The period of Church history known as the Protestant Reformation spawned many Confessions by various groups in Europe yearning to express clearly what they believed Scripture taught as well as define what made them distinct and different from other groups existing at the time. What these documents said, and what their emphasis was had a lot to do with what particular doctrinal struggles were occurring at that particular time and that particular place, giving rise to a rich tapestry of religious authorship and thought that the world has not experienced since. Of the churches born of the Reformation were the Church of England, often referred to as Anglican, but Reformed Catholic in nature, and the Particular Baptists which were a sort of credo-baptistic, congregational Puritans. The Church of England and the Particular Baptists penned the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion and the London Baptist Confession of 1689, respectively. It is these two documents we shall look at in more detail.
Historical Background
Thirty-Nine Articles
Although the Thirty-Nine Articles (the “Articles”) were drawn up in Convocation under Archbishop Matthew Parker in 1563 and were finalized in 1571, the history of the Articles stretches back to the original Ten Articles of 1536, which first began to carve out a distinct identity for the Church of England during the Reformation.1 This period of almost 40 years was turbulent for the Church of England as it navigated the waters of the Protestant Reformation in a singular fashion, never quite prone to the overreaction to “all things Rome” that plagued so many of the Reformation churches on the Continent. A singular fashion that indeed would only be disrupted for a short time a hundred or so years later in the 1650s when the Puritans were in control of England. The pendulum in England swung between Protestant and Roman yet always remained catholic in the greater sense. The Reformation in England in many ways achieved what the Continental Reformation itself had set out to do, that is to reform Catholicism rather than create a new thing, a laudable goal that several of the magisterial reformers on the Continent had worked toward only to have their heirs take things in a different direction during subsequent generations.
Second London Baptist Confession of 1689
Sometimes referred to as the “1689” among Reformed Baptists, the Second London Baptist Confession of 1689 (the “1689”) actually first appeared in 1677 as “‘A Confession of Faith put forth by the Elders and Brethren of many congregations of Christians baptized upon profession of their faith.’ It was reprinted in 1688, 1689, and approved and recommended by the ministers and messengers of above a hundred congregations met in London, July 3–11, 1689.”2
The Baptists, in this case the Particular Baptists in England, were a hybrid mix of various systems. In one sense, they owed some of their beliefs to the Anabaptists of the Continent, but they also held many beliefs in common with the English Presbyterians whose Westminster Confession they modified in order to create their own confession clarifying the similarities and distinctions to the Presbyterians and also distancing themselves from some of the more radical actions and beliefs of the Continental Anabaptists. The hybrid nature of their belief matrix can be seen as having two lines feeding their identity, the Puritan line and the Anabaptist line.
Despite several differences in doctrine and some occasionally heated debates over those differences in the several hundred years since the inception of the Articles and the 1689, it behooves us to remember that adherents to both documents hold to the fundamental truths of the faith and thus are both legitimate denominations within the Body of Christ and brothers in Christ in regards to ourselves.
