- He answered " baptist church has nothing to do with Martin Luther, There is already baptist church before Martin Luther.
I don’t know how to answer them. They are telling there are books about baptist history and when It was started. They are also telling that Jesus is a baptist. Now, I am still searching answers from books, forums, websites, etc.
This is called the “Landmark Baptist” view. It is not held by all Baptists by any means. In fact, Baptist scholars (I mean “real” scholars with Ph.D’s from accredited universities) have refuted it. The best history of the Baptists is
The Baptist Heritage: Four Centuries of Baptist Witness by Leon McBeth. This will not go far with your friends, however. Baptists who hold their views typically won’t listen to any scholarship outside their own very narrow circles, and Baptists are very far from unified among themselves, so the fact that McBeth was Baptist won’t get you very far. They will just say that he was a liberal:shrug:. But you don’t need to be troubled by their claims.
The groups they have in mind as “Baptist” were dissenting groups that have existed off and on throughout Christian history. Some of them were actually much closer to Catholicism than to Baptist belief (Montanists, Donatists, Waldenses). Others were much farther from orthodox Christianity than Baptists are, being more like the Mormons in their relationship to Christianity (Cathars). In the latter case, Landmark Baptists will typically claim that the Catholic Church lied about these people, but that won’t wash. We have actual primary sources, writings from them that show us what they believed. Also, the possibility that Catholics misrepresented them doesn’t prove that the real beliefs were like those of Baptists.
In the sense that many of these groups rejected Catholic sacramental theology and had a simpler, more decentralized church structure, the Baptists are right–in those specific ways, these folks were more like Baptists, at least in some cases. But the one big difference is soteriology (what people believe about salvation).
None of the pre-Reformation groups believed in salvation by faith alone. Sometimes people will claim that they did, but the evidence never supports it. The Waldenses, for instance, who are often the Baptists’ favorite “ancestors” (partly because they claim that the Waldenses were around ever since the fourth century, although historians are pretty sure that they originated in the 12th century), became Protestants in the sixteenth century. We have records of the process by which this happened, and we know that the Reformed Protestants who negotiated with the Waldenses found their doctrine of salvation to be far too works-oriented, and that there was a lot of resistance when Protestant-trained pastors began ministering in Waldensian churches. They weren’t the same as Protestants at all. They
became Protestants, so obviously they recognized common ground against the Catholic Church, but they changed in some pretty big ways in doing so. And of course they didn’t become Baptists!
On baptism itself, Baptists often misunderstand and misinterpret the evidence. On the one hand, many groups in the early Church (Donatists, for instance) rebaptized Catholics. But this wasn’t because they rejected infant baptism (infant baptism wasn’t a universal practice among Catholics at that time anyway, because people were afraid that if they sinned after baptism they would go to hell or at least would have to spend years doing penance). It was simply that they didn’t acknowledge the Catholic Church as the true Church, and they thought baptism was only valid in the true Church. Donatists, like Catholics, believed that baptism saved you. That was why they rebaptized! It wasn’t the same as Baptist theology at all.
On the other hand, some people have tried to argue that the Waldenses rejected infant baptism for the opposite reason–because we don’t have record of them baptizing at all. But there is evidence that this was because they took their children to the Catholic priest for baptism. They didn’t want to go to confession to Catholic priests or receive the Eucharist from them, but they didn’t mind having their children baptized. And by doing this, they could pass as Catholics, since baptism was
the basic thing that held medieval society together. As long as their children were baptized, they could just do their own thing up in their remote mountain villages and hope to be left alone.
The history of medieval dissenting/heretical groups is complex, because these groups
were persecuted by Catholics and the evidence is fragmentary. But the “Landmark Baptist” picture is a fantasy. They take the lack of evidence and use it as an excuse to make stuff up.
The standard scholarly account of Baptist origins, put forward by McBeth and other historians both Baptist and non-Baptist, is that they were English Separatists (radical Puritans) who began rebaptizing in the early 17th century. There was also some influence from the “Anabaptists”–people in Germany and Switzerland and the Netherlands who rejected infant baptism at the time of the Reformation, a hundred years earlier.
Contrary to what they tell you, their origins do have something to do with Luther. However, it’s a mistake to assume that Protestants just follow Luther. Luther had a huge impact, but many Protestant groups disagreed with him. Baptists tend to follow one aspect of his teaching (justification by faith alone–but even this they interpret quite differently), but they disagree with him about the sacraments very strongly.
Edwin
