The Lord of the Conscience is Not the Self

In a recent reflection on the disaffiliation of two churches from the Baptist Association of NSW/ACT, an Anglican commentator offered a gracious and sympathetic reading of Baptist history and identity. He noted with surprise the strong reaction among some Baptists to the idea of their Association adopting a formal doctrinal position on marriage, let alone enforcing it through disciplinary means. For him, the reaction revealed something deeply ingrained in Baptist DNA: a peculiar prioritisation of the individual conscience.

Now, credit where it’s due. The piece was generous, charitable, and well-intentioned. It resisted easy caricature and tried—more than most—to understand a tradition from the inside. But it stumbled at a critical juncture: Baptist history.

Now, to put it plainly, the idea that Baptists—across the board—are historically anti-creedal, or that conscience sits at the centre of Baptist identity, is a thoroughly modern invention. It is not a recovery of historic Baptist thought, but a reinvention shaped by later theological currents. If we fail to distinguish between the historical confessionalism of early Particular (and even General) Baptists and the libertarian impulse that emerged much later, we will misread what’s unfolding within the NSW/ACT context—and we’ll be blind to what faithfulness requires going forward.

Let’s begin where the myth often takes root: with the notion of ‘soul liberty’ or ‘soul competency.’ The term, as its popularly understood, gained prominence in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. Perhaps, most notably through E. Y. Mullins (1860-1928), the American Baptist theologian, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and, later, president of Baptist World Alliance. Mullins championed the idea that the individual soul is competent to interpret Scripture and relate to God without external interference. It was, he said, the ‘mother principle’ of Baptist identity.^[1]E. Y. Mullins, The Axioms of Religion, Library of Baptist Classics 5 (Nashville: B & H, 1997), 79. In his view, all denominational structures, confessions, and churchly forms must bow before the liberty of the soul.

But as mentioned, Mullins did not invent this idea from whole cloth. He gave systematised expression to a theological tangent already underway—a drift that began when the Enlightenment exalted human reason and autonomy. Man was no longer chiefly a creature accountable to divine revelation, but a rational individual capable of discerning truth from within. And by the time 19th and 20th century evangelicalism baptised Romantic individualism, ‘conscience’ had ceased to mean what it once did. No longer tethered to the God who speaks definitively, it became a euphemism for personal preference with theological window dressing. And predictably, as God’s sovereignty was softened and human autonomy amplified, the church’s doctrinal clarity crumbled.

Mullins simply gave this Enlightenment anthropology a Baptist accent. The result—especially in (American) Baptist life—was a theological individualism not unlike that of the Remonstrants or certain strands of the Radical Reformation. Confessional accountability was traded for personal experience. Orthodoxy became optional; discipline, coercive. And the church, once defined by a shared submission to Scripture and the Lordship of Christ, was reduced to a fellowship of atomised individuals bound by sentiment, not confession. While Anabaptist and Remonstrant ecclesiologies had long harboured this impulse, it was foreign to the General Baptists at their inception, and utterly alien to the Particular Baptists who articulated a church built on covenant, confession, and regenerate membership under the authority of Christ.

Indeed, that’s the problem: this is not historic Baptist thought. This is theological liberalism with a believer’s baptism sticker slapped on the front.

Historically, Baptists—at least those of the kind that planted theologically serious churches—were deeply confessional. One need only skim William L. Lumpkin’s Baptist Confessions of Faith to see the point. From Helwys and the 1611 Confession to the Second London Confession of 1677/89, the early Baptists wrote, subscribed to, and enforced theological standards. They understood that liberty of conscience was not the same as liberty of opinion.

The early Baptist defence of liberty of conscience was never a licence for theological pluralism or ecclesial anarchy. It was a liberty grounded in submission to Christ, not autonomy from Him. The 1689 Second London Confession puts it clearly: ‘God alone is Lord of the conscience… so that to believe such doctrines, or obey such commands out of conscience, is to betray true liberty of conscience.'^[2]The Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), Chapter 21, Paragraph 2. Liberty, in other words, is not found in freedom from all authority, but in being bound only to what God has revealed. This view shaped the earliest articulations of Baptist religious liberty. Thomas Helwys, in A Short Declaration of the Mistery of Iniquity ^[3]Thomas Helwys, A Short Declaration of the Mistery of Iniquity (1612), ed. Richard Groves (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1998), 61–62., pleaded with King James not for a relativist melting pot, but for the magistrate to recognise the limits of his authority over the soul. Leonard Busher followed, arguing that it is preaching—not persecuting—that wins people to Christ. Both saw conscience not as an open field, but as a battleground in which Christ’s exclusive Lordship must be upheld.

Roger Williams carried forward this impulse in Rhode Island, establishing a society that aimed to shelter ‘persons distressed of conscience.’ But even Williams, though often romanticised by modern pluralists, refused to defend what he called ‘an infinite liberty of conscience.'^[4]Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience (1644), ed. Richard Groves (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2001), 247. Williams rejected “an infinite liberty of … Continue reading He knew from experience that a conscience unfettered from moral truth fractures communities rather than binding them together. Disorder followed where no shared doctrinal ballast existed. Isaac Backus, writing more than a century later, reinforced this original vision: liberty of conscience is not liberty to believe anything, but the God-given right to believe and obey what God has revealed.^[5]Isaac Backus, An Appeal to the Public for Religious Liberty (1773), in The Sacred Rights of Conscience, eds. Daniel L. Dreisbach and Mark David Hall (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2009), 206. Once conscience is detached from that telos—once it becomes self-defining rather than Christ-submitting—it ceases to be liberty at all. It becomes license. And that’s precisely what our forebears sought to guard against.

What many forget (or never learned) is that even early advocates of Baptist toleration were not prioritising conscience as a vague principle of personal authenticity. They were defending the ability of churches to order their life under Christ, according to his Word. Indeed, Thomas Patient, for instance, who planted the first Particular Baptist churches in Ireland, said little about religious liberty and nothing about soul competency as a defining trait of the church. He planted churches on the basis of regenerate membership and believer’s baptism—not on the liberty of divergent views. And when one church compromised those distinctives, Patient’s response was not sentimental: it was fraternal rebuke.^[6]John Rogers (ed.), Ohel: A Tabernacle for the Sun (London, 1653), 302. A letter from Patient’s church rebukes another congregation “for joining together in fellowship with such as do … Continue reading

So what happened? How did we go from robust confessionalism to what’s now sometimes called ‘libertarian Baptist’ identity—where conscience trumps Scripture, and the only heresy is to tell someone they’re in error?

The short answer: modernity. A vision of the self that is self-defining. A theological climate in which God’s sovereignty is reduced to lip service, and the voice of the community speaks louder than the voice of the Christ. And in Australia, we have not been immune. The idea that Baptist associations cannot draw lines, or that churches can walk contrary to Scripture and still expect fellowship, is not a legacy of the Reformation or the Dissenters. It results from post-Enlightenment assumptions about the self, imported uncritically and applied with all the force of sentimentality.^[7]On this point, I would simply point individuals to Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution … Continue reading

This is not to say that all who appeal to conscience today are dishonest or unfaithful. Far from it. There are many sincere Baptists who are wrestling with these issues and seeking to honour Christ. But sincerity is not the test of truth. The question is not whether we feel strongly, but whether we are submitting to what God has clearly said.

And this is where our Anglican friend’s reflection, for all its kindness, ultimately falters. He imagines that Baptist resistance to creedal enforcement is an expression of our deepest DNA. But if anything, it reveals a departure from our roots. The early Baptists knew that shared confession, bound to Scripture and protected through mutual accountability, was the only way to safeguard gospel fidelity. Without it, the term ‘Baptist’ becomes a banner for whatever one likes, and unity becomes little more than managed decline.

So no, conscience is not the centre of our ecclesiology. Christ is. And his Lordship is not determined by personal interpretation, but received in covenantal submission. The church does not exist as a collection of free-floating individuals, but as a gathered congregation of visible saints, mutually accountable to one another under the authority of Christ through his Word. At the heart of Baptist ecclesiology is not solitary autonomy, but shared submission—a people covenanted together to walk in the fear of the Lord, admonishing and exhorting one another in love. We are not free to redefine the terms of Christ’s church according to preference or modern sentiment. We are free to obey him together, under the cross, without coercion from men and without compromise with the age. That is true liberty—and anything less is bondage disguised as freedom.

And that is why this moment matters. The decisions being made by associations like NSW/ACT are not secondary. They are a test case for whether Baptist churches still believe the church belongs to Christ—or whether we’ve handed the keys to modernity in exchange for a counterfeit peace.

Let us remember: the conscience is not king. Christ is.