From Personal Salvation to Personal Baptism: The Shaping Influence of Evangelical Theology on Baptism (Essay‪)‬

As the great revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shifted soteriological language toward personal salvation, they similarly altered Baptist understanding and articulation of baptismal theology in America. The writings of this era suggest that Baptist baptismal theology in America was a betwixt and between theology that attempted to distance itself from both sacramentalism and mere symbolism. In other words, Baptists were as equally uncomfortable with the various sacramental theologies expressed by Puritans, Separatists, Congregation-Mists, Methodists, and Restorationists as they were with the groups like the Quakers and Antinominans, who argued that baptism had no perpetual significance outside the New Testament era. Baptists countered both extremes--those who made too much of baptism and those who made too little of baptism. In so doing, however, Baptists were not simply offering a reactionary theology with little or no substantive quality. Instead Baptist baptismal conversation carried the great weight of Baptist theology--ecclesiology, soteriology, Christian ethics, and eschatology--on its shoulders. Where seventeenth century Baptists with their quest for a visible church were primarily concerned with the ecclesiological role of baptism, (1) Baptists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries emphasized the soteriological dimension of baptism. In particular, with the emergence of the Great Awakenings in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, baptismal conversations emphasized language that articulated the personal and relational nature of baptism.