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.
Bethlehem Chapel near the university gave Hus an unrivaled opportunity to circulate Wyclif’s teachings, including his criticisms of the abuses of power in the papacy. On the walls were paintings contrasting the behavior of the popes and Christ. The pope rode a horse; Christ walked barefoot. Jesus washed the disciples’ feet; the pope preferred to have his kissed.
The Reformation of the sixteenth century struck a heavy blow against monasticism. Martin Luther, who had himself been a monk, declared war on the cloister. Monasticism, said Luther and the other Reformers, encourages the idea of two roads to God, a higher and a lower. But the gospel knows only one way to salvation. It is by faith alone in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Sometime around 318 Arius openly challenged teachers in Alexandria by asserting that the Word (Logos) who assumed flesh in Jesus Christ (John 1:14) was a lesser god who had a different nature than God the Father and that the Son was neither eternal nor omnipotent. He was a created being—the first created being and the greatest, but nevertheless himself created.
Such teaching appealed to many of the former pagans; it was so much like the religion of their youth. Converts from paganism found it hard to grasp the Christian belief that the Word existed from all eternity and that he is equal with the Father. Arius made Christianity easier to understand.
The Gnostics liked the idea of the good God sending Christ, so they thought that the ultimate deity sent one of his subordinate powers, called Christ, into the world to free people from the chains of matter. Christ, however, could have no real contact with matter, so at the baptism of Jesus of Nazareth, or thereabouts, the Christ descended into him; then at the arrest of Jesus, or thereabouts, the Christ withdrew. What was scourged and slain could not have been Christ.
The first position was held by a Jewish-Christian sect known as the Ebionites. They taught that Jesus was a mere human who by his scrupulous obedience to the Law was “justified” and became the Messiah.
The opposite position was called Docetism. The word comes from a Greek verb meaning “to seem.” The title comes from their teaching that Christ was not really a man: he was a spectral appearance. He only seemed to suffer for humankind’s sins, since we all know divine beings are incapable of dying.