Journal: Journal of the Institute of Reformed Baptist Studies
Volume: JIRBS 01:1 (NA 2013)
Article: Separating God’s Two Kingdoms: Two Kingdom Theology Among New England Baptists In The Early Republic
Author: Ronald Baines

JIRBS 1 (2014) p. 27

Separating God’s Two Kingdoms:
Two Kingdom Theology Among New England Baptists
In The Early Republic

Ronald Baines*

* Ronald Baines is pastor of Grace Reformed Baptist Church, Topsham, ME. He received the MAR from Reformed Theological Seminary and is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maine.

On September 21^st, 1808, Daniel Merrill, pastor of the Baptist Church in Sedgwick, Maine, ascended the pulpit of the Baptist Church of Ballstown, Maine, to give the “Introductory Sermon” at the Lincoln Baptist Association annual general assembly. His text was Ephesians 2:20 and his title, as it was later published, was The Kingdom of Heaven Distinguished from Babylon.

Not a lifelong Regular Baptist, Merrill, a Dartmouth educated paedobaptist Congregational clergy, had converted to Baptist principles three years earlier. Boston’s Thomas Baldwin, pastor of the Second Baptist Church, made the arduous journey from Boston to Sedgwick to participate in the baptism and ordination of Daniel Merrill on May 15, 1805. It was, according to Baldwin, “a season to us uncommonly solemn and precious.”1 The ordination marked the final stage of Merrill’s conversion from Congregationalism to Baptist principles. The path which led to these events was recounted by Merrill almost thirty years later and published in 1833, only days before he died at the age of sixty-two.2

Recording his pilgrimage, Merrill confessed that after some years in the ministry in Sedgwick members of his own congregation as well as some others challenged him to consider the subject of

JIRBS 1 (2014) p. 28

infant baptism more carefully. Intending to refute the “hurtful nature” of the Baptists’ practice by writing a book confirming infant baptism, he took to “a careful and critical review of the oracles of God” expecting to find “the certain scripture evidence of their errors.” To his “great disappointment and extreme regret” he found he could neither refute the Baptists nor confirm his own practice of infant baptism. The matter was exacerbated when eight children in the large Sedgwick congregation were presented to him for baptism. Confessing “distressing uncertainty and profound ignorance” he “administered no gospel ordinance for nine months.” Struggling with what he described as “an unconquered antipathy against being a Baptist” and not being able to “bear the idea of being called one,” he continued “from month to month, in Egyptian darkness.” Finally, as he narrates, “by an unconditional submission to the will ...