Jarrel - Baptist Church Perpetuity - Landmark Baptist

is demonstrated. The Professor of History in the Campbellite College, at
Irvington, Indiana, in a letter to me, Oct. 9, 1893, says:
“Nor is it true that a church may not depart, in some measure, from the perfect
ideal church of the New Testament and still be styled a church. The Seven
Churches of Asia, held pernicious doctrines and yet were called by an
Apostle, churches.”
In the fellowship of Baptist churches of our own day this is recognized. An
isolated and occasional error or temporary variation as to what is Christian
baptism, as to church polity, as to whether certain books of the Bible are
canonical, as to the exact relation of grace and works to salvation, or as to
being slightly dyed with an essentially modified form of Manichaeism, is not a
more radical departure from the New Testament than is incest, following the
error of Balaam, of Jezebel, substituting works for grace, or for the doctrine of
Christ substituting the doctrine of the Nicolaitanes. In other words, as these
errors of the churches of the first century invalidated them only when they
became their permanent character, so errors, even when fundamental, in
succeeding churches, cannot be allowed to invalidate their claim to a place in
the perpetuity line, save when they become permanently characteristic. f80
Much less can we, for a moment, consider incidental errors in the history of
our churches as entitled to any bearing on the succession question.
To the question, then:
“Why recognize, as Baptist churches, sects in past ages which were guilty of
errors equal to affusion, infant baptism, other Pedobaptist errors and errors of
certain non-Pedobaptist bodies while you deny that Pedobaptist churches are
New Testament churches?”
the answer is: For the same reason that we recognize the churches of the first
century, with all their errors — referred to in the foregoing — as Baptist
churches, while we deny the recognition to all present contemporaneous non-
Baptist churches. Pedobaptist and other non-Baptist churches by faith,
constitution and practice, are essentially and permanently anti-New Testament.
But, were we to admit much that is falsely laid to the charge of those sects
which are usually counted in the succession line, it would be true of them only
as greater errors were true of the churches of the first century, referred to in the
preceding part of this chapter. Like it was with the church at Laodicea, Christ
does not deny a church because of even a great temporary error, but He spews
it out only because it becomes characteristically and permanently wrong. f81
I, therefore, conclude this chapter with this rule: Only by becoming
characteristically, fundamentally and permanently unscriptural, as to either or
both faith and practice, has a church ever thrown itself out of the Church
Perpetuity line, or can it ever do so.