Mertcan Bulak
@MBulak
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Ağustos 2020 tarihinde katıldı
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After abolishing the House of Lords, the House of Commons proclaimed England a republic—the Commonwealth. But in 1653 the army, still distrusting Parliament, overthrew the Commonwealth and set up a form of government called a protectorate. Cromwell held the Office of Lord Protector, virtually a military dictator of England.
The Lord Protector tried to achieve a religious settlement for the nation by granting liberty to a wide variety of Christian groups growing on the religious landscape: Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, Quakers, Levelers, and others. Unfortunately, he found the task impossible, and the last three years of his life were filled with disappointment and trouble. When he died in 1658, the “rule of the saints” in old England died with him. Within two years the country welcomed the return of the monarchy and, with the king, the office of bishop.
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By the end of 1646 Cromwell’s army had forced Charles to surrender. For the next two years, the king tried to play his enemies against each other: the Scots, the Presbyterians (who controlled Parliament), and the Independents (who dominated the army). He succeeded in splitting Parliament and making a secret alliance with the Scots. But fierce resentment against Charles broke out in the army, and in 1648 war erupted anew.
When Charles tried to punish the leaders of this opposition, civil war erupted. The Royalist members of Parliament left London to join the forces defending the king. So Parliament was free at last to institute the reform of the church the Puritans had always wanted. It called to Westminster scores of Puritan theologians and assigned to them the creation of a new form of worship and a new form of church government for the Church of England.
Laud’s high-minded and high-handed policy drove some Puritans toward Separatism and others across the Atlantic to America. Within ten years after Laud became archbishop, twenty towns and churches had sprung up in Massachusetts Bay: in all sixteen thousand people, including the four hundred who heard John Cotton’s farewell at Southampton.
The pastor of the Separatists, a Cambridge graduate named John Smyth, studied his Greek New Testament and discovered that the practice of baptizing babies never appeared in its pages. If babies were not included in the covenant of grace, only believers in Jesus Christ, then shouldn’t churches be constituted by confession of faith rather than ties of covenants? Smyth and forty members of the Amsterdam congregation answered yes and were baptized upon the profession of their personal faith in Jesus Christ. Smyth baptized himself by pouring water on himself and then baptized the other forty members of his congregation. The year was 1609. Thus they constituted the first English Baptist church.