Can Baptists Be Catholic? (Part 1)

by on August 4, 2025 | Comment

Whether Baptists can be catholic is a serious question that requires a serious answer. Before we proceed, however, we must define our terms. What is catholicity? Our English word catholic is really a Greek word, katholikos (καθολικός), borrowed by English. What does catholicity mean when applied to the church and theology?

Catholicity Defined

In Belgic Confession (1561) art. 27 the Reformed churches confess:

We believe and confess One single catholic or universal church—a holy congregation and gathering of true Christian believers, awaiting their entire salvation in Jesus Christ being washed by his blood, and sanctified and sealed by the Holy Spirit. This church has existed from the beginning of the world and will last until the end, as appears from the fact that Christ is eternal King who cannot be without subjects. And this holy church is preserved by God against the rage of the whole world, even though for a time it may appear very small in the eyes of men—as though it were snuffed out. For example, during the very dangerous time of Ahab the Lord preserved for himself seven thousand men who did not bend their knees to Baal. And so this holy church is not confined, bound, or limited to a certain place or certain persons. But it is spread and dispersed throughout the entire world, though still joined and united in heart and will, in one and the same Spirit, by the power of faith.

So, the first aspect of catholicity to which the Reformed churches appeal is universality. We say that Christ has always had a church and he shall always have a church. It is not limited to a “certain place or certain persons,” that is, to Rome or to the papacy. The unity is not grounded in an officer of the church or a holy city but faith in Christ.

The second aspect is reflected in the Confession’s appeal to Ahab (1 Kings 19:18; Rom 11:4). Catholicity is not only synchronic (extensive with contemporaries) but also diachronic (it extends back into redemptive history, including the church under the types and shadows). This way of speaking comes from the Patristic, Medieval, and Reformed conviction that there is one covenant of grace variously administered.1

There is a third aspect, however, to catholicity and in the Heidelberg Catechism (1563) the Reformed churches speak to it:

22. What then is necessary for a Christian to believe?

All that is promised us in the gospel, which the articles of our catholic, undoubted Christian faith teach us in sum.

23. What are these articles?

I believe in God the Father, almighty, maker of heaven and earth.

And in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, our Lord; who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; He descended into hell; the third day He rose from the dead; He ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God the Father almighty, from there He shall come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, a holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.

This is the catholic faith of which the Athanasian Creed speaks when it says, “[w]hosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the catholic faith; Which faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.”2 This the faith to which the church refers in the Definition of Chalcedon (AD 451) when it says, “following the holy Fathers.”

The Reformed churches heartily believe and confess that holy catholic faith. We see this in Belgic Confession art. 9 when we confess, “and so, in the doctrine of the Trinity we willingly accept the three ecumenical creeds—the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian—as well as what the ancient fathers decided in agreement with them.” We also see the Reformed commitment to catholicity in the way they explain the faith. For example, Calvin’s Institutes are organized by the Apostles’ Creed. Book 1 is focused on the Father, book 2 on the Son, book 3 on the Holy Spirit and the application of redemption, and book 4 is about the work of the Holy Spirit in the visible church through the means of grace. Reformed theology is Trinitarian not merely in the formal sense but in its substance.3

We are intentionally and substantially catholic. We confess the ecumenical creeds in our worship services and we bind ourselves and each other to them as faithful, ancient confessions of God’s Word. This is in contrast, for example, to the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), which in 2024 considered and rejected a move to adopt the Nicene Creed. According to reporter Dale Chamberlain, in that debate one major figure within the SBC even questioned the theology of the Nicene Creed. In 2025, the SBC did affirm the Nicene but that it did so only this year and only after controversy illustrates the different relationship that exists between a large number of Baptists (about 12 million) in North America and the historic Reformed view of the ecumenical creeds.4 The Reformed churches have never expressed such hesitation or doubts about the Nicene Creed.5 Any denomination or federation of churches that did not confess the ecumenical creeds would not be able to enter into ecumenical relationships with the Reformed churches.

One reason why the Reformed churches are so explicit about their affirmation of the “holy catholic faith” as confessed in the ecumenical creeds is because they saw the creeds as founded upon and drawn from Scripture. The Reformed believe the Rule of Faith (regula fidei) as summarized by the early post-Apostolic Christians (e.g., Ignatius, Justin, Irenaeus, and Tertullian). By the fourth century that Rule became the Apostles’ Creed (Symbolum Apostolorum). This faith is ours.

The Reformed claim to catholicity was a major point of contention in the Reformation. The Roman Catholic critics of the Reformation generally and the Reformed in particular argued that the Reformed churches were not genuinely catholic because they were not Roman Catholic. In fact, the Roman critics suggested the Reformed were really no different than the Anabaptist radicals.

We confess, “we believe and confess one only church catholic or universal.”6 The contest between the Roman communion and the Reformed churches was never whether there is a church catholic but rather which institution is that church that Christ instituted. This is why William Perkins (1558–1602) wrote not one but two treatises arguing that 1) the Roman communion is not the catholic church and 2) her catholicism is “forged.”7 Perkins wrote, “By a Reformed Catholic, I understand anyone that holds the same necessary heads of religion with the Roman Church; yet so as he pares off and rejects all errors in doctrine whereby the said religion is corrupted.”8 Perkins’ stance toward Rome was the Reformed stance. It was the stance of the magisterial Reformation, in contrast to the Anabaptist approach, which was radical and discarded the church before 1523.

A second reason the Reformed churches defended their catholicity is that they shared a common baptism. In the Nicene Creed all Christians confess, “I confess one baptism for the remission of sins.”9 This is an allusion to Acts 2:38, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38; ESV). As I have argued elsewhere, this is figurative or sacramental language, not literal, language. He was not saying that baptism itself forgives sins. Christ’s death is the ground of the forgiveness of sins. Rather, for Peter, baptism is the sacrament of that blessing. It signifies to all and seals to believers what is promised in the gospel.10

When the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed was promulgated in AD 381, the church had long practiced infant baptism. They believed that it was the apostolic practice. They knew, with Augustine, that it was the universal practice of the church. Though it is not widely recognized, the earliest Christian fathers articulated the framework within which baptism was understood, that there is one covenant under the types and shadows (the Old Testament) and under the New Testament. There is one spiritual people under both administrations: the saints who received the covenant in, with, and under the types and shadows and the saints who received the same covenant in light of the advent of Christ and the fulfillment of the types and shadows. As early as AD 120, the Epistle of Barnabas argued this very thesis strenuously against the Jewish critics of the legitimacy of the church.11 Justin Martyr (c. AD 100–65) made substantially the same arguments as did Irenaeus (AD c. 125–202).12

It is true that, by the late patristic period (e.g., Augustine), parents were not consistently bringing their children for baptism. They had come to think of baptism more as an obligation or the beginning of a set of obligations—that is, as a law rather than as a gift (the sacrament of recognition of inclusion in the covenant of grace of believers and their children). That defect in practice, however, does not wipe out the fact that the teaching of the church, as recognized unequivocally by Origen and Tertullian in AD 206, was that believers and their children were to be recognized as a members of the visible church and baptized. This was the context of “one baptism for the remission of sins.”

It is in recognition of catholicity that, for all our criticisms of the corruption of Roman Catholic theology, piety, and practice, the Reformed churches have always recognized the validity of Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Lutheran, Pentecostal, Mainline (liberal), and even Baptist baptisms. Our rule is that so long as the baptism was performed by a Christian minister in the name of the Trinity it is valid.13 There is one baptism. It is unthinkable to the Reformed churches to un-baptize the entire church before 1523.14 This commitment to catholicity informed the Reformed churches when they denounced the Anabaptists as heretics for their celestial flesh Christology and for their sectarian view of baptism:

For that reason we detest the error of the Anabaptists who are not content with a single baptism once received and also condemn the baptism of the children of believers. We believe our children ought to be baptized and sealed with the sign of the covenant, as little children were circumcised in Israel on the basis of the same promises made to our children. And truly, Christ has shed his blood no less for washing the little children of believers than he did for adults. Therefore they ought to receive the sign and sacrament of what Christ has done for them, just as the Lord commanded in the law that by offering a lamb for them the sacrament of the suffering and death of Christ would be granted them shortly after their birth. This was the sacrament of Jesus Christ. Furthermore, baptism does for our children what circumcision did for the Jewish people. That is why Paul calls baptism the “circumcision of Christ.”15

For all their criticism of the Roman communion—the Reformed churches denounced Rome as a “false church” in Belgic Confession art. 29—the Reformed churches of the Reformation and post-Reformation periods always recognized the validity of Roman Catholic baptisms. None of the magisterial Protestant leaders were themselves re-baptized, despite their misgivings about Rome, nor did they re-baptize their congregations. As we have seen, they detested the Anabaptists for refusing to accept the validity of infant baptisms they had all received at the hands of Roman priests, in Roman churches. This is a kind of catholicity of which the Anabaptists were incapable. It was incompatible with the Anabaptist ecclesiology, which demanded visibly pure, gathered, separated congregations now. Their ecclesiology was, in turn, funded by their highly realized eschatology and their vision of the New Covenant, in which there is no place for the messiness of genuine catholicity. Where, for the Reformed (e.g., Caspar Olevianus), the promises of Jeremiah 31:31–34 were about the essential continuity of the covenant of grace between the types and shadows and the New Covenant, for the Anabaptists, as for their Baptist successors, Jeremiah 31 is really about the arrival of the eschatological state, in the New Covenant, and the true arrival of the covenant of grace.16

notes

  1. See Westminster Confession of Faith, 7.6.
  2. Historic Creeds and Confessions, electronic ed. (Oak Harbor: Lexham Press, 1997).
  3. See R. Scott Clark, Caspar Olevian and the Substance of the Covenant: The Double Benefit of Christ (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2005), 74–103.
  4. On the current membership in the SBC, see Aaron Earls, “Southern Baptists’ Membership Decline Continues Amid Other Areas of Growth,” The Baptist Courier May 2, 2025.
  5. Calvin raised questions about the pedagogy and source history of the Nicene Creed but not the substance of its theology. He cited and alluded to the Nicene repeatedly in the Institutes. E.g., see Reynolds, Stephen M. “Calvin’s View of the Athanasian and Nicene Creeds.” Westminster Theological Journal 23, no. 1 (December 31, 1960): 33–37.
  6. “Nous croyons et confessons une seule Église catholique ou universelle” My translation from Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, with a History and Critical Notes: The Evangelical Protestant Creeds, with Translations, vol. 3 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1882), 416.
  7. See William Perkins, The Works of William Perkins, ed. Joel R. Beeke et al., vol. 7 (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), 1–419.
  8. Perkins, Works, 7.5.
  9. The received Greek text says, “ὁμολογοῦμεν ἓν βάπτισμα εἰς ἄφεσιν ἁμαρτιῶν.”
  10. For more on the Nicene doctrine of baptism see, R. Scott Clark, “Does The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed Require Baptismal Regeneration?“
  11. The reader may read The Epistle of Barnabas for himself in Michael W. Holmes, ed., The Apostolic Fathers, Greek Texts and English Translations, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007).
  12. See R. Scott Clark, “Christ and Covenant: Federal Theology in Orthodoxy,” in Herman Selderhuis, ed., Companion to Reformed Orthodoxy (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
  13. We understand that Mormons imitate Christian baptism but we do not recognize the LDS as a Christian church of any sort.
  14. This is the year that the so-called Swiss Brethren in Zürich announced their rejection of infant baptism and began re-baptizing themselves and others.
  15. See Belgic Confession articles 18 and 34.
  16. See e.g., Caspar Olevianus, De substantia foederis gratuiti inter deum et electos (Geneva, 1585), 1.1–4.

©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.

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  • R. Scott Clark
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    R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.

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