Proclaimer Blog
Feeling thankful for my baptist (and other) forebears
Bear with me, if you're not a baptist. I spent an afternoon last week Dr Williams' Library as I posted here. The bulk of my time was reading about the life of Benjamin Keach and reading some of his sermons too. The library is the largest collection of non-conformist material in the world outside the statutory libraries and is a real treasure trove, even though it is run like a 1950s establishment (remember card indexes?). Wonderfully, I discovered more than Keach's sermons and writings. I found the court transcript from his indictment in 1661. He was accused of writing "A child's instructor" – a little primer in which he took objection to Cranmer's homily position that baptism washed away original sin and (I hadn't realised this) his position that lay people with gifts ought to be allowed to preach. I found reading the trial very moving. It was a kangaroo court, really, like something out of Blackadder. Keach was found guilty and pilloried, fined and imprisoned. One of his contemporaries was not so lucky. He was hanged.
Modern doctrinal differences on baptism aside (the paedo baptism of the judge was a very different kind of paedo-baptism he was arguing against, it seems to me, than modern evangelical paedo-baptist positions), I was moved to see how our forebears stuck up for the faith. This is true from every part of evangelicalism. It was true for John Rogers, Anglican minister here in the city of London and editor of the first English Bible. He became Protestantism's first martyr here in the UK. It was true for Benjamin Keach, imprisoned for what we would now call orthodoxy. They weren't fazed. And they carried on preaching.
Given our past, we can tend to be over-alarmist about the pressures we now face. Perhaps one day we will face imprisonment. But it's nothing that our forebears have not had before. And indeed, it's nothing that Christian preachers don't themselves face all around the world today. So, a little perspective please. And a little thankfulness for those brave souls who preached the gospel despite the extraordinarily high cost. And continue to do so.