Liberty of conscience

by Matthew Arkapaw

I often hear ‘liberty of conscience’ talked about in Baptist churches in a way that I think misunderstands what it actually refers to. As I understand it, the Baptist idea of liberty of conscience does not mean people are free to do what they like and believe what they like, nor that they have a ‘right’ to do so. It actually has a rather narrow twofold historical meaning.

Firstly, that the state, or ecclesiastical, hierarchy has no apriori right, in God’s eyes, to order the beliefs and practices of a local church which gathers around the word of God and gives evidence of the work of the Spirit of Jesus. Such a church is ‘free’ to organize itself, and consider itself spiritually legitimate, regardless of the church’s connection to a state or ecclesiastical hierarchy.

The only caveat on such ‘liberty’ would be in the case of a congregation voluntarily associating with a group, and voluntarily submitting to certain rules for the sake of belonging to that group. So, for example, a church in our union could not expect to reject our statement of faith and remain in our union. Such a church would not necessarily be anathematized as anti-gospel (depending on what it rejected!), but it could not reasonably expect to stay in the union. It would not be at ‘liberty’ to reject the statement and yet remain in the group that finds its common ground in the statement. This is simply logical.

Secondly, liberty of conscience refers to the belief that force (manipulation, threat of punishment, or even the minimizing of civil liberties) is not a biblically valid way of promoting and maintaining the Christian church. This is where the early Baptists differed radically from the Magisterial Reformers. Thus, even in the early 17th century the early Baptists thought no person should be socially or politically disadvantaged for being Roman Catholic, or ‘Mohammedan’ or atheistic, or whatever. Coercion (political, social, economic, physical) should not force a person to go against their conscience. Such ‘conversion’ is invalid in the eyes of Baptists and does not appear in the New Testament.

Likewise, there should be no social or political disadvantage for a person converting out of Christianity and into another faith (the spiritual disadvantage, of course, remains terribly absolute and would be clearly explained to the person, but the decision would be made on the basis of their un-coerced conscience, and they would be accountable to God for that. They would not be accountable to any earthly power in any earthly way.)

If I’m on the right track here then we would need to be careful about using the phrase ‘Baptists believe in the liberty of conscience’ to suggest that ministers, churches, or individual members of our churches have some kind of doctrinal and behavioral liberty per se.

Matthew Arkapaw is a pastor at Mortdale-Oatley Baptist Church (Sydney).