Reformation and Revolution

Have you ever wondered why there are so many different kinds of Baptist churches?

There are the Conservative Baptists, which our church belongs to. Then there are the Southern Baptists, the American Baptists, the Bible Baptists, the General Assn. of Regular Baptists, and the Baptist General Conference.

You have the Black Baptists, the Free Will Baptists, the Central Baptists, the Evangelical Baptists, the Landmark Baptists, the Soul-Saving Baptists, the Primitive Baptists, and the Reformed Baptists. You have Separate Baptists, Independent Baptists, Seventh-Day Baptists, Two Seed in the Spirit Predestinarian Baptists, and Hard-Shell Baptists. And of course you have that most unusual group of all, the United Baptists.

In fact Mead’s Handbook of Denominations in the United States lists no less than 26 different Baptist denominations, not to mention all the independent Baptist churches which belong to no particular association. Why are there so many different Baptist churches?

For the answer to that question, you have to go back all the way to two historical events which happened within twenty-five years of each other. Both events happened in October, which I happen to think is a great month.

- Oct.11, 1492 - Columbus discovered America (or to be more accurate, re-discovered it.)

- Oct.31, 1517 - Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the chapel door at Wittenberg, marking the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.

Little did Martin Luther realize that his challenge to the Roman Catholic church was going to change the course of history. What did Luther believe that was so controversial?

1. Salvation is by faith in Jesus Christ alone. There is no place for earning your way to heaven by doing good works. Therefore, there is no need for a sacramental system administered by an established church to help you get there.

2. The Bible is the sole authority for Christian faith and behavior. What the church says doesn’t matter. The teaching of the church must stand or fall under the scrutiny of Scripture. And where the church errs in its doctrine, as in the case of the sale of indulgences, it is to be protested and reformed. Hence, the Protestant Reformation.

3. Every believer, whether he is a nobleman or a peasant, is a priest. Each person can come to God and worship him as an individual. Every Christian can read and understand the Bible for himself. There is no need for a special class of priests to act as mediators between God, the Bible, and the common man.

4. The church, by definition, is any community of believers in Jesus Christ who unite to worship and serve God. There is no need for a local church to have the sanction of any higher ecclesiastical body. Wherever you have believers, there you have the church.

1. Salvation by faith

2. Scripture the only authority

3. Every believer a priest

4. The church the community of believers

Now these principles had a tremendous impact on Northern Europe, not just theologically, but culturally, and politically as well. Because what Martin Luther and other Reformers were saying was that the individual was important, and that in God’s eyes, all men were equal.

So it isn’t surprising that the peasants of Germany took hold of Luther’s religious ideas and applied them politically. In 1524 they revolted against the landowners and nobles. They demanded the abolition of serfdom. They demanded the right of local churches to elect their own pastors.

In fact, the peasants went so far in their demands that even Martin Luther himself opposed them. A terrible war broke out. After a bloodbath in which over 100,000 peasants were killed, the Peasants’ Revolt was put down. But the seed had been sown. The ideals of the Protestant Reformation lived on and spread to other parts of Europe.

Little Christian groups like the Puritans, the Anabaptists, the Huguenots, and the Mennonites sprang up around Europe. They separated themselves from the established state-run churches. And they were persecuted, hunted down, and even burned at the stake for their beliefs. That brings us back to Christopher Columbus.

Those little groups of believers began to look across the Atlantic Ocean to that great wilderness called America that Columbus had discovered in 1492. They saw it as a place where maybe they could settle down in peace and find community as the people of God.

And so they came. Dutch Reformed to New York; Quakers, Mennonites, Moravians, and Scottish Calvinists to Pennsylvania; Swedish Lutherans to Delaware; Puritans and Baptists to New England.

And they found community here. They built thriving colonies, centered around their churches and their faith. The remarkable thing about early America—something which is being less and less emphasized in modern history text-books—is that more than anything else, religion shaped the culture of the colonies.

Because of their religious beliefs coming out of the Protestant Reformation, these hardy settlers built a society where the ideas and the rights of the individual mattered. Where fairness and democracy were important. And where power was instinctively mistrusted—whether it was the power of a distant government, or the power of a mother church - .

The emphasis in early America was on the citizen rather than the state; on personal liberty rather than slavish conformity; and on the rights of the individual rather than on the rights of the government or the church.

Christianity, as practiced in the American Colonies, bore the unmistakable stamp of the Protestant Reformation. Churches were mainly run by congregational government. Laymen were heavily involved. There was very little hierarchy. Not even the Church of England had a bishop in the colonies.

The clergy was weak, due to the lack formal training in divinity schools, or seminaries. Liturgy, tradition, and formality were downplayed. The emphasis was on the individual’s relationship with God and his personal experience in worship.

In the 1740’s, a tremendous spiritual revival swept through the colonies. It was called the Great Awakening, and it reinforced all of these things. Even the staid and conservative Anglican church in the southern colonies was affected. People got excited about having a personal relationship with God. Many of them joined a new movement led by John and Charles Wesley. They called themselves Methodists, because they practiced a methodical, disciplined approach to personal holiness.

So given this predisposition toward freedom and individualism, it isn’t surprising that when England began to play political hardball, the Colonists didn’t take it lying down. They responded with protest and rebellion.

Preachers like Jonathan Mayhew, the pastor of the West Church in Boston, delivered hell-fire sermons against the King of England. He called his parishioners to free themselves from their slavery to the English and their abominable Stamp Act.

To make a long story short, what happened on July 4, 1776 happened because the American colonists were people who were steeped in the values of the Protestant Reformation. If there had been no Protestant Reformation, there would probably not have been an American Revolution.

Robert Middlekauff writes in the Oxford History of the United States:

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and many who followed them into revolution may not have been men moved by religious passions. But all had been marked by the moral dispositions of a passionate Protestantism.

The American Revolution took the core values of the Protestant Reformation and burned them into the national conscience. The importance of the individual, of equality, of freedom and independence, were written on the very foundations of American society. They became more than just religious convictions; they became the law of the land.

So as American evangelicals, we have a double birthmark. Because we are Protestants, and because we are Americans, we see things through free-thinking, independent-minded eyes. As heirs of these two great historical events, we have a strong sense of the worth and the rights and the autonomy of the individual in every aspect of life, including the spiritual.

But there’s the rub. Because of where we’ve come from, we also have some blind spots. Because we place such a high premium on independence, we often place a low premium on interdependence - the relationship that should exist among believers in the local church.

We don’t very often look favorably on the idea of submitting to one another, because we have this inbred instinct to dissent, to rebel, and ultimately to separate from anyone or any group that we disagree with.

That’s why there are 26 different Baptist denominations in North America and well over 250 forms of Protestant Christianity. That’s why, when conflict or disagreement arise in a typical evangelical church, people will simply leave and go somewhere else and feel entirely justified in doing so.

After all, we’ve been taught that what matters most is the personal freedom and independence of the individual. It’s in our blood. It’s our heritage as Americans. But maybe we have become so good at independence that we have forgotten our need for dependence. Dependence on God, and dependence on each other as fellow Christians.

When we look at the Bible’s description of life in the church, we see that Christians are to be involved with one another. The church is not just a collection of autonomous individuals who show up for a weekly get together. It is a family, with all the privileges and responsibilities and involvement of a family.

The best way to see this is to look at the number of times that the NT uses the expression “one another”. There are no less than 37 “one anothers” in the NT.

Jn.13:34 Love one another

Rom.12:10 Be devoted to one another in brotherly love. Honor one another

Rom.12:16 Live in harmony with one another

Rom.14:13 Stop passing judgment on one another

Rom.15:7 Accept one another

Rom.15:14 Instruct one another

1 Cor.1:10 Agree with one another

Gal. 5:13 Serve one another

Eph. 4:32 Be kind to one another

Eph. 5:21 Submit to one another

Col. 3:13 Forgive whatever grievances you have with one another

Col. 3:16 Teach and admonish one another

1 Thes. 5:11 Encourage one another

Heb.10:24 Spur one another on toward love and good deeds

Jam. 4:11 Do not slander one another

1 Pet. 3:8 Live in harmony with one another

1 Pet. 4:9 Offer hospitality to one another

1 Pet. 5:5 Clothe yourselves with humility toward one another

1 Jn. 1:7 Have fellowship with one another

We live in an age when church hopping and shopping have become pretty much the accepted norm. Christians will separate over the most trivial issues. I heard of a couple who left a church over the issue of what color the new carpet in the sanctuary was going to be. I guess that their own taste in carpet and their own freedom of self-expression were more important to them than their relationship with their brothers and sisters in Christ.

We live in a society which has carried personal freedom and self-expression to irresponsible extremes. America has made an idol out of independence. If the church is ever going to make an impression on this freedom-mad culture in which we live, we’re going to have to start modeling a different lifestyle. A lifestyle in which interdependence and mutual submission are modeled in practical ways.

We’re going to have to stop fighting and start loving. We’re going to have to stop separating and start uniting. We’re going to have to stop leaving and start cleaving. We’re going to have to stop disagreeing and start agreeing. And we’re going to have to do this for the sake of the Body, for the sake of Jesus Christ, and for the sake of His cause in the world.

Exactly 218 years ago tomorrow, not far from here, Benjamin Franklin and 54 other men enacted the Declaration of Independence. But Franklin, for one, recognized that independence was only one side of the issue. Interdependence was the other. As he anticipated the great struggle to come, he said ” We must all hang together, or assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” His words have great meaning for us today.

As we look ahead at the coming year, our church will be going through some significant changes. We will initiate an additional worship service on Sunday mornings. We will begin to build a new building. We will increase our outreach to our community, with the result that new people will come to the Lord and join our fellowship. There will be new faces to recognize; new names to learn; new relationships to build.

These changes may be threatening to some, and frightening to others. We’re going to need each other in ways we have never needed each other before. We’re going to need to be a team, where everyone is important, and everyone can be counted on. We’re on a mission, you see—a mission into enemy territory.

My prayer is that our church would be united in the coming year. That we would not be bickering and fighting and picking at one another. But that we would be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving each other even as God in Christ forgave us.

So as we celebrate this holiday weekend, let’s remember that independence is wonderful. We can thank God for providing it for us through what happened on July 4, 1776.

But interdependence is even better. And what happened on Good Friday in 30 AD on a cross outside the city of Jerusalem is what provided that for us. So let’s go forward together for His glory.