First London Baptist Confession

“We cannot but speak the things that we have seen and heard.”

— Acts 4:20

The First London Baptist Confession is the earliest confession of faith produced by the Calvinistic, or Particular, Baptists, published in London in 1644 and subscribed by two representatives from each of seven congregations, among them William Kiffin and John Spilsbury.¹ Its fifty-two articles confess a Reformed doctrine of God’s eternal decree, particular redemption, and believer’s baptism by immersion, and the title page itself rejects the label “Anabaptist” that opponents had attached to its authors.¹

Historical Development

By the early 1640s several Reformed congregations in London had adopted believer’s baptism, and other Protestants accused them of reviving the continental Anabaptist movement the Reformation had already condemned.² In 1644, William Kiffin left the Church of England to help establish one such Particular Baptist congregation; the seven congregations’ first confession, drafted in 1643, was published the following year.³ Its preface states that it was issued “for the taking off those aspersions” that its authors held free will, denied original sin, disclaimed civil magistracy, and baptized “unseemly,” charges the churches called “notoriously untrue.”¹

Publication did not end the dispute. In 1646 Benjamin Cox published an appendix answering “questions raised” against the confession, occasioned chiefly by continuing disagreement over its account of baptism.³

Relation to the Second London Confession

The Particular Baptists’ later and better-known confession, the Second London Baptist Confession of 1677, reissued with formal subscription in 1689, took a different course than its 1644 predecessor: rather than drafting new articles, its authors adapted the Westminster Confession of 1646 chapter by chapter, departing from it chiefly on baptism and the church.⁴ Benjamin Keach, who helped call the 1689 general assembly that adopted it, treated the Westminster Confession and its Larger Catechism as carrying real doctrinal weight even where the Baptists modified them.⁴ The Second Confession’s own language on effectual calling and regeneration was, as a result, “almost identical” to Westminster’s, a continuity the First Confession, composed independently three decades earlier, does not share.⁵

Confessional Content

The confession opens with the Trinity and God’s eternal, unconditional decree, confessing that God “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, … leaving the rest in their sinne to their just condemnation” (Article 3).¹ It teaches that Christ’s death “did bring forth salvation and reconciliation onely for the elect, which were those which God the Father gave him” (Article 21), and that the faith by which sinners lay hold of Christ is itself “the gift of God wrought in the hearts of the elect by the Spirit of God” (Article 22), not a work of the unaided will (Article 24).¹

Roughly a third of the confession is given to the church: a gathered congregation of visible saints (Article 33), governed by pastors, teachers, elders, and deacons whom the congregation itself chooses (Article 36), and empowered to receive and excommunicate its own members (Article 42).¹ Baptism is reserved for professing believers and administered by “dipping or plunging the whole body under water” (Articles 39-40).¹ The closing articles confess civil magistracy as an ordinance of God to be obeyed “in all lawfull things,” while reserving to the churches a liberty of conscience the magistrate’s own ecclesiastical laws could not override (Articles 48-51).¹

Objections and Responses

That the churches held free will, contrary to the sovereignty of grace in conversion. The preface disclaims this charge as “notoriously untrue,” and the confession’s own articles teach the opposite: faith is “the gift of God wrought in the hearts of the elect by the Spirit of God,” and the sinner “doth beleeve, and is converted by no lesse power … then that which raised Christ from the dead” (Articles 22, 24).¹

That believers might fall away from grace and forfeit their salvation. Article 23 answers directly: those in whom this “precious faith” has been “wrought … by the Spirit, can never finally nor totally fall away,” but “shall be kept by the power of God to salvation.”¹

That the churches denied original sin. Article 4 confesses that “all since the Fall are conceived in sinne, and brought forth in iniquitie, and so by nature children of wrath, and servants of sinne.”¹

That the churches disclaimed civil magistracy and would not assist it. Articles 48 through 51 confess civil government as “an ordinance of God,” pledge obedience “in all lawfull things,” and bind believers to defend the civil laws of King and Parliament “with our persons, liberties, and estates,” reserving only the case where an ecclesiastical law would bind the conscience against God’s own commands.¹

That the manner of baptism practiced was indecent. Articles 39 through 41 answer by stating the ordinance’s own rationale: baptism signifies “the washing of the whole soule in the bloud of Christ” and the believer’s interest in Christ’s “death, buriall, and resurrection,” administered by immersion “with convenient garments both upon the administrator and the subject, with all modestie.”¹

Related Doctrines

References

The Confession of Faith of Those Churches Which Are Commonly (Though Falsly) Called Anabaptists (London, 1644). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³
Graham Shearer, “Covenant, Creation and Children: A Response to David Gibson’s Critique of Credobaptism,” Themelios 42, no. 3 (2017): 465-76, at 472. ↩
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), chap. 3, “On Concupiscence, the Roman Catholics Rejected Augustine and the Reformed Tradition Followed Augustine,” 116. ↩ ↩²
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), 20-51, at 21. ↩ ↩²
Matthew Michael Barrett, “Exploring the Relationship Between Effectual Calling and Regeneration in the Reformed Ordo Salutis,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 432-72. ↩