TOLERATION AND LIBERTY: Baptists between 1640 and 1689

To describe Baptist Christians to-day as Dissenters or Nonconformists, would only be understood by a few.  However, such words were used because they conveyed who Baptists were.  When Charles II came to power as the monarchy was restored in 1660, the Act of Uniformity [1662] re-established the Church of England as an Episcopal state church that all Christians must accept.   All ministers had to declare their ‘unfeigned assent and consent’ to the Book of Common Prayer, and the Thirty-nine Articles’ If they had not been ordained by a Bishop, they had to be re-ordained.  Conformity to the established church was also required of every university Fellow, school teacher and private tutor.  There was no place for any kind of dissenting from this. 

All ministers had to sign up to the Uniformity Act by 24 August 1662, St Bartholomew’s Day.  1,000 clergy resigned their livings rather than do this. 2029 clergy, lecturers and Fellows were deprived of their posts between 1660 and 1662. Of the 2029 clergy affected, 194 were known to be Independent[Congregational] ministers, and 19 were Baptists.  Most stood down with great reluctance.  For a while the Presbyterians tried to get a foothold in the restored Anglican church without success, and by 1689 were firmly in the dissenting community.  They dissented from, and were unable to accept, the form and practices of the Church of England. 

The immediate effect of the Restoration was to bring persecution and suffering between 1660 and 1689, as the Broadmead Records testify, with Ewins, Hardcastle, and Fownes being imprisoned, as well as many other church members.  It was also the final step towards the division of English Christendom into Church of England, Dissenters, and Roman Catholic..  It was in this period that Baptists, as a denomination found their shape, beliefs, and practices.

Baptists had already argued for religious toleration when they returned to England, with Thomas Helwys giving religious liberty and toleration ‘the finest and fullest defence it had ever received in England’.  The King is a mortal man and not God, therefore hath no power over the immortal souls of his subjects.  Helwys argued that the state has no right to persecute people for their religious opinions or invade their worship gatherings.  Wars of religion, the savage tortures of the Middle Ages, the cruelties of the Inquisition, the brutal penalties enacted by Protestants on one another, all depended upon linking of the state’s secular arm with its religious arm. 

With John Milton, our Baptist forefathers protested against those who would
‘Adjure the civil sword/To force our consciences that Christ set free.’

A distinguishing mark of Baptist people was their fight to establish the complete separation of Church and State, so that the secular force could not be used in matters of religious belief.  Equally, Baptists argued that the affairs of the Church should be controlled by the church, not by the Crown through Parliament.  Think of the persecution of Christians in Islamic countries, as is happening in Pakistan now, or when Baptists, like Georgi Vins, were being persecuted in the Communist Soviet Union for their religious faith, and the vital relevance of this distinctive belief is seen as a contemporary issue for Baptist people.

Toleration, religious liberty, and the separation of Church and State, were vital issues in this period and the price paid to secure them was significant.  Baptists let them fall into disuse to-day at their peril. Richard Hooker argued in his famous defence of the Church of England as established by the first Queen Elizabeth, that:
“There is not any member of the Church of England but the same person is also a member of the commonwealth; nor any member of the commonwealth, which is not also of the Church of England.”

He was profoundly wrong in thinking that Church and commonwealth were ‘personally one society’.  The Church of England was then regarded as the nation in its religious aspect.  It was not true then, and it is not true to-day.  Our dissenting forefathers rejected the idea, believing such a view obscured and distorts the true nature of the Church.  The church is, as R C Walton, one of my predecessors at Waterbarn, Bacup called it, The Gathered Community; or as Ernest A Payne preferred to call it The Fellowship of Believers.  From within that believer community within our nation, the Free Churches, as we Baptists and other dissenting friends call ourselves to-day, are not called to be ‘a beneficent voluntary association within the life of the State, which the State is content to patronize’ as an adjunct of its ‘Big Society’, serving its goals.  We are to be a necessary ‘prophetic voice to the state’ concerning God’s values and plans for his world.  The gathered Church community and its ministers are here to help the State to be properly an agent of the coming Kingdom of God.

ROGER HAYDEN