John Smyth and Thomas Helwys Unleash a Burgeoning Polity and Theology

            Insofar as church polity had been about political control for the previous one hundred years, the goals and aspirations of the Separatists, and eventually the Free Church movement, were politically conceived as well.  However, their political aspirations did not seek to have the national Church succumb to their demands; rather, they sought to have the true church come out from under the authoritarian and adulterous relationship it had endured with the magistracy.  This, consequently, was not a direct complaint against the episcopacy as much as it was a plea for religious freedom. 

            As an Anglican priest, to say Smyth had only political problems with the Anglican Church would be a gross mischaracterization, however, the consolidation of James’ political power within the church prevented those theological problems from being worked out in an ecclesiastical setting.  In fact, Smyth had personally exercised a myriad of options searching for the means to deal with the discrepancies he saw.  Coffey explains:

“Smyth went through a prodigious number of religious incarnations; he began his career as a puritan within the Church of England, became an Independent, moved on to separatism, baptized himself, and finally joined the Waterlanders, a Dutch Mennonite sect. Although his 1610 Confession of Faith was published before he had joined the Mennonites, it reveals significant Anabaptist influences, not least in its comprehensive statement on freedom of religion: the magistrate, wrote Smyth, was ‘not to meddle with religion or matters of conscience’.”[1]

This left Smyth and those like him having to reject political power in order to have theological dialogue.  Like Luther and Calvin before them, their attempt to call the church to theological purity was hindered by demagoguery, though some would have certainly accused Luther and Calvin of being demagogues themselves at this point.

            All of this inner turmoil and self-discovery culminated in a concerted effort along with Richard Bernard, Thomas Helwys, and others to begin to meet at Gainsborough in 1606 under the auspices of a Separatist congregation in order to formerly resist the established church of King James.[2]  Shortly, this congregation was forced to flee to Amsterdam, because of Anglican persecution.  Under the influence of Dutch theologian Jacob Arminius, no doubt, this small congregation, lead by Smyth and Helwys, were persuaded that, “baptism should be administered only to those who could testify to a work of grace in their lives and that infant baptism had no precedent in the New Testament.”[3]  This subsequent conviction regarding believer’s baptism would become a staple of Baptist faith and polity, and would also prove to be the theological axiom by which their conclusions of separation of Church and State were derived.  However, it also proved to be the sticking point for Smyth and drove him to seek membership with the Waterlander Mennonites, which was still pending at the time of his death.[4]

            While a Baptist theology was definitely still emerging by the time Smyth’s congregation broke from Helwys in favor of the Waterlanders, Baptist polity had emerged from out of its Separatist and Anabaptist surroundings as a movement toward “extreme toleration.”  Helwys even propagated that religious freedom ought to extend to all “peaceable religions,” arguing that the magistracy’s power could not extend to the spirits of men.[5]  He rejected more than the political abuses of the episcopacy.  He rejected the whole of the Catholic Church in all its forms in favor of a free congregational polity.  Indeed, he moved the congregation back to England, in Spitalfields, just outside of London in order to become an evangelistic presence in the “city of the Beast.”  This is officially recognized as the first Baptist congregation on English soil.[6]

           Helwys’ increasing insistence that the magistrate ought to have no dealings with the church, though Christians could belong to the magistracy, gave rise to church polity founded in the theological notion that the believer’s priesthood supplants not only the Levitical priesthood but also the episcopacy.  This was due, in part, because Helwys viewed the episcopacy in both political and theological terms.  In Helwys’ mind, it was congruent to simultaneously call for civil toleration from the episcopacy, because they had no right to impose religious views, and proclaim God’s intolerance/judgment upon that same institution, because of the Christian hypocrisy that it engendered.  By this time, what began as a civic protest with Smyth and other Separatists had turned into a theological polemic.

            The political rejection of the Anglican Church and its use of the episcopacy turned quickly into a theological rejection of the Anglican Church as a whole for Helwys and his followers, which, in-turn nearly ended in a theologically unsound entity.  Maclear notes that, “Even obvious polity differences were eclipsed by anti-Anglican polemic.”[7]  During the next thirty years, men like Helwys and Barrow would discover that the intricacies of Separatism would be explored in thought and practice, and would come to realize the “disruptive tendencies that conservative Puritanism had been trying to keep in check.”[8]  Namely, the very parameters of a congregational church which existed outside the boundary of magisterial authority existed in an experimental realm.  There was no doctrine or dogma that could currently speak to the group because they had effectively removed themselves from magisterial restraint, and the group was consequently impotent in dealing with its own problems.[9]  Because of their political ostracizing, they were left with no readily available authority structure to deal with errant theology outside of self-regulation.  After a generation of battling for religious liberty, the Free Church hardly had the fortitude now to battle internally for doctrinal purity.  This theological deconstruction, which came at the hands of their religious liberty, had the effect of amplifying the alienation the group felt.  Consequently, many of the initial movement left with other English Puritans to pursue religious freedom in the Colonies.

Conclusion

            The episcopacy of the Catholic Church had run unchecked for hundreds of years, and when the need for change in the Church reached its apex those who fought for the purity of Christ’s church found themselves battling much more than the false teachings of a priesthood who had fattened themselves with magisterial authority.  They found themselves battling self-propagating notions of authority and structure.

            Initially, the Baptist response, in its seminal years, addressed largely political arenas, much like the context into which it spoke.  As that polity was tested and gained articulation, however, it became clear to its adherents that the very system by which it tried to argue its tenets was skewed against them.  There was no use in trying to wrest political control from a governmental entity by Spiritual means.  Nonetheless, as the early Baptist church pursued its calling, believers pioneered the notions of separation of Church and State and religious freedom that became theological cornerstones for colonial Christianity.

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[1] Ibid.

[2] Jason K. Lee, The Theology of John Smyth, (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2003), 46.

[3] Bill J. Leonard, Baptists in America, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 8.

[4] Ibid., 9.

[5] Coffey, “Puritanism and Liberty Revisited,” 964.

[6] Leonard, Baptists in America, 9.

[7] Maclear, “The Birth of the Free Church,” 103.

[8] Ibid., 104.

[9] Ibid., 109.

Why does Homer make such a suitable Henry VIII?

The Magisterial Reformation and Separatists in England

            In 1534, King Henry VIII’s dynastic aspirations for the house of Tudor thrust England into the midst of the Reformation with one of the most infamous matrimonial debacles of all time.[1]   Henry’s father, Henry VII of England, received a papal dispensation from Pope Julius II in order to salvage an arranged marriage between Catherine of Aragon and his son, Arthur, who died four months after the marriage.  The papal dispensation granted Henry VIII, now heir to the English throne, permission to marry his brother’s widow, which he did as soon as he was of age.  Henry VII was relieved that his actions had ensured the Tudor dynasty on the throne of England, and, as an added bonus, had rescued his foreign policy, which hinged on friendship with Spain.  One problem that Henry could not have foreseen, however, was that Catherine would bear no male heir for his son.

            After sixteen years of marriage, Mary Tudor was the only heir who survived.  Henry VIII began the process of annulling his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, so that he might marry again and produce a male heir for the throne of England and avoid plunging England into another war of succession.  Consequently, Henry petitioned Pope Clement VII for an annulment of his marriage to Catherine on the basis that his marriage to her under the auspices of the dispensation granted by Pope Julius II had all along been erroneous.  To Henry’s great surprise, Clement refused to honor his petition for fear that he would estrange the nephew of Catherine, Emperor Charles V, who had recently sacked Rome.            

             All of this political jockeying was not uncommon to the landscape of the middle ages.  What was uncommon about this situation, as Bainton explains, is that religion was threatening to seriously contravene politics by insisting in this case that, “As a sacrament of the Church, marriage was subject to ecclesiastical jurisdiction.”[2]  However, because kings had to satisfy a civic expectation of succession by producing heirs, “royal marriages were affairs of the state.”[3]  This constituted a power struggle of epic proportions, and Clement seemed bent on upping the ante by declaring that Henry was going to be excommunicated if he somehow got around the matter and married again anyway without the approval of Rome.[4]

            Henry married anyway.  However, prior to his decision to divorce Catherine, he consulted Thomas Cranmer, who he had elevated to the position of Archbishop of Canterbury, and secured proof through Cranmer from the most prestigious universities in the west, including those in Italy, that his marriage with Catherine had indeed been invalid.  With backing from the English court and the English Church in 1533, Henry’s union with Catherine was annulled and he married Anne Boleyn.  Then, in 1534, Henry formally broke with the Roman church when he demanded that Parliament pass a series of laws alienating the church in Rome.  Among these laws, Parliament denied contributions to Rome, renounced Henry’s marriage to Catherine, and declared the king “Supreme Head of the Church of England.”[5]  Additionally, Parliament declared that any who disagreed with the king would be guilty of treason; in effect, the decrees of the king would become the teachings of the church.  Henry had successfully and officially instituted the national Church of England, the Ecclesia Anglicana.[6]

            After Henry VIII’s death in 1547, his only son, Edward VI became the king of England.  Edward continued his father’s policies, and consolidated the religious power Henry had begun amassing.  McGrath calls this restructuring of the church a “top-down” imposition upon the entire English church that was difficult at times because of the collaborative effort that was taking place among the king’s advisors, as he was only nine years old when he assumed the throne.[7]  England’s Protestant reformation would then receive a monumental contribution through the work of Cranmer, who was given a wide berth under the regency of Somerset, in the publication of the Book of Common Prayer, the decidedly Protestant liturgy.  This publication became the lasting testament to the theological reform that had taken place in the Church of England.  However, it should be noted that this was a theological reform that came from the political authority of the king of England.

            Edwards’ death at the age of fifteen, in 1553, was untimely for the Protestant movement that sought to bring about ubiquitous national change.  Edward’s half-sister, Mary, took the throne with the vengeance of a woman scorned.  It would be speculative to say that the reversal of her father’s Protestant decrees were based in personal retribution, but the vitriolic pursuit of Protestant blood that her regime enacted makes the speculation believable.  The one certain thing about the reign of the bloody queen that does remain is the fact that her realigning of England back to Catholicism was not seen as a theologically motivated campaign.  According to McGrath, Mary’s execution of Cranmer and others at Oxford was received as the power play of a foreign religion that was being imposed by foreign influence on a queen with Spanish sympathies; Cranmer and the others were received by the public as martyred English patriots.[8]

            Mary died in 1558, and was succeeded by Elizabeth, the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn.  Elizabeth sought to heal the wounds inflicted by Mary, and wrested control of the national church back away from Rome; all the while, Marian exiles who fled to Geneva during persecution returned home fueled by different ideas from the Reformed movement.  Elizabeth restored the Act of Uniformity, but softened her father’s language as supreme head of the church to “Supreme Governor” so as to not upset the delicate balance of religious sensibilities she was trying to impose.[9]  Elizabeth set about trying to establish a religious life for the English Church that was uniform.  She wanted to create a via media that could right the religious oscillations that had rocked the English Church.  Her efforts resulted in the enduring vision of the Anglican Church: a church whose cardinal beliefs and practices were Protestant, but whose ecclesiastical polity and customs harkened back to England’s pre-Reformation traditions.[10]  This, of course, gave rise to heated conflicts between puritanical and radical groups, neither of which was pleased with what they viewed to be Elizabeth’s apathetic approach.  Her resolution was a decidedly political one; designed not to settle theological or doctrinal uncertainty, but to bring civic unity.

            This state of magisterially imposed religious homogeny was normative throughout Elizabeth’s reign.  It was imposed for the same reasons her father had broken from Rome, political expediency.  Bainton reports that, “The queen herself was not interested in doctrinal differences.”[11]  James Fulton Maclear in an exploration of the origins of the Free Church movement explains the religious climate at the twilight of Elizabeth’s reign thusly:

“At the beginning of the seventeenth century the medieval ideal of one church enjoining uniformity upon the nation through a close partnership with a confessing state still went largely unchallenged in England. The Reformation had introduced changes, but the state had seized supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs and it chose to maintain uniformity for political purposes.”[12]

 This Parliament enabled, magisterial dictation of religious practice seemed unassailable to some, and was the basis of Separatist rumblings among Puritans that had begun in the reign of Mary Tudor and was proving true at the turn of the century less than a generation later.

            By the end of Elizabeth’s reign, the puritanical sect that had arisen in England was primed and hoping for a radical religious upheaval that would swing the pendulum of magisterial reform decidedly in the direction of Protestantism.[13]  When it was revealed that Elizabeth had named James VI of Scotland (soon to be James I of England) as her successor, there were factions within the Anglican Church, who all loosely fit under the banner of the Puritans, which began to mobilize immediately in order to petition James I to enact the same kind of Reformed church that he had established in Scotland.  It is important to note, at this point, that he Puritan agenda was not to necessarily have magisterial political regulation lifted, only to have the force of such regulation behind their personal cause instead.[14]

            The Puritans would be bitterly disappointed to find, however, that the Reformed Presbyterian church that was established in Scotland was something that James I looked forward to relieving himself of once in England.  He, in fact, looked forward to possessing the kind of freedom he felt that the monarchy deserved once he was in England.  Consequently, James’ private ambitions were to arrive in England and strengthen the episcopacy so that his own power might increase as well.[15]  Nonetheless, James was met on the road to London by a Puritan dispatch armed with the “Millenary Petition,” a document of Puritan grievances against the Anglican Church signed by more than one thousand ministers.  James, though, had no sympathies for these grievances; he had neither a doctrinal proclivity to assent nor a personally pleasing political reason to acquiesce. 

            In actuality, what James did was the opposite; he fought the Puritans at every turn, in the church and Parliament, because he viewed their advances through the lens of his experiences with Presbyterians in Scotland.  He thought it likely that the Puritans, like the Calvinistic revolutionaries of the republic of Geneva, were out to overthrow him, which became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.[16]  As a result, James found himself maneuvering around the Puritans and Anglicans within the episcopacy and Parliament only to develop his own policies that, “managed to contain Puritanism’s agendas without leading to any major alterations to the practices or beliefs of the established church.”[17]  He paid lip service to the Puritans, but enacted change that amounted to little in their eyes.  The Puritan hope of a royal decree that would rule in favor of their desired Protestant reforms were beginning to look increasingly bleak, and some among them started to look for other options.

            A fundamental belief of the Puritans, that the “magistrate had a religious duty to punish heresy, idolatry, and apostasy” through persecution, endured through the English civil war.[18]  Interestingly, this point of political activism is where the Separatists began to come out from among the Puritans.   One of the hallmarks of the early Free Church movement was correlative to the Separatist notion of religious toleration.  Coffey explains the resulting shift in political agenda and theological inquiry thusly:

“But there were a minority of radical puritans who broke decisively with the mainstream puritan view and maintained that religious toleration should be extended to all who did not endanger the civil peace and safety of the commonwealth. This view first emerged among the godly in the reign of James I, and its earliest proponents were General (or Arminian) Baptists”[19]

           These individuals had abandoned the hope of royal decree ever resulting in the kind of religious freedom they hoped would occur.  It had finally become clear in their minds that religious liberty could not be achieved within the bounds of a system that sought to maintain some form of church-state, theocratic or otherwise.  This turning point, early in seventeenth century during the rule of James I, is precisely what sent key players among the Separatist camp across the paths of Radical Reformers in the Netherlands.  Their views had brought them into direct conflict with James’ “divine right of kings,” and so they fled imminent persecution into Amsterdam under the leadership of John Smyth and Thomas Helwys.

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[1] McGrath points out that Henry’s attempt at a smooth transition for power as the catalyst for the English reformation is preferable to the notion that there was popular dislike of the late medieval church or any substantial academic interest in Lutheranism, see Alister McGrath, Christianity’s Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution, (New York: HarperOne, 2007), 109.  It is a point corroborated by González and Bainton; see also Justo L. González, The Story of Christianity: The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation, Vol. 1, (San Francisco: Harper, 1984), 70-1; and see also Roland N. Bainton, Christianity, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000), 272. 

[2] Bainton, Christianity, 272.

[3] Ibid.

[4] McGrath, Christianity’s Dangerous Idea, 109.

[5] González, The Story of Christianity, 73.

[6] Bainton goes on to explain that here the king did not assume the role of a priest but had irrevocably tied nationalism to the English reformation.  Bainton, Christianity, 273-75.

[7] McGrath, Christianity’s Dangerous Idea, 115.

[8] Ibid., 117.

[9] Ibid., 119.

[10] Ibid., 122-23.

[11] Bainton, Christianity, 287.

[12] James Fulton Maclear, “The Birth of the Free Church Tradition.” Church History, 6 (June 1957): 100. 

[13] McGrath, Christianity’s Dangerous Idea, 123.

[14] González, The Story of Christianity, 150-1.

[15] Ibid., 152.

[16] McGrath, Christianity’s Dangerous Idea, 124-5.

[17] Ibid., 125.

[18] John, Coffey, “Puritanism and Liberty Revisited: The Case for Toleration in the English Revolution.” The Historical Journal. 41,  (Dec 1998): 962.

[19] Ibid., 964.

Introduction

            Separating the concepts of the religious and the political in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may be impossible; it is a theological and historical swamp.  However, of all the groups represented at the Reformation, the problems in the Church of England were propagated by some of the most audacious political power plays of the era.  Consequently, it was precisely these kinds of political maneuvers that fueled further endeavors by German and Swiss Reformers.  This would ultimately drive some within the Puritan sects of the Church of England to separate entirely in search of reformation from the Reformation, in turn forming the General Baptist movement.

            Saying the Reformation is the historical context within which the Baptist church developed, though, is much like saying that Europe is the geographical context of someone driving in Berlin.  “The Reformation,” as a historical term, encompasses much more than a particular set of doctrinal qualms, political quagmires, or ecclesiastical debates.  McGrath is helpful in navigating the use of the term “Reformation” and all of its ancillaries in recent scholarship.  In its broadest sense, “Reformation” incorporates the four elements of the western European movement that began with Martin Luther’s protest in 1517 in Wittenberg: Lutheranism, the Reformed tradition, the Radical Reformation, and the Counter-Reformation.[1]

            Within this context, the Counter-Reformation and the Radical Reformation, those concerning the Roman Catholics and Anabaptists respectively, fell outside of the “magisterial Reformation”: a phrase which draws attention to “the manner in which the mainstream reformers related to secular authorities, such as princes, magistrates, or city councils.”[2]  According to McGrath, the term magisterial Reformation is increasingly recognized in scholarship as a reference to Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Anglicanism collectively.[3]  Consequently, the English Reformers who influenced John Smyth were representative of the Reformed tradition which sought to reset the boundaries of magisterial authority within the church, but had “relatively little interest in doctrine, let alone one specific doctrine.”[4]  This state of affairs was unacceptable to Smyth, whose Puritan leanings were known by the time of his ordination, and so one of the foundational thinkers of the General Baptist movement in England began to seek a more radical reformation outside of the magisterial Church of England.  He sought a reformation that removed magisterial interference in religious choice and expression.

            John Smyth and his colleague, Thomas Helwys, were among the first English thinkers to insist that the magistracy had no right to impose religious beliefs or practice on its population.  This contradicted those magisterial thinkers who hoped to create some form of theocracy with a continued union of the Church with the State.  The lives of Smyth and Helwys, then, become important indicators of the true nature of issues facing early Baptist polity.  Common theological concerns over adult baptism drew Smyth and Helwys to the Netherlands during English persecution, but internal fights, which would cause splinter groups to break fellowship, were especially common during their shared time among the radical Reformers.  Those conflicts, which were rarely theological, were driven predominantly by differing views about the extent to which the magistracy ought to be involved in settling affairs of the Church.

            A rejection of the episcopacy continues to be theologically important for congregational churches, but is, in fact, historically subsequent to the political factors that were inexorably tied to the episcopacy’s ecclesiastical significance during the magisterial Reformation.  If the beliefs of Smyth and Helwys were truly indicative of the early Baptists, then early Baptist polity was primarily a political reaction to the magisterial Reformation.[5]  Somewhere along the way, however, the episcopacy became guilty by association and came under theological fire, and as that theology of ecclesiastical liberation evolved so did the ethos that sundered congregational polity from the episcopacy.  This series will explore early Baptist polity as it occurred within the context of the English Reformation; it will attempt to demonstrate that early Baptist (congregational) polity as conceived by John Smyth and Thomas Helwys functioned primarily as a political critique of the magisterial Reformation and only subsequently as a theological amendment, and that the subsequent theological amendments following the death of John Smyth served only to further polarize already alienated factions within the English Reformation.

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[1] Alister McGrath, Historical Theology: An Introduction to the History of Christian Thought, (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 1998), 158.

 [2] Ibid., 159.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., 161.

[5] This, of course, presumes that the agenda of the Reformation broadly was to, “make European culture more Christian than it had been” by “rerooting” what was seen then as the traditional imposition of the Church by the State.  See Scott Hendrix, “Rerooting the Faith: The Reformation as Re-Christianization.” Church History, 69 (Sep. 2000): 560-564.