J.M. Carroll book

"Skewing the Record"

Who was it who tried to destroy the early English translations of the scripture--and those who did the translating?

Satan does not want The Word in the hands of the laity--but thanks be to God they had The Truth anyway--as in every generation God has preserved The Bride of Christ. She is still here--undefiled--the pillar and ground of the Truth.

Selah,

Bro. James

 

Bro James, thou art not far from the kingdom, sir! Amen to your post!

Rufus

 

Well, here we go again - after another long absence, I note that "Dean198" asked for some quotes. Clearly, few of us have the kind of library necessary to quote only "primary" sources on much of anything, especially dealing with the middle ages or before! Possibly "secondaries" will be forgiven, since they are at hand.

Mosheim, "Church History," p. 39, relating to 1st Cent.: "The churches, in those early times, were entirely independent, none of them being subject to any foreign jurisdiction, but each governed by its own rulers and its own laws . . . ." The bulk of this invaluable work is given to showing the departures from the apostolic and primitive simplicity, including centralization which led to
"papacy" and "decrees of councils," etc. On p. 122, he shows that the followers of Donatus, after losing an appeal to the emperor, declared themselves independent and self-governing. (See Leonard Verduin's "The Reformers and Their Stepchildren" for a thorough discussion of this.)

Re Paulicians, Mosheim, p. 233: "They had not ...
an ecclesiastical government administered by bishops, priests, and deacons; they had no sacred order of men distiniguished ... from the rest of the assembly; nor had councils, synods, or the like institutions any place in their religious polity." On the same page, he defends them (as does Gibbon) against the charge of Manicheanism.

Peter Allix, "Ancient Churches of Piedmont," my ed. 1821, speaks of Albigensians and Waldensians together, and in his preface says: "What I undertake in these my reflections is only this; to set down the true antiquity of both those Churches, who were so famous in the thirteenth century, because of the opposition they made against the corruptions which the Romish Church had introduced in matters of faith, worship, and the government of the Church." (p. xiv) He then details their lineage century by century "from the time of the apostles to the said thirteenth century." One thing stands out; their congregations were self-governing, for which they were severely persecuted. He quotes the full decree of Pope Lucius III (1181-85), pp. 281-285, and the decree of King Ildephonsus against the Waldenses, pp. 285-287, and that of the Emperor Frederick against "the Cathari, Paterines, Leonists, Speronists, Arnoldists, Circumcised, and all other heretics . . . ." (p. 288)

One quote, out of Allix, from Claudius, c. 820, out of a long discussion in Ch. IX: "We know very well, that this passage of the Gospel is very ill understood: 'Thou art Peter, etc.' under the pretense of which words the stupid and ignorant common people, destitute of all spiritual knowledge, betake themselves to Rome, in hopes of acquiring eternal life; for the ministry does belong to all the true superintendents and pastors of the Church, who discharge the same, aslong as / they are in this world; and when they have paid the debt of death, others succeed in their places, who enjoy the same authority and power." (pp. 83 / 84) This early "waldensian" (valley dweller) clearly taught the equality of congregations and of their pastors rather than a centralized form of church government, for which he was condemned by Rome.

And from Glanmor Williams, "Reformation Views of Church History," these quotes: "Bullinger,for instance, responded with warm approval to Gregory's comment: 'I affirm boldly that whosoever
he be that calleth himself the universal priest is a forerunner of Anti-Christ.' The real turning point had come with the relations between the Emperor Phocas and Pope Boniface III. . . .
It was Phocas, said Calvin, 'who conceded to Boniface III what Gregory by no means demanded - that Rome should be the head of all churches'."

And: "Because the unholy alliance of Church and State from the Age of Constantine onwards had made for the negation of all that they understood by the Christian Church, the Radicals [Anabaptist groups - RCB] held it to be utterly unthinkable that tarue believers could have been comprehended within the utterly corrupt state Church. During the thousand years and more of darkness, the true Church was in dispersion among those called heretics." (p. 20 - John Knox Press, 1970) This reference, of course, is to Reformation times, but shows the Anabaptist view of earlier history.\

Well, it is tired and I am late; the case is far from complete, of course, and I will grant (with Allix!) that we cannot defend all that any of these folks held, any more than we would try to defend everything that is posted on this board, or that goes under the "Baptist flag," OR even in our own group of Baptists. (I'm SBC; 'nuff said?)
But if there is a succession (and I affirm that there is), it is among these persecuted, ignored and ridiculed "heretics" rather than among the
"established" state religions which have sought to impose both their form of chruch government and their views of history on the rest of us.

Peace! Charles - Ro. 8:28

 

Amen! Sometime read the book 50 Years in the Chruch of Rome by Charles Chiniquy.

 

Moique,
You know it sure would be interesting for you to put that education together and write a book about Baptist history Americans could read.

 

Dean 198,

You said,

There are several quotes in the New Testament attributed to Old Testament prophets the source for which you will search in vain. Does that mean the New Testament authors fabricated these quote? Does your ignorance make another man a liar?

Mark Osgatharp

 

Yes, certainly, since the secondaries in your case are usually very reliable indicators of the primacy sources.

Yes, but the early church did have a governing, external ministry - the apostles and their delegates.....as did the early Baptists - they were called 'apostolic ministers' and they had trans-local governing authority. Some of the Anabaptists (in Moravia) had a similar ministry. Perhaps the Waldensian 'perfect' did as well, though I don't know enough about the sphere of their authority right now.

By the way, Mosheim is available in PDF on the internet...let me know if you want the link.

Yes, the Donatists appealed to the emperor! They wanted all of the imperial favours which Constantine had recently given to the church to go to them and not to the Catholics....they wanted the nice buildings and the state salary for their ministers....hardly baptists......and though they re-baptised Catholics, I have never found evidence that they did not practice infant baptism....though I would like to look into that more......also they were episcopal in their church government, as were the Catholics, with bishops, presbyters, and deacons.

Yes, so far I agree.....I plan to get a copy of the Key of Truth soon to judge for myself....by Stanley Faber does an excellent job of defending them too. I do not deny that there have always been 'old evangelical brotherhoods.' I do deny that they were distinctively Baptist, and that there was an outward succession joining them.

Again, this work is available in PDF....if anyone wants the link let me know.

Allix does trace the Waldenses back to ancient times.....but not the independent movement you say.....he traces them through various reform movments within the Church - usually through reformers who happened to also be bishops - hardly Baptist church government there. He speaks of Ambrose, bishop of Milan, Rufinus, a presbyter of a catholic church (before the rise of papal power as we later knew it, when the churches were still semi independent of a centralised hierarchy). He continues through Claudius, bishop of Turin (whom you quote) and other reformist bishops, until the time of Waldo. He even speaks about the liturgies these proto-Waldenses used! Allix was an anglican so he has no problem tracing the Waldensian history through episcopal reform movements!

Yes, there were groups, but they were not distinctively Baptist, though they were evangelical. For example the Waldenses believed in the Real Presence (as did the Bohemian Brethren - in fact the Anabaptists and Bohemian Brethren could not join because of this difference.)

Well then I would ask, what are the essential distinctives which make one Baptist? I am confident I can show you where these groups - from the Donatists to the Anabaptists, did not fit one or more categories.

 

Well you would say that and get all annoyed....you are not the one who wasted countless hours trying to track down quotes which even other Baptist historians admit don't exist.

So you are saying that the New Testament writers said that a quote was in a certain book when it wasn't? Or maybe they had access to other works now lost, but which did actually exist. Camps quotation from Tertullian cannot be found in any volume of Tertullian's works....so I suppose Camp had access to some special golden plates.

 

dean198,

No, not at all.

Depends on what you mean by "lost." My point is, just because you do not have access to a book does not mean that it did not or does not exist.

My point is, you, nor any other restorationist, are not the end all of historic knowledge. Now condider the fact that many thousands of Christians existed through the ages who left no record whatsoever of their beliefs or deeds, and the best you can say is that you don't know if there was a succession of "baptist" churches or not.

Mark Osgatharp

 

Mark,
I am not the sum of knowledge, but we DO POSSESS the complete Ante Nicene Fathers....it is just not feasible that Cramp could quote from something which nobody else has access to....in fact he gives the reference to the work of Tertullian, and I read it through trying to find the quote and it wasn't there......and that was just one example.....another was a quote from an inquisitor which is admitted by Baptist historians to not exist....and there were other examples of this kind of sloppy work....it became very annoying after a while. It's not just Baptists - and it's not all Baptists.....I was so excited after reading Broadbent the Plymouth Brethren writer....and then I began to hunt down the references and found that half of his book is pure imagination. I suppose you could believe that there were these Baptist churches throughout history and that they simply do not show up anywhere in the historic record.....but you cannot believe that they are to be identified with groups we do know about - the Donatists, Paulicians, Waldenses, Bohemian Brethren, Anabaptists etc., firstly because there is no succssion between these groups and serious doctrinal differences, and secondly because though they were 'evangelical' in nature, they were not distinctively 'baptist' - the Waldenses believed in the Real Presence and seven sacraments for example. Also, the early Baptists themselves were restorationist! Both General and Particular Baptist....they knew were they originated, and they did not see their having a beginning as weakening their position in any way. In fact, these groups tell us how they came to be. It's just that simple. The Anabaptists tell us how they came to be......just read Martyrs Mirror.....I recently got a copy of the Hutterian Chronicles from an interlibrary loan and that gives the account of the origin of the Anabaptists too......they were restorationist.....Pious Melia in his histor of the Waldenses provides quotes from original sources showing that some of the Waldenses believed that the church had been restored in thier day by Waldesius (or Waldo). By suppressing some facts and emphasising others, a history book can give a false impression that the Waldenses, for example, were Baptist or Sevent Day Adventist or Plymouth Brethren or Church of Christ, or proto Pentecostal, or even Presbyterian (as one book I have claims). oh and by they way - i don't believe that they were Sabbath keepers, and I don't believe in Sabbath keeping (though some groups among them probably did keep the Sabaath - i don't know).
I am working on a church history, but above all i want it to be an honest one....i will not deny, and in fact hold, that there have always been evangelical groups throughout history, but not in a physical succession, and there were often serious differences between them.

 

R. Charles Blair
"Clearly, few of us have the kind of library necessary to quote only "primary" sources on much of anything, especially dealing with the middle ages or before!"
"
I'm the verger of a small IFB church in the Netherlands. Our modest churchlibrary contains among others translations of: The complete Apostolic Fathers, a reasonably complete set of New Testament Apocrypha, works of half a dozen Churchfathers including Origenes, Augustinus, Hieronymus and Tertullianus, the churchhistory of Eusebius, the complete works of Josephus and a couple of works by more obscure Christian authors of the first 5 centuries of Christendom.
We also have the writings (once again translations) of a number of medieval authors including Thomas van Aquino and Thomas van kempen.

Primary sources aren't that hard to come by. But all we get is quoted opinions by authors writing centuries after the fact.

gb93433
"50 Years in the Chruch of Rome by Charles Chiniquy. "
"
The book that accuses the Catholic Church of the murder of Abraham Lincoln.

Mark Osgatharp
"here are several quotes in the New Testament attributed to Old Testament prophets the source for which you will search in vain."
"
The source of a number of these quotes can be found in the Apocrypha and the pseudo-epigrapha.

 

Friend Mioque: It is good to know that your church library has this scope. I'm reasonably familiar with about a hundred SBC church libraries
through my ministry, and don't know of a single one with more than possibly one or two such works,
most with none. My personal library has the full Ante-Nicenes (5-vol. set; I was never interested in the Nicenes or Post-Nicenes, because of the totally wild-eyed heresies that set in); in no particular order but from memory, Bede, Eusebius, the 19th-cent. work by John, Bishop of Bristol, on 2nd-3rd century history "illustrated from the writings of Tertullian," (close to a primary), the Correspondence of Pope Gregory VII, Geo. Williams collection of "Spiritual & Anabaptist Writers including Blaurock, Muntzer (sorry, my machine doesn't have an umlaut key), Denck, Hubmaier, and several others, Ferm's "Classics of Protestantism," starting with Luther & Calvin; Augustine, and probably some more I'm forgetting. (By the way - my favorite Anabaptist, present company excepted, is Pilgram Marpeck.)
Also, a superb little volume from Bettenson,
"Documents of the Christian Church," jam-packed with excerpts in historical order, and the 3-vol. Schaff "Creeds of Christendom." I am 30 miles from a superb theological library at the Bible college where I once taught,(mostly Bible), and have 2 friends with in-depth sources within 50 miles. Of course (as Dean 198 notes) now all this investment in books is somewhat unnecessary because of the tool we are using for this correspondence! But I have never had the relationship with the computer that I can have with a book.

Primaries are valuable for evidence in research, of course, but we wuold agree that they are often deliberately oabscure for a variety of reasons. At times, severe censorship kept some from giving a full opinion; others held back for fear of loss of status; and of course genuine persecution had a part to play throughout the period in question.
At times, a skillful editor can put the primaries into historical perspective by selective quotes tied with historical framework far better than trying to wade through the verbiage of all the originals. (Unless one is to become a full-fledged scholar, "knowing more and more about less and less"). For myself, it has been more interesting to be a "specialist in integration," trying to tie together universal history with specific illustrations. ("Universal" reminds me that I have a short work by Pelikan on the conflict between universality and finality in the 3rd century, and that reminds me of G. Williams work on "Reformation Views of Church History," both quite acceptable to any scholar in their quotations if not always in all conclusions.)
I also have, in a dust-proof cabinet, several works from the 1800's which belonged to one of my old professors and which I try not to use unless necessary, as in the quote from Allix above. (I do also have the Albigensian document mentioned, not in book form, and some Waldensian items from Valdese, North Carolina, where they settled when the came to North America a century ago, including
"Key of Truth" and "The Noble Lesson," all photo-copies.) But the bulk of my history library is, I admit, "secondary." Most of my book investment has been in works directly on Scripture or on the Greek of the NT (I'm translating Mark just now for our Southern Baptist Winter Bible Study this coming year).

My point is not to claim that I have a great library; I acknowledge that it is short on early sources. I simply was pointing out in the few quotes for Dean 198 things at hand, late in the evening, without driving 30 or 50 miles, on the subject under discussion.

Since I suppose Dean 198 is also reading this, let me say that I appreciate the thoroughness of your reply. I note that your comment on Mosheim (which I also have) is brief; his point that all the NT churches were independent and his tracing of what I consider the "centralizing heresy" was the basis of my other selected quotes from the (admittedly inadequate for "real scholarship") materials at hand. The closest any NT passage comes to justifying your view of "governing external ministry" is Acts 15, and that is simply one congregation challenging the heresy which had been presented by some members of another, sort of a "Baptist associational meeting." The 1641-44 London Confession (which I do have, along with the Presbyterian-influenced 1689) speaks clearly of "particular churches," and makes it clear that this is simply a confession on which people from this small group of churches could agree, not some "top-down directive." They are closer to us "landmarkers" at that point, in my judgment.

My view of "what makes a Baptist" is a bit broader than some. Especially in history, where the facts are already set (if sometimes obscure), we can have a wide range of "secondary" views and even bring together people who refused to recognize one another, or who never heard of one another; our "free church" heritage of dissent is a noble one. But just as once God established national Israel, He did not have to "re-start" His work, so it is my conviction that NT churches have continued (congregations, however few, how ever scattered, however differing from one another in incidentals), each one seeking from Scripture their own ground of existence. By the way - no evidence that Donatists did baptize infants, either, so far as I have found. It was not common at that point, to say the least; some would argue, not even done yet.)

In west Kentucky, we have an expression "to holler calf-rope," and I'm going to do that - far too much "stuff" for one evening, and it will be a few days before I can get back to read your interesting replies. Best- Charles - Ro. 8:28

 

Charles
"don't know of a single one with more than possibly one or two such works"
"

What do those churches do with their librarybudget? Invest in the complete works of Agatha Christie!?
I've got a budget that is the equivalent of about a 100 dollars a year and strict orders not to buy anything that will be outdated 10 years from now.

 

Regrettably, most "church libraries" in the States are "popular" rather than "academic" in orientation. Some will have one or two general church histories, most will have some sets of Bible commentaries (often donated by some pastor's widow who no longer wanted them), and all will have some one-volume Bible reference works. Much of the rest is "Left Behind" style, or "Purpose-Driven" material, etc. - whatever the
"genre of the month club" provides. The small congaregation I serve (about 15-20 people) has about 100 volumes, some of them quite good, from earlier "glory days" with a few I have added. But there is more reading of "Christian fiction" or self-help items than history of any sort, Baptist or otherwise. Our Baptist associational library (my wife is librarian) has a better assortment, and it is only 5 miles from our home (I'm the retired associational missionary), but not really much on history either, though I've been able to put in a few items.

Typically I believe, Europeans tend to think in centuries, North Americans in months, our more perceptive folks in years or possibly decades. And this is precisely why such works as Carroll's have been of genuine value: not because they are verbally inspired (they aren't), but because at least they give SOME historical insight beyond what most prospective readers have received from our horrendous public education.

Though my M. A. is in history, from a state university, my interests are much broader - I see history as a framework for general knowledge, so that my books are shelved so far as possible in order of either their writing or the period they cover. Currently, I'm mentoring some young preachers in selecting their own personal books, and trying to get them a step ahead of the "pop culture" stuff. But most of their auditors are not ready to hear much beyond that. My reputation
is of "going down deeper, staying down longer, and coming up dryer" than most, I suppose.

Wishing you His best - Charles - Ro. 8:28

 

RSR, is there a published response to "Trail of Blood?"

 

"Baptist Successionism" by James Edward McGoldrick

 

Hi, all - just plugging in after an enjoyable week of revival and some other activities - it may be of interest that McGoldrick is now a Presbyterian. Also, he is certainly not a
"primary," but very much a "secondary." There is a good deal of personal experience in his little work, much of emotion, all of which may have its place; however, a similar work attempting to
"prove" succession would be ridiculed quickly, I suspect? Leon McBeth has done a much more thorough and effective job in "The Baptist Heritage," in my judgment. (Of his four models, I would hold to the succession of ideas as clear and provable, though by faith I affirm an actual succession as well.) Best - Charles - Ro. 8:28