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Baptists and Church of Christ folk have far more in common than either of them sometimes acknowledges. Right-thinking people in both places know that we must trust Christ's work on the cross for salvation. Neither group attaches any significance or value to baptism apart from faith-trust in Jesus Christ. Both groups baptize converts in obedience to Jesus' charge in the Great Commission, and both do so by immersion (Matt. 28:18-20). Both are congregational in church government and both prize freedom of individual conscience.
Alexander Campbell, a founding father of the Restoration Movement which spawned modern Churches of Christ, belonged for a while to a regional Baptist Association. He broke that connection before being expelled from it, after he inferred from Acts 2:38 that the chief purpose of baptism was the forgiveness of sins. Although Campbell saw baptism as the "formal" means of forgiveness, he did not consider it the actual or "effective" means, and he personally regarded unimmersed believers as Christians. However, his focus on Acts 2:38 (rather than the same Apostle Peter's remarks, for example, in Acts 10:43) eventually led the majority of Church of Christ folk to conclude that only those who were baptized "for the remission of sins" had received New Testament baptism.
By the 1880's, David Lipscomb, a Nashville educator and editor of The Gospel Advocate, still received Baptists without rebaptizing them -- insisting that obedience to Christ was not only an adequate reason for being baptized but was the noblest reason possible. In 1884, Austin McGary, a former sheriff and recent convert in Texas, started his rival paper, The Firm Foundation, specifically to oppose Lipscomb's teaching on this subject and to insist on rebaptizing Baptists. Eventually many Baptists returned the favor, arguing that Church of Christ baptism was invalid because it looked to baptism for salvation rather than to Jesus. Church of Christ folk denied the charge, of course, but the dogmatic rhetoric of their prominent debaters often drowned out their most earnest protestations.
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The Baptist flock provided many converts to Campbell's movement, particularly throughout the South. When Campbell preached in Nashville, Tennessee in the mid-1800's, a majority of the city's First Baptist Church membership was persuaded to join his reformation. Little wonder that the Southern Baptist Encyclopedia labels "Campbellism" as one of two great heresies among Baptists, the other being "Landmarkism." Over the next 100 years, Baptists and Church of Christ folk frequently engaged in public debates, which usually generated more heat than light, and which often resulted in more Baptists being "converted" to the Church of Christ.
A century of antagonism and isolation hardened stereotypes of each other in the minds of both groups. Many Church of Christ folk came to believe that Baptists "do not believe in baptism," even though their historical insistence on the rite provided their name. And many Baptists came to think of Church of Christ people as those folks who "believe in baptismal regeneration." Both stereotypes were unfair, if applied to the best representatives of either group, but both caricatures found popular justification in the extreme statements of zealots on both sides.
Today, the gospel light is shining across Christendom, and there are signs of gospel renewal among these two groups as well. Many Baptists today, following the lead of British Baptist scholar G.R. Beasley-Murray, relate baptism more carefully to the gospel, rather than making it a mere requirement for local church membership. Many Churches of Christ are now clearly preaching Christ rather than baptism, still being careful to baptize those who believe on him as Savior and Lord. And many congregations associated with both groups are receiving baptized believers from the other group into full membership without requiring their rebaptism. That is a wonderful step forward, for which we all may be grateful to God.
I beg the indulgence of readers who are not associated with Baptist churches or Churches of Christ, as we look in three gracEmails at those two groups of Christians, both particularly populous and highly competitive throughout the southern United States.
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In the light of the gospel, we must say that both Baptists and Church of Christ people have often missed the real point by focusing on something we do, rather than focusing on what God had done for us in Jesus Christ. Baptists have often talked as though the saving event occurs when we believe ("accept Christ"), while Church of Christ people have talked as though the saving event occurs when we are baptized ("obey the gospel").
Both groups are right in what they require, but both are wrong in thinking that our human activity constitutes the saving event. The saving activity which set sinners right with God happened almost 2,000 years ago, in the perfect doing and dying of Jesus Christ our representative. It does not occur when we believe or when we are baptized, though we can only trust Jesus for his salvation, a trust which he commanded us to express in baptism. Jesus died because of our transgressions and he was raised because of our justification (Rom.4:25). He reconciled us to God in his fleshly body on the cross (Col. 1:19-22). He made atonement for sin, once for all, and he perfected forever those for whom he died (Heb. 1:3; 10:12-14).
Jesus commanded his followers to preach the gospel and to baptize believers. Baptists have done very well in preaching the gospel, but sometimes they have been careless about promptly baptizing those who believe, and in relating that baptism to the gospel. Church of Christ folk have been diligent to baptize everyone who believes, but they have often gotten the cart before the horse by passing lightly over the gospel, or by confusing the gospel with the believer's response to it. By God's grace, both groups are learning to do better all that Jesus commanded in the Great Commission. May they also learn to hold up each other's hands as brothers and sisters as they do so.