Baptists and War: Essays on Baptists and Military Conflict, 1640s–1990s

By Pickwick Publications

While Baptists through the years have been certain that "war is hell," they have not always been able to agree on how to respond to it. This book traces much of this troubled relationship from the days of Baptist origins with close ties to pacifist Anabaptists to the responses of Baptists in America to the war in Vietnam. Essays also include discussions of the English Baptist Andrew Fuller's response to the threat of Napoleon, how Baptists in America dealt with the War of 1812, the support of Canadian Baptists for Britain's war in Sudan and Abyssinia in the 1880s, the decisive effect of the First World War on Canada's T. T. Shields, the response of Australian Baptists to the Second World War, and how Russian Baptists dealt with the Cold War. These chapters provide important analyses of Baptist reactions to one of society's most intractable problems.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Mar 11, 2015
• ISBN: 9781630879457

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Baptists and War

Essays on Baptists and Military Conflict, 1640s–1990s

edited by

Gordon L. Heath

and

Michael A. G. Haykin

32879.png

Baptists and War

Essays on Baptists and Military Conflict, 1640s–1990s

Copyright © 2015 Wipf and Stock Publishers. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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Pickwick Publications

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ISBN 13: 978-1-62564-674-3

EISBN 13: 978-1-63087-945-7

Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Baptists and War: Essays on Baptists and Military Conflict, 1640s–1990s / edited by Gordon L. Heath and Michael A. G. Haykin

xii + 234 p. ; 23 cm. Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 13: 978-1-62564-674-3

1. 2. 3. I.

call number 2014

Manufactured in the U.S.A. 03/09/2015

Scripture quotations marked NASB are taken from the New American Standard Bible® copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission (www.Lockman.org).

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McMaster General Studies Series, vol. 5

Canadian Baptist Historical Society Series, vol. 2

List of Contributors

Editors

Gordon L. Heath (PhD, St. Michael’s College) is Associate Professor of Christian History at McMaster Divinity College, and serves as Director of the Canadian Baptist Archives. His recent appointment to the Centenary Chair in World Christianity at the college reflects his growing interest in how Christian communities around the world have been eliminated. His publications include A War with a Silver Lining: Canadian Protestant Churches and the South African War, 1899–1902 (MQUP, 2009), and Doing Church History: A User-friendly Introduction to Researching the History of Christianity (Clements, 2008). He has also recently edited Canadian Churches and the First World War (Pickwick, 2014), and co-edited Canadian Baptists and Public Life (Pickwick, 2012), and Baptism: Historical, Theological and Pastoral Perspectives (Pickwick, 2011).

Michael A. G. Haykin was born in England of Irish and Kurdish parents. He is currently Professor of Church History at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky. Dr. Haykin is the author of a number of books dealing with Patristic and Baptist studies and is also the general editor of a forthcoming 16-volume edition of the works of Andrew Fuller (Walter de Gruyter). Dr. Haykin and his wife Alison live in Dundas, Ontario.

Other Contributors

Doug Adams is currently pursuing a PhD in history at the University of Western Ontario. His father was a loyal supporter of Shields and in time became the principal of Toronto Baptist Seminary. Doug studied at the seminary and graduated in 1977 with a Master of Divinity degree. He went on to serve as an assistant pastor in Briscoe Street Baptist Church and later as Pastor of East Williams Baptist Church, a position he occupied for twenty years. During that time, Doug also pursued further education at the University of Western Ontario and by the mid-1990s achieved his Master of Arts degree. Doug also served as the Professor of Church History at Toronto Baptist Seminary for nearly twenty years. Involvement in both Shields’s school and his church gives Doug unique opportunities to study the life of Dr. Shields. Jarvis Street Baptist church has graciously granted him access to their extensive archives, which contain most of the Shields papers. Doug is currently writing his dissertation on Shields as something of a revisionist biographical account of Shields’s life and ministry.

Paul Brewster is the pastor of Ryker’s Ridge Baptist Church, Madison, Indiana. He is also an Assistant Professor of Religion at Liberty University and a fellow of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, KY. He has been in the pastoral ministry for almost twenty-five years, serving congregations in Arkansas, North Carolina, and Indiana. He was educated at the University of Arkansas (BA 1986), New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary (MDiv 1989), and Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (PhD 2007). He is the author of Andrew Fuller: Model Pastor-Theologian (Broadman & Holman, 2010) and several articles on Baptist history and theology. Pastor Brewster and his wife Debbie have four grown children.

Anthony R. Cross is a Member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford, and in the fall of 2013 was Scholar in Residence in the Department of Dogmatics and Ecumenical Theology, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. Among his most recent work is Recovering the Evangelical Sacrament: Baptisma Semper Reformandum (Wipf & Stock, 2013); with Pieter J. Lalleman and Peter J. Morden, editor of Grounded in Grace: Essays in Honour of Ian M. Randall (Spurgeon’s College and The Baptist Historical Society, 2013); with John H. Y. Briggs, editor of Freedom and the Powers: Perspectives from Baptist History (Didcot: The Baptist Historical Society, 2014), and, forthcoming, an historical and theological volume on the importance of a theologically educated Baptist ministry, Able and Evangelical (Wipf & Stock, 2015), and a volume on Baptism and the Origins of the Baptists (Wipf & Stock).

Maurice Dowling comes originally from Liverpool. He majored in Russian language, literature, and history at the University of Cambridge (BA 1969), obtained the BD from London University in 1973, and completed his MTh (1982) and PhD (1987) in Patristics at Queen’s University, Belfast. For over 40 years Maurice taught at the Irish Baptist College in Northern Ireland, mainly in the areas of church history, historical theology and Hebrew. He was a Recognized Teacher in the theology department at Queen’s University, and subsequently also in theology departments at the Universities of Wales and of Chester. Since his retirement in 2012 he has continued to teach and to supervise research on a part-time basis. For over 20 years Maurice travelled regularly to the former Soviet Union, teaching short-term courses at seminaries and Bible colleges and ministering in many (mainly Baptist) churches and speaking at conferences. For nearly 30 years he has been an elder in a Baptist fellowship in Belfast. Maurice is married to Brenda and they have four children.

Nathan A. Finn serves as Associate Professor of Historical Theology and Baptist Studies at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina. He has contributed over two-dozen essays to scholarly books and journals and is co-author of a forthcoming Baptist history textbook. He also serves as an associate editor of the multi-volume The Complete Works of Andrew Fuller (Walter de Gruyter, forthcoming) to which he is contributing the volume on Sandemanianism. Nathan is married with four children and serves as one of the elders of the First Baptist Church of Durham, North Carolina.

Robert D. Linder is University Distinguished Professor of History at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. He earned his BS degree in history and political science at Emporia State University and his MA and PhD in history from the University of Iowa. He taught at the University of Iowa as a Graduate Teaching Assistant and as a full-time faculty member at William Jewell College in Missouri before joining the faculty at KSU in 1965. He also has done postgraduate work at the University of Oxford and has been a visiting professor of history at the University of Wollongong and at Macquarie University in Australia. Linder is the author and/or editor of seventeen books and of scores of articles in professional journals and books. His main research interests lie in American, European, and Australian religious, and political and social history from the Reformation to the present. He spent eight years on the Manhattan City Commission and was twice Mayor of his city. He served in the United States Army Reserve from 1959 to 1967, two years of which was on active duty. His forthcoming books include The Age of Anxiety: Australian Evangelical Christians and the Inter-War Years and New Light on the Southern Cross: Essays on Australian Religious and Political History.

James Tyler Robertson received his PhD in 2013 from McMaster Divinity College. He is currently editing his book A Good Fight: The Religious War of 1812. He has published journal articles and book chapters on a variety of subjects related to the War of 1812, Canadian history, missionaries, the crusades, British imperial history, and Baptist, Anglican, and Methodist histories. He currently works in the history department of Tyndale Seminary as well as pastoring two rural Baptist churches in southern Ontario. A frequent speaker at popular and academic societies, Robertson has presented on British identity in Northern Ireland, imperial history in England, and throughout America on the topic of Christianity in the early republic, military morality, and the religious implications of Francis Scott Key’s The Defence of Fort M’Henry which became the American national anthem. He resides in Hamilton, Ontario.

Introduction

The essays in this volume were originally papers given at the fifth annual conference of The Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies, co-sponsored by the Canadian Baptist Historical Society, which took place at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. This annual conference is normally stretched over a two-day period with a variety of plenary sessions and some smaller parallel papers. All but three of the papers given at the plenary sessions on 26 and 27 September 2011 —the three being those of Larry Kreitzer, Keith Harper, and George Rable—are contained in this volume.

While Baptists have generally not shunned military involvement, there has been a Baptist stream of pacifism, which the first paper by Anthony Cross seeks to ground in the Anabaptist witness in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and which he sees represented in the thought of John Smyth. Cross’s paper contrasts Smyth’s view with that of Thomas Helwys, a forerunner of English Baptist engagement in the political and military turmoil of the mid-seventeenth century. Paul Brewster’s paper then looks at the thought of the eighteenth-century author and preacher Andrew Fuller about war during the British Empire’s struggle against Napoleon. Fuller recognized that there was a place for patriotism in the Christian life and thus the military defense of one’s homeland against the aggression of a foreign power. Yet, he was quite adamant that loyalty to Christ superseded this natural duty. James Robertson’s chapter reflects on the oft-forgotten (though not by Canadians) War of 1812 and Baptist response to it within the American republic. Gordon Heath’s essay explores the exuberant support of Canadian Baptists for the fight of the mother country (the British Isles) in Egyptian Sudan and Abyssinia during the 1880s. Heath sees this support as a forerunner of the way Canadian Baptists would react when they were called to greater sacrifice during the South African War at the turn of the century.

Four essays look at Baptist response to war in the twentieth century, possibly the bloodiest century on record. Doug Adams details the impact of World War I upon the life and ministry of T. T. Shields, and sees it as a key turning-point in that influential Baptist’s thinking. Doug’s essay is the only one in this volume not actually given at the conference. Robert Linder examines the way Australian Baptists approached participation in World War II and, upon the whole, finds them reluctant warriors. The seventh paper draws upon Maurice Dowling’s extensive knowledge of and involvement with Russian Baptists, and provides a fascinating look at their perspective on the Cold War of the 1950s and 1960s. The final paper in this book is a fresh examination by Nathan Finn of the way that American Baptists profoundly disagreed among themselves about how to regard the Vietnam War—in this they reflected the larger culture of the United States.

Preparing these papers for publication has been a strong reminder for the editors of two things in particular: while Baptists in their history have been certain that, as the saying has it, war is hell, they have not been able to agree about how to respond to it. In our day, it is imperative that serious thought be given to the way Baptist followers of the Prince of Peace should live in a world increasingly filled with violence and war and rumors of war. That this book might in some small way aid in that process of thinking is the ardent wish of its editors.

Michael A. G. Haykin and Gordon L. Heath

July 2014

1

Baptists, Peace, and War: The Seventeenth-Century British Foundations

Anthony R. Cross

Introduction

As a tradition we should rightly be proud of the fact that there have been two ¹ Baptist Nobel Peace Prize winners—Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1964, ² and Jimmy Carter in 2002. ³ That said, however, we have had comparatively little to say on the issue of peace, and, all too often, have been all but silent at times when a prophetic voice has been required. None of this is to our credit.

H. F. Lorkin’s 1969 booklet examining Baptists and the issues of war and peace opens with the question, What do Baptists teach about war? The author’s answer is that this is impossible to answer because Baptists do not have a denominational structure that works out answers to moral questions for its members. Rather, we are expected to find the answers for ourselves, and he ties this in with the Baptist principle of liberty of conscience,⁴ a note that Timothy George also strikes in his 1984 article, Between Pacifism and Coercion: The English Baptist Doctrine of Religious Toleration.⁵ Lorkin maintains that:

One of the consequences of such liberty is the variety of individual views on the same matter of Christian concern, even though the Scriptures are the same for all. Baptist views on war are a notable example of this. On the one hand, Baptist chaplains, officers and men have served with distinction in the armed forces since the days of the Civil War. On the other hand, in the last two centuries Baptists have been imprisoned as conscientious objectors, following a pacifist tradition which can be traced at intervals since the sixteenth century. And in between these extremes, there have been many who have preferred to have no pronounced views on the subject, but to withdraw from such controversial matters, to pray and practise simple virtue. These varied views have existed side by side, and only very occasionally have they been openly and publicly debated.

What is needed, then, is dialogue, and Lorkin offers his booklet in support of such dialogue, on a matter increasingly vital to the world and to the Christian, a matter in which the agonies of personal choice are linked with a complex pattern of racial and international relations.⁶ Written at the height of the Cold War and the Vietnam War, his words read as strikingly contemporary, not least when he speaks of high explosives, remote-control weapons and the mushroom cloud of nuclear bombs, though now the conflicts are the Second Gulf War, the war on terror, and a time of revolutions in the Middle East and North and West Africa, and when talk is not just of conventional warfare, but also dirty bombs and biological weapons.

Twenty-four years after Lorkin, Paul Dekar published his For the Healing of the Nations: Baptist Peacemakers, which offers a helpful Baptist discussion of the various nuances of the word peace, and he bases his book around three concepts. First, there is negative peace, which he understands as opposition to war. Second, there is positive peace, which is the effort to eliminate the causes of war. Third, there is prophecy, which is a critique of religion and wider society based on a biblical vision of a better world.⁷ He then draws two further helpful distinctions.

First, there is pacifism, for which he adopts as his working definition principled opposition to all war,⁸ while recognizing that it can mean different things to different people:

It can mean conscientious objection, or refusal to bear arms and, in some cases, to pay for the preparation of war. It can refer to love of enemy. Some pacifists withdraw from society. Others engage in active politics. Some devote themselves to life service for the enthronement of love in personal, social, commercial and national life. Others pledge to resist war. Some equate pacifism with weakness or appeasement. Others identify pacifism with nonviolent struggle. Some regard pacifism as a faith. Others see it as ideology. Many pacifists eschew use of the word altogether. Others think they ought to.⁹

Second, a cognate to pacifism is pacificism, the advocacy of peaceful processes such as arbitration and conciliation.¹⁰ All these nuances have found expression in Baptist life and thought. The present chapter does not set out to distinguish these different understandings or their expression by individual Baptists and by various Baptist bodies, because they are not mutually exclusive; rather they often overlap in the thought of various Baptists as they have sought to respond to changing circumstances.

What is particularly useful is Lorkin’s classification of three views held by Baptists throughout their 400-year history. First, there is the pietistic view. This recognizes that the world is gripped by evil, and those adopting this position contract out and separate themselves from the evil world. They do not bear arms, take oaths, appeal to the law, or engage in politics, for these are all worldly; rather their focus is on the spiritual.¹¹ Second, there is the patriotic view where obedience to the monarch or government is seen as a Christian duty.¹² Third, there is what Lorkin calls the pacifist view in which Baptist pacifists try to express their beliefs in positive service and also in their refusal to fight and kill.¹³ This framework is particularly useful as the founding fathers of the Baptist movement, John Smyth and Thomas Helwys, exemplify the pietist and patriotic positions respectively, while the pacifist view is closely associated with the pietist one. That said, I am unconvinced that these three positions can be as sharply distinguished as Lorkin suggests.

The aim of this chapter is modest. It does not attempt to set Baptist views of peace and war within a broader ecclesiastical and/or social context, but merely to illustrate the variety of Baptist views in the formative years of their existence in Britain during the seventeenth century. And what we see is that in their differences of opinion, Smyth and Helwys raised many of the issues that reappear throughout 400 years of Baptists trying to deal with issues of peace and war.

John Smyth and the Baptist Pietist View

While I believe that the Baptist movement developed out of English Puritanism and Separatism in 1609,¹⁴ within less than a year the majority of the first Baptists followed John Smyth’s lead in seeking union with the local Anabaptists, a company of Waterlander Mennonites under the leadership of Hans de Ries. During this year, 1609–10, it is clear that the nascent Baptists and local Mennonites had considerable contact, so much so that the split between Smyth and Helwys was interpreted by Helwys as due to Smyth’s adoption of four positions that closely allied him with the Waterlanders’ beliefs, and these comprised the four sections of Helwys’s 1611 An Advertisement or Admonition—on Christ’s flesh, on keeping the Sabbath, the issue of successionism, and on the role of the magistracy.¹⁵ The Anabaptists, then, most certainly did influence the development of the pietist position among the first Baptists; therefore it is important that we briefly sketch the Anabaptist views of peace and war in order better to understand the adoption by some Baptists of the pietist viewpoint.

The Anabaptists’ formative statement of faith is The Schleitheim Confession (1527). Article 6 declares,

The sword is ordained of God outside the perfection of Christ. It punishes and puts to death the wicked, and guards and protects the good. In the Law the sword was ordained for the punishment of the wicked and for their death, and the same [sword] is [now] ordained to be used by the worldly magistrates.

This contrasts sharply with the perfection of Christ where only the ban is used for a warning and for the excommunication of the one who has sinned, without putting the flesh to death. In answer to whether a Christian should be a magistrate, believers should follow Christ and not walk in darkness. The Anabaptists held a dualistic view of the worldly and spiritual realms, what they termed darkness and light. The government magistracy is according to the flesh, while the Christian’s is not of this world; their citizenship is in this world, the Christian’s is in heaven; the weapons of their conflict and war are carnal and against the flesh only, but the Christian’s weapons are spiritual, against the fortification of the devil. The worldlings are armed with steel and iron, but the Christian is armed with the armor of God, with truth, righteousness, peace, faith, salvation, and the Word of God.¹⁶

In his Hutterite Confession of Faith (1540–42), Peter Riedemann states, One should therefore be obedient to rulers as to those who are appointed by God to protect us, as long as they do not attack the conscience or demand what is against God.¹⁷ Since the office of government is appointed and instituted by God, it is both right and good, even if the positions are held by godless men. An earthly king was given to Israel because they rejected God and his reign over them, so the authority of government, Riedemann argues, comes from God’s wrath.¹⁸ Therefore, God’s people are not to use the worldly sword or rule with it; instead they should be led and ruled by the spirit of Christ alone. This illustrates well the dichotomy between the kingdom of this world and Christ’s kingdom in Anabaptist—and later some Baptist—thought, for as the old order was to punish evil, so the new is to recompense it with good. As the old way was to hate the enemy, so the new way commands us to love him, for Christ wants his servants to submit themselves to [his kingdom] and become like him.¹⁹ He continues:

Therefore, all that was given in wrath must come to an end in Christ. It has no place in Christ. Governmental authority was given in wrath, so it cannot find a place in Christ or be a part of him. No Christian is a ruler, and no ruler is a Christian, for the child of blessing cannot be the servant of wrath. In Christ, temporal weapons are not used.²⁰

As Riedemann expresses it later, Christians should not take part in war, nor should they use force for purposes of vengeance,²¹ because vengeance belongs to God and so it is to be left to him and not practiced by his disciples. Jesus could have repaid evil with evil, and could have protected himself against his enemies, but he did not, and he would not let anyone else do so for him. Anabaptist pacifism comes out when Riedemann declares, it is clear that Christians cannot take part in war or avenge themselves. Whoever does so forsakes and denies Christ and is untrue to Christ’s nature.²²

Many of these themes appear in the writings of other Anabaptists. Menno Simons, writing in 1535, contrasts the kingship of Christ and the pretensions of John of Leiden, who led the bloody debacle of Münster. For example, in the middle of summarizing the teaching of Jesus and Paul on the sword and repaying evil with evil, Simons asks, How can Christians fight with the implements of war? and states unequivocally, It is forbidden to us to fight with physical weapons.²³

For Pilgram Marpeck, Even though we walk in the flesh, yet we do not fight with physical means, for our victory is not won with our own power and might, nor is it done with earthly or physical power and sword.²⁴ Like Simons, Marpeck condemns the recourse to violence of the Münsterites in 1534–35, as well as the use of the sword by Luther during the Peasants’ Revolt in 1525, and Zwingli’s involvement in the two battles of Kappel, during the second of which in 1531 he was killed. Of these three, Marpeck writes,

All of these Satan raised up in order to confuse and disrupt the true baptism of Christ, which, through patience in faith and love alone, can do good to friend and enemy alike by fighting with the sword of the Spirit in the Word of truth . . . [N]o true Christian needs to occupy or defend either city, land, or people, as earthly lords do, nor to carry on with violence, for such belongs to the earthly and temporal rulers and not at all to true Christians, who show forth the faith in Christ . . . Those who are truly and correctly baptized in Christ are baptized with Christ in patience under tribulation. Committed to suffer even unto their physical death, every Christian who is baptized with Christ is a participant in His tribulation.²⁵

Passages such as these could be multiplied many times over from the writings of other Anabaptists, among them leaders such as Hans Denck and Balthasar Hubmaier,²⁶ and are also to be found in the writings of the Waterlander Mennonites in Amsterdam,²⁷ the city in which the soon-to-be first Baptists settled in 1608.

The two leaders of the first Baptists were John Smyth and Thomas Helwys. Smyth’s theological pilgrimage took him from being an Anglican/Puritan, through Separatist views to being a Baptist, and finally holding Mennonite convictions.²⁸ Timothy George notes that while Smyth’s rejection of Calvinist understandings of original sin and predestination coinciding with his move towards the Mennonites in 1610 have been the focus of most scholars’ work, less attention has been given to the equally significant shift . . . on the question of coercive jurisdiction of the magistrate and the proper Christian response to force and violence.²⁹ This is clearly important, because the difference of opinion on the magistracy was an important matter that contributed to the parting of the ways between Smyth and Helwys in 1610–11.

While the Anabaptists’ discussions relating to peace revolve around the language of the magistracy and the sword, Smyth’s and Helwys’s language focuses on the magistracy and the means they employ to sanction those who contravene the laws of the land. In 1605, while still a Puritan in Anglican orders, Smyth maintained that the magistrate was to enforce the commandments when the Commandments concerning justice and equitie is transgressed, that is, in the earthly realm, but also when those matters pertain to the kingdom of God, that is, the spiritual realm.³⁰ His acceptance of a hierarchical structure in society is reflected in his belief that the devil wished to abolish the magistracy and that the Anabaptists’ egalitarianism did away with all rule and authority. This would remove the fear of punishment and the hope of reward. [I]t is better, he says, to have a Tyrant than no King, even though a Tyrant might doe and suffer much impietie and iniquitie, yet some good must needes proceed from him, for it is better to have tyranny than anarchy as there is some order in the one, and none in the other.³¹ For Smyth at this time, religious toleration would result in the kingdom of God being pushed out by the devil’s kingdom, for the devil would subtly take advantage of human inclination to false doctrine and worship, and thousands would follow strange religions. Therefore, the Magistrates should cause all men to worship the true God, or else punish them with imprisonment, confiscation of goods, or death as the qualitie of the cause requireth.³²

By 1606, Smyth had become a Separatist and one of the leaders of the Scrooby-Gainsborough congregation in the East Midlands, and two years later led his congregation to Amsterdam. When, in 1609, Smyth baptized himself, then Helwys and the rest of the Separatist congregation, thereby founding the first Baptist church,³³ he still acknowledged that magistrates were ordained by God that every soule ought to be subject unto them for they are the ministers of God for our wealth: that we ought to be subject unto them for conscience sake: that they are the ministers of God to take vengeance on them that do evil. However, when magistrates were converted to the true faith and added to the true church by baptism Smyth admitted he did not know what to tell them to do;