Introduction to the 1689 Confession

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An introduction to the ​1689 Second London Baptist Confession of Faith.​​​​​ i) A Case for Confessions ii) A History of the 1689 Confession

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Yes, so a whole new project in front of us and what we're going to be doing over the next 40 weeks or so,
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Lord willing, is to take bite -sized chunks out of the confession to study them together and the intention, as we've discussed at our members' meetings and as we'll discuss in upcoming members' meetings, is to affirm the 1689
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Second London Baptist Confession of Faith as the confession of our church in lieu of our current confession.
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But it's only fair and right and appropriate that we first teach through it so that we have a sound understanding of it and we can affirm it intelligently, affirm it with informed consent, if I can say it that way.
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Now what we're going to be looking at today, the confession itself has 32 chapters. We're not actually going to be dipping into the chapters, but today we're going to be doing a general introduction of the confession, looking at two sections in our introduction.
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The first section I've titled, A Case for Confessions, and we'll be looking at five headings as we make a case for a sound confession.
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And then section two is we'll look briefly at the history of the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession.
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Some people might ask the question, why in 2025 would we adopt a confession that was last published in 1689 or officially published in 1689?
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And I hope that as we look at these two sections tonight, we'll come to a conclusion that in fact, it is good and wise and appropriate.
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And perhaps I would suggest there is no better confession to hold to than the 1689.
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And as we see the formulation of it in the history of the church, and then as we go through it together chapter by chapter,
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I trust, I'm praying that we all end up on the same page, coming to have a deep appreciation for this confession.
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So before we begin, we'll pray together, ask for the Lord's help, and then we'll go through and dive right in.
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Our Father in heaven, Lord, we are so exceedingly grateful to you for all the kindness that you have shown us over this day and Lord, this week, and even already this year, and Lord, for all of our lives, that what do we deserve?
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We deserve a place of darkness and separation from you. But Lord, even while we were still sinners,
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Christ died for the ungodly, even for us particularly. Lord, we thank you that you have not only given us the blessing, the unspeakably good blessing of your son in our place on that cross, and then conquering death in our place, rising from the tomb, but Lord, that you have given us your church, you've given us your word, you've given us your
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Holy Spirit, you've given us every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places so that we not only enjoy justification and fellowship and sanctification through your word, but also
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Lord, adoption and glorification, and every other blessing, Lord, I think of all the blessings in Ephesians 1.
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Lord, you are such a good and kind and faithful God, and Lord, we glorify you, and we desire to glorify you tonight,
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Lord, not now to hold to the traditions of men, but Lord, to see the summary of your word captured in this small book, and Lord, to hold to something that's even more robust than what we have already, but Lord, a summary of your word at best,
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Lord, not a replacement, Lord, not a tradition that we hope will, or even will not hope for, but would allow it to supersede your word, but Lord, merely a summary, a standard of doctrine, but like orange juice squeezed from an orange, only that which comes from your word, and adding and taking away nothing,
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Lord, we ask that you would bless our time together in Christ's name, amen. So, you don't have the confession yet in front of you, but what will happen is, as we go through it,
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I will include the original text of the confession, what is in this book here, in each of the chapters, so I am expecting by the end of our time, you're going to have a bursting duoteng.
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But this will be, I imagine, one of the larger packets, this is 10 pages, I expect that most others will be maybe four to five pages as we go along.
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I do have copies of the confession in the modern English, does anyone not have a copy that would like a copy?
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Or have a spouse that doesn't have a copy that would like a copy? No? Good. Looks like we need one, perfect, there you go, you're very welcome.
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And then, if in the meantime, this is one of the blessings of the
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Trinity Hymnal, in the meantime, if you're looking, and I will make a couple of references to the confession tonight, if you're wanting to see it in the original
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English text, you can actually find it in the back of the Trinity Hymnal. So that's one of the blessings of this hymnal, is that it actually contains the
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Second Lenten Baptist Confession. I see Sam's smirk there, he knows that this was intentional.
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So with that, brethren, we will jump into section one, this is a bit different because I'm not used to teaching in a more scattered way as opposed to expository preaching, so we'll see how it goes, but we're going to look first at a case for confessions.
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And not just the Second Lenten Baptist Confession, but all confessions. Some people will ask the question, should we have confessions?
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Is it not enough that we have God's Word in the Bible? Here it is. Can't we say, if people were to come through the back door of the church and they ask us, what do you believe?
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Well, we believe the Bible. We're going to come and ask those questions tonight, that is it sufficient in the world in which we live and the myriad of interpretations and the multiplication of cults, for instance, to say that we believe the
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Bible? And what happens when we ask the question, what does the Bible teach? Well, we're going to look at how a confession helps us in that way.
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And I'm going to list under five headings, and the first is this, that our Christian identity recommends a confession.
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Now what do I mean by that? You see in the line there, you have a good vantage point to my notes, it simply cannot be denied that our very
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Christian identity is confessional. And you'll see quotes throughout,
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I've tried as often as possible, I'm doing housekeeping as we go, to include the reference at the bottom, the citation at the bottom, wherever I have access to those citations.
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Rob Ventura says this, it has been correctly said that true Christianity is confessional
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Christianity, and that a church with a little creed is a church with a little life.
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The true church has always confessed her faith openly, for there is faith which is once for all delivered to the saints.
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As Christians, we should never be ashamed of this fact. And one of the things that we need to recognize as we go along is that so often in Scripture we see the germs of confessions emerging from the text of Scripture itself.
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The text of Scripture is inspired and it's authoritative, unlike human confessions, and yet we see a valuable contribution made that Scripture points to, where we see these various summaries of biblical doctrine throughout.
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And I want to take us through a couple of them really quickly. Deuteronomy chapter 6 and verse 4, if you have your
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Bible, you can open there. Does anyone know what this confession has been called by the
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Jews? Starts with an S. The Shema.
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It reads like this, Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. A commentary on this says that the
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Shema, the Hebrew word for hear, has become the Jewish confession of faith recited, in their case, twice daily by the devout.
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Even in the Old Testament, there was the emergence of some of these confessions of faith. We see an early confession of faith in Matthew chapter 16, as the
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Lord is with his disciples, he asks them, who do you say that I am, or who do people, who do the others say that I am?
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They give a myriad of answers, and then he asks his disciples, who do you say that I am?
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And Peter, we know, answers, often being the first one to speak, he says, you are the
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Christ, verse 15, you are the Christ, the
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Son of the living God. And Jesus answered him, blessed are you, Simon Barjona, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my
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Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
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Upon the apostles, we believe, I think Ephesians 2 is fairly clear on that, and upon this confession, the
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Lord is going to build his church, upon the apostles and the apostolic confession. In 1
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Corinthians chapter 12, in verse 3, we read here, Paul says, therefore
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I want you to understand that no one speaking in the spirit of God ever says Jesus is accursed, and no one can say
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Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit. Now I'm not going to go into all of them, but if we continue on, we see in 1
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Timothy chapter 3, great indeed we confess is the mystery of godliness, and we see the beginnings of what would have been, or what was, excuse me, an early
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Christian confession. He was manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory.
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Or the reference to Christ's humility in Ephesians, or Philippians chapter 2 in verse 5.
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And there the Reformation Study Bible says this, that this is a hymn to Christ that may be divided into six stanzas.
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The first three to celebrate Christ's humiliation, and the last three to celebrate his exaltation.
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Set to meter, as it were, to help the early disciples memorize these details about Christ's humiliation on the cross.
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But it didn't just stop in Scripture, and we'll look at more even as we go from Scripture, but this confessional impulse on the part of the church bled from not only
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Scripture, but into the early church, so that we see that in the Didache, an early Christian treatise that was written somewhere, or compiled somewhere between AD 50 and AD 100, that there is an early creed in the
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Didache, including even a catechism. So many have looked at that and seen that as one of the earliest
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Christian creeds. And then, to list just a couple, we see the Apostles' Creed, the
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Nicene Creed, we'll look a little bit later this evening at how those came about, the
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Athanasian Creed, the Heidelberg Catechism, the 39 Articles, and so on, until you see at the bottom there, the
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Second London Baptist Confession, first published in 1677, and then again in 1689.
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So, it could be said that creeds and confessions have been most prevalent in the church, especially when the church was most concerned with biblical fidelity and sound doctrine.
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You will look at those confessions and see that after AD 500, the
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Athanasian Creed, there's a big gap. Now, certainly, we start to disagree with creeds, not to say that there weren't other declarations, councils, or other things that took place, but really, the most solidly faithful periods of history have been when the church is encountering error and they're responding to that error by teaching the church and by repeating these creeds and confessions.
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Rob Ventura says, this confession, referring to the Second London Confession of Faith, I see
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I have my F and my C backwards there, has been in greater or lesser use among the churches at various stages of history, but whenever it was hardly embraced and faithfully applied, the churches were the strongest and purest, doctrinally and morally.
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So, we see this confessional impulse. It's part of our Christian heritage, but there's more.
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Simple honesty demands that we hold to a confession, and you'll see that simple honesty is in the scare quotes.
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For those of you who are familiar with Sam Waldron, he was my professor for Symbolics, the study of the
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Second London Confession, and whenever I see those words, I just hear it in his voice, simple honesty.
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He said in one of his lectures, he said simple honesty demands that we possess a confession of our doctrinal standards because, and I'm quoting him here, every church, though it is often denied and sometimes perhaps even unwritten, has a creed.
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It's just more honest to admit that you have a creed and to state it clearly.
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Unwritten creeds are just the worst and most tyrannical kind of creeds of all.
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Now, some of us have perhaps been to or visited churches where there are unwritten creeds, and over time you come to learn those creeds, and you wish that perhaps earlier on you had known a little bit more about what it was that that church believed, and so simple honesty demands that we simply make clear what it is that we believe.
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Chad Van Dixhorn, he adds to this, he says, the desire to state truth openly is a basic Christian instinct.
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Cults hide things, and I might add, if I could, Christians don't. We show our cards.
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We let people know what we believe, and I remember hearing one story in Grand Rapids where there is a myriad of Reformed churches and a few
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Reformed Baptist churches that some of these Reformed folks would be in Grand Rapids, would come through the door of a
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Reformed Baptist church wondering, okay, what is this church about, and they maintained a little track rack at the front of the church where, as some of these
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Reformed folks came in wondering, is this a heterodox church, is this a
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Pentecostal church in Baptist form? They would simply say, this is what we believe, and would be able to show them how there were similarities between the 1699
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Second London Confession and the Westminster and the Savoy of the Congregationalists. So I say there, therefore we must not hide what we believe, but we must confess it publicly.
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This should be done in as many places as appropriate, so to our members in our church constitution, on our church website, in a rack at the front door, made available to those who would want to know what we're about, so that in two years' time or three years' time, they don't ask the question incredulously, wait a second, you believe what about the
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Atonement? You believe what about Christ, or what about the Lord's Day, when we can say, this is what we believe.
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Also, a confession is helpful for avoiding and exposing error. Many of the ancient and modern creeds and confessions have been drafted to respond to and to counter heresy and doctrinal error.
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So I mentioned just a few minutes ago how the Apostles' Creed arose early in the church to respond to a false doctrine.
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In this case, Gnosticism, Arianism, the denial of Christ's divinity, led to the formulation of the
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Nicene Creed. Errors concerning the nature of Christ led to the, oh, I misspelt that as well, the
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Creed of Chalcedon. Rome and the Papists led to many of the
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Reformation creeds and confessions. And we'll see as we go through the 1609 Confession how there are many places where it addresses that.
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It reads like a Reformation document, even to the point of identifying the
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Pope as the Antichrist. Now, I believe that we can have different views on that particular thing.
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I would say the Pope is un -Antichrist, but perhaps not the Antichrist. The Lord knows.
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B .H. Carroll says, The modern cry, less creed and more liberty, is a degeneration from the vertebrate to the jellyfish, and means less unity and less morality, and it means more heresy.
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Definitive truth does not create heresy, it only exposes and corrects.
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Shut off the creed, and the Christian world will fill up with heresy, unsuspected and uncollected, but nonetheless deadly.
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And then, relying a bit more on Sam Waldron's work, he points out that in the New Testament we see these creedal formulations beginning to develop specifically to address heresy.
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A good example, we will remember the Judaizers that came to the early church in the
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Book of Acts, and how they were causing a great deal of disruption in Antioch, and so what ended up happening was the
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Jerusalem council came together with the apostles and the elders and various others, and there they met and determined to put together a letter to clarify what it was that the
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Christians ought to believe on the matter of the Jewish law, specifically the civil and ceremonial law, and having put together that letter, they sent it back with messengers to the church in Antioch to be read aloud.
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That would be one such example of the church coming together to articulate what it is we believe on a certain point, document it, and then declare it, confess it.
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But we see it too when Gnostic error came up in 1 John chapter 4, in verse 2, as the
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Gnostics were beginning to come around denying the bodily coming, or at least the bodily existence of our
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Lord Jesus, John put together this formulation, he said, And by this you know the
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Spirit of God. Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, verse 3, and every spirit that does not confess
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Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already.
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And then we see these germinal creeds throughout the scriptures, but especially near the end of the
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New Testament. Now, just to keep you guys engaged, I want to ask you, why do you think we see these germinal creeds, and you'll see this in point 3 there, in this section under point 3,
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I guess point 3 in the subheading point 3, the New Testament contains many such germinal creeds, 1
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Timothy 1, 1 Timothy 3, 1 Timothy 4. Why do you think we see so many of these germinal creeds in the latter half, the tail end of Paul's life, and the tail end of our
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New Testament? Yes, exactly.
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So as the church is existing, and as error begins to become introduced, we read all of these trustworthy statements of Paul.
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It is a trustworthy statement, worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom
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I am the foremost. So as the church's Christology is not so much developing, but being revealed, and then as error is being introduced, these germinal creeds begin to pop up.
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Now, who here has had a conversation with someone, I'm sure we've all encountered someone like this, or perhaps it was us, or maybe it is us, who would say, there is no creed,
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I have no creed but Christ, or I have no creed but the Bible? Who here, maybe just by a show of hands, has experienced that?
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How would you respond, if I were to ask you, how would you respond to someone who says, well, we don't need a confession,
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I've got my Bible, I believe the Bible, don't you believe the Bible? No creed but Christ, no creed but the
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Scriptures. How would you respond to that? What I'm saying is that it is a creed.
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Yeah, it is a creed. Now, it might be a very minimal creed, but already they're refuting themselves in putting that creed forward.
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Marcus Dodds says, a man may accept the same inspired books as yourself, while he rejects every important article of faith that you find in these books.
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Now, we've seen this, haven't we? I don't know about you, but I recall many times, especially my first time encountering the
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Jehovah's Witnesses, we sat down at the kitchen table, across from each other, we opened up our
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Bibles, the same Bible, they had a King James and I had, I think, an ESV or an
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NASB maybe, and we sat across the table, we looked at each other, and looking at the exact same text, we came to the complete opposite conclusions.
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So he goes on, they use the same inspired books, and yet they reject every important article of faith that you find in these books.
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If we are to know who believes as we do, and who dissents, we must state our creed in language explicitly rejecting such interpretations of Scripture as we deem to be false.
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This is what the early church was doing, as they're speaking about Jesus is
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Lord, and Jesus came in the flesh, and making various other statements like this, they are seeking to discern who belongs to us, and who does not belong to us.
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Yes, sister? Oh, yes, no, good question.
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So think of it this way, a germ, like a seed that goes into the ground, these are the beginnings, they're the early formulations of a creed, and so when
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Paul uses these trustworthy statement expressions, there's an indicator that these are trustworthy statements because we're familiar with them.
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It's a statement that people are using regularly. So I might say, you know the old saying, this, and what he's saying is it's a trustworthy statement worthy of full acceptance, and this is something that they would have been familiar with, and so it's the germ, it's the seed in the ground of a confession on a particular matter, in this case, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.
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Not the righteous, not like the synagogues of Satan might say, but he came to save sinners, of whom
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I am the foremost. Does that make sense? So we see these early doctrinal standards that are being established in the church within Scripture itself, and then working its way out from there.
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Number four, say, the spiritual unity of the church demands that we express what we believe in some kind of confession.
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First Corinthians chapter 1 and verse 10 speaks to what the Lord's mind is towards us and our unity.
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Paul says, I appeal to you brothers by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ that you all agree and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment.
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Now, John MacArthur, and I really enjoy, actually, you'll see this throughout, I enjoy taking the commentary from men who don't fully agree with us on these points, just to demonstrate the universality of them.
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So John MacArthur is not confessional in the same way that we are seeking to be, and yet this is what he says, weak commitment to doctrine and commitment to disunity of doctrine will severely weaken a church and destroy the true unity.
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In its place, there can be only shallow sentimentalism or superficial harmony.
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Now, the second London Baptist confession is, as you can see, it's far more robust than I think our current statement of faith, which can be printed on three pages, and someone might ask, why, why, why the thickness?
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Why the detail? Why are we going to do this? Well, as I'll mention in my next point, it's an important teaching tool, but also it's an important tool for unity, that we can look at these doctrines and we can say, amen,
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I agree, I believe that too. Of course, Christ is our greatest source of unity, but then we can rejoice in this, and we've all been there, where you're with a dear brother or sister in Christ, and you have so much in common, and then something comes up and you go, oh boy, now what do
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I do with this? A good example is a friend of mine who believes in Christus Victor and the ransom theory of atonement and denies penal substitutionary atonement, and as I'm sitting and talking with him, we're talking about Christ, we're talking about the inerrancy of scripture, we're talking about all of these good things, and then
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I speak of, I'm so glad that the Lord Jesus died on the cross to pay the penalty for our sins, and he, whoa, no, no, he did not do that.
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What do you mean he didn't do that? So the scripture says, no, he did this to triumph over the evil one.
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He did this one, he did this to pay a ransom to Satan. Well, right away, this man and I have some issues, and this becomes a standard whereby at least we can say this is what we believe, and this is why, in the case of the confession even, there are proof texts galore to show us, okay, well,
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I hold to this, let's look at some of the texts pointing us back to scripture. One of the framers of the
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Second Lenten Baptist Confession, a man named Nehemiah Cox, was once forced to defend the particular
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Baptists, that's just another way of saying reformed Baptists, the particular Baptist churches in England from a man, he was an evangelist and an author named
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Thomas Collier, who accused these churches of being heretics because they were
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Calvinists, and in response, he wrote a little book, listen to this book, we don't see many of these on Facebook anymore, but the
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Vindice Veritatis, or a Confutation of the Heresies and Gross Errors Asserted by Thomas Collier, and in this book he says this, there can be no gospel peace without truth, nor communion of saints without an agreement in the fundamental principles of the
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Christian religion. We want to know that we agree on the fundamentals, and so when a church affirms a confession, we say to this friend of mine, for instance, we greatly appreciate you,
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I appreciate your friendship, I appreciate your views on the inerrancy of scripture, and on the resurrection of Christ, and on the nature of the church, and this and this and this, but before we can proceed, we want to agree on the atonement.
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We want to agree on the nature of Christ's atonement, because we want to have true Christian fellowship, and the position that you are articulating, it's not just that it contradicts the confession, it contradicts scripture, but this becomes the standard.
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We don't say, well the Bible is our standard, we say the statement of doctrine becomes the standard, because you can say, yes,
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I believe the Bible, and come to a completely different conclusion. And then point five, a robust confession becomes an invaluable resource for sound biblical instruction.
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This is, for me, my favorite point as it refers to the value of a confession like the 1689 in the church, is that our church at present has a much briefer statement of faith, and it's much more accessible to a new believer, and that's one of the strengths that it has.
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But one of the advantages that we have with a more robust confession, is essentially what we get is a concise package of gems, of a miniature systematic theology in one volume, that we can give to all the members of the church, and use even for the purpose of discipleship.
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This modern confession has 60 pages, and just in these 60 pages, we can take a brother to, for instance, the doctrine of God, and look at the doctrine of the
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Trinity, or of eternal generation of the Son, or the eternal procession of the
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Holy Spirit. And we can begin to get deep into these doctrines just by looking at the doctrinal standard of our church.
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Now, what this means is not that we require babes in Christ to study this, to become theologians, and only then can they be members of the church.
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What it means is to say that the church is going to teach according to this. We want to see that you hold to sound
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Christian doctrine without gross error, and over time, we can use the doctrinal standard of our church to disciple and to encourage, not to replace
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Scripture, but just the way that we might put knowing God by J .I. Packer in someone's hands, or the knowledge of the holy into someone's hands, so they might learn more about the doctrine of God.
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We can put this in someone's hands and say, you know, there are doctrines that you've never heard of yet, and you can read through this, and go to the
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Scripture references, and begin to learn, and we can study these things. Again, I repeat ad nauseum, not to replace
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Scripture, but as a summary of sound Christian doctrine, as a summary of what
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Scripture teaches. And Spurgeon, I think, details this very nicely in this quote.
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We always have to have Spurgeon's quote. He says, this little volume is not issued as an authoritative rule or code of faith.
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If you think that what I've said thus far is that I'm putting this forward as a rule and code of faith,
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I am not. He says, whereby you are to be fettered, but as an assistance to you in controversy, as a confirmation in faith, and as a means of edification in righteousness.
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And here, he's essentially encapsulating what I just said. Here, the younger members of our church will have a body of divinity in small compass, by means of scriptural proofs, and by means of scriptural proofs will be ready to give an account for the hope that is in them.
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Be not ashamed of your faith. Remember that it is the ancient gospel of martyrs, confessors, reformers, and saints.
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Above all, it is the truth of God, against which the gates of hell cannot prevail.
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Let your lives adorn your faith. Let your example adorn your creed. Above all, live in Christ Jesus and walk in him, giving credence to no teaching but that which is manifestly approved by him and owned by the
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Holy Spirit. Cleave fast to the word of God, which is here mapped out for you.
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So if we see the confession not as a rule, not as a substitute, not as an addition, but as he says, a summary of sound doctrine as a map in small compass, then we will understand what it means to hold to a confession.
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Now we'll look at section 2, the history of the confession, but I just want to ask, are there any questions before we move on?
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Or any contributions? I'll trust
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I'm going to ask a question at the end, so I'll try to get you talking by the end of it. So section 2, the history of the 1689
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Second Lenten Baptist Confession. Now what I've done here is to put together a timeline so that we can really find ourselves in the history of this confession and then to look at the sources of the confession.
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So we'll start, not at the beginning, we won't start at Genesis 1 -1, but we will start when
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Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses to the castle church door in Wittenberg, Germany. Now we know for many of us who are
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Reformation buffs that that happened in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses, and it was said of that nailing of that 95
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Theses to the door, if in fact that was what happened, that the echoes of that hammer resounded through Europe in terms of the spread then of Reformation doctrine.
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It wasn't that Martin Luther was looking at creating a schism in the church and branching off into a
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Protestant church, but was seeking to correct the errors that he saw in the Roman Catholic church.
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So that really kicked off the Reformation as we know it today. Now William Tyndale's work was published in 1526, his
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English New Testament, which also to aligning with the printing press led to really what was a massive revival of knowledge of the gospel in Europe.
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And you might remember that William Tyndale, some of his famous words were,
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Lord, open the king's eyes. And fascinatingly, in the years that followed, we see that in 1534,
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Henry VIII led British Parliament to separate from the Roman Catholic church.
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You might remember that he divorced his wife and wives and had some put to death even.
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And in the midst of that, created the Church of England and became the supreme head of that Church of England.
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And then from there, the Lord did in fact open his eyes in 1538, he commissioned the translation of an
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English Bible, which became known as the Great Bible. And many others followed after that.
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King Edward VI became king in 1547. So we can see now 30 years or so after the beginning of the
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Reformation and began or continued to advance Protestantism. The Book of Common Prayer, which became one of the guiding books in the
37:43
Church of England, was published a couple of years later. Things were going reasonably well for Protestant Christianity in Britain until 1553.
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In 1553, you might recognize that name, Mary Tudor. Yeah, Bloody Mary, I was just going to ask what her nickname was.
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She became the queen and sought to reestablish Roman Catholicism.
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And we see here, nearly 300 Protestants are martyred during her reign, including Thomas Cranmer.
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Steve, you read a biography. Was it on Thomas Cranmer? No, it was Fiber. Oh, okay.
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The Fiber. Yeah. And I believe it was Cranmer that said, be of good courage, Master Ridley, as they were being burned at the stake.
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I think it was Thomas Ridley that was next to him. Maybe I'm confusing names there. And they were lighting
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Thomas Cranmer. He was already on fire, and they were having difficulty lighting Master Ridley's wood.
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And he was quite concerned, as I think I would be, watching them light a fire at my feet.
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And he said, be of good courage, Master Ridley. In 1558, five years later,
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Queen Elizabeth inherited the throne, Queen Elizabeth I, and restored Anglicanism.
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Now, we have some little gems here along the way of different people who were born, just so we can place them.
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But William Perkins, that same year, who was called the Prince of the Puritans, one of the first Puritans, was born during that time.
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A year later, the Act of Uniformity, one of the first appearances of it, required then the
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Book of Common Prayer for public worship. Now, what I want to show you as we go through this timeline, is that as Protestantism enters
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England, it does not enter under necessarily the best form, not with the best motives.
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But Anglicanism begins to take shape in England. And as Anglicanism begins to take shape under the
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King and the Parliament, it begins to take a shape that is moving away from faithful, biblical
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Christianity, and really veering closer and closer, or alongside at least,
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Roman Catholicism. And so you see this Act of Uniformity, insisting that the Book of Common Prayer be used.
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And then, eight years later, in 1567, clerical vestments begin to appear.
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And the Puritans, now that are on the scene, are becoming more and more concerned about the course of the
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Church of England, and are wanting to seek further reformation. So they're seeking a purer church, and that's where the word
40:38
Puritan came from. It was actually a name that was used to revile them, as those people who wanted to purify the
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Church of England, they're Puritans, they're the stuffy men who have no fun and always have long faces.
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But what happens? We see in 1571, the Parliament approves what was called the 39
41:00
Articles of Religion, stating the doctrinal beliefs of the Church, and so this was the confession of the
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Church of England, the Anglican Church. In 1583, John Whitgift becomes the
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Archbishop of Canterbury, and enforces uniformity in public worship. And so, as the
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Puritans are pulling back, seeking to reform and purify the Church, the
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Church is becoming more militant, the Church of England is becoming more militant in its pursuit of uniformity to their doctrines.
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We see the death of William Perkins in 1602, as well nearby the birth of Oliver Cromwell, who is going to be coming up later in our story.
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In 1604, King James I rejects most Puritans' request for reform, included in their millenary petition.
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So, they are here putting forward documents to request reform, and they're being put off for it.
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In 1611, he commissions the King James Version, or the Authorized Version. In 1616,
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Richard Baxter and John Owen are born. Same year, William Shakespeare dies. So, we're beginning to see where we are, in terms of secular history, even.
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And in 1618, James I advocates Sunday recreation. You might have heard me make reference to this about a month ago,
42:25
Sunday recreation in opposition to Puritan Sabbatarianism. And so, scheduling dances, and sporting events, and various things on the
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Lord's Day, so that he might be able to trip up the people in the church from maintaining their
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Sabbatarian convictions. Well, as this opposition is mounting, the
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Puritans in Britain are now beginning to look beyond Britain.
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And so, in 1620, I notice there's a bit of a word that got cut off there in the photocopying, but the
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Pilgrims, Puritan Separatists, fled then to the Netherlands, and then eventually sailing to America, where they founded a colony at Plymouth in Massachusetts.
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In 1628, John Bunyan is born, the same time that Oliver Cromwell becomes a member of Parliament.
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William Laud, who we'll see, if you were to read Puritan history, you'll see time and time again, is appointed the
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Archbishop of Canterbury. And then, really, at that time, the Great Migration happens, where these
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Puritans are now going to the New World to establish a faithful Christian colony that is free of the tyranny of England and of the
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Church of England. Civil War begins, and the Puritans side with Parliament against King Charles I.
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And then, shortly after that, it's interesting, you've got civil war happening, and at the same time, Parliament calls together the
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Puritans to establish the Westminster Confession of Faith, and the larger and shorter catechisms.
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And so, it's from 1643 until 1646 that they worked on that, and it was published then in 1646.
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Now, right around this same time, and we'll get into a bit of the history of it, but in 1644, the first London Baptist Confession of Faith was formed.
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And, maybe I'll let the cat out of the bag a little bit, I won't reference it as much later, but really, what was happening was the
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Baptists during this time, not only are the Puritans struggling with the Church of England, and with it seeking to keep them under its thumb, but the
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Baptists have now been lauded in with the Anabaptists. Now, the Anabaptists, we didn't see it in our timeline, but emerged around 1525, so very shortly after the
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Reformation, and by 1527, we were already seeing Protestant -on -Protestant persecution as the
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Anabaptists were being drowned, going through their third baptism, as it was called by some of the
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Reformed Christians. And as a result of both their treatment and some of their theology, they were engaging in all kinds of outrageous things, including the upsetting of whole cities, like an incident that happened in Munster.
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And at this point, the Baptists, who are very much part of the Reformed tradition, are getting lumped in with the
45:35
Anabaptists. And so, while the Westminster Assembly is happening, and they're seeking to establish their own confession, these early
45:44
Baptists say, well, we're going to establish a confession as well, so that others know that we believe the same doctrine.
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The only difference, really, is in the area of church government and in the area of baptism, in the ordinances.
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Those are the two main areas. And so, in 1644, they put that together. We'll read a couple of quotes that they published in that confession in a few minutes here.
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In 1645, you'll remember that Archbishop William Laud, in 1633, was appointed to the
46:18
Archbishop of Canterbury. Well, by 1645, the Puritans have had enough, and he is executed.
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Charles I is defeated by Oliver Cromwell's parliamentary army. In the midst of this,
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John Bunyan publishes The Death of Death and The Death of Christ. And we see the espousal, sorry,
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John Owen, thank you, brother, and the espousal of particular redemption. And then, in 1649,
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Charles I is beheaded by Parliament, and then Commonwealth begins under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell.
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He would later become known as the Lord Protector, because they didn't want a king. He certainly didn't want that either, but he was thrust into it.
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And from 1649 to 1660, that time is known as the
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Puritan Ignorant, I don't know if you knew this, but the Puritans actually ran
47:13
England for about 11 years. And things were going relatively well until Oliver Cromwell died.
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Oliver Cromwell died, let's see here, in 1658, and it was only two years later that the kingdom was passed back over, this time to Charles II.
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And when Charles II came, the Puritans were leery about this, but there were a lot of promises made that things would go well for them, but that is not what happened.
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So just in terms of a timeline of confessions, 1646, the Westminster is published, in 1658, just around the same time that Oliver Cromwell dies, the
47:57
Savoy Confession or the Savoy Declaration is published, which is still a
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Paedo -Baptist Puritan confession, but espousing Congregationalist views.
48:08
So you've got these Congregationalist Paedo -Baptists happening. King Charles enters the scene in 1660, and then by 1662, you can circle that one if you're writing things down, we see the
48:21
Act of Uniformity passed, which was a significant event in the life of the Puritans, where 2000 clergy, including men like Richard Baxter, who wrote the book
48:30
The Reformed Pastor, were ejected from their parishes. One almost has to wonder if this was one of the judgments of the
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Lord upon Britain, I'm not sure, but 70 ,000 people in London died just a few years later from the
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Great Plague, and at this time, they passed what's called the Five Mile Act, which forbids non -conformists, now non -conformists are those who will not submit themselves to the
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Church of England, from not only not pastoring, but not being allowed to come within five miles of their former parishes or those towns.
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And you can imagine, if you are an elder, if you were an elder, if you have a heart for God's people, what it would be to love a church and to pour your life into serving them, and then to have the government come and say, not only can you not attend, you can't be within five miles of that church, how heartbreaking that would be.
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Now following that, in 1677, so just a couple years after that, during this
49:41
Five Mile Act and the Act of Uniformity, the English Baptist published for the first time the
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Second London Baptist Confession, and so the initial publication is not 1689, it's actually 1677, but because of the great persecution and opposition that they endured, they published it quietly, without much fanfare, and so this is actually the 1677
50:08
London Baptist Confession of Faith. A year later, John Bunyan publishes, and he was a
50:15
Reformed Baptist brother, publishes the Pilgrim's Progress. And then, as the years come on, we see again another disruption.
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In 1685, now 23 years after the
50:30
Act of Uniformity is passed, imagine, if you didn't agree with some of the conditions of the
50:38
COVID lockdowns, and I'm not going to wade into that right now, imagine something as difficult as this
50:44
Act of Uniformity for 23 years. But here, Charles' Catholic brother,
50:50
James II, takes the throne, and then he increases the persecution. It's not the end, but now it's just really the beginning of the intensifying of persecution.
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And then, in 1688, there was what was called the Glorious Revolution, and William and Mary become the
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King and Queen of England. And in 1689, the Puritans and the
51:11
Reformed Baptist brothers, or Reformed Baptist brothers of old, regained their freedom through what was known as the
51:18
Act of Toleration. And only then, in 1689, once the Act of Toleration happens, is the
51:25
London General Assembly able to meet and publicly affirm this document.
51:30
And so, they waited in the wings for 12 years, quietly holding to this confession, and then after that 12 years, being able to say, this is what we believe, and we're not going to be killed for believing it.
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And so, some might ask, why the 1689 document? Well, in many respects, this document was forged by faithful, faithful Christians who understood sound doctrine, who lived in the
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Puritan era, who were persecuted severely for their beliefs, and yet they held them, and they even wrote them down, that they would be made known.
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So that is the history, the general history of the Confession. We find, then, the Confession existing in that timeline, in the version of the
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First Confession in 1644, and then 1677 -1689. And then
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I want to talk very, very quickly about the sources of the Confession. So someone might say, where did this
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Confession come from? Did we, did, as these Reformed Baptists, as they were being persecuted, did they just sit in their studies with their
52:46
Bibles, five miles away from their churches, and write this down? Well, I'm actually exceedingly grateful that this is not the invention of one or two men sitting in their studies, but actually is a collection.
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Again, what I think, what makes this the greatest confession of faith in the history of the world is that it seeks to take the very best of all of the
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Confessions, use those to promote the unity of the local church, while at the same time articulating
53:23
Baptist distinctives. And so, the five main sources, as I have them listed here, and there's some debate, some would say there's four main sources,
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I say five, and I'll tell you why in a moment. The first main source is historical creeds and confessions, that we see these historical creeds popping up in the
53:43
Confession throughout. The Westminster Confession of Faith, so that the
53:48
Second Lenten Baptist Confession of Faith is a Puritan document, it's a
53:53
Puritan Reformed Baptist document. The Savoy Declaration, in that it reflects a congregational form of church government, along with the autonomy of the local church, religious freedoms, and the separation of maybe
54:10
I said this already, forgive me if I did, separation of church and state, so sovereign spheres of authority. It encapsulates some of the
54:19
First Lenten Confession of Faith, Nehemiah Cox, who was one of the framers of the Confession, his father was one of the framers of the
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First Confession, and then the contributions of the framers themselves at the Second Confession. So we'll go over some of these quickly,
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I'm not going to read everything, I'll leave some of it for you for later. We see in terms of the historical creeds and confessions, quoting from Sam Waldron, he says, the 1689 stands in confessional agreement with the historic creeds of the church.
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And I, for one, am encouraged that creeds like the Nicene Creed appear in this confession.
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The creed of Chalcedon appears in this confession. We won't look at those, but I encourage you afterwards, look at some of the similarities in language between the two
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LCF, the Second Lenten Confession of Faith, and then the Nicene Creed and the Creed of Chalcedon.
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Number two, it comes from the Westminster Confession of Faith. This confession was prepared by Puritan theologians, this is the
55:21
Westminster, published in 1646. It reflected Presbyterian church government,
55:27
Presbyterian view of the sacraments of the state church, and yet, for those of you who love the
55:33
Westminster Confession, I know a few here that are studying it, it takes some of the very best of the
55:42
Westminster Confession, these Puritans, and you can, I love the pictures, the paintings of the
55:48
Westminster Assembly meeting together, seeking to formulate this confession together, and the
55:55
Reformed Baptists. What they did, they weren't stealing from, they weren't trying to plagiarize from the
56:00
Westminster Confession, but what they wanted to say to their Pato -Baptist Puritan brethren was this, that we are of like mind and faith.
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We are Puritans too, we are Reformed too, but we are Reformed Baptists.
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We believe in baptizing believers, not in children, but brothers, we are more alike than you think.
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And so, in the interest of not just preserving unity, but of establishing unity, they sought to take the very best from the
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Westminster. And then from the Savoy Declaration, now the Savoy is essentially just a rewrite, a modification of the
56:40
Westminster from a congregational standpoint, so recognizing the autonomy of the local church rather than a
56:48
Presbyterian form of church government, where you've got this branch of church government that oversees multiple churches, and you'll see here there's thirty paragraphs in the
56:59
Savoy that were added to describe this congregational church order. And so, the Baptists looked to that document as well.
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The first Lenin Confession of Faith also makes an appearance. I'm not going to read all of these paragraphs.
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What I will do is I'll read the second paragraph, it's footnote number twelve at the end of it, where it starts with the word hostility.
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Why, some might say, why was the first Lenin Confession written? Hostility, often born of hatred or fear, prejudice and misunderstanding, confronted these new congregations practicing believers' baptism.
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At this point, English was meshed in a civil war between parliamentarians and royalists. The Westminster Assembly of Divines had been convinced to drop a new confession of faith and modify the thirty -nine articles of the
57:48
National Church. The Assembly was principally comprised of Presbyterian and Congregational. These newer
57:54
Baptist congregations, almost certainly aided by their Congregational friends in the
58:00
Assembly, wanted to promote their credentials as churches and pastors who espoused, sorry for the typos here, espoused and defended
58:08
Calvinistic orthodoxy. So what they're doing here is they're saying, brethren, we are like you.
58:17
We serve the same Lord. We believe most of the same things. And it's really interesting because, and you have to understand that it's not like today where maybe there's differences with us and Pentecostals and say, well, we wrote a whole confession to let people know that we're not
58:36
Pentecostals, you know, because it's an inconvenient mistake or an inconvenient misunderstanding for people to think that we speak in tongues.
58:44
No, what they're saying is we're not like those people that are being drowned to death for their views and at the same time are creating a ruckus in various parts of Europe with strange views.
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And so the title of their confession, right as the confession begins in the 1644, it says this.
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It says, it's a confession of faith of the seven congregations or churches of Christ in London, which are commonly, though unjustly, called
59:16
Anabaptists, published for the vindication of the truth and information of the ignorant.
59:22
It was written because some, said the preface, were charging us with holding free will, falling away from grace, denying original sin, and then that got cut off somehow.
59:35
But declaiming, I think it's the legitimacy of the magistrate. And then the framers.
59:43
So there were framers who put these documents together, two among them, Nehemiah Cox and William Collins of the
59:49
Petit France Church, who were the editors, the editors -in -chief, you could say, of the document, with many other helpers who took extracts from these above creeds along with their own contributions to form a coherent confession.
01:00:05
And in my note here, this confession sought to maintain unity with their surrounding
01:00:10
Reformed Puritan brethren, while also acknowledging their own distinctives as Baptists.
01:00:16
And then on that last page, really quickly, I think this is really helpful, Sam Waldron gives what he calls his confessional genealogy of the
01:00:25
Second London Baptist Confession of Faith. So the grandmother is the Westminster Confession, the mother is the
01:00:30
Savoy, so that's the congregational Puritans, and then the daughter confession becomes the 1689
01:00:37
London Baptist Confession. And you'll see then the sources that he lists there, that eight paragraphs are taken from the
01:00:44
First London, six are taken from the framers themselves that are original to this confession, and then 146, so a great deal, come from the
01:00:54
Savoy, which if you remember is a modification of the Westminster. So as much as possible, they tried to maintain that Westminster Confession in the document.
01:01:03
And so, why do I think this is the greatest confession in the world? Because I think it comes from one of the greatest times in the history of the
01:01:12
Church, when the understanding of sound doctrine was so much better than it is today, where to be a pastor meant that you had studied
01:01:23
Latin and Greek and Hebrew, and the various languages, and then the
01:01:29
Scriptures for eight, ten, twelve years, where some of the most masterful minds,
01:01:37
I think in the history of the English -speaking Church, were together, summarizing what it is that Scripture teaches, and then yet at the same time, equally brilliant minds, by God's help,
01:01:51
I trust, were seeking to tailor those confessions to reflect the fact that we should not baptize our babies, but we should baptize those who believe the
01:02:02
Gospel and are saved. That we should recognize an autonomy of the local church, as opposed to a
01:02:09
Presbyterian form of church government. That there is a difference between the church and the state, and King Charles, or King Henry, or whoever comes after them is not the supreme leader of the church, but that we stand separate, and that Christ is the
01:02:23
King of the church. So I think it's a fantastic confession.