Can Baptists Be Catholic? (Part 3)

by on August 18, 2025 | Comment

More Than Identity, More Than Intention

My Baptist friends give two replies to the claim that they are not truly catholic. First, they appeal to their intent to be catholic. For example, in the introduction to the Second London Confession (1689) they say: “This we did the more abundantly to manifest our consent with both in all the fundamental articles of the Christian religion, as also with many others whose orthodox Confessions have been published to the world on the behalf of the Protestant in diverse nations and cities.” In 26.1 the Particular Baptists confess, “The catholic or universal church, which (with respect to the internal work of the Spirit and truth of grace) may be called invisible, consists of the whole number of the elect, that have been, are, or shall be gathered into one, under Christ, the head thereof; and is the spouse, the body, the fulness of him that fills all in all.”

Second, in defense of the thesis that the Baptist tradition is truly catholic some have appealed to a 2013 essay by Timothy George in which he described how he as a Baptist is able to appreciate and borrow from other traditions:

Being a Baptist is a blessing but also sometimes a burden. From time to time I have considered the possibility of becoming something else. I once prepared a talk called “The Confessions of a Catholic-friendly, Pentecostal-admiring, Reformed Baptist with a Hankering after Lutheranism and a Strong Affinity for the Book of Common Prayer.” Each of these ecclesial traditions, among others, has enriched my life and calling to serve the Body of Christ. Each brings distinctive treasures to our common labors pro Christo et ecclesia. Being a Baptist gives me all the freedom I need to appropriate as fully as I can the gifts they offer without abandoning the Baptist principles and ways that I cherish.1

We should recognize and honor the Baptist intention to be catholic and we should recognize their self-identity as catholic, but true catholicity is more than mere intent and self-identity. There must be objective reality accompanying intention, and objective reality correlated to an identity.

To address the latter first and quickly, if I demand that people regard me as a bunny rabbit, those of whom I am making this demand have a right to know whether there is any evidence that I am, in fact, a bunny rabbit. Do I have rabbit ears? No. Do I hop like a bunny? No. Do I munch on grass in the yard like a bunny? No. Do I sleep in a hutch? No. Having failed all these tests (and more), a rational person is entitled to reject my demand to be regarded as bunny on the grounds that there is no objective evidence to support my demand.

The first objection, intention, is more difficult. After all, Roman Catholics object to the Reformed claim to catholicity on similar grounds. Our claim, however, has more merit than the Baptist claim because it has more substance. Indeed, as previously noted, we argue that we have a better claim to true catholicity than Roman Catholics. After all, our Lord instituted only two sacraments. Rome has added five false sacraments. There was no papacy in the New Testament or in the early post-apostolic church. There is no evidence before the mid-ninth century of a developed doctrine of transubstantiation and no evidence of ecclesiastical adoption of the doctrine until the late thirteenth century. The list could go on. We, who have preserved New Testament and early post-apostolic theology, piety, and practice are much more catholic than Romanists.

Further, it is true that orthodox Baptists (e.g., Particular Baptists) reject the Christological heresies of the Anabaptists (e.g., the Melchiorite celestial flesh Christology adopted by Menno) and they affirm the ecumenical creeds, the catholic doctrines of Scripture, God, man, Christ, salvation, and last things. Were we to stop there, we might have to concede the Particular Baptist claim to catholicity.

What our Baptist friends are asking us to do, however, is to exclude ecclesiology and sacraments from catholicity; and this we may not do. This was the crux of Augustine’s argument with the Donatists. Ecclesiology is essential to catholicity. The ninth article of our “undoubted catholic faith” says we believe in “the holy catholic church.” That is a reference, at least in part, to the visible church. That is why, in Belgic Confession articles 28 and 29 the Reformed churches affirm that there is a church catholic in all times and places, but that church catholic comes to visible manifestation in history. That is why the Reformed churches give marks of the true church, so that Christians may know where the church catholic is.

The Anabaptist and Baptist denial of the validity of the administration of baptism of the entire church until 1523 creates gigantic and arguably insurmountable problems for the Baptist claim to catholicity. First of all, the very Baptists who claim not to be Anabaptist, with a few notable exceptions, acknowledge the validity of Anabaptist baptisms but deny the validity of infant baptisms administered in Roman, Eastern, Lutheran, Anglican, and Reformed churches. Where is the catholicity in that? Where is the catholicity in, as it were, de-baptizing (were such a thing possible), virtually the entire church before 1523.

From the most ancient evidence available to us, it has been the Christian position that only baptized persons are eligible for holy communion.2 Thus, unbaptized persons are excommunicate. Further, baptism is a prerequisite to inclusion in the visible church. Formally, that is, outwardly considered, unbaptized persons are outside the visible church. Since the time of Cyprian the church has held and the Reformed churches confess that outside the visible church there is no salvation.3 Belgic Confession 28 confesses, “Outside the church there is no salvation.”4 Westminster Confession 25.2 says,

The visible church, which is also catholic or universal under the gospel (not confined to one nation, as before under the law), consists of all those throughout the world that profess the true religion; and of their children: and is the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ, the house and family of God, out of which there is no ordinary possibility of salvation.

Thus the problem is evident. Our Baptist friends regard our members who have only an infant baptism as unbaptized, putting them at odds with the entire church before 1523 and putting millions of people out of the church and, as far as the Reformed churches confess, outside of salvation. They have effectively denied the catholicity of huge swaths of the church and yet they want us to regard them as catholic? Does not catholicity entail, at least, a certain degree of informal communion? Why would Baptists want to be in any communion with unbaptized, unsaved people who have the gall to call themselves Christians? Is this not why the Anabaptist and Baptist movements arose in the first place, to separate from the impure, visible churches which baptized infants and thereby corrupted the church?

Conclusions

The current Baptist retrieval movement, ressourcement, which seeks to reconnect Baptists and others with the fathers and the Medieval church, is much to be appreciated, but it is also bound to create a crisis.5 The Anabaptist and Baptist movements are, essentially, radical separatist movements. Retrieval and ressourcement are movements in the opposite direction. Put plainly: separation and connection are two different impulses. It would seem there is a sort of schizophrenia at work here: on the one hand, purifying the church by radically rejecting big chunks of what counted for catholicity, and thus redefining it, and on the other, seeking to be regarded as catholic by those from whom the Anabaptists and Baptists have separated.

The catholic Baptists find themselves, as Timothy George implicitly recognized, in a sort of no man’s land. I do not profess to know what contemporary Anabaptists are saying, but to their credit, the first- and second-generation Anabaptists were consistent. They rejected the church before them and rejected any and all attempts to correct them. They forged their own path with little care about catholicity. The Baptist appropriation and redefinition of catholicity seems rather more tenuous.

Notes

  1. Timothy George, “Is Jesus a Baptist?” First Things, August 12, 2013
  2. “But let no one eat or drink of your Eucharist except those who have been baptized into the name of the Lord, for the Lord has also spoken concerning this: ‘Do not give what is holy to dogs.’” Didache 9.5, in Michael William Holmes ed., The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations, Updated ed. (Baker Books, 1999), 261.
  3. “Quia salus extra ecclesiam non est.” Because salvation outside the church does not exist. Ep. 73.21, in Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (volume 3.2): Cyprian, Opera; Cyprian of Carthage, “The Epistles of Cyprian,” in Fathers of the Third Century: Hippolytus, Cyprian, Novatian, Appendix, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, trans. Robert Ernest Wallis, vol. 5, The Ante-Nicene Fathers (Christian Literature Company, 1886), 384. I am grateful to Harrison Perkins for his help with this quotation.
  4. “et salus nulla sit extra eam.”
  5. Ressourcement is a French term which refers to the Nouvelle Theologie movement among Roman Catholic theologians such as Henri de Lubac (1896–1991). It has come to be used more widely to describe good faith efforts at retrieval of the past for contemporary usage.

©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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