My Parker Family - Daniel Parker

Elder Daniel Parker

Daniel Parker (January 29, 1781 – December 3, 1844) was an early American leader in the Primitive Baptist Church in the Southern United States and the founder of numerous churches including Pilgrim Primitive Baptist Church at Elkhart, Texas, the location of the Parker family cemetery. As an elder, Parker led a group who separated from that church and formed the Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Predestinarian Baptists. Parker is one of the earliest documented proponents of the doctrine of Serpent Seed among Protestant Christianity.

Elder Parker was one of the earlier ministers to speak out against the "missions" movement. In 1820, while living in Vincennes, Indiana, he released a booklet entitled "A Public Address to the Baptist Society, and Friends of Religion in General, on the Principle and Practice of the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions for the United States of America." The Baptist Board of Foreign Missions, organized at Philadelphia in 1814, is best known as the Triennial Convention, but its official name was the "General Missionary Convention of the Baptist Denomination in the United States." Objections by Baptists to the Convention were based on both soteriology and ecclesiology. He was a strict Predestinarian, but his chief objections in the booklet are based on ecclesiology - for example, "They have violated the right or government of the Church of Christ in forming themselves into a body and acting without of the union." Several important preachers on the east coast led in the "anti-missions" movement, but Parker was the leader on the frontier, and probably spoke best to the common man.

It appears that during this time, Parker was also formulating views on God and man that he would first release in his Views on the Two Seeds (1826). He taught that all persons are from the moment of conception either of the "good seed" of God or of the "bad seed" of Satan (the children of the good seed are roughly equivalent to the "elect" of Calvinism, and those of the bad seed similar to the "non-elect"), and were predestined that way from the beginning; nothing a person can do can change one from God's seed to Satan's or vice versa. Therefore, mission activity was not only unbiblical and sinful but, as a practical matter, useless since the "decision" was already made prior to birth.

Many consider his theory a type of Manichaeism.

The swastika (卐) was used as the cross of the Manicheans, a religious movement started in the latter half of the third century. that was founded by the Iranian prophet Mani in the Sasanian Empire. Manichaeism taught an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness. Its beliefs were based on local Mesopotamian religious philosophy, Buddhism, Tantra, and Christian Gnosticism. http://atlanteangardens.blogspot.com/2018/09/hidden-history-of-european-dark-ages.html

Catharism was a christian Gnostic movement that thrived in some areas of Southern Europe, particularly what is now northern Italy and southern France, between the 12th and 14th centuries. Followers were known as Cathars, and their beliefs were said to have been brought from Persia, influenced by concepts rooted in the Manichean philosophy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_n72ntB4j