Friday, 6 July 2012

[9] Are Baptists just ‘churches’ or are they ‘a Church’, a denomination even ?

Robert Hall
A copy of an early nineteenth century print, which used to hang in Baptist chapel vestries, was a composite etching of Baptist worthies.  Though they never actually gathered together, since Carey who left for Serampore never returned, the print was a statement of  Baptist leaders at this time.  Alongside Carey it included Fuller, Ryland and Knibb, all advocates of overseas mission; the Downend Baptist essayist John Foster, as well as Joseph Kinghorn, the Norwich minister who believed all Baptist churches should have a closed church membership, and those members only would be recipients of the Lord’s Supper.

In the middle, the only one who is standing, in the midst of his peers, is Robert Hall, an acknowledged ‘prince of preachers’, a vigorous social reformer, and a champion of religious liberty.  He was twice pastor at Broadmead, first as a young student and then pastor from 1785-91, alongside Caleb Evans and James Newton, then as senior pastor from 1826-31.  Hall was primarily a doctrinal preacher on the fundamentals of  Christian faith, but his sermons were deeply rooted in the events of the day.  As The New York Observer once declared:

“The springs of political government have also felt the touch of his unobtrusive but mighty hand.  There is perhaps not a man living...of whom the English politicians stand so much in awe as Robert Hall.  He explains to them the British Constitution , points them to the path of duty, arraigns them before the tribunal of the public, sifts all their proceedings, and dares even to speak against Mr Pitt”.  [ For Hall, see G W Hughes, Robert Hall, Carey Press, 1943, p.84]

An example of this is Hall’s Sentiments Proper to the Present Crisis.  Hall was on visit to Bristol, and had been called upon, unexpectedly to preach a sermon on October 19, 1803, in Broadmead.  The chapel was filled with a large congregation that included many servicemen in uniform.  This special ‘fast day’ service, called nationally as Napoleon stood on the French coast, ready to invade Britain, brought out the best of Hall’s superb oratory, as he concluded: “the intoxication of his [Napoleon’s] greatness is the omen of his fall”.  The sermon became a best seller.  In an earlier sermon [1800], Hall attacked the irreligion which was rooted in the philosophy of the French Revolution.  He contrasted the moral bankruptcy of irreligion and the ethical fruits of Christianity. “Atheism”, said Hall, “is an inhuman, bloody and ferocious system...its first object is to dethrone God, its next to destroy man.”

Although intellectually brilliant, Hall was very much at home with ordinary working class people. War and industrialisation made the period after the Napoleonic wars desperate for such people.  The government of the day pursued a repressive policy against all who tried to organise workers in defence of their basic pay.  An Appeal on the subject of the Framework Knitters’ Fund appeared as an anonymous tract in 1819. Flying in the face of the Combination Acts , it argued for a workers ‘Union’ among the stocking workers of the Midlands area to prevent starvation and raise basic wages.  The workers would contribute to a central fund from which fellow unemployed workers would be paid.   The problem was these workers were already on starvation wages.  To be out of work was even worse, so many workers would accept lower wages, a position which manufacturers exploited to the full to reduce their overheads.  The Appeal sought capital for a proposed central fund.  It would benefit workers by supporting the unemployed and thus remove a cause of low wages.  It would also help by relieving the already over-stretched local parish poor-relief.  Local tradesmen would benefit because the purchasing power of the workers would be increased and debts reduced.

This called down the wrath of William Cobbett, author of Rural Rides, on the scheme, and it was at this point that Robert Hall revealed he had written the pamphlet and replied on behalf of the  workers.  Hall viewed Cobbett as ‘careless of the truth of his representations and indifferent to the consequences’.  Cobbett claimed the employers could not afford to pay the workers more, and the whole scheme would encourage idleness.  Hall was able to reply that already many employers in three counties had recognised the wisdom of the scheme and responded with gifts for the capital of the union.


Hall’s view on the slave trade was that it ‘degrades human beings from the denomination of persons, to that of things...the sale of human flesh is the most atrocious of social crimes’.  He believed the slave trade ‘as the most iniquitous in its origins, most mischievous in its effects, and diametrically opposed to the genius of Christianity and   the British Constitution’.


Hall’s advocacy of Christian ministers being involved in public affairs was published in his An Apology for the Freedom of the Press, published first in 1791 and then again in 1822. Hall claimed Christianity was consistent with a love of freedom.  Ministers should be involved in civil affairs, cherish freedom and work for it, and when it was secured, maintain it.  The Apology demanded universal adult suffrage, annual parliaments, and the independence of the House of Commons from the paralysing control of the rich.  His final plea was for a free press, a free church, and a free state, in which the people governed themselves.


As a Baptist community not everyone would have been as politically active as Robert Hall, but as the nineteenth century progressed, Baptists moved towards a new national understanding of themselves as a community of interdependent local churches.  When the only official census of religion was taken in 1851, there had been a considerable among Baptist Christians.  There were about 366,000 Baptists meeting in 1374 Particular Baptist chapels and 179 General Baptist chapels, with the ‘Old Baptists’ having 93 chapels, whose members were largely Unitarian in belief. 


What had brought this about?  A new vigour in theology and participation in the local community, typified by Hall at home and by Carey and his BMS partners abroad.  There had been a surge in local Baptist itinerant preaching, particularly in villages which previously had had no dissenting church.  In the country as a whole, General and Particular Baptists made common cause through the formation of the Baptist Union of Great Britain in 1812-13.  Slowly at first the new unity found expression in this London based national organisation, where doctrinal distinctive once embodied in denominational Confessions of Faith that had originated in the 17th century, gave way to a shared conviction in sentiments ‘usually denominated  evangelical’.  It really got under way in 1832, when churches from the Particular and the General Baptist traditions, Calvinistic and Arminian found fellowship and strength in facing the common evangelistic challenge of presenting the Gospel  in a growingly prosperous land under Queen Victoria, with an expanding Empire, colonies  and dependencies around the world.


The Victorian age was one of famous preachers, like Robert Hall, with most cities having a dozen or more, each of whom had a considerable influence on community life and local politics.  Baptists were well supplied with such preachers.  They were well-known in their respective communities.  Alexander Mclaren in Manchester, Charles Williams in Accrington, and C M Birrell in Liverpool in the north-west; J P Mursell in Leicester and John T Brown in Northampton in the Midlands; and C H Spurgeon and John Clifford in London; and Richard Glover in Bristol were typical of the denomination in this century.  Through such leaders Baptists were more and more perceived to be a Church, a denomination, on an equal standing with other Free Churches, and together, part and parcel of the wider Christian community in England.  Those of an earlier generation would have been surprised just how close Baptists had come to being a denomination, among other denominations.  In fact some Victorian Baptists did not like this new shape to Baptist life, and withdrew to form countrywide associations of ‘Strict and Particular Baptists’ who held to the old, distinctive Baptist doctrines, especially as enshrined in the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith.

Broadmead, Bristol, who had been part of that community, moved in the new direction.  By the mid nineteenth century the church had followed Robert Hall’s lead and opened its membership and communion to all who would confess faith in Christ as Lord and Saviour.  It became a loyal supporter of the Baptist Union and the Baptist Missionary Society, a position to which we still adhere to-day.

ROGER HAYDEN

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