Pt. 3 The History of Confessions

Today, we're still at part three of the introduction, and we're looking at a history of confessions because one of the questions that's asked a lot is, how did we get from the Shema, the Lord our God is one, to the 1689 London Baptist Confession with 32 chapters and numerous subsections?

And what's that? Progressive revelation.

Okay.

That's a very legitimate question. And remember, in a previous session, we mentioned the difference between creeds and confessions. Creeds tend to be short and to the point. Confessions tend to be longer and include more theological concepts.

And if you remember, I quoted Jim Renahan, and he says, creeds tell us what we must believe. Confessions tell us what we should believe.

All right?

So, in other words, the creeds are short. If you disagree with the major tenets of a creed, the church would consider you to be outside the realm of the true church.

All right?

So, a creed is a short statement that will identify who is a true Christian and who is.

Not.

In fact, let me give you an example of a creed in action. All right? We've been studying the arrest and the trial of Jesus through the Gospel of John. And we've seen how the leaders of Israel had convinced the crowds that Jesus is an enemy of Israel and worthy of the death penalty.

That's what we've seen. Anybody disagree with that that we've seen so far in chapter 18 and 19 of the Gospel of John? Now, Pilate, on the other hand, finds no guilt in him. And he tries everything he can to avoid sending Jesus to the cross.

And when Pilate says, Shall I crucify your king? You remember what they said? We have no king but Caesar.

All right?

That's their creed. Okay?

All right?

By that statement, all right, we have no king but Caesar, they have repudiated the Shema, the Lord our God is one, all right? And so, by their own lips, by shouting this statement, this very simple statement, they have rejected the Lordship of Jesus Christ and of Almighty God.

So there you can see an example of a creed. You disavow the Shema, you're outside the faith, all right? So then the question is, how did we go from these short creeds, such as the Shema, and others, we looked at a couple of the creeds in the New Testament, how do we get from there to 32 chapters?

Okay.

The simple answer is theology has become more complex. With progressive revelation, all right, theology has become more and more complex, all right? For example, Trinitarianism. The early church prior to Christ didn't have to deal with Trinitarianism, not to say that the Trinity wasn't in existence, but it was not revealed to them in the way it has been revealed since Jesus Christ came to earth, all right?

So we have the Trinitarianism, but we need to remember now, when Trinitarianism came, you know, to fruition as we see in the New Testament, one of the creeds of the Christian church is that we still believe in one God.

The Trinity doesn't negate the fact that we are monotheistic, we believe in one God. But he manifests himself in three persons. Now how many people understand that fully? We can't understand it fully.

It is a difficult concept. It's clearly what the Bible teaches, there are three persons in one God, all right? Yet we find ourselves, so in this dilemma of how do we explain this? There's one essence, in fact in our confession, it describes that there is one essence, one substance, and three subsistences.

That's the word that the people who wrote the confession wrote. So we strongly believe in one God. Now, for the first 500 years of the Christian church, after the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ, the nature of Jesus Christ and the Trinity was hotly contested and debated, all right?

And had to be defended on numerous occasions. In fact, what we find is that during this period of time, during this first 500 years, this is when all the great creeds were formulated, within the first 500 years, all right?

Now there was another reason for the creeds being formulated. The world was, in quotations, larger at that time. What I mean by that is, what do we say in our society today? The world seems to be getting smaller and smaller.

Why?

Because of all the technology. Used to be that if something happened in Jerusalem, it took days, weeks, maybe months before it to even reach Rome, okay? Because of the lack of communication. Today, the president sneezes in the Oval Office, and three seconds later, somebody from Tel Aviv is saying, God bless you.

I mean, that's how crazy the whole system is. I mean, it's like instantaneous communication. But back in those days, it was like the world was larger. So there had to be some sort of written communication, okay?

So the creeds unified the church, even at great distances apart, because these creeds, when they were formulated, were circulated, usually by a circular letter or something similar to that, so that all true believers who identified as true believers knew what was going on, all right?

One of the reasons why this became so important was churches strayed. Remember the church in Galatia, all right? Now, this was still even during the time of the Apostle Paul. Paul wrote his letter, and remember what he said.

I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting him who called you by the grace of Christ for a different gospel, which is really not another gospel, only there are some who are disturbing you and want to distort the gospel of Christ.

Isn't this still happening today, all right? But this was one of the reasons for the creeds is you had this tendency back in those days because of the isolationism that was going on. You'd have one church, and they would start studying.

They'd come up with an erroneous doctrine. And so the creeds were meant to keep everybody on the same page. So Paul wrote his letter to Galatia to correct, well, we know this was a Judaizing heresy here.

So that was one of the benefits of having a creed. Now, the earliest of the creeds was the Apostle's Creed, all right? I'm not going to read the whole thing. I just put it up there so you can read it.

And I want you to notice I highlighted and underlined the word the Holy Catholic Church, all right? And I did that for a couple of reasons, all right? But this creed was one of the earliest, and in this creed are all the major tenets of Christology and theology, theology proper about who God is, who Jesus Christ is, et cetera, okay?

Now, it's considered to be one of the earliest of the creeds. The earliest mention of it was about A .D. 390. Now, it's interesting. It's called the Apostle's Creed because tradition says that each of the apostles added to this and had a part in working through it.

There's absolutely no written evidence to support that, but it's a nice theory. So, but anyway, but that doesn't negate the essence of it, but it's just that we can't take everything that you hear for granted, all right?

Now, the Roman Catholic Church capitalizes the word Catholic. That's why I highlighted that in there. The reason they do that is they have inserted their name as the Roman Catholic Church, but for our purposes, the purpose of that creed, and this is interesting, the purpose of that creed was to unite the early church, all right?

Catholic means universal, all right? That's why that's in there. What was meant to unify the early church, the Roman Catholic Church uses now, and it actually is a form of division. Unless you're part of the Roman Catholic Church, they say you're not part of the Catholic Church.

That's why they, and if you ever see this creed published in a Roman Catholic document, you'll see that Catholic is a capital C. It's in our hymn book. It's a small c, okay? Catholic simply means universal.

What is the Catholic faith? This is very interesting. We affirm that we are part of the holy Catholic Church. What is the Catholic faith? We certainly are not affirming that we hold to the Roman Catholic faith.

We have so many differences, we would never do that. So what are we affirming when we recite this creed is simply this. There was a man, a monk, Vincent of Lourans, all right, I believe that's in France, and I'm probably butchering the name of it with my Brooklynese, all right?

He lived in the fifth century, and he gave a profound answer to this question. What is the Catholic faith? And I've fallen in love with his definition, all right? This is what he said. Moreover, in the Catholic Church itself, all possible care must be taken that we hold a faith which has been believed everywhere always by all.

Just look at that for a minute. There's three elements to that. The faith which was believed everywhere always by all. Now, you can't take that literally because we know that there is no faith that has been always everywhere by all.

But it's a good definition. And interestingly enough, the reformers accepted that definition. They liked it, okay, which probably swayed me to liking it, all right?

Why?

Because there is a truth that transcends all denominational lines that has been handed down from God and is there and is always there. There is this one universal Catholic truth, okay? And so, this kind of really gives the essence of what we're talking about.

It's not found in any particular local church or any denomination, but it's what was handed down in scripture. Now, it's interesting, of course, this is where we have to be careful. I throw out his name, Vincent of Loranz.

I give you his statement, but we need to be careful because he himself was a semi-Pelagian. So right off the bat, we disagree with some of his theology, all right? That being said, there are many theologians that trace the roots of some of the reformers' thinking right back to Vincent of Loranz.

Pardon me for the video. Okay, so let's go to the next of the important creeds, the Nicene Creed. I'm certainly not going to read this. This is much longer. In fact, it goes to two pages here. And again, this affirms the basic truths that we know about God as the triune God, okay?

Now, what do we know about the Nicene Creed? The Nicene Creed comes out of the Council of Nicaea, all right? Why was the Council of Nicaea called? A man named Arius was teaching that Jesus was similar to God, but was not the same substance as God.

In other words, he was below God the Father, all right? He was opposed by Athanasius of Alexandria. And this is a very important man in church history. You know, there's actually two Athanasiuses, so you got to be careful.

This is Athanasius of Alexandria. And he opposed the teaching of Arius. And as a result of this, a council was held in Nicaea, which is up kind of like in northern Turkey. And the council held and reiterated the biblical doctrine that Jesus Christ is truly God.

So, notice that a lot of the councils and creeds were formulated because of some heresy that came into the church, all right? So, here we have the Nicene Creed, all right? And this council was held, and I'm getting ahead of myself.

All right, the Nicene Creed was the result of that council that was held in Nicaea. They held and reiterated the biblical doctrine that Jesus is truly God, the same substance as God the Father, all right?

Now, there are several other important creeds. I'm not going to go through them, just going to list them. Other creeds and councils. The Council of Chalcedon talked mostly about the incarnation of Jesus Christ.

Before, you had the deity of Christ who was being attacked. Now, you have the humanity of Christ being attacked, all right? The Athanasian Creed of the 5th century focused on the Trinity, that the Trinity, all persons of the Trinity are equal, what they are and what they're not in relation to each other, but the fact of the equality of them within the Trinity, all right?

The Council of Chalcedon was in 451, and then the Athanasian Creed was in the 5th century, okay? Now, oh, by the way, the Athanasian Creed was not authored by Athanasius. They adopted his name because of the teaching in it, but some people actually believe that Vincent of Laronne had a lot to do with the Athanasian Creed.

One of the things that's very interesting, in the churches that were alive at the time, that were functioning at the time, there was universal acceptance of the creeds, okay? The Eastern Orthodox, the Roman Catholic, and the Protestant churches that came out of the Reformation all accepted these creeds.

Now, think about that. Think about some of the diverse doctrines, and yet they all accepted these creeds and held them as their own. So you ask, how can this be? Well, this leads to another question. One of the questions that is often asked of us as Protestants, everybody realizes that we are Protestants, all right?

That we come out of the Protestant Reformation. We were protesting the doctrines that were taught by Rome. That's where we get our name. So all of the churches that came out of the Reformation. One of the questions that's often asked was, where was your church before the Reformation?

That can be asked very smugly by a Roman Catholic or an Eastern Orthodox person who's looking at somebody from a Reformed position, and they'll look at us in particular and say, you have your roots in the 16th century.

You're newbies. OK, so how do we answer that question? Well, the answer is very simple. The Reformation was a dispute over how to interpret the church fathers. All right. Now, notice there's a subtle difference.

It's not over doctrine per se, but how the doctrine of the early church has been interpreted. Because, again, think about it. If you argue with a Roman Catholic, are you going to appeal to the Apostles Creed?

No, because he agrees with it. How about the Nicene Creed? No, he agrees with it. So what you have to look at is where is the difference then, is how to interpret the church fathers who were the authors of the creeds.

OK, and herein is where the Reformers, in particular, applied Vincent of La Ron's rule for Catholicity. OK, and here's what I mean by that. The Reformers would say, and we should say, we are the ones who have followed the teaching of everyone everywhere.

Not the Roman Catholic Church. We look at them and say, you have strayed from the teaching of the church fathers. So you are the ones who have strayed. Same thing with the Eastern Orthodox Church. If you go back to the to the essential doctrines of the faith, we are the ones who are direct descendants of the church fathers.

OK, so and in fact, in the 11th century, there was that great east-west divide with the Eastern Church split from the Roman Catholic Church. And some actually say that the root of that split went all the way back to how to interpret the Council of Chalcedon in the 5th century.

OK, so there is there is a big problem. OK, I said, oh, notice the small. Oh, I put this up here. The Eastern Orthodox Church, Roman Catholic Church had strayed from the teaching of the Catholic Church.

Notice the small c. Whenever we write that, unless it's the beginning of a sentence, we should always put a small c at Catholic that we can hold to. If you ask me if I am a Catholic with a capital C, I will tell you, no, I am not.

If you say, are you a Catholic with a small t, small c? Yes, I am. OK, you see the difference. OK, and who says grammar is unimportant? OK, now the east-west split is a big problem for the Roman Catholic assertions of Catholicity, because here you have two supposedly Orthodox churches and yet they split and yet they look at us and say, oh, you're just a splinter group.

But they've already had this one big split. But there is another problem. OK, and here's here's the problem. The internal split. Between A .D. five hundred and A .D. fifteen hundred in the Roman Catholic Church.

Now, I've called it a split. In most textbooks, it's not called a split. All right. So if you want to take exception with me calling this a split, you're on good grounds. But I'm still calling it a split.

All right. And maybe you'll see why I call it a split. What was happening during this period of time in within the Roman Catholic Church was that politics was taking over. Theology was taking a back seat.

All right. So yet the controversy within the Roman Catholic Church was the theologians versus the canon lawyers. OK. The theologians within the Roman Catholic Church were concerned with exegesis. That is the interpretation of Scripture.

What were the canon lawyers concerned with? What the pope said and the magisterium. You see how this is starting to go astray. OK. So. Well, we see as a result of this is there was a shift in authority.

The authority started coming away from Scripture. Because the canon lawyers were winning the debate. And in fact, today you can say they won the debate. And now the Roman Catholic Church is run more by what is the pope say?

What is this pope say? What does this council say? What is tradition say? And you find out, even though they hold to the inerrancy of Scripture, the Scripture takes a way, way, way back seat. OK. So now at the same time, you'll notice that between 500 A .D. and A .D. 1500, there were no creeds or confessions.

It was the silence of creeds and confession. No, no major councils. There were church councils, but not of the magnitude of of Nicaea or Chalcedon or any of the other councils. OK. So that leads us. What do we know coming up to about 1500?

What are we looking for in church history? The Reformation. The Reformation. Far and away was a return to theology. Remember, the Reformation did not start to start out to split the Roman Catholic Church.

The theologians who came who came about in the Protestant Reformation and earlier. Remember, Knox and Wycliffe were earlier technically than the Reformation, although they were the morning star of the Reformation, Wycliffe was called.

Then you got Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and others were looking to reform the Roman Catholic Church and bring it back to theology. These were. Doctors of theology. OK. So what they realized was that exegesis had become a lost start.

And everything was all the decisions in the Roman Catholic Church was based upon what the canon lawyers said, because this pope said this, this pope said that, etc. It didn't matter that the popes disagreed with each other.

Or that they disagreed with the councils. So exegesis had become a lost start. And so as these men and others just like them studied the scripture, they came and they drew some conclusions. And here's what they came to.

The church fathers were right. And the creeds were right. Notice, where's the roots of the Reformation? All the way back to the church fathers. Remember, who were the church fathers? These are the ones who were the disciples taught, the apostles themselves taught.

All right. Those are the church fathers. They were right. The creeds were right. The church had strayed from the truth. Notice the statement I made before. What do we tell somebody? A Roman Catholic or an Eastern Orthodox?

No, no. Don't sell us shirt. We go back to the church fathers. You have strayed. You do not teach what the church fathers taught. OK. So as they began teaching, the Roman Catholic Church had interpreted them wrongly.

As they began teaching, they came into opposition with Rome. All right. So the question then came is how could they defend their position against the errors of Rome? OK. They couldn't use the fathers in the creeds.

Why not? Because Rome says we accept there. We accept the teaching of the fathers. We accept the teaching of the creeds. We hold them. In fact, the Roman Catholic Church says there are creeds. And these are our fathers.

All right. So what did they do? They expanded on the creeds and developed more detailed confessions of faith. You see how this is coming about. All right. They expanded on the creeds. They didn't say they didn't do away with the creeds.

They didn't do away with the church fathers. They expanded on them and explained in greater detail what the creeds said and what the church fathers said. All the Reformed churches, all of them coming out of the Reformation, developed confessions of faith.

Every single one. You can't find a Reformed church that didn't develop one. Beginning with the Lutheran is one of the earliest ones, the Augsburg Confession, 1530. In the 1560s, the Heidelberg, the Belgic, Helvetic confessions coming from the Dutch Reformed, the Netherlands Reformed in that whole area of Europe.

All right. Fifteen fifty nine to thirty nine articles. That was the Church of England developed the thirty nine articles. If you ever wanted to read some in some fascinating information, read how they came to thirty nine articles, starting with six and seven and very interesting.

All right. Now, all of these confessions came from a need to challenge the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. That's why they came up with them. They didn't just decide, OK, why don't we have a confession?

It arose from a need to explain just how the Roman Catholic Church and how the Eastern Orthodox Church had strayed from the true Christian faith. How they had strayed from the what? Catholic small c faith.

That's why we don't ever shy away from calling yourself Catholic. All right. Just make sure that you explain it in the right way. OK. So all of these confessions contain wording from the early creeds.

There's the point of continuation. If you go back to the church fathers and you go back to the early creeds of the church and then you look at all of the modern confessions, you'll see that they contain sometimes the exact wording from the from the creeds.

It's just an expansion of them. All right. The reformers and later the Puritans used all works to refute heresy. The reformers love to go back and quote some of the theologians, some of the great theologians of the Roman Catholic Church to refute Roman Catholic theology.

Who are some that you can think of? Augustine of Hippo comes right to mind. All right. For example, John Owen, great Puritan theologian, one of the greatest of all times, used whole sections of Augustine's confessions in his works.

So a lot of the works you ever see that 14 or 15 volume set of theology by John Owen. It's about this big. Seven volumes just on the book of Hebrews alone. OK. It's a massive work. A lot of it come from Augustine.

OK. They would put it somewhere like this. They use the best men of the past to demonstrate the Catholic city of the reformed faith. Notice I phrased it this way intentionally. They use the best men of the past to demonstrate what the Catholic city.

I love the word. Keep using it. Find a way to use it tomorrow in a sentence. OK. You're you're part of the Holy Catholic Church. All right. That leads us. To the Westminster standards. OK. The Westminster Confession was written in 1646 and has become somewhat of a standard for other.

All the other confessions. In some way, the Westminster divines put this together and everybody else has used some of their work. The council that produced the Westminster Confession was commissioned by parliament to produce standards for worship and religion and daily practice.

All right. They met at Westminster Abbey. Hence the name Westminster Confession. If you're ever wondering where the name came from, Westminster Abbey obviously is that beautiful cathedral in London. OK.

These standards are used by most Presbyterian churches around the world today. Remember, they were written in 1646. OK. Now, the Congregationalists used those standards to write their Savoy Declaration in 1658.

And that brings us up to. Oh, I'm sorry. And it was used by the particular Baptist in writing the Baptist Confessions. Now, one of the things if you ever run into a smug Presbyterian. No, I'm not going to say what it's going to say.

But if you run into a smug, they'll always say, yeah, but, you know, your confession was 1689. You took everything from ours. Ours was 1646. All right. Well, I got an answer for that in a minute. London Baptist Confession of 1689.

This is the confession of our church. Two groups of Baptists were emerging in England about 1630. The General Baptist and the Particular Baptist. The General Baptist were Arminian. The Particular Baptist were Calvinist.

In the 1640s, the Particular Baptist began to suffer persecution for their faith. They came under very specific persecution. They were pinpointed. All right. For for a few reasons. All right. Following the other reformed churches, they saw the need for a confession of faith that was uniquely Baptistic.

They could have just used the Westminster standards, but there were certain sections that they could not completely agree with. All right. So notice the date. Two years before the Westminster. They wrote the first London Baptist Confession in 1644.

So stick that in your eye, Presbyterians. I'm just kidding. I love my Presbyterian brothers. Then hopefully they understand my sense of humor. The Particular Baptists were charged with treason. And they continue to suffer for their faith after the 1644.

So the first confession was revised twice. All right. And then ultimately, in 1677, the second London Baptist Confession was written. That's our confession of faith. Now, I usually when I teach this, I usually have a trick question.

Before I put this slide up, I'll say, when was the 1689 Baptist Confession written? The answer is 1677. All right. For for not for theological reasons, but just for practical reasons, it was not adopted until 1689.

That's when the Council of Churches met together, about 100 churches, and they voted and they adopted the second London Baptist Confession. So it's been called the 1689 because that was when it was officially adopted by the Particular Baptists.

OK, so this confession is in sync with the Westminster Standards, with a few exceptions, particularly baptism, church government. But there's one or two other sections. The rest of it is almost verbatim.

So, yes, we did borrow extensively from the Westminster Confession for the second London Baptist Confession. Hats off to our Presbyterian brothers. OK, so and this is the one. This confession is used around the world today and has become a unifying factor in the Reformed Baptist churches.

So whenever you travel, one of the things you can do is you look up Baptist churches, look and see if they hold to the 1689. And you know that they're in line with what we believe. And I've done that wherever I go.

Even when I was in Ukraine, I've you know, although there I had to go to a church that was Presbyterian because but they held to the Westminster. When I was in Medellin, Colombia, I preached in a Reformed Baptist church, 1689, held it right out there.

You can do that all over the country. It's a huge movement now going back to Reformed Baptists and the Particular Baptists of London holding to the 1689. OK, so again, we're showing this unity and Catholicity of Reformed Baptists.

So if anybody comes up and asks you, you know, about, you know, that Reformed Baptists is a new thing. No, it's not. We have our roots at the church fathers in those early creeds. And by the way, I didn't include this in the presentation, but I'm just thinking of it now.

Do you know that there's no mention in any writings of baptizing infants for about 300 years in the history of the church? Archaeology has shown it in the early church. They did not have baptismal fonts.

They had pools. So and in fact, if you look at the Didache, which again is teaching of the 12, talks about baptism by immersion.