Theopedia

Benjamin Keach

Overview

Benjamin Keach (1640-1704) was an English Particular Baptist pastor and one of the most prolific writers of the first generation of Baptists in England, responsible for more than fifty mostly book-length publications.1 He led the congregation at Horsleydown, Southwark, for thirty-six years, took part in the 1689 General Assembly that adopted the Second London Baptist Confession, co-produced the catechism known as the Baptist Catechism, and argued at length that the covenant of grace and the eternal compact between the Father and the Son are one and the same covenant, not two.2

Life and Ministry

Keach was born February 29, 1640, in Stoke Hammond, Buckinghamshire, the sixth of seven children of John and Joyce Keach.3 Though his parents had him baptized as an infant in the Church of England, he came to saving faith, was baptized by immersion in 1655, and joined the General Baptists.3 He began preaching in 1658, and by 1664 was facing persecution for teaching “that infants ought not be baptized and that laymen may preach the gospel.”3 He was pilloried for the offense and was arrested again in 1666.3

In 1668 Keach and his family moved to Tooley Street in Southwark, London, where he took over as pastor of a General Baptist congregation.4 By 1672, when he married Susannah Partridge (his first wife, Jane, had died in 1670), Keach had come to Particular Baptist convictions, and that same year the congregation built its own meeting house at Horsleydown.4 He remained its pastor there for the rest of his life, thirty-six years in total. During this period he wrote several of his best-known works, including War with the Devil (1673), a poem on conversion; The Glorious Lover (1679), an epic poem on redemption; Tropologia (1681), a study of biblical typology and metaphor that is perhaps his most cited work; and Travels of True Godliness (1683), an allegory in the vein of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.4

Keach was among the ministers who called the 1689 General Assembly of Particular Baptist churches in London, which adopted the confession drawn up in 1677 by William Collins and Nehemiah Coxe as the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith, subscribed to by representatives of more than a hundred congregations.4 The last fifteen years of his life brought three major controversies: renewed debate over infant baptism in 1689; a dispute, from 1691, over singing hymns of human composition in worship, in which Keach was the most prominent advocate, a controversy from which the London Assembly never fully recovered;5 and a running dispute with followers of Richard Baxter over the doctrine of justification. Benjamin Keach died on July 18, 1704; his son-in-law, Benjamin Stinton, succeeded him as pastor at Horsleydown.5 Under Keach the Horsleydown meeting house building had grown large enough to hold, on one contemporary account, almost a thousand people.6

Theological Contribution

Keach’s most sustained theological contribution was his argument that the eternal compact between the Father and the Son, later called the pactum salutis or covenant of redemption, and the temporal covenant of grace are not two distinct covenants but one.2 He set out this case at length in two works: The Everlasting Covenant (1693), a funeral sermon for a fellow pastor expanded for publication, and The Display of Glorious Grace (1698), a series of fourteen sermons written chiefly to refute what he saw as errors in the doctrine of justification.7

Keach had earlier accepted the more common distinction between the two covenants, but reconsidered after seeing it used, in his judgment, to support a conditional covenant of grace, one in which “faith and repentance” become conditions that themselves merit salvation.8 He identified this danger chiefly with Richard Baxter and his followers, whose two-covenant scheme he called “calculated to unfold Arminianism, [rather] then to establish sound divinity.”9 On Keach’s reading, if the covenant of redemption is treated as a covenant Christ merely fulfilled to make a separate covenant of grace possible, then that second covenant can be recast as a law of works in milder form.9 Against this, Keach maintained that Christ fulfills every condition of the covenant of grace as the elect’s surety, and that whatever faith and repentance believers exercise are themselves purchased by that same covenant and worked in them by the Spirit, not conditions they independently meet.10

Keach did not deny that the covenant of grace has two aspects, an eternal transaction with Christ as mediator and a temporal application to believers; he insisted only that these are “not two distinct and compleat covenants, but two subjects…of the same covenant.”11 Christ, as head, and the elect, as his body, must always be considered together, so a covenant made with the head is necessarily a covenant made with the body it represents.12 Keach drew out five ways he believed the everlasting covenant functions: it displays the attributes of God, manifests the glory of each person of the Trinity, confounds the works of Satan, upholds God’s righteous law, and is the channel through which the elect receive every spiritual blessing.7

Keach applied the same doctrine to two further points. In The Marrow of True Justification (1692), directed against the same Baxterian position, he argued that the Baxterian scheme reduced the covenant of grace to “a new and milder Law of Grace, or Terms of Life,” undermining the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to the believer.13 And in A Golden Mine Opened (1694), he argued from the everlasting covenant to the saints’ final perseverance: because the covenant is made with Christ as surety on the elect’s behalf, ratified by his blood, and carried out by the Spirit’s work in them, none of the elect can finally fall away.14

Keach was also a co-author, with William Collins, of the catechism published in 1693 that came to be known as the Baptist Catechism.15 The catechism drew on both the Savoy Declaration and the Westminster Shorter Catechism, at points quoting the Shorter Catechism verbatim, to state Particular Baptist doctrine in relation to the wider Reformed and Congregationalist tradition.16

Historical Significance

John Gill, pastor of the same Horsleydown congregation a generation later, continued to affirm Keach’s identification of the covenant of redemption with the covenant of grace, and Baptist affirmation of the doctrine traces back through Keach as its first substantial Particular Baptist expositor.17 The hymn-singing practice Keach championed split the London General Assembly for years and drew published opposition from the Baptist layman Isaac Marlow; the Assembly itself met only once more after the dispute began.5 The Horsleydown congregation grew large enough under his ministry to hold, by one contemporary account, close to a thousand hearers.6 The catechism he produced with Collins is still referred to as “The Baptist Catechism.”15

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Daniel David Scheiderer, “Benjamin Keach: Baptist Expositor of Puritan Doctrine,” in “Eternal Covenant: The Trinitarian Shape of an Historic Baptist Doctrine” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2022), 20, quoting Jonathan W. Arnold, The Reformed Theology of Benjamin Keach (1640-1704), Centre for Baptist History and Heritage Studies 11 (Oxford: Regent’s Park College, 2013), 1. ↩

  2. Scheiderer, “Benjamin Keach,” 27. ↩ ↩2

  3. Scheiderer, “Benjamin Keach,” 24. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  4. Scheiderer, “Benjamin Keach,” 25. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  5. Scheiderer, “Benjamin Keach,” 26. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  6. Steven Tshombe Godet, “Gill’s Context, Life, and Works,” in “The Trinitarian Theology of John Gill (1697-1771): Context, Sources, and Controversy” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2015), 76, citing Joseph Ivimey, History of the English Baptists, 3:410. ↩ ↩2

  7. Scheiderer, “Benjamin Keach,” 33. ↩ ↩2

  8. Scheiderer, “Benjamin Keach,” 28-29. ↩

  9. Scheiderer, “Benjamin Keach,” 30. ↩ ↩2

  10. Scheiderer, “Benjamin Keach,” 35-36. ↩

  11. Scheiderer, “Benjamin Keach,” 32. ↩

  12. Scheiderer, “Benjamin Keach,” 31-32. ↩

  13. Scheiderer, “Benjamin Keach,” 38-39. ↩

  14. Scheiderer, “Benjamin Keach,” 39-40. ↩

  15. Jared Heath Moore, A Biblical and Historical Appraisal of Concupiscence with Special Attention to Same-Sex Attraction (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 121. ↩ ↩2

  16. Moore, A Biblical and Historical Appraisal of Concupiscence, 121-22. ↩

  17. Scheiderer, “Benjamin Keach,” 50-51. ↩