I am currently studying Baptist theology and history, and I thought it would be helpful to share some must-reads on the topic that I have discovered. With that said, let me begin:
Tom Nettles, The Baptists, vol. 1, Key People Involved in Forming a Baptist Identity (Mentor, Scotland: 2005)
Tom Nettles’ The Baptists (vol. 1) provides sketches of key Baptists in the early period of the movement. And I think it is worth reading to get a sense of the key pastors and theologians of the movement. I didn’t know, for example, that William Kiffen (1616–1701) was a wealthy merchant that helped support his ministry.
Nettles points to two ways to identify Baptist origins. First, one can point to liberty of conscience as central, like Smyth and Helwys or even E.Y. Mullins, who spoke of “the competency of the soul in religion” as central to Baptist thought. Or one may go the direction that Nettles does and argue that Baptist tenets flow from the larger context of the Christian religion.
And hence affirm: “Baptists must be Christian and Protestant evangelical before they can be Baptist” (13). Nettles affirms this view and calls it the “coherent-truth party.”
I am convinced that Baptists must see themselves as a renewal movement from within Protestantism. We are first Christians because of faith in Christ; then we are second Protestants as non-Roman Christians of the West in unity with various reformational communions; and we denominate as Baptists among the denominations of the whole church.
Luke Stamps and Matthew Emerson, The Baptist Vision: Faith and Practice for a Believers’ Church (B&H Academic, 2025)
Speaking of a Baptist vision as being a renewal within Protestantism, I found Stamps and Emerson’s work The Baptist Vision to be brilliant in this regard. As they explain:
“We will also suggest a particular vision for the Baptist future, one that is more explicitly and intentionally positioned as a renewal movement within the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. As we will argue in the first part of this book, Baptists are Christians first, and a particular expression of Protestant and evangelical Christianity at that. Only from this ‘little-c’ catholic and reformational position can Baptists effectively make their case for continued reformation and renewal according to the Scriptures.” (3)
Mind you, part of the reason why they lay out this vision (which I agree with) has to do with their view of Baptist origins. They explain:
“Baptists emerged in the context of seventeenth-century English Separatism, which in turn emerged in the context of the English Reformation” (28).
But this view points to one of three common origin stories that can be categorized thus:
- Baptist successionism (Landmarkism, Trail of Blood)
- The Anabaptist kinship view
- The English Separatist view (28–29)
Stamps and Emerson affirm the third view, explaining:
“The English Separatist view of Baptist origins is the most historically credible. The early Baptists emerged from congregations that had separated from the established church in order to form assemblies that were more perfectly conformed to the rule of the New Testament. We often speak of these churches as ‘congregationalist’ because they were seeking to form independent congregations of visible saints.” (29)
By the way, they also write what has become my new favourite definition of a local church:
“Baptist churches are covenanted communities of visible saints who commit together to walk in the discipline and order of the Lord Jesus Christ” (143). I took this general approach in my article on local churches here.
Matthew Bingham, Orthodox Radicals: Baptist Identity in the English Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2019)
In Orthodox Radicals, Matthew Bingham’s central thesis is that during the 1640s and the Interregnum period, certain English congregationalists began rejecting infant baptism. However, since a distinct and self-conscious Baptist identity had not yet formed, these figures are better described as “baptistic congregationalists” rather than as Baptists in the denominational sense.
While his thesis will continue to be challenged—and, I suspect, it is not quite as clean and easy as Bingham proposes—the general notion that Particular Baptists arose out of a congregationalist setting during a specific time period seems sound.
As a consequence, we might say that Particular Baptists or baptist congregationalists (to use Bingham’s preferred language) share in common much with John Owen or Jonathan Edwards. But, arguably, the Baptists followed through with congregational logic to form a regenerate membership, avoiding the debates around the Halfway Covenant of some congregationalists.
While I do not have the historical skill to be able to fully confirm the argument of Bingham, the general argument that he provides, to me, seems reasonable. But as a historian friend of mine has said, his thesis does not fit every Particular Baptist evenly. So it may require further updates.
Eds. Matthew Emerson, Christopher Morgan, R. Lucas Stamps, Baptists and the Christian Tradition (B&H Academic, 2019)
As a multi-author work, Baptists and the Christian Tradition does not always show uniquely Baptist emphases since it aims to show how Baptists are within the evangelical or Protestant movement and in line with the early church.
I enjoyed Baptist theologian W. Madison Grace’s chapter because he affirmed something which I find vital, namely, that Baptists must agree with “classic ecclesiology” as expressed in the Nicene Creed. The church is one, holy, universal, and apostolic. “Baptists have embraced this classic ecclesiology historically” (110).
In longer refrain:
“That the term for church (ἐκκλησία) meant ‘gathering’ has not gone unnoticed, but the concept holds a meaning beyond merely a group of people amassed. Churches are not merely ‘persons gathered in one place’; they have purpose, ritual, belief, and creed. An early example of this richer understanding of ‘church’ can be found in Irenaeus and his confession of faith, which addresses ‘the Church . . . scattered through the whole world to the ends of the earth.’ The specific, and important, doctrinal affirmations—purpose, ritual, belief, and creed—in this more expansive definition are intended to represent the tradition and belief of the entire church. According to the logic of early Christians, to deny this understanding calls into question one’s standing to be a member of the church. As in Acts 15, here we see a continuing tradition of limiting the constituency of a church to the beliefs, or creed, a particular community may hold.” (Grace, 111)
And:
“Before discussing these specific marks in detail, it is important to note that classic ecclesiology affirmed both the universal and the local church. Churches can be conceived of locally, as in house churches or regional churches, and universally, as the one body of Jesus Christ. This is why schism was dangerous in the minds of the church fathers. As the company of the redeemed, believers within the universal church experience a connection with all redeemed communities across the globe. Both the visible and the invisible nature of the church were affirmed by the end of the early church era, though such affirmations were not uniform in expression and would see further development later on. Still, for the early church, the nature of the company of the redeemed needed to be expressed broadly as a church that was one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.” (Grace 111–112)
Stanley Fowler, The Collected Writings of Stanley K. Fowler
Volume 2 of the collected writings of the eminent Baptist theologian Stanley Fowler speaks of the church, a topic that I find myself deeply invested in. Why? Because I have found that we in Canada have increasingly adopted a more American style of being Baptist than a British one.
It is worth hearing Fowler narrate this emphasis in his own words:
“Over the last few years, I have been involved in various dialogues which have given me new insight into this puzzling connection between a commitment to local autonomy and a commitment to a very narrow doctrinal basis for any formal association with other churches. I think it works something like this: in this ecclesiology, the real church is the local church, and anything beyond this is purely optional and justified on pragmatic grounds. Although there may be a theoretical affirmation of a universal church, this is really just an abstraction which lacks any kind of tangible structure in the real world which we experience. So in this view, the burden of proof is on the one who wants to create formal structures beyond the local congregation, and since these structures are completely optional, their doctrinal basis is optional as well. In other words, we can make the basis as narrow as we wish without violating any biblical principles about the unity of the church, because we are not dividing the real (local) church anyway. On the other hand, if one sees the universal church as a matter of biblical concern, and perhaps even sees the universal church as the primary reality which manifests itself in local expressions, then the burden of proof is on the one who wants to disconnect from other churches.” (26–27)
Fowler surveys various modern Baptist confessions and notes how they omit discussion of the universal church of which local churches are the manifested reality. But he notes that British Baptists have not lost that original emphasis, citing as an example a 1948 declaration by the Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland.
He then writes:
“These examples of the growing sense of local church autonomy and the functional insignificance (though generally not the theoretical denial) of the universal church illustrate the trajectory of Baptist ecclesiology in North America, but the trajectory in other anglophone contexts was sometimes very different.” (40)
I concur with Fowler’s appraisal. I wonder if our narrowing as Baptists has more to do with a 20th-century American approach rather than a classical or British approach to Baptist life and practice.
The Baptist Doctrine of the Church (1948)
In 1948, the Council of the Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland approved a statement called The Baptist Doctrine of the Church (1948). I found it refreshing, verifying in a small way Fowler’s arguments (he cites it as one piece of evidence).
For example, here is how The Baptist Doctrine of the Church (1948) defines the local and universal church:
“It is in membership of a local church in one place that the fellowship of the one holy catholic Church becomes significant. Indeed, such gathered companies of believers are the local manifestation of the one Church of God on earth and in heaven. Thus the church at Ephesus is described, in words which strictly belong to the whole catholic Church, as ‘the Church of God, which He hath purchased with His own blood’ (Acts 20:28). The vital relationship to Christ which is implied in full communicant membership in a local church carries with it membership in the Church which is both in time and in eternity, both militant and triumphant. To worship and serve in such a local Christian community is, for Baptists, of the essence of Churchmanship.”
This follows from the doctrine of the universal church:
“Although Baptists have for so long held a position separate from that of other communions, they have always claimed to be part of the one holy catholic Church of our Lord Jesus Christ. They believe in the catholic Church as the holy society of believers in our Lord Jesus Christ, which He founded, of which He is the only Head, and in which He dwells by His Spirit, so that though manifested in many communions, organized in various modes, and scattered throughout the world, it is yet one in Him. The Church is the Body of Christ and a chosen instrument of the divine purpose in history.”
Here we also find evidence of Madison Grace’s assertion that Baptists do in fact have a classical ecclesiology. I wrote something in line with this view of the church recently, which you can read here.
Michael Haykin, Amidst Us Our Beloved Stands: Recovering Sacrament in the Baptist Tradition (Lexham Press, 2002)
Michael Haykin is an eminent historian of Baptist history. Like Fowler, he pays close attention to the British Particular Baptists. This leads him to affirm the sacramental nature of the Lord’s Supper and Baptism. This book is worth reading to get a sense of the rich history of our theological thought that has sometimes been narrowed in 20th-century contexts.
Second London Baptist Confession (1689)
While not a book per se, the Second London Baptist Confession (1689) makes concrete Particular Baptist belief in the 17th century. What I find fascinating is how, like the congregationalist Savoy Declaration (1658), the LBC 1689 also self-consciously aligns itself with the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646). More or less, these three confessions can be seen as being from the same genus of theological thought. We might say the fact of this confession shows how Particular Baptists viewed themselves as a renewal movement within Protestantism.
The Baptist Catechism
Benjamin Keach, one of the possible authors of the Second London Baptist Confession (1689), along with others, also wrote The Baptist Catechism, otherwise known as Keach’s Catechism. It is worth reading and perhaps even using with your family and church! By the way, Keach was pilloried for doing so. I used an image of that for the article’s header image!
Baptist Theology and History Reading List
Tom Nettles – The Baptists, Vol. 1: Key People Involved in Forming a Baptist Identity
Buy on Christianbook | Buy on Amazon
Luke Stamps & Matthew Emerson – The Baptist Vision: Faith and Practice for a Believers’ Church
Buy on Amazon
Matthew Bingham – Orthodox Radicals: Baptist Identity in the English Revolution
Oxford University Press | Buy on Amazon
Matthew Emerson, Christopher Morgan, Lucas Stamps (eds.) – Baptists and the Christian Tradition
Buy from B&H Academic | Buy on Amazon
Stanley Fowler – The Collected Writings of Stanley K. Fowler, Vol. 2
Buy from H&E | Buy on Amazon
The Baptist Doctrine of the Church (1948)
Read here| Also referenced in Fowler’s Collected Writings
Michael A. G. Haykin – Amidst Us Our Beloved Stands: Recovering Sacrament in the Baptist Tradition
Buy from Lexham Press | Buy on Amazon
Second London Baptist Confession (1689)
Read online at Founders Ministries | Read PDF
The Baptist Catechism (Keach’s Catechism)
https://baptistcatechism.org/
Articles by Wyatt Graham
What Is a Local Church?
On Prudence and Dogma
