Influence On Modern Baptists
Thus, Spilsbury might be excluding from salvation anyone who does not go on to believer's baptism. Alternatively, however, the meaning of "expresly owned" is that, apart from volitional submission to the established ordinance, the public confession whereby one says, "I have faith in Christ alone as Savior" is absent.
Spilsbury's arguments for the rightness of believer's baptism found virtually no detractors from within Baptist ranks; it continues to influence both Baptist belief and practice today. His arguments that believer's baptism as a necessity for the public owning of Christ became common doctrine.
On the other hand, if one applies the statement rigorously, that apart from believer's baptism there is no saving faith, few if any followers can be found in subsequent Baptist history. Perhaps this ambiguity gave rise to article XVI of the appendix to the 1646 edition of the London confession written by Mr. Spilsbury's friend and co-laborer, Benjamin Cockes (Cox):
Although a true believer, whether baptized, or unbaptized, be in the state of salvation, and shall certainly be saved: Yet in obedience to the command of Christ every believer ought to desire baptism, and to yield himself to be baptized according to the rule of Christ in His word: And where this obedience is in faith performed, there Christ makes this His ordinance a means of unspeakable benefit to the believing soul, Acts 2:38, 22:16; Rom. 6:3, 4; 1 Pet.3:21. And a true believer that here sees the command of Christ lying upon him, cannot allow himself in disobedience thereunto, Acts 24:16.
Read more about this topic: John Spilsbury (Baptist Minister)
Famous quotes containing the words influence, modern and/or baptists:
“Power lasts ten years; influence not more than a hundred.”
—Korean proverb, quoted in Alan L. Mackay, The Harvest of a Quiet Eye (1977)
“The great British Library—an immense collection of volumes of all ages and languages, many of which are now forgotten, and most of which are seldom read: one of these sequestered pools of obsolete literature to which modern authors repair, and draw buckets full of classic lore, or “pure English, undefiled” wherewith to swell their own scanty rills of thought.”
—Washington Irving (1783–1859)
“[T]he Congregational minister in a neighboring town definitely stated that ‘the same spirit which drove the herd of swine into the sea drove the Baptists into the water, and that they were hurried along by the devil until the rite was performed.’”
—For the State of Vermont, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)