Arminian Baptist

(1) Titled A Brief Confession or Declaration of Faith, this document would prove to be the most significant articulation of Arminian Baptist beliefs ever produced.

Daniel Goodwin, Associate Professor of History at Atlantic Baptist University in Moncton, New Brunswick, addresses this dearth in the literature in his study of the formation of the United Baptist Convention of the Maritime Provinces, which brought together two Arminian Baptist groups and one Calvinistic Baptist denomination in 1905-06.

Indeed, there is no evidence that the Baptist union movement, as it developed, was influenced by any notion of the "sin of a divided Christendom." That different groups and stripes of Baptists regarded one another as potential collaborators was a testimony to a common heritage and understanding of the Christian faith, even if some Arminian Baptist groups from New England made that common heritage more difficult to recognize.

Amid their theological differences, Calvinist and Arminian Baptists were united in their belief "that baptism was not to be administered to infants, but such only as professed faith in Christ." (4)

(For purposes of this paper and a bit of historical quirkiness, I prefer to think of non-Calvinist rather than Arminian Baptists since the seventeenth-century non-Calvinist groups demonstrate varying responses to Reformed theology with elements of Anabaptist, neo-Reformed, and Arminian approaches to theological identity.