Three Reasons why "Reformed Baptist" is No Misnomer

3 - Baptist Origins

There are three or four view of the origin of the Baptist movement: English Separatism, Anabaptist Kinship, and two kinds of successionism: landmarkism and perpetuity succession.

The least tenable in scholarship says that baptists have always existed in a direct and verifiable chain of churches, sometimes traced through cults, since John and Jesus in the river Jordan. It is a kind of Baptist triumphalism, and it tends to say that non-Baptists are invalid or extremely errant churches. The milder kind only says that baptists views have always been present and follow from the New Testament itself, even when the church at large neglected these issues. (Isn't this basically Protestantism as a whole?)

Anabaptist kinship alleges that the best way to think about the Baptist movement is in its relationship with the Anabaptists on the continent. This view does not require that the Baptists and the Anabaptists are the same movement, just that they are closely related. The history gets messy when 18th and 19th c works sometimes use these labels interchangeably, despite the existence of discrete movements and terms.

It is not my goal here to persuade the reader, but the English Separatist movement is the most appropriate theory of origins. The Baptists are in short credobaptist congregationalists. Think only about the predominant Baptist confession, the Second London. Westminster was drafted by the Assembly, for the Presbyterian movement. The Congregationalists in London adapted it for their movement (Savoy). The Baptists then adapted Savoy for themselves. Hercules Collins did the same with the Heidelberg Catechism, and it should be admitted that the original First London Baptist Confession shared the same distinctive theology, as does the Abstract of Principles for Southern Seminary in the US. 

Did the confession become non-reformed? Not by mere principle of alteration, because the Congregationalists did the same without opposition. The opponent to the phrase "reformed baptist" needs to demonstrate the single issue of credobaptism breaks the "reformed" designation, and not only that it is idiosyncratic or false. Careful Baptist theologians are willing to admit that the change in the sign of the covenant has other implications for covenant theology.

Think also about the movement in the US: Roger Williams obviously moved out of a Reformed, Congregationalist context in New England. "But", I hear you say, "So did the Mormons schism from a Reformed context, and so did the Remonstrants!" Yes, and the burden of proof is on you, inner voice, to demonstrate that the degree of change from paedobaptist Congregationalist to credobaptist congregationalist throws out the Reformed moniker. The Arminians were rebuked at the Synod of Dort. The Mormons are restorationists - their central argument is that the church of all ages was false or absent until they dug up some new scriptures and then translated them by staring into a hat (look it up).

Conclusion

Can the doubters prove their point? I doubt it. The semantic range of given terms are always in flux. Consider the extra wrinkle that even the Heidelberg Catechism and its original proponents were not officially, technically, Reformed. They claimed to stay within the bounds of the Augsburg Confession during the Peace of Augsburg, and they were right. The Reformed movement, like any other, had its origins, a period of formation, then a settling long after. Would "reformed baptist" be an anachronism in Germany in 1563? Yeah, probably. I'm only suggesting that we stop interrupting the Baptists to say "Um, Actually!" when they bring up Calvin.