There are about 700 organizations in America today, claiming to be churches. Every one of these false churches can be traced to some man as their founder. Every one of these, each and all, have their own man-made creeds or faiths, and they are as conflicting as light and darkness. They can't all be true. But our school textbook writers throw all these conflicting creeds into one pile, and label the whole conglomerated mess: "The Christian Church!" Baptists have been permitting their children to be taught this monstrous falsehood without entering a protest. No wonder confusion, infidelity, atheism and wickedness are stalking rampant everywhere, defying every code of decency. The ONE and ONLY true Church is the Bride of Christ. She walks with him, trusts in him, leans on his arm, and has never strayed off into some spiritual "red light" district and needed reforming.
-Monroe Jones in The Bride and Seven Other Women 1948
I have never viewed myself as Protestant although I
constantly get lumped into that pile. I’m a Primitive Baptist and have a
heritage of baptism in churches that go back to Christ and the apostles without
ever coming out of the Roman Catholic Church.
I have come to find out that that is called “pseudohistory” and that “no
reputable church historians have ever affirmed the belief that Baptists can
trace their lineage through medieval and ancient sects ultimately to the New
Testament”. Should I just submit to the scholarly opinions accepted by even
Baptist scholars that all Baptists are protestants?
The realistic truth is, my Baptism doesn’t have some kind of
pedigree like a registered Border Collie that certifies and proves the validity
of each baptism back to Christ. No one does. If you think a Roman Catholic or
an Eastern Orthodox has such a pedigree (doubtful), then I would argue that is
only a nominal or mechanical succession. I’m not really interested in a succession
of the same name, or a perpetuity based on human tradition, but rather interested
in perpetuity of the same faith and discipline from Christ.
Before I can jump into history, it’s vital I review my
starting point. The first axiom is that the 66 books of the Bible are the
infallible word of God and therefore the only authoritative source of light on
the subject. But didn’t the Bible come from the church? No. The Bible contains
revelation from God to the church, through God’s servants. The church never
decided what God’s words were, they recognized them and submitted to him by
obeying those words and rejecting anything spurious pretending to be God’s
words. I know what they are by tradition, yes. Tradition means to hand down
over time. So, in some sense, I am relying on the church while putting that
tradition to the test. That’s the only starting point I have at my disposal. First,
my church must be judged on the authority we profess to follow. If we pass
that, then the protestants are out because we profess the same authority. If we
fail the test of the scriptures we hold to, then our tradition does nothing to
validate the Bible we profess as the authentic words of God, and I’m left to search
for the tradition that kept the oracles as delivered from Christ. I don’t see
any consistency in the belief that you can know what the scriptures are and
deny the tradition that kept them through the generations. The perpetuity of
the church and perpetuity of the scriptures go hand in hand.
From the Bible, I want to go through and carefully review what
it teaches about the identity of the church. Then and only then can I judge the
history, because we have to subject each historian’s conclusion to the light of
the Bible, not the other way around.
