Orthodox Radicals (Oxford Studies in

Historical Theology) Matthew C.

Bingham [Bingham
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Orthodox Radicals
 OXFORD STUDIES IN HISTORICAL THEOLOGY

Series Editor
Richard A. Muller, Calvin Theological Seminary
Founding Editor
David C. Steinmetz†
Editorial Board
Irena Backus, Université de Genève
Robert C. Gregg, Stanford University
George M. Marsden, University of Notre Dame
Wayne A. Meeks, Yale University
Gerhard Sauter, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn
Susan E. Schreiner, University of Chicago
John Van Engen, University of Notre Dame
Geoffrey Wainwright, Duke University
Robert L. Wilken, University of Virginia
READING AUGUSTINE IN THE REFORMATION
The Flexibility of Intellectual Authority in Europe, 1500–1620
Arnoud S. Q. Visser
SHAPERS OF ENGLISH CALVINISM, 1660–1714
Variety, Persistence, and Transformation
Dewey D. Wallace, Jr.
THE BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION OF WILLIAM OF ALTON
Timothy Bellamah, OP
Miracles and the Protestant Imagination
The Evangelical Wonder Book in Reformation Germany
Philip M. Soergel
THE REFORMATION OF SUFFERING
Pastoral Theology and Lay Piety in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany
Ronald K. Rittgers
CHRIST MEETS ME EVERYWHERE
Augustine’s Early Figurative Exegesis
Michael Cameron
MYSTERY UNVEILED
The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England
Paul C. H. Lim
GOING DUTCH IN THE MODERN AGE
Abraham Kuyper’s Struggle for a Free Church in the Netherlands
John Halsey Wood Jr.
CALVIN’S COMPANY OF PASTORS
Pastoral Care and the Emerging Reformed Church, 1536–1609
Scott M. Manetsch
 THE SOTERIOLOGY OF JAMES USSHER
The Act and Object of Saving Faith
Richard Snoddy
HARTFORD PURITANISM
Thomas Hooker, Samuel Stone, and Their Terrifying God
Baird Tipson
AUGUSTINE, THE TRINITY, AND THE CHURCH
A Reading of the Anti-Donatist Sermons
Adam Ployd
AUGUSTINE’S EARLY THEOLOGY OF IMAGE
A Study in the Development of Pro-Nicene Theology
Gerald Boersma
PATRON SAINT AND PROPHET
Jan Hus in the Bohemian and German Reformations
Phillip N. Haberkern
JOHN OWEN AND ENGLISH PURITANISM
Experiences of Defeat
Crawford Gribben
MORALITY AFTER CALVIN
Theodore Beza’s Christian Censor and Reformed Ethics
Kirk M. Summers
THE PAPACY AND THE CHRISTIAN EAST
A History of Reception and Rejection
Edward Siecienski
RICHARD BAXTER AND THE MECHANICAL PHILOSOPHERS
David S. Sytsma
DEBATING PERSEVERANCE
The Augustinian Heritage in Post-Reformation England
Jay T. Collier
THE REFORMATION OF PROPHECY
Early Modern Interpretations of the Prophet & Old Testament Prophecy
G. Sujin Pak
ANTOINE de CHANDIEU
The Silver Horn of Geneva’s Reformed Triumvirate
Theodore Van Raalte
ORTHODOX RADICALS
Baptist Identity in the English Revolution
Matthew C. Bingham
 Orthodox Radicals
Baptist Identity in the English Revolution

MATTHEW C. BINGHAM
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bingham, Matthew C., 1983– author.
Title: Orthodox radicals : Baptist identity in the English revolution / Matthew C. Bingham.
Description: New York, NY, United States of America : Oxford University Press, [2019] |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Description based on print version record and
CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018016553 (print) | LCCN 2018041640 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190912376 (updf) | ISBN 9780190912383 (epub) |
ISBN 9780190912390 (online content) | ISBN 9780190912369 (cloth : acid-free paper) |
Subjects: LCSH: Baptists—Great Britain—History—17th century. |
Great Britain—History—Puritan Revolution, 1642–1660. |
Great Britain—Church history—17th century. | Identification (Religion)
Classification: LCC BX6276 (ebook) | LCC BX6276.B56 2019 (print) |
DDC 286/.14209032—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018016553
For Shelley
 Contents

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations Used in the Notes

Introduction
1. The Jessey Circle and the Invention of Baptist Identity
2. Baptists Along the Congregational Way
3. “Between Us and the Compleat Anabaptists”: Reframing Sacramentology in
Light of Ecclesiology
4. “Opposite to the Honour of God” No Longer: Rehabilitating “Anabaptism”
in Cromwellian England
5. “Years of Freedome, by God’s Blessing Restored”: Baptistic Self-Identity
during the Interregnum
Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index
 Acknowledgments

It is a great joy to be able to thank the many individuals and institutions that
have made the completion of this book possible. Pride of place must go to
Crawford Gribben, a superlative doctoral adviser and a continual source of
guidance and encouragement. For his generous investment of time, expertise,
and enthusiasm, I am deeply appreciative. I am also most grateful to Alec Ryrie
and Chris Marsh, for their perceptive observations on the work’s argument and
scope. Likewise, I am grateful to the anonymous readers commissioned by
Oxford University Press for their insightful feedback on the manuscript. For
their incisive comments on portions of the text, I would like to thank Scott
Dixon, Ian Campbell, Andrew Holmes, Jim Davison, Daniel Ritchie, Colin
Armstrong, and Sam Manning. My thinking has also been stimulated and
sharpened through conversations with Larry Kreitzer, Joel Halcomb, Jim
Renihan, Sam Renihan, Michael Haykin, Ariel Hessayon, Robert Strivens,
Austin Walker, Alan Argent, Robert Oliver, Kathleen Lynch, Jeremy Walker,
Scott Spurlock, Tim Somers, Reagan Marsh, Harrison Perkins, David Whitla,
and Todd Rester.
I am grateful to Queen’s University Belfast and the School of History,
Anthropology, Politics and Philosophy for both helping to fund the research that
led to this monograph and providing an intellectual atmosphere congenial to its
completion. For their generous assistance, I am grateful to the staff at the Angus
Library, Dr. Williams’s Library, the McClay Library, the library of the Irish
Baptist College, and the Gamble Library. Many thanks are also due to Cynthia
Read, Drew Anderla, and all at OUP who have supported this book and have
helped bring it to fruition.
Finally, I would like to thank the many colleagues, friends, and family
members whose encouragement and warmth has ensured that the years spent
working on this project will be remembered with fondness. I am particularly
grateful to my colleagues in #11 University Square for their fun and good
humor, and to Gareth Burke for his unflagging support and wisdom. An
incalculable debt is owed to my parents, Gordon and Lisa Bingham, for a
lifetime of love and nurture. It is also with great affection that I thank for their
support my sister Jamie Gleason, my father and mother-in-law, Gary and Nancy
Campbell, and, of course, my children, Amelia, John, and James. But above all
others, I am grateful to my wife, Shelley, whose company is a delight and to
whom this book is dedicated.
 Abbreviations Used in the Notes

NB: Unless otherwise indicated, the place of publication is London, and biblical
references correspond to the Authorized Version of 1611.
BHH Baptist History and Heritage
BQ Baptist Quarterly
CH Church History
CJ Commons’ Journals
CSPD Calendar of State Papers, Domestic
DWL Dr Williams’s Library, London
EED Champlin Burrage, The Early English Dissenters in the Light of Recent Research (1550–1641)
(2 vols., Cambridge, 1912)
EHR English Historical Review
HJ Historical Journal
HLQ Huntington Library Quarterly
JEH Journal of Ecclesiastical History
LJ Lords’ Journals
ODNB H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, eds., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford,
2004)
P&P Past & Present
RSTC W. A. Jackson, J. F. Ferguson, and F. F. Pantzer, eds., A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed
in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475–1640 (2nd ed.,
1986–1991)
TBHS Transactions of the Baptist Historical Society
Wing Donald G. Wing, ed., Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland,
Wales, and British America . . . 1641–1700 (2nd ed., 5 vols., New York, 1972–1994)
 Introduction

MID-SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND was a theological hothouse. As rapidly

escalating political and religious tension during the early 1640s weakened and
eventually collapsed the protective bulwarks of episcopacy and print censorship,
a host of innovators seized upon the opportunity to introduce new religious ideas
and movements. Many of these novelties died along with the revolutionary
fervor out of which they grew. But some of the new groups persisted, and of
those more hearty species, arguably the most successful has been the Baptists. In
2009, for instance, an international gathering of self-identified Baptists involved
representatives from 214 organizations spread across 120 nations.1 According to
one recent estimate, the United States alone boasts some 37 million people
claiming membership in Baptist churches.2 This impressive international
expansion contrasts sharply with many of the other religious groups that
developed out of the same mid-seventeenth-century English milieu but withered
rapidly thereafter.
And yet, it would seem that this very success has obscured key aspects of the
group’s early modern origins: for by enduring and expanding, Baptists were able
to write their own history and to control and shape their historiographical legacy
in a way that more ephemeral early modern contemporaries were not. Diggers,
Muggletonians, and Ranters still await their denominational champions, but self-
conscious Baptist-historians, by contrast, have been writing their own story for
some three hundred years. As a result, historians whose ostensible aim is to
better understand seventeenth-century England have often been unduly and
unknowingly influenced by a legacy of denominational historians whose desire
to tell their own “Baptist story” has sometimes been pursued at the expense of
fidelity to the early modern record. Historical accounts of early English Baptists
have thus struggled to accurately locate their subjects within the wider cultural
and religious landscape of revolutionary England. This book will clarify this
confusion and reconfigure our understanding of both early modern English
Baptists and the multilayered seventeenth-century contexts out of which they
emerged. For when such careful attention is paid to interpreting early English
Baptists in their own historical context, rather than that of later denominational
writers, one finds that the seventeenth-century “Baptist story” is not nearly as
neat and tidy as some authors would suggest. Indeed, Baptist identity during the
mid-seventeenth century was contested, confused, and deeply vexed, a
contention perhaps best introduced through an incident that occurred late in
1645.
On December 3, 1645, a “Publike Dispute” was scheduled to take place at the
St. Mary Aldermanbury parish church in London. Several months before, a
prominent local merchant had begun to have “some doubts . . . arise in his
minde” regarding the “different doctrines and Administrations of Baptisme” then
being “publickely held forth both in preaching and practice,” finding himself
torn between the long-standing orthodox opinion that baptism could rightly be
administered to infants, and the new idea then being spread that the sacrament
should be reserved exclusively for “believers, who made profession of faith, and
manifest the fruits of repentance.” Which view, he wondered, was “more
agreeable to the Scriptures?” For the merchant, the question was freighted with a
sense of personal urgency—his wife was “great with childe” and the couple
would soon need to decide whether to present the infant at the parish font.3
The fact that the merchant was able to consider this question reflected wider
cultural and political changes that had swept across the entire nation. Before the
1640s, almost no one in his position would have asked such questions, and had
the odd eccentric managed to do so, he would have been forcefully and even
violently suppressed.4 But the merchant’s world had dramatically changed. By
the mid-1640s, the established church had effectively collapsed and the state was
riven by civil war. One consequence was the transformation of London’s once
well-ordered religious life into a “jungle of Protestant exotica.”5 It was a space
in which laypeople could challenge clerical authority in unprecedented ways,
and in which many aspects of the old religious order were abruptly made subject
to renegotiation and change. To the self-perceived guardians of orthodoxy, such
developments were deeply menacing. Contemporary chroniclers of heresy and
error described the “very miserable times” in which they lived, times in which
“so many of all conditions” were “given over to beleeve lies” and “to be
inveigled with the hypocrisie of seducing spirits.”6
But for the London merchant, and others like him, the new opportunity for
laypeople to question received dogma was justified by the divinely ordained
mandate “to try all things, and hold fast that which is good.”7 So, like the noble
Bereans, he “searched the Scriptures daily,” looking for an answer to his
question about baptism.8 After reaching the end of his own resources, “he
earnestly desired, and at length . . . obtained a conference and private
disputation” between a group of paedobaptist presbyterian ministers led by
Edmund Callamy and a group of three baptistic ministers, Benjamin Coxe,
William Kiffen, and Hanserd Knollys. During the private meeting, the two sides
discussed the issue “at the Merchants own house” for some time, but he did not
“receiv[e] satisfaction touching the lawfulnesse of baptizing the Infants of
Believers.” This led to the scheduling of another, more formal confrontation,
now at the parish church, in which the presbyterians were to publicly debate the
three baptistic ministers.9 As it happens, concern over potentially unruly crowds
ensured that the debate never actually took place. But despite the cancellation,
the incident captures a sense of the possibility and vitality with which the
religious milieu of revolutionary England had been rapidly infused. As formal
constraints were lifted, theological experimentation proliferated and the result
was a growing number of individuals who became public champions of novel
ideas and movements.
The baptistic participants in the Aldermanbury debate, Benjamin Coxe,
William Kiffen, and Hanserd Knollys, were three such individuals. Their
involvement in the disputation both reflected and furthered an ongoing public re-
evaluation of baptism, and subsequent historians have been quick to cite the
incident as an example of “Baptists” promoting their distinctive views. When
scholars mention the debate, the unstated assumption is that Coxe, Kiffen, and
Knollys represented an imagined community of “Baptists”—that is to say, a
group of religious fellow-travelers who would have identified one another as
such on the basis of a shared set of distinctive beliefs and practices.10 But this
standard interpretation is not convincing. For despite the ubiquitous assertion
that the participants were clearly “Baptists,” it is not at all clear that Kiffen,
Knollys, and Coxe would have self-identified as being included within this
category. Instead, the three men struggled to settle on a consistent, coherent self-
descriptor. In the Declaration, the three “Baptists” never referred to themselves
by that or any other name, but instead defined themselves only in terms of what
they were not, as in as “we (who are falsely called Anabaptists)” or “us, and our
Brethren, called Anabaptists.” Although they vehemently rejected the
“Anabaptist” label as a scurrilous term of abuse foisted upon them by their
opponents, they apparently felt compelled to use it, again and again, perhaps
worrying that if they failed to do so, they would not be recognized at all. Kiffen,
Coxe, and Knollys believed they had rediscovered important truths and were
eager to “to publish [their ideas] to the view of the world,” but they were far less
sure about how, exactly, to describe them.11
Such linguistic ambiguity reflected an inherently tenuous, contested, awkward
sense of self-identity among the group that historians have recognized as mid-
seventeenth-century “Particular Baptists.” In the early 1640s, and for some time
thereafter, members of this group did not know what to call themselves because
they were not quite sure what they were. Yet, much of the secondary literature
that purports to describe and explain this group expresses no such diffidence.
The relevant historiography portrays those attacking paedobaptism at the
disputation unambiguously as “Baptists.” These Baptists and the churches they
represented are often viewed reflexively as links in a denominational chain,
stretching back to at least the early seventeenth-century and winding its way
forward into the present day. This book challenges that understanding by
presenting a significant reinterpretation of the group known by historians as
Particular or Calvinistic Baptists during the English Revolution and the
Interregnum. As we explore their origins, ideas, and development, I will argue
that many of those presently described in the literature as “Baptists” were
actually far closer in their theological affinities and relational networks to the
more mainstream paedobaptistic congregationalists or independents. The label
“Baptist,” as we shall see, is unhelpful and obscures rather than clarifies. “We
have repeatedly been warned against the dangers and potential anachronism of
denominational labeling,” cautions J. C. Davis, “but we find it hard to give the
practice up.”12 He is correct, and nowhere more so than with respect to early
English Baptists. As the proceeding chapters will demonstrate, by projecting
later denominational categories on to early modern actors, we distort our
understanding of both the individuals we study and the period as a whole. This
book will both consider the ways in which these distortions have unfolded and
point toward a more helpful interpretation of Baptists during the mid-
seventeenth century. Along the way, it will contribute not only to the
historiography of early modern “Baptists,” but also to the literature documenting
religious and cultural change during England’s calamitous mid-seventeenth
century.

I
The historiography of religion during England’s Revolution and Interregnum is
vast. This abundance of scholarly output reflects the striking degree to which
religious ideas and practices both permeated the whole of early modern society
and catalyzed the mid-seventeenth century’s larger political and social
changes.13 “The English Revolution,” writes John Coffey, “was a theological
crisis, a struggle over the identity of British Protestantism.”14 Thus, in addition
to the work of scholars directly studying religious expression, the student of
Stuart history quickly discovers that the interpenetration of religion, culture, and
politics during this period was so thoroughgoing that whatever subject one
examines, doctrine and piety are always close at hand. Indeed, just as Peter Lake
has said that “to review the historiography of Puritanism is to review the history
of early modern England,” surely the reverse is true as well: one cannot grasp
the historiography of early modern England without also taking hold of
England’s religion along the way.15
Yet, amid this historiographical profusion, seventeenth-century Baptist groups
—that is, those dissenting sects operating outside of the established Church of
England and practicing believer’s baptism—have not received the attention one
might expect. In 1984, Barry Reay and J. F. McGregor observed that despite the
“considerable literature” on so-called radical religion16 in revolutionary England,
Baptists remained “a group curiously neglected by historians.”17 Two decades
later, David Como offered a remarkably similar assessment, listing controversy
over infant baptism as an area “of intra-puritan conflict” that has “not been
properly explored in the existing literature.”18 In the decade following Como’s
evaluation, some historians have begun to investigate that territory, but vast
swathes remain uncharted.19
For much of the modern period, those looking for sustained historical analysis
of seventeenth-century English Baptists had to content themselves with either
broader studies of radical religion or narrative histories that spoke on behalf of
the tradition they described. This latter method has been termed denominational
history, and its first practitioner among Baptist writers was the London historian
and Baptist deacon Thomas Crosby (d. in or after 1749).20 In his four-volume
History of the English Baptists (1738–1740), Crosby self-consciously
positioned himself as both an heir to and a guardian of the theological tradition
about which he wrote. As a result, he often presented apologetic readings of
historical events and hagiographical treatments of major figures.21 Crosby’s
successors adopted a similar posture and deliberately used their historical labors
to encourage their contemporary ecclesiastical communities. Joseph Ivimey, for
example, began his own History of the English Baptists (1811) by declaring his
desire to be “useful to the denomination to which he considers it an honor to
belong, by exciting them to a zealous imitation of the virtues of their
ancestors.”22
 Beyond such denominational histories, early and mid-twentieth-century
scholarship often considered seventeenth-century Baptists only insofar as they
impinged upon broader narratives of early modern English dissent. A common
thread linking such studies is their willingness to amalgamate under a single
conceptual category all religious expression that stood outside of the national
church. By using generic labels such as “dissent,” “separatism,” and “radical
religion,” a variety of different movements, congregations, and individuals can
be treated in aggregate as a coherent object of historical inquiry.23
More recent work has considered English Baptists directly, and scholars such
as Murray Tolmie, Michael Watts, J. F. McGregor, and B. R. White have
provided helpful, although sometimes derivative, narrative histories of Baptist
activity during the 1640s and 1650s.24 But the most important contribution to the
field has easily been Stephen Wright’s study of The Early English Baptists,
1603–49 (2006).25 The historiographic significance of Wright’s work is twofold.
First, over the past three decades, Wright’s has been the only substantial, critical,
overarching, monograph-length account to focus exclusively on seventeenth-
century English Baptists. Second, Wright’s analysis challenges longstanding
assumptions regarding the relationship between the Calvinistic Particular
Baptists and the Arminian-influenced General Baptists. Historians prior to
Wright had largely maintained that “General Baptists had no sense of common
purpose with the Particular Baptists and their Calvinist predestinarian
orthodoxy.”26 Yet, Wright argues that Particular and General Baptists did not, in
fact, begin as separate and distinct groups, but rather grew apart in response to
political circumstances beyond their control. In advancing this argument, Wright
calls into question many of the most basic interpretive assumptions that had
framed the earlier accounts of Tolmie, McGregor, and White.
The first chapter of this book will examine key aspects of Wright’s work in
greater depth, but for our present purpose, we must simply note that despite the
significance of Wright’s research, he has still left many relevant areas
unexplored. First, Wright’s challenge to previous historiography only affects
how Particular Baptist self-identity ought to be understood prior to the 1644
confession. He affirms that after the document’s publication “the seven London
churches emerged as a self-conscious Particular Baptist denomination,” leaving
to future historians the analysis of that “self-conscious” group. Second, the
narrative history presented in The Early English Baptists concerns itself far
more with diachronic progression than with any sort of holistic, theologically,
and culturally nuanced analysis of the Particular Baptists as such. And third,
Wright ends his narrative in 1649, leaving unaddressed Particular Baptist
activity and identity during the Interregnum. But beyond those areas that Wright
left unexplored, it is also significant that no subsequent scholarship has yet
attempted to critique or challenge Wright’s provocative thesis, a silence which
the present volume intends to fill.

III
Given its important place within the relevant historiography, it is surprising that
Wright’s book has gone almost completely unanswered and unchallenged.27
This lack of substantive interaction reflects, in part, the fact that most scholarly
attention given to seventeenth-century English Baptists, both before and after the
publication of Wright’s book, has been directed toward quite specific studies
rather than overarching, holistic analysis. Much recent work has been organized
thematically, investigating either individual personalities or specific cultural and
theological issues. Examples in the first category include significant biographies
of the Particular Baptists Hanserd Knollys28, Benjamin Keach,29 and Hercules
Collins,30 the General Baptist Thomas Grantham,31 and the more well-known,
but less easily categorized, John Bunyan.32 Other works more overtly blend
biography and historical theology by researching an individual’s thought and
influence on specific doctrinal debates.33 In his innovative five-volume project
entitled William Kiffen and His World (2010–2015), Larry Kreitzer offers
close-readings and critical editions of key primary sources relating to the life of
the Particular Baptist leader William Kiffen.34 In addition to these more
extensive projects, numerous articles and shorter pieces have examined the
history of seventeenth-century Baptists through a biographical lens.35 While
these often rigorously researched studies do provide useful insights into larger
questions of group identity, their central preoccupation with specific lives
necessarily limits and qualifies their contribution to that debate.
Other studies of seventeenth-century Baptists have been organized
thematically rather than biographically. The role of women in Baptist churches,
for example, has received significant attention, most notably from Rachel
Adcock in her historical and literary analysis of Baptist Women’s Writings in
Revolutionary Culture, 1640–1680 (2015).36 Many of these thematic studies
have focused on specific doctrinal issues and theological controversies, and
during the past two decades, historians have examined how Baptists approached
worship,37 Christology,38 ecclesiology,39 covenantal theology,40 and
eschatology41. T. L. Underwood’s Primitivism, Radicalism and the Lamb’s
War (1997) exemplifies this doctrinal approach through an innovative analysis
of mid-seventeenth-century doctrinal debates between Baptists and Quakers.42
Thus, despite this wide-ranging research, there is still no holistic,
theologically sensitive yet historically rigorous study of mid-seventeenth-century
Particular Baptists. Although aspects of their history and thought have been
treated, the overarching question of their theological and religious self-identity
in regards to other contemporary religious groups has not been subject to
sustained, critical inquiry. Existing scholarship disproportionately attends to
events prior to the Interregnum and dilutes the corporate-focus on Particular
Baptists by either splitting attention among various other separatist groups, or
looking so closely at specific personalities and controversies that one can no
longer appreciate the entire picture. Furthermore, much work done on English
Baptists suffers from a failure to balance historical and theological concern and a
tendency to conflate and thus distort the distinct identities of various baptistic
groups operating in seventeenth-century England. The present volume will
challenge long-standing assumptions within Baptist historiography and offer a
major reinterpretation of Particular or Calvinistic Baptist self-identity during the
English Revolution and Interregnum.

IV
This book explores the lives and ideas of English Calvinistic Baptists through a
series of interlocking, thematic studies. And although I have not attempted a
traditional narrative history of early modern English Baptists, the chapters do
progress, roughly, in chronological order, beginning in the first three chapters
with the origins of Baptist groups during the 1630s and 1640s, and then
proceeding in chapters 4 and 5 to examine how those same groups responded to
the rather different political and cultural environment of the 1650s. In this way, I
hope to have conveyed a sense of change and development over time despite
having eschewed a standard, diachronic narrative account. These structural
decisions reflect my judgment that a coherent narrative of English Baptists as
such during the mid-seventeenth century is neither possible nor desirable, and
that any attempt to tell such a story will inevitably distort both the individuals
under investigation and the wider historical context in which they lived.
Chapter 1 introduces the men and women commonly described in standard
histories as “Particular Baptists,” surveying their origins, formation, and early
attempts at ecclesiastical organization. But, more importantly, the chapter also
examines in some depth the development of Baptist historiography and the ways
in which the deliberate distortions of early Baptist historians continue to
influence present scholarship. While helpful in many respects, much of this early
historiography was written, to paraphrase Herbert Butterfield, with one eye very
much fixed upon the present.43 The result was the construction of an unhelpful
historiographical paradigm that continues to surreptitiously function as the
normative framework within which early modern English Baptists are
considered.
After deconstructing this rarely examined history of Baptist history, chapter 2
will advance a more helpful way of viewing the subject. It suggests that so-
called Particular Baptists during the mid-seventeenth century can be more
helpfully regarded as a baptistic variation on the more mainstream
congregational movement then developing on both sides of the Atlantic. To this
end, the chapter introduces the term “baptistic congregationalists,” a neologism
that serves both to avoid anachronistic projection and to more closely connect
“Baptists” during the English Revolution with the congregational religious
culture out of which they emerged. The chapter will substantiate this link by
demonstrating the manifold relational ties that bound baptistic congregationalists
to their mainstream paedobaptistic counterparts.
All of this, however, leaves a fundamental question unaddressed: why did so
many congregationalists begin to reject paedobaptism during the late 1630s and
early 1640s? Chapter 3 addresses this question directly. Most standard accounts
of English Baptists either dismiss this inquiry as unhelpful speculation or as a
question that finds an obvious and rather uninteresting answer in an appeal to
Baptist biblicism. But chapter 3 argues that while such explanations contain
elements of truth, they are superficial and ultimately unsatisfying. Instead, one
must reconstruct the shifting ideological context in which the rejection of
paedobaptism rather abruptly became intellectually plausible for many otherwise
orthodox puritan-types, and, in so doing, provide a more nuanced explanation of
why these changes occurred when and how they did. The chapter will root the
rejection of paedobaptism in the prior embrace of a congregational ecclesiology,
thus serving to both explain the emergence of baptistic congregationalists while
also reinforcing the historical connection drawn in chapter 2 between “Baptists”
and more mainstream congregationalists.
Chapter 4 begins the second major movement of this book and thus represents
a shift in both chronology and thematic emphasis. Chronologically, our study
moves, broadly, from the 1640s to the 1650s—from Revolution to Interregnum.
Thematically, the latter two chapters attempt to take the interpretive framework
developed in the first three and use it as a lens through which to better
understand historical developments during the Interregnum. In other words,
chapters 1 to 3 function as a unit, the purpose of which is to explain and defend
the decision to reclassify mid-seventeenth-century “Particular Baptists” as
“baptistic congregationalists.” Chapters 4 and 5 then assume the legitimacy of
that reclassification project and test its validity by applying its insights to
baptistic activity during the 1650s.
Chapter 4 serves this end by re-examining the position of Baptists in relation
to the Cromwellian regime. Historians often note that Cromwell extended
religious liberty to Baptists, but, I argue, the significance of this fact has been
obscured by an unacknowledged sense of denominational teleology. By
recognizing this and viewing Baptists within the more nuanced framework
developed in chapters 1 through 3, we are able to better understand both the
extent of religious liberty under Cromwell and why it took the particular shape
that it did.
If chapter 4 is concerned, broadly, with how baptistic congregationalists were
viewed from without—that is, how they were understood by the Cromwellian
regime—then chapter 5 considers, broadly, how baptistic congregationalists
during the same period were viewed from within—that is, how they understood
themselves. The 1650s provided space for baptistic congregationalists to pursue
their ecclesiastical agenda relatively free from the state persecution that had
trailed them prior to the Interregnum. Although standard histories portray 1650s
“Particular Baptists” as a more-or-less unified movement, chapter 5 will
demonstrate that the reality was far more complicated, and that so-called
Particular Baptists were actually evolving along two rather divergent, mutually
exclusive paths. Such reflections both complicate our understanding of
Interregnum religion and further undermine the too-hasty application of
denominational labels during the period.
Finally, a brief concluding section will consider how the book’s central
argument might impinge more broadly upon the widespread historiographical
assumption that one can appropriately and coherently describe a distinctive
“Baptist” identity during the English Revolution and Interregnum.
Many readers will perhaps be surprised that this book does not contain a
chapter devoted to the so-called General Baptists. These Arminian-influenced
baptistic separatists also developed and grew during the English Revolution and
it would seem eminently reasonable for a book like Orthodox Radicals to
consider them in some detail. But while the present volume does closely analyze
the relationship between soteriology and baptistic identity, it does not contain an
extended treatment of the “General Baptists” as such. This omission is
intentional. First, to adequately locate the “General Baptists” within their social,
relational, and theological contexts would require a far longer book and rather
different book.44 But second, and more importantly, to consider “General
Baptists” alongside “Particular Baptists” would be incongruent with the basic
argument presented in this book.
One of the primary tasks of Orthodox Radicals is to discourage the reflexive
assumption that a book on mid-seventeenth century “Baptists” should naturally
contain descriptions of all the various “kinds of Baptists”—much in the way that
a book on cake should be sure to treat carrot, sponge, and Lemon Chiffon. This
book does not treat the various “kinds of Baptists” during the English Revolution
because, as I argue throughout what follows, at that time, there were not any
“kinds of Baptists.” The very category “Baptist” was an eighteenth-century
development and to impose it upon the mid-seventeenth century is to think
anachronistically about the past. The habit of describing any and all who reject
paedobaptism as “Baptists” may or may not be a coherent way to taxonomize
believers in later periods, but, as this book will demonstrate, it does not help us
to better understand debates over baptism during the English Revolution. Were
the present volume to include a chapter on the “General Baptists,” it would thus
serve only to undermine the work’s overarching thesis by implying that so-called
General and Particular Baptists were really just two species of the same genus.
The labels with which we describe the past inevitably presuppose and project
an interpretation of that past. But these embedded interpretations are almost
always implicit rather than explicit and often inherited from historiographical
predecessors rather than chosen with intention and care. “Religious labels,” as
Alec Ryrie has observed, can create especially acute difficulties, “because they
imply the coherence or even existence of a particular group when that may not
be obvious.”45 It is not at all obvious that the labels affixed to mid-seventeenth-
century “Baptists” have helped to clarify the self-identity of the men and women
they purport to describe. This book will explain how this mislabeling occurred,
how it has skewed our understanding of the period, and how we might begin to
think differently.
 1
The Jessey Circle and the Invention of Baptist Identity

UPON ENTERING THE House of Commons on January 29, 1646, Members of

Parliament were greeted by an unwelcome surprise. Two men, Samuel
Richardson and Benjamin Cox, stood outside the door, accosting entrants and
handing each one a small pamphlet. Inside the assembly room, after morning
prayers were said and thanks offered for two sermons recently delivered, the
disrupting pamphleteers were brought to the attention of the house. The Sergeant
at Arms was called upon to arrest Richardson and Cox and state censors were
ordered to “take diligent Care to suppress” the little book distributed earlier that
morning.1 The cause of the uproar was titled “A Confession of Faith of Seven
Congregations or Churches of Christ in London, Which Are Commonly, but
Unjustly, Called Anabaptists.”2 This confession was an explicit act of self-
promotion, its authors keenly aware of their need to “unfainedly declare . . . what
wee teach” so as to rebut the “many hainous accusations unjustly and falsly laid
against us.”3 Indeed, the pages distributed in January 1646 represented a
“corrected and enlarged” edition of a confession published two years earlier
under a similar name.4 Revisions had been made, at least in part, in an attempt to
impress the more zealous defenders of religious orthodoxy among the Parliament
and Assembly of Divines, the hope being that perhaps the confession’s
signatories might be tolerated by the establishment if only the reasonableness of
their doctrine was more fully known. Reconciliation, however, was not
forthcoming. The hard-line Presbyterian clergy were not impressed by the
document’s attempt to conform to acceptable theological standards, a reception
cynically summarized by Daniel Featley: “they cover a little rats-bane in a great
quantity of sugar, that it may not be discerned.”5 The image of Richardson and
Cox standing outside the door looking in thus becomes a picture of the
movement they represented: the signatories of the “Anabaptist” confession
standing outside of a theological mainstream from which they felt wrongly
excluded, grasping at a legitimacy that was not to be granted.
 If Richardson and Cox had hoped to win a sympathetic hearing from
parliament that morning, they were surely disappointed. But the document they
distributed did not go away, nor did the ideas championed within its pages. This
chapter will review the events that preceded the initial publication of the 1644
“Anabaptist” confession, and then consider one of the most vexing
complications that inevitably surfaces when later interpreters have attempted to
explain those events. Namely, this chapter will analyze the self-identity of the
1644/1646 signatories by re-evaluating the most common label affixed to them
by historians, “Particular Baptists.” But before arriving there, we must first
attend to the events that led to the controversy outside the assembly hall.

I
Had a curious member of parliament leafed through the papers thrust into his
palm, he might have been struck by a common thread linking several of the more
prominent names which appeared at the end of the document: a large number of
the signatories were connected with the semi-separatist London church founded
by Henry Jacob in 1616. Under the successive leadership of Jacob (c. 1563–
1624),6 John Lothropp (1584–1653),7 and Henry Jessey (1601–1663),8 this
church dominated London independency and “appears to have accounted for
most of the organized separatist activity in London before the revolution.”9
Given this high profile, it is perhaps unsurprising that the Jacob church was also
remarkably fecund, spawning multiple offshoots, including most of London’s
leading Calvinistic, baptistic churches.10 Of the thirteen 1644 signatories, at least
five—William Kiffen, John Spilsbery, Thomas Shepherd, Thomas Munden, and
Thomas Kilcop—can be directly connected to the Jacob church and its
offshoots.11 To these five, one can add Hanserd Knollys, who had clear links to
the Jacob-Lothropp-Jessey circle but only signed the revised version of the
confession in 1646.12 Given how few traces remain from what was, for much of
its history, an illegal movement, the strength of this association becomes both an
impressive testimony to the influence of Jacob’s congregation on London
separatism, and an important clue as to the theological orientation of the seven
London “Anabaptist” churches.
Knowledge of the splits and realignments within the Jacob church was
preserved through the historical labors of Benjamin Stinton (1676–1719).13
Stinton was the son-in-law of prominent Particular Baptist minister and author
Benjamin Keach (1640–1704).14 After Keach’s death, Stinton succeeded him as
minister of the congregation in Horselydown, Southwark, and began in 1711 to
assemble materials for an eventual history of Baptists in England. Stinton died
before he could complete his historical project, but his transcriptions of
otherwise unavailable source documents survived him and have become the
standard source for reconstructing the key events of the period.15
Three of these documents are relevant to our present purpose. First, a text
which has come to be known as the “Jessey Memoranda” describes the origin
and growth through 1641 of the Jacob-Lothropp-Jessey church, an “Antient
Congregation of Dissenters from w[hi]ch many of ye Independant & Baptist
churches in London took their first rise.”16 Secondly, there is the so-called
Kiffen Manuscript,17 a record that B. R. White has described as “the most
important single document now in existence relating to the origins of the English
Particular or Calvinistic Baptists.”18 The Kiffen Manuscript briefly narrates how
some fifty-three members of the Jacob church, by then under the leadership of
Henry Jessey, were baptized by immersion. Thirdly, Stinton’s repository
contains “An Account of divers Conferences, held in ye Congregation of w[hi]ch
Mr Henry Jessey was Pastor, about Infant baptism.” Allegedly transcribed from
Henry Jessey’s journal, this document narrates a 1643 debate among members
and friends of Jessey’s church, a debate that began with Hanserd Knollys’
hesitation to baptize his own child and ended with Knollys and some thirty-two
others leaving the church to worship in baptistic congregations.19
Largely on the strength of these documents, a generation of historians have
reconstructed the emergence of the seven London churches, chronicling how the
various divisions and splits within the Jacob-Lothropp-Jessey church evidenced
increasing radicalism and a diminishing appetite for the compromising semi-
separatist attitude upon which Jacob had founded the church after returning from
the Netherlands in 1616.20 Unlike the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean
separatists who “separated from puritanism as well as from the Church of
England,” Jacob’s church strengthened its position within the London separatist
movement by offering disaffected puritans an alternative to the national church
that was relatively untainted by the more colorful and heretical elements of
English radical religion.21 This mediating stance between radical separatism and
full capitulation to the demands of an increasingly aggressive national church
was an ecclesial innovation which helped Jacob’s church avoid the isolation that
beset a previous generation of English separatists and in time became “the model
for the Independent gathered churches of the future,” including the seven
London churches of 1644.22
As elucidated in a 1616 confession of faith, Jacob’s new London church was
not determined to sever all links with the parish churches and their ministers.
Instead, Jacob drew a clear distinction between the national church as such and
the individual congregations operating within it. By distinguishing the whole
from its constituent parts, Jacob and his followers could condemn the unbiblical
nature of the former while recognizing the essential legitimacy of the latter. With
respect to the idea of the national church, or indeed any national church
considered as such, Jacob and his followers were clear that “no such church . . .
is found in all the new Testament.” And yet, the people worshipping within the
parish structure were “true visible Christians with us” and their assemblies were
“true visible politicall [i.e. institutional] Churches in some respect and degree.”23
This grant of legitimacy flowed from Jacob’s recognition that although local
parish churches were embedded within an overarching episcopal framework that
he repudiated, many of them often operated to a large extent according to the
congregational principles that Jacob identified as biblically normative. Insofar as
the local parish church could be considered as an individual entity, conceptually
separated from the overarching parish structure, these local congregations met
Jacob’s definition of a true church:
Wee believe that the nature & essence of Christs true visible (that is, politicall) Church under the
Gospell is a free congregation of Christians for the service of God, or a true spirituall bodie politike
coteyning no more ordinary Congregations but one, and that independent.24

The parish churches did not, of course, meet this definition in every respect—
hence, in part, the need for separating from them in the first place—and yet, they
were not so far removed from what Jacob identified as the biblical pattern as to
require a complete repudiation.25 To completely break from what remained
essentially true churches was neither required nor desirable, and those who did
so would be guilty of sinful schism. In this way, by refusing to completely deny
ecclesial validity to the parish churches, Jacob created the possibility and even
the obligation for his followers to “communicate also with them on occasion,”
the understood caveat being that “in such communicating wee countenance out
no evill thing in them.”26 By the time of the English revolution, some were using
the term “semi-separatism” to describe the various attempts at reaching a via
media between complete separation and full parish communion.27 This novel
descriptor can help explain both Jacob’s hostile reception among more zealous
dissenters, and the otherwise confusing preface to Jacob’s 1616 confession of
faith which described the document, even as it outlined twenty-eight objections
to remaining within the Church of England, as intending to free his congregation
“from the slaunder of Schisme, and Noveltie, and also of Separation.”28
Jacob’s arrangement was attractive to many, but it proved to be inherently
unstable. As time progressed, Laudian reforms made some parish churches
repugnant to puritan sensibilities, and Jacob’s semi-separatism became less and
less tenable. By the early 1630s, cracks began to appear in the foundation Jacob
had so labored to build, the first fissure coming in 1630, while John Lothropp
was minister. A group led by John Dupper became “grieved against” another
member of the congregation because the offending member took his child to be
baptized within a parish church. Although this decision did not necessarily
conflict with either the letter or spirit of the Jacob church’s 1616 confession of
faith,29 we can infer from the strong objections it raised that by 1630, the
congregation—or at least an influential segment of it—had been reconsidering
precisely where to draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable
participation within the national church. Dupper pressed the leaders of the
church to codify those shifting boundaries, calling for a renewal of the church
covenant and a more forceful, formal renunciation of all communion with the
parish churches. And although conciliatory moves were made “for peace Sake,”
these proved insufficient, and Dupper’s rigorist faction “joyned togeather to be a
Church.”30
Rather than an isolated incident, this break seems indicative of a broader trend
toward radicalism within Jacob’s fellowship. Dupper’s exit was only the first in
a string of secessions, with each departing group seeking a more thorough
separation from the parish structure. The cause of stricter-separatism may have
been strengthened by a mass arrest of forty-two church members in April 1632,
as the church divided again not long after the incident.31 Samuel Eaton and
others “desired dismission that they might become an Entire Church,” a request
granted on September 12, 1633. Just as with Dupper’s faction before them, the
Eaton group was “dissatisfyed wth ye Churches owning of English Parishes to be
true Churches.”32 This split indicated not just a changing perception of the
national church, but also, for the first time among the Jacob-Lothropp-Jessey
circle, a changing perception of the national church’s baptism: “Mr Eaton wth
Some others receiving a further Baptism.”33 Eaton likely rejected his baptism as
a way of more fully rejecting the church in which he had received it, as nothing
in this all-too-brief diary entry suggests dissatisfaction with infant baptism per
se. But, that being said, it is nonetheless notable that by 1633, questions about
baptism had been raised within the Jessey circle, and some influential members
were prepared to radically depart from long-settled understandings of how the
sacrament was to be administered.
In June 1638, that process of communal reassessment took another decisive
step in a baptistic direction when a small group left to join a church led by John
Spilsbery. These six were drawn to Spilsbery’s fellowship because they had
become “convinced that Baptism was not for Infants, but professed Beleivers.”34
Although the origin of Spilsbery’s church remains obscure, Murray Tolmie has
plausibly argued that the congregation was originally part of John Dupper’s
group and split with them over the issue of rebaptism.35 If this is correct, it
furthers the impression that a growing number of those connected with the
Jacob-Lothropp-Jessey church were not content simply to meet apart from the
parish churches, but instead continued to press the logic of congregational polity,
a path that led a growing number to believer’s baptism. Three years later in
1641, this point was made in dramatic fashion when some fifty-two members of
Jacob’s church were rebaptized by Richard Blunt and Samuel Blacklock. The
ceremony was distinguished not only by the relatively large numbers involved,
but also by the manner in which it was carried out: unlike the sprinkling of the
forehead which the participants would have received in infancy, those rebaptized
by Blunt and Blacklock were fully immersed, “resembling Burial & riseing
again.” 36 With this climactic mass baptism, the Kiffen Manuscript draws to a
close, but not before suggesting that the participants and those in their orbit went
on to form the core of the congregations associated with the 1644 confession:
“Those that ware so minded had com[m]union togeather were become Seven
Churches in London.”37

II
The preceding narrative, broadly considered, has been largely undisputed over
the past hundred years of Baptist historiography. A high level of scholarly
agreement should not surprise us, given the degree to which the standard
reconstructions of these events all so heavily depend on a common primary
source in the Stinton Repository. That being said, the widely accepted picture of
Baptist beginnings in seventeenth-century England still contains a significant
tension that remains unresolved: the problem of terminology and identity.
Assigning descriptive labels to early modern religious groups is fraught with
difficulty,38 as any student of the name “puritan” can attest.39 But the dynamic
swirl of events in mid-seventeenth-century England further complicates an
inherently difficult issue because of the sheer numbers involved—sects
proliferated at such an alarming rate that cataloguing and denouncing them
became something of a popular pastime for heresy hunters like Ephraim Pagget,
Thomas Edwards, and Robert Baillie.40 Any attempt, then, to address radical
religion during this period must grapple with the labels assigned to the men and
women under investigation and the group identities which those labels denote.
Up until this point, I have described my subjects in terms of the labels most
commonly applied by Baptist historians: “early English Baptists” divide into
“General Baptists” and “Particular Baptists.” This arrangement presents an
overarching religious identity, Baptist, which then houses within its walls two
distinct subgroups, these being separated by disagreements about soteriology—
that is, the cluster of interrelated theological concepts that explains how sinners
might be reconciled to a holy God. The terms “General” and “Particular” refer to
how each group understood that reconciliation, and more specifically, the extent
of Christ’s atonement: did the dying savior bear the sins of all people generally,
or only those of a particular people, God’s elect? And while the “General” and
“Particular” labels, strictly speaking, refer only to the extent of the atonement,
they also serve as shorthand for the series of interlocking doctrinal positions
collectively grouped under the headings “Arminianism” and “Calvinism.” As
outlined above, the Particular Baptists are widely understood to have emerged
from within the Jacob-Lothropp-Jessey church circle, while the General Baptists
are usually traced back to the English exile John Smyth and the English
congregation founded by Smyth’s associate Thomas Helwys upon the latter’s
return from the Netherlands in 1612.41 Confessional statements published by
baptistic separatists during the mid-seventeenth century clearly demonstrate the
existence of both Calvinistic and Arminian baptistic congregations, and so, to
that extent, the labels General and Particular are helpful.42
Yet, as convenient as they may be, we must also keep in mind that during the
English Revolution and Interregnum, neither group used these or similar labels
to describe themselves.43 Although that fact alone is not necessarily problematic,
it should give us pause and prompt reflection on how the imposition of
anachronistic labels might prejudice our reading of the historical materials.
“There are,” as Peter Marshall observes, “particular dangers in careless or
unreflective use of religious and confessional labels.” When historians
inappropriately label historically situated religious groups they “create
teleological presumptions about patterns of development, sanitizing conditions
of disorder or uncertainty, and obscuring pointers to paths not taken.”44 By too
casually adopting the General and Particular Baptist schema and then reading the
evidence in that light, we risk misunderstanding the actual religious bodies to
which those labels are meant to refer. Most pressingly, by assuming a priori that
the baptistic separatists emerging from the Jessey circle fit comfortably under
the label “Particular Baptists,” we inappropriately unite them with so-called
General Baptists. For to speak of General and Particular Baptists assumes some
sort of overarching “Baptist” identity that can meaningfully be applied to both
groups, but the historical record does not support this supposition. The evidence
does not reflect any sustained, meaningful interaction between seventeenth-
century General and Particular Baptists, nor does it suggest that baptistic
separatists during this time would have understood the exclusive practice of
believer’s baptism to be a sufficient basis upon which to build a common
“Baptist” identity.
There is simply no positive case to be made for any meaningful dialogue,
interaction, partnership, or even debate among mid-seventeenth-century baptistic
separatists of differing soteriological persuasions. The period’s efflorescence of
print seems to have produced only one significant piece of writing coauthored by
prominent Particular and General Baptists and this exceptional case did not
emerge until 1660/1661. Moreover, the coauthored document was written in
direct response to a failed coup led by Thomas Venner and was clearly prompted
by political necessity rather than any authentic desire for theological or
ecclesiastical concord.45 Other attempts to demonstrate collaboration between
“Particular” and “General Baptists” during the mid-seventeenth century prove,
upon closer inspection, similarly unconvincing. William Lumpkin, for example,
has suggested that the 1656 Somerset Confession “represents the earliest
important effort at bringing Particular and General Baptists into agreement and
union.”46 Yet, the confession in question clearly articulates both unconditional
election47 and limited atonement,48 and the only evidence produced in support of
Lumpkin’s claim is the fact that some members of what has come to be called
the Particular Baptist Western Association endorsed, at a single meeting, a
somewhat softer form of predestinarian theology than did many of their
contemporaries.49 To conclude from this that the confession’s signatories were
making a deliberate and “important effort” to bring “Particular and General
Baptists into agreement and union” is unwarranted.
To appreciate the improbability of any alleged collaboration between
Particular and General Baptists during the mid-seventeenth century, one must
first appreciate the degree to which Arminianism was vilified within the
Calvinistic puritan milieu out of which mid-seventeenth-century Particular
Baptists emerged. Although some would qualify the claim that post-Reformation
England enjoyed an unambiguous “Calvinist consensus” in 1603, few would
deny outright that the early Stuart church and England’s wider religious culture
was meaningfully oriented toward Geneva.50 For many leading Stuart divines,
both the Protestant religion and national identity more generally, were
inextricably bound to Calvinistic theological convictions. In 1606, for instance,
when Anthony Rudd delivered A Sermon Preached before the Kings Maieste,
the Bishop of St. David’s imagined the would-be assassins of the recently failed
Gunpowder Plot saying to one another, “Come let us cutte them of[f] from being
a Nation, and let the name of Calvinists bee noe more in remembraunce.”51
Thus, defenders of Calvinist orthodoxy were quick to identify any deviation
from their preferred soteriology as a crypto-popish return to Rome; the rhetorical
conjunction of “Popish & Arminian Errors” being a commonplace in their
polemical writings.52 The alignment of Roman Catholicism and Arminianism
can be clearly seen in John Warre’s popular handbook The Touchstone of Truth
(1624), in which the author thematically arranged scripture references so that
even those of “the meanest capacitie . . . may bee able to argue with any Papist
and confute him by Scripture.” The doctrinal heads covered included both
obvious points of Catholic-Protestant discord (for example, whether “Purgatory
is a meere Fiction”), but also points germane to Arminian soteriology such as the
“infallible certainty of our salvation” and “Mans free will after his Fall.”53
Indeed, Arminian ideas were often portrayed as even worse than anything that
the pope might endorse, as when Anthony Wotton described Arminians as “[f]ar
exceeding the limits of the Councell of Trent” and teaching “grosse points
which” even “the Church of Rome durst not Patronize.”54
For many, then, Calvinistic soteriology was definitional not just to puritanism,
but to England’s identity as a nation set in opposition to the anti-Christian errors
of Rome. There were, of course, exceptions—consider, for instance, John
Coffey’s persuasive argument that the independent minister John Goodwin
“remained the model of an orthodox, godly divine” despite his ardent
Arminianism—but, in a meaningful sense, puritan divinity and Calvinistic
soteriology were inseparably joined during the mid-seventeenth century.55 “For
many Puritans,” observes Crawford Gribben, “the rise of the Arminians could
mean nothing less than the dismantling of the Reformation.”56 At a minimum,
these observations suggest that those who did embrace Arminianism would not
have done so lightly, and that such a countercultural move would likely have
become a constitutive part of one’s religious self-identity. And when we
examine how mid-seventeenth-century Baptists thought about these issues, this
is precisely what we find.
From their earliest writings, Particular Baptists consistently worked to
disassociate themselves from Arminian doctrine. As was already noted, they
incorporated anti-Arminian polemic into their 1644 Confession of Faith as part
of an ineffectual attempt to curry favor with the mostly Presbyterian divines then
debating the nation’s religious future at the Westminster Assembly. They wrote
in large part because they were “being much spoken against as unsound in
Doctrine as if they ware Armenians,” and when reciting a list of the many
“calumnies cast upon” them, they gave pride of place to the “notoriously untrue”
accusations that they endorsed “Free-will, Falling away from grace” and
“denying Originall Sinne,” all doctrines associated with Arminianism.57
Likewise, when Samuel Richardson, one of the 1644 confession’s signatories,
wrote to defend the document in 1645, he raged against critics who still had the
audacity to accuse Particular Baptists of teaching Arminian doctrine. Citing a
slew of anti-Calvinist theological positions including “free will,” election based
upon “foreseen faith and repentance,” an atonement in which “Christ died
indifferently alike for all,” and “such like stuffe which we utterly abhorre and
detest,” Richardson described Arminian teaching as “poyson . . . drawn out of
the impure fountaine of divers Heretickes.”58 Predictably in light of such
rhetoric, when the signatories of the Confession reissued a revised version of
their statement in 1646, many of the emendations explicitly strengthened the
document’s distinctively Calvinistic points.59
Individual baptistic authors likewise produced a steady stream of anti-
Arminian polemic throughout the 1640s and 1650s. In one of the earliest
published treatises on believer’s baptism, John Spilsbery described the doctrine
of “Christs dying for all persons universally” and other characteristically
Arminian positions as “doctrine from beneath, and not from above,” and he
described those teaching such positions as “teachers . . . from Satan, and not
from God.” Spilsbery’s comments are especially significant because they
represented a deliberate attempt by Spilsbery to distance himself from those
who, as he put it, “seem to be of my judgment about Baptism.”60 In other words,
Spilsbery explicitly highlighted the fact that any agreement over baptism among
baptistic separatists was easily overshadowed by the more significant
disagreement over soteriology. After leaving the Church of England to lead a
baptistic congregation, Benjamin Coxe responded to allegations of “time-
serving” and “self-seeking” during his parish ministry by recounting how he
would “preac[h] constantly against the Arminian error, notwithstanding the
Kings Directions to the contrary.”61
Among Particular Baptists, the significance of Calvinist soteriology relative to
other doctrines can perhaps be seen most clearly within congregational and
regional association records produced during the 1650s. For it is within such
records, rather than the pages of published polemic, where one most clearly
observes how the quotidian exigencies of church life forced congregational
leaders to define acceptable and unacceptable doctrine and practice; when
confronted by the pressures of shared life together, their religious communities
were forced to identify and distinguish between central and peripheral aspects of
their shared group identity.
Thus, at a September 1654 meeting among congregations in the West of
England, the question was raised “[w]hether a member varying from the faith . . .
as in respect of free will, general redemption, and falling from grace” would be
need to be excommunicated “without some other occasion.” Surely prompted by
an actual case within one of the participating congregations, the question
required its respondents to weigh the significance of Calvinist orthodoxy relative
to other shared communal values and to determine whether the bare commitment
to believer’s baptism was a sufficient basis upon which to build an ecclesiastical
identity. The answer given by the assembled church leaders was an unequivocal
negative: “a person holding general redemption, free will, and falling from grace
. . . after due admonition, is to be rejected.” To underscore the seriousness of the
issue, the association then cited the biblical exhortation to “reject him that is an
heretic” and urged all “ministering brethren” to “be much in holding forth such
truths as may strike against such errors.”62 Other Particular Baptists responded
to the perceived Arminian error in like fashion. At a June 1656 meeting of
Midlands churches, for example, the association sternly forbade their members
from comingling with any “baptised persons” who were “not sounde in the
faith,” a categorisation, which, they quickly added, aptly described “those that
are called free willers.”63
Among Particular Baptists, this intransigent hostility to Arminianism was
evident even among more ecumenically minded baptistic ministers who were
perfectly willing to commune with paedobaptistic congregationalists. In a 1654
letter from the Particular Baptist congregation at Hexham, church leaders
explained their rationale for maintaining communion with “godly preachers and
congregations” who were “unbaptized” and yet true “ministers and churches of
Christ.” Immediately after doing so, the letter expresses the congregation’s
gratitude to God who “through grace hath kept us sound in the faith, not any of
us tainted with that Arminian poison that hath so sadly infected other baptized
churches.”64 This conjunction of themes is significant. By moving from an
endorsement of paedobaptistic Calvinists to a severe denunciation of Arminian
Baptists, the letter illuminates a clear hierarchy of error within the minds of even
the most irenic Particular Baptists. Paedobaptism could be tolerated, but the
“Arminian poison” could not. Notice, also, the description of so-called General
Baptists—here, they are not characterized as a rival denomination or movement
with clearly defined boundaries, but simply in terms of independent baptistic
churches that have embraced what the letter’s author believed to be a dangerous
heresy. Such a mentality excludes the possibility of an overarching sense of pan-
Baptist identity during the period, and suggests instead a far more complex
religious landscape in which multiple doctrinal issues intersected within
particular congregations to produce a diverse range of theological alignments.
A final example comes from the records of the Particular Baptist church at
Broadmead, Bristol. In a revealing passage, the author muses upon the degree to
which the “bare holding of believer’s baptism” can be considered constitutive of
a group’s religious identity. There are “many thousands in England,” he
explains, with whom he would “not hold communion . . . though they do own
and practise believer’s baptism.” The reason given for withholding fellowship is
that “they hold with it [i.e. along with believer’s baptism] free will and falling
from grace, &c.,” errors which were “unsound and heretical.” The author
compares such individuals to “those people in Germany” who “did hold that
truth [i.e. believer’s baptism] and many errors with it.” He and his church do not
identify with these fellow “Baptists,” but rather only with those who accept the
“sound truth” of believer’s baptism along with “all other sound principles of
Christian religion equally with the godly, called presbyterians and
independents.” Here, we find no shared religious identity among those whom
later historians will label “Baptists,” and yet a strong sense of shared religious
identity among “godly” Calvinist puritans of varying ecclesiological and
sacramental persuasions.65 By fiercely defending a sense of Calvinistic identity
—elevating it in importance above even their baptistic convictions—the
Broadmead church demonstrated its affinity with a wider puritan culture that
produced a steady stream of anti-Arminian polemic during the 1650s.66
General Baptists, for their part, were equally if not more hostile to Calvinist
doctrine, and they likewise emphasized soteriological correctness over and
above the rejection of paedobaptism. In 1646, the Particular Baptist Benjamin
Coxe complained about Arminian baptistic separatists who were so strongly
opposed to Calvinistic doctrine that they issued blanket anathemas against any
who affirmed it, even if such individuals also promoted believer’s baptism. They
“so oppose us,” wrote Coxe, “that they deny us to preach any Gospel, to hold
forth any true faith, or to administer any true Baptisme; who have openly called
us The gates of hell, their common enemie, &c.”67 Similarly, Luke Howard, who
fled the “dark Stuff” taught by Particular Baptists to join a Quaker congregation
in 1655, recalled how “them that held the General”—that is, “General
Baptists”—refused to “receive such as held the Particular into Fellowship, until
such were Re-baptised.” Calvinist teaching on election and the atonement was
declared to be “a wrong Faith” and “another Gospel”—in other words, a
theological breach which no amount of baptismal concord could ever hope to
repair.68
And though Howard’s testimony is that of a hostile witness, church and
association records from the 1650s corroborate his report on General Baptist
intransigence. General Baptist congregations did not hesitate to discipline those
members who were believed to have compromised on vital soteriological points.
In July 1655, for example, John Matthews, a member of the Fenstanton church
was “exhorted to repent” by several church leaders because he “affirmed . . .
[t]hat Christ died only for his elect” and that “God hath from the beginning
chosen a certain number of persons to himself.” When he “resist[ed] stubbornly
in his opinion,” the leadership resolved to proceed with formal church discipline,
calling him to account “in the presence of the congregation.”69
Whatever Matthews might have thought about his treatment by the Fenstanton
congregation, his coming under discipline for professing Calvinistic views
should not have taken him by surprise. For two years earlier, in December 1653,
Fenstanton church leaders had produced a summary statement outlining “the
great differences about religion” that separated the believers at Fenstanton from
their “adversaries.” By drafting such a document and having “a copy thereof
delivered to every part of the congregation,” the leadership hoped to “acquain[t]
the saints with the objections of our adversaries . . . so they may not come upon
us unawares.” In preparing such “spiritual weapons,” the group chose five of
“the greatest controversies” for inclusion. At the top of the list was the extent of
the atonement, and a full three out of the five issues pertained to related
soteriological questions—the other two named “controversies” being baptism
and a question about right worship. Both the content of this document and the
fact that it was produced with a deliberate eye toward educating the congregation
suggest that church leaders understood Arminian soteriology as constitutive of
their self-identity and at least as important to it as their collective rejection of
paedobaptism.70
General Baptists thus understood their soteriological convictions to be
definitional aspects of their religious identity. To deny foundational Arminian
doctrines such as Christ’s universal atonement was, as the General Baptist
William Jeffrey put it, to make “the Gospel . . . the tender of a lie, which is
blasphemy to affirme.”71 Particular Baptists, in turn, also placed unity on
soteriological points ahead of unity on baptism. Many Particular Baptists who
would not hesitate to ally themselves in a variety of contexts with paedobaptistic
congregationalists, would nonetheless recoil from promoters of Arminianism,
whether baptistic or not. Arminianism was an “opinion [which] much oppresseth
and disturbs the godly” and its champions were those “who under pretence of
seeking truth, doe by cunning and craftie enquiries undermine the same, and . . .
overthrow the faith of some.”72 Although many people in mid-seventeenth-
century England were drawing similar conclusions about baptism, this
agreement was dwarfed by disagreement over soteriology. Sacramental concord
did not necessarily create a sense of collective identity or unite them all in an
imagined Baptist community, and these conclusions should caution against the
use of any linguistic formulation that would imply as much.
Unfortunately, however, such caution has not always been shown, and the
anachronistic use of the denominational label “Baptist” has created a curious
phenomenon within the historiography: scholars simultaneously speak of
seventeenth-century Baptists as though they were a coherent entity, while at the
same time recognizing that in practice, the General Baptists and Particular
Baptists had no more interaction than any other two randomly selected English
sects. There is basic agreement that, at a minimum, by 1644, the General and
Particular Baptists were wholly distinct movements. B. R. White explains that
“they consistently organized separately, differed in their views of inter-
congregational relationships and the ministry, and, on the whole, flourished in
different parts of the country.”73 Likewise, Ian Birch notes helpfully that “the
two groups developed separately and independently throughout the period” and
“had little to do with each other.”74
And yet, despite this widespread recognition, authors will continue to speak of
a common “Baptist cause,” reference the “Baptist position” on doctrinal
controversies, and generally muddle two movements that, by common consent,
were almost entirely distinct.75 Much of this stems from the problematic nature
of the labels themselves. When the terms “Particular” and “General Baptist” are
imposed onto mid-seventeenth-century baptistic separatists, the impression is
conveyed, whether intentionally or not, that arguments over soteriology were
actively dividing what would have otherwise been a natural union of likeminded
Baptists. The ubiquitous application of the “General” and “Particular” labels
quite naturally conveys the impression that a “section of the Baptists had . . .
broken with Calvinism and embraced Arminianism, as early as the second
decade of the seventeenth century.”76 Such formulations begin with an imagined
community of “Baptists” and then divide it along soteriological lines, implying a
unified whole that has been fractured by soteriological disagreement, rather than
two wholly disparate groups which happened to reach similar conclusions
regarding baptism. One account of Particular Baptists explains that they would
sometimes draw the boundaries of communion so narrowly “as to exclude the
possibility of fellowship even with General Baptists on account of their doctrine
of Free Will.”77 The use of the intensifier “even” implies that any lack of warm
interaction between Particular and General Baptists represented a surprising
disruption to an otherwise friendly coalition of self-identified “Baptists.”
Elsewhere, one reads that General Baptists were “[l]argely isolated by doctrinal
differences from the radical Calvinist coalition” within the “Baptist”
movement.78 To speak this way is to suggest, at least implicitly, that debate over
Arminianism and Calvinism had disrupted a putative pan-Baptist communion.
But the evidence does not support such a reading, and this tendency toward
Baptist conflation distorts our understanding of all baptistic groups and the
period’s wider religious culture.

III
To better understand this phenomenon, one must trace the stream back to its
source, that being the first recognized “Baptist historian,” Thomas Crosby (d.
1749).79 Crosby did not initially set out to inaugurate Baptist historiography.
Instead, the opportunity came to him unexpectedly when Benjamin Stinton died
in 1719 and bequeathed to Crosby the contents of his “repository of divers
historical matters relating to the English Antipedobaptists.” Recognizing the
historical value of what he had received, Crosby wrote to the historian Daniel
Neal (1678–1743), who was then working on his own History of the Puritans
(1732).80 Crosby hoped that Neal would incorporate Stinton’s materials into his
larger narrative, finally giving a fair hearing to the baptistic wing of English
puritanism. But this was not to be. Upon the publication of The History of the
Puritans, Crosby was instead “surprised to see the ill use Mr. Neal made of
these materials,” complaining that Neal had condensed the entire story into a
mere five pages, “and that too with very great partiality.”81 Infuriated by the
slight, Crosby set out to complete the project cut short for Stinton and rejected
by Neal: a thorough and sympathetic History of the English Baptists.82 Crosby
finished the four-volume work in 1740, and with it set a course that would
influence all subsequent historians of English Baptists.
Despite its significant impact on later Baptist historiography, Crosby’s
scholarship has been widely criticized for its haphazard arrangement of materials
and overtly tendentious argumentation. With respect to the latter, B. R. White
has suggested that Crosby’s apologetic burden can be best understood in terms
of three main arguments. First, Crosby wanted to “show that the English Baptists
were a quiet, orderly and harmless people.” Secondly, he supplemented his
historical narrative with theological arguments in favor of believer’s baptism.
Thirdly, “he took considerable pains to refute the common contemporary
opinion that Baptist ministers were ignorant and ill-educated.”83 These three
concerns indeed dominate Crosby’s narrative, but, curiously, White does not list
a fourth apologetic thrust that, while less overtly evident, arguably played a more
decisive role in distorting Crosby’s history. Namely, Crosby intentionally and
systematically conflated General and Particular Baptists in order to establish a
singular “Baptist identity” that would draw together any and all who rejected
paedobaptism.84 His very title, The History of the English Baptists, presupposes
such a coherent, pan-Baptist identity, but as his text unfolds, Crosby made
explicit what his title only implied. The key passage comes some 170 pages into
Crosby’s first volume, and reminds us, with a startling frankness, of the
historiographic otherness of mid-eighteenth-century scholarship. After claiming
that English Baptists “ever since the beginning of the reformation” had been
divided along Arminian and Calvinist lines, Crosby wrote that he would not
“enquire into the reasons for their thus distinguishing themselves, so as to hold
distinct communities thereupon.” Whatever reasons the actual seventeenth-
century actors had for drawing the lines of self-identity as they did were not
important because in Crosby’s judgment as an eighteenth-century churchman,
such disputes only distracted from the sort of pan-Baptist unity that he wished to
foster among his English co-religionists:
I am fully persuaded, and clearly of opinion, that this difference in opinion is not a sufficient or
reasonable ground of renouncing christian [sic] communion with one another, and therefore have not
in the course of this history, lean’d either to one side or the other, but have taken facts as they came to
my hands, without regarding to which of the parties they were peculiar. And I know that there are
several churches, ministers, and many particular persons, among the English Baptists, who desire not
to go under the name either of Generals or Particulars, nor indeed can justly be ranked under either of
these heads; because they receive what they think to be truth, without regarding with what human
schemes it agrees or disagrees.85

In deciding to treat his subjects in this way, Crosby introduced profound

distortions that have affected virtually all subsequent Baptist historiography. By
conflating General and Particular Baptists, Crosby retroactively connected two
unconnected groups, inventing and then forcing upon them an anachronistic pan-
Baptist identity. Crosby’s conflation obscured from view the intense feelings
which would have accompanied seventeenth-century soteriological debate and
inflicted further damage by implying that the only issue differentiating General
and Particular Baptists was that same soteriological debate he minimized.
Instead of recognizing two distinct, unrelated communions with very different
priorities, doctrinal platforms, and ecclesial structures, Crosby reduced all
distinction to contrasting soteriological schemes.
Thomas Crosby’s deliberate confusion of the historical record has left an
unfortunate legacy that continues to be felt today. Crosby established the basic
pattern for Baptist historiography by calling forth a seventeenth-century Baptist
identity ex nihilo and leaving future historians only to tweak, modify, and revise
his basic framework. Subsequent scholars have almost universally treated all
baptistic separatists under the common heading “Baptists,” a conflation that
yields confusing and sometimes internally contradictory results. This was
especially evident among the so-called denominational historians of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As was already reviewed in the
introduction, these Baptist chroniclers wrote with a clear sense of continuity
between themselves and their historical subjects, and the resulting narratives
were often skewed as a result. B. R. White, writing from within the Baptist
tradition, acknowledges that “from the first, Baptist historians in England have
not merely tried to give as adequate a narrative as their sources allow but have
seen their task as that of defending their co-religionists and of influencing
denominational policy.”86 Benjamin Evans, author of The Early English
Baptists (1864) did not hesitate to confess that within the pages of Baptist
history “religious training and sympathy frequently give a color to our
opinions.”87
By the early twentieth-century, this trend was beginning to change. One can
sense the new historiographic atmosphere in the comments of George Gould,88
then president of the Baptist Historical Society, as he reviewed Champlin
Burrage’s The Early English Dissenters (1912):
It may occur to some readers that the passion for primary sources is the only passion our author
permits himself to manifest; to him, apparently, it matters not whether his discoveries are to the
advantage of Anglican or of Separatist: to correct misapprehension and to clear away traditional error
is the aim which is pursued inflexibly and without even a momentary deviation towards partisanship.
To write in such an impersonal fashion of the period under discussion is an achievement hardly
possible for a British scholar.89

Gould admired Burrage’s objectivity, and yet, the evident surprise with which he
greeted it conveyed the impression of a discipline in flux, still transitioning
between the modern era of impartial assessment and an older one in which
denominational representatives eagerly and openly claimed ecclesial and
theological continuity with their historical subjects. Similarly, as Burrage and
Gould’s contemporary W. T. Whitley was assembling his Baptist Bibliography
in 1916, he made sure to note that his work would attempt “for the first time to
register everything relevant to Baptist history, whether pro or con,” a comment
that pointed toward an emerging standard of objectivity even as its very
inclusion betrayed just how far reality was from the envisioned ideal.90 But even
as growing numbers of twentieth-century historians began to downplay the
partisan posture which had characterized prior eras, the influence of Thomas
Crosby continued to shape Baptist historiography in decidedly unhelpful ways.

IV
From the perspective of modern scholarship, the overtly apologetic gestures of
denominational historians are problematic, but they are also easily discerned and
disregarded. The far more subtle and, consequently, more dangerous
historiographic legacy of eighteenth and nineteenth-century denominational
scholarship has not been its overt partisanship, but rather the way in which it
reinforced certain assumptions regarding the ecclesial landscape of early modern
dissent and created a starting point for future inquiry that remains largely intact.
Denominational historians frequently projected later developments within their
own sects back onto mid-seventeenth-century actors. And although
denominational history was often motivated by openly acknowledged apologetic
concerns,91 its practitioners bequeathed a way of thinking about the period that
continues to tacitly influence even those later historians who write with very
different intentions.
Chief among these presumptions is the notion of a seventeenth-century Baptist
identity that conceptually unites all baptistic separatists under a common banner.
Consider, for instance, how W. K. Jordan decided to classify “Baptists” as a
single ideological unit in his encyclopedic analysis of The Development of
Religious Toleration in England (1938). Jordan explained this decision by
prefacing his conflation of baptistic separatists with a caveat about the wide
expanse separating the two groups:
Though the division of the Baptist communion into two sharply separated doctrinal groups should
engage the close attention of the historian of the sect, it does not appear that this schism extends
importantly to Baptist thought in the larger areas of speculation which must be examined by the
historian of toleration.92

As with Crosby’s work two centuries earlier, Jordan assumes a united “Baptist
communion” and explains that while in practice, this “communion” was divided
by doctrinal disputes, these disagreements were sufficiently narrow in scope so
as to not impinge upon the historian’s ability to identify a coherent school of
“Baptist thought.” But to say that the “Baptist communion” was divided implies
argumentation and schism within an already established group. Two groups that
never shared any common identity cannot be properly described as “divided” in
this sense, and yet this is precisely what Jordan and others have done. Passages
like that quoted above convey the sense that seventeenth-century General and
Particular Baptists would have recognized each other as fellow-travelers, that
they would have felt, at least on some level, the significance of a common
“Baptist” identity that transcended and superseded any other relatively minor
doctrinal differences that might temporarily have come between them. Such
rhetoric seems to reflect both the influence of early Baptist historians who
sought, like Crosby, to manufacture a pan-Baptist identity for their own
denominational purposes, and a tendency to project upon the seventeenth
century, the later denominational realignments that did, in fact, unite the
previously disparate baptistic communions.93
More recent literature on the early English “Baptists” has been more sensitive
to the danger of denominational teleology and the anachronistic application of
labels,94 and yet, the drift toward conflation remains and consistently muddies
our understanding of how these men and women would have actually perceived
themselves.95 T. L. Underwood’s otherwise excellent comparative analysis of
seventeenth-century Baptists and Quakers illustrates this phenomenon.96
Underwood states that although Particular and General Baptists “agreed on the
nature and method of baptism,” they, nonetheless, “remained separate.” This
formulation again suggests a pan-Baptist movement that could “agree” about
some things (baptism), while “remain[ing] separate” because of unresolved
disagreement in other areas. The problem persists throughout as, for example,
when Underwood informs the reader that “in 1644 there were probably only fifty
or so Baptist churches,” without any indication of what kind of “Baptist”
churches these were.97 Later, he describes John Bunyan as “a key spokesperson
for the Baptists,”98 and refers without qualification to a generic “Baptist
concern.”99 In each of these instances, Underwood’s language implies a
common “Baptist” identity.
Such analysis is not atypical, and the conflation of baptistic groups into a
generic pan-Baptist conglomerate has become deeply embedded into the way in
which historians conceive the period. In Philip Gura’s discussion of seventeenth-
century baptistic groups, for example, he carefully differentiates between
General and Particular Baptists. Yet, even in doing so, he refers to them as the
two “wings” of “the baptist movement,” a description which betrays an assumed
overarching Baptist identity uniting the General and Particular.100 Likewise,
Mark Bell acknowledges the diversity among baptistic separatists—“the Baptists
were never a monolithic movement”—but then proceeds to identify the “most
distinctive mark of the early English Baptists” as a single entity and proffers
comment on “Baptist thought during the English Revolution.”101 He refers to
General and Particular Baptists as “the predominant branches of English
Baptists”—thus, presupposing a common tree—and asserts, without evidence,
that they “did regard each other as part of the same family of Christians.”102
Elsewhere, writing in an undifferentiated manner about a collective “Baptist”
group, Bell argues that these Baptists “began to change the direction of their
eschatology from criticizing the establishment to endorsing it” with the result
that “those aspects of the Leveller agenda that Baptists had supported became
less attractive.”103 This pushes Baptist conflation even further as Bell presents an
explanation for historical change that depends for its coherence on a
presupposed Baptist unity that Bell himself elsewhere acknowledges did not
actually exist.
J. F. McGregor’s influential essay “The Baptists: Fount of All Heresy” (1984)
furnishes one final example of the historiographical trend toward Baptist
conflation. Despite initially framing his discussion by sharply distinguishing
between the two groups—“co-operation, even friendly communication between
the two sorts of Baptists, was practically impossible during the Revolution”104—
McGregor consistently makes broad, unqualified statements explaining “Baptist”
practices and “Baptist” views. The following passage, taken from McGregor’s
conclusion, is representative:
The Baptists’ fundamental weakness was their inability to attract leaders of the quality necessary to
resolve the ambiguities in their relations both with the world and with their fellow radicals. Their
mentality was shaped in the hostile environment of the late 1630s and early 1640s when submission to
collective discipline, rather than imaginative leadership, best served the elementary cause of survival. .
. . They lacked the dynamic inspiration of the clerical renegades so influential among their separatist
precursors. Imaginative talent, lay or clerical, was usually either suppressed or alienated by the sect’s
narrow legalism and claustrophobic discipline.105

This analysis immediately raises concerns: if, as McGregor has already asserted,
the “two sorts of Baptists” enjoyed no “co-operation” or “even friendly
communication,” it is problematic to then assert that “Baptists,” understood as
an inclusive category, had a “fundamental weakness.” Equally problematic is
McGregor’s similar assertion that an overarching “Baptist” mentality was
“shaped in the hostile environment of the late 1630s and early 1640s,” and that
this collective sense was so powerfully developed among Baptists as an
undifferentiated mass that it could effectively guide the course of their
movement for decades to come.
To begin to explain the apparent tension between McGregor’s initial
separation of the “two sorts of Baptists” and his subsequent reattaching of the
same, one must recognize that McGregor’s essay seems to implicitly rely on
modern denominational labels and a concomitant assumption that these modern
religious identifiers shed light on seventeenth-century religious self-identity. The
language used throughout to analyze the relationship between Particular and
General Baptists begs the question of broader Baptist identity by presupposing a
fundamental inter-group kinship based on a shared commitment to believer’s
baptism. But this connection between Particular and General Baptists emerged
only in subsequent centuries and should not be imposed upon the religious
radicals of Stuart England. Consider again McGregor’s language: “co-operation,
even friendly communication between the two sorts of Baptists, was practically
impossible during the Revolution.”106 By referring to “the two sorts of Baptists,”
McGregor unwittingly assumes a stable, coherent category called “Baptist,”
within which one finds two subcategories or “sorts.”107 Thus, even as he informs
the reader of the expansive gulf separating so-called Particular and General
Baptists, McGregor betrays his unstated presupposition that these two groups,
despite all evidence to the contrary, were, in fact, so closely related as to warrant
a common appellation. And, in all of this, the intellectual validity of this
presupposition as applied to the seventeenth-century religious landscape is left
wholly unexamined.
These confusing categorizations have especially deleterious effects because
they are then appropriated and repeated by scholars working in tangentially
related areas and thus relying to a large degree on secondary literature for their
understanding of baptistic English separatists. As the multiplying references in
the secondary literature then echo and amplify one another, a consensus grows
and the conflation of baptistic groups further entrenches itself into the
historiographic consciousness. For example, in his essay on the physician and
Particular Baptist Peter Chamberlen, the linguistic historian Michael Adams
looks to McGregor’s essay on Baptists for background information and suggests,
citing McGregor, that Particular Baptists like Chamberlen “regularly interrupted
parish priests in mid-sermon”—an audacious activity which nicely supports
Adams’ characterization of Chamberlen as a man possessing a “naturally
confrontational temperament.”108 But does this colorful detail actually apply to
the religious activity of so-called Particular Baptists? Historical documentation
for the description of Baptist agitators disrupting parish preachers comes from
the Presbyterian heresiographer Thomas Edwards, who, in the passage in
question, described the activity of Thomas Lambe and his followers.109 But
Lambe was a notorious General Baptist and, as such, had no substantive
connection to the Particular Baptists about whom Adams writes. Given his
reliance on McGregor, one suspects that Adam’s confusion stems in part from
the underlying confusion of baptistic groups found throughout McGregor’s
essay. For although McGregor actually does take care to identify Lambe as a
General Baptist, the pervasive, essay-long drift toward Baptist conflation
contributes to a sense that all baptistic separatists formed, in a significant sense,
a single, coherent group with shared motivations and characteristics.
In recent years, the most significant interaction with these unfortunate
taxonomic mergers has been Stephen Wright’s The Early English Baptists,
1603–1649 (2006).110 Throughout his account of English Baptists under the first
two Stuart kings, Wright impresses with a fine-grained analysis of source
material and careful attention to detailed, knotty problems. But surely his most
important historiographical contribution is his attempt to redress the problematic
“General Baptist” and “Particular Baptist” labels that have introduced so much
confusion into our understanding of the period. Sensitive to anachronism, Wright
accuses previous historians of falling under the distorting spell of
“denominational teleology” and thereby misrepresenting the self-understanding
of early English Baptists.111
Wright explains that in an effort to “tidy up Particular Baptist origins,”
scholars such as Murray Tolmie and B. R. White have exhibited a “strong
tendency to exaggerate the fixity of divisions” between the General and
Particular Baptists of the late 1630s and early 1640s, the two groups being
“presented as separate branches of the same genus, like horses and zebras on the
tree of denominational evolution.” This arrangement, in Wright’s estimate,
“reflects a lack of scientific caution.” In response, he labors to demonstrate
ideological and associational fluidity among early Baptists and thus challenge
“the traditional view that the Particular and General Baptists had existed from
the first as separate and opposed communions.”112 Rather than two distinct
communions, each tightly confined to its own denominational compartment,
Wright reconstructs an early Baptist community in which Baptists, presumably
of varying soteriological persuasions, argued not over the rightness of the Synod
of Dort, but rather over the right and proper way to run a Baptist church: “in
London, the Baptists were indeed divided in the early 1640s, but . . . the lines of
division were defined not by theology but by the proper method by which they
should form and order their churches.”113
By shifting the center of Baptist identity away from the nature of the
atonement and onto the structure of the church, Wright rejects several decades of
settled conclusions, and recasts early Baptist alignments as provisional and in
flux. In support of his thesis, Wright marshals an impressive array of primary
source materials in order to make his case positively and negatively, working
both to demonstrate the fluidity of early Baptist identity and to point out the
paucity of evidence available to prove otherwise. Wright helpfully recognizes
that prior to the 1644 confession the men who signed it and the people they
represented almost certainly did not understand themselves as “Particular
Baptists.” And Wright’s analysis of Tolmie and White correctly identifies what
appears to be an all too neat alignment of Arminian-leaning General Baptists on
the one side and Calvinistic Particular Baptists on the other. This is an important
insight. But his interpretation does not go far enough.
The standard view of early English Baptists rests on two assumptions: first,
the existence of something that can be meaningfully called a “Baptist
communion,” and second, that this communion was divided into two parts,
General and Particular. Wright quite correctly perceives serious flaws in the
second assumption: there is no evidence of Baptists arguing over soteriology and
then dividing themselves accordingly during the late 1630s and early 1640s. The
problem is that while Wright thus overturns the second assumption, he leaves the
first untouched, the logic of his argument serving not to challenge, but to
strengthen the assumption that some sort of pan-Baptist identity existed at this
early stage.
According to Wright, London Baptists of different soteriological leanings
intermingled far more freely during the early 1640s than Tolmie or White would
have imagined. While debating the details of an emerging Baptist ecclesiology,
they formed “fluid and provisional alignments” that were “based upon divisions
not over theology but (in large part) over the proper means of church formation,”
and it was only later that “the inter-congregational relationships of the Baptists
were shaken up and recast.”114 When this shakeup finally did occur, Wright
argues that the great Baptist separation into Particular and General came largely
as the result of the “broader political and theological controversy” then brewing
among English parliamentarians, an external controversy which nonetheless
“came to influence far more the terms in which the Baptists debated and related
to each other.” According to this retelling, then, Calvinistic soteriology was not a
pressing issue among “Baptists” prior to the 1644 confession. Instead, a
Calvinistic branch of the Baptist tree grew only as part of “a general
realignment.” This “general realignment” took place as some more conservative
Baptists sought to “decisively distanc[e] themselves from the extremists” within
their own Baptist communion and thus curry favor with the mainstream
Another random document with
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 Plate XXXVII.
“Mdlle. Parisot.”
Stipple-Engraving by C. Turner, A.R.A.,
after J. J. Masquerier.
(Published 1799. Size 6⅝″ × 8⅜″.)
From the collection of Mrs. Julia Frankau,
to whom it was presented by the late Sir Henry Irving.
 Plate XXXVIII.
“Maria.”
Stipple-Engraving by P. W. Tomkins, after J. Russell, R.A.
(Published 1791. Size 4¾″ × 6¼″.)
From the collection of Frederick Behrens, Esq.
 Plate XXXIX.
“Commerce.”
Stipple-Engraving by M. Bovi, after J. B. Cipriani, R.A.
and F. Bartolozzi, R.A.
(Published 1795. Size 18⅜″ × 7⅝″.)
From the collection of Basil Dighton, Esq.
 Plate XL.
“The Love-Letter.”
A very rare Stipple-Engraving, probably by Thos. Cheesman.
and F. Bartolozzi, R.A.
(Size 8¾″ × 6¾″.)
From the collection of Major E. F. Coates, M.P.
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