Pt. 3 The History of Confessions

And today, we're still at part, this is 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, all right?

Creeds tend to be short and to the point, all right? Confessions tend to be longer and include more theological concepts, all right?

And if you remember, I quoted Jim Rinehan, 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 to fruition, as we see in the New Testament, the statement of the creed, 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 is 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 could 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

Roman Catholic Church, 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 there, if you ever see a creed, this creed published in a

Catholic, 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? It's, we certainly are not affirming that we hold to the

Roman Catholic faith, but we have so many differences, we would never do that. So what is, what are we affirming when we recite this creed, is simply this.

There was a man, a monk, Vincent of Lourance, all right? I believe that's in France, and I'm probably butchering the name of it with my

Brooklyn ease, all right? He lived in the 5th 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 the 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? 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. 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. I'm just going to list 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's 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 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, ha, you have your roots in the 16th century.

You're newbies, okay? 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, okay?

And herein is where the Reformers in particular applied

Vincent of Lorraine's rule for Catholicity, okay? 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 Eastern Orthodox Church. If you go back to the essential doctrines of the faith, we are the ones who are direct descendants of the church fathers, okay?

And in fact, in the 11th century, there was that great East -West divide where 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, okay? So there is a big problem.

Okay, I said, oh, notice the small, oh, I put this up here. The Eastern Orthodox Church, Roman Catholic Church have 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 c, yes, I am, okay?

Do you see the difference? Okay, and who says grammar is unimportant? Okay, 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, okay? And here's the problem.

The internal split between AD 500 and AD 1500 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 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, okay?

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, okay? So what 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 does the pope say? What does this pope say?

What does this council say? What does tradition say? And you find out even though they hold to the inerrancy of scripture, the scripture takes a way, way, way back seat, okay?

So now at the same time, you'll notice that between 500 AD and AD 1500, there were no creeds or confessions.

It was the silence of creeds and confessions. No major councils. There were church councils, but not of the magnitude of of Nicaea or Chalcedon or any of the other councils, okay?

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 out to split the Roman Catholic Church. The theologians 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, okay? So what they realized was that exegesis had become a lost art, and everything was based, 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 art, 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 your, we go back to the church fathers. You have strayed. You do not teach what the church fathers taught, okay?

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, okay?

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 Reform, the Netherlands Reformed, and that whole area of Europe, all right?

1559, the Thirty -Nine Articles, that was the Church of England, developed the Thirty -Nine Articles. If you ever wanted to read some fascinating information, read how they came to Thirty -Nine

Articles, starting with six, then 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, okay, 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, okay?

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, exact wording from the creeds.

It's just an expansion of them, all right? The Reformers, and later the

Puritans, used old works to refute heresy. The Reformers loved 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 were 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, okay? It's a massive work.

A lot of it come from Augustine, okay? They would put it somewhat like this.

They used the best men of the past to demonstrate the Catholicity of the Reformed faith.

Notice I phrased it this way intentionally. They used the best men of the past to demonstrate what?

The Catholicity. I love the word. Keep using it. Find a way to use it tomorrow in a sentence, okay?

You're part of the Holy Catholic Church. All right, that leads us to the

Westminster Standards, okay? The Westminster Confession was written in 1646 and has become somewhat of a standard for 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, okay? These standards are used by most

Presbyterian churches around the world today. Remember they were written in 1646, okay?

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 he'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 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 and hopefully they understand my sense of humor. The Particular Baptists were charged with treason and they continued 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, 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. Okay? 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.

Okay? 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, but they held to the Westminster. When I was in Medellin, Colombia, 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 Baptist and the particular

Baptist of London holding to the 1689. Okay? So again, we're showing this unity and Catholicity of Reformed Baptist.

So if anybody comes up and asks you, you know, about, you know, that Reformed Baptist 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?

Archeology 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.