Was John Bunyan a Baptist? The question has often been raised, and it is not easily answered. In his recent dissertation, Timothy Haupt has argued that, despite being convictionally credobaptist, Bunyan should not be considered a Baptist—based on his practice of open communion—and that close communion was a boundary marker for Baptist identity in the seventeenth century. However, “open-communion credobaptists” like Bunyan, as Haupt refers to them, had regular interactions with and influenced other Particular Baptists going back to the beginnings of the movement. As such, there is little warrant to categorize them as some separate species of Independent or Separatist. Moreover, the acknowledgement that some Baptists practiced open communion led the drafters of the Second London Baptist Confession of 1677/89—in a notable change from the 1644/46 version—to omit communion distinctions from the statement, despite their own personal arguments in favor of close communion. While Haupt argues seventeenth-century credobaptists who practiced open communion should not be labeled “Baptists,” this is effectively begging the question and defining terms with a precision that did not exist at a time when Baptist identity was a still-developing concept. In this paper, I will argue that the omission of communion distinctives in the Second London Confession was not an oversight, but a conscientious choice made as a concession to minority views on ecclesiology among early English Baptists.
To accomplish this, I will examine the development of the seventeenth-century communion debate among Baptists, as well as note the changes that were made regarding baptism and communion in the two London Confessions. I will also give attention to several notable figures on both sides of the divide, including Henry Jessey, William Kiffin, and Bunyan himself, considering their interactions with one another in the debate and its effective culmination in the Second London Confession. Finally, I will examine the historical data in Haupt’s work to demonstrate that not only has he misread and misused it, but that labeling Bunyan as “non-Baptist” is anachronistic and misguided.
This paper contributes to the field of Church History, with particular interest to the study of Puritan and early Baptist History in Interregnum and Restoration England. The question of Bunyan’s Baptist identity has been examined by numerous scholars over the centuries and is important to both historical and confessional Baptist ecclesiology. The issue of Particular Baptist identity has also been broached in recent years by Matthew Bingham in his work Orthodox Radicals: Baptist Identity in the English Reformation. This paper builds on his work in part, showing how Bunyan maintained a position far closer to the Particular Baptists than they did to the General Baptists. For the “Baptist” moniker to be applied to both of these disparate groups but not to open-communion Baptists like Bunyan makes little sense.