Thread by @gavinortlund

Can you be an ecumenical Baptist?🧵

I often get flack from fellow Baptists for the view Derek mentions here. Advocates of closed membership/communion say that my position is "not a Baptist view." I have heard this claim many times. Here is why I find it untenable.

https://twitter.com/derekradney/status/1617926967231410179

When John Bunyan published Differences about Water Baptism No Bar to Communion in 1673, he was not innovating; his predecessor in Bedford, John Gifford, had held to open membership. The appendix included a work of Henry Jessey, a Baptist pastor in London who argued similarly.

Even the 1689 Second London Confession does not mention closed communion. Why? Was this just an oversight?

Significantly, in an appendix to one printing it is stated to be a matter of freedom of conscience, *not obligatory for Baptist fellowship/unity.*

The above picture is from Michael Haykin's Amidst Us Our Beloved Stands, pp. 80-81, where he notes that the 1689 Baptist Assembly had at least one representative from an open membership church. (Haykin himself does not appear to affirm open membership [cf. 119]).

Just consider this: the most famous Baptist confession of all time, written early on in the Baptist tradition when the tradition was more cohesive, did not require a closed membership/communion view, but allowed mutual acceptance amidst differences on the question.

That was just the 17th century. There were subsequent high-profile disputes on this question among Baptists in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the global picture today is extremely diverse, in many regions tilting toward open membership and/or open communion.

Thus, the relation of baptism and membership has always been a question WITHIN the Baptist tradition. And you can find many significant Baptists who affirm an open posture, on either membership or communion or both. William Carey's mission society, e.g., affirmed open communion.

So: you can say open membership/communion is the *wrong* Baptist view, but you cannot say it's not *a* Baptist view. Or if you do, start calling John Bunyan and William Carey faux Baptists, and start saying that the 1689 Confession compromised Baptist identity.

I share all this in hopes that Baptists will give this question some consideration. The video Derek linked to in the original tweet makes my own case.

Wouldn't it be cool of ecumenical progress was furthered among Baptists? Wouldn't it be, dare I say, irenic?

UPDATE: it appears the Baptist Missionary Society (with which Carey was involved) switched back to closed communion in 1811. And that Carey switched back as well, as far as I can tell.