HERESIES ENDOUNTERED AMONG OLD SCHOOL BAPTISTS (Santamaria)

Heresies Encountered Among Old School Baptists

Contents

• Introduction
• 1. Core, Capital-H Heresies
• 2. Heresies Outside the Old School Camp
• 3. “In-House” Old School Controversies
• 4. How to Use This as a Writer
• Notes

Introduction

Short answer: There is no such thing as an exhaustive list of “OSB heresies,” because Old School Baptists have never had a magisterium with an official heresy index. What you do have is a fairly consistent set of doctrines they attack over and over in Black Rock, Signs of the Times, Zion’s Landmark, etc., plus some internal fights where each side calls the other “heretical.”

Think of what follows as: “If you teach X, a historically strict Old School Baptist will probably say you’re a heretic.”

1. Core, Capital-H Heresies (Denials of Basic Creedal Orthodoxy)

These are basically the same things most confessional Protestants would call heresy. Old School writers don’t even argue them at length; they just swat them.

Anti-Trinitarianism

• Arianism ^[1] (Christ a created being)
• Socinianism ^[2] / Unitarianism ^[3] (denial of Trinity, substitutionary atonement, etc.)

Christological errors

• Denial of the true deity or true humanity of Christ ^[4]
• Any notion of Christ as a mere example / moral teacher

Pelagianism and hard semi-Pelagianism ^[5]

• Man not totally depraved
• Ability to repent and believe without prior regenerating grace

Universalism ^[6]

• All will eventually be saved; hell is not eternal

Open theism / finite God ideas

• God does not exhaustively know or determine the future

These are “instant excommunication” level for a classic Old School Baptist.

2. Doctrines They Label as Heretical Outside Their Own Camp

Here’s where the Old School distinctives show. These might be “evangelical” elsewhere, but are fire alarms in OSB literature.

Arminian / Free-willism

• Conditional election
• Resistible grace
• Universal atonement in the “Christ died for everybody alike” sense
• Falling from grace

Fullerism / duty-faith / offers of the gospel

• Everybody is duty-bound to repent and believe savingly
• The “well-meant offer” of Christ to all without distinction
• The gospel as a conditional proposal rather than a declaration to the called

Old School writers routinely tie this to Andrew Fuller, New Divinity, and “means Baptists.”

The “means system” (mission boards, Sunday Schools, etc.)

• Mission boards, tract and Bible societies, paid “missionaries” under boards
• Theological seminaries as a minister-factory
• Sunday Schools, protracted meetings, anxious benches, revival machinery

Black Rock treats this whole complex not just as unwise, but as anti-church and anti-grace – practically a new religion.

Gospel regeneration / means-regeneration

• The idea that the preached word is a means of producing spiritual life in the dead sinner.

OSB “absoluters” insist regeneration is immediate by the Holy Spirit alone; the gospel is for the living, not the dead. They will call “gospel regeneration” a flat denial of total depravity and irresistible grace.

Baptismal / sacramental regeneration

• Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Campbellite / Church of Christ, etc.
• Any teaching that water baptism, sacraments, or church membership cause the new birth.

Decisional evangelism

• Sinner’s prayer as an instrument of new birth
• Walking the aisle / signing the card as the hinge of salvation
• “Accept Jesus as your personal Savior” as the central command

This is viewed as a soul-destroying counterfeit – man-centered, manipulating emotions, creating “two-fold more the children of hell.”

Universal / invisible-only church ecclesiology ^[7]

• Strong “universal church” talk used to downgrade the necessity of concrete local churches
• Ecumenical “body of Christ” that makes local order, discipline, and ordinances secondary

Old School writers see this as dissolving the New Testament pattern of visible, covenanted assemblies.

Charismatic / continuationist extremes

• Extra-biblical prophecy and tongues as normative
• Ongoing revelatory gifts that relativize Scripture

They may tolerate a bit of experiential language, but the “prophet-apostle networks” are treated as delusion.

3. “In-House” Old School Controversies Where Somebody Screams “Heresy”

Now the messy bit: fights inside the Old School world.

3.1. Conditional Time Salvation vs. Absolute Predestination

Conditionalists / “time-salvationists”

• Eternal salvation is by grace alone, but many temporal blessings, chastisements, and “deliverances” hang on the believer’s obedience.
• Heavy emphasis on conditions in Christian experience (for example, “if ye do these things, ye shall never fall”) without touching eternal security.

Absoluters

• God has absolutely predestinated all things whatsoever come to pass, including the believer’s walk, chastisements, and temporal trials.
• They tend to treat “time salvation” language as smuggling in Arminian means and conditions.

Each side has called the other “heretical” at times:

• Conditionalists charge Absoluters with making God the author of sin and destroying moral responsibility.
• Absoluters charge Conditionalists with reintroducing free-willism, duty-faith, and a two-track salvation.

From a historian’s standpoint, this is a family fight; from inside the polemics, each side has labeled the other’s extremities as “rank heresy.”

3.2. Progressive Sanctification ^[8]

Many Old School Baptists (especially the more absoluter wing) reject the common evangelical slogan that the believer “becomes progressively more holy in nature.”

They affirm growth in knowledge, comfort, and outward walk, but insist that:

• Holiness as a state is complete in Christ.
• The new man is not partly holy, partly unholy.

So they will call “progressive holiness of nature” a practical denial of finished work, and in some cases, outright heresy. On the other side, more “moderate” PBs talk about progressive sanctification in a Reformed way and accuse the anti-progress folks of Antinomianism.

3.3. Two-Seedism (Daniel Parker and Followers) ^[9]

• Teach that humanity is literally divided into two eternal seeds: the seed of God and the seed of the serpent, with a quasi-eternal dualism.

Most Old School Baptists eventually rejected this as:

• Going beyond Scripture
• Confusing election with ontological two-seed metaphysics
• Opening the door to fatalism and weird speculation

So “Parkerism / Two-Seedism” becomes a standard heresy label in many Old School writings (even though Parker helped spearhead anti-missionary sentiment early on).

3.4. Eternal Justification / Eternal Vital-Union Extremes

Some writers push justification or union with Christ so far into eternity past that:

• Faith, Christ’s actual obedience, even the cross, seems almost unnecessary historically.

Critics inside the camp accuse this of:

• Ditching the covenant structure of redemption
• Collapsing history into a bare decree
• Leading to practical Antinomianism (“we were always justified, so nothing really happens in time”)

So you’ll see “eternal justification in an extreme sense” or “ultraism on vital union” treated as a dangerous error, sometimes “near heresy.”

3.5. “New School” Practices Inside Old School Lines

Things like:

• Protracted meetings
• Sunday schools and Bible classes
• Choirs, special singing, instruments
• Salaried pastorates behaving like modern denominations
• Aggressive “mission work” under quasi-boards

Hard-line Old Schoolers sometimes use the word “heresy” for these, but more often talk in terms of “disorder,” “departure,” “Babylon,” “progressive,” or “not Old Line.” The implication, though, is that persevering in such practices will eventually show you were never truly “Old School” at all.

4. How to Use This as a Writer

If you’re cataloguing “OSB heresies,” a clean way to frame it is something like:

• Creedal heresies – where Old School Baptists stand with classical orthodoxy (anti-Trinitarianism, Pelagianism, Universalism, etc.).
• Evangelical-world heresies – things many evangelicals accept but Old School writers condemn as soul-destroying (Fullerism, means-regeneration, duty-faith, mission systems, decisionalism).
• Intra-Old-School heresies – positions like Two-Seedism, extreme eternal justification, or the sharp edges of Conditional Time Salvation vs. Absolutism, where one Old School faction anathematizes another.

And then you add one big hermeneutical warning label:

“Heresy” in Old School usage often means “a doctrine that, if followed out consistently, undermines sovereign grace, the finished work of Christ, or the spiritual nature of the church.”

They’re not shy with the word, so part of your task as a historian is to distinguish between fatal departures (for example, Parker’s Two-Seedism) and in-house exaggerations that got tagged “heresy” in a heated controversy. That way you respect their own rhetoric without canonizing every 19th-century editorial broadside as if it were the Nicene Creed.

Notes

[1] Arianism is the classic error that treats Jesus as “sort of divine” but not truly and eternally God. It arose in the early 4th century in the teaching of Arius, a presbyter in Alexandria. He taught that the Son is the first and greatest creature, made by the Father before all ages and then used as the instrument to create everything else. The Son, however, is still a creature, not of the same essence as the Father. Arian slogans can be boiled down to, “There was when he was not.” The Son is exalted above all creation, but he is not co-eternal with the Father, not equal in Godhead, and not “very God of very God.” This is more than a minor Christological misstep. If Christ is not truly God, he cannot finally reconcile us to God, bear the full weight of divine wrath, or bring us into union with the divine life. This is why Nicaea insisted that the Son is homoousios (“of one substance”) with the Father, “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made.” Any theology that treats Christ as a high creature, a semi-divine being, or a subordinate deity ends up with another Jesus and therefore another gospel. Old School Baptists stand solidly in the Nicene stream on this point: a Christ who is not eternally and essentially God is no Savior at all. ↩︎

[2] Socinianism is a rationalist, anti-Trinitarian system that cuts Christianity down to moral example and ethical instruction. It is named after Fausto Socinus (1539–1604), associated with the Polish Brethren, and is more radical than Arianism. Where Arianism makes Christ a pre-existent but created being, Socinianism typically denies both the eternal deity and the personal pre-existence of Christ. Jesus is a uniquely inspired man, miraculously born, but he does not exist as the eternal Son before the incarnation. Socinian theology rejects the doctrine of original sin and total depravity. Adam’s fall does not bring inherited guilt and corruption upon all his descendants; the human race remains fundamentally capable of obeying God. In the doctrine of the atonement, Socinianism discards penal substitution and satisfaction. The cross is said to be a demonstration of divine love, an example of obedience, and a pledge that God will forgive the penitent, but it is not the bearing of wrath in the place of a specific people. Justification in a Socinian scheme is not God declaring a sinner righteous on the basis of Christ’s imputed righteousness; it becomes more like God accepting those who repent and live uprightly. Underneath all this lies a strong confidence in unaided human reason: anything that appears “irrational” (such as the Trinity, two natures in one person, penal substitution, or eternal punishment) is either reinterpreted or simply rejected. From an Old School Baptist standpoint, this isn’t just an error on the fringes; it is a wholesale replacement of the faith. It denies the Trinity, the deity of Christ, original sin, substitutionary atonement, and justification by imputed righteousness. It amounts to a different God, a different Christ, and a different way of salvation. ↩︎

[3] Unitarianism, in its classic “Christian” form, is a broad family of anti-Trinitarian views that insist God is one person only, the Father. The Son and the Spirit are not distinct divine persons; the Trinity is dismissed as irrational and unbiblical. In early modern contexts (especially in England and New England), Unitarians often portrayed Jesus as a great teacher, prophet, or moral exemplar—uniquely inspired, but not eternal God. Some versions allowed a kind of pre-existence (closer to Arianism), but still refused to confess him as “of one substance with the Father.” Unitarian theology generally rejects penal substitution and tends to soften or deny eternal punishment. Salvation becomes the moral improvement and enlightenment of the individual rather than the substitutionary suffering of the God-man for a specific people. In the modern Unitarian Universalist world, things go further: the movement becomes openly pluralistic and creedless, embracing many religions or none, and completely abandoning the boundaries of historic Christianity. From the standpoint of Nicene orthodoxy, and therefore from a strict Old School Baptist standpoint, Unitarianism must be classed with Socinianism and Arianism as a fundamental heresy. It unravels the doctrine of the Trinity, empties Christ of his divine glory, and turns the cross from a saving sacrifice into a mere illustration of love. Here again, it is not just another denomination; it is an entirely different religion. ↩︎

[4] Denial of the true humanity of Christ is the mirror opposite error to denial of his deity, and it is just as destructive. The orthodox confession is that the eternal Son assumed a real and complete human nature—body, soul, mind, and will—so that he is one person in two natures, fully God and fully man. Errors on this side include Docetism (from a word meaning “to seem”), which claims Christ only appeared to have a real human body and to suffer, but in reality did not enter into our flesh and weakness at all. Another form is Apollinarianism, which grants Christ a human body but says the Logos replaces a true human rational soul or mind. In that scheme, Christ does not have a human mind that grows, learns, and obeys; his “mind” is simply the divine Logos. Later, monothelite or similar views try to protect Christ’s unity by denying he has a distinct human will, asserting only one will, the divine. Against all of these, the church insisted that whatever in us is to be healed must be assumed. If he does not assume a real human body, then our bodies are not redeemed; if he does not assume a real human soul and mind, then our souls and minds are not redeemed; if he does not take a true human will and obey as man, then our disordered willing is not restored. Scripture presents him as one who hungers, thirsts, grows weary, sorrows, is tempted, and increases in wisdom and stature—without sin. Any Christology that denies or dilutes that genuine humanity leaves us with a Savior who cannot truly stand in our place as man, cannot render human obedience to the law, and cannot be a sympathetic High Priest. Old School Baptists, standing with the ancient councils, therefore treat denial of Christ’s real humanity as a direct assault on the incarnation and atonement. ↩︎

[5] Pelagianism and semi-Pelagianism are twin assaults against the doctrines of total depravity and sovereign grace. In full Pelagianism, Adam’s fall did not corrupt human nature in a way that leaves us spiritually dead. Each person is born like Adam before the fall: morally neutral and fully able, by nature, to obey God’s law. Sin is a matter of bad habits, bad examples, and poor choices, not a radical inward corruption. Grace, in this system, is helpful but not strictly necessary. It consists mainly in external aids—law, teaching, Christ’s example, and forgiveness—rather than an inward, effectual work that raises the dead. Semi-Pelagianism arose as a softening of Pelagius: it admits that the fall weakened us and made sin pervasive, yet still insists that the first movement toward God originates in the sinner’s free will. The unregenerate can decide to seek God, to believe, or to cooperate with grace, and then grace comes in to help and complete what that first decision began. Election is often recast in terms of God choosing those whom he foresees will use their free will rightly. Against both forms, Augustinian and Old School Baptist theology insists that we are “dead in trespasses and sins,” that the carnal mind is enmity against God, and that even the beginning of faith and repentance is a gift of God’s effectual grace. Grace does not merely assist free will; it creates a new heart. Any system that puts the decisive first motion toward God in fallen man, rather than in sovereign grace, is seen as a betrayal of the gospel of free and effectual grace. ↩︎

[6] Universalism, as it concerns this discussion, is the claim that, in the end, every human being (and sometimes every rational creature) will be saved. Hell, if acknowledged, is treated as temporary, purgative, or merely symbolic. The shared core is that there will be no final, eternal division between the righteous and the wicked. Some forms teach that all are effectively saved in this life already; others teach that those who die in unbelief will pass through a post-mortem process of correction and eventual restoration. Divine punishment becomes remedial rather than truly retributive. Passages about God reconciling “all things” or being the “Savior of all men” are interpreted to guarantee ultimate universal salvation. From the standpoint of historic orthodoxy, this collides with the repeated biblical witness to a final, irreversible separation: sheep and goats, wheat and tares, those who go away into “everlasting punishment” and those into “life eternal.” The same term group that describes the eternality of life is used of punishment; there is no textual basis for making one temporary while preserving the other forever. Universalism also undercuts the logic of definite atonement and judgment. If Christ truly, effectually bore the sins of his people, then those sins cannot again be punished in them. If all are finally saved, then either Christ bore the sins of all in a way that does not actually secure their salvation, or the atonement must be redefined away from substitution. Old School Baptists see Universalism not as a harmless optimism but as a different gospel. It evacuates divine warnings, flattens the gravity of sin, and clashes with the scriptural depiction of a holy God who both saves and judges. ↩︎

[7] By “universal / invisible-only church ecclesiology” we are dealing with a way of speaking about the church that absolutizes the unseen, universal aspect and effectively makes concrete local churches optional. Historic Reformed and Baptist theology has always distinguished between the universal church (all the elect in every age, united to Christ) and visible, local congregations (actual assemblies in particular places, with Word, ordinances, elders, and discipline). The problem arises when the “invisible” and “universal” side is treated as the only real church, while local churches are reduced to human expressions or mere denominational shells. In that way of thinking, believers may say, “I’m part of the Church (capital C), so I do not need to commit to any particular congregation.” Membership covenants, discipline, pastoral oversight, and congregational responsibility all become secondary, optional, or even suspicious. Practically, this destroys the New Testament categories of those who are “within” and those who are “without,” because there is no definite, bounded flock to which a person belongs. It also undermines the possibility of meaningful separation and church order: if we are all simply in the one universal body, then local disorder and doctrinal corruption can be shrugged off as unimportant so long as there is some vague spiritual unity somewhere. Old School Baptists are jealous for the concreteness of New Testament church life. For them, “church” in Scripture is overwhelmingly local and visible—the gathered body in a place, under the rule of Christ, walking together in doctrine and practice. They may acknowledge a mystical body of all the elect, but they insist that Christ’s ordinances, discipline, and pastoral care are all located in actual congregations. The invisible-only mindset therefore appears to them as a gateway error: once you dissolve the local assembly into a free-floating spirituality, it becomes easy to justify the “non-local church” mentality—believers who claim to love Christ while staying perpetually unjoined, unaccountable, and unpastored. ↩︎

[8] In the debates over “progressive sanctification,” Old School Baptists—especially those of the stricter, absoluter stripe— draw a sharp line between God’s once-for-all setting apart of his people and modern talk of believers gradually becoming more holy in their very nature. In Beebe’s treatment of sanctification, for example, he frames it first in terms of the Father’s eternal election, by which the saints were chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world that they should be holy and without blame before him in love. Next, he locates sanctification in the finished mediatorial work of Christ, who by his obedience and blood has consecrated and perfected his people once for all. Finally, he speaks of the sanctification of the Spirit, by which the elect are effectually called, separated from the world, and experimentally brought into the liberty of the children of God. In all of this, sanctification is God’s work: the Father sanctifying in election, the Son sanctifying in redemption, and the Spirit sanctifying in calling and separation. He explicitly denies that the saints are their own sanctifiers, or that Scripture anywhere represents them as progressively sanctifying themselves. He is very wary of systems that talk about believers climbing a ladder of inward holiness or achieving some higher state of purity by consecration and effort. Those schemes, in his view, end up smelling of self-righteousness and New School “means” religion. None of this means Beebe denies growth. He fully recognizes that there is growth in knowledge, experience, and outward walk, and he prays that the God of peace would sanctify the Thessalonians “wholly,” in body, soul, and spirit. But the point is that whatever increase of devotedness, separation, and practical holiness appears in the saints is God unfolding his own purpose and applying the benefits of Christ’s work, not a cooperative project by which the old nature becomes progressively holier. The holiness of the new man is complete in Christ; the “progress” is in manifestation and experience, not in the essence of holiness itself. ↩︎

[9] Two-Seedism, associated especially with Elder Daniel Parker, is a striking example of an in-house aberration that hardened into a separate sect. Parker began as a vigorous opponent of mission boards and extra-church institutions; his 1820 Public Address to the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions attacks the emerging mission system on ecclesiological grounds. But he went on to develop a distinctive doctrine of “two seeds,” set out more fully in his later writings. In this scheme, the human race is not simply one fallen lump out of which God chooses some vessels of mercy and leaves others as vessels of wrath. Instead, there are two spiritual “seeds” or lines running through humanity: the seed of God and the seed of the serpent. These seeds are treated as something like spiritual bloodlines. Those of the good seed are, in effect, the elect; those of the evil seed are the non-elect. The emphasis falls not merely on God’s decree, but on a quasi-ontological division of mankind into two spiritual races. In Parker’s hands, this undergirded a fierce anti-mission stance: if people are already of one seed or the other, and that cannot be changed, then mission efforts are not only unscriptural structures but also theologically pointless. Over time, “Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Predestinarian Baptists” emerged as a distinct body. Most Old School / Primitive Baptists, however, came to repudiate Two-Seedism as going far beyond Scripture, confusing election with a speculative metaphysic of two races, and tending toward fatalism. They insisted that Scripture presents one human nature in Adam, universally fallen and guilty, with God’s electing grace distinguishing vessels of mercy from vessels of wrath, not two pre-existing spiritual bloodlines. For that reason, Parker’s Two-Seed doctrine came to be cited as a cautionary tale: a case where zeal for predestination and anti-missionism ran off the biblical rails into a dualistic error that most Old School Baptists could not tolerate. ↩︎