John Piper Sermons What Is a Baptist?
This new teaching by Pastor John Piper titled “What Is a Baptist?” is what we are bringing to you to listen to and meditate on.
In answer to the question (title), Pastor John described the kind of Baptist he is. He went on to mention all the defining trait of a Baptist. According to him, These traits is typical of most Baptist churches in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The roots of all Baptists in their earliest centuries to go back to the Reformation itself — namely, the renewal and the reform of the church, the Roman Catholic Church at the time, under Martin Luther and John Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli in the 1500s in Europe.
The roots of all Baptists in their earliest centuries go back to the Reformation itself . Baptists would hold in common the five great emphases of the Reformation:
- justification on the basis of the work of Christ alone;
- provided and imparted to human beings by God’s grace alone;
- appropriated in a personal and effective way in each individual life through faith alone;
- so that God’s glory alone, not man’s, is exalted;
- and all of that based not on tradition or ecclesiastical authority but on Scripture alone.
Baptism and the Solas
What distinguishes Baptists is that, as they pondered the implications of Scripture alone as their authority, rather than fallible human church authority, and as they pondered the implications of faith alone as what brings a person into a right relationship with God and makes him part of God’s redeemed people, what the Baptists saw (and I’m speaking of people now in the early 1600s) was that, in the Bible, the reform of the church hadn’t gone far enough.
It seemed to those early Baptists, and it seems to me, that the doctrine of justification by faith alone — and thus entrance into the new people of God, the church, by faith alone — implied that we should not think of entering into salvation and into the people of God through physical, family connections.
Therefore, since baptism was the outward sign of such acceptance with God and participation in the redeemed people of God, baptism should not be given to persons just because they had a physical connection with saved people — namely, their believing parents. This is why Baptists do not baptize babies, and this is the main reason why they are called Baptists. They believe that there should be a credible profession of saving faith before a person receives the outward sign of that credible profession and that union with Christ. And that sign is baptism — a symbol of passing from death to life through faith in Jesus.
Speaking on Baptism, the Baptists believe in immersion and not sprinkling. The reason for this belief is as follows:
- That’s what the Greek word baptizō means: “dip” or “immerse”; it didn’t mean “sprinkle.”
- Immersion fits the symbolism in Romans 6:1–4 of being buried with Christ in baptism, and being raised up out of the water, signifying resurrection life.
- It appears that the early church baptized by immersion. Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch “went down into the water” along the road (Acts 8:38), and John the Baptist baptized in the Jordan River: he needed a river, not a font to put a hand in and sprinkle some water.
In addition to the above, he stated that several other marks of a Baptist church follow from this position as an ongoing reformation of the Roman Catholic Church. One is that the church is seen as an assembly of believers. Another implication of the ongoing reformation among Baptists was that we have tried to take seriously the priesthood of all believers: that each of us has a direct, personal relationship with God through Christ.
Another implication of the ongoing reformation among Baptists was a recovered belief in the freedom that Christians have from coercive dictates, not only from centralized ecclesiastical authorities, but also from civil authorities. Most of the non-Baptist Reformation churches in their early decades, and longer for some, failed to disentangle themselves from civil governments, so that the people, like Baptists, were oppressed and persecuted even by their Protestant brothers and sisters who thought that state authority should be used by churches to coerce theological and ecclesiastical unity.
In summary, Pastor John lists the following:
1. Baptists are Protestants who share the great pillars of the Reformation: justification on the basis of Christ alone, by grace alone, through faith alone, to the glory of God alone, on the basis of the authority of Scripture alone.
“The only people who receive the sign of new life in Christ are those who by faith have received new life in Christ.”
2. We hold to believers’ baptism, so that the only people who receive the sign of new life in Christ are those who by faith have received new life in Christ.
3. Baptists hold to a believers’ church, in which the members consist only of those who give a credible profession of faith in Jesus.
4. We hold to congregational governance, governance finally by the congregation and administered practically through elders and deacons. Most of the early confessions always referred to elders and deacons among Baptists.
5. And then finally, we are committed to freedom of religious expression without any external ecclesiastical or governmental control over the local congregation.
Watch and learn from one of the sermons by Pastor John Piper for the year titled “What Is a Baptist?” as we bring the latest sermons from pastors around the world to you daily.
Credit: John Piper YouTube/https://www.desiringgod.org