John Smyth had been a Separatist in England who fled to Holland to escape persecution. While there, he became convinced that Scripture teaches believer’s baptism. At the time, both Catholics and Protestants practiced infant baptism according to a parish model, but Smyth could not find that pattern in the Bible. When he examined the New Testament, he saw the church baptizing only professing believers. With no one he believed could administer a legitimate, biblical baptism, he baptized himself and then baptized the congregation of roughly fifty people who were with him.
This act drew immediate criticism. While infant baptism cannot be found in Scripture, Smyth’s critics pointed out that self-baptism is not found there either. But the objections ran deeper than that. This issue becomes significant throughout early Baptist history, and Helwys would have to confront it after returning to England. The Particular Baptists would also have to deal with it. To understand why this was such a serious concern for so many people, we need to situate ourselves in their historical context.
Church Succession and the Keys of the Kingdom
This discussion really begins with the Roman Catholic Church. For centuries, the Catholic Church believed and taught the necessity of unbroken church succession. Think about Jesus’s words to his apostles in Matthew 16. Peter makes his confession, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” and Jesus responds, “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church” (Matthew 16:16, 18). He then adds, “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” (Matthew 16:19).
The Catholic Church eventually understood this to mean that Peter himself was given the keys to the kingdom and that those keys would be passed down through subsequent generations. They were transmitted through the church, specifically through its leadership, from one generation to the next. As long as the church held the keys, it alone could authorize the existence of a true church. A group might gather and claim to be a church, but if the Catholic Church had not granted its approval, it was considered a false church.
As paradoxical as it seems, this same mindset carried over into the Protestant Anglican Church of England. Despite having broken from Rome during the Reformation, the Church of England would not tolerate the Separatist movement, precisely because Separatists formed churches apart from its authority. These congregations were considered illegal.
John Smyth’s argument, and one that Helwys and others would adopt, was that Scripture does not require unbroken church succession for a church to be legitimate. The keys to the kingdom, they argued, are not passed along through an institutional chain of authority. Rather, the keys are given to all true believers. Anyone who genuinely shares Peter’s confession about Christ possesses the keys of the kingdom. In other words, the right to be a true church does not come from another church. It comes from the authority of Christ himself, revealed through Scripture. This was the principle the Reformers stood on, and it is the principle the Baptists would also affirm.
Even so, Baptists have at times developed the strange habit of returning to the Catholic understanding of church succession. I mentioned the Landmark Baptists last time, for whom this was a defining belief. The Primitive Baptists eventually adopted a similar view. In the twentieth century, the idea gained traction among American Baptists, especially through J. M. Carroll’s book The Trail of Blood. Carroll argued that Baptists were the true church and that, while Catholics and Protestants were in conflict with one another, Baptists had always existed separately, maintaining an unbroken succession from the apostles onward.
The problem with that view is that it is a theory without historical evidence. Biblically, the entire concept of church succession is unnecessary. It may be comforting to think, I know my church is the true church because I can trace an unbroken lineage back to the apostles, but no one can actually do that. In fact, the historical evidence points in the opposite direction.
One of the most helpful lessons I have learned about history is that it is not black-and-white. We are dealing with the history of sinners. Rarely do we find clearly defined heroes and villains, or situations that are obviously right or wrong. Scripture itself makes this plain. Consider Abraham. God chose him to be the father of a great nation, yet instead of waiting for the Lord to fulfill his promise, Abraham took matters into his own hands and fathered a child through his wife’s servant.
The same could be said of Moses, David, or Israel as a whole. None was perfect, yet God used them to accomplish his purposes. That is what makes God’s providence so remarkable. He brings about his will in and through a messy, broken world, working faithfully through flawed people to accomplish what he intends.
Helwys’s Break with Smyth
Returning to Smyth, he eventually fell into the same temptation of doubting the legitimacy of his baptism, not only because he had baptized himself, but because it had not been administered by what he now considered a true church. In his thinking, he had never received the keys of the kingdom from a legitimate church.
At first, Smyth argued that he had no other option. There was no church to which he could go for baptism. That changed when he became connected with the Waterlander Mennonites. After moving to Amsterdam, he had grown increasingly aligned with them in his soteriology, and they practiced believer’s baptism. On that basis, he concluded that the best course of action for himself and his congregation was to join the Mennonites and be rebaptized.
One man in the group, however, strongly disagreed: Thomas Helwys. The Mennonites held several unorthodox views concerning Christ and leaned in an anti-Augustinian direction in their theology. There is evidence that they denied the transmission of Adam’s sinful nature, suggesting that people are born morally neutral. There were other concerns as well, but what Helwys called “succession in holy things” appears to have been the central issue.
In Helwys’s view, Smyth was conceding the idea that a church’s authority must be received through an unbroken line of succession from earlier churches. He denounced this as a human tradition with no biblical foundation. He famously referred to it as “the antichrist’s chief hold,” meaning that it was a Jewish and later Roman Catholic concept used to keep God’s people in bondage. To Helwys, it was no different from Jews insisting that Gentiles must become Jewish in order to be Christians, or Catholics insisting that one must become Catholic to be a true Christian or part of a true church.
Instead, Helwys argued that Scripture itself grants believers the authority to “church themselves” through a confession of Christ and obedience to the Word. A true church, he maintained, is founded directly by the Word and the Spirit, not by any human institution.
Helwys even went so far as to write a letter to the Mennonites, warning them not to accept Smyth and his group into their fellowship because they had been excluded from the church in England. Whether this was motivated by spite or by a desire to draw Smyth back to his position is difficult to say. In any case, it was unsuccessful. The Mennonites received Smyth’s congregation, though Smyth himself died before he could be rebaptized.
The Return to England and the Rise of Baptist Streams
That left Thomas Helwys with about twelve people. Rather than remaining in Amsterdam, they decided to return to England. Helwys was deeply missionary-minded and held a strong conviction that the gospel should never be hidden. Christians, he believed, must not place their candle under a basket. As he put it, it was their “absolute duty to bear witness to [their] own countrymen.” Sometime in 1611, possibly 1612, they made the journey back to England.
At this point, King James I was still on the throne and continued to persecute Separatists and others who broke away from the Church of England. If you want a striking example of God’s providence, consider King James himself. While persecuting Separatists, including Baptists, he also authorized the English translation of the Bible that would shape the English-speaking world for the next four hundred years, influencing Baptists more than any other translation, or any other book for that matter. God is fully capable of drawing straight lines with crooked sticks.
By 1612, Helwys and his group formally established the first Baptist church on English soil. They met in Spitalfields, just outside London. It was a house church, since they had no public building, if for no other reason than the fact that their congregation was illegal.
This church was not only the first Baptist church in England; it was also the first General Baptist church. That distinction becomes important as Baptist history develops. As Baptists multiply, they do not initially form denominations in the modern sense, but distinct streams or categories.
In England, two primary streams eventually emerged: the General Baptists and the Particular Baptists. When Baptists arrive in America, the picture becomes more complex, with General Baptists, Regular Baptists, and Separate Baptists, not to be confused with the English Separatists.
Although these categories are not fully formed at this point, it is helpful to understand where things are headed. In England, the General Baptists are Arminian in their soteriology. They affirm a “general” or universal atonement, meaning Christ’s death is available to all. The Particular Baptists, by contrast, hold a Calvinistic understanding of salvation. They believe in a “particular” or definite atonement, teaching that Christ died specifically for those who will be saved.
By the eighteenth century in America, three groups were visible. The General Baptists descend from the English General Baptists and retain an Arminian theology. The Regular Baptists trace their lineage to the English Particular Baptists and are Calvinistic. Like their English counterparts, they are also confessional, a distinction that will prove important. The Separate Baptists emerged out of the First Great Awakening. They, too, are Calvinists, though generally less confessional. Before long, especially in the South, the Regular and Separate Baptists began to merge.
None of these distinct streams has fully developed yet, but understanding them can be helpful for anyone who chooses to explore Baptist history further.
Helwys, Religious Liberty, and the Cost of Conviction
Returning to the church in Spitalfields, they did not consider themselves a General Baptist church. As far as they were concerned, they were simply a group of believers seeking to follow New Testament ecclesiology as closely as possible. They practiced believer’s baptism, though it was administered by affusion, or pouring. Baptism by immersion would not be recovered among Baptists until the 1640s. Their worship was intentionally simple, consisting of little more than singing, prayer, preaching, and the Lord’s Supper.
Tragically, within a year, Thomas Helwys was arrested and imprisoned in the notorious Newgate Prison in London. It was the same prison in which John Bunyan was held for twelve years while writing The Pilgrim’s Progress. Unlike Bunyan, Helwys would never be released. He died in prison about four years later, at the age of forty, becoming the first Baptist martyr.
Helwys’s arrest was hardly surprising, since he made no effort to keep his unlawful church hidden.
Soon after returning to England, he published a small book titled A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity. In it, Helwys explicitly argued for universal religious freedom, not merely freedom for Baptists, but for everyone. He wrote, “Men’s religion to God is betwixt God and themselves,” and went on to say, “Let them be heretics, Turks [or Muslims], Jews, or whatsoever, it appertains not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure.”
This was Europe in 1612, not twenty-first-century America. These were radical and deeply controversial claims. No one was seriously arguing for this kind of freedom. The debate was not whether there should be religious liberty, but which church or religious system the state should enforce.
At the same time, Helwys was not indifferent to truth or content to see false religion spread. He argued that forcing people to worship against their conscience “stinks in the nostrils of God.” Citing Jesus’s words, he wrote that “true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth” (John 4:23). The Lord also warned against outward worship without inward devotion, saying, “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me” (Mark 7:6–7).
For Helwys, true worship must be voluntary. You cannot compel someone to be a genuine Christian, so why should the state require people to belong to a church? He argued that the state is accountable to God to enforce the second table of the Ten Commandments, but not the first. To do so would exceed its God-given authority and contradict Christ’s teachings.
From the opposite angle, Helwys accused the state of uprooting good wheat in its attempt to pull up the tares. Drawing on Jesus’s parable, he argued that persecution was doing precisely that. In seeking to eliminate what the state labeled heresy, it was destroying faithful Christians along with it.
Helwys did not soften his language. Using imagery from Revelation, he identified the Roman Catholic Church as the first beast and the Church of England as the second. He rebuked Puritans and Separatists as well, accusing them of working for the antichrist because they practiced infant baptism, which he considered the mark of the beast. He even criticized the Pilgrim pastor John Robinson, calling him a “malicious adversary of God’s truth.”
Nor did Helwys stop there. He directly addressed King James I, who by law was regarded as the “Supreme Head of the Church of England,” and placed governing authorities firmly in their proper place. Yes, they bear responsibility before God, but that responsibility does not include ruling the church or persecuting Christians.
In fact, Helwys personally inscribed a copy of his book and sent it to the king. In it, he wrote, “The King is a mortal man and not God, therefore hath no power over the immortal souls of his subjects to make laws and ordinances for them and to set spiritual Lords over them.”
The response was predictable. Helwys was imprisoned, where he died four years later. He also found little sympathy within the broader Protestant world.
Even so, it is important to note that despite his sharp rhetoric, Helwys was not advocating anarchy or sedition. He was not calling for rebellion against governing authorities. He argued, rather, that the government should neither force religion upon people nor interfere with the free exercise of their faith.
This conviction would become a clear Baptist distinctive. It would be taken up by the Particular Baptists, and later carried to America by Roger Williams, who was influenced by Helwys and his associate John Murton. Williams would found the Rhode Island colony on the principle of religious liberty and would also establish the first Baptist church in America.
John Murton and the Growth of the General Baptists
After Helwys was imprisoned, leadership of the Spitalfields church passed to a man named John Murton. He had traveled with Helwys and Smyth to Amsterdam and later returned to England with Helwys. His time as pastor, however, was brief. About a year after Helwys’s arrest, Murton was also imprisoned.
Like John Bunyan after him, Murton did not waste his time in prison. He devoted himself to writing, focusing primarily on religious liberty. His books expanded on Helwys’s arguments and made a compelling case for freedom of conscience. These writings were smuggled out of prison and became highly influential.
The way his work escaped the prison is remarkable. Friends would bring him small pieces of paper hidden in the cork of a milk bottle. Murton would then use a stick dipped in milk to write on the paper. Because the milk served as invisible ink, he could not see what he was writing. The paper would be placed back in the cork and carried out of the prison. Once outside, his friends would hold the paper over a flame, causing the milk to darken just enough for the writing to appear. They then transcribed his words and compiled his short notes into complete works.
Given that process, his writings are surprisingly coherent and well-crafted.
Despite ongoing persecution, the General Baptists continued to grow. By 1626, what had begun as a small congregation of twelve had expanded to approximately 150 members spread across five churches. This growth may have been aided, at least in part, by the accession of King Charles I in 1625. Preoccupied with other matters, he paid little attention to this small but steadily growing Baptist movement.
The Emergence of the Particular Baptists
We will pause the General Baptist story here, because another Baptist movement was beginning to take shape—one that would soon surpass the General Baptists in both size and influence. This was the rise of the Particular Baptists.
Returning to London in 1616, while Helwys was still imprisoned in Newgate, a former Anglican minister named Henry Jacob had aligned himself with the Separatist movement. He might best be described as a semi-Separatist, since, unlike Smyth or Helwys, he still believed the Church of England, though deeply corrupted, remained a true church. He never went so far as to label it the second beast.
That year, Jacob gathered several dozen people to form a Separatist church in London. What distinguished this congregation was his refusal to require members to sever all ties with the Church of England, at least initially, provided they abstained from practices they believed were unbiblical. This position drew criticism from both sides. Other Separatists derided the church as “half-separated” and accused Jacob of idolatry and lingering Anglicanism, while Anglicans regarded him as too Separatist.
Despite the criticism, Jacob remained committed to the autonomy of the local church under Christ’s headship, and the congregation continued meeting, often changing locations to avoid detection.
This church eventually became known as the Jacob-Lathrop-Jessey church, or the JLJ church, named after its first three pastors. Orthodox, evangelical, and firmly Calvinistic, it would become something of a mother church for the Particular Baptists in England. By 1644, at least four, possibly five, of the first seven Particular Baptist churches in London could trace their origins directly to the JLJ church.
Henry Jacob served as pastor until 1622, when he left England to settle in Virginia. He maintained regular correspondence with John Robinson of the Pilgrims and concluded that he could be more effective in the American colonies.
After Jacob’s departure, John Lathrop became pastor. Like Jacob, he had once served as an Anglican minister. During his tenure, one of the church’s meetings was raided, and Lathrop, along with forty-two others, was arrested and imprisoned for about eighteen months. When he was released, it was on the condition that he leave England. In 1634, he and several others relocated to Massachusetts, where he would go on to plant at least two churches. In this way, the Calvinistic Separatists were already contributing to the shaping of early America.
As a historical aside, Lathrop was an ancestor of two American presidents: George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush.
Lathrop’s departure left the JLJ church without a pastor for roughly three years. In 1637, Henry Jessey was called to lead the congregation. Jessey was well credentialed as a Cambridge-educated, ormer Puritan minister, fluent in both Hebrew and Greek, and widely regarded as both intellectually gifted and personally gentle.
Throughout the 1630s, the JLJ church remained only semi-Separatist. Although it had broken from the Church of England, it was not yet a Baptist church and continued to practice infant baptism. Beginning around 1630, however, the issue of baptism became increasingly contentious. At first, the question was not whether infants should be baptized, but whether baptisms performed in the Church of England were valid at all. Given their conviction that the Church of England was corrupt, the church was forced to ask whether such baptisms should be recognized.
In 1630, a member named Mr. Dupper urged the congregation to reject baptisms performed by the Church of England. At this stage, he was not advocating believer’s baptism, but re-baptism for those baptized within Anglicanism. He would later embrace believer’s baptism, but not initially. Even so, he eventually left to form a new congregation.
A second group became dissatisfied in 1633, including Samuel Eaton and William Kiffin, both significant figures in Baptist history. In September of that year, they requested permission to form a separate congregation, which the church granted with its blessing. The division was peaceful, and the two groups continued to meet together on occasion.
As with Dupper’s group, the central issue for them was not infant versus believer’s baptism, but the validity of Anglican baptisms. They believed those baptized in the Church of England should be rebaptized.
A third group soon departed the JLJ church, including Thomas Wilson and John Spilsbury. Unlike the previous groups, they were convinced of believer’s baptism. According to the church records often referred to as the Kiffin Manuscript, they left “being convinced that baptism was not to be administered to infants, but to such only as professed faith in Christ.”
In summary, from this single Separatist congregation, three groups emerged. The first two were not initially Baptist, though they would become Baptist churches. The third group, led by John Spilsbury, was distinctly Baptist from the outset. It became the first Particular (Calvinist) Baptist church.
Others soon followed. At least one additional Particular Baptist church would emerge from the JLJ church later that same year, and even the JLJ church itself would begin moving steadily toward Baptist convictions.
The Recovery of Baptism by Immersion
None of these groups practiced baptism by immersion at this point. They were still baptizing by affusion, or pouring. That began to change in 1640, when a member of the JLJ church named Richard Blunt became convinced that not only was infant baptism unbiblical, but that affusion itself was not the biblical mode of baptism.
Three considerations led him to this conclusion. First, the New Testament presents baptism as a symbol of Christ’s death and resurrection, a symbolism far more clearly conveyed through immersion than pouring. Second, the word baptism literally means to immerse. Third, whenever baptism appears in Scripture, the individuals go to a body of water, go down into it, and come up out of it. These details strongly suggest immersion.
With this conviction, Blunt wanted to investigate further, but there was a problem. No one in England practiced baptism by immersion. Few practiced believer’s baptism at all, let alone immersion. Blunt had, however, heard of a Mennonite group in Holland known as the Rinsberers, who were baptizing by immersion. Like the Waterlander Mennonites, they were not orthodox, and Blunt had no interest in joining them. He simply wanted to observe how they practiced baptism. So he traveled to Holland.
Some historians suspect that Blunt was baptized by this group while he was there. Much of that suspicion arises from the vague way later church records describe his baptism. In the so-called Kiffin Manuscript, we are told that Blunt returned to England and baptized a man named Samuel Blacklock. It then states, “Mr. Blacklock that was a Teacher amongst them, & Mr. Blunt being Baptized, he & Mr. Blacklock Baptized the rest of their friends that were so minded.”
That leaves two possibilities. Either Blunt and Blacklock baptized one another, or Blunt had been baptized in Holland by this unorthodox Mennonite group, and no one wanted to say so explicitly.
Regardless of where Blunt himself was baptized, he does appear to have been concerned with continuity. The idea of unbroken succession had been deeply ingrained, and even though the Dutch group was unorthodox and did not exclusively practice immersion, Blunt returned to England with a letter from one of their leaders, seemingly to lend credibility to immersion as a legitimate practice.
In the end, the letter carried little weight. If Blunt had been baptized by the Mennonites, the records deliberately avoid highlighting it. As Separatists and Baptists, they did not believe any form of succession was necessary. Their authority rested in Scripture alone.
Upon his return, Blunt and Blacklock baptized forty-one people by immersion. It is not entirely clear who all these individuals were. Many were likely members of the JLJ church, and some may have come from the Particular Baptist congregations that had already separated from it. The lines were blurred, since these groups maintained close fellowship and consulted with one another both before and after Blunt’s trip to Holland. In short order, all of them would embrace baptism by immersion.
This group of forty-three, including Blunt and Blacklock, formed two new Particular Baptist churches. Blunt became the pastor of one, and Thomas Kilcop pastored the other.
Within three years, these Particular Baptist churches would unite to produce the First London Baptist Confession of Faith.
