Theopedia

Reformed Baptist

Definition

Reformed Baptist names a theological position within Baptist life, not a separate denomination: a congregation that holds the Calvinistic soteriology traditionally called Reformed together with Baptist convictions on believer’s baptism and congregational church government.1 The term is sometimes used narrowly, for a church that holds the Second London Baptist Confession of 1689 itself, and sometimes more broadly, for any Baptist congregation committed to the doctrines of grace outside dispensationalism.1 Reformed Baptists trace this theological identity to the Particular Baptists of seventeenth-century England.2

Historical Origin

General and Particular Baptists

Seventeenth-century English Baptists divided into two theological camps, distinguished chiefly by their doctrine of the atonement. The General Baptists were “named for their broadly Arminian theology of general or unlimited atonement,” while the Particular Baptists were “named for their Calvinistic theology of particular or limited atonement.”2 English Calvinistic Baptists did not settle on the name “Baptist” for themselves in their own church records until 1691; before that they called themselves “baptized churches” or “baptized congregations,” partly to distance themselves from the continental Anabaptists.2 It is the Particular Baptists, and their theological descendants, whom the term “Reformed Baptist” describes.

The 1677/1689 confession and Benjamin Keach

Particular Baptist congregations in London issued a confession of faith in 1644.3 A later confession, drafted in 1677, was formally adopted by a General Assembly of Particular Baptist churches meeting in London in 1689 as the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith.4 Benjamin Keach (1640-1704) was among the ministers who called that assembly together.4 Keach, whom one biographer calls “the most prolific theologian” among the Particular Baptists of his generation, published more than fifty book-length works.5 He substantially agreed with the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), the confessional standard other English Puritans held, and the Second London Confession modified Westminster’s own wording chiefly at the points where believer’s baptism and congregational polity required a different statement, while restating the rest of Westminster’s doctrine largely unchanged.6

Gill, Fuller, and Carey

John Gill (1697-1771) followed in the next generation, producing the first verse-by-verse commentary on the whole Bible and the first complete systematic theology written by a Baptist.7 His own doctrinal and ecclesiological writing drew heavily and positively on patristic and Reformed paedobaptist sources rather than distinctly Baptist ones, presenting Baptist convictions such as believer’s baptism and congregational government as a faithful expression of the wider Christian and Reformed tradition rather than a sectarian departure from it.8 Some later historians have classed Gill’s theology as Hyper-Calvinist; other scholars dispute that classification.9

Andrew Fuller (1754-1815) wrote against a stricter, Hyper-Calvinist trend among some Particular Baptists in his The Gospel of Christ Worthy of All Acceptation, arguing that the gospel obligates everyone who hears it to believe.10 Fuller’s position shaped the evangelical Calvinism of William Carey (1761-1834), the Baptist missionary to India whose work belongs to the wider Calvinistic missionary movement of the period.11

Confessional Basis

The Second London Baptist Confession states the covenant of grace in terms shared with the wider Reformed confessional family:

“This covenant is revealed in the gospel; 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; and it is founded in that eternal covenant transaction that was between the Father and the Son about the redemption of the elect.”12

Its relationship to the Westminster Confession is close enough that historians of Baptist covenant theology compare the two documents chapter by chapter, tracing where the Second London Confession’s wording departs from Westminster’s and where it repeats it unchanged.6

No Reformed Baptist congregation holds binding authority over another. The confession limits any association of churches to an advisory role: messengers meeting on behalf of several churches “are not intrusted with any church-power properly so called; or with any jurisdiction over the churches themselves.”13 Reformed Baptist congregations today continue to organize into such voluntary associations, among them the Association of Reformed Baptist Churches of America.14

Distinctives

Regulative principle of worship

Reformed Baptist worship follows the regulative principle:

“The acceptable way of worshipping the true God, is instituted by himself, and so limited by his own revealed will, that he may not be worshipped according to the imagination and devices of men, nor the suggestions of Satan, under any visible representations, or any other way not prescribed in the Holy Scriptures.”15

In practice this yields a comparatively plain liturgy centered on the reading and preaching of Scripture, prayer, congregational singing, and the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper.16

Covenant theology and believer’s baptism

Reformed Baptists hold covenant theology: a single covenant of grace, administered differently across redemptive history but one in substance.17 They differ from paedobaptist Reformed churches over what that covenant’s new-covenant administration requires. Where covenant theology has more often supported infant baptism, a Reformed Baptist argument traces the fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant in Christ and concludes that the new covenant’s own members are those already regenerated, forgiven, and taught by God (Jer. 31:31-34), so that baptism belongs only to those who can credibly profess that reality.18

Congregational polity and plurality of elders

Each Reformed Baptist congregation governs itself. The confession vests “all that power and authority” needed for worship and discipline in “each of these churches thus gathered,” rather than in any wider ecclesiastical body.19 A congregation is led by a plurality of elders, called “bishops or elders,” together with deacons, both chosen by “the common suffrage of the church itself.”20 Later Baptist writers have argued that this plural pattern, rather than government by a single pastor, is the New Testament’s own norm for local-church leadership.21

Complementarian eldership

Reformed Baptist churches generally reserve the office of elder, and usually deacon, for men. This follows Paul’s qualification for an elder as “the husband of one wife,” able to “manage his own household well” (1 Tim. 3:2, 4), and his instruction that a woman is “not to teach or to exercise authority over a man” in the gathered church (1 Tim. 2:12).

Cessationism

Most Reformed Baptist churches hold a moderate cessationism: the extraordinary, revelation-bearing gifts of the apostolic age, such as prophecy and tongues, are not an ordinary expectation in the church today. The confession grounds Scripture’s own sufficiency in similar terms, stating that the “former ways of God’s revealing his will unto his people” have “now ceased” since revelation has been committed to writing.22 Reformed theology has long distinguished such “extraordinary or miraculous” gifts, given to found the church, from the “ordinary” gifts that continue in every age.23

The Lord’s Day

Reformed Baptists observe Sunday, not Saturday, as the Christian Sabbath. The confession teaches that the creation Sabbath, kept on “the last day of the week” before Christ’s resurrection, was “changed into the first day of the week, which is called the Lord’s day” at the resurrection, and “is to be continued to the end of the world as the Christian Sabbath.”24

Related Movements

Not every Calvinistic Baptist congregation identifies as Reformed Baptist. Some hold New Covenant Theology instead of the covenant theology described above, a position some usages of “Reformed Baptist” exclude specifically because it departs from the classical Reformed account of the covenants.1

Related Doctrines

External Links

References

  1. Daniel David Scheiderer, “Introduction,” in “Eternal Covenant: The Trinitarian Shape of an Historic Baptist Doctrine” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2022), 1-19, n. 24. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Nathan Sherman, “A Change in Kind, Not Degree: Labels, Identity, and an Evaluation of ‘Baptistic Congregationalists,’” Themelios 49, no. 1 (2024): 95-107, at 97. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. Sherman, “A Change in Kind, Not Degree,” 99. ↩

  4. Daniel David Scheiderer, “Benjamin Keach: Baptist Expositor of Puritan Doctrine,” in “Eternal Covenant,” 20-51, at 20-21. ↩ ↩2

  5. Jonathan W. Arnold, The Reformed Theology of Benjamin Keach (1640-1704) (Oxford: Regent’s Park College, 2013), 1, quoted in Scheiderer, “Benjamin Keach,” 20. ↩

  6. Greg Nichols, Covenant Theology: A Reformed and Baptistic Perspective on God’s Covenants (Birmingham, AL: Solid Ground Christian Books, 2011), discussed in Carol Man Fen Chen, “Post-Reformation Development of Covenant Theology,” in “A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 109-207. ↩ ↩2

  7. Christopher Green, “Baptist Catholicity in the Ecclesiology of John Gill (1697-1771),” Themelios 49, no. 3 (2024): 643-55, at 643. ↩

  8. Green, “Baptist Catholicity,” 646. ↩

  9. Green, “Baptist Catholicity,” 644n5, citing Hong-Gyu Park, “Grace and Nature in the Theology of John Gill (1697-1771)” (PhD diss., University of Aberdeen, 2001), 24-25. ↩

  10. Matthew Michael Barrett, “Monergism in the Calvinist Tradition,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 21-87, at 129. ↩

  11. Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1932), 307. ↩

  12. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 7, “Of God’s Covenant,” para. 3. ↩

  13. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 26, “Of the Church,” para. 15. ↩

  14. Association of Reformed Baptist Churches of America, www.arbca.com. ↩

  15. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 22, “Of Religious Worship and the Sabbath Day,” para. 1. ↩

  16. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 22, para. 5. ↩

  17. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 7, para. 2. ↩

  18. Martin Salter, “The Abrahamic Covenant in Reformed Baptist Perspective,” Themelios 40, no. 1 (2015): 35-49, at 35. ↩

  19. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 26, para. 7. ↩

  20. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 26, para. 8. ↩

  21. Alexander Strauch, Biblical Eldership: Restoring the Eldership to Its Rightful Place in the Local Church, 4th ed. (Littleton, CO: Lewis and Roth Publishers, 2017), chap. 20. ↩

  22. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 1. ↩

  23. Charles Hodge, “Chapter XIV. Vocation,” in Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 664. ↩

  24. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 22, para. 7. ↩