Buried with Him, Raised with Him
The Particular Baptists from the Reformation to the Confession of 1689
eformed Baptists are stewards of a costly
inheritance. The Baptist distinctive was forged by men and women who boldly applied the leading
principle of the Reformation still deeper and further into the church’s self-understanding and
practice. The pejorative name “Baptist” was earned sometimes at great personal cost. And
still they are rarely remembered. Yet their convictions have shaped the worship and witness of
millions.
Church history is helpful, but it is also riddled with sinful ambitions, partisan bias, and the temptation to rewrite the past to our own liking. Humility is the first requirement of the student, and the first aim is to glorify the Lord of the church.
The story of the Particular Baptists is nothing novel. It is not the story of a new or separate Reformation, but rather the continuance of it. It exemplifies the Reformation watchword: Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda secundum verbum Dei, the church reformed and always being reformed according to the Word of God.
The Soil of the Reformation
A Rediscovered Gospel
The Particular Baptists grew in soil turned by the Reformation of the sixteenth century. When Martin Luther insisted at Leipzig in 1519 that popes and councils could err, and that true doctrine must rest upon Scripture alone, he set loose a principle that would not stay where he left it.1 Ulrich Zwingli in Zurich, John Calvin in Geneva, Martin Bucer in Strasbourg, and William Tyndale with his English New Testament all labored to bring the church back under the voice of God Himself. Timothy George summarizes the achievement well: “Luther’s discovery of justification by faith alone, Zwingli’s insistence on the clarity and certainty of Holy Scripture, Calvin’s emphasis on the glory and sovereignty of God, and the Anabaptist quest for a true visible church all found expression” in the confessions, commentaries, and hymns of the age.2
The Baptists who later emerged in England were heirs of every one of those recoveries. They preached justification by faith alone. They bowed to the sovereignty of God. They stood upon sola Scriptura. Their distinctive contribution was to press the Reformation principle still deeper: to the doctrine of the church itself.
The Unfinished Question of the Church
For all their courage, the magisterial Reformers retained one great inheritance from medieval Christendom: some measure of marriage to the state. The consequence was that every child born in the realm was baptized into the church of the realm. Since the days of Constantine, infant baptism had served not only as a sacrament but also as a civic bond. The historian, Leonard Verduin, observes that in such a world, “If one’s baptism is a sign of one’s citizenship in ‘Christendom,’ then a second baptism is a badge of disloyalty to that ‘Christendom.’”3 To question infant baptism was to question the social order.
Even Luther felt the force of the argument for a personal faith. Writing of those who insisted upon believer’s baptism, he conceded, “These brethren hold to the idea that every man must believe for himself and on the basis of his own faith receive baptism and that otherwise baptism or the sacrament is useless. So far they believe and speak correctly” (as quoted by Verduin).4 Yet Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin all kept the baptism of infants, and with it a church that was coextensive with the parish.
Zurich, 1525: The First Rebaptisms
The question broke into the open in Zurich. Several of Zwingli’s own young disciples, among them Conrad Grebel, Felix Manz, and George Blaurock, became convinced that the New Testament knew nothing of infant baptism. On January 21, 1525, they baptized one another upon confession of faith. Their opponents called them “Anabaptists” (rebaptizers), and the name became a weapon. Within two years Felix Manz was drowned in the Limmat on January 5, 1527, the first of many to die at the hands of fellow Protestants. Stanislaus Hosius, a president of the Council of Trent, wrote in 1565 that no group in twelve hundred years “have bene more cruelly punished” than the Anabaptists.5
The story was soon darkened by the fanaticism of Münster in 1534 and 1535, where a band of self-styled prophets seized a German city, enforced their kingdom by the sword, and introduced polygamy. Münster had little to do with the peaceful Swiss Brethren or the later followers of Menno Simons, but for more than a century every dissenter who questioned infant baptism in England would be tarred with its brush.
Kindred, Not Ancestors
On this point, clarification is needed. The Particular Baptists shared certain convictions with the Continental Anabaptists: a gathered church, believer’s baptism, discipline, and freedom of conscience. But they were not their theological children. The Anabaptists were generally anti-Calvinistic, frequently pacifist, often refused oaths and civil office, and in some cases held unusual views of Christ’s human nature. The Particular Baptists, by contrast, were Calvinists who honored the magistrate, served in Parliament’s army, took lawful oaths, and confessed the full deity and humanity of Christ in the language of the great Reformed confessions. The German scholar Ernst Troeltsch, studying them, found a real kinship with the Anabaptists, yet concluded that “on account of their historic origin and their permanent environment, they became strongly impregnated with the spirit of Calvinism.”6
It is telling that the first Particular Baptist confession bore the title The Confession of Faith of those Churches which are commonly (though falsely) called Anabaptists. They wished to be judged as what they were: Reformed Christians who had followed the Scriptures one step further on the doctrine of the church.
England: From Supremacy to Separation
A Reformation by Act of State
In England the Reformation came, at least officially, by an act of the state. Henry VIII severed the English church from Rome by the Act of Supremacy in 1534, though he left it largely Catholic in doctrine and worship. Under the boy-king Edward VI the church became genuinely Protestant. Under Mary Tudor it was dragged back to Rome amid the fires of Smithfield. Under Elizabeth I it was “settled” in 1559 in a via media that satisfied neither the ardent Catholic nor the earnest Protestant.
Meanwhile, a Book had been loosed upon the nation. Tyndale’s New Testament of 1526, Coverdale’s Bible, the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible, and finally the King James Version of 1611 placed the Scriptures into the hands of ploughmen and apprentices. J. H. Shakespeare once remarked that “the great discovery, therefore, of the age was not the New World, but a book.”7 He ventured further, perhaps with a smile: wipe out every religious group of the seventeenth century, leave an open Bible, and “there would be Baptists” tomorrow.8
Puritans and Separatists
Those who longed for a more thorough reformation were nicknamed “Puritans.” Most hoped to purify the Church of England from within. Some, despairing of the slow pace of change, became Separatists. Robert Browne’s Treatise of Reformation without Tarying for Anie (1582) gave them a battle cry, and Henry Barrow and John Greenwood sealed their convictions with their blood in 1593. The Separatists insisted upon a “gathered church” of visible saints, bound together by covenant, governed by Christ through His Word rather than by bishops and canons. H. Leon McBeth notes that Baptists would later fault the Separatists on one point: most of them “did not go on to believer’s baptism and religious liberty, two areas in which Baptists went significantly beyond the Separatists.”9
The General Baptists: An Earlier and Different Stream
The first English Baptist church was not Particular but General. In 1609, among English exiles in Amsterdam, John Smyth baptized himself and then Thomas Helwys and others upon profession of faith. Smyth soon regretted the step and sought union with the Mennonites, but Helwys led a small band back to England, where about 1612 they planted a church at Spitalfields, outside London. Helwys’s A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity contains one of the boldest pleas for liberty of conscience in the English language. On its flyleaf he wrote to King James I:
The king is a mortal man and not God, therefore he has no power over the immortal souls of his subjects, to make laws and ordinances for them and to set spiritual lords over them.10 Thomas HelwysA Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity, 1612
Helwys died in Newgate Prison about 1616. His witness to religious liberty became a common Baptist inheritance. Yet his theology was Arminian, holding to a general atonement and the possibility of falling from grace, and his movement had a different origin, at a different time, under different leaders. As McBeth emphasizes, the two Baptist streams did not “divide” from one another; they arose separately. The Particular Baptists “represent not just more Baptists, but Baptists of a significantly different kind.”11
The Mother Church in Southwark
Henry Jacob and the JLJ Church (1616)
The cradle of the Particular Baptists was a gentle one. In 1616 Henry Jacob, a moderate Puritan who never became a Baptist, gathered an independent congregation in Southwark, south of the Thames. Historians call it the “JLJ church” after its first three pastors: Henry Jacob, John Lathrop, and Henry Jessey. Unlike the harsher Separatists, Jacob refused to unchurch the parish churches of England, but he longed for a congregation ordered by Scripture alone. The account of its founding has a lovely simplicity:
Those who minded this present Union & so joyning togeather joyned both hands each with other Brother and stood in a Ringwise: their intent being declared, H. Jacob and each of the Rest made some confession or Profession of their Faith & Repentance, some ware longer some briefer, Then they Covenanted togeather to walk in all Gods Ways as he had revealed or should make known to them.12 Jacob church recordfounding of the Southwark congregation, 1616
That last phrase, “as he had revealed or should make known to them,” is key. These were people who expected the Word of God to lead them further, and who were prepared to follow.
Further Light on Baptism (1633 to 1638)
Under John Lathrop the church grew, and with growth came questions. Some members were troubled that their brethren still had children baptized in the parish churches. On September 12, 1633, a group led by Samuel Eaton received the church’s blessing to form a separate congregation. The old church book records that “Mr Eaton with Some others receiving a further Baptism.”13 Among those who joined this group was a young apprentice named William Kiffin.
In 1638 the record is unmistakable. Six members, “being convinced that Baptism was not for Infants, but professed Believers,” joined with John Spilsbury.14 Historians therefore conclude that definitely by 1638, and possibly by 1633, a church of Calvinistic, believer-baptizing convictions existed in London. The Particular Baptists had been born.
Buried and Raised: The Recovery of Immersion
The Kiffin Manuscript
Believer’s baptism was the first step; the second was its mode. The famous “Kiffin Manuscript” records what happened in 1640, when the Southwark church divided by mutual consent between Praisegod Barebone and Henry Jessey:
Mr. Richard Blunt with him being convinced of Baptism and that it also should be by dipping the Body into the Water, resembling Burial and rising again. Col. 2:12. Rom. 6:4. We had a sober conference about it in the Church and then with some of the forenamed who were also so convinced. After Prayer and conference about their so enjoying it, none having then so practiced it in England to professed Believers, and hearing that some in the Netherlands had so practiced they agreed and sent over Mr. Rich. Blunt (who understood Dutch) with Letters of Commendation.15 The Kiffin Manuscripton the Southwark church, 1640
Blunt returned with letters from a Dutch teacher named John Batte, and the record continues: “Mr. Blunt Baptized Mr. Blacklock who was a Teacher among them, and Mr. Blunt being Baptized, he and Mr. Blacklock Baptized the rest of their friends that were so minded, and many being added to them they increased much.”16
Notice the reasoning. These believers did not choose immersion out of novelty or stubbornness. They chose it because of Romans 6:4 and Colossians 2:12, because the outward sign ought to picture the inward reality: “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (Rom. 6:4). Their baptism was a Christ-centered sermon in water.
Spilsbury and the Authority of Scripture Alone
Not every Particular Baptist approved of Blunt’s mission to Holland. Thomas Crosby, the first great Baptist historian, reports that “the greatest number of the English Baptists, and the more judicious, looked upon all this as needless trouble, and what proceeded from the old Popish Doctrine of right to administer sacraments by an uninterrupted succession.”17 John Spilsbury put it with characteristic plainness. If believers could restore the church, the preaching of the gospel, and the Lord’s Supper by the authority of the Bible alone, why must baptism come by succession, “tho’ it comes thro’ the hands of pope Joan”?18 His conclusion is a small masterpiece of common sense: “where there is a beginning, some one must be first.”19 Elsewhere he wrote, “There is no succession under the New Testament, but what is spiritually by faith and the Word of God.”20
This conviction deserves to be underlined. The Particular Baptists did not claim their authority from an unbroken chain of churches reaching back to the apostles. They claimed it from the apostles’ own writings. That is the Reformation principle applied without exception.
The Dippers Dipped
Immersion was new to England, and it caused a stir. On October 17, 1642, William Kiffin and three other Baptists disputed at Southwark with Daniel Featley, a learned minister of the Church of England. The Baptists opened with admirable courtesy:
Master Doctor, we come to dispute with you at this time, not for contention sake, but to receive satisfaction. We hold that the baptism of infants cannot be proved by the testimony of scripture, or by apostolical tradition. If therefore you can prove the same either way, we shall be willing to submit to you.21 William Kiffin and fellow Baptistsopening the disputation with Daniel Featley, October 17, 1642
Featley answered by calling them “Anabaptists, heretics, mechanics, and illiterate men,”22 and later published his account under the memorable title The Dippers Dipt, or the Anabaptists Duck’d and Plung’d over Head and Eares. His complaint inadvertently paints a vivid picture of the young movement: it “hath held weekly Conventicles, re-baptized hundreds of men and women together in the twylight in Rivulets, and some armes of the Thames.”23 The “watery war” had begun, and the presses of London, as one critic grumbled, began to “sweat and groan” with Baptist pamphlets.24
The Seven Churches and the Confession of 1644
“The Main Wheel that Set Us to Work”
By 1644 seven Particular Baptist churches in London had come into being. Slandered “as if they were Arminians, and also against Magistrates,” they joined in a confession of fifty-two articles which, the Kiffin Manuscript records, “gave great satisfaction to many that had been prejudiced.”25 Among the signatories were William Kiffin, Thomas Patience, John Spilsbury, Paul Hobson, Thomas Gunne, and Thomas Kilcop.
Their purpose was not to parade novelties but to demonstrate their orthodoxy. To show their agreement with other Reformed Christians was, they said, “the Maine wheele that set us awork.” The confession is thoroughly Calvinistic on the decrees of God:
That God hath decreed in himselfe from everlasting touching all things, effectually to work and dispose them according to the counsell of his owne will…. And touching his creature man, God had in Christ before the foundation of the world, according to the good pleasure of his will, foreordained some men to eternall life through Jesus Christ, to the praise and glory of his grace.26 London ConfessionArticle III, 1644
Alongside this shared Reformed heritage stood their distinctive convictions. The church, they confessed, is “a company of visible saints, called and separated from the world, by the Word and the Spirit of God, to the visible profession of the faith of the Gospel, being baptized into the faith” (Article XXXIII). Baptism is “an Ordinance of the New Testament, given by Christ, to be dispensed onely upon persons professing faith, or that are Disciples” (Article XXXIX).27 And as to its manner:
The way and manner of the dispensing of this Ordinance the Scripture holds out to be dipping or plunging the whole body under water: it being a signe, must answer the thing signified.28 London ConfessionArticle XL, 1644
With characteristic English decency, the framers added a note that immersion should be performed “with convenient garments both upon the administrator and subject, with all modestie.”29 The 1644 confession was the first Baptist confession to specify immersion as essential to baptism, and it wielded, in McBeth’s words, “vast influence upon the future shape of Baptist life and thought.”30
Kiffin, Knollys, and Jessey
Three men may stand for the whole generation. William Kiffin (1616 to 1701) lost both parents to the plague at nine years of age and was himself left “with six plague sores” upon him.31 Converted as an apprentice under Puritan preaching, he met with other young apprentices before the six o’clock Lord’s Day lecture to pray, read Scripture, and share “what experiences we had received from the Lord.”32 He became a wealthy merchant, pastor of the church at Devonshire Square for some sixty years, and the most trusted Particular Baptist leader of his century. He signed nearly every major confession of his era.
Hanserd Knollys (about 1599 to 1691), a Cambridge-trained clergyman, ministered for a time in New England, where even Cotton Mather called him one of the “godly Anabaptists,” before returning to London.33 His preaching at Great St. Helen’s commonly drew a thousand hearers.34 Near the end of a long life of exile, imprisonment, and labor, he wrote:
My wilderness, sea, city, and prison mercies afforded me very many and strong consolations. The spiritual sights of the glory of God, the divine sweetness of the spiritual and providential presence of my Lord Jesus Christ, and the joys and comforts of the holy and eternal Spirit, communicated to my soul… have so often and so powerfully revived, refreshed, and strengthened my heart…. I am a very unprofitable servant, but yet by grace I am what I am.35 Hanserd Knollysreflecting on a life of trial
Henry Jessey (1601 to 1663), the third pastor of the Southwark church, came to Baptist convictions slowly and prayerfully. Before acting, he consulted Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, Jeremiah Burroughs, and other eminent Independents. Unpersuaded by their arguments, he was baptized by Hanserd Knollys in June 1645. Crosby notes that Jessey “maintained the same christian love and charity to all saints as before,” and spent his travels urging the churches “to love and union among themselves, notwithstanding their differing from one another.”36 Here is a portrait worth hanging in every Baptist parlor: firm conviction joined to warm catholicity.
Liberty, Growth, and Peril (1645 to 1660)
The years of civil war and Commonwealth brought the Particular Baptists unprecedented freedom. They multiplied through preaching, through public disputations (Baptists took part in at least seventy-nine between 1641 and 1660),37 and through a flood of printed works. Churches sprang up in the Midlands, the West Country, Wales, and Ireland, and they soon linked arms in associations. At its first meeting in 1652, the Abingdon Association gave a theological reason for such fellowship:
There is the same relation betwixt the perticular churches each towards other as there is betwixt perticular members of one church. For the churches of Christ doe all make up one body or church in generall under Christ their head…. all the perticular assemblys are but one Mount Syon.38 Abingdon Associationfirst meeting, 1652
Liberty brought temptations as well as opportunities. The heady millennial atmosphere of the 1650s drew some Baptists toward the Fifth Monarchy movement, whose radicals dreamed of establishing Christ’s kingdom by the sword. To their great credit, William Kiffin in London and Thomas Collier in the West labored to keep the churches from political violence. When the Fifth Monarchist Thomas Venner rose in arms in January 1661, Kiffin, Spilsbury, and others signed The Humble Apology of Some Commonly Called Anabaptists, disowning “the late wicked and most horrid treasonable insurrection.”39 It was the first document on which General and Particular Baptists cooperated. It did not spare them.
The Furnace of the Great Persecution (1660 to 1688)
The Clarendon Code
With the restoration of Charles II in 1660, the Church of England returned with its bishops, and Parliament erected the Clarendon Code against Dissent: the Corporation Act (1661), the Act of Uniformity (1662), the Conventicle Act (1664), and the Five Mile Act (1665). Baptists, who had been loudest in pleading for liberty and prominent in the army that had toppled the king, were singled out for special abuse. Their main task, as one historian put it, was merely to exist.40
The records of the Broadmead church in Bristol read like an adventure story. Members stationed young men at the door to watch for informers; sisters crowded the stairway to slow the officers’ approach; the preacher spoke from an adjoining house, or disappeared through a trap door “made like a Biffet-Bench against ye Wall.” Once, an officer seized a fleeing pastor by his coat, but the pastor “gave a Spring, and ye Coat slipt off, and he wonderfully made his Escape.”41 Not all escaped. Their pastor George Fownes died in Gloucester jail on November 29, 1685, after nearly three years’ imprisonment “for the testimony of Jesus and preaching the Gospel.”42
The Cross Is the Way to the Crown
John Bunyan spent twelve years in Bedford jail, where he wrote much of what would become The Pilgrim’s Progress. Benjamin Keach, a young pastor who would later become one of the leading Particular Baptist theologians and a pioneer of congregational hymn singing, was convicted in 1664 for writing a children’s primer, The Child’s Instructor, which taught believer’s baptism. He was sentenced to stand in the pillory at Aylesbury and Winslow and to watch his book burned by the common hangman. Crosby preserves his words as he was led to the pillory: “the cross is the way to the crown.”43 Once his head and hands were fixed in the stocks, he preached:
Good people, I am not ashamed to stand here this day, with this paper on my head; my Lord Jesus was not ashamed to suffer on the cross for me; and it is for his cause that I am made a gazing-stock. Take notice, it is not for any wickedness that I stand here; but for writing and publishing his truths, which the Spirit of the Lord hath revealed in the Holy Scriptures.44 Benjamin Keachfrom the pillory, 1664
“I Have a Christ to Go To”
The darkest year was 1685. After the failed rebellion of the Duke of Monmouth against the Catholic James II, Judge Jeffreys’s “Bloody Assizes” swept the West Country. Among those condemned were Benjamin and William Hewling, the young grandsons of William Kiffin. William was executed at Lyme on September 12, 1685, and Benjamin at Taunton on September 30. Their sister recorded their final days. Benjamin said, “Oh! blessed be God for afflictions. I would not have been without them for all this world.”45 And William, at the very end, “with a joyful countenance, he said, ‘Oh, now my joy and comfort is that I have a Christ to go to;’ and so sweetly resigned his spirit to Christ.”46
Two years later, James II, courting Dissenters for his own purposes, summoned the aged Kiffin and offered to make him an alderman of London. The story, preserved by Mark Noble and retold by J. M. Cramp, has the old merchant answer, with tears running down his cheeks: “the death of my grandsons gave a wound to my heart which is still bleeding, and will never close but in the grave.”47
“No Itch to Clog Religion with New Words”: The Confession of 1677
A Confession Born in Persecution
It was in the middle of this furnace, in 1677, that the elders and brethren of “many congregations of Christians, baptized upon profession of their faith, in London and the country” published a new and fuller confession.48 Its preparation is widely credited by modern scholars to Nehemiah Coxe and William Collins of the Petty France church in London, though the confession itself appeared without names, a prudent choice in a season when names could become evidence.
The framers deliberately built upon the Westminster Confession of 1646 and the Congregationalists’ Savoy Declaration of 1658. Their preface, “To the Judicious and Impartial Reader,” explains why:
We did in like manner conclude it best to follow their example, in making use of the very same words with them both, in those articles (which are very many) wherein our faith and doctrine is the same with theirs. And this we did, the more abundantly to manifest our consent with both, in all the fundamental articles of the Christian religion… And also to convince all that we have no itch to clog religion with new words, but to readily acquiesce in that form of sound words which hath been, in consent with the holy scriptures, used by others before us; hereby declaring before God, angels, and men, our hearty agreement with them, in that wholesome protestant doctrine.49 Second London Confessionpreface, “To the Judicious and Impartial Reader”
What a gracious posture for a persecuted minority. They did not define themselves chiefly by their differences. They stood shoulder to shoulder with Presbyterians and Independents in “all the fundamental articles,” and only then, “with all candour and plainness,” set out the points on which they differed.50 They urged every reader to imitate “the noble Bereans, who searched the scriptures daily,”51 and closed with a longing prayer:
And oh that other contentions being laid asleep, the only care and contention of all upon whom the name of our blessed Redeemer is called, might for the future be, to walk humbly with their God, and in the exercise of all Love and Meekness towards each other, to perfect holyness in the fear of the Lord.52 Second London Confessionpreface, “To the Judicious and Impartial Reader”
A Family Disagreement: Bunyan and Kiffin
The Particular Baptists were not uniform, and their honesty about their differences is instructive. In the 1670s John Bunyan and William Kiffin carried on a spirited debate about the Lord’s Supper. Bunyan, though himself baptized as a believer, welcomed unimmersed Christians to the table and into membership, warning that “It is possible to commit idolatry, even with God’s own appointments.”53 Kiffin answered that the order of Christ’s ordinances must not be rearranged: “Nor may the Lawes, Orders, and Prescriptions of Christ be altered, or varyed, in any tittle, upon any pretense whatsoever.”54 Most Particular Baptists in Kiffin’s lifetime sided with him, and the 1677 confession says little directly on the question. The debate reveals two men who loved Christ, honored His Word, and sought to guard both the purity and the charity of the church.
1689: Toleration and the General Assembly
The Glorious Revolution
In 1688 James II fled, and William and Mary came to the throne. On May 24, 1689, the Act of Toleration received royal assent, granting Protestant Dissenters who met its conditions the freedom to worship in licensed meeting houses. It was not yet full religious liberty, but it ended the long night. Crosby wrote simply, “by this glorious revolution, a stop was put to persecution, and liberty of conscience to all protestant Dissenters established by law.”55
The Assembly of September 1689
That very year the Particular Baptists did something they had never done before. Messengers from more than one hundred congregations across England and Wales (McBeth counts 107)56 gathered in London in September 1689 for a general assembly. Upwards of 150 persons attended, and every day was “opened and concluded with solemn prayer.”57 Their first act was not to celebrate but to call the churches to a day of fasting and humiliation, mourning “that great decay of first-love, faith, and zeal, for the ways and worship of God.”58 Remarkably, they reported that “Scarcely one brother dissented from the assembly in the sentiments of his mind in any one thing proposed.”59
They were careful to safeguard the liberty of the local church. Their first resolution reads:
We disclaim all manner of superiority, or superintendency over the churches; and that we have no authority or power to prescribe or impose any thing upon the faith or practice of any of the churches of Christ. Our whole intendment is, to be helpers together of one another, by way of counsel and advice, in the right understanding of that perfect rule, which our Lord Jesus, the only bishop of our souls, hath already prescribed, and given to his churches in his word.60 General Assembly of 1689first resolution
They established a fund, raised “by a free-will offering,” to support poor churches, to send ministers “to preach both in city and country, where the gospel hath, or hath not yet been preached,” and to help gifted young men attain “the knowledge and understanding of the languages, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.”61 Mission, ministry, and learning were already on their hearts. Most importantly, the assembly formally owned the confession of 1677, which was signed by thirty-seven messengers “as containing the doctrine of our faith and practice.”62 From that year it has been known as the Second London Confession, or simply the 1689.
What Made Them Distinct: The Convictions of the 1689
The 1689 confession is, for the most part, the Westminster Confession in Baptist dress. Its doctrines of God, Christ, sin, justification, sanctification, the law, and the Lord’s Day are shared with the whole Reformed family. Yet at certain points the Baptist framers changed, omitted, or added material, and those changes reveal their distinctive convictions. The comparison below sets out the most important of them.
The Sufficiency of Scripture for Faith and Church Order
The Baptists opened their confession with a sentence not found in Westminster: “The Holy Scripture is the only sufficient, certain, and infallible rule of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience” (1.1).63 They shared the Reformed regulative principle, but they applied it with special rigor to the ordinances and the constitution of the church. Kiffin’s words are representative: the “Lawes, Orders, and Prescriptions of Christ” may not be altered “in any tittle,” for God has never given mankind the prerogative “to be arbiters how he may be best and most decently worshipped.”64
The Doctrines of Grace
Here the Particular Baptists stood with Calvin, Dort, and Westminster, and apart from the General Baptists and most Anabaptists. The confession teaches unconditional election, particular redemption, effectual calling, and the perseverance of the saints, who “can neither totally nor finally fall from the state of grace; but shall certainly persevere therein to the end, and be eternally saved” (17.1).65 Their very name, “Particular,” witnesses to their conviction that Christ died effectually for His elect.
The Covenant of Grace and the New Covenant Church
Westminster speaks of one covenant of grace “differently administered” in the times of the law and of the gospel, a framework that supported the baptism of the children of believers as members of the covenant community.66 The Baptist framers chose different words. The covenant of grace, they confessed, was revealed “first of all to Adam in the promise of salvation by the seed of the woman, and afterwards by farther steps, until the full discovery thereof was completed in the New Testament” (7.3).67 For them the New Covenant is not simply a new administration of the old arrangement but the full revelation and establishment of the covenant of grace, whose members are those who know the Lord. Nehemiah Coxe developed this covenant theology at length in his Discourse of the Covenants (1681). It is the theological root from which Baptist practice grows.
A Regenerate, Gathered Church
Westminster defines the visible church as all who profess the true religion, “together with their children” (WCF 25.2).68 The 1689 replaces this with a different definition:
All persons throughout the world, professing the faith of the gospel, and obedience unto God by Christ according unto it, not destroying their own profession by any errors everting the foundation, or unholiness of conversation, are and may be called visible saints; and of such ought all particular congregations to be constituted (26.2).69
The church is a fellowship of those who have been born again and who have willingly given themselves “to the Lord, and one to another, by the will of God” (26.6).70 As J. M. Cramp observed, the early Baptists “open the doors to the godly — all besides are excluded,” and they practiced loving discipline to keep the church’s witness pure.71
Believer’s Baptism by Immersion
Westminster’s chapter on baptism was rewritten from top to bottom. The Baptists confessed that baptism is “a sign of his fellowship with him, in his death and resurrection; of his being engrafted into him; of remission of sins; and of his giving up into God through Jesus Christ to live and walk in newness of life” (29.1).72 They then drew the two conclusions that set them apart from every other Protestant body of the age:
Those who do actually profess repentance towards God, faith in, and obedience to, our Lord Jesus Christ, are the only proper subjects of this ordinance (29.2).73
Immersion, or dipping of the person in water, is necessary to the due administration of this ordinance (29.4).74
Note that the emphasis falls not on the water but on Christ: fellowship with Him, union with Him, forgiveness in Him, and new life through Him. The meaning of the sign required both its proper subject, a believer, and its proper mode, a burial and a rising.
Ordinances, Not Sacraments, and a Spiritual Feast
The Baptists generally preferred the word “ordinance” to “sacrament,” calling baptism and the Lord’s Supper “ordinances of positive and sovereign institution, appointed by the Lord Jesus, the only lawgiver” (28.1).75 Yet they were not bare memorialists. With Calvin, against both Rome and Luther, they confessed that worthy receivers “do then also inwardly by faith, really and indeed, yet not carnally and corporally, but spiritually receive, and feed upon Christ crucified, and all the benefits of his death” (30.7).76 Timothy George rightly commends this balance: Baptists “can do no better than to listen afresh to what their seventeenth-century forbears declared.”77
Congregational Polity and Voluntary Association
In place of Westminster’s chapters on synods and councils, the 1689 sets out a congregational order. Each local church is complete under Christ, with two offices, “bishops or elders, and deacons” (26.8).78 Churches ought to seek one another’s counsel, yet assemblies of messengers “are not intrusted with any church-power properly so called; or with any jurisdiction over the churches themselves” (26.15).79 Particular Baptists cherished interdependence, but they would not surrender the authority Christ gave to each gathered congregation.
Liberty of Conscience and the Civil Magistrate
The 1689 retains Westminster’s noble sentence, “God alone is Lord of the conscience” (21.2).80 But it omits the paragraph in which Westminster charged the magistrate to see “that all blasphemies and heresies be suppressed” (WCF 23.3).81 That omission speaks volumes. Unlike many Anabaptists, the Particular Baptists honored the magistrate, took lawful oaths, and served the commonwealth. Unlike their Presbyterian brethren, they denied the magistrate any authority to compel worship. Roger Williams expressed that matter with unforgettable beauty in 1644: “the Christian church does not persecute; no more than a lily scratches the thorns, or a lamb pursues and tears the wolves.”82
J. M. Cramp summed up the whole posture of these believers in a single line: “They owned no master but Christ, no rule but His Word. Hence they were Protestants.”83
Conclusion: Heirs of the Reformation, Servants of the Word
Who, then, were the Particular Baptists? They were not a novelty, nor did they assume an unbroken chain in practice reaching back to the New Testament. Charles Spurgeon, whom many of us love most dearly, once spoke of the Baptists as having “an unbroken line up to the apostles themselves.”84 The fuller historical record points elsewhere, and the early Particular Baptists themselves would have pointed us elsewhere too. Their claim was not to an unbroken line but to an unbroken Book. As Spilsbury said, “There is no succession under the New Testament, but what is spiritually by faith and the Word of God.”85
They were, in Timothy George’s phrase, heirs of the Reformation for whom “the great doctrines of the Reformation were refracted through the prism of persecution and dissent.”86 They held the gospel of Luther, the sovereign God of Calvin, the Scripture of Tyndale, and the warm piety of the Puritans. They carried that Reformation into the doctrine of the church, insisting that the body of Christ be composed of those who have been united to Christ by faith, and that baptism should picture that union in burial and resurrection.
For those of us who stand in their line today, their story is both a gift and a summons. It calls us to hold our convictions firmly without holding them proudly. It calls us to stand gladly with all who confess the “wholesome protestant doctrine” while speaking “with all candour and plainness” where we differ.87 It calls us to count the cost of faithfulness. Above all, it calls us to make much of Christ in the order of polity, purity, and practice of His church according to His written Word alone.
Timeline
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1517 | Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses; the Reformation begins |
| January 21, 1525 | First believer’s baptisms among Zwingli’s former disciples in Zurich |
| January 5, 1527 | Felix Manz drowned in the Limmat at Zurich |
| 1534 | Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy separates the English church from Rome |
| 1559 | The Elizabethan Settlement |
| 1582 | Robert Browne publishes A Treatise of Reformation without Tarying for Anie |
| 1609 | John Smyth and Thomas Helwys form the first (General) Baptist church in Amsterdam |
| 1611 | The King James Version is published |
| 1616 | Henry Jacob gathers the JLJ church in Southwark |
| September 12, 1633 | Samuel Eaton’s group is dismissed from the JLJ church |
| 1638 | Six members join John Spilsbury’s believer-baptizing church |
| 1640–1641 | Richard Blunt’s mission to Holland; immersion recovered among Particular Baptists |
| October 17, 1642 | Kiffin and others dispute Daniel Featley at Southwark |
| 1644 | First London Confession of the seven churches |
| 1645 | Henry Jessey baptized by Hanserd Knollys (June) |
| 1652 | Abingdon Association holds its first meeting |
| 1660 | Restoration of Charles II; the Great Persecution begins |
| 1664 | Benjamin Keach pilloried for The Child’s Instructor |
| 1672 | Declaration of Indulgence; Bunyan released after twelve years |
| 1677 | Second London Confession first published |
| 1685 | Monmouth’s Rebellion; Benjamin and William Hewling executed (September) |
| 1688 | The Glorious Revolution |
| May 24, 1689 | Act of Toleration receives royal assent |
| 1689 | General Assembly in London (September) owns the 1677 Confession |
Read More
1689 Confession
The full text of the Second London Baptist Confession, with its preface, proof texts, and
the Westminster and Savoy parallels.
Introduction to the Second London Baptist Confession
Its background under the Clarendon Code, its deliberate dependence on Westminster, and what it cost
the
men who owned it.
First London Baptist Confession (1644)
The confession of the seven churches, with its article on immersion.
