The Influence of Calvinism on Seventeenth-Century English Baptists: Theological Labels Need to be Treated with Care, For They are Not, And Cannot be, Representative of Fixed Systems, Totally Resistant to Reinterpretation According to Changing Context, Be This Temporal, Geographical, Or Political‪.‬

In tracing ecclesiastical influences, care must be taken, in default of specific evidence, not to confuse the process of "derived from" with "conforms to," particularly given that numerous groups were thumbing the scriptures at one and the same time, anxious to discover biblical patterns of belief and churchmanship. (1) Moreover, self-respecting Puritans would argue that the authority for their reforms was not a human-made system of theology, be it ever so orthodox, but the authority of Christ as discovered in the scriptures themselves. (2) But that said, it remains that the norm of theological thinking among English Puritanism, and the Dissent that derived from it, was a "prevailing Calvinism," from which deviations have to be established and evidenced. Even so, a common origin can be found for even apparently discrepant thinking. W. T. Whitley, for example, argued that Richard Baxter was as much in the Calvinist tradition as was John Owen, however much the doctrine and system followed by them diverged. (3) Recent thesis writer, Stephen Wright, contended that some in the General Baptist tradition continued to uphold aspects of Calvin's teaching, even though diverging from him on other matters. Wright noted that Thomas Lambe, normally identified as a General Baptist, wrote a pamphlet defending particular election as well as general redemption, and that his 1645 Fountain of Free Grace Opened explicitly condemned Arminianism. (4) Wright also wrote that Thomas Crosby was not in error, as some have suggested, in attributing A Treatise of Particular Redemption to this same Thomas Lambe, soap boiler and General Baptist, who wrote of "those that are predestined, and therefore effectually called, justified and glorified, but others to walk in their own ways, as the vessels of wrath, fitted to destruction." (5) Wright argued that debates about the issue of grace did not define the theological outlook of Lambe's Bell Alley Church at this early date, but rather those disputes took place within that congregation that seems to have combined both free-willers and high-Calvinist antinomians.