Savoy Declaration

Definition

The Savoy Declaration is the confession of faith and church order adopted in 1658 by about 120 representatives of England’s Congregationalist (“Independent”) churches meeting at the Savoy Palace, London.¹ Its full title is A Declaration of the Faith and Order Owned and Practiced in the Congregational Churches in England, agreed 12 October 1658.¹ Doctrinally it restates the Presbyterian Westminster Confession of Faith (1646) almost unchanged, replacing that confession’s presbyterian polity with a congregational one.² English Particular Baptists later revised the Declaration again, alongside Westminster, into the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession.²

Historical Development

Background

The Westminster Assembly, convened by the Long Parliament in 1643, sat for nearly six years and finished its confession in the final days of 1646.³ A minority of the Assembly’s divines already held Congregationalist rather than Presbyterian views of church government; that disagreement changed little in the Assembly’s own work, but Waldron notes it forecast the revisions Congregationalists and Baptists would later make to the Confession.³

The 1658 Assembly

In 1658, about 120 representatives of England’s Congregational churches met at the Savoy Palace in London and produced A Declaration of the Faith and Order Owned and Practiced in the Congregational Churches in England, agreed among its elders and messengers on 12 October 1658.¹ According to Moore, Parliament had refused to approve the Westminster Confession in its entirety, so the Independents drafted a confession of their own that Parliament would find acceptable; the group finished in only twelve days, likely because the new document leaned so heavily on the Westminster text.⁴ A committee of six, John Owen, Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, William Bridge, Joseph Caryl, and William Greenhill, produced the document, and Owen is thought to have written its lengthy preface.⁴³

The revisions concerned primarily issues of church and state: the Declaration replaces Westminster’s presbyterian polity with a congregational one.³ The committee also made a few doctrinal additions of its own. Chapter 8’s statement on Christ as mediator, for example, adds the phrase “according to a covenant made between them both.” Chen reports that some scholars read this addition, given Owen’s and Goodwin’s own use of the covenant of redemption elsewhere in their writings, as making explicit what had only been implicit in the Westminster Standards.⁵

On the doctrine the two documents share, Hodge writes that the Savoy assembly “declared their approval of the doctrinal part of the Confession and Catechisms of the Westminster Assembly, and conformed their own deliverance… very nearly to it.”⁶ He quotes Daniel Neal’s judgment that the difference between the two documents was “so very small” that Independent congregations eventually set the Savoy Declaration aside in practice and used the Westminster Assembly’s own catechisms instead.⁶

Legacy in the 1689 Baptist Confession

The Declaration’s authority among Congregationalist churches was, in Waldron’s words, “great, though brief.”³ Its lasting influence came instead through its Baptist revision. Waldron calls the 1689 Baptist Confession “this Baptist revision of the Savoy Declaration and Westminster Confession,” probably framed in 1677 and adopted in London in 1689 by representatives of around 100 Calvinistic Baptist churches; it later became, with only minor revisions, the Philadelphia Confession of 1742.² The continuity between all three documents sometimes runs word for word: Westminster’s definition of justifying faith, that believers are justified “not by infusing righteousness into them… but by imputing the obedience and satisfaction of Christ unto them, they receiving and resting on him and his righteousness, by faith,” is, in Waldron’s words, “repeated verbatim in the Savoy Declaration and 1689 Baptist Confession.”⁷

Related Doctrines

• Westminster Confession
• London Baptist Confession of 1689
• Congregationalism
• John Owen
• Thomas Goodwin

References

1. J. V. Fesko, “John Owen on Union with Christ and Justification,” Themelios 37, no. 1 (2012): 7-19. ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. Waldron, Faith, Obedience, and Justification, 122. ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Samuel Eldon Waldron, Faith, Obedience, and Justification: Current Evangelical Departures from Sola Fide (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2005), 121. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

4. 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), 120-121. ↩ ↩²

5. Carol Man Fen Chen, A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants: Unconditionality and Conditionality in Relation to Justification and Sanctification (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 136-137. ↩

6. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 7, “Creeds and Confessions.” ↩ ↩²

7. Waldron, Faith, Obedience, and Justification, 123. ↩