Avoiding the Roger Williams Trap
Advice on thriving within your tradition (especially if you’re Baptist)
I don’t consider Roger Williams (1603–1683) a Baptist. He was one for a brief period when he submitted to baptism and cofounded the first Baptist church in America in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1638. However, while he shared many Baptist convictions, he also believed that a church’s validity rested on the necessity of apostolic succession—the idea that Christ had passed spiritual authority to the apostles who then passed it to their successors. This doctrinal remnant from Roman Catholicism caused massive problems for Williams’ overscrupulous conscience, for he believed that the Roman Catholic Church had become corrupted to the point of breaking the succession. And if corruption entered the succession around the time of Constantine’s conversion, then how could any church be legitimate over a millennium later?
As John Barry writes, “His reasoning and search of Scripture forced him to the position, then, that no human on earth could claim Christ’s authority to gather a church, and could not again until divine intervention reestablished the succession.”[1] Williams removed himself from the Baptist church he helped found and never joined another church for the rest of his life. Since all churches were corrupt, Williams concluded that no true church existed on earth. Functionally, he became a church of one.
I’ve been thinking of Williams lately in light of some very public denomination switching that’s been happening. While no one to my knowledge is arguing for apostolic succession as the reason for switching traditions, there’s usually a sentiment expressed that the denomination being abandoned (usually Baptist) is corrupted beyond hope. Matthew Barrett, for example, wrote in his exit post, with no qualifications, that “for Southern Baptists image is everything.” I saw another post last week in which the author suggested that American evangelicalism is completely overrun by greed for money and celebrity-ism.
Interestingly, at the very same time some are leaving the Baptist tradition for greener pastures, others from within the traditions to which they are going are writing about dysfunction and corruption there. Consider Anglicanism as just one example. Would anyone care to make an honest historical argument that Anglican polity has preserved pristine orthodoxy through the centuries? Can anyone look at the state of Anglicanism in its native land and conclude that it has effectively maintained righteousness and truth? Do we really want to point to Anglicanism’s inauspicious start under Henry VIII as a shining moral counterexample to the horrendous beginnings of my own Southern Baptist Convention?
As a Baptist historian, it’s fun to speculate about the potential reactions of early American Baptists like David Barrow and Isaac Backus—both of whom led efforts to counter Anglican persecution of Baptists—had they somehow found a way to peer into the future at Barrett’s musings about leaving the corrupt Baptists for the pure and faithful Anglicans. One of the most common charges leveled against established Anglican clergy by New Light evangelicals in early America was that they were worldly and unconverted!
I mention this history, not to pile on Anglicanism or even to validate those historical indictments, but to merely acknowledge that these kinds of accusations have persisted interdenominationally throughout history. There’s no such thing as a pure church tradition. Whether you credit it to indwelling sin in the lives of believers or wolves infiltrating the church in sheep’s clothing, every denomination—every single tradition—is tainted. If you feel the need to be a part of a pure historical tradition to go to sleep at night, you only have one option—the path of Roger Williams. But let me warn you. Should you choose that lonely path, you’re not going to like the corruption you discover there either.
Several factors impact our ability to accurately evaluate our traditions. I’ll only mention two here. First, we tend to universalize our own experience. Matthew Barrett did this in his exit post. He clearly experienced some unspecified conflict in his former setting and was uncharacteristically sloppy in universalizing those experiences and applying them to the whole tradition. Is it true that every Southern Baptist believes image is everything?
I often meet people who have encountered various levels of abuse in local churches. Tragically, these traumatic experiences leave deep and lasting scars. Consequently, many struggle to trust any church ever again. As painful as those experiences are, however, you simply can’t evaluate a whole tradition through the lens of your personal experience within that tradition. For every bad actor, there are plenty of faithful, Christ-loving pastors laboring away in service to their flocks. For every tragic case of abuse, there are plenty of people who would testify to deep experiences of love and growth within that same tradition.
Second, the internet changes the way we interpret reality. Who gets the press? It’s not those faithful, Christ-loving pastors. They’re boring. In fact, I’ve yet to stumble upon a successful Substack that features regular articles on faithful pastors shepherding their flocks in real time. But I can find dozens devoted to abuse. I can find even more devoted to controversial hot topics. Spectacle and controversy sell. Faithfulness is dull. And when you feed your attention a steady diet of bad news, don’t be surprised when you start to believe your whole tradition is absolutely and irredeemably beyond repair. You can always find what you’re looking for.
What can we do? How can we live contentedly within any tradition amid so much corruption? How can we honor our theological convictions in a covenant community with likeminded believers knowing that our own tradition, whichever one we belong to, is full of bad examples? I don’t have all the answers, but I can tell you three things that help me.
First, form your convictions. I put this first because it’s the most important. If you believe that Baptists get the order of God’s covenants right and that regenerate church membership is nonnegotiable in the new covenant in Christ, like I do, then paedobaptist traditions are simply not valid options. Our beliefs about true doctrine must override our emotions. I enjoy many of the aesthetics of high church traditions, but that preference must not supersede my convictions. Theology trumps all. Of course, views on baptism and polity are not first order issues, meaning I don’t condemn all non-Baptists as unsaved. But these doctrines are certainly important enough to define the parameters of church fellowship.
Second, retrieve your tradition’s history. C. S. Lewis famously recommended reading an old book for every new one. That wise advice is even more relevant in the Digital Age. Our constant connection to the digital world keeps us glued to the present. How much more do we need to remind ourselves of our history today? Narrative identity forms when a group maintains the permanence of a proper name across changing historical circumstances by telling and retelling a shared story.[2] After 400 years, Baptists have a narrative identity worth preserving, but preserving it depends on knowing it. And to know it we must commit intentional effort to studying it.
If your primary connection point with the Baptist tradition is the cool megachurch pastor in skinny jeans talking from his iPad with the lights dimmed, it’s going to be easy to walk away when the seemingly inevitable moral failure comes. Similarly, traditions that don’t value deep thinking and education will usually struggle to inspire longstanding commitment. Pragmatism and vibes can’t sustain commitment; planting deep roots in a worthy historical tradition can. We belong to a long line of imperfect but faithful witnesses that stretches back 400 years and counting. Over that time, a consensus has formed around the question of what it means to be a Baptist. It’s now our generation’s turn to carry that torch forward.
Third, focus local. Wendell Berry writes often on the importance of place to counter dehumanizing models that work against human flourishing. I once heard Eugene Peterson say that when he read Berry, he substituted “church” every time he saw “farm.” Digital culture provides us with abstract notions of a “church” that never actually gathers. It perpetuates a form of disembodied gnosticism disconnected from where real people live their real lives. The incarnation of Jesus Christ means that there’s no such thing as disembodied Christianity. You can’t be an online Christian. The gospel must take root in your actual life where you live among real people. Berry’s character, Jayber Crow, gets to this notion when he says, “To feel at home in a place, you have to have some prospect of staying there.” That’s true for local churches as well. The access point for any church tradition is the local church where you are a member.
When you think of “the church,” do you imagine the headlines from places disconnected from your life or do you envision the actual people you have covenanted with before Christ? Most of us can’t do anything about the latest megachurch pastor scandal. Thankfully, most of the people in my church have no idea who that guy is anyway. But I can work toward leading my own church toward Christ. I can invest in these people—planting seeds, daily laboring, and praying to God for a good harvest. That’s where I choose to focus.
[1] John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty (New York: Viking, 2012), 263.
[2] John Seed, Dissenting Histories: Religious Division and the Politics of Memory in Eighteenth-Century England (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 1–2.
Excellent post!
Excellent!