Baptists in America: A History

by Thomas S. Kidd

HAVING SETTLED ON segregation as the answer to the race question, Southern Baptists faced one of their most intense theological controversies, this time over Landmarkism—the belief that only Baptist congregations are true churches and that there exists an unbroken succession of Baptists since apostolic times. The controversy centered on Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and its president, William H. Whitsitt. Whitsitt grew up as a member of Landmark leader James R. Graves’s church. His experience in the Civil War put him in contact with non-Landmark Baptists whom he came to view as authentic Christians. After the war he attended Southern Seminary. His studies there convinced him more fully of the errors of Landmarkism, and he debated those still in its throes. After seminary, Whitsitt studied at the University of Virginia, then the University of Berlin, where he adopted what was called “scientific history,” essentially the quest to document with evidence what actually happened in the past. In 1872, he returned to Southern Seminary as a faculty member. Whitsitt began a quest to pinpoint when Baptists actually started baptizing by immersion, concluding that it was not until 1641. This meant that the earliest English Baptists had baptized adult believers by affusion (pouring) or even sprinkling for an entire generation before adopting immersion. Such a view rejected the unbroken line of Baptist churches that Landmarkers insist existed from the time of the apostles forward...