Overview of Reformed Baptist History

So today we are going to go through Reformed Baptist history, the history of the Reformed Baptist movement. It's going to be kind of like a 10-mile-up view. We're not, we are going to dial down on some things, but not all things.

This is an extensive topic that we could spend months, even years, going through, going through the particulars of each person and what they've done and how they contributed to the movement. But suffice it to say this is going to be an overview.

We'll talk about, we're going to go through a timeline starting from the birth and resurrection of Jesus all the way up to the Reformation and onward. And then we'll go through some more particulars. So just to let you know, can anybody tell me who that is?

Spurgeon, right? And can anybody tell me where he's preaching? London, okay, good. More specifically? There we go, the Metropolitan Tabernacle. So this ends up being the fruit of the Reformed Baptist movement in England, okay, specifically Scotland, yeah, in England, right?

This Tabernacle Fellowship, the Metropolitan Tabernacle, dates back to 1650 when the English Parliament banned independent Christian organizations from meeting together. This congregation braved persecution until 1688 when the Baptists were once again allowed to worship in freedom.

Now, as you rightly pointed out, that's Charles Spurgeon and he ministered there for 38 years. Anybody know who he was preceded by? We might be going through his catechism. Benjamin Keech. Benjamin Keech preceded Charles Spurgeon, okay, that's where we get our Baptist catechism.

Also during that time, before Keech, during Keech, and after, John Gill was ministering at Metropolitan Tabernacle for 51 years. Now, the original building, which is there, was burned down in 1898 and it was rebuilt again, but destroyed in 1941 due to a German bombing of London in World War II.

In 1957, the Temple Tabernacle was rebuilt to a new but much smaller design and that's right here, if you can see that. Now, I started out with this because this is basically, I don't want to say the pinnacle of the Reformed Baptist movement, but the pinnacle of it in that area at that time.

I mean, we get great men like Benjamin Keech, John Gill, Charles Spurgeon out of this movement. So, how did we get here? That's what we're going to go through now. Oh, just another little tidbit. This is the Metropolitan Tabernacle.

That's Ireland, Scotland, and England, okay? That's where he was ministering. And just as another point of reference, the Amadis. We support them as a missionary on the island of Ireland on the Cooley Peninsula.

So, that's where they're located. It's a very dark area spiritually, so they do need our prayers and him and his wife are fully committed. They're renouncing their... Yeah, they would renounce their American citizenship in order to be citizens of Ireland, to stay there forever.

So, that's a heavy, heavy.

Burden. Yes, sir?

Just would be remiss if we didn't call Matthew Brennan as well, who's working in Ireland in a different area. He's in Clonmel. Okay. So, if on the map you see where it says Ireland, he's kind of south of there.

Okay. But he's an actual Irishman local to the area, and one of the other few.

Reformed Baptist people trying to make a movement in that area. Great. Thank you. I didn't even know that, but thank you. So, you know, Ireland is certainly an area that we're trying to make a greater headway with the Reformed Baptist movement.

So, okay. So, this is the geographic location, and I just wanted to point out the Imanis for us. So, like I said, what I want to do now is just a timeline. It's not going to be an exhaustive list of events.

It's going to be a highlight of some important ones. So, obviously, we begin... the beginning of Christianity is the advent of Christ. Now, I would contend that even Judaism was Christianity looking forward.

Okay. So, we have in 33 AD, Jesus rises from the dead, and Christianity begins its movement and starts to spread throughout Rome. In 313, Constantine issues the Edict of Milan, which makes Christianity legal.

Now, it's also known as the Edict of Toleration, which at Rome during that time, it was predominantly pagan. So, for Christianity to come on the scene and now not just be accepted, but made legal was a big deal.

So, Constantine helped that, although, you know, Constantine's theology is probably not one we would, you know, follow. He desired to be baptized at the end of his life so that his sins would be remitted and that kind of stuff.

But, be that as it may, God in his providence used Constantine to make Christianity legal in Rome. In 325, the Nicene Creed is written, and that's the one where Arius was claiming that Jesus was little God, basically like the Jehovah's Witnesses of today.

This creed, the council gets together in Nicaea to debate this, and I think it was 140 ministers to two voted that Jesus is one in essence with the Father. The homo osea, homo osea is controversy, but so I just want to give you that little point of reference.

Okay, in 520, Irish monasteries begin to flourish. So, missionaries got to Ireland, started establishing monasteries, monks were there. Later on, they would be sacked by the Vikings, but that there was an appearance of Christianity there at that point in time, which will eventually rise up again.

In 1054, the great schism between the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches split. I shouldn't say Roman Catholic. At that point in time, it was still considered Catholic, which means universal, the universal faith.

So, there's a split between the Catholics and the Orthodox. Basically, a split between East and West. That's why we know it as Eastern Orthodox. Okay, it was those churches to the east of Rome, okay, that separated.

Now, Rome and the Catholic Church have different understandings of Christianity. Eastern Orthodox is more of a mystical, incarnational view. Roman Catholicism is a more sacramental and Western mindset view, and here we get the first split of the church.

In 1302, the Pope issues Unum Sanctum, and this is kind of like a watershed moment, because I'm going to read this to you. Unum Sanctum proclaims papal supremacy. Pope Boniface VIII issued the papal edict Unum Sanctum on November 18, 1302, in a response to a dispute with Philip IV, King of France.

The edict asserted that there was neither salvation nor remission of sins for those outside of the Catholic Church. Emphasizing the role of the Pope as the head of the church, the decree promised excommunication to anyone who rejected his supreme authority, the authority over all things political and spiritual.

It also articulated that the temporal sword, in other words, the secular authority, was to submit to the spiritual sword, the clergy. So, the secular was to submit to the spiritual sword. The edict concluded with the message that submission to the Roman Pope was necessary for salvation.

Unum Sanctum marked the height of medieval papal power. Okay, so this is kind of like a watershed, in-writing decree that the Pope is head over all things, and unless you submit to him, and unless the secular authorities submit to him, there is no salvation outside of that.

Okay, you see what happens in the heart of man when they start to exert this power that they truly don't have. Pope Boniface VIII. And, obviously, this leads to other issues in the church, and before we get to Martin Luther, there was Jan Hus, and he, about a hundred years, ninety-five years before Luther, started recognizing these things and speaking out about them, and they burned them at the stake.

Luther comes along about a hundred years later, and that's when this really erupts. This is what we know as the Protestant Reformation, where he nails the 95 thesis to the church door in Wittenberg. Okay, going through the indulgences in purgatory, and, you know, justification by faith, and all these different things that he protested against the Catholic Church for.

Now, the goose and the swan, right?

His goal was not to split the church. He was not looking to tear it apart. He was looking to reform it from within and get everybody on board to conform with biblical Christianity. Obviously, we know that didn't happen, and here we are today.

Okay.

1525, the Anabaptist movement begins. Now, the Anabaptists are basically credo Baptists. They believe in believers' baptism. They put forth that infant baptism is invalid. It wasn't valid. So, if you were baptized as an infant, but not as an adult, as a professing Christian, you needed to be baptized again, and the way I remember what an Anabaptist is is that you have to be baptized again, and again, and again, Anabaptist, and again, and again.

All right, real quick, I just want to read this to you. The Anabaptist movement in 1525, often called the Swiss Radicals or the Left Wing of the Reformation, the Anabaptists separated from Swiss Reformer Ulrich Zwingli over the issue of infant baptism.

They believed that only those who could understand and publicly confess their faith should be baptized. The movement, originally called the Swiss Brethren, originated and flourished in Zurich, Switzerland, and then spread to Germany, Moravia, and the Netherlands.

The Anabaptist movement began on January 21st, 1525, when Grebel and Manz held their first adult believers' baptism. Persecution quickly followed. Grebel died after being imprisoned in 1526, and the following year, Manz was drowned in the Lehmat River, the first Protestant martyred by other Protestants.

The Anabaptists were predecessors of the Mennonite movement. So, here you have infant pedobaptism holders, Presbyterians, persecuting and killing Anabaptists. Credo Baptists. So, that's an issue, too.

So, our history goes back to those people. All right.

In Henry,.

1534, Henry VIII passes the Act of Supremacy, and we're going to get to that a little bit later. I've got a little blurb to read on that. The Count of Reformation begins. The Council of Trent was written in 1545, and this was headed up by Ignatius of Loyola to counter the teachings of the Reformation.

In other words, to get people back to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. This is where we actually get the, I don't even want to call it a doctrine, this is where we get Molinism from. A Jesuit, Louis Molina, started to study what the Reformation taught, and in order to counter Calvinism and God's sovereignty, he came up with a system known as Modalism, which Not Modalism.

Thank you. Molinism. Got the D and the L wrong. Molinism. We're actually probably going to watch something like that at the mentoring group this week. So, all right, onward. 39 Articles of Church of England are issued in 1563.

Now, England was predominantly Catholic.

Okay, the.

King at the time passed an edict where 39 Articles of the Church of England, now they're going to separate from the Roman Catholic Church, and these 39 Articles are basically a list of their doctrines, their polity, their church government.

So, they're separating, and they're known as the Church of England. They're predominantly still Catholic in practice and belief, but they have these Articles separating them from the Roman Catholic Church.

We're getting there. We're getting there. Okay?

Shortly, shortly after that, in 1611, King James is there, King James I, and he issues an edict to retranslate the Bible, and that's where we get the King James Bible from. Around this time, a little bit after the Reformation, Arminius enunciates Arminianism in 1630, and he enunciates that in five points.

Most people think that Calvinists were the ones who came up with the five points of Calvinism, but actually, they were in response to Arminius's five points of Arminianism. So, every point that he issued, Calvinists countered with an opposing view.

That's where we actually get the five points of Calvinism. And finally, in the 1630s, the Clarendon Code was issued, and we're going to go a little bit deeper into this in a minute or two, but it basically was trying to enforce the Church of England's beliefs on the Presbyterians and the Baptists at that time.

It's also shortly before the Westminster Confession was completed and brought forth. Okay? So, this is basically the timeline from the beginning of Christianity up until the Reformation. We're going to concentrate probably about from where the 39 Articles of the Church of England are until now.

Okay? Any questions at this point? We're good?

Okay.

So, I told you we were going to get to King Henry, right? He passes the Act of Supremacy, and King Henry of England was a devout Catholic who had received the title Defender of the Faith from Pope Leo.

However, in 1529, Henry began an assault on papal control of England in order to divorce his wife, Catherine of Aragon, and marry Anne Boylan. So, now, the Pope wasn't allowing this to happen. So, King Henry says, well, I'm going to defy the Pope.

I'm going to issue this Act of Supremacy and do what I want. So, it was an act of rebellion. In 1534, the English Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy. So, the people who were in England supported King Henry during this, declaring Henry to be the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England, thus placing England outside the Roman Catholic Church's control.

Appeals to Rome were forbidden, clergy were forced to submit to the throne, and church assets were appropriated. The Act of Supremacy laid the legal groundwork for the English Reformation. It is also the basis upon which English bishops today are appointed by the Sovereign.

So, the Church of England basically became known as the Anglican Church. The word Anglican is of England. So, when somebody says the Church of England or the Anglican Church, they're talking about the same thing.

Anglican means of England, and this is the beginning of the labor pains for the birth of Protestantism in this area. By the end of King Henry's reign, the Church of England was no longer Roman Catholic, no longer in submission to the Pope, which based on the Unum Sanctum is outright defiance of his papal bull.

But it was also not really, the Church of England was not really Protestant in worship or government. So, there was still more work to be done. Later on, King Edward Henry's son continued to reform the church, and then it started to become truly Protestant.

King Edward died, and his half-sister Mary became Queen. She was once again Roman Catholic, so now it's going to start shifting the other way. She died prematurely, and also, say again? Bloody Mary, right.

She died prematurely, and then Elizabeth became Queen, and she wanted England to become a Protestant nation, and worked hard to get the Anglican Church in line with a more biblically-based understanding.

So, I was thinking that the map was behind me. So now, you have King Henry in England, okay? Defying the Pope's papal bull, and start moving away from them, and now you have King Henry's son who tried to reform it and get it to be more Protestant, all right?

So, here's the map I was looking for. So, this doesn't pertain to Ireland. This is basically pertaining to Scotland and England. Ireland has its own thing going on. In fact, they're still staunchly Roman Catholic.

Okay.

After decades of contending with Elizabeth and her ministers, Puritans began to yearn for the day when her successor, James VI of Scotland, would come into power. In 1603, he did, and subsequently became King James I, which we talked about.

He brought forth the King James Bible. He was raised up as a Calvinist, believe it or not, and a Presbyterian, but demanded conformity to the crown. So, he still had an allegiance to the political powers at that time, versus a separation between the church and the state.

Disappointed with James, Puritans began to separate and leave the Church of England, and some England altogether. In 1620, some left for the New World. So, now, what we're going to do in the next, like, two or three slides, after two or three slides, we're going to go through a hierarchy of terms.

So, when I say Protestant, when I say Puritan, we're going to go through what each one of those means, okay? I'm just giving you an overview at this point. England grew worse, with James's son, Charles I, pushing an anti-Puritan agenda.

Political and religious tensions mounted until England found itself in a civil war. It was during this time that a hundred Puritan ministers and leaders assembled at Westminster Abbey, under the direction of Parliament, to abolish the Anglican form of government and separate the church and state.

Eventually, Charles was charged for treason and beheaded at the hands of Oliver Cromwell, who began to lead England for the next ten years. So, the Puritans, they wanted an internal change, in other words, a real heartfelt conversion to the faith, not just adherence to external religious ordinances, which is basically what Roman Catholicism looked like.

They wanted faith to be a matter of the heart, a way of life, such that when you confessed Christ, your whole life was guided by the Lord Jesus Christ. It wasn't something that you just talked about. You walked the walk.

You talked the talk, and you walked the walk.

Okay.

Now we're going to get into the hierarchy of terms. So, what is a Protestant? A Protestant is those who protested the Roman Catholic Church and its unscriptural practices resulting from the events of the Reformation, starting in 1517.

So, starting from Martin Lutheran, we now have a protest of the Roman Catholic Church. In England, with the publication of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Faith in 1563, the Anglican Church would then officially be considered Protestant.

So, once they issued the Thirty-Nine Articles, and King Henry issued the Act of Supremacy, they are now separating themselves completely from the Roman Catholic Church. Unfortunately, it still looked much like the Roman Catholic Church in practice.

Now, what's a Puritan?

So,.

Puritans were Protestants, so it comes out of that category. It's those Protestants who wanted to purify the new church, the Anglican Church of England, from within and not split away from it. Puritans felt the Church of England was still too Catholic and incomplete in its purification.

They desired a separation between the church and state as opposed to a monarchy. The Puritans would never settle for what Elizabeth established by a royal decree. The church needed more reforming. In fact, the term Puritan came to denote against pleasure, right, because the Puritans were all about following the scriptures, and obviously that's going to cause people problems who are in the flesh and desirous to live happy lives and entertaining themselves and feeding their flesh.

Yes, sir?

Could you just give a little more of an explanation of the difference between the monarchy and then there being the separation between the church and the state? What would the state be at that point, rather than the monarchy?

Okay, the state was still a kingdom with a king in its head, and that's what monarchy means. Mono meaning one, arch meaning leader. Right. So there's one leader, and the one leader is over the government and the church at the same time.

Now that's a problem, right? And we're going to see that once the Clarendon Code gets issued. But when you have one leader who's king over the government and the church, now you have a recipe for disaster.

Okay, it's the Protestants' desire and the Puritans' desire to pull away and separate the two. Not that the two would work independent of one another, they're designed to work together, but they held the belief that a church should be on top of the government.

Governments should submit to the church. Yeah, governments should submit to the church, whereas if you're the king, and you're king of the government, and you're also king of the the church, you'd want the church to submit under so you could do whatever you want.

Yes, mate? Sure, God is the one who establishes the governments and the leaders and that stuff, so that they should fall underneath God's God's law, God's commandments. What God says to do, not what they decide to do.

Okay, make sense?

Okay. All right, so now we have separatists, okay? These were Protestants, Puritans, who now wanted to purify the church by separating from the Church of England, which was trying to impose one religion upon the whole of Great Britain.

So what they're, the separatists are saying, say, look, we understand you want one one faith over the whole country, but we want freedom of worship. If we have differences, if I want to baptize a baby, and you want to baptize only adults, we want the freedom to do that.

Under the Church of England, they had one set of rules. You couldn't do that. So the separatists are the people who want to separate from the Church of England and basically follow what they could, their conscience, in the way they see the doctrines of the Bible.

The separatists also did not want a monarchy, a king who ruled over both the people and the church. They wanted a separation of power and authority between the two. Again, this gave rise to Presbyterianism and subsequently other doctrinally distinct churches, right?

So at this point, the church is still evolving, and it's rooting out false practices and false teachings, right? Other people, like the Roman Catholic Church, would say the church is becoming contaminated and diluted.

It's moving away from truth. We as Protestants see that we're moving away from the false teachings of Roman Catholicism and more in line with the scriptures. Now, obviously, with that, because we're sin-stained people, we're not all going to agree on everything.

We agree on the essentials, but the other things we tend to disagree on. Okay. So, Presbyterians. So, so far we had Protestants, Puritans, separatists, and now Presbyterians. Presbyterians are an assembly of separatists in Parliament during the English Civil War in 1647 who sought to abolish or abolish the Episcopal form of government and authored the Westminster Confession of Faith under Charles I.

The Westminster Confession was completed over a five-year period through 1 ,163 meetings by 121 clergymen known as divines, 10 members of the House of Lords, and 20 members of the House of Commons who are also members of Parliament, a .k .a. the Westminster Assembly, and appointed by Parliament to do so.

So, this was actually a government dictate to have these men go aside, meet together, and come up with a confession of faith. What does the Bible teach about all these things? So, this was within the government.

The government told them to do this, and they did. The resulting confession is clearly spelled out, spelled out the Protestant position on the Christian faith and Christian authority. This was done at Westminster Abbey, adjacent to Parliament in London, hence it received the name Westminster Confession, right?

So, it'd be like people meeting in Congress, and across the street is the Royal Something Hotel, and they meet there, and they hammer out some teachings on the Bible, and that becomes the Royal Confession that we go forward with.

Yes?

Can you clarify what you mean by the Episcopal form of government?

Episcopal form of government, I think that would be similar to a Pope. There'd be a hierarchy of people involved, whereas a Baptist form of government, we hold to autonomy, and I think it would be closely tied to the government.

I'm not exactly sure, Cameron, but that's...

My understanding is that Episcopal, so when you say form of government, you really mean church government, correct? Yes. Yeah, so an Episcopal form of church government would be basically mirroring Roman Catholicism, but outside of Roman Catholicism, so you would have... Priests.

I don't know if you would have a Pope, but you'd have like bishops who would rule over larger groups of churches, and then clergymen at the local level, and so there would be a hierarchy of individuals that worked their way up to some supreme form of hierarchical nature, I would think in the Episcopal sense, it would be the King of England at the time.

Yes, I... It wouldn't be the Pope, so it would be tied to government, but like today we have Episcopal churches in America which are essentially, they're the Anglican Church, but they can't because they're not in England.

So if you're Episcopal, you're basically an American Anglican, basically.

Yes, yes, and that's a great point, and they would still have priests, you know, priests who... And bishops, and cardinals, and that whole hierarchy, which again, a Protestant or Presbyterian would look at that and say, that's not biblical.

It's just not biblical. So, but thank you for clarifying that. A good movie for you guys to watch if you wanted a little bit more background on this, it's called Cromwell. It's about Oliver Cromwell, and it's about two and a half hours long, and it's an older movie, I think in the 70s, but it really helps clarify all these things.

You get a better perspective of what was going on at that time. Okay, now we get to the Westminster Confession. This is the document completed in 1652 by mostly ministers and theologians appointed by Parliament to give a clear statement of doctrine, worship, and church government in order to further reform the Church of England.

The official Church of England never adopted the Confession and responded with the Clarendon Code. So the Westminster Assembly comes back, they come out with the Westminster Confession. The hierarchy of the Church of England, the Anglican Church, doesn't like this.

Okay, and this is what they issue, the Clarendon Code. As a result, the Church of England determined to impede the non-conformists and stop their movement. The code included four acts passed in England during the ministry of Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, and here are the four codes.

First, the Corporation Act, which forbade public office to those not taking sacraments at a parish church overseen by the Church of England. And basically what this means is if you weren't part of the Church, the Church of England, you couldn't take part in the government.

So in other words, to serve in Parliament in the Church of England, you had to be part of the Church of England. If you were Presbyterian, you know, trying to separate, you were not allowed to hold public office.

This is the monarchy, basically government overreach. Next was the Act of Conformity. It made compulsory the Common Book of Prayer, which led to 2 ,000 ministers resigning. In other words, the government wanted to dictate to the Church, the Church calendar, what the offices are, the rites and sacraments.

It wanted to dictate to the Church what the doctrine should be. And again, the ministers, obviously 2 ,000 have walked away from this. Next was the Covenantal Act of.

1664.

It made meeting for non-conformist worship illegal, even in private houses, where more than four outsiders were present. So what it does, it makes gathering apart from government-sanctioned worship illegal.

It's made to look like family worship was okay because you couldn't have more than four people, but if you wanted to worship home alone in your house, you could. But once it becomes more than four people, well, that's really like a church.

And if it is a church, you have to be part of the Church of England. That's illegal.

As long as you wear a mask and sit...

As long as you wear a mask and take the cookies. So you can see how some of the things happening today, you know, parallel this. And this is just the heart of humanity and the overreach and men in power trying to go further than what they're supposed to.

And then the Five Mile Act, which forbade non-conformist ministers to live or visit within five miles of a town or any other place where they had ministered previously. So basically what they're saying is they didn't want the influence of these men to take root in the communities that they helped build.

They had to move away. So if you had a church of a hundred, two hundred people, you had to move at least five miles away from these people so that they wouldn't be influenced by you. So you see how the government, even back then, has animus towards the church.

Right? Because the church is God's representative here on the earth. So this is what actually pushed. But God uses these things, all things together for good. God uses these things to clarify and further his church on, which we're going to see in a second.

The Clarington Code caused deeper division and essentially ruined any possibility of the Anglican Church of England and the non-conformists working together under one religious and political banner. So they were never going to be able to be meshed together.

There was no basic friendship between the two. Prior to this code, and up to this time, civil war was taking place between the monarchy, led by Charles I, and Parliament, led by Oliver Cromwell. Again, it would be a good idea to watch that movie.

It's really going to help put things in order in your mind. And despite these terrible odds, Cromwell defeated the monarchy. His side, the church, ended up beating the government. Defeated the monarchy and had the king beheaded for treason in 1649.

And he continued to fight for religious freedom. It was the people, he was the people's choice, Cromwell, and he was offered the crown. He was offered the crown to lead England. But he vehemently refused.

Cromwell continued to fight for a separation of church and state and later became Lord Protector of England. So Cromwell recognized that if he was to become the king of England, he basically just reverted back to what he was fighting against in the first place.

He wanted a separation of church and state. Now he believed that they should work together. And again, the government should come under the church's.

Moral authority.

But he refused to become the king because of that reason. He didn't want to go back to a system that had a political head of state who was also the head of the church at the same time. Yes, brother?

What is the Lord Protector of England?

Lord Protector is basically another way of saying King of England, the people's choice. So he ended up leading England, but not as the king. Okay, so people followed him, flocked to him because of his stance and the way he handled the Civil War and leading the people to actually win.

They looked to him as the leader. So they were the ones who called him Lord Protector of England, even though it wasn't an official office. It wasn't a true king. He was the leader.

Well,.

Somebody has to be the leader. He didn't want to be king. Okay, so non-conformists, I used that term. It's also known as the church freemen. It was those Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists that were united together in their common faith who would not submit to the act of conformity, which is part of the Clarendon Code, that established the Church of England as the only legally approved church.

So yeah, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists, and we're going to learn what Congregationalists is in a minute. I know I didn't get to that. Congregationalists, there we go. They held to the Westminster Confession.

Okay, they held to the doctrinal standard that the divines came to, with the exception of its ecclesiology. They rejected the idea of a presbytery or synods overseeing and ruling over the individual congregations, and held that individual congregations were independent, autonomous, and responsible directly to God himself.

They amended slightly the Westminster Confession at the Savoy Palace in London in 1658 to include their position on church government. Their confession has become known as the Savoy Declaration. Okay, so now here we have the separatists, the Protestants, Presbyterians, who are separatists.

Now we're starting to see distinctions between all of them. And the Savoy Declaration, this was an issue of church government. In other words, they didn't want a hierarchy of government. They wanted people to be able to lead their own churches and be held directly responsible to God.

It's basically where we are today. Yes?

Shortly after this, 1663, is when Thomas Watson wrote the book we're going through in the Premier.

Amen. It's a good point to note that many of the Puritan writings that were, that we learn from and glean from, are being written during this period. So it's a period of persecution, it's a period of turmoil, trial, and these guys are pouring their hearts out.

And as well as it's a time of them digging into the Word because now they have to substantiate their positions to the other men in Parliament to say, look, this is what we believe.

And just to go right along with that, I mean, all this turmoil that's going on, what does he write?

All things for good. All things together for good, right? Yeah, exactly. Good point.

Pastor, I think just to kind of expand on that point, you see a lot of writings coming out of this time because there was so many people really diving into the nuances of their positions and then now defending it publicly, right?

So like all of these Samoan declarations, Westminster confessions, and ones that will come beyond that you haven't gotten to, those are all groups of men getting together who have agreed on these commonalities in their forms of belief and declaring them publicly to everybody that this is what we believe and why we believe it.

So they're needing to dig into the Word to defend those beliefs and the outworking of that is all these blessed writings that we have. Nehemiah Cox, we've gone through a number of his books, all are from this time period.

Yeah, excellent point. Again, this is God's sovereignty and His providence working to clarify His Word for His people. Now again, there's going to be differences between us and Presbyterians and Congregationalists, however, we're united on the Gospel, whereas Rome was united around a false Gospel, okay, and demanded conformity to all of their rules.

The Bible tells us we're supposed to be in unity, not conformity. Now, it doesn't mean that we shouldn't seek purity of doctrine and hold to the same doctrine, but it recognizes that we're each individuals and each one of us is going to think differently and God has given everybody different talents, gifts, and abilities, so He wants unity, not conformity, whereas the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England are demanding conformity.

You have to hold to this or you're not in the true Church. We would recognize that the Church is the invisible body of Christ, born by the Spirit of God wherever you are, and even though we can have some wrong beliefs, we're still united by God's Spirit, so there's leniency when it comes to that.

All right, in the meantime, the Act of Tolerance. The Toleration Act of 1689 was issued by King William and Queen Mary to ease some of the religious restrictions, but the specific acts under the Clarendon Code were not repealed until the 19th century.

So they issued this Act of Toleration basically to say, all right, we'll appease you Protestants, we'll work this out, and let's all make nice-nice, but it didn't actually work. So here we get to the Baptists.

The Baptists agreed with the Westminster Confession and the ecclesiology of the Congregationalists. In other words, we believed in the autonomy of the local church, but we differed on infant baptism. We hold to credo baptism, baptism to those who professed faith in Christ, not as infants.

They became known as particular Baptists, and while all this persecution was going on, they met in 1677 under difficult circumstances, persecution from the monarchy, to include the revisions of the Savoy Declaration and further refine the Westminster Confession to reflect their position on believers' baptism.