The English Baptists and the Anabaptists

The name. "Anabaptist" means "rebaptiser". In the sixteenth century the name was given to those who, in Switzerland, Germany and the Low Countries, rejected the baptism of infants and baptised anew those who had received it. The name remained joined for ever to what happened at Münster in 1534 and 1535, and to other doctrines of those groups: that the Christian may not be a magistrate, nor swear, nor bear the sword, and in some cases that goods ought to be held in common. The Westminster Confession has them in view in several chapters, although it does not name them: when it affirms that it is lawful for the Christian to accept the office of a magistrate and to wage war, that the lawful oath is a part of worship, that the communion of saints does not take away from anyone the property of his goods, and that the children of believers are to be baptised.

The denial. The English Baptists always rejected that name. In October 1644, while the Westminster Assembly was deliberating a short distance away, seven churches of London published their first confession of faith, and in the very title they present themselves as churches "commonly (but unjustly) called Anabaptists". That was the purpose: to show that they were orthodox and Reformed, and that they had nothing to do with Münster.

The accusation. Their contemporaries did not believe them, and among these were men of the Assembly itself. Daniel Featley, who had been a member of it, published against the Baptists a book entitled "The Dippers Dipt". Robert Baillie, one of the Scottish commissioners, wrote another with its thesis in the title: "Anabaptism, the True Fountaine of Independency, Brownisme, Antinomy, Familisme".

The origin. Historians today distinguish two things which were then mingled.
The English Baptist churches do not descend from the Anabaptist churches of the Continent. They are born of English Separatism: of Puritans who, convinced that the Church of England could not be reformed, went out of her to form congregations of their own, and who later concluded that her baptism was not valid either. That is the most widely held opinion, and the best founded.
But the Anabaptist influence is real, and it is documented in both branches. The first, that of the General Baptists, Arminian in doctrine, is born in Amsterdam in 1609, among exiled English Separatists. Their pastor, John Smyth, baptised himself and afterwards baptised the others; being later convinced that this had not been valid, he asked to be joined to the Mennonites, and part of his group ended among them. Those who would not, with Thomas Helwys, returned to England in 1612.
The second, that of the Particular Baptists, Calvinistic in doctrine, which is the one that drew up the London Confession, comes out of an independent church in London in the 1630s. About 1641, some of its members came to the conclusion that baptism ought to be by immersion, and as no one in England practised it so, they sent one of their number, Richard Blunt, who knew Dutch, to Rhynsburg, in Holland, to treat with a community akin to the Mennonites which baptised in that manner. On his return, Blunt baptised another, and the two of them, the rest.

What the texts say. The comparison of the confessions makes it possible to state precisely in what the Baptists depart from the Anabaptists and in what they agree with them.
They depart in everything that made that name odious, and the London Confession confesses it in the words of Westminster. It maintains that God has ordained magistrates, that the Christian may be one, and that he may wage war upon just occasions. It maintains that the lawful oath is a part of religious worship, and that it ought to be taken when imposed by lawful authority. And it does something more significant still: Savoy had deleted the paragraph of Westminster which says that the communion of saints does not take away or infringe "the title or propriety which each man hath in his goods and possessions", and London, which in almost everything follows Savoy, goes to Westminster to fetch that clause and restores it. The Congregationalists did not need it; the Baptists did.
They agree, on the other hand, in what defines Anabaptism: that infants are not to be baptised, that he who was baptised as an infant must be baptised on professing the faith, and that the visible church consists only of those who profess. In that the London Confession does not merely depart from Westminster: it says the contrary.

What this shows. That the English Baptists rejected the name, but kept the thing. They were not born of the Anabaptists, and they were right to deny it; they were not the men of Münster, and they were right to protest. But they arrived, by their own road and with the help of those others, at the doctrine of baptism and of the church which had given Anabaptism its name, and they confessed it in 1677 within a text which in everything else is that of Westminster. For that reason the divines of the Assembly were not altogether mistaken in calling them so, nor they in rejecting it: the former were looking at baptism, and the latter at Münster.
The difference from the Anabaptists of the Continent is, for all that, much greater than the likeness. A Baptist of the London Confession confesses the decree of God, justification by faith alone, the perseverance of the saints and the moral law as a rule of life, in the same words as a Presbyterian. In almost all its chapters he is a child of Westminster. He ceases to be so at two points; but those two are the church and baptism.

Sources. For the origin of the English Baptists and the journey of Richard Blunt, the so-called Kiffin Manuscript, as summarised by Baptist historians; for the confession of 1644 and the works of Featley and Baillie, their own titles.