234 – Aug. 22 – This Day in Baptist History Past

 

A Dull Scholar in Christ’s School

1751 – Rev. Isaac Backus, one of the outstanding pastors of a Separate (Conservative Congregational) Church at Middlebourgh, Massachusetts was baptized by Rev. Benjamin Pierce. This was at a time when the Baptists (only fifty churches total in America) being small in number, were also divided and persecuted.  Backus would later write, “After renewing grace was granted, I was such a dull scholar in Christ’s school, that I was thirty-two years in learning a lesson of only six words, namely, ‘one Lord, one faith, one baptism.’ It took ten years to get clear of the custom of putting baptism before faith [his Congregational experience] and near five more to learn not to contradict the same in practice [his Separate experience] after which, above seventeen trying years…before we could refrain from an implicit acknowledgment of more than ‘one Lord’ in religious affairs” [the embracing of the church/state as an overlord]. His joining the Baptists was not prompted by prominence, popularity or pedigree but out of conviction. [Robert C. Newman, Baptists and the American Tradition (Des Plaines, Ill.: Regular Baptist Press. 1076, p. 32. This Day in Baptist History II: Cummins and Thompson, BJU Press: Greenville, S.C. 2000 A.D. pp. 459-460.] Prepared by Dr. Greg Dixon