CATHOLIC REFORMED BAPTIST

In 1985, God un-blinded my eyes, and opened my eyes to the words, ". . .but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name."

I journeyed for 17 years among the fundamentalist baptists, usually aligned with the General Association of Regular Baptists (G.A.R.B.C.). In all that time, I always had a feeling of alienation with other Christians. Even among the G.A.R.B.C. there always seemed to be conflict around some theological issue or another.

Within the last five years, I jettisoned my dispensational theology to embrace a more reformed understanding of scripture; this change was not to much of a jump since I has always grown-up spiritually being taught the Doctrines of Grace. Embracing these truths of scripture, eventually forced me to face the fact that my brothers I sought to minister with were Arminian, although they might deny this claim. But in their practices to bring people to decisions for Christ, accompanied with calls to walk the aisle to pray to accept Jesus, they would betray their beliefs.

Now, as I explore the riches of Calvinist Baptists and Puritan and Presbyterian writers that view not only salvation and sanctification differently, but also the fellowship of the saints, I am enjoying a largeness of heart toward other Reformed people that I never had in my sojourns among my fundamentalist brethren.
I was pleasantly pleased to see that the heritage of Reformed Baptists in the stories of William Kiffin, Hanserd Knollys and Benjamin Keach, is one of a greater circle of fellowship with Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Puritans. These men were purified with the fire of persecution of the Church of England, that tempered their spirits to downplay their denominational differences for the sake of embracing the truths of scripture that the Reformers brought forward during the Reformation as it played out in England, Scotland and Ireland. This new understanding comes from reading the book by Michael A. G. Haykin, Rediscovering our English Baptist heritage: Kiffin, Knollys and Keach.
Haykin summarizes the reformed heritage of the Baptists, "Although the seventeenth-century Calvinistic Baptists were not backward in confessing their distinctive beliefs, they were also very conscious that they stood in a broader movement that went back to the time of the Reformation, when certain central New Testament truths, especially to do with the doctrine of salvation, had been rediscovered. The Calvinistic Baptist regarded themselves as part of an international Reformed movement that embraced believers throughout Europe."
He quotes Samuel E. Waldron, "How often small, isolated and despised bands of Reformed Baptists or other Reformed Christians have reacted by over-emphasising their distinctives and displaying a vulnerability to all sorts of peculiarities and eccentricities! Such things have destroyed much of their usefulness. What is needed is the same kind of catholicity of spirit manifested by our first fathers. We must, without betraying our convictions, emphasise our oneness of spirit with other conservative and Reformed Christians."