Whew! What A Change!

The changes or evolution in doctrine that I have discovered throughout my many years of studying the history of the "Two Seed," "Primitive," or "Old School" Baptists, concerns not only the change in views regarding the means and nature of "regeneration" or the "new birth," and the change regarding the certain "perseverance" of the regenerated (changes that I have addressed in voluminous writings), but also the change in the strictness of their idea of perseverance. Let me explain.

Today's Hardshells, for the greater part, deny that the regenerated will and must persevere in grace and holiness, and in the faith of the gospel, believing rather that many of the regenerated will fail to persevere and yet be "preserved" in grace. One can be a Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, or a believer in any other false or heathen religion, and still be "regenerated" and "preserved" and so be finally saved. It is because of the change in belief about "regeneration" (believing that it does not make one a Christian), divorcing it from evangelical conversion, and about perseverance in the truth (that the new birth does not guarantee perseverance in faith), that led the Hardshells into quasi Universalism.

Yet, when one reads the first several years of "The Primitive Baptist" periodical of the 1830s he discovers how different was the thinking of those first PBs from their followers of today! Those brethren believed that anyone who did not belong to the "one true church" was in Babylon and a part of Antichrist. They were constantly saying "come out of her my people," believing that the truly elect and regenerated would come out of the false churches! They suspected the salvation of all they thought were heretics! This is why they constantly talked about how only few would be saved (as the scriptures also teach). Wow, what a change! Ironic too when one considers how today's PBs are under a delusion that they have not changed in the past two hundred years.