“Between Us and the Compleat Anabaptists”
Chapter 3 explains and analyzes why the first Baptists rejected infant or paedobaptism, rooting the rejection of paedobaptism in the prior embrace of a congregational ecclesiology, thus serving to both explain the emergence of baptistic congregationalists while also reinforcing the historical connection drawn in chapter 2 between “Baptists” and more mainstream congregationalists. Drawing on close readings of theological treatises published during the 1640s, chapter 3 demonstrates that baptistic congregationalists understood their embrace of believer’s baptism to be the logical outworking of their congregational principles. The chapter also demonstrates that episcopalian and presbyterian critics of both “Baptists” and congregationalists understood the two groups to be closely allied to one another, an insight that further buttresses the chapter’s overarching contention that it was congregational ecclesiology which made the rejection of paedobaptism a viable, mainstream, intellectual possibility for the first time in England’s history.