Well, how many men do you know who have been nurtured under the ministry of Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones, been a pastor of a church with a history that extends back to the 17th century, who served as a professor of church history at London Theological Seminary, who has lectured in former Soviet countries in Europe, who has published the definitive book on 18th century English Calvinistic Baptists? I have a feeling that it's not very often that you get the chance to hear someone like that speak. Well, we're privileged to have that man with us this evening, the man who fits all of these qualifications. It's an honor to introduce to you Dr. Robert Oliver, who is the retired pastor of the Old Baptist Chapel in Bradford-on-Avon in Wiltshire in the United Kingdom. He is a recognized authority on the dissenting and nonconformist history of England, and especially that among the Baptists. And Dr. Oliver, in Christ's name, we welcome you this evening. Well, it is indeed a privilege for me to be here in Texas. to share with you a little bit of Baptist history. I was asked to give an English Baptist biography this evening. For some time I couldn't really settle on a subject, but in the end I decided Christopher Blackwood must be the man. Maybe if you will excuse me, I'll just say a little bit about the reasons behind this. Christopher Blackwood was the first pastor of a church in Kent. Sadly, the church itself now is extinct. But the graveyard is still there. And in that graveyard, my parents lie, and my grandparents, and my great-grandfather, who was a 19th century pastor in that church. We knew very little about Christopher Blackwood, but he was recognized as the first pastor of that particular church. And so I've been making it my business to try to find out more about him. perhaps a little bit of family sentiment, but I've also in the process discovered that a great deal of early particular Baptist history is illustrated by the career of Christopher Blackwood. He was a pioneer, one of the men who pushed forward as a Calvinistic Baptist in the 17th century and who made a significant literary contribution, now alas forgotten, but nevertheless his writings were important in their day. So let me tell you something about him. Christopher Blackwood was born in the reign of King James I In 1605 or 1606, we can't be quite sure, but let me tell you that 1605 was the year of the gunpowder plot, a Roman Catholic plot to blow up Parliament. You see, terrorist plots are not a new thing. This plot was discovered and It's still celebrated every year in UK on the 5th of November. Well, Christopher Blackwood was born around that time in the northern county of Leigh, of Yorkshire. And we don't know a great deal about his early life, but Yorkshire is the biggest of the English counties. It's also noted for its northern characteristics. a certain degree of toughness. They tell you, the northerners do, I'm a southerner, but they will tell you, we tell it as it is. So they're plain-spoken people up in the north. And Brock Backwood perhaps needed that characteristic, growing up as a leader in the, amongst, as he, well, he eventually became amongst the particular Baptists. We don't really know where he began his education, but he must have done quite well because he was awarded a place in Pembroke College, Cambridge. And his writings all show that he was proficient in the classical languages, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. And he went to Cambridge at a time when the Puritan tradition was very strong, still in the university. William Perkins had died before he went there, but William Perkins is sometimes known as the father of English Puritanism. That, I think, could be challenged, but he was certainly an important figure and an important writer. But there were other big names, Lawrence Chatterton, and at the time that Blackwood was at Cambridge, John Preston, and Richard Sibbes. Now these were all giants, spiritual giants. And at what stage Blackwood really became a Puritan, we don't know. But he was certainly in Cambridge at, if you like, at the time of the flowering of English Puritanism in that university. It was always the more Puritan of the two ancient universities of England. And I suppose it was really at its peak at this point, because the reaction against Puritanism in the universities was really only just around the corner. He graduated with a master's degree in 1628. And the same year, he was ordained a priest, as they call them, in the Church of England. He was, see, like so many of these men, they began in the Anglican ministry. And he then went not back north, but he went into Kent, the southeastern county of England. and he became a vicar of a small village just north of the county town of Maidstone and more significantly in the Diocese of Canterbury. Now, at the time he arrived in that diocese, the Archbishop of Canterbury was a man called George Abbott. And George Abbott was the last, as far as I can tell, of the Calvinistic archbishops of Canterbury. I can't think of another one since George Abbott died in 1632, who really was distinctively Calvinistic. And he certainly was indulgent, friendly towards the English Puritans. Sadly, that was about to change. James I had now died in 1625 and was succeeded by his son, Charles I. It's been said that in politics, constitutional matters, James I had a knack of driving the ship straight towards the rock but turning away at the last minute. Charles I drove straight into the rocks and, of course, provoked the English Civil War. Charles was married to a French princess, Henrietta Maria, and she was a Roman Catholic. And that began to lead to all sorts of difficulties. The king allowed her to have Roman Catholic chaplains and her own personal chapel in London became a resorting place for Roman Catholics at a time when Roman Catholic worship was strictly illegal in the country. Memories of the Armada were still strong, memories of the gunpowder plot were still strong. And so the The indulgence that the king showed towards his wife's religion aroused great suspicion in the country. And then his chief advisor in religious matters in the early first few years of his reign was William Lord, who at that stage was Bishop of London. When Archbishop Abbott died, Lord was promoted to be Archbishop of Canterbury. And that spout trouble for the Puritans because Lorde was not only anti-Puritan, he introduced semi-Roman Catholic practices into the liturgy and the worship, things that had not been practiced in Anglicanism since the Reformation. And in addition, he was an Arminian. George Abbott had been a Calvinist. Lorde was an Arminian. And he started to put the pressure on to the Puritans. Now, it so happened that just before he became archbishop, Christopher Blackwood left his parish in Kent, crossed the county boundary, and became curate, a deputy to the vicar of Rye in Sussex. If you really want to see a beautiful old English seaport, go to Rye. It still preserves a great deal of its medieval and Tudor-Stuart characteristics. Well, he went to Rye as a deputy to the vicar of Rye, and he established a reputation for preaching. He was said to be a plain, easily understood preacher. But also we know that his Puritan convictions were now becoming quite apparent because one of the church wardens complained, this would have been to the Bishop of Chichester because Rye is outside of the Diocese of Canterbury. He complained that Blackwood abbreviated the prayer book services to a point where they hardly mattered. So he was in fact quite a thoroughgoing Puritan. And it's not surprising that as Lord established himself in the Archbishopric, so the pressure became on the Puritans. And we find that he introduced a visitation of all of his provinces. Now the Archbishop of Canterbury is above all the bishops of the southern part of the country. And so his visitation was like a general inspection, checking up on what was going on, how many were being loyal, how many were using the prayer book, how many had accepted the new practices which he himself had introduced. And it's not surprising that Blackwood found it was right to leave Rye. His presence there was becoming an embarrassment to his senior. Something else was happening in the country because of Lord's, Archbishop Lord's heavy-handed policy. He was forcing a Puritan exodus from the country. Man after man, vicar after vicar was being forced out of his livings under the pressure that Lord was putting on things. So many big names of people well-known that left the country or were forced to leave the country. They were turned out of their occupations and we find, for example, that Thomas Goodwin and William Bridge, both significant Puritan men, left to minister in the Netherlands, rather as the separatists had done earlier. These men actually did change their church practices. They left as Presbyterian sympathizing Anglicans, and they, in the Netherlands, Bridge and Goodwin both became independents. Not Baptists, but independents, believing in the sufficiency of the local church to ordain, to regulate its own affairs, admit its members, and so on. And then other men left the country at the same time. They took a longer journey to New England. Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, John Cotton all left in this general Puritan exodus and many other men as well, less well-known people. Now the question is, did Christopher Blackwood go? There's some indication he did. Because there is a record of a Christopher Blackwood preacher buying a piece of land in Massachusetts. Now, whether he bought it through an agent and never went, we're not quite sure. But he may well have gone. There are other examples of men who left in the late 1630s and then, Civil War broke out in the early 1640s, they came back again because the whole situation was changing. Hugh Peters was an example of one man who did just that. He came to New England and then went back again to Old England as changes were taking place. Now, I just need to very quickly outline what had been happening in the country. Charles I had blundered badly in his handling of his parliaments. And for 11 years through the 1630s, he managed to run the country without a parliament. Now, he was only able to do that by stretching the law at certain points, because the king is dependent upon a vote of parliament for the ability to raise taxes and to fix taxes. That was well established by this time. So he had to really scratch around for all sorts of ways of raising money. For example, he had the right to impose a tax on ports called ship money to raise money for the Royal Navy, but he then extended it to inland areas and cities of the country, which was technically illegal. And there were other things as well that he did at this time. This went on for a period of 11 years, but it broke down really, again, as a result of Lord's policy. Lord decided to try to bring the Presbyterian Church of Scotland into line with the Church of England and impose a prayer book rather like the Anglican one on the Scottish church. and that really was pushing things too far. You see, Scotland was technically a separate kingdom, united by the King of England was both King of England and of Scotland. Charles' father, on the death of Queen Elizabeth, who was the King of Scotland, he inherited the throne of England. So it was James VI of Scotland, James I of England. They'd never had a Charles in Scotland, Charles was Charles I of both kingdoms. But Scotland still had its own parliament at this time, its own law courts, and quite a number of customs that were different, and certainly it had a different church. Well, this policy provoked riots in Scotland. Charles wanted to send an army north to quell the riots, but in order to do that, he had to summon an English parliament to raise the money. And that's where he began to come undone because the Parliament refused to vote the money until the King put, dealt with their grievances. And the situation got worse and worse until eventually the King left London, retreated to Nottingham in the Northern Midlands, rallied troops in order to bring Parliament to heel, and Parliament gathered its troops in London and the consequence was civil war, which raged from 1642 until 1646. Now, during the Civil War, in the area controlled by Parliament, the laws against non-conformity, non-observance of the Anglican rules were relaxed and the result is Puritanism, Puritan preachers had tremendous freedom and also other groups began to appear and it was in this particular period that the first particular Baptist churches began to appear in London. So it's possible that Blackwood was offered a pastorate in a London separatist church at this time. But he still seems to have felt he belonged to the Church of England, and he wasn't prepared to make that break. So he took a small Anglican parish somewhere in North Kent, where he started his ministry. And it's at this point that the turning point comes in Blackwood's life. The ministers of the central area of Kent, known as the Weald of Kent, it's an area which was once covered by a great forest. These ministers in 1644 were meeting for a fraternal, for ministerial discussion. And they were meeting in the beautiful little Kentish town of Cranbrook, sometimes known as the capital of the Weald. And it was arranged that they would be addressed on one particular occasion by a man by the name of Francis Cornwell. Now, Francis Cornwell was the vicar of Mardin, a parish about 10 miles from Cranbrook, perhaps a little less. Now, Francis Cornwell had run into trouble under Archbishop Lord and had been put in Maidstone Jail. Now the Archbishop himself was in jail for the innovations that he'd been trying to introduce illegally into the Church of England. But Cornwall had been released. But something had happened while Cornwall was in Maidstone Jail. He was visited by a woman who had problems about baptism. And she spoke to Cornwall about this. And he decided to try to sort them out for her. But he then found that he hadn't got the answer to the problems. And the upshot was that Cornwell, while in Maidstone Jail, adopted Baptist convictions. So they went into prison a Pied a Baptist, and he came out a Baptist. Well, he came out theoretically a Baptist, because he hadn't been baptized at that point. He sought out a Baptist evangelist, actually a general Baptist evangelist by the name of William Jeffery. Now in the confusion with the king has gone away from London now and things are beginning to break down in the country, William Jeffery had become an evangelist in Kent, but he'd also established a church near a place called Seven Oaks. And Cornwall approached him and asked to be baptised and he was baptised by William Jeffery. So he now turns up at the minister's meeting and it's his turn to preach. He took his text from Mark chapter 7 and verse 7. In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men. Well, you can imagine what a man who'd just come to Baptist convictions would do with a text like that. The assembled clergy were alarmed. especially when Cornwall actually asserted that infant baptism was an Antichrist innovation. Now Antichrist to a Puritan meant Romanism. Romanism, which offered a way of salvation, which supplanted the way of salvation through Christ alone. And so a way which was mediated through the sacraments rather than directly by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. So you can see the force of his argument. It was an Antichrist innovation, a human tradition, a practice with no precept, example, or true deduction from the word of God. They did sit up at this point. And not surprisingly, they had a debate. They always did have time for questions and discussion. Now, Cornwall had taken William Jeffery with him, so he wasn't quite alone. But he got hammered with questions and how do you justify this and how do you explain that. Why was it that the church was baptizing infants? Why was it that they'd been doing it for so long? And so on. Finally, it was agreed that everybody would go home, would give themselves two weeks to discuss the sermon, and in two weeks' time, they would come back with their conclusions to another meeting in Cranbrook Parish Church. Well, I don't know what they all did. Some of them were busy men. They probably didn't do much in this respect. They had other things to attend to. But Christopher Blackwood had taken careful notes of Cornwall's sermon, and comparing scripture with scripture, he came to the conclusion that Cornwall was right. So when they all came back in two weeks' time, They went from one to the other. Have you done anything? Have you got anything written down? No. Nobody had until they came to Blackwood. Nobody had really done any serious detailed homework on this. But Blackwood had. And his homework was a passionate plea to take Cornwall seriously. He was scriptural. Well, they didn't know what to do about that. So it was agreed that Blackwood's notes would be left on the table for another two weeks and they would study those. They came back after two more weeks and again nobody had done anything very serious about this. Blackwood explains this in one of the prefaces to one of his books. And so he left the notes with one of the leading men, and said he would call back for them later. Nothing happened. He did call back for them. Nobody had come up with a serious answer to the statement that had been made that there was no example of the baptism of an infant in the New Testament. Everybody had taken it for granted because it had been done for so long that it was a well-established Christian principle with strong biblical foundations. Of course, they could quote texts like Suffer Little Children to come unto me, but there's no mention of water at that point whatsoever. So Blackwood then collected his notes and decided to publish them. And he must have worked fairly quickly because it seems that the meetings took place in Cranbrook in the summer, but by the end of the year, there appeared a book, The Storming of Antichrist, in his last and strongest garrisons. And the two strong garrisons were compulsion of conscience and infant baptism. using the might of the state to try to force people into a line against scripture. Compulsion of conscience. People's consciences were being overridden. Blackwood, I think, quite strongly quickly realized that many of the men who'd been in that meeting were very uneasy. They weren't competent to answer. And so they really were stifling their consciences at this point. His approach was scholarly. He makes an appeal to the meaning of the Greek verb baptizo. He argues that ministers are Christ's commissioners who should cleave to the Great Commission. And they should respect the order of the Great Commission as given in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark. He uses this statement, ministers are Christ's commissioners. And they, therefore, are responsible for obeying the letter of the commission. There is no New Testament precedent for the baptism of infants. Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. He dismisses the idea of a seminal faith which will blossom into the real thing and he answers the objection about children dying in infancy. He appeals to the election of God. He looks at the question of circumcision, the circumcision of Israelite children, he concluded. Those who were children of wrath, they never came to faith. Whatever circumcision he says sealed to Abraham personally, it certainly didn't seal it to Ishmael and Esau. And infant baptism, he concluded, is not a harmless innovation. It fills the church with rotten members. Such persons in following times grow up, prove often to be wicked and many of them only civil. We know not how to get them out of communion and so the matter of churches comes to be corrupted. They are made incapable of reform. The big problem with the Church of England is large, unregenerate membership. was really brought about, so Blackwood concluded, by the practice of infant baptism. And until this principle could be grasped, the gains of the Reformation would never be secured. He has become a Baptist. He makes, at one stage, a somewhat wry remark. He said, in the New Testament, they were, with joy, they were baptized. He said, I never knew a baby baptized with joy. They always wept whenever I baptized them. And to the storming of Antichrist, he annexed a brief catechism summarizing his points. And that was later on reprinted separately as a separate pamphlet, a brief catechism on baptism. And when he published it separately, he did so for the instruction and the information of the people of God in Lancashire. another of the northern counties, which seems to suggest that he had, in fact, had a ministry in that area as well. That was not until 1652. At this point, he's still down in Kent. Well, inevitably, having come clear as a Baptist, Blackwood had to be baptized. And he was baptized again by Jeffrey, but unlike Jeffrey, he never abandoned his Calvinistic convictions. He joined a church which was meeting in a farmhouse in a village called Staplehurst in the Cranbrook area. Now, they were meeting in this big farmhouse called Spills Hill, which was owned by a man called Richard Kingsnorth. And it seems that Blackwood was chosen to be the pastor of this group. They were later on to move to the village I spoke about earlier. But Blackwood was a man of such tremendous gifts. He was bound to be a powerful influence in the church. It's not surprising that they initially chose him as pastor. But, and this was a problem, Richard Kingsnorth, who owned the house was a General Baptist. He'd been influenced by the spreading General Baptist movement in Kent, which was largely prospering through the ministry of Francis Cornwall. But Blackwood couldn't relinquish his Calvinistic convictions, and so he withdrew after about a year. It was a short one-year pastorate. And the issue of the extent of the atonement remained a big issue in that church. And eventually, the church does come out on the Calvinistic side, but that's some years later when they were moved to the neighboring village of Smardin. But they still regarded Blackwood as their first pastor. Blackwood's wife Martha died at this time and he went on to another village. Now there's some suggestion he might have sought a chaplaincy in the parliamentary army and that might have given him his connections with Lancashire. However, the civil war came to an end in 1646. Another short civil war broke out in 1648 and then the king was put on trial and executed at the beginning of 1649 and England became a republic for some 11 years. You probably all, you know, are aware of the problems that there was a campaign in Ireland. Cromwell still has a bad name in Ireland. But right at the very, immediately after the execution of the king, John Owen, was of course was emerging as one of the leading figures in Puritanism at this time, made an urgent plea to Parliament to send ministers into the darkest parts of the land and he included Wales and Ireland. And a number of Puritan men went to Ireland, neighbouring Ireland and there was a fairly strong reformed Presbyterian presence in the north, but Blackwood went to the south and he was ministering for a number of years in the south of Ireland. And in 1653, for example, we have a letter that he wrote, a signed letter to the particular Baptist churches of London. And he was urging closer fellowship between the churches of England and Ireland. And the signatories described themselves as representatives of the churches at Waterford, Kilkenny, and Dublin. So there were clearly Calvinistic Baptist churches in those cities that felt a kinship with the Calvinistic Baptists in London. and were corresponding with them. Now this led to a day of prayer and fasting in London specifically for the churches in Ireland and the work of the gospel. A few years later the Irish churches were actually writing letters of encouragement to the very young particular Baptist churches in South Wales at Ilsted and Llantrisant. And a letter of 1653 refers to a people lately gathered by Brother Blackwood in London. In 1654, there was a constitutional crisis out of which Oliver Cromwell emerges as the law protector. Now, many of the Puritans weren't happy about this. They didn't want to return to one man headship of state. They preferred the affairs of state to be run by a council, a committee. That was a debatable issue. But they, there was some fear that this would lead to major unrest. Consequently, the Secretary of State in London a man by the name of Furlow, wrote to the governor in Dublin, Henry Cromwell, asking, well, what do the Baptists think about these changes in London? And he got a reply from Cromwell, I'm apt to believe that on the change of affairs, there was discontent here, but very little animosity. And he goes on to talk about the congregations. He speaks of the congregation in Dublin, of which Mr. Patient is the pastor. And then a little later, we read of Christopher Blackwood. This man is now fixed with the congregation at Dublin. Mr. Patient is an evangelist, preaching up and down the country. Blackwood was associated as a leading preacher in the cathedral. Now at the end of his time in Ireland, Blackwood published a commentary on the first ten chapters of the Gospel according to Matthew and it's dated 1659. Spurgeon speaks highly of it in his comments on commentaries and commentators. Anyway, in the introduction to this, he said that, um, I'd no sooner finished three or four chapters in Matthew, but I was called from the city of Kilkenny in Ireland to be overseer of the Church of Christ in Dublin, or a Church of Christ in Dublin. He explained that he'd been under pressure to write a commentary on the whole of the New Testament, but he says, I feel my life is too far spent My body is much worn. This exposition was offered in lieu of this commentary on the New Testament and indeed on Matthew as a whole, but it's a very substantial piece of work. It's a quarto of over 900 pages on the first 10 chapters of the gospel according to Matthew. I've been lent a copy, and I haven't been able to give it the study that I would like to, but I am impressed with Blackwood's comments. And certainly his treatment of the Sermon on the Mount is good. Now, about the time he published this commentary, the political situation was changing very rapidly indeed. Oliver Cromwell died in September 1658, and the arrangements for the succession were confused. His successor, his immediate successor, was his son, Richard Cromwell, who really hadn't got his hang his finger on the pulse of things. And there was a breakdown in communications and in government. I won't go into all the details of that. But we find that Charles Fleetwood, who actually was deputy governor of Ireland at the time, was recalled to become governor general of the forces in England. And there was a fear of anarchy. Fleetwood had left. Edmund Ludlow had been appointed commander of chief of the forces, but his power was undermined. Incidentally, Ludlow was a Baptist. Blackwood received a threat to his life and left for England, at least for the time being. Out of all this confusion, Charles Stuart, the son of Charles I, returned as Charles II in 1660. And with the restoration of the monarchy came the restoration of the Arminian Laudian Church. Before the full measure of the persecution was apparent, there was a very foolish rebellion led by a man called Thomas Venner, a fifth monarchist rebellion in London. And many of the Baptists felt that they were being accused of implication with Venner's rebellion. Venner, as far as I can tell, wasn't a Baptist at all and never had been. He was a leader of a sect called the Fifth Monarchy sect, which was an attempt to replace Charles II with King Jesus. A similar rising against Cromwell's rule a few years earlier had occurred. A few Baptists certainly had dabbled in fifth monarchy ideas to the embarrassment of their associates. However, within days of the suppression of the Venner rising, A number of Baptist leaders issued a humble apology of some commonly called Anabaptists in behalf of themselves and others of the same judgment with them. Blackwood was one of the signatories with William Kiffin and John Spilsbury and others. Unfortunately, this piece of folly gave the new government of Charles II an excuse to issue a proclamation forbidding all meetings for religion outside Church of England, the Church of England churches. Now, the Church of England wasn't settled yet in its final form, but it was now the body, the existent of the body. the Church of England, was recognized by the state, by the government. And now, things look very dark, and Blackwell began to consider moving with his family to the Netherlands. Late in 1661, he did move. He no longer got a place in Ireland. There was no prospect for him in this country. And he was in... correspondence with a man called Samuel Jake, town clerk of Rye. Now he kept up correspondence with the Jakes family. The Jakes were Huguenots in an earlier generation and I've now discovered, but too late for this address, that there's an archive of Jake's correspondence and Some of Christopher Blackwood's letters are included among them. Blackwood was encouraging Jakes to go to the Netherlands, but the Jakes family had already left the continent. They'd settled in Rye, and they'd been there now for two or three generations. Samuel was town clerk of Rye, not yet forced out, although he quickly would be under the Cooperation Act. And it seems then that when his friends didn't want to join him, Blackwood came back and went to Ireland, where persecution was not so fierce at that point as it was in England. In August 1669, in a letter he described his weariness in which he said that he was near his journey's end and he must have died soon afterwards because his son Christopher wrote a letter in March 1670 saying that his father had died six months earlier. Blackwood had maintained a good testimony to the end. Early in his career, he'd come to Puritan convictions, which he never relinquished. He left the Church of England on conscientious grounds on the baptism issue. He maintained his position as a Baptist minister to the end of his life, combining his Baptist convictions with a Calvinistic soteriology and his work in Ireland, although it may not have lasted, certainly was significant while it did. And he left behind several books which bear testimony to his convictions and show that he was an able minister of the New Testament. A man not widely known, but part of a group who were pushing forward with in the particular Baptist cause in the middle years of the 17th century. Stand with me as we close with our singing this evening. Take the Blue Trinity Hymnal. The Blue Trinity Hymnal. Turn to number 26.