Confessing the Faith
If my goal is to entrust the faith, it seems important to understand which faith is meant. Well, the Bible, of course. That’s great! But what does the Bible teach? Catholics, Churches of Christ, Pentecostals, Methodists, Baptists, and many other groups all appeal to the Bible as a basis for what they teach. Yet their teaching yields dramatically different conclusions. A faith entrusted according to how all these groups understand the Bible would be a doctrinal mess.
When folks use the phrase “no creed but the Bible,” what they mean is the Bible as they interpret it. And guess what? That’s exactly what creeds, confessions, and catechisms do. They express what a person or group understands the Bible to mean. Across denominations, teaching is contradictory, and when contradictory things are taught, at least one is wrong. One may be right, all may be wrong, but contradictory doctrines cannot all be correct.
That’s where Confessing the Faith comes in. Here, you will find greater specificity about what is meant by entrusting the faith. I want to pass on my understanding of God’s Word, and that understanding is best expressed in documents that for centuries have served as summaries, expressions, or formulations of what the Scriptures teach. It is my conviction that historic Particular Baptist doctrine, commonly identified today as Reformed Baptist doctrine, faithfully expresses the body of biblical truth that will serve here as “the faith.” Further, I believe that the broader Reformed tradition shares much of that same body of truth.
So, here you will find three sections of doctrine.
Christian Orthodoxy
These creeds confess the central truths of the Christian faith. Denying these essential teachings is to reject Christianity itself.
The Protestant Reformation
This narrows the doctrinal focus to the body of teaching arising from the sixteenth-century Reformation and expressed in the historic Lutheran and Reformed confessional traditions. While some doctrines within the broader Reformed tradition differ from Reformed Baptist doctrine, those differences concern secondary matters that warrant denominational distinctions without destroying the Christian kinship shared between Reformed Baptists and the broader Reformed community.
Particular Baptists
This narrows the focus further still. Particular Baptists emerged from the reformational movement in England and share the central convictions of the broader Reformed tradition while differing in important areas such as baptism, covenant theology, and the nature and government of the church. The Particular Baptist tradition forms the historical foundation for what is commonly called Reformed Baptist doctrine today and is expressed especially in the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith, commonly known simply as the 1689. For purposes of this website, the 1689 serves as the principal confessional expression of “the faith” being confessed, taught, and entrusted to others.