Baptists are Not Protestants Part 1 of 3

All good Baptists should, at times, protest, but Baptists are not Protestants. Baptist origins are not rooted in Protestantism. The term Protestant refers to all denominations which have separated from the Roman Catholic Church since the Reformation. It has been the historic pattern in America to divide the great majority of people into three religious groups: Protestant, Catholic, and Jew. It is assumed that since Baptists are not Catholic or Jew they are Protestant. Baptists and Protestants have separate and distinct origins.

It is proper to trace the origins of Protestantism to Roman Catholicism. The Lutherans and all infant baptizing Calvinists, such as the Congregationalists and Presbyterians, came directly out of Romanism. Martin Luther, John Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli – the three most notable Protestant reformers – had been Roman Catholics before their conversion. Other Protestants, such as Episcopalians and Methodists, also trace their origins ultimately to Rome. Methodism originated in Anglicanism.

The term Protestant, as applied to a distinct religious movement, came into existence during the Reformation in 1529 at the Diet of Speyer in Germany. (A diet is a formal assembly gathered to discuss public issues.) The term Protestant was derived from this Lutheran protest at Speyer. The Catholic emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Charles V, permitted Lutheran political rulers to practice their religion in their territories. This concession was made at the first Diet of Speyer in 1526. The second Diet of Speyer was called by Charles in 1529 to curtail the privileges of the Lutherans and to expand Catholicism in Lutheran territory. Charles was now free of the military distractions that had forced the concessions in 1526. This attempt to once again expand Catholicism at the expense of the Lutherans brought a formal “protest” from the Lutheran princes. They accused Charles of violating the agreement arrived at in 1526.

Baptists had nothing to do with this protest. In fact, at this time, the Lutherans considered Anabaptists to be heretics and, therefore, worthy of death. The Lutherans sided with the Catholics against what they called Anabaptists or rebaptizers. The Baptists originated in that same cluster of New Testament ideas and traditions from which came the Anabaptists. Only the Swiss Anabaptists were closely associated with the Protestants in their origins. They had been associated with Zwingli. Some younger Waldensians were Calvinized in the 1550s. Church Historians, Williston Walker of Yale, William Estep and others, believed that Anabaptists had great influence in shaping English Separatism.

The 1529 Diet of Speyer pronounced the death penalty on Anabaptists or on any who would rebaptize after they had been baptized as infants. The Lutherans did not protest this death penalty, but rather affirmed it. The Diet of Speyer produced the following document. It is the single most important piece of documentary evidence that Baptists did not originate within Protestantism or Catholicism. It is reproduced from the book, The Radical Reformation by Dr. George H. Williams, a Unitarian and, perhaps, the leading Anabaptist scholar in America during his life time. He taught at Harvard. In this introduction to the document, Williams is emphatic that the Protestants and Baptists have separate and distinct origins and traditions. This document also affirms the remote antiquity of this “old sect of Anabaptism, condemned and forbidden many centuries ago….”

Dr. Williams wrote in his introduction:
To this repudiation of an earlier accord, six evangelical princes and representatives of 14 South German cities protested on 19 April 1529, thereafter to be designated the ‘Protestant’. For a moment, only Lutherans were involved, for they were willing to hold the sacramentarians in check. Both Lutheran Protestants and Catholics could agree in making even more explicit than before the death penalty for the crime and heresy of rebaptizing.

Though there had been earlier local mandates, and in 1528 an imperial mandate, against the Anabaptists, that of the “Protestant” diet of Speyer is the most important; and in the tense religio-political context of this diet, its approbation by the Lutherans makes palpably clear the great difference between the Baptist and the Protestant traditions, though today their descendants often claim a common origin. (– Radical Reformation, pp. 237-239)

Charles’s (Charles V – Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire) mandate of 23 April 1529 reads in part as follows:

Whereas it is ordered and provided in common [i.e., canon] law that no man, having once been baptized according to Christian order, shall let himself be baptized again or for the second time, nor shall he baptize any such, and especially is it forbidden in the imperial law to do such on pain of death; whereupon we therefore at the beginning of 1528….earnestly entreated you altogether and especially as Roman Emperor, supreme advocate and guardian of our holy Christian faith, by our public mandate, to exhort, to restrain, and to warn your subjects, relatives, and those who belong to you against the recently arisen, new error and sect of Anabaptism and its Christian preachers from the pulpits and otherwise, also to remind them faithfully and earnestly or the penalty of the law in such a case, and especially of the great punishment of God…and to proceed against those who are discovered in such a vice and error, and not to be tardy therein: to the end that such evil be punished and that further nonsense and any extension thereof be prevented and warded off. Notwithstanding, we find daily that despite the cited common law and also our mandate…, this old sect of Anabaptism, condemned and forbidden many centuries ago, day by day makes greater inroads and is getting the upper hand. In order to prevent such evil and what may proceed from it, as well as our above-named imperial mandate,..that…every Anabaptist and rebaptized man and woman of the age of reason shall be condemned and brought from natural life into death by fire, sword, and the like, according to the person, with out proceeding by the inquisition of the spiritual judges; and let the same pseudo-preachers, instigators, vagabonds, and tumultuous inciters of the said vice of Anabaptism, also whoever remains in it, and those who fall a second time, let them all by no means be shown mercy, but instead be dealt with on the power of this constitution and edict earnestly with punishment.