A marker takes the colour of the side it landed on — blue toward the left pole,
orange toward the right. The shape says which tradition; the colour never does.
The rails draw traditional, non-Calvinist Southern Baptists and confessional Presbyterians bound to the Westminster Confession. Calvinist Baptists inside the same convention sit far over on grace, and the larger mainline Presbyterian bodies read several of these questions differently.
What they share
Only the Bible settles it. Both land in the same band on authority: any council may err, and nothing can be required that Scripture will not carry.
Nobody wears a mitre. Neither tradition has bishops. A Baptist congregation answers to no church above it; a Presbyterian minister answers to a court of fellow elders.
Neither expects tongues on a Sunday. Both stand on the cessationist side of the gifts rail, a Presbyterian from the Confession's opening chapter, a Baptist from long settled practice.
Both build their own service. They are not in the same place on the worship rail, but they are on the same side.
Where they differ
Both sides below are stated the way people who hold them would state them. Landing in
the same band is not agreeing, and landing in different ones is not a verdict.
Baptists call the Supper an ordinance rather than a sacrament: something Christ told His church to keep, not a channel grace arrives through. The bread and cup remember His death until He comes, and the blessing comes by the faith of the one taking part. Baptism is the immersion of someone old enough to say what they believe, which is why the building has a pool and no font.
Presbyterian
sacramental
Presbyterians hold that God really gives something at the Table: Christ truly present and truly received, spiritually rather than physically, by faith through the Holy Spirit. Baptism is the sign of the covenant, so the children of members are marked with it as Abraham's children were. Nobody claims the water converts a child on the spot; the claim is that God uses it and makes His promise good in His own time.
In plain wordsA Baptist is baptised once he can say what he believes; a Presbyterian baby is baptised into a promise and grows up to own it.
The call goes out to every person, grace can be refused, and the decision is genuinely the hearer's. That is synergism, the view that a person freely cooperates with the grace God gives. Once someone truly believes, God keeps him for good: eternal security, or once saved, always saved. Classical Arminians hold that a believer can fall away, so these churches turn down that label as firmly as the Calvinist one.
Presbyterian
firmly monergist
Westminster says God chose a people before the world was made, and that the grace which raises the spiritually dead makes the unwilling willing. That is monergism: God alone brings a person to believe, and nobody contributes to it, not even the decision. Presbyterians do not hear it as cold. The work was His at the start, so finishing it is His too, and a frightened member is pointed towards the One holding him.
In plain wordsBoth say God saves people. They differ over whether a person can turn Him down.
The Baptist reading leans dispensational: God's promises to the nation of Israel will be kept literally in a future earthly kingdom, and most expect the church caught up before a seven-year tribulation, which is what people mean by the rapture. The Baptist Faith and Message requires none of it, but the expectation runs through the preaching and the study Bibles this stream grew up reading.
Presbyterian
one-people-of-God
Presbyterians hold covenant theology, which reads the whole Bible as one promise differently administered. One people of God runs across both testaments, Jew and Gentile together in Christ inheriting what was promised to Abraham, so there is no separate track for Israel and no rapture in the system. The logic that makes the church Abraham's family is what puts his children's children at the font.
In plain wordsOne expects a chapter still to be written for the nation of Israel; the other reads one story with one people in it.
Beyond the compass
The Compass measures six things, not everything. These differences are real and
sit outside all six.
Who runs the church
A Baptist church is the highest authority over itself: the members vote, call and dismiss the pastor, own the building, and the convention they fund can withdraw fellowship but cannot hand them an order. Presbyterian is a form of government before it is a set of doctrines. Presbyteros is the Greek for elder, and elders run these churches, in a session in each congregation, a presbytery over a region and a general assembly above that.
Creeds nobody calls creeds
Both hold to Scripture alone, and one of them will ordain no minister who does not promise to teach a seventeenth-century document. Presbyterians subscribe the Westminster Confession, and a candidate who differs from part of it says so and lets his presbytery judge whether the difference may stand. Baptists say no creed but the Bible, then adopt the Baptist Faith and Message and expect their seminaries and missionaries to work inside it.
How they came to differ
They are children of the same century and, for a while, of the same country. Parliament summoned a hundred and twenty-one ministers to Westminster Abbey in July 1643 to settle what the English church would be, and they finished the Confession in 1646. The Baptists had already gone: John Smyth's English congregation in Amsterdam baptised believers in 1609, out of Separatism rather than from the Continental Anabaptists.
They parted over the water, and at first over little else. In 1689 the Particular Baptists published a confession that walks through Westminster chapter by chapter and rewrites it where baptism and church government come up.
America pulled them apart. Presbyterians brought Scottish order, an educated ministry and a system of courts; Baptists grew on the frontier revivals, where the gospel was offered to whoever happened to be in the tent, and the Southern Baptist Convention formed in 1845. The Calvinism of 1689 stayed alive in one Baptist stream and is argued over inside that convention still.
Walking in
In the Baptist church the room points at the pulpit and a pool sits behind it. Songs, prayer, notices, a sermon of half an hour or more, then a closing hymn and an invitation to come forward and settle it now. In the Presbyterian church a font stands at the front, the elders sit where everyone can see them, the minister chooses his own words for every prayer, and sooner or later a baby is carried up while the parents answer for it.
Did you know?
The two are closer on paper than in the pew. The Baptist confession of 1689 follows the Westminster Confession chapter by chapter, keeping its sentences for pages at a stretch, and changes course mainly at the font.
What we read
Baptist
The Baptist Faith and Message (2000)
Article 4 on salvation, 5 on God's purpose of grace, 7 on baptism and the Supper.
Baptist
A Statement of the Traditional Southern Baptist Understanding of God's Plan of Salvation (2012)
Ten short articles, each an affirmation and a denial: this side on its own terms.
Presbyterian
The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646)
Chapter 1 on Scripture, 3 on God's decree, 7 on the covenant, 28 and 29 on the sacraments.
Presbyterian
The Westminster Directory for Public Worship (1645)
What replaced the Prayer Book: advice to a minister rather than words to read aloud.
Both
The Second London Baptist Confession (1689)
The Baptist rewrite of Westminster: the clearest place to see how much the two share.
