Anglicans and Baptists in Conflict: The Bible Society, Bengal and the Baptizo Controversy

Abstract

The year 1804 was something of a watershed in British church history. In that year the British and Foreign Bible Society was founded, the first large-scale experiment in ecumenicism, uniting evangelicals of various stripes and colours in a gigantic publishing venture that would cover the globe with Bibles printed in every language known to humanity. A key ingredient that would enable various Churches to work together in this massive ecumenical enterprise was a strict rule, to which all subscribed, stating that only the Authorised Version of the Bible would be published and that these Bibles would be circulated ‘without note or comment’. This rule, known as ‘The Fundamental Principle’, was designed to protect the Bible Society from accusations that it was promoting a seditious or heterodox document. Moreover, governance of the new society would be equally divided between Churchmen and Dissenters. In this way it was hoped that Baptists and non-Baptists, Calvinists and Arminians, Dissenters and Anglicans, could forget that which divided them, and join together in publishing and distributing a book to which they all subscribed. And to a large degree the Bible Society was successful in this enterprise, circulating 4,252,000 Bibles by 1825 and uniting many denominations and Churches in the process. In the year 2004, the Bible Society will celebrate its bicentennial, still intact as an ecumenical institution.

Yet in the early years of its history, achieving consensus over the translation and distribution of the Bible proved problematic. A case in point involved Baptist and Anglican evangelicals in West Bengal, India, where ecumenical co-operation worked for a season, but only as long as certain cherished theological principles were kept sacred. Thus when these evangelicals engaged in a joint enterprise to translate the Bible into the Eastern and Oriental languages under the auspices of the Bible Society, co-operation gave way to bitter controversy over how to translate key biblical concepts sacred to each group.

This paper studies the challenges to pan-evangelical co-operation in the Bible Society through a little known episode that took place in and around Calcutta and which covered the first forty years of the Bible Society's history. It first examines the forces which brought Baptists and Anglicans together in a common quest to translate and distribute Bibles. Next it outlines the stresses and strains which this activity produced between Baptist and paedobaptist members of the Bible Society in England and between William Carey and his Anglican counterparts in India. It ends by describing the schism that resulted in the creation of the Bible Translation Society, an event which proved that the Bible could be a force for division as well as for unity. Along the way, we get a candid glimpse of interpersonal relationships between evangelical leaders of the day. They emerge not as the unsullied saints often portrayed by their official biographers, but as fallible human beings. This understanding gives us a more realistic view of the people who guided the nineteenth-century evangelical revival, both their strengths and their shortcomings.