ABSTRACT: English and American Congregationalists like John Cotton, John Owen, and Jonathan Edwards arrived at somewhat Baptist conclusions regarding the regenerate nature of the church and its distinction from the state. Because they also believed in infant baptism and state-sponsored religion, however, they had a dilemma. The steep decline in Congregationalism since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries speaks loudly to their inability to achieve their vision of an infant-baptized, state-wedded, congregationalist, visibly regenerate church, suggesting that the Congregationalist Way was something of a halfway position in church history between the Anglican and Presbyterian polity of the Old World and the Baptists who would come to dominate the New. Baptists certainly saw themselves as the spiritual descendants of these Puritan theologians, principally because Congregationalist arguments for the purity of the church were so very similar in logic to those of their Baptist successors.

As Puritan John Cotton (1585–1652) journeyed across the Atlantic toward Boston in 1633, he was headed away from the corruptions of the Church of England, not the Church itself. Unlike Plymouth, which had been established in 1620, Massachusetts Bay, settled ten years later, was not a separatist colony. In fact, Cotton was even more leery of separatists who broke away from the state church than he was of bishops who imitated the “popery” of Catholicism. As a Puritan, Cotton believed in “purifying” the Church of England, not leaving it altogether.

However, Cotton was a specific kind of Puritan:¹ he was a Congregationalist, a term Cotton himself invented a few years after arriving in Boston. Along with his friend Thomas Hooker, who was also on board the Griffin in 1633, Cotton believed that only autonomous, individual congregations were real churches. No higher ecclesiastical power could exercise legitimate authority over the local church. Hence, there was no such thing as the collective Church of England.² Headed westward, Cotton was also drifting in a somewhat Baptist direction.

In many ways, on an English ship bound for America, Cotton was a man sailing between two theological worlds. While still holding fellowship with the parish congregations in the Church of England, Cotton did not acknowledge the traditional authority of the Church itself. On the one hand, to Archbishop William Laud in London, Cotton reeked of nonconformity.³ On the other hand, in the eyes of Roger Williams in Massachusetts, Cotton was a bedfellow with the antichrist.

Like the Reformers before them, Congregationalists were a reflection of the very Church they sought to reform. As a result, especially for those in America, Congregationalists continually walked a kind of middle road between the more conservative, high-church sensibilities of Anglicanism and the more localized, democratic beliefs of English religious dissent.⁴ In time, this middle road came to be called a “halfway covenant.”

John Cotton and ‘The Puritan Dilemma’

John Cotton’s beliefs about the nature of the church were put to the test before he ever set foot in the New World. While in passage to Boston, his wife Sarah gave birth to a son named Seaborn. However, since Cotton believed that the authority to administer sacraments was conferred by particular congregations and not by a national church, he could not by conscience baptize his infant son. He was, in effect, a Congregationalist without a congregation. So, rather than retroactively acknowledging the validity of the baptism once he had been appointed minister of the First Church of Boston, Cotton chose not to baptize Seaborn until he was received into fellowship. Only a local church could admit members and install ministers because this authority had been given exclusively to God’s elect.

Before leaving for America, Cotton had begun to view the church as a regenerate body. Yet instead of withdrawing from his local parish church in England, Cotton had gathered routinely with a more tight-knit circle of believers who were qualified to receive the sacrament and who wished to avoid the more offensive ceremonies of the Church of England. As one historian has noted, “They became, in effect, a congregation within the congregation.”⁵ Within the accepted bounds of his seventeenth-century English context, Cotton was convening a believer’s church.

As Cotton embraced Congregationalism, his doctrine of the church exhibited a kind of Baptistic logic. The church was not to be “commingled . . . with notorious wicked ones: the Church may be Christs love, yeah, and a fragrant and pure flower in his sight and nostrils, and yet live amongst bryars and thornes.”⁶ While this pursuit of holiness in the church was by no means unprecedented, Cotton provided more systematic form to views that were relatively novel for their time and place. Although he believed himself to be an active member of the Church of England with some obligation to it, Cotton also envisioned a (1) locally centered, (2) believer-oriented, (3) congregationally governed, (4) infant-baptized (5) state-tied church.

The discordance between the first three components of Cotton’s vision and the last two demonstrate what historian Allen Guelzo and others have called “The Puritan dilemma” — “desiring a purified church, disciplined to include only the elect, which manages to be at the same time a church-in-society that embraces and directs the life of all members of a community.”⁷ In a sense, Congregationalists wanted to have their ecclesiological cake and eat it too. While pursuing the ideal of a Christian commonwealth where all citizens were made to be virtuous, Congregationalists (or “Independents,” as they were called by their opponents) also believed that each church should be “particular,” founded on a covenant formally entered into by its “godly” members, and that it should be composed only of “visible saints.” When the near-apostate Church of England looked at New England’s Congregationalist churches, they were to see authentic believers, not nominal Christians.

The Puritan “errand” to America was predicated not so much upon geographical as spiritual and moral separateness — that their righteous sojourning in the wilderness would be a visible example to their wayward brothers and sisters back home. As Governor John Winthrop boasted in 1630, Massachusetts Bay was to be a “City on a Hill” (Matthew 5:14).

Evidenced in former Congregationalist Roger Williams, the founder of the first Baptist church in America (established in 1638), believer’s baptism seemed to many to be the logical conclusion of a believer’s church.⁸ When the first president of Harvard, Henry Dunster, refused to baptize his infant son at Cambridge Church in 1653, his basic argument was unmistakably Baptist in logic: Soli visibiliter fideles sunt baptizendi (“Only visible believers should be baptized”).⁹ Almost from the beginning of the American experiment, Congregationalism carried within it the seeds of a Baptist awakening.

Isaac Backus, Separate Baptist

With this theological DNA in the Congregationalist doctrine of the church, it is little wonder that their New Light descendants a century later during the Great Awakening became known as “Separates.” Similar to John Cotton, who longed for a purified Church of England, these radical evangelicals longed for “separate” congregations that practiced pure and undefiled religion within the Congregationalist church. And this impulse to purify only continued until it inevitably took Baptist form. A generation later, contending for a more devoted, godly congregation distinct from the moribund state church, Isaac Backus (1724–1806) embodied the Baptistic evolution of Congregationalism: he was a Congregationalist-turned-Separate-turned-Separate Baptist.

To support his views, Backus invoked his Congregationalist forbears: “Since the coming of Christ is only congregational, therefore neither national, provincial nor classical.” Historically speaking, it was a short jump from congregational polity to believer’s baptism. Quoting the Cambridge Platform of 1648, which codified Congregational polity in the colonies in response to the Presbyterianism of Westminster Assembly (1643–1652), Backus declared, “The matter of a visible church are saints by calling.”¹⁰ To a lesser degree, even Backus carried in his thinking the same church-state tensions that vexed his Congregationalist ancestors. While denouncing the idea of a state church in Massachusetts, Backus insisted that “no man can take a seat in our legislature till he solemnly declares, ‘I believe the Christian religion and have a firm persuasion of its truth.’”¹¹

There was always a bit of the Puritan dilemma in the early American Baptists themselves.¹² (One could argue that this dilemma continues today.) Nevertheless, Backus’s strongest arguments for the church-state distinction and the born-again nature of the church were drawn not from fellow Baptists but from Congregationalists.

John Owen’s View of the New Covenant

Incredibly, when Isaac Backus made his case for the Separate Baptists in A Fish Caught in His Own Net (1768), he made no mention of Roger Williams. In fact, there were more references to Congregationalists John Cotton, Increase Mather, and Cotton Mather than there were to the esteemed Baptist theologian John Gill, a near-contemporary of Backus.¹³ After all, what could better illustrate the set-apart-ness of the church than the theological tradition of those committed to being “visible saints”?

In the treatise, Backus quoted from Congregationalist theologian Jonathan Edwards’s Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England (1742), Edwards’s farewell sermon in Northampton (1750), and his Freedom of the Will (1754), which Backus termed “unanswerable” in its argumentation.¹⁴ Still, for all of his admiration for “our excellent Edwards,” Backus sought most of his proof texts from an even more widely regarded Congregationalist luminary: John Owen (1616–1683).¹⁵ Drawing from the “learned and renowned author” over a dozen times, Backus believed that Owen, the preeminent Congregationalist theologian of his century, laid out the most convincing case for a Baptist church.

In New England, the name of John Owen carried considerable weight. (Cotton Mather once called the English divine “our Great Owen.”¹⁶) With the help of men like Thomas Goodwin, Owen was the chief author of the Congregationalist statement of faith known as the Savoy Declaration (1658), a light revision of the Presbyterian Westminster Confession (1647). Owen was a theological authority on both sides of the Atlantic.¹⁷ According to Backus, Owen had traced the corruptions of the Church of England to unbelievers being admitted into its communion, and “the letting go this principle, that particular churches ought to consist of regenerate persons, brought in the great apostasy of the Christian Church.”

Backus’s point was simple: Would New England repeat the declension of the Church of England? Once the church was populated with unbelievers, unbelieving clergymen were sure to follow. Citing Owen’s A Guide to Church-fellowship and Order, Backus restated what Owen had established without any apparent controversy: “On the duty of believers, or of the church, which is to choose, call, and solemnly set apart unto the office of the ministry such as the Lord Christ by his Spirit hath made meet for it according unto the rule of his word.”¹⁸ In other words, ministers were called to their churches by real Christians, not half-Christians or so-called Christian statesmen.

“Historically speaking, it was a short jump from congregational polity to believer’s baptism.”

At times, Owen’s theology certainly had a Baptist ring to it. After all, did not the Savoy Declaration allow members of “less pure” churches to partake of the sacraments provided they were “credibly testified to be godly”?¹⁹ Although he did not subscribe to believer’s baptism, Owen believed that true faith should be verified, not assumed. He was not alone in this belief. As early as 1636, to confirm whether someone was indeed a “visible saint,” Congregationalist churches required a “conversion narrative,” a public testimony of how one came to saving faith in Jesus Christ.²⁰ In some ways, this public declaration of faith before the church was the closest thing the Congregationalists ever had to believer’s baptism. As historian Sydney Ahlstrom explains, “For the first time in centuries (if not ever), the conversion experience was made normative for church membership on a wide and comprehensive scale.”²¹ With such a zealous defense of the spiritual boundaries of the church, it is little wonder that many of the descendants of Congregationalists became Baptists.

As several historians have noted, Owen’s view of the new covenant went a step beyond most Puritan theologians of his era and was noticeably similar to that of Baptists. Non-Baptist scholars Joel R. Beeke and Mark Jones acknowledge, “Owen affirms that the old and new covenants are different in kind, not degree, in distinction from most of his Reformed orthodox contemporaries. Both positions fall within the broader outlines of Reformed covenant theology, but Owen’s position is certainly not the majority view.”²² As a result, like Isaac Backus, Baptists today have cited Owen to explain a biblical theology of credobaptism.²³ In his exposition of Hebrews 8:6–13, for example, Owen writes,

The new covenant is made with them alone who effectually and eventually are made partakers of the grace of it. “This is the covenant that I will make with them. . . . I will be merciful to their unrighteousness,” etc. Those with whom the old covenant was made were all of them actual partakers of the benefits of it; and if they are not so with whom the new is made, it comes short of the old in efficacy, and may be utterly frustrated. Neither does the indefinite proposal of the terms of the covenant prove that the covenant is made with them, or any of them, who enjoys not the benefits of it. Indeed this is the excellence of this covenant, and so it is here declared, that it does effectually communicate all the grace and mercy contained in it to all and every one with whom it is made; with whomsoever it is made, his sins are pardoned.²⁴

Reflecting upon this excerpt from Owen, Reformed Baptist theologian Pascal Denault concludes, “In reading these lines, one asks oneself on what basis Owen practiced child baptism.” According to Denault, Baptists have “the same understanding” of the covenants as Owen.²⁵ Owen’s view was Baptistic in its logic because of his emphasis upon the completely new nature of the new covenant and not upon its continuity with the old. Baptists used the same rationale to argue for a baptism by faith in Christ and not by bloodline or ancestry. With Owen, Baptists of all generations have affirmed that the covenant of grace is “a new, real, absolute covenant, and not a reformation of the dispensation of the old.”²⁶ To the perennial question of whether Baptists are truly Reformed, John Owen forced many to instead ask, “Are the Reformed Baptistic?”

Jonathan Edwards and the ‘Halfway Covenant’

Nevertheless, by the late seventeenth century, the Puritan dilemma had introduced a contradiction into the Congregationalist churches of New England. Traditionally, church membership and admittance to the Lord’s Supper was reserved for those who had undergone a genuine conversion experience, and only the children of church members were permitted to be baptized. However, over time, as infant baptism became increasingly synonymous with citizenship in a religious state, membership in the church devolved into a kind of hereditary birthright.

By virtue of being born into the local parish, second- and third-generation Congregationalists expected that they should enjoy the privileges of membership without being converted. Baptized individuals who had never been reborn were eventually allowed to have their own children baptized. The Puritan doctrine of “visible sainthood” was being compromised by the Puritan doctrine of a Christian commonwealth. Although opposed by Increase Mather and other Puritan leaders, this “Halfway Covenant” — or “large Congregationalism,” as it was first termed — was approved by New England churches in 1662.

In Northampton, Massachusetts, Reverend Solomon Stoddard (1643–1729) subscribed fully to this new Halfway Covenant. Not long after assuming the pastorate at Northampton, as his church became populated with more unconverted members than converted, Stoddard, the successor of Eleazar Mather (the brother of Increase Mather), went a step further in innovating his Lord’s Supper policy. According to Stoddard, the Table should be open to all members, regenerate and unregenerate, excepting those who lived publicly scandalous lives. By 1700, this practice was set in stone at the church. In short, natural birth, rather than the second birth, had become the prerequisite for partaking of the Lord’s Communion. The Supper had been transformed into a means of conversion. As the so-called “Pope of the Connecticut Valley,” Stoddard only extended his influence through this new policy, including among the unregenerate.

Stoddard’s successor at Northampton was also his grandson, Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758). Despite the family tie, throughout the 1730s and 40s, Edwards grew to despise the Halfway Covenant (or “Stoddardeanism”). He believed that churchgoers had begun to confuse law and gospel, ignoring the fact that sincere faith in Christ should be “visible” in a person’s life.²⁷ After experiencing and interpreting the revival of religion in Northampton during the Great Awakening, Edwards was more convinced than ever of the power of a Spirit-indwelt heart to manifest itself in everyday life. In The Distinguishing Marks of the Work of the Spirit of God (1741), Edwards gives five positive signs of genuine revival: (1) it raises people’s esteem of Jesus Christ as the Son of God and Savior, (2) it leads to repentance of corruptions and lust and to righteousness, (3) it exalts one’s view of Scripture, (4) it convinces people of the truths revealed in Scripture, and (5) it compels people to truly love God and neighbor.²⁸

Not surprisingly, Edwards’s religion of the heart carried over into his doctrine of the church. In December 1748, Edwards finally told one of his parishioners that he must profess Christianity before he could take the Lord’s Supper.²⁹ Given that Edwards was reforming his grandfather’s long-held practice and that many of his relatives were beneficiaries of the Stoddard kingdom, this decision did not go over well. As Edwards confided to his friend John Erskine in 1749, “I dared no longer proceed in the former way, which has occasioned great uneasiness among my people, and has filled all the country with noise.”³⁰

Edwards articulated his view in A Humble Inquiry (1749): “None ought to be admitted to the communion and privileges of members of the visible church of Christ in complete standing, but such as are in profession and in the eye of the church’s Christian judgment godly or gracious persons.”³¹ Edwards’s standing suffered additional harm in a controversy that involved disciplining children over an inappropriate book. Even with that controversy in mind, however, it is not too much to suggest that Edwards lost his pastorate in 1750 because he believed that the church was for Christians.

Baptists knew the story of Edwards’s dismissal well and seemed to embrace him as one of their own. In his work on Baptist polity, James L. Reynolds, professor of theology at Furman Academy, wrote a century later,

In the famous controversy between Pres. Edwards, and Solomon Williams, concerning the half-way covenant, the former took the broad scriptural ground, that none but such as gave a credible evidence of their faith in Christ should be admitted to the Lord’s Supper. But, as a pedobaptist, he was obliged to admit that those who had been baptized in infancy were “in some sort members of the Church.” In this they were both agreed. Here Williams erected his strong battery, and managed it with great effect. He proved that the position of his opponent, if maintained, would annihilate infant baptism. Either that ordinance must be given up, or Edwards must surrender. He did not choose to abandon infant baptism, and was vanquished, not by the truth of his opponent, but by his own error.

Praising Edwards’s “heavenly spirit,” Reynolds concluded that Edwards simply had not followed the logical conclusions of his own sublime theology.³² In his Terms of Communion (1844), R.B.C. Howell, the pastor of First Baptist Church of Nashville, likewise praised Edwards for opposing “Mr. Stoddard’s system” and thus leading his church “to a remarkable revival.”³³ From the Northeast to the South to the West, Baptists boasted in Edwards as a kind of proto-Baptist who never completely unshackled himself from his Congregationalist context. But whereas Edwards had failed to solve the Puritan dilemma, Baptists had a biblical solution. To maintain a believer’s church, one had to practice believer’s baptism.

Baptists Untimely Born

Although it is true that Jonathan Edwards ended his career in the Presbyterian denomination and no longer thought of churches as completely autonomous, scholars Michael J. McClymond and Gerald R. McDermott note that Edwards “likely did not regard issues of church governance as having the importance that certain other doctrines did.”³⁴ What mattered even more to Edwards than the exact polity of the church was the regenerate nature of the church. After all, so important was the latter that it cost him his pulpit of twenty years. As George Marsden explains, Edwards “was willing to give up his own and his family’s worldly security for the cause of protecting eternal souls. He pursued that personally disastrous course because he was convinced that the logic of his conversionist theology demanded it.”³⁵ Edwards’s logic was unwittingly, yet strikingly, Baptistic.

To the question of whether Edwards and his seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Congregationalist brethren would be Presbyterians or Baptists if they lived in the twenty-first century, one can only speculate. Just as the Congregationalist church produced its fair share of Separate Baptists in the eighteenth century, it also generated a number of New School Presbyterians in the nineteenth. Nevertheless, what is undeniable is that, with the fall of the last Congregationalist state church in 1833, the Puritan dilemma looked very different than it had in 1633. Gone were the days of the so-called Christian commonwealth, but the ideal of a church composed of “visible saints” remained. As the number of Congregationalist churches declined precipitously in the nineteenth century, a community of people grew quickly — many of them former Congregationalists who had long rejected state-sponsored governments and who still believed in a (1) locally centered, (2) believer-oriented, (3) congregationally governed church. They were Baptists. Their solution to the Puritan dilemma was simple and strangely familiar to Congregationalist ears: “Only visible believers should be baptized.”