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English Baptists and the Struggle for Theological Authority, 1642–1646

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 April 2017

MATTHEW C. BINGHAM
MATTHEW C. BINGHAM*
Affiliation:
School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics, Queen's University Belfast, 25 University Square, Belfast BT7 1PB; e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article explores interactions between Baptist lay theologians and ordained clergy during the first English civil war. Despite their marginalised position outside the national Church, Baptists employed a variety of innovative techniques to coerce ordained ministers into debates which the latter would have preferred to avoid. Though Baptists during the period did not achieve intellectual parity with the members of the Westminster Assembly and others whom they sought to influence, their efforts contributed to an ongoing transition within the early modern English Atlantic whereby religious culture was made more participatory and theological authority democratised.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 68 , Issue 3 , July 2017 , pp. 546 - 569
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

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11 For example, in his survey of public disputations, Bernard Capp analyses the period in terms of religious ‘radicals’ in conflict with representatives of a more orthodox religious culture. Though he often mentions Baptists and notes that ‘Baptists were by far the most active challengers’ during the 1640s, it is clear that his interest lies with the phenomenon of public debate per se, rather than any distinctive Baptist contribution. There is nothing wrong with this, of course, and Capp's article testifies to the value of such an approach. But it is also worth noting that by treating a more-or-less undifferentiated mass of religious ‘radicals’ as the object of one's study, one risks losing the ability to register the distinctive theological and social timbres which might otherwise distinguish any particular separatist group from the religious cacophony swirling around them: ibid. 78, 53.

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30 For example, compare the excerpted material in Lambe, A confutation of infants baptisme, 4, 5, 7 with that reproduced in Spilsbery, A treatise concerning the lawfull subject of baptisme, 1, 4, 5. These points of correspondence continue throughout the two treatises.

31 Stephen Wright identifies those discussed here as Baptists who disagreed with Spilsbery regarding the finer points of church order. But Wright was not aware of the connection between Spilsbery's treatise and the Lambe-Phillips dialogue and his identification ignores both this fact and the trans-Atlantic context in which Spilsbery set his discourse: The early English Baptists, 105.

32 Spilsbery, A treatise concerning the lawfull subject of baptisme, 43–4. Stephen Wright has argued for a more fluid relationship between Calvinistic and Arminian baptistic groups during this time period, downplaying the significance of soteriological division, and suggesting instead that, prior to 1644, ‘the lines of division were defined not by theology but by the proper method by which they should form and order their churches’. The evidence he adduces, however, is speculative and circumstantial. Moreover, Spilsbery's damning anti-Arminian comments cited here were published a year before Wright's crucial year of 1644 and directed toward the Arminian-learning Thomas Lambe, indicating that even at an earlier stage the division between the two baptistic groups was, pace Wright, very much driven by soteriological rather than ecclesiological differences: Wright, The early English Baptists, 12.

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51 Ibid.

52 These observations lend credence to the arguments of those who have attempted to locate a modified form of Habermas's ‘public sphere’ within the context of mid seventeenth-century England. See, for example, Hughes, Gangraena, 409–15; Zaret, David, Origins of democratic culture: printing, petitions, and the public sphere in early-modern England, Princeton 2000 Google Scholar; Lake, Peter and Pincus, Steve, ‘Rethinking the public sphere in early modern England’, Journal of British Studies xlv (2006), 270–92Google Scholar; Cressy, England on edge, 322; Cambers, Godly reading, 159–61; and Capp, ‘The religious marketplace’, 70–5.

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