What did Jesus Accomplish on the Cross? A Particular Baptist Reply

John Calvin

We have already noted a significant question for early English Baptists: what did Jesus accomplish by his life, death and resurrection?   John Calvin answered this in a very clear cut, but fundamentally different manner, to that of his successor, Jacob Arminius. 

To understand Calvin’s significance it is important to outline his life and his broad theological principles, before looking at the narrower issue of predestination.  John Calvin [1509-64] a French Roman Catholic, trained as a lawyer at the Sorbonne in Paris, studied the writings of Luther and other theologians, and in 1532, like them underwent a deep evangelical religious experience. ‘God subdued my heart’ he wrote, ‘to docility by a sudden conversion’.

 He was forced to leave France and it was while he was passing through Geneva that he was persuaded to become the city’s ‘reader in Holy Scripture’. Here Calvin published The Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536, a classic statement of the whole of his reformed theology, which was revised continually throughout his life.  He was persuaded to become the organizer of ‘the reformation’ in Geneva, and in 1541 began his work, remaining there as the ‘unopposed dictator’ of a theocratic regime in the city till 1564. 

The government of this new reformed church was by a consistory church court, which could excommunicate unrepentant church members, and had far reaching authority over the private lives of every citizen. In Geneva people saw a theocratic state in action, and many in England thought it the best model of a reformed church.  English separatists who took refuge there responded warmly to Calvin’s revolutionary proposals for a new church structure, and sought a reformation in England advocating the Geneva model.  However, Queen Elizabeth 1 would not tolerate it.  In Scotland John Knox led the introduction of Calvin’s model for church and state.


English Separatist Christians, meeting outside Church of England structures, began to form ‘gathered churches’, established on Calvin’s principles. Henry Jacob led one such Independent Calvinist congregation as early as 1616.  By 1630, this church was led by John Lathrop, the congregation insisting upon a complete separation of church and state, rejecting the ‘parish’ system of Anglicanism.  Ten years later, in May 1640, Henry Jessey was the pastor.  This Calvinist orientated congregation discussed believers’ baptism in the 1640s, and by 1644 believers’ baptism had become the norm for admission to this congregation.  By 1644 seven other London Baptist congregations signed a common statement of their faith and practice.  Calvinist Baptist congregations grew steadily.

In the time of Oliver Cromwell, Baptist Christians in the Parliamentary army spread Calvinist Baptist churches around the country.  It was the English Civil War that led the Broadmead, Bristol congregation to leave ‘Royalist’ Bristol, and migrate to London where they joined with a Calvinist Baptist congregation under the leadership of William Kiffin.  Once Cromwell was ruling the country, Broadmead Christians returned to Bristol, to be led by Matthew Hazzard, his wife Dorothy, and later Thomas Ewins.

Calvinism maintains that the Bible alone contains all that is necessary to know God and our duties towards God and our neighbour.  Calvinist theology asserted that before the Fall, man was in a state of innocence and could attain to holy living.  But the Fall, which was willed by God, substantially changed human nature, so that man no longer had free will.  All human works outside the Christian faith were sins, and even the good works of Christians were intrinsically evil.  However, the imputed merits of Christ won at Calvary covered humanities intrinsic evil, and they were not counted as such.  Calvin argued that before the Fall, even before the creation of the world, God in his wisdom predestined some of humanity, his elect, to salvation and the rest to damnation.

In a recent Baptist Quarterly [January 2011] an article claims that The True Calvinist is a Baptist.   This may be true but to-day’s English Baptists are certainly not Calvinist, but are more accurately termed Arminian.  When Baptist churches in the mid-eighteenth century awoke to the missionary challenge of Andrew Fuller and William Carey, they modified their Calvinism without becoming fully Arminian, because ‘high Calvinism’ had to all intents and purposes, reduced the missionary task of the Church to helping the elect of God to recognise their calling.  Calvin’s assertion of predestination was meant to maintain the sovereignty God, but it effectively reduced God’s elect to a very small number, when set within the context of the vast populations on earth that Carey discovered, when reading of the voyages of Captain Cook.  Arminius, on the other hand, maintained that God’s sovereignty was compatible with man’s real free-will.  He was clear that Jesus died for all people, not just the elect and rejected predestination as unbiblical.


When the Baptist Union united English General and Particular Baptists into a single group in 1891, it signalled a retreat by the majority of English Baptists from full-bloodied Calvinism, though a small group maintained the original Calvinist position, and are to-day as known as Strict and Particular Baptists.

3. What did Jesus accomplish on the cross?

A GENERAL BAPTIST  REPLY

Imagine holding a mirror before your present church’s congregation.  What would you see in the mirror? Many of our Baptist forefathers might well have answered: the Church of Jesus as it is described in the Gospels.  In the time of Queen Elizabeth 1st, it was very plain to see that this was not so.  Some people wanted Bishops out of the picture.  Many objected to some of the services in the Book of Common Prayer.  Others thought that the State should be totally separated from the life of the Church.

Thomas Cartwright of Cambridge University was prepared to give the Church in England time to put its house in order.  Robert Browne vehemently disagreed, his tract in 1582 calling for A Treatise of Reformation without tarrying for any.  When Browne and his friend Harrison were persecuted by both Church and State, they emigrated to Middleburg, in Europe.  They were soon joined by other congregations led by John Penry, Henry Ainsworth, and Francis Johnson. Another group led by John Robinson had fled to Leyden, and it was from this group that some members left, first on the ship Speedwell, before transferring to the Mayflower.   William Brewster, who became one of the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’, was from this group who arrived in America in June 1620.  Another group which went from Gainsborough, Lincs, was led by a former Anglican priest, John Smyth, who set up the first English Baptist Church in Amsterdam.
Smyth was born c.1570, and began his studies at Christ’s College, Cambridge in 1586, where one of his tutors was Francis Johnson.  At University, Smyth was in trouble with the authorities for objections he made to the burial service, wearing the surplice and the ‘churching of women’.  The last was still being objected to by Dorothy Hazard in Broadmead, 50 years later!  Smyth continued in trouble with the Anglican authorities, but arrived in a Gainsborough parish, on the borders of Nottinghamshire.  While here, Smyth styled himself as ‘the pastor of the Gainsborough Church’. Among those he met with at this time, were Richard Clifton, rector of Babworth, who emigrated to Amsterdam, 1608; William Brewster who went to Leyden; and a local lawyer, Thomas Helwys, a member with him at Gainsborough.

Helwys did his legal training at Grays’ Inn, London, before getting married and settling down at Broxtowe Hall, Nottinghamshire.  He was a member in Smyth’s Gainsborough congregation, and played a key role in getting the congregation safely to Amsterdam, where they were housed in the great bakehouse of Jan Munter.  Here they were at last free to worship according to the dictates of their consciences as guided by the New Testament, and also free as A C Underwood comments, ‘to experience all the evils of overcrowding, from exacerbated tempers to the plague’.

In 1610 John Smyth and about 30 members asked to join the Mennonite church, believing that they had been wrong to baptize themselves.  They had baptized themselves at a time when they believed that no pure New Testament Church existed, but now they had made contact with the baptizing congregation of Menno Simons, they felt this should be their ‘church’ home.  Helwys and the other half of the members became a distinct Baptist congregation in 1612.  In 1612 Helwys published the first claim in English for complete freedom of worship.  The book, with its unusual title, A Short Declaration of the Mistery of Iniquity, published in Amsterdam, was sent to King James 1, with a note on the fly-leaf from Helwys to the King.

‘Hear, O King, and despise not the counsel of the poor...The king is a mortal man and not God: therefore he hath no power over immortal souls of his subjects, to make laws and ordinances for them, and to set spiritual Lords over them’.

In the body of the book Helwys wrote:
‘men’s religion to God, is betwixt God and themselves; the King shall not answer for it, neither may the King be judge between God and man.  Let them be heretics, Turks, Jews and whatsoever it appertains not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure.  This is made evident to our Lord the King by the Scriptures.’[p.85]

General Baptists persistently argued for religious freedom and toleration. They did not believe that anyone was destined by a divine decree to damnation, but that all people had the possibility of repenting, believing the Gospel that Christ came to save sinners.  This also led them to argue most strongly that nobody should be killed for their mistaken beliefs.  This act might defeat the purposes of God whose will it is that all people should repent, find forgiveness, and live in Christ forever.

We now return to our original question: what did Jesus accomplish by his life, death and resurrection? The earliest English Baptist answer was not a Calvinist one.  General Baptists did NOT believe that before the world began, God in his wisdom had already decided who should be saved.  General Baptists preferred the teaching of Calvin’s successor, Jacob Arminius, and were please to be called, Arminian or General Baptists because of their conviction.  As indicated at the close of our second article, how we to-day answer the question: ‘what did God in Christ ultimately accomplish at Calvary?’ is fundamental for Baptists.

ROGER HAYDEN