TUB PREACHERS AND THEIR KIN (Santamaria)

TUB PREACHERS AND THEIR KIN

FOREWORD

We have a rather famous quote from the highly-regarded (not by us) Baptist Andrew Fuller:

1. What Fuller actually said

“When I first published my treatise on the nature of faith, and the duty of all men who hear the gospel to believe it, the Christian profession had sunk into contempt amongst us; insomuch that, had matters gone on but a few years longer, the Baptists would have become a perfect dunghill in society.” (The Baptist Particular)

He’s talking about the state of the English Particular (Calvinistic) Baptists shortly before his own theological shift and the publication of The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation (1785)—his “treatise on the nature of faith, and the duty of all men who hear the gospel to believe it.”

2. Where the quote actually comes from

It is not from Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation itself, despite what some secondary writers once said.

The line comes from:

A letter to Archibald McLean,^[1] the Scottish Sandemanian Baptist, written in 1796, where Fuller is reflecting back on the spiritual and reputational decline of the Baptists twenty or so years earlier. (Boyce Digital Repository)

That letter is printed in The Works of Andrew Fuller, ed. Andrew Gunton Fuller, vol. 3, p. 478 (London: William Ball, 1841; repr. Banner of Truth, 2007). (Southern Baptist Theological Seminary)

Michael Haykin has explicitly corrected the older mistake: Estep had said the “perfect dunghill in society” line was the conclusion of Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation, but Haykin points out it’s actually in the letter to McLean, Works III, 478. (Credo Magazine)

Andrew Gunton Fuller also cites this passage in his biography of his father, Andrew Fuller (1882), around p. 112, so the line enters the tradition partly through that memoir. (Southern Equip)

3. What Fuller meant by “perfect dunghill in society.”

In context, Fuller is doing three things at once:

Describing the reputation of the Baptists

He says the “Christian profession had sunk into contempt amongst us,” meaning the Baptists were widely despised and considered socially and intellectually marginal. The “dunghill” image is his farm-boy hyperbole for utter social contempt. (Southern Baptist Theological Seminary)

Blaming what he called “false Calvinism” / High Calvinism

In the same letter and elsewhere, Fuller is attacking what he calls “false Calvinism”–what later critics dubbed hyper-Calvinism: a system that, in his mind, choked evangelism, refused to press the duty of sinners to believe, and had “little or nothing to say to the unconverted.” (Understanding Ministries)

Justifying his own reforming project

Fuller explicitly says his aim was “to rescue the Christian profession from being contemptible and save the Baptists from being a dunghill in society.” (The Baptist Particular)

In other words, the “dunghill” line is used to defend his program of “evangelical Calvinism” and missionary activism: he is arguing that without the doctrinal and practical changes he championed, the Baptists’ public witness would have remained in the gutter.

So “dunghill level” here is not a cool, detached sociological description; it’s a polemical before-and-after contrast:

• Before Fuller’s reforms, Baptists = “dunghill” in society.
• After Fuller’s reforms (he hopes): respectable, evangelistic, revived.

4. How later writers picked up (and sometimes weaponized) the quote

You can trace the afterlife of the remark like this:

19th-century biographical tradition

Andrew Gunton Fuller’s Andrew Fuller (1882) quotes the line approvingly as a vivid summary of the low state of the denomination before the “Fuller–Carey” revival. (Southern Equip)

20th-century Baptist historiography

Writers like A. C. Underwood and others repeat Fuller’s assessment of Baptists being on the verge of becoming “a perfect dunghill in society” to dramatize the pre-revival decline of English Calvinistic Baptists. (baptisthistoryhomepage.com)

Haykin and modern evangelical historians

Michael A. G. Haykin turns the phrase into a chapter title: “‘A very dunghill in society’: The Calvinistic Baptists and their need for revival” in his work on the eighteenth-century Baptist revival. (The Andrew Fuller Center)

Others (Wellum, Morden, etc.) quote the “perfect dunghill in society” line as a compact summary of the spiritual and institutional malaise among Particular Baptists before the Evangelical Revival. (Southern Baptist Theological Seminary)

Strict/Hyper-Calvinist and Primitive Baptist critics

On the other side, opponents of Fullerism (including some Strict Baptists and modern “free-grace” writers) quote the same line as evidence that Fuller despised the older High-Calvinistic tradition and boasted of “improving” the Baptists by moving away from their fathers (Gill, Brine, etc.). They often cite his “perfect dunghill” remark and then ask whether later, larger Baptist bodies were actually more holy or doctrinally sound than the despised “dunghill” churches. (The Baptist Particular)

So the remark becomes a kind of Rorschach test:

• To evangelical admirers, it shows Fuller’s clear-eyed realism and reforming zeal.
• To critics, it shows arrogance toward his own Calvinistic Baptist heritage.

5. Summary, in one line

The “dunghill level” comment is Andrew Fuller’s own hyperbolic description—in a 1796 letter to Archibald McLean, printed in Works vol. 3, p. 478—of how far the English Particular Baptists had sunk in public esteem under what he called “false Calvinism.” It’s been quoted ever since either to praise his reforming role or to attack his departure from older Baptist Calvinism.

When did Baptists Start Becoming Respectable And What Did That Look Like?

Short answer: They gradually became “respectable,” and every time they did, they lost some of their sharpest edges.

Big picture:

• In 1600s England, Baptists are scruffy, suspect sectaries.
• By 1700s, they’re increasingly bourgeois Dissenters.
• By the late 1700s–1800s, with Fuller & co., they’re a respectable evangelical denomination at home and in the empire.

1. From “dangerous sect” to tolerated Dissent (late 1600s–early 1700s)

Early English Baptists (General and Particular) in the mid-1600s are exactly the people mocked as “tub preachers,” lumped with Anabaptists, Levellers, and other radicals. They’re associated with:

• believers’ baptism (already suspect),
• gathered churches outside the parish system,
• sometimes regicide/revolutionary sympathies. (Google Books)

Two big shifts start their climb out of the “dunghill” in the eyes of respectable society:

The Restoration & the Toleration Act (1660–1689)

After the trauma of Civil War and Cromwell, every sect looks dodgy. But the Toleration Act of 1689 gives legal breathing space to Trinitarian Dissenters (including Baptists) who take certain oaths. They’re still second-class, but no longer automatically criminals. (JSTOR)

Alignment with other Dissenters

As one modern historian notes, after the more radical Baptist elements faded with the Interregnum and Fifth Monarchist millenarianism, Baptists “sought respectability” by allying themselves with Independents and Presbyterians—signing common confessions, cooperating politically, and softening their public image. (Southeastern Seminary)

By around 1700, English Baptists are still a small, often poor minority, but:

• they have fixed meeting-houses rather than improvised tubs,
• are increasingly led by settled pastors,
• and are recognized as one type of lawful Dissenter, not just wild sectaries.

They’ve gone from “dangerous” to “tolerated but odd.”

2. The 18th century: from sect to “denomination”

Through the 1700s, you see Baptists (especially Particular Baptists) slowly becoming middle-class religious citizens.

Chapel culture & architecture

Purpose-built brick or stone chapels in towns; burial grounds; pews and galleries funded by tradesmen, shopkeepers, and a few wealthy patrons.

Ministerial education & associations

Increasing use of academies and reading societies; ministers writing circular letters, theological treatises, and devotional works; associations giving some structure. (Southern Equip)

Social profile

Particularly in places like Bristol, London, the West Country and the Midlands, Baptists are part of the emerging urban commercial middle class—not gentry, but not rabble either. (JSTOR)

Yet they’re still often introspective and defensive. Many 18th-c. Particular Baptists:

• are heavily predestinarian,
• suspicious of the wider Evangelical Revival,
• and measure “revival” largely by whether it produces properly ordered Baptist churches. (Southern Baptist Theological Seminary)

They’re becoming socially respectable, but they still feel like a beleaguered remnant.

3. Fuller, missions, and full bourgeois respectability (late 1700s–1800s)

The real public “glow-up” comes with Andrew Fuller and the Evangelical turn.

Andrew Fuller & the Evangelical turn

Andrew Fuller (1754–1815) is a Particular Baptist pastor who attacks both High Calvinism and rationalist Sandemanianism, arguing for a robust, duty-faith, evangelistic Calvinism. (Desiring God)

In The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation (1785) he basically retools Particular Baptist theology to support missions and active evangelism. (Boston University)

He then helps found the Baptist Missionary Society (1792) alongside William Carey. (Southern Baptist Seminary)

Friends and enemies both recognize that Fuller is trying to “make the Baptists respectable”—one modern critic (hostile to Fuller) even quotes him as wanting to clean Baptists of “the dunghill” of High Calvinism in order to make them more acceptable and rational. (The Baptist Particular)

Result: Baptists move from being seen as a small, closed, predestinarian sect into being key players in the evangelical missionary movement, rubbing shoulders with Anglicans and Presbyterians in the larger “evangelical” world. (Oxford Bibliographies)

19th-century denominational respectability (UK & US)

By the 1800s:

• In Britain, you get the Baptist Union (1813), ministers like Robert Hall and Spurgeon, colleges, tract societies, and a large chapel network; Baptists become a standard part of the Victorian Nonconformist middle class—the “Nonconformist conscience,” Liberal politics, temperance, Sunday schools, foreign missions, etc. (Wikipedia)
• In America, persecuted Separate/Regular Baptists of the colonial era become, by the 19th century, major denominations (Triennial Convention, then Northern Baptists; SBC 1845), influential in frontier missions, education, and eventually politics. (Open Scholarship)

A recent overview literally titles the story: “From English Sect to Global Movement.” (Oxford Bibliographies) That’s the respectability arc in one phrase.

4. What “respectable” looked like in practice

If you dropped into a “respectable” Baptist world (late 18th–19th c.), what would you see?

Social & cultural markers

Chaplains, not street ranters. Pastors with some education, recognized as local leaders, sometimes moving in polite company (Fuller with Wilberforce’s circle, etc.). (ABWE)

Chapel as middle-class hub. Pews occupied by tradesmen, shop-owners, professionals; deacons who are also aldermen or businessmen; tea meetings, lectures, benevolent societies. (JSTOR)

Respectable morals. Strong discipline, temperance, Sabbatarianism, family worship—exactly the sort of ethos Victorian liberals and moralists liked in their dissenters.

Institutional and theological markers

Denominational machinery. Associations → unions → missionary societies → colleges → relief funds. Baptists start to look institutionally like everyone else’s denomination, not a scrappy “gathered sect.” (Oxford Bibliographies)

Printed confessions & hymnals. The 1689 confession becomes a heritage document; hymnody, especially in the 18th–19th centuries, becomes polished and widely used; sermons are printed and circulated. (Southern Equip)

Toning down the radical edges. Less open talk about the magistrate as antichrist and the national church as harlot; more talk about liberty of conscience, toleration, and moral reform. High, supralapsarian, absoluter-style rhetoric gets muted in many circles in favor of a more missionary-friendly Calvinism.

Public reputation

By late 19th century in Britain and the US:

To worldly eyes, Baptists are no longer the scary ones hiding by rivers at night; they’re one of the “good” Nonconformist groups:

• industrious,
• pro-family,
• anti-drunk,
• big on education and missions.

They’ve become part of the respectable Protestant establishment, even while still officially “Dissenters” from the state church.

5. The double edge of respectability

From our angle, the important tension is:

Gain:

• Legal protection, resources, literacy, spread of Baptist principles worldwide.
• Ability to print Beebe, Trott, Fuller, Carey, whoever—and have those books actually survive.

Cost:

• The earlier sense of outsider radicality—separation from the religious world-system, suspicion of “means,” sharp absolutist predestinarianism—was often smoothed down to make Baptists more compatible with broader evangelical and bourgeois culture.
• Andrew Fuller’s “rescue from the dunghill” remark (and the way later admirers repeat it approvingly) is emblematic: what older high-Calvinist Baptists saw as faithfulness, later respectability projects rebranded as an embarrassment to be cleaned off. (The Baptist Particular)

So when you ask “When did Baptists become respectable?” you’re really pointing at that long, uneven transition:

From a persecuted, preaching-in-tubs minority in the 1600s, to tolerated but edgy Dissenters after 1689, to solidly middle-class evangelical denominations by the 19th century—each step gaining social legitimacy, and each step tempting them to forget why they were thrown in jail in the first place.

Old School Baptists do not want that kind of respectability in the eyes of the world.

Tub Preachers

“Tub Preachers” weren’t a denomination; they were a nickname – a sneer – for a certain kind of preacher in 17th-century England.

The basic idea

“Tub preacher” was a contemptuous term for dissenting/nonconformist preachers, usually outside the Church of England, often lay or semi-educated, often preaching in conventicles or on the street. (merriam-webster.com)

The word tub itself was slang for a pulpit – probably from the image of someone standing on an actual barrel or upturned tub to harangue a crowd. Etymological sources note that tub becomes jocular slang for “pulpit,” spawning terms like tub-preacher (1640s) and tub-thumper. (EtymOnline)

So a “tub preacher” = that noisy dissenter ranting from a makeshift pulpit instead of a proper church.

Who used the term, and against whom?

The term shows up constantly in royalist / Anglican polemics and satire in the 1640s–60s:

• The Oxford English Dictionary cites a 1670 complaint about people forsaking their “lawful Ministers… but to Tub-preachers in Conventicles.” (WeHD)
• 17th–18th c. writers use it as shorthand for ignorant, ranting sectaries. One historical slang anthology glosses it: “a contemptuous term for a dissenting minister; hence, a ranting, ignorant preacher.” (Wordnik.com)

Targets included:

• Independents / Congregationalists
• Baptists (especially London Separates and early Particular Baptists)
• Quakers and other radical sectaries
• Lay “holders-forth” who preached without ordination

One modern Baptist historian notes “considerable enthusiasm for gatherings led by lay ‘tub-preachers’ such as Thomas Lambe and William Kiffin” among London Baptists in the 1640s.^[2] A recent article on church imagery even describes a print showing “a villainous tub-preacher, perhaps a Baptist,” attacking the bishops’ canons. (OpenEdition Books)

So: not only Baptists, but a lot of the people being mocked as tub preachers were precisely the kind of early Baptist / Independent types you’ve been studying.

Literal tubs and street pulpits

The term wasn’t purely metaphorical. Contemporary descriptions and later explanations say:

• Some dissenting preachers literally used an upturned tub or barrel as a lectern for street or house-meeting preaching, hence the nickname. (eBay)
• Anti-sectarian pamphlets like Tub-preachers Overturn’d (London, 1647) attack such Independent and Baptist “tub-preachers” as a threat to the “majestracy and ministery” of church and commonwealth. (Quod Lib.)

You see the same world in John Taylor the Water-Poet’s satires and, later, in Jonathan Swift’s fascination with “tales of tub preachers” as archetypes of heretical ranters. (OUP Academic)

Some actual “tub preachers” we can name

The label was thrown around widely, but we can point to concrete examples:

• Captain John Spencer^[3] – described by one modern study as a Baptist “tub preacher” as early as 1639, active in London politics and religion. (Biblical Studies)
• John Duppa^[4] – an Independent minister in 1640s London whose congregation included Colonel Thomas Pride; one scholarly article literally calls him “the tub preacher.” (Chicago Journals)
• Various lay radicals and army preachers: in Civil War sources, officers and soldiers mock each other as “tub-preachers,” and royalist authors label cobblers, bricklayers, and other artisans who preach as classic tub-preacher types. (University of London Press)

All of this lives in that mid-17th-century stew of London conventicles, army preaching, and print-war over “sects and schismatics.”

So, who were they in one sentence?

Historically: “Tub preachers” were 17th-century English dissenting and often lay preachers—frequently Independents, Baptists, and other sectaries—mocked by their opponents as ignorant ranters declaiming from makeshift ‘tubs’ instead of proper pulpits.

They’re the scruffy, up-from-below side of the story you’re tracing: the people whose very existence made establishment writers coin insults … and whose preaching often seeded the kinds of gathered churches you care about.

Baptist Preachers in the 1500s–1600s

In the 1500s, the closest thing to “Baptist preachers” were the Anabaptists, and they were often seen as demon-spawned heretics and political terrorists.

In the 1600s, when actual Baptists emerged in England, their preachers were viewed as dangerous “sectaries” and subversive radicals—gradually moving, by century’s end, toward the “tolerated but suspect” slot.

1. 1500s – Before there are “Baptists,” there are Anabaptists

Historically, “Baptists” as a distinct English movement don’t show up until the early 1600s. (Wikipedia)

In the 1500s, what you really have are continental Anabaptists (Swiss Brethren, South German, Dutch/Mennonite streams). Their preachers are the ones who look most like later Baptist preachers (believer’s baptism, gathered churches, separation from the state).

a) The dirtiest religious name in Europe

Early modern sources and modern historians both agree: “Anabaptist” was basically a curse word.

One Christian History study calls it “the dirtiest name a person could be called in sixteenth-century Christian Europe,” associated with devil-inspired heresy and the violent overthrow of social order. (Christian History Institute)

Anabaptists were condemned by both Catholics and magisterial Protestants (Lutherans, Zwinglians, Reformed) as heretics and/or seditious radicals. (OhioLINK ETD Center)

So an Anabaptist preacher in the 1500s was not “that odd Nonconformist down the road”; he was legally a criminal and often a capital one.

b) Heretic and political threat

Their preachers were seen as dangerous on two fronts:

• Doctrinally – rejecting infant baptism, insisting on believer’s baptism, often refusing oaths and military service, and arguing for a believer’s church separate from the state.
• Politically – After the Münster Rebellion (1534–35), where radical Anabaptists briefly set up a theocratic commune in Münster, the whole movement was branded as apocalyptic revolutionaries. (Wikipedia)

Authorities tended to treat Anabaptist preaching as a spark that could burn down the entire church–state order. Hence:

• Imperial and territorial edicts on the Continent made rebaptism a capital crime.
• Execution by drowning, beheading, or burning was common; some Emperors literally decreed that “Anabaptists shall be drowned”—a macabre joke about “baptizing them properly.” (Christian History Institute)

So, in the 1500s, Anabaptist preachers were usually perceived as seditious heresiarchs, with small pockets of followers who saw them as the only true Christians.

c) In England under the Tudors

England didn’t yet have homegrown Baptists, but it did have foreign Anabaptists drifting in.

Henry VIII’s proclamation of 1535 ordered all Anabaptists to leave England within twelve days on pain of death, explicitly condemning them as dangerous. (ResearchGate)

In the 1530s, Flemish Anabaptists in London were arrested; some 14 were burned at Smithfield in 1535–36. (flemishamerican.blogspot.com)

Under Elizabeth I, executions for Anabaptist heresy continued; a 1575 case records two Dutch Anabaptists burned at Smithfield. (Wikipedia)

So in Tudor England, “Anabaptist preacher” basically meant a foreign heretic who might end up at the stake.

2. 1600s – Actual Baptists appear, and everyone calls them “Anabaptists” anyway

a) Early 1600s: born under suspicion

English General and Particular Baptists emerged in the early 17th century out of Separatist/Puritan soil. (Wikipedia)

To the authorities and much of the public, fine distinctions didn’t matter:

• Baptists were lumped in with “Anabaptists” and other radical sects.
• In 1646, seven London churches describe themselves as “commonly (though falsely) called Anabaptists” in their confession—showing the term was both widespread and negative. (Academia)

So an early Baptist preacher is perceived as:

• Rejecting infant baptism (already suspicious).
• A separatist from the national church.
• Possibly tainted with Münster-style radicalism, whether he likes it or not.

b) Civil War & Commonwealth (1640s–1650s): sectaries and subversives

During the English Civil War, Baptists sided heavily with Parliament and liberty-of-conscience ideas:

• They earned a reputation for radicalism by supporting Parliament against Charles I and, in some cases, the Levellers and broader democratic/egalitarian ideas. (Rambling Ever On)
• In the 1640s–50s, they are listed alongside Diggers,^[5] Ranters, Quakers, Fifth Monarchists, Muggletonians, etc. as “radical religion” – communities whose democratic leadership and religious liberty ideas made them look to authorities like they were “subversive and a threat to good order.” (The Andrew Fuller Center)

So a Baptist preacher in Cromwell’s England often looked like:

• A fiery sectary, preaching in conventicles, recruiting men in the New Model Army,^[6] and maybe infecting soldiers with dangerous ideas about conscience and kings.

There is a spectrum: some Baptists were steady, orderly Calvinists; others drifted close to Leveller political radicalism. But from the establishment’s side of the telescope, the details blur together: this is the dangerous left wing of Protestantism.

c) Restoration & Clarendon Code (1660s): dangerous dissenters

After 1660, when the monarchy and the episcopal Church of England were restored, the reaction was harsh:

• The Clarendon Code (Corporation Act, Act of Uniformity, Conventicle Act, Five Mile Act) is designed to suppress dissenters as threats to the church and state. (Cambridge University Press & Assessment)

Dissenters—including Baptists—are jailed, fined, and barred from office. Their meetings are portrayed as breeding grounds of fanaticism and sedition.

Literature and official rhetoric at the time often paint Dissenters as:

• “Dangerous radicals who resist not only the state religion but politeness and civility itself.” (Cambridge Assets)

Within that caricature, Baptist preachers are the men who:

• Undermine parish unity by rebaptizing adults.
• Preach in barns, homes, and hidden chapels.
• Encourage people to obey conscience over Crown-and-Church.

So in the Restoration decades, they are marginal, persecuted, and feared.

d) Social status and class

Like their 1700s successors, 17th-century Baptist preachers are often:

• From artisan or small-trader backgrounds, not the educated gentry clergy.
• “Hole-in-the-wall” dissenting ministers on the edge of social respectability.

A Christian History survey puts it vividly:

The Baptist movement began as “a collection of hole-in-the-wall dissenters who were easily confused with Seekers, Ranters, Quakers, and political anarchists,” only later rising to respectability by 1700. (Christian History Institute)

So through much of the 1600s, a Baptist preacher looks, to the establishment, like:

• The religious edge of lower-class radicalism.
• Not a “real” clergyman but an upstart sectary.

3. How Baptists themselves saw their preachers

Internally, of course, the valuation is flipped.

Baptists saw their ministers as gifts of Christ to gathered churches, chosen by grace rather than by bishops or universities.

They intentionally contrasted their pastors with “legal preachers” of the Church of England, whom they accused of a cold, formal ministry. (Dissenting Experience)

They leaned into the identity of being churches “commonly called Anabaptists” but actually “Churches of Christ” standing for scriptural purity and liberty of conscience. (Academia)

So while the 1500s–1600s establishment talks about heretics, fanatics, and incendiaries, Baptists and Anabaptists talk about faithful pastors shepherding a remnant church under the cross.

Big arc across the two centuries

• 1500s: Anabaptist preachers = heretics + revolutionaries, often literally hunted and killed.
• Early–mid 1600s: Baptist preachers in England = “Anabaptist” sectaries, radical, politically suspect.
• Late 1600s: Still persecuted, but increasingly recognized as a stable (if disliked) part of the religious landscape—on the way to the “tolerated but second-class” status you see in the 1700s.

So the story runs from “kill them” to “jail them” to “tolerate them…but keep an eye on them.”

Baptist Preachers in the 18th Century

In 18th-century England, Baptist preachers were legal but marginal—tolerated by law, distrusted by the establishment, often looked down on socially, yet sometimes deeply respected in their own communities and increasingly visible by the end of the century.

1. Legal status: tolerated, but second-class

After the Glorious Revolution, the Toleration Act (1689) allowed Protestant “Dissenters” (including Baptists) to have their own meeting houses and “teachers and preachers,” if they took the oaths of allegiance and supremacy and registered their buildings. (Encyclopedia Britannica)

But:

• They were still barred from political office and from the universities (Oxford/Cambridge). (Encyclopedia Britannica)
• Their preachers had to be licensed; unauthorized itinerant preaching could still get them into trouble. (Wikipedia)
• It remained illegal for Baptists to hold open-air mass evangelistic campaigns outside their meeting houses; this pushed them toward a more inward, chapel-based ministry. (Southern Baptist Theological Seminary)

So legally, a Baptist preacher is no longer a hunted outlaw (as earlier in the 1600s), but he’s not a “proper clergyman” in the establishment’s eyes either. He’s a licensed religious dissenter with limited rights.

2. As “Dissenters”: an embattled religious minority

Baptists were part of the broader world of English Dissent (Presbyterians, Independents/Congregationalists, Baptists, etc.). To be a Dissenter in the early 1700s meant belonging to a self-conscious, “embattled minority” that saw itself as the unfinished business of the Reformation and as victims of lingering legal and social injustice. (MacMillan Center at Yale)

That meant Baptist preachers carried certain labels in the public mind:

• Stubborn and “sectarian” – they refused to conform to the Church of England, and they rejected infant baptism, which looked shocking and dangerous to many.
• Politically suspicious – Dissenters were sometimes seen by church-and-crown elites as potential troublemakers who might undermine social order, even when they were personally loyal to the Crown. (UNT Digital Library)
• Religiously “enthusiastic” – their emphasis on conversion, personal experience, and lay preaching fed stereotypes of “fanaticism” or “enthusiasm” (a dirty word in 18th-century polite society).

Yet internally, Dissenters remembered themselves as martyrs of conscience, and Baptist preachers often leaned into that identity.

3. Class and education: “mechanic preachers”

Unlike Anglican clergy, who were university-educated, many 18th-century Baptist ministers came from artisan or trades backgrounds—what contemporaries called “mechanics” (craftsmen, shopkeepers, small farmers).

They typically had modest formal education but strong self-taught habits: reading Puritan divinity, learning some Greek/Hebrew, etc.

This made them socially suspect to some: a man with rough hands and no university degree presuming to preach doctrine looked like an inversion of the proper order.

On the other hand, in many towns and villages such ministers were deeply respected precisely because they were “one of us” rather than a remote gentleman-parson.

So, from the Establishment perspective: upstart laymen. From the chapel-pew perspective: our shepherd, our neighbor, our man.

4. How the establishment viewed them

From the viewpoint of bishops, magistrates, and much of the polite Anglican world:

• Religiously – Baptists were schismatics who denied a key practice of Christendom (infant baptism) and were dangerously “narrow” in refusing communion with the parish church.
• Socially – Baptist preachers embodied the “lower orders” speaking with spiritual authority; that looked like a challenge to deference and hierarchy.
• Politically – By the later 1700s, some Particular Baptists were vocal about liberty of conscience and reform. One modern study notes that church–state elites often perceived Baptists as a threat to social order, even though Baptist ministers themselves tended to stress loyalty to king and country. (UNT Digital Library)

You can feel the tension: “We’re not rebels; we’re just not going to do what you say about religion.”

5. How ordinary people viewed them

Here it gets wonderfully messy and local.

In some places, Baptists were tolerated but weird: the people who dunk adults in rivers, don’t baptize babies, and meet in plain chapels instead of proper churches.

In strongly Anglican parishes, Baptist preachers could be mocked as ranters or fanatics, especially when their preaching was emotional, long, and aimed at conscience rather than decorum.

But in other communities, especially where a chapel had been around for decades, a long-serving Baptist pastor might be seen as one of the most stable, morally serious figures in town.

Over the “long eighteenth century,” dissenting meeting houses—including Baptist chapels—literally moved from out-of-the-way back streets to more visible positions in town, reflecting a gradual rise in public prominence and respectability. (Academia.edu)

So: early 1700s, more marginal and hidden; late 1700s, more publicly present and sometimes quite respectable.

6. Changes across the century

The 1700s aren’t flat; Baptist preachers’ reputation shifted.

Early 18th century (c. 1700–1740):

• The trauma of 17th-century persecution is still fresh in memory.
• Dissenters are legally tolerated but politically distrusted; chapels are often architecturally modest and tucked away. (Wikipedia)
• Baptist preachers are mostly small-scale local figures with limited social reach.

Mid to late century (c. 1740–1800):

• The Evangelical Revival changes the religious atmosphere. While Baptists are not the main drivers (that’s more Wesley/Whitefield and the Methodists), evangelical emphases on conversion, personal faith, and preaching vindicate some Baptist instincts.
• Particular Baptists actually decline numerically for part of the century and wrestle with internal issues (including tendencies toward High Calvinism/Hyper-Calvinism), but by the 1780s–90s, there’s a revival among them. (Encyclopedia Britannica)
• By the 1790s, scholars note that Particular Baptist ministers are starting to articulate a clear sense of being both “true Baptists” and loyal Britons—publicly visible, patriotic, and engaged in reform discourse, even as they remain dissenters. (UNT Digital Library)

So by 1800, a Baptist preacher might be seen not just as a crank in a side alley but as the respected minister of a longstanding town chapel—still outside the establishment, but no longer socially invisible.

7. Internal Baptist perceptions

Inside the Baptist world:

• Baptist preachers were often viewed as gifts of Christ to the church, called by grace rather than by university or bishop.
• Their lack of state recognition was turned into a badge of honor: Christ, not the Crown, ordains ministers.
• Suspicion of “clerical domination” meant that Baptists were wary of anything that smelled like Anglican priestcraft; ministerial authority was real, but it was congregational and spiritual, not backed by law or patronage. (baptisthistoryhomepage.com)

So while the wider culture might see them as lesser clergy, Baptists saw them as the real clergy.

Pulling it together

If you dropped into England in, say, 1750 and asked, “What do people think of Baptist preachers?” you’d get something like this:

• From an Anglican gentleman: “Stubborn schismatics; low-born enthusiasts; tolerated for now, but hardly the right sort of clergy.”
• From many ordinary Anglicans: “Odd folk down at the chapel; some are sincere, some too intense; not our people.”
• From a Baptist hearer in a market town: “Our pastor is a godly, plain man, not a lord, not a hireling—he preaches the truth.”
• From the state’s perspective: “Legally allowed, politically watched.”

So they lived in that awkward space: neither persecuted outlaws nor fully accepted insiders—a tolerated, occasionally respected, but always marked minority ministry.

How did Old School Baptists view All These Things?

They would’ve looked at that entire 17th-century circus and said, basically:

“God was on the throne. Men were busy proving they weren’t.”

We can sketch this Old School / Absoluter reading of the landscape by tying it to: the New Model Army, Levellers, Fifth Monarchists, Diggers, Ranters, Muggletonians, Quakers, early Baptists, and then “respectable” Baptist projects later.

1. Important qualifier: time gap

Old School Baptists (Absoluter wing) are 19th-century creatures (Trott, Beebe, Dudley, etc.), mostly in America. They’re not writing direct commentary on Levellers, Diggers, Venner’s rising, etc.

But they do write a ton about:

• political revolutions & reform schemes,
• “means” religion,
• Quakers, Methodists, enthusiasts,
• missionary / Fullerite Baptists,
• and how to read church history.

So the best way to answer the question is: How would their principles make them read those 17th-century phenomena?

2. General Old School (Absoluter) grid

Absoluter OSBs are:

• Absolute predestinarians – every event, good or evil, is comprehended in God’s decree; nothing falls outside His purpose.
• Anti-means in the Fullerite sense – no schemes to “bring about the kingdom” or “evangelize the world” by human planning.
• Strict on church/kingdom distinction – the gospel kingdom is spiritual; civil government is providential but outside the church.
• Suspicious of enthusiasm and also suspicious of rationalistic “improvement”: they reject both “lawless inner-light religion” and “polished religious machinery.”

With that in mind, we can run the pieces.

3. New Model Army & politicized “godly” projects

In the 17th century, the New Model Army, Leveller agitators, godly officers, army fast days, “soldiers’ catechisms,” etc., all treat England’s crisis as a chance to build a godly commonwealth.

Absoluter OSB angle:

• They’d affirm: God absolutely decreed every battle and regime change—from Naseby to Pride’s Purge. No “plan B,” no accidents.
• They would not baptize the army’s self-understanding as some covenant people establishing Zion on earth.

Old School writers are almost uniformly:

• Grateful when providence gives space to worship in peace,
• but cold to the idea that “the saints” should seize the sword to remodel society.

Think: Dudley’s constant warning that Christ’s kingdom is not of this world; Beebe’s repeated insistence that the church should not entangle herself “with the kingdoms of this world” even where those kingdoms are outwardly favorable.

So: New Model Army piety?

• “God overruled them.”
• “Some of the elect may have been there and were kept.”

But the whole fusion of sword + “reformation” project would smell very much like what they later condemn in American “Christian nations,” benevolent empire, etc.

4. Levellers, Diggers, Fifth Monarchists – political & social radicalism

Levellers

Levellers want:

• near-universal male suffrage,
• regular parliaments,
• legal equality,
• religious toleration.

19th-century Old School Baptists often appreciate civil liberty and religious liberty (think Black Rock’s very American suspicion of state-church), but:

• They don’t see political agitation as the business of the church,
• and they definitely don’t see popular sovereignty as any kind of gospel principle.

So they’d probably say:

• “The Levellers were instruments of providence to loosen tyrannies and bring about those civil things which God had purposed.”
• “But their program, as a religious project, has nothing to do with the gospel kingdom.”

The minute Leveller language drifts toward “this political structure is the kingdom of Christ,” Old School instincts go red-flag.

Diggers (“True Levellers”)

Diggers go further: common treasury, communal cultivation of land, abolish buying/selling land, all wrapped in Bible language.

Absoluter ears:

• A classic case of using Scripture to engineer social arrangements,
• a kind of early “Christian socialism,” just as suspicious as later “Christian capitalism.”

They’d reject:

• The idea that Acts 2–4 communal sharing was a political-economic program for nations,
• the idea that earthly redistribution schemes have anything to do with regeneration or the spiritual church.

At most: “God overruled them to show the vanity of man’s attempts to make heaven on earth.”

Fifth Monarchists

Now it gets really spicy: apocalyptic theocrats who think the civil war should culminate in Christ’s visible rule via the saints—and they try to help with swords.

Absoluter response:

• “Christ already reigns. You don’t install Him by overturning parliaments.”
• “Any kingdom installed by the sword is not what Daniel 2 is talking about.”
• “They were zealous without knowledge; mixing spiritual promises with carnal expectations.”

The whole “King Jesus and muskets in the street” thing would be lumped with post-millennial schemes, civil-religious crusades, and later “Christian nation” rhetoric that they firmly reject.

5. Ranters & Muggletonians – antinomian & bizarre “inner” sects

Ranters

Ranters boast:

• God is in all things,
• the enlightened are beyond good/evil,
• Scripture and outward law are dispensable.

Old School Absoluters are:

• strong on free grace,
• but equally strong that the born-again child of God walks in gospel holiness,
• and that “free grace” is never license.

So they’d see Ranters as:

• An extreme, fleshly abuse of antinomian slogans,
• a cautionary tale of what happens when you divorce “no condemnation” from the actual, Spirit-wrought new heart.

They already spend pages fighting what they call antinomians who deny any rule of life; Ranters are the cartoon version of that.

Muggletonians

Muggletonians:

• claim last-prophet status,
• deny the Trinity,
• collapse God into a glorified man in a literal place,
• curse opponents by name.

Old School response would be straightforward:

• “Heretics. No church order, no gospel, no Spirit-taught humility. Whatever elect people may have been trapped among them, the system itself is darkness.”

They’re stricter than many evangelicals on the Trinity, on the personality of God, and on the completed canon. Muggletonian “two witnesses” claims would be tossed into the same bin as Joseph Smith and other later prophet-sects.

6. Quakers – inner light vs. outward word and ordinances

Quakers are trickier, because:

• Old School Baptists share with them strong emphasis on internal work of the Spirit,
• and suspicion of formal religion,
• plus historical marginalization & persecution.

But early Quakers:

• deny or spiritualize water baptism and the Supper,
• elevate Inner Light above or alongside Scripture,
• flatten ministry into spontaneous “leading” in the meeting.

Old School Absoluters would say:

• On experience: “Yes, Christ must be known inwardly and personally; the letter alone kills.”
• But on rule and revelation: “The Spirit never contradicts the Word; the Scriptures are the external standard, and ordinances are Christ’s appointments, not optional trappings.”
• On church order: “The New Testament lays down pastors, teachers, discipline, and ordinances; silent meetings and sacrament-less ‘church’ are not Christ’s order.”

So Quakers become a big warning:

“If you detach inward teaching from the fixed Word and ordinances, you drift into mysticism and subjectivism.”

They would not deny that some of God’s elect may have been among them (same way they talk about some among Methodists, Presbyterians, etc.), but they’d refuse to recognize the Quaker system as a New Testament church.

7. Early Baptists, tub preachers, and respectability

Here it gets interesting, because there’s both kinship and distance.

Lay “tub preachers” & early gathered churches

Things Old School Absoluters would resonate with:

• Laymen preaching where God has given gift, not just seminary men.
• Gathered churches outside the parish system.
• Heavy emphasis on believers’ baptism, regenerate membership, and discipline (especially in the Kiffin line).

They would see early Particular Baptists as:

• imperfect, but genuine “sister churches” in the earlier era,
• often closer to their own ecclesiology than 19th-century Fullerites.

But they’d still critique:

• the persistent state/toleration negotiation (lobbying within the political system),
• and, in some cases, involvement in civil/military power (army officers, MPs) as a kind of entanglement.

They can admire the men as men, while insisting the church as church has no business owning the revolution.

Andrew Fuller, missions, and “respectable” Baptist projects

Here they come out swinging.

Old School Absoluters (especially Beebe & co.) see:

• Fullerism, mission boards, Bible societies, convention machinery as a repetition of the “New School” / “means” mindset: using organized human systems to “help along” God’s purposes.

So when Fuller talks about lifting Baptists out of the doctrinal “dunghill” of high Calvinism and making them more acceptable to the religious public, Old School absoluters read that as:

“You despise the very doctrines we cherish—absolute predestination, particular redemption, the spiritual nature of the church—and you want respectability at the cost of truth.”

When you asked earlier, “When did Baptists become respectable?”—Old School Baptists basically answer:

“When they ceased to be Baptists in any primitive or apostolic sense and became one more respectable branch of the religious world.”

So their verdict on respectable Baptists is harsher than on many of the 17th-century sectaries.

8. How they read the whole tapestry

If you zoom out, an Absoluter Old School Baptist reading of that 17th-century landscape might sound like this:

• God’s absolute purpose was unfolding through all of it—kings, parliaments, armies, sectaries, and even heresies.
• Elect children of God were scattered among many of those parties: in the parish, in the army, among Presbyterians, Independents, maybe even among Quakers or others.
• But none of those political or ecclesiastical projects—Leveller democracy, Digger agrarianism, Fifth-Monarchy theocracy, New Model crusades, Quaker inner-light church, or later respectable mission machinery—constitutes the kingdom of Christ.

They’d say:

• The church is a spiritual body, gathered by the Spirit, ruled by Christ, marked by the ordinances and discipline He appointed—not by civil structure, property arrangements, or enthusiastic programs.
• Every time men tried to “help God” by sword, parliament, commune, or board, they simply demonstrated the need for the gospel to come without might nor power.

The one thing they’ll affirm about all this chaos is:

• Christ never lost a sheep in it,
• never lost a truth He intended to preserve,
• and never needed a single Leveller, monarchist, parliament, or missionary board to secure what His own arm had already secured.

So Old School Baptists look back at that feverish, fascinating age and say:

“Providence is magnificent. Human schemes, from the wildest Ranters to the most polished Fullerite, are just different costumes on the same restless flesh. The only solid line through the centuries is the voice of the Shepherd, gathering and feeding His flock where the world barely knows they exist.”

Guillermo Santamaria

Endnotes

1. There is one, even Christ Jesus, who can speak to thy condition” directly—no priest required. (Wikipedia)Date / place: mid-1600s, England / Wales. George Fox (1624–1691), the founder of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), travels the countryside preaching repentance and immediate experience of Christ. His own account (in his Journal) includes that famous line: “There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition,” spoken to a despairing hearer. What Fox crystallizes is a particular way of saying: Christ is alive, present, and inwardly known; he is not locked up in buildings, ceremonies, or educated clergy. 2. The doctrine: inner light, Christ within, Scripture relativized. Fox preached that there is “that of God in everyone,” often described as an inner light or seed which, if heeded, leads a person to Christ and righteousness. For early Friends, Christ is both the historical Jesus who died and rose again and the present, inward Teacher who enlightens and judges. The stress falls on the latter. Early Quaker preaching often sounds like this: • The letter (even of Scripture) can kill; the Spirit gives life. • Outward ordinances (water baptism, outward supper) are shadows; the substance is Christ. • The same Word that inspired Scripture now speaks directly in the heart. Outward ministry, sacraments, and church order are thus subordinate, and often dispensable, compared to the immediate voice of Christ in the soul. 3. Worship & ministry: silence and spontaneity. Quaker meetings famously gather in silence, waiting on the inward motion of the Spirit. Any member may speak or remain silent as led. No fixed liturgy, no professional clergy, no set sacraments. Ministry is recognized, but not in the way of a separate class of ordained pastors ruling congregations. Instead, the stress is on: • the equality of believers, • the Spirit’s present guidance, • a distrust of forms as potentially deadening. 4. Ethics: refusal to bow, swear, or fight. Here Quakerism becomes a visible irritant to church and state: • Refusal to swear oaths (Matthew 5). • Refusal to take off hats or use deferential titles. • Refusal to pay tithes or support the state church. • Refusal to bear arms. To magistrates and parish clergy, this looks like sedition dressed as piety. But Quakers see it as straightforward obedience to Christ, whose inward voice they esteem above any outward authority. 5. Where Old School Baptists nod—and where they balk. Old School Baptists, especially of the stricter absolutist wing, actually agree with more of this than either side might think: • They insist as strongly as early Friends that mere outward forms, education, and ceremonies cannot give life. • They emphasize the internal work of the Holy Ghost, the voice of Christ to the conscience, and the utter insufficiency of “the letter” apart from the Spirit’s teaching. • They have no use for a priestly caste or compulsory tithes. But for them, Quakerism crosses crucial lines: • The Spirit does not supersede the Scriptures as an external, objective standard; he speaks in and through that Word, never against it. • Christ himself instituted outward ordinances—baptism and the Supper—not as empty forms, but as visible gospel signs for his gathered churches until he comes. • Christ gave pastors and teachers; he did not leave churches to perpetual formlessness and an anti-structure mindset. So, the Old School complaint is not that Quakers expect to hear Christ personally. They expect exactly that for every child of God. The complaint is that, in the name of honoring the inner Christ, Quakerism ends up flattening the fixed outward testimonies and institutions in which that same Christ speaks—Scripture, ordinances, and a gospel-ordered ministry. In short: the problem is not “Christ within,” but Christ within without Christ’s own outward word, order, and ordinances—and a stubborn refusal to bow, swear, or fight for anybody’s crown. ↩︎
2. Mark Burden, discussing seventeenth-century radical groups, notes: “...enthusiasm in London for gatherings led by lay ‘tub-preachers’ such as the Baptists Thomas Lambe and William Kiffin...”. Burden uses this to illustrate both the appeal and the volatility of lay-led congregations among London’s artisans and lower middle class. Kiffin and Lambe, though very different in temper, are emblematic of that Free Church, ‘up-from-below’ preaching culture that made the word ‘tub-preacher’ necessary in the first place. ↩︎
3. On “tub-preacher” John Spencer: a study in the Baptist Quarterly describes him as an early London Baptist and sometime army officer, already publicly preaching by 1639. He is described as a “tub-preacher” in contemporary sources, and his name becomes a convenient shorthand for that noisy, lay, sectarian style which alarmed more genteel sensibilities. Spencer’s presence in civic and religious agitation illustrates how tightly intertwined Baptist convictions, lay preaching, and political ferment were in those early decades. ↩︎
4. John Duppa appears in mid-17th century sources as an Independent preacher in London, famously associated with Colonel Thomas Pride (of “Pride’s Purge” fame). Some accounts literally style him a “tub preacher,” emphasizing both his lay background and his conventicle leadership. His congregation included key army figures, which made his pulpit a node where theology, politics, and class resentment met—everything that royalist propagandists feared from sectarian religion. ↩︎
5. The Diggers are where apocalyptic Bible politics runs head-first into agrarian communism. Inspired by (their reading of) Acts 2–4 and Old Testament jubilee imagery, Gerrard Winstanley and his companions proclaimed that the earth was “a common treasury” and began to cultivate common land on St. George’s Hill in 1649, refusing to recognize customary enclosures or landlord rights. They held that the fall had introduced private property and that the kingdom of Christ required restoring the earth to shared use. For Absoluter Old School Baptists, this is a classic case of men mistaking the apostolic church’s voluntary, Spirit-wrought sharing for a blueprint for nation-states or economic systems. They would see the Diggers’ experiment as a providentially ordained episode that exposed the carnal hope of building a visible kingdom by restructuring property relations—pious in some of its language, but still an attempt to make heaven on earth, and therefore doomed to frustration and persecution. That they were quickly suppressed and driven off the land would only confirm the Old School conviction that Christ’s kingdom is not advanced by ploughing up other men’s fields in his name. ↩︎
6. The New Model Army is basically the big melting pot where a lot of these currents—Independent congregationalism, Baptist conviction, Leveller politics, Fifth-Monarchist apocalyptic hopes, and a certain wild confidence that the “godly” should rule—boiled together. Army chaplains and “gifted brethren” preached in camp; soldiers debated political and theological questions in “agitators’” meetings; and sermons from the field were printed and circulated back in London. From an Old School Baptist perspective, this army represents what happens when you try to hitch the chariot of Christ’s kingdom to the horses of political and military power. However sincere many of the soldiers and preachers were, the project of fusing “a godly army” with the cause of the kingdom confuses providential judgments on nations (where God raises up and casts down powers) with the spiritual gathering and preservation of Christ’s church, which proceeds by the word and Spirit alone. When the army’s political fortunes waxed and waned, the gospel itself did not rise or fall with them; Christ had never put his crown in their keeping to begin with. ↩︎
7. The Levellers, with their famous “Agreement of the People,” pressed for radical reforms: near-universal male suffrage (excluding servants and dependents), biennial Parliaments, equality before the law, and broad religious toleration. They spoke in the idiom of natural rights and popular sovereignty, arguing that legitimate government rests on the consent of the governed rather than divine right or hereditary privilege. An Absoluter Old School Baptist can appreciate the civil benefits that later flowed from some of these ideas—especially in the sphere of religious liberty—while still insisting that none of this belongs to the essence of Christ’s kingdom. To equate “gospel liberty” with democratic forms is, in their estimation, just as misguided as equating it with monarchy or aristocracy. The Levellers’ program may have been one of the many tools providence used to shake and reshape nations, but the church’s calling was never to become the midwife of any particular constitutional order. ↩︎
8. The Diggers are where apocalyptic Bible politics runs head-first into agrarian communism. Inspired by (their reading of) Acts 2–4 and Old Testament jubilee imagery, Gerrard Winstanley and his companions proclaimed that the earth was “a common treasury” and began to cultivate common land on St. George’s Hill in 1649, refusing to recognize customary enclosures or landlord rights. They held that the fall had introduced private property and that the kingdom of Christ required restoring the earth to shared use. For Absoluter Old School Baptists, this is a classic case of men mistaking the apostolic church’s voluntary, Spirit-wrought sharing for a blueprint for nation-states or economic systems. They would see the Diggers’ experiment as a providentially ordained episode that exposed the carnal hope of building a visible kingdom by restructuring property relations—pious in some of its language, but still an attempt to make heaven on earth, and therefore doomed to frustration and persecution. That they were quickly suppressed and driven off the land would only confirm the Old School conviction that Christ’s kingdom is not advanced by ploughing up other men’s fields in his name. ↩︎
9. The Ranters are like the wild, half-legendary cousins living at the edge of the 17th-century religious map—more rumored than carefully documented, but notorious enough to leave a lasting caricature. Contemporary hostile accounts portray them as antinomians who claimed that the enlightened person, seeing God in all things, is beyond good and evil, and therefore free to indulge the flesh without sin. They allegedly turned “Christ in you” into a license for blasphemy, drunkenness, and sexual immorality. Modern scholars debate how far the stereotype matches reality, but from an Old School Baptist standpoint, the point stands: whenever “Christ in the believer” is preached without an equally clear testimony that the new birth produces a walk in holiness, the flesh will seize the language of grace to excuse lawlessness. Ranters thus become, in their theology, a vivid negative parable of what happens when “free grace” is divorced from the new heart and the rule of Christ’s commandments in the life of the saints—an example of “religion without church” that goes completely off the leash. ↩︎
10. Quakers are basically what happens when a bunch of 17th-century believers push a true insight (Christ speaking inwardly by his Spirit) past the guardrails that Scripture itself erects. Fox and early Friends saw clearly that the letter, without the Spirit, is dead, and that a man may be versed in chapter and verse and yet a stranger to Christ. They insisted that the same Jesus who spoke in Galilee now speaks immediately to the conscience, convicting of sin and leading into truth. But in flattening the outward word, ordinances, and ministry—treating them as at best temporary scaffolding and at worst worldly husks—they set inner impressions and “openings” on a collision course with the fixed testimony of Scripture and the institutions Christ actually left his churches. Old School Baptists would say that Quakerism is a poignant warning of what happens when “the Spirit” is pried loose from the text he inspired and the order he established: eventually the inward light may shine in directions that the written Word does not sanction, and the gathered church, with her ordinances and discipline, is quietly displaced by a circle of seekers listening to their own hearts. The problem, in other words, is not expecting Christ to speak, but refusing to let him speak where he has promised to: in the Scriptures, in the ordinances, and in the gospel ministry he himself gave. ↩︎
11. Fifth Monarchists were the “King Jesus now, with swords” wing of the 17th-century radical galaxy, convinced that the four empires of Daniel were nearly past and the fifth kingdom—Christ’s visible rule through the saints—was dawning. It was a short step from that exegesis to thinking that you should help the kingdom along by coercing the magistrate, seizing power, or, in some cases, taking up arms. The Venner rising of 1661 is a bloody little parable of this temptation. From an Old School, absolutist perspective, this is just one more attempt to drag the spiritual kingdom down into flesh-and-blood politics, to confuse providential changes in empires with the unshakable reign of the Lamb, and to mistake the patience of faith for a mandate to force the Fifth Monarchy onto the streets of London. They would say that Christ has already received all power in heaven and earth, and that his kingdom comes without observation by the effectual call of his people, not by saints trading their Bibles for pikes and banners. ↩︎
12. The Muggletonians are one of the strangest little planets orbiting the 17th-century religious sun—a sect built around the visions and curses of two London tradesmen, Lodowick Muggleton and John Reeve, who styled themselves the last two witnesses of Revelation. They denied the Trinity in any orthodox sense, insisted that God has a literal, localized body, rejected both outward ordinances and any continuing ministry beyond themselves, and occasionally cursed their opponents in the name of King Jesus. Their gatherings revolved as much around reading and defending their prophets’ writings as around anything like ordinary worship. To an Old School Baptist, this is an example of how far religious imagination can run when it is cut loose from the rule of Scripture as collectively received and from any ordinary, accountable church order. Whatever elect souls may have been among them by God’s secret purpose, the system itself—in its rejection of the triune God, its prophetic self-certainty, and its contempt for the ordinary means of grace—would be classed as sheer delusion rather than an erring sister church. ↩︎
13. The New Model Army is basically the big melting pot where a lot of these currents—Independent congregationalism, Baptist conviction, Leveller politics, Fifth-Monarchist apocalyptic hopes, and a certain wild confidence that the “godly” should rule—boiled together. Army chaplains and “gifted brethren” preached in camp; soldiers debated political and theological questions in “agitators’” meetings; and sermons from the field were printed and circulated back in London. From an Old School Baptist perspective, this army represents what happens when you try to hitch the chariot of Christ’s kingdom to the horses of political and military power. However sincere many of the soldiers and preachers were, the project of fusing “a godly army” with the cause of the kingdom confuses providential judgments on nations (where God raises up and casts down powers) with the spiritual gathering and preservation of Christ’s church, which proceeds by the word and Spirit alone. When the army’s political fortunes waxed and waned, the gospel itself did not rise or fall with them; Christ had never put his crown in their keeping to begin with. ↩︎