This thesis is a historical study and evaluation of the form of church government practised by the Particular Baptists of the 17th and 18th centuries, from the years 1650 to 1750. This study is based on confessional statements, the ecclesiological literature, and the extant church books of the Particular Baptists. It is shown that the Particular Baptists practised a definitive form of church government known traditionally as Independency, similar to that expounded by John Owen, minus infant baptism. Under the principle of the autonomy of the church the Particular Baptists practised believer’s baptism, an explicit church membership, and upheld covenant theology. Under the principle of the headship of Christ, they practised the separation of church and state, upheld the divine right of the magistrate, and also believed in the liberty of conscience. Under the principle of rule by elders the majority of the Particular Baptists practised a plurality of elders in which there was a distinction made between the roles of the pastor or minister and the ruling elders, although they occupy the same basic office of rule. However, deviation from a plural eldership took place, leading to the singlepastor- and-multiple-deacons situation, accompanied by the disappearance of ruling elders and the practice of congregational democracy in governance. This arrangement is characteristic of modern Congregationalism. Under the principle of the communion of churches the regional associations of churches accomplished much good, while a number of issues remained unresolved, including open and closed communion, congregational hymn singing, and the training of ministers. In the final chapter, the study attempts to resolve some ecclesiological issues controverted among Reformed Baptists today by applying the lessons learned from the Particular Baptists. To the Particular Baptists, Independency was the jus divinum (divinely ordained) form of church government used by God as the vehicle to carry out the Great Commission with a view to establishing biblically ordered churches, which upheld the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith. These three components of church life − mission-mindedness, biblical church order, and the 1689 Confession of Faith − arose from the thorough biblicism of the Particular Baptists. / Thesis (Ph.D. (Church and Dogma History))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2012

In recent years a number of important studies have emerged that focus on the lives of the human agents who operated in the early-modern book trade. This marks a scholarly shift away from the technologies of book production towards the figures who operated, profited from, and helped to shape, print technologies and their related products. In this critical movement the identities of printers, publishers, and booksellers have come to matter, both in terms of our understanding of what constitutes ‘print culture,’ and in efforts to narrativise the history of the book. However, although scholars have become increasingly familiar with a critical vocabulary that links early-modern print with textual transience, and the archive with paradigms associated with absence, disputation, and authenticity, biographies related to the lives of book-trade professionals have tended to privilege the representational stability of the documentary evidence we use to reconstruct past lives. This thesis aims to address this critical vacuum by analysing the life and career of one highly controversial, although critically neglected, 17th-century printer, Henry Hills (c. 1625-1688/9). By drawing together methodologies associated with bibliography, the history of the book, and the study of literatures, the thesis seeks to self-reflexively respond to the absences, doublings, missing or fabricated texts, revisions, accretions, and amendments that seem to mark, and have come to shape, the story of Hills’ life. Theories and approaches associated with the materiality of early-modern lives, critical biography, and the archive are used to fully explore the way Hills functioned both in his own time and after as a metonymic figure who has been actively written and rewritten with different historically specific agendas in mind. Ideas of elusiveness, how his contemporaries struggled to represent Hills, and the problem of locating him in the documentary evidence, are also investigated. In the process this thesis casts new light not only on Hills but on the 17th-century printing trade and the printer as a cultural emblem, 17th-century history and culture, and the way we research lives in the early modern period. Each of the chapters of this thesis discusses archival sources that critical biography and bibliography have traditionally looked to for biographical details of Hills’ life. These include a Particular Baptist confession-cum-conversion account entitled The Prodigal Returned, said to have been composed by Hills in 1651 while he served a prison sentence in the Fleet for adultery. I also discuss three accounts of Hills’ high-profile conversion to Catholicism in the mid-1680s, which were authored between 1684 and 1733. The thesis provides a detailed analysis of a conspiracy story, first published in 1697, which posthumously cast Hills as a key player in a bibliographical scandal that is said to have taken place in 1649. I also pay close attention to Hills’ last will and testament, a document that spawned a number of very public legal contestations amongst members of the Hills family. Through a close, historicised reading of these materials, this thesis adds new discussions of the way in which Hills was read and contested by his contemporaries, later historians, and bibliographers, and throughout I retain a sense of the highly mediated nature of the evidence we use to reconstruct Hills biographically, while stressing his importance in the cultural imagination of the period.

This thesis is a historical study and evaluation of the form of church government practised by the Particular Baptists of the 17th and 18th centuries, from the years 1650 to 1750. This study is based on confessional statements, the ecclesiological literature, and the extant church books of the Particular Baptists. It is shown that the Particular Baptists practised a definitive form of church government known traditionally as Independency, similar to that expounded by John Owen, minus infant baptism. Under the principle of the autonomy of the church the Particular Baptists practised believer’s baptism, an explicit church membership, and upheld covenant theology. Under the principle of the headship of Christ, they practised the separation of church and state, upheld the divine right of the magistrate, and also believed in the liberty of conscience. Under the principle of rule by elders the majority of the Particular Baptists practised a plurality of elders in which there was a distinction made between the roles of the pastor or minister and the ruling elders, although they occupy the same basic office of rule. However, deviation from a plural eldership took place, leading to the singlepastor- and-multiple-deacons situation, accompanied by the disappearance of ruling elders and the practice of congregational democracy in governance. This arrangement is characteristic of modern Congregationalism. Under the principle of the communion of churches the regional associations of churches accomplished much good, while a number of issues remained unresolved, including open and closed communion, congregational hymn singing, and the training of ministers. In the final chapter, the study attempts to resolve some ecclesiological issues controverted among Reformed Baptists today by applying the lessons learned from the Particular Baptists. To the Particular Baptists, Independency was the jus divinum (divinely ordained) form of church government used by God as the vehicle to carry out the Great Commission with a view to establishing biblically ordered churches, which upheld the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith. These three components of church life − mission-mindedness, biblical church order, and the 1689 Confession of Faith − arose from the thorough biblicism of the Particular Baptists. / Thesis (Ph.D. (Church and Dogma History))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2012

Benjamin Keach, the most prolific Particular Baptist theologian of the seventeenth century, described himself as a defender of ‘Reformed Orthodoxy’. Despite this self-identification, modern scholarship has largely relegated Keach to a self-educated dissenting pastor whose major achievement could be found in his controversial support of hymn singing. Two recent dissertations have attempted to revise this view of Keach, but no scholarly work has yet attempted to wrestle holistically with Keach’s view of himself as a Reformed theologian. This work fills that void by reviewing Keach’s own understanding of the term ‘Reformed Orthodoxy’, reconstructing Keach’s connections both in the personal contacts available in dissenting London and Buckinghamshire and in the books at his disposal, examining the major aspects of his theology, and placing that theology within the spectrum of Reformed Orthodoxy. From the time of his entry onto the public theological stage, Keach quickly became identified with those with whom he networked intellectually. From his branding as a Fifth Monarchist to his identification first as a General Baptist and later as the most prominent Particular Baptist, those connections proved to be the most idiosyncratic characteristic of Keach’s theological pilgrimage. Those connections crossed the conventional lines of systematic theology and boundaries of religious sects, resulting in Keach’s theology crossing those same lines yet remaining Reformed in its major assertions. Following the organizational structure of Keach’s catechisms and confessions, this work proceeds by expounding and interrogating Keach’s major theological positions—his understanding of the Trinity including this doctrine’s foundational role in ecclesiology, the significance of the covenants, justification, and eschatology. Throughout this exposition, Keach’s theological lenses, shaped by his contacts and his independent, creative thought, become clear. Ultimately, Keach proves himself to be a capable Reformed theologian, able and willing to dialogue with the most influential theologians, yet consistently forging his own ground within Reformed Orthodoxy as a whole and more specifically Particular Baptist theology.

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