Dennis: On your church history page you state that Baptists were started by John Smyth in 1609. Not so! Baptist had no one human founder. John Smyth only started one congregation in the Netherlands as Roger Williams started the first Baptist Church in America in 1639. There is evidence that Baptist go all the way back to the time of Tertullian (Edinburg Cyclopedia). Also from the “Apud Opera” pp> 112, 113 By Cardinal Hosius, President of the Council of Trent 1524 “Were it not that the Baptist have been grievous tormented (by the Roman catholic Church) and cut off with the knife during the past twelve hundred years, they would swarm in greater number than all the reformers”.
Sir Isaac Newton wrote “The Baptist are the only body of known Christian that have not symbolized with the church at Rome. Therefore it would be no stretch of the imagination to believe that the apostles were in fact Baptist.
J. Salza: Your resources are incorrect. But even if you refuse to believe that the baptist church didn’t start in 1609, the burden is on you to demonstrate that the baptist church is the church of the apostles. The problem, of course, is you cannot. First, there is not one single early Church father in the first seven centuries of Christianity who ever referenced the “baptist” Church (but many quotes referring to the “Catholic church.”) If you disagree, then provide the quotes and the sources from which you are quoting. Further, the baptist church has no internal or systematic consistency on key core Christian doctrines, like justification, salvation, and, yes, baptism.
Again, the burden is on you to prove the apostolic roots of the baptist church, but I assure you that you cannot. The baptist church denies key tenets of the Christian faith that were believed and wrote about by the early church Fathers, such as the Eucharist as a sacrifice, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, salvation by grace through faith and works, baptismal regeneration, Peter as the chief shepherd of the universal church, etc.
Dennis: You say that my resources are incorrect. In other words you are saying that Cardinal Hosius (Catholic, 1524, President of the Council of Trent) never said what I wrote He said. That Sir Isaac Newton never said what I wrote you he said and that it is not written in the Edinburg Cyclopedia what I wrote you is said in it. PROVE IT. By the way Baptist is not a denomination nor are they Protestants. Also not everyone that call themselves baptists are true Baptists.
J. Salza: Dennis, for your information, neither Cardinal Hosiu, Isaac Newton nor the Edinburg Encyclopedia are able to make dogmatic pronouncements about what is true and what is not true concerning faith or morals. So your reliance upon them is misplaced. It is funny you bring up the Council of Trent. Have you actually read that council’s documents? If you do, then you will discover that the Council of Trent rejected all of the fallacious views held by Baptists such as justification by faith alone, the Mass as a mere fellowship meal, and the non-inspiration of the deuterocanonical books. You really need to check your sources before quoting them, since your reliance upon Trent just bit you in the backside.
By the way, the baptists, and any other organization that claims to be Christian but is not in union with the successor of Peter, is a Protestant organization. That is, it is “protest”ing against the authority of Rome.
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We can not prove that we come all the way from the time of the Apostles, because we have been destroyed and persecuted for 100's of years by the Church of Rome. This statement comes from Cardinal Stanislaw Hosius "if it were not for the fact that the Baptists were severely tortured and cut off with a knife for the last thousand two hundred years, they would be enormously numerous than all the reformers." I've been to Malta and have seen pictures and have read of Spain's Inquisitions. This shows the awful things that the Church of Rome has done. Most importantly we have the wonderful Promise from our Lord about the Church. " the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it." We are still here the true Church of Saved Baptized Believers.
In 1984, when I was praying about where to attend seminary, I explored the possibility of going to Union Theological Seminary in NYC. I scheduled an appointment to visit the campus. On the appointed day I was met by several staff and students and given a very informative tour of the facilities, a wonderful "sales pitch" about why I should consider getting my theological education at Union, guided all the time by a very nice young couple.
The highlight of the trip was that I was privileged to sit in on a lecture concerning John 14, given by the world's foremost Johannine scholar, a Jesuit Priest by the name of Raymond Brown. For 45 of the 50 minutes Dr. Brown delivered the most brilliant exposition of John 14 I had ever heard. But the last five minutes he began with the words, "Of course that is only what John believed. . . " and in those last five minutes I discovered the difference between Catholics and Baptists.
People of Catholic faith believe that their Popes and Cardinals have authority over the Bible. After all, as they see it, the Romans compiled and established the Canon, and by appealing to both the canonical documents and their tradition, they consider themselves the arbiters of faith and practice. Baptists, on the other hand, believe that the 66 books of the Bible have authority over the Church in all matters of faith and practice.
So, two conclusions from this true story:
(1) Baptists reject as unbiblical the Roman traditional teachings about salvation by faith and works, and the Sacraments as works conveying grace (especially baptismal regeneration, the continual sacrifice of Christ on the cross, and Roman teaching about the Eucharist).
(2) Because Baptists place themselves under the sole authority of the 66 books called the Holy Bible-- Old and New Testaments-- the Baptist faith predates the Roman faith by at least 300 years. Even though the first known Baptist church was founded in the Netherlands in 1609 by John Smyth, the principles of our faith are grounded in the principle of Sola Scriptura.