The Falsehood of English Separatism

Many who profess to be Baptist today claim the English separatist view of Baptist history.  They say that Baptists began during and as a part of the Protestant Reformation.  And yet they are "Baptists."  I ask, "How?"

Just as examples, Roman Catholics don't teach immersion for believers only, don't believe justification by faith, don't teach premillennialism, don't believe in separation of church and state, and much more.  Protestants came out of Roman Catholicism.  Just as examples, Protestants don't teach immersion for believers only, don't teach premillennialism, don't believe in separation of church and state, don't believe in congregational form of church government, and much more.  English separatist "Baptists" came out of the Protestant Reformers.

Just as an example, English separatists immerse believers only, don't practice infant sprinkling.  Why?  The English separatist might say, "Because the Bible teaches it."  So Protestants didn't teach that and before that, Roman Catholics didn't teach that.  How far do we have to go back to find believer's immersion?  Is it third, second, or first century?  So did we have at least 1200 years of apostasy on baptism and more or less on several other doctrines?  Is this what God said would happen?

English separatists say we don't know if there were any true churches from the second or third century until the 17th century.  In other words, they teach a total apostasy, just like the Mormons and the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Church of Christ.  If the Bible is true, this can't be true.

Here's my take on English separatism.  I'm not alone on this.  Rank and file Baptists have believed that they trace their lineage back to the first century.   Many historians have espoused this.  I don't care what you call it, but they have believed that there were always true churches, not something bigger than a local church that existed to preserve the truth, but several individual churches, which remained separate from something bigger than a local assembly, something hierarchical, or something like a state church.  English separatists have called this a populist position, and rejected it as wrongfully a priori.  They say history can't sustain it, so the scholarly, defensible position is English separatist, even if it contradicts both the Bible and, therefore, a Christian world view.

Let's consider this as it relates to Baptist belief in the 19th century United States, and in particular, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.  The first Southern Baptist seminary was fittingly named The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, because it was, well, that.  There are at least five others now in the Southern Baptist Convention, but it was the first and at that time, the only.  It is no longer the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, but it is still called that (SBTS).

The SBTS began in 1859 in Greenville, SC under the leadership of James Petigru Boyce.  In hindsight, 1859 was a bad year for anything to get started in the South.  It closed during the Civil War, stayed a short while in Greenville at the campus of Furman University, and then moved to Louisville, KY in 1877.  For such a long history, the SBTS has had only 8 presidents including its present, Albert Mohler.  The shortest tenured presidency was that of William Heth Whitsitt (1895-1899), and his short stay related directly to English separatism.  The explanation of English separatism, Whitsitt, and liberalism at SBTS and in the Southern Baptist Convention all dovetail.

William Heth Whitsitt, born in 1841, was a third generation Baptist, and at the age of 14 he joined the Mill Creek Baptist Church in Nashville, TN.  When Whitsitt was a boy, his family received The Tennessee Baptist, edited by James Graves beginning in 1846.  Graves preached many times at Mill Creek with Whitsitt in attendance.  Mill Creek itself practiced closed communion.   When he was 16 in 1857, Whitsitt began college at Union University in Murfreesboro, TN, a state Baptist institution.  It was there at Union, that Whitsitt became attached to J. M. Pendleton.  J. R. Graves preached his ordination sermon, shortly after which, Whitsitt joined the Confederate army as a private, and was later promoted to the chaplaincy.   He served four years in the military and in 1866 began attending the University of Virginia.  The next year he joined the SBTS in Greenville.

I want anyone reading to pay special attention to this point in Whitsitt's life.  After two years of study at Southern, he enrolled at the University of Leipzig in 1869, and then in 1870 at the University of Berlin.  Whitsitt came to Germany when the historical-critical, scientific method, was predominant in the treatment of the Bible, where traditional positions were to be questioned.  Independent thinking was prized.  Whitsitt became convinced of these.  His professors were Karl Friedrich August Kahnis and  Christoph Ernst Luthardt, among others.  He did not attend a Baptist church, but the American chapel where King Wilhelm and Count Bismarck also went.  When he came home with a big debt, he looked for a pastorate as employment, but was looked at with suspicion by churches.  Instead, in 1872, he was hired by the SBTS to teach.  Whitsitt took delight in the ecumenical spirit of the Greenville church attenders and the peace between religious denominations, regularly participating in pulpit exchanges between Episcopalians and Methodists.  Whitsitt reflected his German training, contending that theology should enter the lists with the other sciences and defend itself as them.

Whitsitt was characterized in his teaching at Southern by a reliance on the scientific method.  For this reason, his teaching was often unique to what others said about the same subjects.  That made him popular with students.  He became president of the SBTS in 1895 and in the same year he was assigned by Johnson's Cyclopedia the article on the Baptists.  There he made public some of his research from his German studies.  Whitsitt asserted that there had not been an unbroken history of adult baptism all the way back to the time of Christ.  This appeared to Baptists to undermine their legitimacy and authority, and was causing attendance and monetary issues at SBTS, so Whitsitt was forced to resign in 1899.  This is the beginnings of the English separatist theory, so it is a new position that arose from the influence of German rationalism upon William Whitsitt.

About twenty years earlier, Whitsitt proved his chops, staking his scholarship and independence, by clashing with Graves over alien immersion.  Whitsitt took his own ecclesiology to its logical end, accepting baptisms other than Baptists according to his spiritualization of the church and his spirit of ecumenism.  This was not a historic or biblical position.  It reads like an axe to grind.  Cloistered in the seminary and opposing an aging and diminishing leader, it was an incremental step for Whitsitt that could elevate his own status, protected by the tenure of a parachurch organization.

Easily the SBTS could be considered the earliest and most liberal of the Southern Baptist seminaries.  It lead the liberal surge of the SBC.  The rise of other seminaries easily could be related to this attack on a biblical Baptist history position, especially the founding of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS) in Fort Worth, Texas in 1908, under the leadership of Benajah Harvey Carroll, the older brother of  James Milton Carroll, who wrote the Trail of Blood.  Both Carrolls were local only in their ecclesiology and the SWBTS quickly became the largest of the Southern Baptist seminaries in a conservative resurgence, certainly reaction to SBTS.  Carroll published 33 volumes of works, and is best known for his 17-volume commentary, An Interpretation of the English Bible.

The churches, the rank and file Baptists, the majority, for the 19th century and much of the 20th century were local only in their ecclesiology, like they were conservative in their theology.  Academia, the parachurch graduate school crowd, refers to it with the obvious pejorative "populist."  When you have the population believing one thing and then the schools, influenced by German rationalism, turning to liberalism, believing something else, do you see that as the trustworthy position?  The English separatist position is the new position, and its obvious that its founders were fond of spiritualizing the Old Testament and ecumenical.  Could their "history" be a product of their education and science?  It reads just like it.  There is a reason the "populists" believed like they did -- they got it from the Bible and from their preachers in the pillar and ground of the truth.  This is the position of faith.  English separatism like many other scientific views is the viewpoint of doubt.

There is no guarantee in the Bible for a preservation of history.  However, there is a biblical position for the interpretation of history.  If you read Isaiah 40 to 46, God through Isaiah says to view the past according to the present and the future according to the past and the present according to the past with a view for the future.  All of this interconnects.  We can't be right about history without starting with the Bible.  Only the Bible connects all three -- past, present, and future.

A catholic "church" was corrupt and just got worse.  The truth wasn't preserved through Roman Catholicism.  Baptism, the Lord's Supper -- what we might call the Baptist distinctives -- these were preserved through churches separate from Roman Catholicism.  That's a biblical view that matches up with biblical ecclesiology and eschatology, even soteriology.  There's no way that a belief in justification by faith ended in the second or third century and then started up again during the Reformation, but that's the view of an English separatist.  It's not true and it shouldn't be trusted.  It's also a convenient invention for people to redefine ministry in order to justify positions and careers.