In recent days, months, and years there has been a renewed interest, even captivation, regarding the subject of political theology across virtually every branch of Christianity. Many are once again seeking to answer the question: what does it mean for there to be (or should there be) a separation of church and state? These are undoubtedly important questions which have extensive implications on both the civil and the sacred depending on how you answer them. In like manner to myself, our brothers at The Particular Baptist Podcast and Blog have sought to answer such questions by recovering the riches of the Particular Baptist tradition concerning it in their recent article: The Particular Baptists Were Against Secular Liberty: A Vindication. While I could not agree more with the mission in mind, I believe there are some points proposed here that require further scrutiny regarding one of the greatest hallmarks of historic Baptist theology—Christian liberty and liberty of conscience.
I’m thankful for the impulse behind this article. It’s trying to do something that needs doing: to rescue Particular Baptist political theology from lazy slogans and modern projections. The author opens by noting that “many seem to assume that if they advocated any view of religious liberty and liberty of conscience, they must have advocated our modern view.” That’s true. The seventeenth century is not the twenty-first century, and it’s a serious historical mistake to read modern categories of secularism, pluralism (though present in the time of the Apostles), and “neutral public space” back into the world of Cromwell, Restoration politics, and dissenting ecclesiology.
So I want to say up front: yes—the Particular Baptists did not “push for a modern conception of religious liberty that seeks to divorce God from the state altogether.” If by “modern conception” we mean a state that treats all religions as equally true (or equally irrelevant) and aims at a principled public agnosticism, that is not how early Baptists generally spoke.
But here’s the tension: the article’s corrective risks overshooting. In pushing against “modern secular liberty,” it tends to frame the issue as a stark choice between (1) modern secularism and (2) a magistrate who may legitimately punish or suppress significant portions of religious error, blasphemy, and denial of Scripture. And that framing—while rhetorically neat—does not actually map cleanly onto the best Baptist sources, nor onto the New Testament’s own ethical and ecclesiological logic.
What follows is an attempt to clarify categories, to tighten historical method, and to ask whether the scriptural reasoning being implied really holds.
1) The Key Category Problem: “Secular Liberty” vs. “Liberty of Conscience”
The article’s thesis is introduced plainly: the Particular Baptists weren’t modern secularists; they held “a more moderate position chiefly concerned with freedom of worship, without throwing off all common-sense restrictions.” That’s an important claim. But it hides a categorical problem.
Historically, liberty of conscience (as dissenters meant it) and modern secular liberty (as we use the term today) are not the same thing. The state can be morally accountable to God without possessing jurisdiction over worship. Early Baptists could reject “purely secular government” and still deny the magistrate authority circa sacra (around sacred things) in the sense of enforcing doctrinal boundaries or punishing unbelief as unbelief.
In short: rejecting secular neutrality does not necessarily entail endorsing coercive religious enforcement.
And that isn’t a modern liberal excuse. It’s a deep Christian instinct: coercion can restrain outward harm, but it cannot produce faith.
2) Blackwood: A Helpful Witness, But Not a Safe Foundation
The article leans heavily on Christopher Blackwood to show that Baptists could “affirm liberty without affirming anything like a modern secular government.” I agree Blackwood is fascinating. The cited passage is striking because it draws a threefold distinction of “evil works,” dividing them into what violates nature or reason, what violates the “light of nations,” and what violates the “light of faith.”
Two observations, though, are worth pressing.
First: Blackwood’s “light of nations” move is not self-justifying. Blackwood says certain things “may be punished by the Magistrate, because all or most Nations in the world do it.” But that rationale is historically descriptive, not theologically determinative. “Most nations do it” is not the same as “God authorizes it.” It risks baptizing consensus as moral warrant.
If the author’s main scriptural anchor is Romans 13, we should be careful here. Romans 13 says the magistrate is to be “a terror” to evil works, but it doesn’t define evil as “whatever most nations treat as evil.” That definition has to be argued from elsewhere.
Second: the article’s own narrative admits Blackwood is complicated. It says Blackwood “makes a partial retraction” and becomes “uncertain” about parts of his scheme. That does not ruin Blackwood as evidence. But it does caution us against treating his earlier statement as a stable representative norm. The article tries to resolve that by arguing his uncertainty did not reflect broader Baptist uncertainty. Fine…but that leads into the next major pillar: the 1659 Declaration.
3) The 1659 Declaration: What It Proves, and What It Doesn’t
The article calls the 1659 Declaration “the most remarkable consensus document we have on the subject,” signed by major leaders, and says it is “crystal clear” against “universal toleration.” It then quotes the famous section:
“we… declare our utter detestation of such a Toleration… Nor do we desire, in matters of Religion, that Popery should be tolerated… or any persons tolerated, that worship a false god; nor any that speak contemptuously… of our Lord Jesus Christ; nor any that deny the holy Scriptures…”
This is strong language. We shouldn’t pretend otherwise.
But we need to ask: what question is this document answering? The declaration itself frames the issue: “Whereas we are further charged with endeavoring an universal Toleration… under pretense of Liberty of Conscience; it is… notoriously false.” In other words, it is (at least in part) a public defense against a particular accusation: that they wanted a society in which every civil and religious miscarriage was tolerated.
That matters, because “universal toleration” in that setting often meant something like no punishments for public disorder, and no meaningful boundaries at all. Baptists are denying that they are anarchists (as Anabapitsts were inclined to be, and Baptists were inclined to be confused with them by authorities).
So the declaration absolutely helps establish this: mainstream Particular Baptists rejected unbounded toleration of “all miscarriages… in things Religious and Civil.”
But does it establish the stronger claim the article seems to want—that mainstream Particular Baptists therefore endorsed civil punishment of doctrinal denial and non-Christian worship as such?
Maybe for some. But as a consensus inference, it’s harder because the Declaration lists a bundle without clarifying the basis for coercion. Notice how it blends together Popery (viewed as politically dangerous), worship of a “false god,” contempt of Christ, and denial of Scripture. But it does not carefully distinguish what is punishable because it is a threat to public peace, what is punishable because it is intrinsically religious error, what is addressed by church discipline, and what is addressed by civil restraint.
The article tends to read the list as straightforward endorsement of civil punishment for each item as such. But the declaration itself does not spell out the mechanism, and that ambiguity matters.
4) Tombes and the “No Distinction of Civil and Spiritual” Claim
A particularly important moment in the article is the quotation from John Tombes, arguing that Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2 speak of rulers punishing evil “without limitation and distinction of Civil and Spiritual things,” concluding therefore “we are to understand the Governing in the text to be in Religious things as well as Civil.”
This deserves careful scriptural engagement.
Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2 do not erase jurisdictional lines. Romans 13 certainly teaches that civil authority is ordained by God and legitimately restrains evil. But Romans 12 immediately precedes it, explicitly removing vengeance and coercive retribution from the Christian’s calling. And Romans 14 immediately follows it, regulating conscience and disputable matters within the church.
So even on a plain reading of Romans, Paul is not constructing an undifferentiated sphere where “civil and spiritual” are indistinguishable. He is doing the opposite: differentiating the Christian’s cruciform ethic from the magistrate’s sword-bearing role, and differentiating both from the church’s conscience-bound life under Christ.
And 1 Peter 2—while commanding submission—also frames Christian identity as “sojourners and exiles” and presents the church as a distinct priestly people. The apostles teach obedience, but they also show limits when commanded to sin (Acts 5:29). The New Testament pattern is not “no distinction,” but ordered distinction under Christ’s lordship.
5) Williams, Clarke, and the “Confessional Test”
The article argues that citing Roger Williams and John Clarke as representatives of Particular Baptist political theology is “wrong headed,” since Williams was a Baptist about “four months,” and Clarke is portrayed as a Fifth Monarchist political radical. It then appeals to John Coffey’s identification of several Particular Baptists who favored universal toleration and argues that they fail the “confessional test.”
There are two fair points here. First, we should not treat the most famous voices as automatically the most representative. Second, “universal toleration” as a mature theory was not the mainstream early Particular Baptist position.
But there’s a methodological risk too: using “confessional boundaries” to decide who “counts” can become circular if we are not careful. If the debate is precisely about how the tradition understood liberty and the magistrate, we can’t simply exclude every inconvenient witness by saying they later fell outside confessional bounds—especially when the confession itself has been interpreted differently across time. This is part of the reasoning for the differences between the First and Second London confessions.
6) Scripture: The Deep Question the Article Doesn’t Fully Resolve
Even if we granted the article’s historical claim in its strongest form, the harder question remains: is that position exegetically demanded by the New Testament?
The article’s recurring anchor is Romans 13. But Romans 13 is not a blank check. Romans 13 must be read in the flow of Romans 12–14. The magistrate restrains evil, but it does not create faith. Conscience is bound to Christ, not to Caesar. Peace and patience mark the church’s witness in the world.
The New Testament’s strategy for false worship and false teaching is overwhelmingly ecclesial and apostolic—preaching, persuasion, discipline, separation—not civil compulsion. When the apostles face pagan worship all around them, they do not call Rome to suppress idols; they preach Christ and build churches.
7) Where the Best “Third Way” Actually Is
If we want to be faithful to both history and Scripture, the most defensible position looks like this:
- The Particular Baptists were not modern secularists.
- They rejected “universal toleration” understood as tolerating all miscarriages in religion and civil order.
- They defended freedom of worship and resisted government overreach against dissenting Christians.
- They sometimes spoke in ways that sound to modern ears like endorsement of suppressing religious error.
- Scripture and the deeper Baptist instinct push us to interpret “restraints” primarily in terms of public peace and moral order, while guarding the church’s spiritual independence and liberty of conscience under Christ.
Conclusion
I appreciate the article’s desire to correct simplistic narratives and to show that early Particular Baptists were not simply proto-modern liberals. That warning should be heeded.
But I remain unconvinced that the evidence put forward establishes the stronger conclusion the article presses: that “boundaries on toleration” in the 1659 Declaration and related materials should be read as a mainstream, principled endorsement of civil punishment for doctrinal denial and false worship as such.
The historical documents are real and weighty, but their function, context, and internal ambiguities require more careful handling. And the biblical texts appealed to, especially Romans 13, do not naturally bear the interpretive weight being placed upon them when read in the full Pauline flow.
If our goal is an old Baptist alternative to both modern secularism and modern Christian nationalist impulses, we must preserve the Baptist genius intact: jurisdictional distinction, liberty of conscience under Christ, and a clear separation between the sword’s work and the keys’ work.
Particularly Modern 