Baptist Flower Fights

In his 18th-century journal entitled, The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution, Anglican Parson Charles Woodmason offered this assessment of the people called Baptists: “They don’t all agree in one Tune. For one sings this Doctrine, and the next something different — So that people’s brains are turn’d and bewildered.”

Has nothing changed in 200 odd years? While Baptists generally agree on a “common core” of beliefs and practices — regenerate church membership, believer’s baptism, local autonomy, ordained clergy, priesthood of the laity, religious liberty — they disagree, often vehemently, on the meaning of those ideals in biblical and theological perspective. Theologically, Baptists often “multiply by dividing,” forming sub-denominations that run from the strict Calvinism of Primitive and Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit-Predestinarian Baptists to the strict Arminianism of General and Free Will Baptists, with innumerable groups in between.