Book Review: The Diary of Isaac Backus

A treasure of information about a great figure of Baptist and American history.

Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vols. 1-3 (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979).

Introduction

William McLoughlin has compiled the entirety of known entries by Isaac Backus in his personal journal or diary. McLoughlin provides readers with a helpful introduction and copious footnotes throughout, so that Backus can be understood in his own words. This compendium of personal thoughts, experiences, and relationships is a treasure. Backus is a major figure of American history, and especially the history of Baptists in America. Backus was a longtime pastor (for the span of nearly sixty years), first leading a Separatist church which became a Separate-Baptist church, and then some of that congregation came along with Backus in 1756 to form a distinctly Baptist church. For fifty years and eleven months, Backus continued as the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Middleborough, and he also participated vigorously in the work of the Warren Association and the public debate over religious liberty in the new world.

In this three-volume set, there are numerous important events and experiences. We shall focus on four of the most important: Backus’s conversion, his first pastorate in Titicut, the founding of First Baptist Middleborough, and his death.

Pietistic Conversion

Backus was born on January 9, 1724, in Norwich, Connecticut. Like all New Englanders, Backus and his family belonged to a parish that was the jurisdiction of the local Standing or Congregationalist church. For “more than 17 years,” Backus “did never think” that he was “Converted,” but he “flatered my Self with this that I would turn by and by.”[1] Then in August of 1741, Backus believed that God “laid open to me the fountain of Sin that was in my heart that I Saw that all the Sins in the whole world were in me.”[2] It was then that God “opened to my Soul the glorious way of Salvation by Christ and gave my Soul to Close therewith.”[3]

Soon after, Backus desired to join the church, but he also perceived “many Corruptions among them.”[4] Finally, after nearly a year, Backus did join the Standing Church in Norwich. However, about eighteen months later, Backus “withdrew from them,” due to his opinion that “they had a form of Godliness yet they did Deny the Power there-of.”[5] He and nine others, including his mother and brother, soon covenanted together as the Bean Hill Separate Church in Norwich. Within a month or two, Backus believed God had commanded him to preach, so he did for the Bean Hill church from Psalm 53 in the fall of 1746.

Backus’s conversion and calling to the ministry of preaching were both according to the pietistic tradition of the mid-eighteenth century. During the time of the Great Awakening (1740s), New Englanders began commonly testifying to personal and mystical encounters with God and Christ. The intensity of their experiences often recounted a foreboding of God’s judgment and a subsequent peace and joy over God’s freeing grace in Christ. Much of the Christian landscape of New England was covered with the duty and ritual of Congregationalist order. Personal conversion became the desire and testimony of pietistic Christians, some of whom were quite radical, but many of those pietists separated from what they believed were dead Congregationalist churches.

Separate Church in Titicut

When Backus began preaching and exhorting among the Bean Hill church, he also embarked as a traveling preacher, preaching regularly in the homes of other Separates. In early December of 1747, Joseph Snow (the pastor of a Separate church in Providence, Rhode Island) invited Backus to come along with him on a preaching trip. A couple of weeks later, Snow and Backus “Came down to Titicutt.”[6] After dinner at Samuel Aldens’s house, Backus preached from John 4:35-38. He believed that his sermon was enabled with divine power, and he also believed that the harvest fields of his message represented the people of Titicut. Backus wrote, “my hart was so drawn forth towards God, and in love to his People here that I felt willing to Impart not only the gospel to them But my own soul also, because they were made dear unto me; tho’ I knew none of ‘em personally.”[7]

Backus preached several times in various houses within the Titicut precinct over the next week and a half, and before the end of the year Backus committed to preaching regularly in Titicut with or without the approval of the Standing Church committee. Though Backus later agonized over his rejection of the authority of that committee, confessing his fear of man, he did begin his pastoral ministry as a public and unapologetic Separate. On February 16, 1748 (just about a month after Backus’s twenty-fourth birthday), ten men and six women signed the “Articles of Faith” and the “Church Covenant” that Backus had penned himself just a few days earlier.[8] He wrote that those Christians “gave up themselves to the Lord and to one another by the Will of God… [and] they appeared to rejoice for the oath for they had sworn with all their hearts.”[9]

In pietistic and Separatist style, Backus and sixteen others covenanted together as a new church. Prior to their signing of a confession of faith and a covenant of membership, the would-be church members each told of their “experiences.”[10] In fact, they had taken such time to hear and examine one another that the agreement to join together in signing the church documents did not occur until their third meeting (over the course of two weeks) for the purpose of the business. Thus, the Titicut Separate Church was founded upon the shared beliefs and shared commitment of its members, and twenty-four-year-old Isaac Backus was their pastor.

First Baptist Middleborough

Eight years after the Titicut Separate Church was established, Backus led them to dissolve. Backus and several church members had been wrestling over the practice of baptism and its relationship to the Lord’s Supper. For a long while, the Titicut Separate Church, like many other Separate churches, practiced open communion. This was the practice of welcoming both paedobaptists and credobaptists to the Lord’s Supper together. In time, some of those who separated from paedobaptist Congregationalist churches further developed in their theology toward the embrace of believer’s only baptism (i.e., credobaptism).

During the early months and even years of the Separate movement in colonial America, Separate churches often practiced both paedobaptism and believer’s baptism. But the churches also faced a good deal of infighting between their paedobaptist members and those who refused to commune with their unbaptized brethren. Credobaptists often considered paedobaptism as no baptism at all, and sometimes they condemned it as sin. So too, paedobaptists regularly condemned credobaptists for neglecting what they believed was Christ’s command to baptize children of the New Covenant.

Backus’s church had come to their final conclusion on the debate over baptism. They would no longer admit church members (i.e., admit them to the Lord’s Supper) apart from believer’s baptism. Backus himself “had a weighty sense of the greatness of the affairs before us, and of the infinite importance of carefully keeping the rules of Christs house both in addmitting members, and also in after dealings with ‘em.”[11] Many of the Titicut Separate Church members did not stay with Backus in his move to reform the church according to consistent Baptist doctrine and practices, but five of them did, including his wife. The First Baptist Church of Middleborough (as it was named by 1760) began with six members on January 16, 1756, when Backus “read the Articles and Covenant which I had drawn, and then proceeded solemnly in the presence of God and his people to sign ‘em.”[12] Isaac Backus was thirty-two years old.

Finishing the Race

Not quite a week after Backus covenanted together for the first time with his small Baptist congregation, he visited another church in a town nearby where there was yet another Separate church wrestling over the question of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. At a meeting with that church and several others who had been called upon for their counsel, Backus was the lone and “trying” voice that advised the church “that as we all hold baptism to be the first ordinance before the supper, so that in ordinary cases none ought to be admitted to the later till they had (according to Christs command) submitted to the former.”[13] Thus began Backus’s long and helpful career of playing the role of both local church pastor and wise Baptist leader at large.

For fifty years, Backus pastored the First Baptist Church of Middleborough. During that same time, he traveled to preach in homes and meeting houses, he served as the chairman of the Grievance Committee for the Warren Baptist Association (which he helped for form in 1767), and he advised Separate and Baptist churches, helping them address problems and ordain pastors. Additionally, Backus was a notable representative for Baptists in the public effort to attain religious liberty in New England and beyond, but especially in Massachusetts.

On February 11, 1798, Backus noted that his “old disorder” (probably some issue with his prostate) was “so great today that I did not preach.”[14] Backus was seventy-four years old, and this was the first of two times he noted “bodily illness” or “lameness” as having prevented him from preaching that year.[15] For nearly two more years, Backus made no more mention of illness keeping him from his pastoral duties, but he did begin to slow down his travel and wind down his earthly affairs. On September 2, 1799, he resigned his position at the Rhode Island College, and at the close of the following year (1800), Backus recorded travel of only 121 miles, having preached 113 sermons. This was a considerable reduction from his normal travel record, which he noted meticulously at the end of most years. In 1787, he traveled (mostly by horseback and occasionally on foot) 1,328 miles and preached 158 sermons. In 1788, the count was 1,369 miles and 148 sermons.

In 1789, Backus made a special trip to North Carolina and Virginia during the early months of the year, and he recorded 1,895 miles by land and 1,280 by water, having preached 190 sermons. But by the turn of the nineteenth century, Backus was slowing significantly. In 1801, he recorded only 50 miles and 103 sermons, and in 1802, it was 20 miles and 28 sermons. Even Backus’s entries were reducing in size and number over the last few years of his life, and he was frequently noting the death of church members, pastor friends, and family members. Susanna Backus (his wife) died on November 24, 1800, and one of his daughters (also named Susanna) died on September 19, 1805.

Right through to the end, Backus was spending time in the study of and meditation upon Scripture. He reaffirmed his convictions about only admitting baptized believers to the Lord’s Supper, and he was even threatened with a legal suit from a previous church member who was angry that he had been excommunicated from the First Baptists Church of Middleborough. Backus lamented many times in his diary that he had not been as diligent as he thought he should in leading his church in the practice of church discipline, but he did not neglect it completely, even in his old age.

It was as though God granted Backus relatively good health in the months leading up to the beginning of his demise. The church was regularly meeting at his house, and Backus noted particular “freedom” and “liberty” in his preaching on Lord’s days in January, February, and March of 1806.[16] In good times and bad, amid death and calamity, blessing and joy, Backus’s primary ministry was always to his own congregation in Middleborough.

McLoughlin records in a footnote that Backus suffered two strokes in the spring of 1806, the first only “slight,” but the second “more severe.”[17] Backus recovered enough to maintain his mind and basic functions for several months, but he preached his last sermon on April 3, 1806. On November 20 of that year, Isaac Backus died, having pastored the same church for more than fifty years. His is a profound legacy as a Baptist pastor, a Baptist churchman, a public theologian, and an advocate for religious freedom in colonial and early America.

Conclusion

This three-volume set of Isaac Backus’s diary, along with tremendous historical background and contextual information from William McLoughlin, is a treasure indeed. McLoughlin has also provided readers with twenty-six appendices, including Backus’s Confession of Faith and Covenant of the Church for First Baptist Middleborough, his last will and testament, and minutes from the Stonington Conference where the decision was formally made for Separates to part ways with Baptists. Interested students of Baptist history ought to get to know Isaac Backus, and there seems no better way to do that than by reading his own personal thoughts with the helpful historical guidance of William McLoughlin.

[1] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vol. 1, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979). 3.

[2] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vol. 1, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979). 3.

[3] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vol. 1, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979). 3.

[4] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vol. 1, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979). 3.

[5] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vol. 1, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979). 3.

[6] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vol. 1, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979). 12.

[7] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vol. 1, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979). 12.

[8] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vol. 1, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979). 31.

[9] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vol. 1, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979). 31-32.

[10] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vol. 1, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979). 32.

[11] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vol. 1, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979). 401.

[12] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vol. 1, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979). 401.

[13] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vol. 1, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979). 402.

[14] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vol. 3, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979). 1427.

[15] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vol. 3, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979). 1427, 1436.

[16] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vol. 3, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979). 1519-1520.

[17] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vol. 3, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979). 1520.