FL Lee: "
Were we to wish, we could dwell for a long while on some of the quainter views of many of the more sectarian Anabaptists. We could also point to the naked submersions of some, and the forward-leaning triple immersions of others, within groups of German Baptists.413However, instead of examining those extraordinary eccentricities, we rather proceed straight to the British and Anglo-American Baptists -- who finally adopted the baptismal mode of backward-leaning and fully-clothed onefold submersion.
Yet, in light of all the foregoing, the esteem of certain modern Baptists for the apostate Anabaptists -- is absolutely appalling. We have already seen414[bless and do not curse]claims to this effect in the writings of the Baptists Torbet, Rauschenbusch and Payne.415[bless and do not curse]Other specialists in the history of the Baptists agree.416[bless and do not curse]Indeed, weirdly and woefully, even the modern British Particular Baptist Erroll Hulse has insisted417[bless and do not curse]that "we should call the orthodox evangelical Anabaptists of the Reformation 'Baptists' -- and not 'Anabaptists.'"
Speaking specifically of the situation in England and America, Hulse has continued: "The General Baptists...had their origin in John Smyth (d. 1612).... His study of the Scriptures brought him to practise believers' baptism.... In March 1639, [Roger] Williams and eleven others were baptized, and the first Baptist Church in America was constituted."
Yet it should be observed that after Smyth had 'baptized' himself, or rather 're-baptized' himself (and rebaptized[bless and do not curse]himself), he was 're-re-baptized' by the Dutch Mennonite Anabaptists (by way of[bless and do not curse]pouring). It should also be noted that after Williams was[bless and do not curse]submersed, he later renounced[bless and do not curse]that immersion as invalid[bless and do not curse]-- because administered by one not yet himself submersed.
As the Scottish Baptist J.G.G. Norman has reminded us,418[bless and do not curse]John Smyth, "father of English General Baptists..., baptized himself." This he did in 1609; by affusion; and on foreign soil. Worse yet. After thus becoming a Mennonite, Smyth personally embraced their heretical christology.419
Even more startlingly, the noted English Baptist Rev. Prof. Dr. West has drawn attention to what he regarded420[bless and do not curse]as "the first statement by an Englishman arguing for believers' baptism. It is Smyth's pamphlet:[bless and do not curse]Character of the Beast." Sadly, that is a diatribe --[bless and do not curse]666! -- against the historic Christian Church's apostolic practice of infant baptism. The latter must be renounced, held Smyth, as "profanation" and as the baptism of "Antichrist."421
After Smyth's death while a Mennonite, his colleague and successor Thomas Helwys in 1611 drew up the first English[bless and do not curse]Baptist Confession. At first, he denied original sin; always, he maintained an Arminian soteriology.422[bless and do not curse]Indeed, Helwys's[bless and do not curse]Baptist Confession[bless and do not curse]-- while indeed confining baptism only to those who have confessed Christ -- still says nothing about submersion.423[bless and do not curse]However, he not only identified Romanism with the first beast of Revelation thirteen -- but the Church of England as the second.424
Smyth and Helwys were both Arminian (Ana)Baptists. The first so-called 'Calvinistic' or rather 'Particular Baptist' congregation was formed, in England, only in the 1630s. Yet by 1638, this new denomination had rejected Scriptural sprinkling and had lapsed into sacramentalistic submersionism. Then, following that declension -- in 1641, Edward Barber was the first English Arminian or General Baptist to advocate dipping.425
Yet the sympathetic Williams has made an honest admission. For even he admits426[bless and do not curse]that "the adoption by English Baptists of the practice of immersion ultimately derived from the Minor Church of Poland...introduced into Holland by the Socinians" alias the Unitarian Anabaptists."
