>>10551
It's too bad they followed in the footsteps of the Trail of Blood (1931) version of events and didn't do some more original research on the subject. They could have found much better sources such as the Edinburgh Encyclopedia article of 1830 (Vol. 3, p. 251) and other primary sources.
The ToB really doesn't argue strongly enough from the case for the local church and against state churches, and what I mean specifically is they think there is a need to identify with "groups," which were usually in their times equally as political as the very state church that they opposed. While it is often the conceivably the case that local, Bible-believing churches were politically under some state church, that doesn't mean churches needed to react to this with some "movement" to compete for political capital with these state entities. Although it is very likely the case that individual members of such churches did participate in these political movements, their local churches did not institutionally go along with them. Because to do so, and to form a denomination, would be antithetical to maintaining true Biblical primacy.
So just as in the counter-reformations baptists were charged as being protestant due to often existing inside lands controlled by those state churches, in other times they would have been called (by their pedobaptist adversaries) donatists or paulicians for instance, or else called by some political movement as the peasant uprising in Munster or the Petrobrusians or Waldensians, or else just struck with the general derogatory anabaptist label (as the Mennonites eventually even adopted this label). But none of these groups or "movements" is the same as the independent, baptist, local church because that is based on the New Testament. It has received the Scripture which is the word of God (preserved from destruction by various state church entities) and it hasn't changed or added doctrine since. Even today, one of those historical distinctives is the refusal to use any corrupted versions of scripture such as the alexandrian or catholic versions, as well as being baptist and not organized into a political denomination.
That's also (one of) the reasons I don't associate with NIFB movement. Corruption starts in political organization. And it may start innocent enough, but it will end up as a frankenstein. If it's the Roman church, it will split into a million pieces. That's one of the main lessons to learn here.
