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4 From the Margin to the Middle to Somewhere In Between An Overview of American Baptist Historiography Keith Harper “History is a problem for Baptists.”So says J. Gordon Melton in the sixth edition of the Encyclopedia of American Religions, and when the issue is measured by any objective standard, it is apparent he is right. The Handbook of Denominations in the United States lists thirty-one different types of Baptists, while Melton’s Encyclopedia identifies some sixty different North American Baptist groups, not counting the Christian Church and its related traditions, which he identifies with the Baptist family. These sundry Baptists claim no single theological tradition; they share no common creed. They have no long-standing ties to any specific institution. They are fiercely independent, but they will readily associate with whomever they choose. Perhaps Walter B. Shurden put it best when he said,“Baptists do not agree on where they came from, who they are, or how they got that way. In other words, Baptists do not agree on their historical origins,their theological identity,or their subsequent denominational identity.”1 If conceptualizing Baptist history is a chore, assessing the course of Baptist historiography is no less difficult. This essay will focus on select works that chart the way historians have interpreted the Baptist experience in the United States. There are hundreds of works that address some aspect of Baptist life in America, many biographical. While biographies are excellent ways to investigate how individuals meet social, political, and theological challenges , space forbids their inclusion in this essay. Neither will this essay include textbook treatments of Baptist history.The literature cited herein,however , suggests a clear trajectory. America’s Baptists began on society’s fringe, they moved slowly to the mainstream, and they are now somewhere between the two. 72 Keith Harper Early Studies In the early seventeenth century most people viewed Baptists as little more than a despicable sect. They were often persecuted, and their earliest chroniclers were eager both to tell the world of their struggles against the established order and to use incidents of persecution to call for freedom of conscience . America’s first Baptist, Roger Williams, wrote prolifically, but it was two works—The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution and The Bloody Tenent Yet More Bloody, both decrying the mistreatment dissenters received from Bay Colony Puritans—that forever secured his position as America’s prophet for liberty of conscience.2 Williams also set the tone for subsequent treatises. John Clarke’s Ill News from New England underscored Williams’s complaints with his graphic account of Obadiah Holmes’s beating for preaching contrary to established order . Holmes’s ordeal was not an isolated incident, and persecution remained the central theme of Baptist writings until the early twentieth century. Considering such persecution, it is tempting to see Roger Williams as a champion of personal liberty as understood within contemporary liberal parameters. However, Williams was neither a political theorist nor an anarchist . As James P. Byrd explains in The Challenges of Roger Williams: Religious Liberty, Violent Persecution, and the Bible, Williams was a theologian who framed his political thought around biblical texts. While some studies may have demythologized aspects of Williams’s career, Byrd reminds readers that whatever else Roger Williams may have been, he was staunchly committed to biblicism.3 Over time Baptists gained a toehold in North America, but for many they remained a loathsome, sometimes persecuted sect. The middle colonies, especially Pennsylvania and New Jersey, proved fairly hospitable for Baptists, and like-minded congregations ultimately formed associations for fellowship and mutual encouragement. The best-known association, the Philadelphia Association, began in 1707. The association’s Minutes offer a glimpse of the way some Baptists conducted their business in the late colonial and revolutionary eras.4 Baptists may have rejected state authority in religious matters, but they were not ultraindividualistic libertarians. Francis Sacks’s The Philadelphia Baptist Tradition of Church and Church Authority: An Ecumenical Analysis and Theological Interpretation argues that the Philadelphia Association wielded considerable influence over member churches. He also maintains that the Philadelphia Association differentiated between “association” and “council.” Whereas the association existed to promote fellowship and har- American Baptist Historiography 73 mony, the council carried more clout. The association was an ongoing entity that called councils to address specific issues like ministerial ordination or disputes between churches. A council decision, while not infallible, was more than advisory. He concludes by noting that Baptists in the late twentieth century tended to be far less...

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