Second London Baptist Confession (1677/1689)

A Confession of Faith Put Forth by the Elders and Brethren of Many Congregations of Christians (Baptized upon Profession of Their Faith) in London and the Country. Drawn up and printed in 1677, while Dissenting worship was still against the law, it was publicly owned in 1689 by the first General Assembly of the Particular (Calvinistic) Baptists of England and Wales, in the same year the Act of Toleration became law.

It is the Westminster Confession’s theology of grace, carried by men who were persuaded from Scripture that the church is a gathered company of believers and that baptism belongs to those who profess faith in Christ. The messengers of 1689 commended it “for the satisfaction of all other Christians, that differ from us in the point of baptism,” and owned it “as containing the doctrine of our faith and practice.”¹

Background

The Particular Baptists had confessed their faith before. In 1644 seven London congregations published the First London Confession to answer the charge that they were Anabaptists of the Münster kind. The preface to the 1677 Confession looks back to that earlier statement, “first put forth about the year, 1643, in the name of seven Congregations then gathered in London,” and explains that it was “not now commonly to be had,” while “many others have since embraced the same truth.”²

But the England of 1677 was not the England of 1644. With the return of Charles II in 1660, Parliament passed the laws known as the Clarendon Code, which made Anglicanism the only lawful worship. Bush and Nettles summarize the two that bore hardest on Baptist congregations:

The Conventicle Act, passed in 1664 after the uprising of the Fifth-Monarchy Men, prohibited meetings for religious purposes “in any other manner than is allowed by the liturgy of the Church of England.” The Five-Mile Act prohibited any dissenting minister from coming within or setting up school within five miles of a corporate town. L. Russ Bush and Tom J. NettlesBaptists and the Bible

So the Confession appeared without names. It was, in their words, “an anonymous version” of the Westminster Confession.³ Only after the Revolution of 1688 could the churches sign it openly. Their certificate reads:

We the ministers and messengers of, and concerned for upwards of 100 congregations in England and Wales, denying Arminianism, being met together in London, from the third day of the 7th month, to the 11th of the same, 1689 … have thought meet, for the satisfaction of all other Christians, that differ from us in the point of baptism, to recommend to their perusal the confession of our faith. The General Assembly of 1689as printed in Crosby, History of the English Baptists

Thirty-seven men signed it. The call for the Assembly had gone out over the names of Hanserd Knollys, William Kiffin, and Benjamin Keach, with three others.⁴ Hence the double date: the Confession of 1677 is the Confession of 1689.

The Westminster Connection

The framers did not write from scratch, and they did not want to. Timothy George explains that the Confession “closely paralleled two prior confessional standards: the Savoy Declaration, put forth by the English Congregationalists in 1658, and the Westminster Confession of 1646, the authoritative creed of English Presbyterians.”⁵ This was deliberate. The preface gives the reason in the framers’ own words:

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. Second London ConfessionTo the Judicious and Impartial Reader

J. M. Cramp put it simply: “In doctrinal points the language of the Assembly’s Confession is for the most part adopted, while on baptism and Church government the views of our denomination are very clearly and fully expressed.”⁶ Leon McBeth, as George notes, observed that Baptists “often used confessions not to proclaim ‘Baptist distinctives’ but instead to show how similar Baptists were to other orthodox Christians.”⁷ That is the spirit of 1677. These were not sectarians inventing a new faith. They were Reformed Protestants, standing on Westminster’s doctrine of God, of Christ, and of salvation by grace alone, and they wanted the world to see it.

Where they did differ, they said so in the open: “In those things wherein we differ from others, we have expressed ourselves with all candour and plainness.” The changes fall chiefly, as Bush and Nettles list them, in “the articles on the church, the ordinances, the duties of the magistrate.”⁸ David Dockery’s summary is a fair one: “an altered form of the Westminster Confession of Faith,” which “put forth a consistent Calvinistic position, with Baptist views of the Lord’s Supper, baptism, and church polity.”⁹

Motivating Convictions

Scripture alone. The Confession’s very first sentence is one the Baptists added; it is not in Westminster.¹⁰ Everything else in the document rests on it:

The Holy Scripture is the only sufficient, certain, and infallible rule of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience. Second London Confession1.1

This was the Reformation’s sola Scriptura pressed one step further. If Scripture is the only rule for faith, it must also be the only rule for the church and its ordinances. The Baptists simply could not find infant baptism there.

A church of professing believers under Christ alone. “The Lord Jesus Christ is the Head of the church” (26.4). Its members are “saints by calling, visibly manifesting and evidencing (in and by their profession and walking) their obedience unto that call of Christ” (26.6). Accordingly, “those who do actually profess repentance towards God, faith in, and obedience to, our Lord Jesus Christ, are the only proper subjects” of baptism (29.2), and “immersion, or dipping of the person in water, is necessary to the due administration of this ordinance” (29.4).

The freedom of conscience. The Baptists kept Westminster’s noble sentence word for word: “God alone is Lord of the conscience” (21.2). But they dropped Westminster’s charge that the civil magistrate must see “that all blasphemies and heresies be suppressed” and has “power to call synods” (WCF 23.3). Their own chapter on the magistrate (24) says nothing of the kind. Men who had been fined and jailed for meeting to pray did not need to be persuaded that Caesar is not lord of the church.

A teachable firmness. The Appendix concerning Baptism shows the temper in which they held these convictions. They refused to let anyone call their practice obstinacy, and they promised to count as their “chiefest friend” anyone who could show them from Scripture where they were wrong:

For we cannot wittingly do any thing against the truth, but all things for the truth. Second London ConfessionAppendix concerning Baptism

Costs and Hardships

The years between the writing of the Confession and its public signing were among the worst Dissenters ever faced in England. Cramp describes them:

The persecution raged furiously in the latter years of the reign of Charles II. It seemed to be the settled policy of the Court to crush the Nonconformists. Informers fattened on them. … The ministers, particularly, were hunted down like wild beasts. J. M. CrampBaptist History

The men behind the Confession knew this firsthand. Benjamin Keach was tried on October 9, 1664, for a children’s primer, The Child’s Instructor. He was sentenced to stand in the pillory at Aylesbury and at Winslow, and to see his book burned before his face.¹¹ McBeth adds that Keach was “oft imprisoned and fined, his books seized and destroyed.”¹² John Bunyan entered Bedford jail in November 1660, “which was destined to be his abode for twelve years.”¹³

The London Baptist schoolmaster Thomas Delaune, a friend of Keach and Kiffin, answered an Anglican challenge with A Plea for the Non-Conformists. For that he was jailed, convicted, and fined beyond his means. His wife and two small children shared his cell in Newgate, and all of them died there. Daniel Defoe wrote his epitaph:

We cannot refrain saying such a champion, of such a cause, deserved better usage. And it was very hard that such a man, such a Christian, such a scholar, and on such an occasion, should starve in a dungeon. Daniel Defoepreface to Delaune’s Plea, quoted in Cramp

Toleration came at last in 1689, and McBeth judges that “no group can claim more credit for the Act of Toleration” than the Baptists. But they won it, he adds, “at the cost of great spiritual fatigue.”¹⁴ Even then, as Timothy George notes, “Baptists, along with other Nonconformists in England, suffered harassment, discrimination, and ridicule.”¹⁵ The Confession they signed in 1689 was not a committee’s paperwork. It was a testimony they had already paid for.

Read the Confession

Creeds and Confessions