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'''Baptists''' are a variety of Evangelical [[Protestantism]]. Baptists claim 90 million members worldwide, approximately seventy percent of which reside in the United States. It should be noted that Baptist members are those who have reached the "age of reason" and been baptized. Baptists do not count infants and young children as members.
==Historical origins==
Some also believe the Baptists got their start from the Anabaptists. However, this is unlikely, due to the fact that Baptists and Anabaptists disagree on many issues (such as practices and doctrines relating to church discipline and pacifism).
Another view known as [[Wikipedia:Landmarkism |Landmarkism]] teaches that the first Baptists were the discples of St. John the Baptist. This, however, is extremely unlikely as Baptism espouses many doctrines that developed either in post-schism Catholicism or in other Protestant sects, more than a millennium after Christ. The most notable denomination that holds this view is the American Baptists.
==Beliefs==
Since there are at least sixty-five Baptist bodies with no structured ecclesiology, it's hard to precisely define their doctrines. Nevertheless, there are some points common to all Baptists. For example, most adherents place strong emphasis on the independence of the individual person ("individual soul liberty"), independence of the each church, affirmation of the believer's baptism, and distinctively American concepts such as freedom of religion and separation of church and state.
Orthodoxy disagrees with Baptists on:
===Scripture===
Baptists firmly believe in sola Scriptura (Scripture alone). Properly understood, this is the concept of Scripture as a unified whole, utilizing literary critism criticism called "historical Biblical scholarship," which was pioneered in the late 19th century, while rejecting the previous two millennia of commentaries by the [[Holy Fathers]].
Orthodoxy, however, knows [[Holy Tradition]] to hold and interpret the [[Holy Scripture|Bible]] within itself.
Like all Protestants, Baptists reject the [[Deuterocanon|deuterocanonical]] books of the [[Old Testament]], considering them to be less than divinely inspired. Biblical inerrancy is yet another common heresy among fundamentalist Baptists.
===[[Baptism]]===
Baptism, commonly referred to as "believer's baptism " among Baptists, is an ordinance that according to Baptist doctrine plays no role in salvation. That is, the act of baptism does not actually save a person or cleanse him from all his sins. Instead, it is merely an outward observance, properly performed only after salvation, which occurs when a person professes Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. This completely opposes Orthodoxy, which regards baptism as a real supernatural transformation, through which the believer dies and rises again with [[Jesus Christ|Christ]] in a very real manner.
Through Anabaptist influence, Baptists reject the practice of pedobaptism, or infant baptism, because they believe parents cannot make a decision of salvation for an infant. Related to this doctrine is the disputed concept of an "age of accountability" when God determines that a mentally capable person is accountable for their sins and eligible for baptism. In contrast, reason and mental capacity are not essential factors in either Orthodox baptism or [[Eucharist|Holy Communion]]. This "tradition" arose from the legalistic, overly rationalistic theology of the [[Roman Catholic Church]], which puts the rational intellect above all else, whereas Orthodoxy places the noetic faculty above all.
