Primitive Baptist Quotes

mother, with her upbringing in the primitive Baptist church, believed that converting to Roman Catholicism was a step upward in the social order. Of course she was wrong; when I grew up in the South, a Roman Catholic was the weirdest thing you could be.

The Shakers’ “communism,” which caused immediate suspicion among their neighbors, was actually based on the very first Christian church, sometimes called the Primitive Church, as articulated in Acts 2:44–45: “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.” While I grew up in the Baptist Church, which I was compelled to attend at least twice a week, I never heard a preacher quote this passage. As Americans, we greatly prefer a version of Christianity that, while it might “care” for the poor, advocates no structural economic changes that might actually decrease levels of poverty in the United States. And

Bossuet. ‘Experience has shown that all the attempts of the Reformed to confound the Anabaptists, by the scripture, have been weak; and, therefore, they are, at last, obliged to allege to them the practice of the church.’161 Chambers. ‘As none but adults are capable of believing, they’ the German Baptists, ‘argued, that no others are capable of baptism; especially, as there is no passage in all the New Testament, where the baptism of infants is clearly enjoined. Calvin, and other writers against them, are pretty much embarrassed, to answer this argument; and are obliged to have recourse to tradition, and the practice of the primitive church.’162 Also the Oxford Divines, in a convocation, held one thousand, six hundred and forty-seven, acknowledged, ‘that, without the consentaneous judgment of the universal church, they should be at a loss, when they are called upon for proof, in the point of infant baptism.

The excellent Mr. Edwards was settled there, with his grandfather Stoddard, upon the opinion that the Lord’s supper was a converting ordinance, and he had gone on fifteen years in that way, until he was fully convinced that it was contrary to the Word of God; and he also found that gospel discipline could not be practiced in such a way. No sooner was his change of mind discovered, in 1744, than most of his people were inflamed against him, and never would give him a hearing upon the reasons of his change of sentiments; but they were resolute to have him dismissed. As he could not get them to hear him preach upon the subject, he printed his thoughts upon it, in 1749, though most of them would not read his book. In it he says, “that baptism, by which the primitive converts were admitted into the church, was used as an exhibition and token of their being visibly regenerated, dead to sin, and alive to God. The saintship, godliness, and holiness of which, according to Scripture, professing Christians and visible saints do make a profession and have a visibility, is not any religion and virtue that is the result of common grace, or moral sincerity, (as it is called), but saving grace.” And to prove this, he referred to Rom. 2:29; 6:1-4; Phil. 3:3; Col. 2:11, 12. [On a right to Sacraments, p. 20-23.] Though he did not design it, yet many others have been made Baptists by the same scriptures, and the same ideas from them.

Whereas Anabaptists are neither spirited or principled to injure or hurt your government nor your liberties; but rather these be the means to preserve your churches from apostasy, and to provoke them to their primitive purity, as they were in the first planting; in admission of members to receive none into your churches but visible saints, and in restoring the entire jurisdiction of every congregation complete and undisturbed. We are hearty and full for our Presbyterian brethren’s equal liberty with ourselves; O that they had the same spirit towards us! But O how it grieves and affects us, that New England should persecute! Will you not give what you take? Is liberty of conscience your due? And is it not as due unto others who are sound in the faith? Amongst many Scriptures, that in the fourteenth of Romans much confirms me in liberty of conscience thus stated. To him that esteemeth any thing unclean, to him it is unclean.