Journal: Journal of Discipleship and Family Ministry
Volume: JDFM 03:1 (Fall 2012)
Article: Baptist Marriage In The Seventeenth And Eighteenth Centuries: Talking, Thinking And Truth
Author: Michael A. G. Haykin

JDFM 3:1 (Fall 2012) p. 28

Baptist Marriage In The Seventeenth And Eighteenth Centuries: Talking, Thinking And Truth

Michael A.G. Haykin

And

Ian Hugh Clary

Michael A. G. Haykin (Th.D., Wycliffe College and University of Toronto) serves as Director of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies and as Professor of Church History and Biblical Spirituality at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Dr. Haykin has authored numerous books including The Spirit of God: The Exegesis of 1 and 2 Corinthians in the Pneumatomachian Controversy of the Fourth Century ; and Rediscovering the Church Fathers: Who They Were and How They Shaped the Church. 

Ian Hugh Clary (Th.M., Toronto Baptist Seminary) is currently enrolled in a doctoral program with the University of the Free State where he is writing a dissertation on Arnold Dallimore and evangelical historiography. He previously served as a church planter in Toronto. Mr. Clary serves as book review editor for Hope’s Reason: A Journal of Apologetics. He is married to Vicky and they have two children, Jackson and Molly.

As all societies, civil and religious, originate from families; so families derive from that first and most important of all social connections, the conjugal relation.—Samuel Stennett1

Baptist memory of the Reformation is somewhat myopic, being usually restricted to the Protestant rediscovery of the way of salvation—by Christ alone, through faith alone—and renewed access to the Scriptures for the man and woman in the pew. However, one of the most important gifts of the Reformation to the various traditions that stem from that era was the concept of Christian marriage as a vocation and the fact that there is no intrinsic value in a celibate life.2 This is patent from a close reading of extant seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English Baptist literature, for instance, which reveals a community that had reflected deeply upon what the Scriptures had to say about the nature of marriage and its purpose. This subject really needs a monograph to do it justice; but, for now, an article will have to suffice.3 In what follows three texts/sets of texts are discussed: first, a key confessional statement on marriage, that of the Second London Confession, which helped define the boundaries for many Baptists with regard to marriage in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; second, the systematic theological reflection of two important Baptist theologians, Thomas Grantham and John Gill, on what constitutes a true marriage and why God has given marriage to humanity; and ...