Expert: Rev. Andrew Smith - 5/4/2007

Question
I first learned of the Seventh Day Baptist about 10 years ago. I grew up in the Baptist church (Missionary) and heard of and visited several kinds of Baptist churches from freewill to primitive, but had never heard of Seventh Day Baptists until researching different sabbath keeping groups. When I first came across the name, I thought it was one small independent church but to my surprise it was a small denomination with roots in United States as early as the 1600s and even before then in Europe as an independent group of believers that followed the Waldenses. I would constantly mention and inquire about them to other Sunday keeping Baptist pastors who said they had also never heard of them, not even the Baptist Conference in Augusta Ga. They seemed to be surprised at their existence and well established history. But, I surprisingly found a link to a letter written by the Seventh Day Baptist General Conference to Sunday Keeping Baptists in 1843, titled "An Address to the Baptist Denomination of the United States On the Observance of the Sabbath From the Seventh Day Baptist General Conference." You can read it if you go to their home page and select Beliefs/History and then Historical Resources, and finally Letter to the Baptists. With their books, articles, magazines, quarterlies, publishing houses and two or three colleges they began, Alfred University in NY and Salem in W. Va and one other, I'm surprised that more Baptist clergy aren't familiar with them. Although still small, there are still active congregations as old as 350 years old in the US alone. Do you know of them and why are they not that well known among their Sunday keeping brethren? According to their website, with the exception of worshipping on the Sabbath, they share the same beliefs as Sunday Baptists. If you've ever heard of them, do you know about any history or interaction they've had with Sunday Baptist brethren over the years and why not more cooperation being that with the exception of the Biblical Sabbath observance, they have more doctrine in common with traditional Baptists than do the primitive Baptists?


Answer
Sky,

  I am aware of the existence of the Seventy Day Baptists. The early Baptists (1600s) were people committed to restoring a biblical order to church worship and practice, a commitment which eventually issued in a rejection of the near universal practice of infant baptism in favor of adult believers' baptism in the 17th century. Some Baptists, however, were looking to modify other practices and beliefs on the basis of scripture as well, and many of the most radical of the early Baptists of post-Oliver Cromwell England (1660s) believed that Sunday Sabbath-keeping was one more holdover from the Roman Catholic Church that had to be modified in order to purify the church. These became Seventh Day Baptists. In the United States, the first Seventh Day Baptist church was formed when a controversy over the correct day for Sabbath observation broke out in the Baptist church of Newport, Rhode Island. The church split, and the Seventh Day members formed a church there in 1671. This was probably the first Seventh Day Baptist church in America.

It was a Seventh Day Baptist, Rachel Preston, that in 1844 introduced Ellen White, the founder of Seventh Day Adventism, to the idea of seventh-day Sabbath observance. Unfortunately for the Baptists, however, the new Adventist movement siphoned off many converts to Sabbatarianism that would eventually have made their way to Seventh Day Baptists churches.

To answer your questions: I imagine that they are not well known because they are 1) still a fairly small denomination, and 2) they are irenic enough not to make waves. The peaceful, friendly tone of the "Address" that you mention in your question says it all.

Next: Seventh Day Baptists, while maintaining their particular beliefs on the Sabbath, have from time to time cooperated with other Baptists when appropriate. Seventh Day Baptists cooperated with other Baptists in the struggle for religious liberty in colonial America, when Baptists were often hounded by Anglican and Congregational religious authorities for dissenting from the state church. In fact, to this very day, Seventh Day Baptists continue to cooperate with the Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Liberty.

At the same time, Seventh Day Baptists have their own mission society and do mission work separately from other Baptists.

There was one thing that you mentioned that I want to highlight. Many Baptists, Sabbatarian or otherwise, affirm a historical connection between medieval heretics such as the Waldenses and modern day Baptists. This is false; no historical evidence exists to support this idea. In the United States, this idea became popularized by a Southern Baptist, J. R. Graves, who asserted that Baptist churches were the only true churches, descended directly from the apostles through a line that had nothing to do with the Roman Catholic Church. Graves was getting his information from G. H. Orchard's “History of Foreign Baptists,” a text in which that very argument was set out. Orchard, however, made some assumptions that were not warranted by the evidence that he had available. Also, he relied heavily on the work of a Scottish historian, William Jones, who had written a work called “History of the Christian Church.” While Jones didn't posit a historical connection between Waldenses and Albigenses and Baptists, he hinted that they were one in spirit. This might well be true, in some sense, but it does not translate into a historical connection. Waldenses and Baptists (of any sort) do not belong on the same family tree. The Baptist movement that gave rise to Seventh Day Baptists cannot be traced back any farther than a group of Puritans that started practicing adult believers' baptism in London in 1633 at the very earliest.

Hope this helps,

Andrew