054. THE CHURCH REPRESENTS CHRIST
THE CHURCH REPRESENTS CHRIST This principle that the church is to represent Christ, and that it is to contain only those who are spiritually joined to Christ, is of immeasurable importance. The neglect of it in the times of Constantine almost destroyed the church. Infant baptism swept into it vast multitudes of the unregenerate, until its early spirituality was lost and it fell an easy prey to the Roman hierarchy. The neglect of it after the Reformation undid almost all the results of that great revival of religion. Infant baptism again flooded the church with godlessness, identified it with the world, and infected it in every part with a skepticism and formality from which it has not yet been delivered. Why is it, on the other hand, that Baptists, without any iron wheel of outward organization,—a very rope of sand exposed at every moment to the rolling waves,—have been able to hold the truth, and to hold together, more perfectly than any other body of believers in Christendom? I give both the fact and the explanation in the words of men who are not Baptists, but whose utterances carry weight everywhere. In a recent letter which I received from Dr. William G. T. Shedd, that stalwart Presbyterian and eminent theologian said to me:
Among the denominations we all look to the Baptists for steady and firm adherence to sound doctrine. You have never had any internal doctrinal conflicts, and from year to year you present an undivided front in defense of the Calvinistic faith. Having no judicatures, and regarding the local church as the unit, it is remarkable that you maintain such a unity and solidarity of belief.
There is the fact. And Dr. J. L. Withrow of Chicago, one of the ablest of our Congregational brethren, gives us the explanation. He says, to our credit:
There is not a denomination of evangelical Christians that is throughout as sound theologically as the Baptist denomination. There is not an evangelical denomination in America to-day that is as true to the simple plain gospel of God, as it is revealed in the word, as is the Baptist denomination.
I think, therefore, that we may fairly claim the advantage of a doctrine which binds the church and Christ indissolubly together.
Thirdly: It is our Baptist advantage that we have always stood for the absolute separation of Church and State, and have done much to secure this freedom for America and for the world. From the beginning we have maintained that the Church should be completely independent of the State. Our doctrine of civil and religious liberty grows directly out of our doctrine of the direct relation of the individual Christian to Christ. Christ is the only Lawgiver, the only Lord of the conscience. There can be no rightful human lordship over God’s heritage. Since each local church is directly subject to Christ, there is no jurisdiction of one church over another, but all are on an equal footing, and all are independent of interference or control by the civil power. Absolute liberty of conscience under Christ has always been a distinguishing tenet of Baptists. Again and again have Baptists suffered persecution, but they have never persecuted. In Switzerland, when Zwingli, following the example of Luther, turned aside from the simple faith of the New Testament and for political reasons subjected the Church to the State, the Anabaptists, in 1527, issued the first public Confession in which Christian men claimed absolute religious freedom for themselves and granted absolute religious freedom to others.