Montanists (Baptist ancestors)

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR> Kiffin, once again you post your opinion as if it were a fact, and offer no support at all for it. Can you give us any documentation to support your assertion all baptists are descended from see-baptists? <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Well, Dr. C you failed to correct yourself in implying Crosby and Ivimey were Landmarkers.

I am sure (I think) you are using the term "ALL" to imply that the Welsh Baptists didn't descend from the English Baptists. An assertion that Landmarkers often make to distance themselves from the English Baptists but a theory that Armitage, Vedder, Torbet, Estep, McBeth all assert in their books is false.


If that is so,

1. I would appreciate it if you can show the Welsh Baptists existing before 1609 please and give me referances.

2. Please also show me a Welsh Baptist Confession written before 1609.

3. Please also show a Welsh Baptist Confession independant of English Baptist thought.

All Baptists from the British Tradition have their direct linkage with either the General Baptists of 1609 or the Particular Baptists who began around 1638. Some mainland Europeon Baptists do have some direct linkage with the Anabaptists but that is irrelevant to us since Baptists in the USA are connected with the British Baptists.

The Welsh theory, is on shaky ground since I know of no credible Baptist historian that espouses it. The theory suffers since it would have to trace itself back to the Ancient Celtic Church before Augustine of Canterbury. The Celtic Church while very orthodox and one that has very much in common with later Baptists was still however one that practiced a Episcopalian form of Church government that is demonstrated with Augustine's first attempt to convert them. It also seems that by the 8th -9th century most if not all of the Celtic church was Romanized. The only other dissenters in Britain up until 1609 were the Lollards who may have held Baptist type beliefs but were dissenters from the Roman Church in Pre Reformation times and Anabaptists who came from the Continent but whose overall doctrine could not be called Baptist and the only connection we have with them is more on a spiritual kinship.

It is amazing that the English General Baptists rediscovered Biblical theology on the Church from the Anabaptists in the Netherlands as did the Particular Baptists as the "Kiffin" manuscript demonstrates. Most of these English Baptists were well traveled but had never heard of any Welsh Baptists preceding them and their Ecclesiology was borrowed from Dutch Anabaptists. Why hadn't they heard of the Welsh Baptists who were in their back yard?


It is also amazing that he Welsh Baptists adopted the English Baptist confessions both in Europe and the USA though the English Baptists would have to be False Baptists by the Welsh theory.

Now, maybe you don't hold to the Welsh theory. In that case you have to reinvent the English Baptists and refute what they declare about their own origins plus deny what all credible Baptist historians state.

 

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Kiffin:
1. I would appreciate it if you can show the Welsh Baptists existing before 1609 please and give me referances.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>See History of the Baptist Church at Hill Cliffe by James Kenworthy, Warrington, 1882, reprinted 1987 by Church History Research & Archives, Gallatin, TN.

[the rest was snipped due to irrelevance]

 

Henry Vedder states regarding Hill Cliff Church,

The fact must not be overlooked, however, that ten Baptist churches in England claim an earlier origin than this whose story has thus been told. Hill Cliff (1522), Eythorne, Coggeshall, Braintree (igso), Farringdon Road (1576), Crowle, Epworth (1599), Bridgewater, Oxford, Wedmore (1600). To substantiate these claims there is little evidence but tradition, of no great antiquity. Thomas Crosby, the earliest of our Baptist historians, who sought with praiseworthy diligence for all accessible facts, and was personally familiar with some of these localities, had either never heard such traditions or did not consider them even worthy of mention. In no case is there the smallest s**** of documentary evidence for such antiquity as is claimed. No title-deeds or records extend back much over two hundred years, few extend so far back. There is some arch~eological evidence, in one or two cases, to prove that a certain site was used for religious services or as a burial-place, long before the beginning of the seventeenth century. The gap between these slender premises of fact and the conclusion sought to be drawn from them is so wide that only the most robust faith could span it. One who is capable of believing in the great antiquity of English Baptist churches on evidence so slender is quite capable of believing on no evidence at all

Later Vedder states,
THERE are traditions among the Welsh Baptists of an ancient origin, and some of their historians have not hesitated to claim for them an antiquity reaching back to the days of the apostles. When such claims are submitted to the ordinary tests of historic criticism, however, they vanish into thin air.

 

My first post ever in this forum!

So this is where Thomas Cassidy disappeared to!

Whew! Heavy reading. I like to zoom through posts.

Anyway, I didn't read through every post so forgive me if this was already stated.

It is still early enough in church history that the ecstatic manifestations of the Spirit could very well have been operating in the Montanist congregations.

I'm not a Landmarkist and I don't believe in an unbroken line of succession. That seems to fall under the "endless genealogy" category.

But let's not forget that these manifestations were common in the early church AND Scriptural. By the looks of what some of you posted I doubt you would have let St. Paul (who spoke in tongues more than we all) past the threshold if you worshipped in the First Century.

 

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Aaron:
My first post ever in this forum!<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>Hey, Aaron, welcome to the Baptist History forum. Come back again.