The pursuit of freedom is one of the chief preoccupations of the human race; where is it found, and how is it achieved?
The answer Jesus gave was: "The truth shall make you free." (John 8.32)
If that's so, the pursuit of freedom becomes the search for truth.
As a Baptist Minister, I find the endeavours of our founding fathers to achieve that freedom in truth, and secure it, to be a fascinating story.

Freedom of Conscience - I

Baptists had their beginnings in the religious ferment of the 16th & 17th centuries which we know as the Reformation. All over Europe at that time groups of Christians were eagerly exploring the newly available Bible to discover what, in the minds of Christ and His apostles, was the essence of their faith.

In England, where a State Church had been established, such groups were outlawed, and as a result many fled to Holland, which at that time was a haven of religious liberty. It is hardly surprising that freedom was a "live issue" among them ... freedom of conscience above all else; freedom too in worship ... and freedom to believe as the Bible, the foundation document of their faith, required - not as the Institution of the Church directed.

To a small group of these refugees in Amsterdam the Baptists as we know them today are traceable.

They were pastored by a John Smyth who had led them there from Gainsborough in Lincolnshire. His personal pilgrimage reflected the path that so many in those days followed. He had been ordained a priest in Holy Orders with the Established Church, but had felt compelled by conscience to identify himself, first with the Puritans, and then with the Separatists. It was not his wish to separate from the Church in which he had been nurtured, but the demands made of clergy by the Civil Authorities at that time were so at odds with his conscience, he felt he had no choice. He later gave expression to his convictions in a statement of faith which he and his little fellowship presented to a Mennonite Congregation in Amsterdam at a time when they sought acceptance into fellowship with them.

It reads, in part: "We believe that the magistrate is not by virtue of his office to meddle with religion, or matters of conscience, to force or compel men to this or that form of religion or doctrine; but to leave the Christian religion free to every man's conscience, and to handle only civil transgressions, injuries, and wrongs of men against man, in murder, adultery, theft, for Christ only is the King and Lawgiver of His Church."

It was a fine enunciation of the principle of religious freedom.

But it was more than just that: the historian A. C. Underwood observed: "It was in fact the first claim for full religious liberty ever penned in the English language." ("A History of the English Baptists" [CKP, p. 42])

The belief that church and state should be separated was conceived, not as a political issue at all - but as a necessary condition of freedom of conscience. Because truth, it was believed, has its rise in the Being of God, not in the minds of His creatures, each person's search for it, therefore, must be unencumbered.

In no other climate can such a quest be pursued as finds expression in the simple, humble, and so very satisfying prayer of Thomas á Kempis:

"Grant us O Lord to know that which is worth knowing,
to love that which is worth loving,
to esteem that which may bear praise rightly,
to hate what in Thy sight is unworthy,
to prize what to Thee is precious,
and above all to search out and to do what is well- pleasing to Thee. Amen."

Freedom of Conscience - II

When John Smyth, the founding father of the Baptists, died in Amsterdam in August 1612, the leader who emerged in his place was Thomas Helwys.

A country gentleman from Broxtowe Hall in Nottinghamshire, where his home had been a place of call for clergy of Puritan leanings, it had been his generosity that enabled the group to take refuge in Holland from persecution in their native land. At the time, he had left his wife and children behind, thinking them safe if he were himself removed from the scene. But the ecclesiastical authorities, annoyed by his escape, threw her into prison.

So toward the end of 1612, believing they should bear their witness in their homeland at whatever cost, the little congregation returned to England.

They founded the first Baptist Church on English soil in Spitalfields, outside the walls of the City of London ... "a church led and officered by laymen," the historian W. H. Burgess observes, "for almost at once it was deprived of its chief leaders by imprisonment" - Thomas Helwys among them.

What led to his imprisonment was a document he published under the title of "A Short Declaration of the Mistery of Iniquity", a copy of which he presented to King James (the copy in his own handwriting, it is believed, now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford). It contained the first demand made in England for universal religious liberty. Here is its pith:

"Our Lord the King is but an earthly king, and he hath no authority as a king but in earthly causes, and if the king's people be obedient and true subjects, obeying all human laws made by the king, our lord and king can require no more: for men's religion to God is betwixt God and themselves; the king shall not answer for it, neither may the king be judge between God and man. Let them be heretics, Turks, Jews or whatsoever, it appertains not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure."

Here is more:

"Hear, O King, and despise not the counsel of the poor, and let their complaints come before thee.
"The king is a mortal man and not God: therefore he hath no power over the immortal souls of his subjects, to make laws and ordinances for them, and to set spiritual Lords over them. If the king have authority to make spiritual laws and Lords, then he is an immortal God and not a mortal man.
"O King, be not seduced by deceivers to sin against God Whom thou oughtest to obey, nor against thy poor subjects who ought and will obey thee in all things with body, life and goods, or else let their lives be taken from the earth.
"God save the King."
Spittlefield, near London. Tho. Helwys
Thomas Helwys' autograph. Inscription of his book to James I

The authorities could hardly be expected to ignore such a challenge - nor did they. Helwys was thrown into prison. We know that by 1616 he was dead, because in that year his uncle bequeathed a legacy of £10 to his widow.

Such was the price paid for the freedoms we in our Western democracies enjoy.

Freedom of Belief

Before John Smyth, the founding father of the Baptists, left for Holland, he had joined a body of separatists in Gainsborough, who chose and ordained him as their Pastor.

The Covenant they drew up, by which they bound themselves voluntarily together, makes fascinating reading. I'd like to quote it in part ... because it reflects the genius of the Baptist outlook in the matter of Creeds. Baptists never have adopted one, and to this day, they are ill at ease with any proposal that they should. Bondage to a Creed, they believe, threatens spiritual freedom. Not because they recognise no authority at all in matters of faith and practise - they do. But the only authority that is binding on Christians, they hold, is the living Christ, communicating His mind through the Scriptures. That means that their basis of faith is the whole Bible - not any "digest" of it, frozen into the thought forms and presuppositions of an era.

In this they are true to the spirit of all the Reformers, who contended that the Scriptures, not the Institutional Church, are the primary, and therefore the authoritative means by which God communicates with us.

The members of the Gainsborough congregation covenanted together (and I quote): "As the Lord's free people ... to walk in all His ways, made known to them, or to be made known to them, according to their best endeavours, whatsoever it might cost them, the Lord assisting them."

There's a fine blend of humility and confidence in that; they didn't think they'd "arrived" - that "they were the people, and wisdom would die with them"; they believed the light would grow ... and they were ready to follow where it led.

This attitude of humble confidence later found simple and telling expression in a hymn written by George Rawson, a Baptist solicitor in Leeds. What inspired him to write it was the charge John Robinson laid upon those members of his congregation in Leyden who sailed from Plymouth in the Mayflower with the Pilgrim Fathers in 1620.

"He charged us", one of them recalled, "before God and His blessed angels, to follow him no further than he followed Christ; and if God should reveal anything to us by any other instrument of His, to be as ready to receive it as ever we were to receive any truth by his ministry. For he was very confident that the Lord had yet more light and truth to break forth out of His holy Word."

The hymn begins: "We limit not the truth of God to our poor reach of mind", and goes on: "The Lord has yet more light and truth to break forth from His Word."

Freedom to Differ

One of the freedoms the Reformers espoused, and which has since been all too often unhappily forgotten, was the simple freedom to differ without losing either affection or respect for each other.

I find it cheering, as a Baptist Minister - and salutary - that this freedom was carried into the very areas where Baptist conviction was strongest.

Baptists were distinguished, among other things, by their views on the manner in which baptism should be administered, and who should be regarded as proper candidates for it. Its symbolism required that it should take the form of full immersion, and only those who had freely and intelligently repented and believed were fit and proper subjects for it, they believed - and still do.

However, I quote now from the Church Covenant of the fellowship at Chipping Norton near Oxford:

"Whereas some of us do verily believe that the sprinkling of the infant children of believing parents in the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit is true Christian baptism; and others of us do believe that true Christian baptism is that which is administered to adults upon the profession of their repentance, faith, and experience of the grace of God by immersion in the name of the Sacred Three; yet notwithstanding this difference of sentiment, we promise and agree to receive one another into the same affection and love; and for these, among other reasons: because we can find no warrant in the Word of God to make such difference of sentiment any bar to Communion at the Lord's Table in particular, or to Church fellowship in general; and because the Lord Jesus, receiving and owning them on both sides of the question, we think we ought to do so too."

That is a statement wholly in the tradition of the founding Baptist fathers.

John Smyth himself, in the statement of faith which accompanied his application to the Mennonite Waterlanders in Amsterdam, wrote: "That all penitent and faithful Christians are brethren in the communion of the outward church, wheresoever they live, by what name soever they are known, which in truth and zeal, follow repentance and faith ... though they be compassed with never so many ignorances and infirmities; and we salute them all with a holy kiss, being heartily grieved that we which follow after one faith and one spirit, one Lord and one God, one body and one baptism, should be rent into so many sects and schisms: and that only for matters of less moment."

A noble spirit breathes through that last clause especially, and in these days of Ecumenical emphasis, it is worth bearing in mind that these words were penned in 1612, during the birth-pangs of the whole Protestant movement. Smyth and Helwys were surely of one accord with their contemporary, Archbishop Laud, in the prayer he offered:

"Most gracious Father, we humbly beseech Thee for Thy Holy Catholic Church. Fill it with all truth; in all truth with peace. Where it is corrupt, purge it; where it is in error, direct it; where anything is amiss, reform it; where it is right, strengthen and confirm it; where it is in want, furnish it; where it is divided and rent asunder, make up the breaches of it, O Thou Holy One of Israel. Amen."

"In Christ, there is no East or West, in Him no South or North,
But one great fellowship of love throughout the whole wide earth."

Freedom in Fellowship

H. G. Wells once described the Hebrew prophets of the eighth century B.C. as "a new sort of men in history", because ... "they carried the common man past priest and temple, past court and king, and brought him face to face with the rule of righteousness," he noted. ("A Short History of the World" Pelican Edition p. 90).

They introduced the power of individual moral appeal into religion.

It was the inspired genius of the Reformers that they recovered it.

The one conviction above all which they (the Reformers) shared - Lutheran, Calvinist, Baptist, Congregationalist, Puritan and Separatist alike - was that salvation is by faith: that is, by direct, personal, individual response to the forgiving grace of God held out to us in Christ Jesus. Neither priest nor church may stand between God and the believer. As the Apostle Paul expressed it, "There is but One Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus." (I Timothy 2.5)

Where the Baptists - and the Congregationalists too - took it a stage further was in their belief that this required, not only that Civil Rulers should have no authority over congregations to govern their beliefs and practices, but neither should Ecclesiastical Authorities have it.

Wrote John Smyth, "Though the Church be one, yet it consisteth of divers particular congregations, as many as there shall be in the world. Every such congregation have Christ given to them, with all the means of salvation, and they are therefore "Body of Christ" and a whole Church. Therefore they may and ought to prophesy and break bread and administer in all the holy ordinances, though as yet they have no officers, or that their officers should be in prison, sick, or by any other means hindered from the Church.
Further, as one congregation hath Christ, so hath all; the Word of God cometh not out from any one alone, neither is it directed to one alone but to all that are in the world, and therefore no church ought to challenge any prerogative over any other."

Not only is the individual free, communities of individuals too are free - though under the acknowledged rule of Christ.

They were never so foolish as to believe, of course, that churches had no need of each other. Associations of Churches were of their essence from the beginning. The General Baptists of Buckinghamshire, for example, provided in 1678 that "General Assemblies ... being met together out of all the churches and appearing there by their representatives make but One Church, and have the lawful right and suffrage in such general assembly to act in the Name of Christ together; it being of Divine authority, and the best means under heaven to preserve unity, and good order among congregations."

Here we see them struggling with the inescapable tensions between freedom and authority which beset every society on earth, no matter how dedicated to the ideal of freedom it may be. But what is clear is that they recognised that no freedom is possible to men at all that does not rest on obedience to an inner discipline.

A paradox it is, but it is an insight we dare not ever lose, or the freedom we cherish degenerates into anarchy.

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