 and divorced a second time in 1934, after which her evangelical following beyond the Pentecostals began to wane. But she created the International Church of the Four Square Gospel with headquarters in Los Angeles and a missionary outreach around the world.¹⁶

Many Protestant women made a contribution to the renewal of society. Two heroic African American women, on whom I comment in my essay The Body, were the ex-slaves, abolitionists, and women’s rights advocates Sojourner Truth (1797–1883),¹⁷ an illiterate but powerful itinerant evangelical preacher, and Harriet Tubman (1822–1913), who made thirteen trips into slave country to help slaves escape and was called the Moses of her people. I also mention in that essay the English pioneer of modern nursing, Florence Nightingale (1820–1910), who was trained in Kaiserswerth, Germany, by some of the first to revive the nonordained caretaking role of deaconess in the nineteenth century. I also call attention in the same piece to Norwegian Lutheran deaconess Elizabeth Fedde (1850–1921), who worked among Norwegian immigrants and others in New York City. Connie Au, in her essay Pentecostal Spirituality, lifts up the name of Indian Sanskrit scholar Pandita Ramabai (1858–1922), who founded the Mukti Mission to house abandoned widows and girls, and who organized gospel bands to preach the gospel in public.

There have been many women writers of religious poetry and devotional literature. Among English-language Protestant spiritual writers were Susanna Hopton (1627–1709), a friend of the Anglican divine, poet, and mystic Thomas Traherne; her Daily Devotions, Devotions in the Modern Way, and A Collection of Meditations and Devotions were popular readings among both Protestants and Catholics. (She herself became a Catholic for a time before returning to Anglicanism.) Mary Ridgway Stockdale (1774–1854) wrote collections of poems and spiritual reflections. Her The Effusions of the Heart: Poems (1798) and The Mirror of the Mind: Poems, with an autobiography (2 vols., 1810) were published late in her life. Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941) is discussed extensively in Paul Marshall’s essay, Anglican Spirituality in volume 1. Dorothy Sayers (1893–1957) was a Christian apologist (see The Mind of the Maker and Creed or Chaos?) as well as a novelist and mystery writer (of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels). She also was a dramatist (of the BBC series on the life of Christ, The Man Born to Be King) and a poet who is often compared with G. K. Chesterton and her contemporary C. S. Lewis. (Sayers considered her translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy to be her best work.) Finally, Madeleine L’Engle (1918–2007), an Episcopalian, brought her faith into her novels and other writings (e.g., see A Wrinkle in Time and Two-Part Invention).

What would Protestant spirituality be without its hymn writers? The earliest Protestant woman hymn writer was Elizabeth Cruciger (c. 1500–1535), a friend and follower of Martin Luther in Wittenberg, whose Herr Christ der Einig Gotts Sohn (The Only Son from Heaven) is still included in Lutheran hymnals. In his essay Baptist Spirituality, Nathan Nettleton comments on the contributions of Anne Steele (1717–1778). The Victorian era was a time of prodigious hymn writing by women authors. Cecil Frances Alexander (1818–1895), born in Ireland, was a partisan of the Anglican Oxford Movement and wrote hymns that were favored among Anglo-Catholics, such as St. Patrick’s Breastplate, as well as children’s hymns such as All Creatures Bright and Beautiful and Once in Royal David’s City and contemplative songs like There Is a Green Hill Far Away. The poet Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) wrote romantic, devotional, and children’s verse, including the Christmas carols In the Bleak Midwinter and Love Came Down at Christmas. The all-time most prolific and popular hymn writer was Fanny J. Crosby (1820–1915), who wrote around eight thousand hymns (surpassing Charles Wesley). Combining the contemplative and active characteristics of Protestant spirituality, Crosby was also known for her work in rescue missions to aid the poor and sick. Catherine Winkworth (1829–1878) almost single-handedly made available in excellent English translations the large corpus of German Reformation and post-Reformation chorales and hymns and also worked to advance the cause of women’s higher education.

This is but a sampling of women who made important contributions to Protestant spirituality in its reformatory, activist, and contemplative aspects. There are, of course, hundreds of others. The gendered face of Protestantism has been changing dramatically in the last half century with the increased number of women serving in pastoral roles, teaching in theological seminaries, writing theology and spiritual books, and reimaging God by drawing on feminine images of God in the Bible. The flourishing of female spiritualities will hopefully also inspire the emergence of a mature male spirituality that is not just a reaction to gender equality and the feminist critique of patriarchy, but a retrieved sense of embodied strength and vulnerability that is lodged within the male body.¹⁸

Because these two volumes are one complete work, indexes at the end of this second volume include names and subjects for both volumes.

Bibliography

Askew, Anne. The Examination of Anne Askew. Edited by Elaine V. Beilen. Women Writers in English 1350

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Project. New York: Oxford University Press,

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Blumhofer, Edith, Aimee Semple McPherson: Everybody’s Sister. Grand Rapids: Eerd-mans,

1994

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Bouyer, Louis. The Spirituality of the New Testament and the Fathers. Translated by Mary P. Ryan. A History of Christian Spirituality

1

. New York: Desclee,

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Brown, Frank Burch. Architecture and Spirituality. In The New Westminster Diction-ary of Christian Spirituality, edited by Philip Sheldrake,

122

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Clifford, Anne. Feminist Spirituality. In The New Westminster Dictionary of Christian Spirituality, edited by Philip Sheldrake,

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Dentière, Marie. Epistle to Marguerite de Navarre; and Preface to a Sermon by John Calvin. Edited and translated by Mary B. McKinley. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

2004

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Kirk, John T. The Shaker World: Art, Life, Belief. New York: Abrams, 1997

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Kolb, Robert, Martyrs and Martyrologies. In The Encyclopedia of Protestantism, edited by Hans J. Hillerbrand,

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vols. New York: Routledge,

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L’Engle, Madeleine. Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,

1988

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———. A Wrinkle in Time. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,

1962

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Luttikhuizen, Henry. The Art of Devotion in Haarlem before and after the Introduction of Calvinism. In Worship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Change and Continuity in Religious Practice, edited by Karin Maag and John D. Witvliet,

281

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. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,

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Matheson, Peter. Argula von Grumbach (

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): A Woman before Her Time. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books,

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Pryce, Mark. Masculine Spirituality. In The New Westminster Dictionary of Christian Spirituality, edited by Philip Sheldrake,

426

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Nuth, Joan M. Women Medieval Mystics. In The New Westminster Dictionary of Christian Spirituality, edited by Philip Sheldrake,

649

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Ryrie, Alec. Being Protestant in Reformation Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press,

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Sayers, Dorothy L., trans. The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, the Florentine.

3

vols. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin,

1950–1963

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———. Creed or Chaos? New York: Harcourt Brace,

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———. The Mind of the Maker. New York: Meridian,

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Stjerna, Kirsi. Women and the Reformation. Malden, MA: Blackwell,

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Tillich, Paul. The Protestant Era. Translated with a Concluding Essay by James Luther Adams. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948

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Truth, Sojourner. They All Know Jesus! I Am So Happy. In Mystics, Visionaries, and Prophets: A Historical Anthology of Women’s Spiritual Writing, edited by Shawn Madigan,

288

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. Minneapolis: Fortress,

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White, James. F. Protestant Worship: Traditions in Transition. Louisville: Westminster John Knox,

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Zell, Katharina Schütz. Church Mother: The Writings of a Protestant Reformer in Sixteenth Century Germany. Edited and translated by Elsie McKee. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

2006

.

1

. Early Protestants at the time of the Reformation were called evangelical more than Protestant. Lutheran denominations usually have the word evangelical in their full name, although they share few of the features of churches now called evangelical.

2

. Tillich, Protestant Era, xiii–xvi.

3

. See Nuth, Women Medieval Mystics.

4

. See Luttikhuizen, Art of Devotion.

5

. White, Protestant Worship, comments on preferred worship spaces for each of the nine traditions included in his book.

6

. Brown, Architecture and Spirituality.

7

. Stjerna, Women and the Reformation.

8

. Matheson, Argula von Grumbach.

9

. Dentière, Epistle.

10

. Zell, Church Mother.

11

. Bouyer, Spirituality of the New Testament and the Fathers,

190

–

210

.

12

. Kolb, Martyrs and Martyrologies.

13

. Askew, Examination of Anne Askew.

14

. Ryrie, Being Protestant,

423

.

15

. Kirk, Shaker World.

16

. Blumhofer, Aimee Semple McPherson.

17

. Truth, They All Know Jesus!

18

. Pryce, Masculine Spirituality.

Nathan Nettleton

1. Baptist Spirituality

Among Baptists around the world, questions of identity and spirituality are hard to pin down. It is not possible to speak about the Baptist Church in the same way that one can about most other denominations. Each Baptist congregation is largely autonomous, so bodies such as the Baptist World Alliance and the various national and regional associations can neither determine the beliefs and practices of their member churches nor describe them in a way that is likely to do justice to the whole spectrum. Despite this, one still encounters firm opinions about Baptist ways of relating to God and being God’s people, and it is possible to identify family traits.

This chapter will be structured around a discussion of Baptist Identity and Baptist Distinctives and how they have been and are (or sometimes should be) expressed in practice. There are three main reasons for this choice. First, a more historical approach would be complicated by the fact that the American branch of Baptist life separated from the British branch during the first generation of Baptist life, and so we have two parallel, autonomous histories right from the start. Second, the diversity can be so extreme that it is hard to account for it in a survey or a historical sketch. Third, Baptist practices often derive from broader movements, and so by focusing on the implications of what is distinctive about Baptist identity, I hope to avoid more of the potential overlap with Glenn Hinson’s chapter on Puritan spirituality, Peter Erb’s chapter on Anabaptist spirituality, and Todd Johnson and Janna Gosselin’s chapter on evangelical spirituality in these two volumes of Protestant Spiritual Traditions.

Focusing on identity and distinctives will also enable us to sidestep some historical uncertainties. For example, the early Baptists clearly held a number of beliefs and practices in common with the Anabaptists, but historians have never settled the question of why. There is no question that the first Baptist congregation—a group of English separatist Puritans who fled into exile in Amsterdam in 1608—had contact with the Dutch Waterlander Mennonites, but did they arrive at their new convictions about believers’ baptism under the influence of that relationship, or did they make contact because they had arrived at similar beliefs? Scholarly opinion favors the latter,¹⁹ but there is not enough evidence to be certain.

We can also sidestep tricky questions about the allegiances of some key historical figures. John Smyth, the former Anglican priest who led that exiled congregation in Amsterdam, left them before their return to England in 1611 and sought to join the Mennonites. John Bunyan, whose spiritual writings were so influential, is claimed by both the Baptists and the Independents (Congregationalists) because he disliked labels other than Christian and belonged to a congregation that moved around on the issues that divided the two traditions.²⁰

Defining Baptist Identity

The choice to start with Baptist identity brings its own difficulties. Authors seeking to articulate Baptist identity frequently begin by speaking of it as a perennial problem,²¹ or even as a crisis.²² They speak of difficulties in defining what it is that constitutes being Baptist, and of a documented erosion of concern among Baptist people for those convictions that historically characterized them.²³ That erosion escalated to outright rejection in the Southern Baptist Convention, which, since the 1990s, has systematically renounced a number of the convictions historically regarded as integral to Baptist identity. That denomination has now severed its ties with the Baptist World Alliance, and so its recent history and present practice are not regarded as part of the subject matter of this essay.

Delving into the literature, it appears that one of the difficulties of defining Baptist identity is that there is no consensus about how to approach the question. Broadly speaking, there have been two main approaches. One seeks a distilled answer by looking for a center point—a vision, practice, or idea—which, once grasped, becomes the key to unlocking the whole mystery of Baptist identity. The other seeks to present a catalogue of distinct convictions, often with little attempt to explore the relationships between them. Some do allude to the importance of how they are woven together and put to work,²⁴ and others speak of a set of convictional genes that together make up the Baptist identity, an image that helps make clear that what is unique to Baptists is the set rather than just the individual convictions.²⁵ Unfortunately these two approaches have often been pitted against each other instead of related to each other. Arguably, the two approaches are simply describing different layers in the peeling of an onion, and if the onion of Baptist identity is to be understood, it is not only the layers but the relationships between them that need to be studied.

Scholars who have sought to articulate the Baptist identity by searching for an underlying vision or principle at its core have differed in their conclusions. Philip Thompson surveyed the writings of the seventeenth-century Baptists and concluded that what most distinguished them was their passion for God’s absolute freedom, affirmed as freedom from any sort of creaturely control and freedom for use of creation in redemptive work.²⁶ Thompson’s use of primary sources is extensive, and he has left little doubt that the early Baptists did burn with a passion for God’s freedom, but there is a problem with seeing this as holding the key to the Baptist movement. The early Baptists, like their Puritan and Anabaptist predecessors, were dismissive of purified orthodoxies that were not incarnated in purified discipleship and a purified church. So while a doctrine about God’s nature can underpin Baptist identity, it is not going to sufficiently explain it.

Leland Hine exegetes the covenant written by John Smyth for the first Baptist congregation, in which they identified themselves as the Lord’s free people . . . to walk in all his ways, made known or to be made known unto them, according to their best endeavors, whatever it might cost them, the Lord assisting them,²⁷ and concludes that Baptist identity finds its essence in the vision of the church as existing only in the living community of faithful saints, struggling as pilgrims to find and do God’s will.²⁸

Eric Ohlmann, although overly dismissive of such attempts to locate the essence of the Baptist movement in their views of the church,²⁹ rightly identifies an important emphasis on the imperative for each individual to personally appropriate the faith and live it out. But two key facts of early Baptist history suggest that he has gone too far when he argues that the

essence of the Baptists is thus found in a soteriology that shifted some responsibility for salvation from the institutional church and its functionaries to the individual and in particular placed a major emphasis on sanctification.³⁰ First, the highly derivative nature of early Baptist confessions of faith shows that Baptist soteriology and theology in general were held in common with the church catholic; second, the early generations of Baptists split into two branches, the General and the Particular Baptists, and the crux of their division was soteriological.³¹ They divided on Calvinist–Arminian lines over who could be saved and exactly how, so it seems unlikely that a doctrine of salvation could be the unifying essence of the movement.

Ohlmann correctly observes that the early Baptists conceived of the Christian life as a covenant relationship in which both faith and obedience were indispensable and inseparable,³² but in focusing on the individual’s relationship with God, his reading of this seems overly shaped by later notions of autonomous individualism. As Paul Fiddes has shown, early Baptist and wider Puritan thought about covenant contained multiple strands of meaning, often intentionally woven together,³³ and the wording of their congregational covenants typically express the twofold dimension of a contract made by the members ‘vertically’ with God and ‘horizontally’ with each other.³⁴

Several of these approaches demonstrate that if one cuts too deeply into the onion in search of concise essence of Baptist identity, one ends up talking about doctrinal themes that don’t sufficiently set Baptists apart from other Christians. These theological underpinnings help us to understand the Baptist vision, but it seems that it is at the level of praxis that the vision takes its distinctively Baptist shape. Informed by the strengths and weaknesses of these various approaches, I propose that the core of the Baptist identity can be described as:

a passionate commitment

to advancing the reign of God

by incarnating the body of Christ

in congregations consisting of individuals

voluntarily responding to God’s self-giving in Christ

and covenanting together to follow Jesus

in a shared life of radical obedience to the will of God

discerned together in Scripture and prayer.

This is not to suggest that only Baptists would be likely to affirm such a commitment, though it is arguable that it is not nearly as central to the mindset of other traditions as it is to that of the Baptists. This core now needs to be related to the specific convictions that arise from it before it will adequately convey what it is that makes Baptists Baptist and adequately help us unlock Baptists’ understanding of communion with God and the practical disciplines through which they live out that relationship.

That brings us to the second and perhaps more common way people have attempted to define the Baptist identity: by simply providing a catalogue of the beliefs and convictions which Baptists have either held apart from other Christians, or at least in a particular configuration or with singular emphasis.³⁵ This approach avoids the overly reductionist dangers of the first, but it typically struggles to show how the various convictions relate to one another. An adequate description of the Baptist identity requires both an identification of its essential core and an