ACTS BIBLE
The Remnant Church, Since Acts — class 8 of 13 · 1689 London Baptist Confession
England in 1643 was at war with itself. King Charles I was fighting Parliament.1 Cities were under siege. And underneath the political war, there was a spiritual war: what does a church look like when it actually follows the Bible instead of following kings, bishops, and inherited habits?
A hundred years earlier, England had split from Rome, but the English church that replaced Rome kept most of Rome's structure.2 Bishops still ran things. The king was still "Supreme Governor" of the church. You were born into the church the way you were born into the kingdom. Nobody asked if you actually believed.
A group of serious Bible readers decided that wasn't good enough. They wanted a church that was pure, purified of human add-ons, shaped only by what Scripture actually commanded. Their enemies mocked them as "Puritans," and the name stuck.3 Within that Puritan movement, a smaller group went further still: they said the New Testament shows baptism as something done to people who have personally trusted Christ, not to infants born into a Christian nation. These were the Particular Baptists, "Particular" because they taught that Christ's death on the cross actually accomplished salvation for particular people God had chosen, not a generic offer that depended on human willingness to activate it. The first Particular Baptist church was gathered in London by John Spilsbury in 1638.4
Between 1643 and 1700, under persecution, imprisonment, and war, these believers hammered out some of the clearest statements of the gospel ever written in English, and they sent missionaries into places the English church had ignored.5
The Puritan and Particular Baptist story makes no sense unless you understand the four convictions they were willing to lose their jobs, homes, and freedom over.6
The Bible outranks everything else. When a king, a bishop, a council, or a tradition says one thing and Scripture says another, Scripture wins. Not "Scripture plus tradition." Not "Scripture as interpreted by the bishop." Scripture as the final court of appeal. (The Latin slogan was sola Scriptura, Scripture alone.) The 1689 Confession opens by declaring that the Holy Scriptures are "the only sufficient, certain, and infallible (incapable of being wrong) rule of all saving Knowledge, Faith, and Obedience."7
Under that authority, Christ's death on the cross paid the whole bill, tetelestai (Greek: 'it is finished,' Jesus' cry from the cross (John 19:30); class 2's word), paid in full (see Class 06). The Puritans insisted you can't add your goodness, rituals, church membership, or suffering to what Christ already completed.6
And they were careful about which half of Christ's work they meant, because they meant both. The 1689 says justification (God declaring a sinner righteous because of Christ's finished work) comes "by imputing Christ's active obedience unto the whole law, and passive obedience in his death, for their whole and sole righteousness."8 Active and passive: the life He lived under the law we broke, and the death He died for breaking it. A gospel that keeps only the second half leaves a sinner forgiven and still owing a righteousness he does not have.
Behind that payment stands God's own initiative, because His choice to save comes from His will, not from anything we bring. Paul writes in Ephesians 1:4 that God "chose us in him before the foundation of the world." The verb there is eklegō, literally "to pick out from among." It's the word a Greek shopper would use at a market stall: this one, not those. It's deliberate, personal, specific. Salvation starts in God's decision, not in ours.
So salvation is God's work from beginning to end. We don't start it, finish it, or keep it going. We receive it. Jesus said in John 6:44, "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him." The Greek verb helkyō means to drag or pull, the same word used in John 21 for hauling in a net full of fish. It's not a polite invitation; it's God actively bringing dead people to life.
Hold these four in your head. Everything that follows is the story of people who staked their lives on them.
In July 1643, at Parliament's call, over 120 English clergymen and 30 laymen gathered at Westminster Abbey to advise Parliament on reforming the church. The Assembly met daily for more than five years.9
What they produced (the Westminster Confession of Faith of 1646, the Larger Catechism (a question-and-answer summary of the faith used for teaching), and the Shorter Catechism (a question-and-answer summary of the faith used for teaching)) became the most influential Puritan documents in history. The famous opening of the Shorter Catechism (a question-and-answer summary of the faith used for teaching) asks: "What is the chief end of man?" Answer: "Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever."10 That sentence alone reshaped how English-speaking Christians thought about their own existence. Underneath it sits one of the Bible's oldest threads: "Be holy, for I am holy" (1 Peter 1:16, quoting Leviticus). The Puritan project at its best was that verse taken seriously, the holiness gap between God and man is real, is lethal, and is closed only by Christ. That is why they wrote so carefully about how a sinner can stand before a holy God.
The Westminster divines (a "divine" was just an older English word for a trained theologian) insisted on all four convictions above. They built the whole system on Scripture as final authority. The Westminster Confession declares that "The whole Counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own Glory, Man's Salvation, Faith and Life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture."11 They taught Christ's finished work. They taught God's sovereign choice. They taught salvation as God's work.
But on one question they stopped short of where the Particular Baptists would go: they kept infant baptism. They believed children of Christian parents should be baptized as a sign of being included in God's covenant people, the way Hebrew boys were circumcised on the eighth day.
A group of Puritans studied the same Bible their Westminster brothers loved and came out at a different answer, and the disagreement deserves to be stated fairly, because their brothers weren't careless men. The paedobaptist (one who baptizes infants (paedo is Greek for child)) case is real: God's covenant with Abraham included his children and carried a sign; Peter preaches "the promise is for you and for your children" (Acts 2:39); whole households are baptized in Acts 16. These Puritans answered: read those texts to the end. The promise in Acts 2:39 runs "for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself," which is a promise about God's calling, not a bloodline guarantee; and every named baptism in the New Testament follows a personal profession of faith. Acts 2:41, "those who received his word were baptized." Received first, then baptized. The new covenant sign, they concluded, belongs to the new-born, not the born. These men became the Particular Baptists.12
The name is doing work. Particular is the ordinary English word, the one in "in particular": they held that when Christ died He had particular people in view and actually secured them, rather than making a payment available and waiting to see who took it. The General Baptists of the same century held that He died for everyone alike. Both immersed believers. They divided over who the cross was for.
In 1644, seven Particular Baptist congregations in London published the First London Baptist Confession.12 They were a tiny, harassed minority, already suspected of being dangerous radicals. They wanted to say clearly: we hold the same core gospel as the Puritan mainstream: Bible as final authority, Christ's finished work, God's sovereign choice, salvation as God's work from start to finish. We just think the New Testament reserves baptism for people who have personally trusted Christ.
The Greek baptizo means "to immerse", everyday Greek for dunking cloth in dye or sinking a ship. The word itself, the practice in Acts, and Romans 6 (buried with Christ, raised with Him) all pointed, they argued, to the immersion of a believer, not the sprinkling of an infant. This wasn't a small disagreement: it put them outside the settled church order, and the cost of dissent was real.13
The verse raised against them then is the one raised now. Christ says in Mark 16:16, "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned." Read quickly, it sounds like baptism is part of what saves, and it is not the only text that presses that way. Acts 2:38 says "be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins," and 1 Peter 3:21 says "baptism doth also now save us."
Take the second half of Christ's sentence. He says "he that believeth not shall be damned." He does not say "and is not baptized." If baptism were required to be saved, that is exactly where it had to appear, and it is not there. Condemnation hangs on unbelief by itself.
The rest of Scripture reads the same way. The thief on the cross was promised paradise that afternoon with no baptism possible (Luke 23:43). In Acts 10 the Spirit fell on Cornelius and his household before any water, and Peter's argument was that no one could refuse water to people who had already received the Spirit. Peter also defines his own terms in the verse people quote at us: baptism saves "not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God" (1 Peter 3:21).
Then notice the order inside Christ's own sentence. Believe, then be baptized. That is the Particular Baptist argument rather than an objection to it, and an infant cannot occupy the first place in it.13
None of which makes baptism optional. Christ commanded it (Matthew 28:19) and the New Testament knows no unbaptized Christian. It is commanded of the saved, not required for salvation. Baptism is the wedding ring and not the wedding: it does not make you married, and refusing to wear it says something.
The most famous Particular Baptist of the era was John Bunyan, a traveling tinker (a man who repaired pots and pans) from Bedford, England.14 Bunyan had almost no formal schooling. He preached without a license, which was illegal, and in 1660 he was arrested and thrown in Bedford jail. He spent twelve years in prison because he refused to stop preaching.
In that prison context, he wrote The Pilgrim's Progress (Part I published in 1678, Part II in 1684), the story of a man named Christian fleeing the City of Destruction and journeying to the Celestial City.15 It became, after the Bible, one of the best-selling books in the English language for two hundred years. It was translated into many languages and carried by missionaries to every continent. An uneducated tinker, preaching illegally, writing in a cell, ended up discipling more people across more cultures than most universities.
By 1677 the Particular Baptists, scattered and hunted under Charles II, printed a fuller confession anonymously, since owning it publicly was still dangerous. Republished with the churches' names in 1689, after the Act of Toleration made non-Anglican Protestantism legal, it's usually called the Second London Baptist Confession, or simply the 1689.16
The Particular Baptists deliberately copied the structure and most of the wording of the Westminster Confession.17 They wanted everyone to see that on the core gospel, they stood with the wider Puritan movement. They only changed what they believed Scripture required them to change, mainly the chapters on the church, baptism, and the Lord's Supper.
Chapter 1 of the 1689 opens with the first conviction: Scripture is the only sufficient, certain, and trustworthy rule for saving knowledge, faith, and obedience.7 Creation partly reveals God's existence and character, the confession says, but not enough for salvation, so God revealed Himself in Scripture and committed that revelation to writing, which makes the Scriptures absolutely necessary, because the older ways God revealed His will have now ceased.
That's the foundation. Everything else in the confession rests on it. When the confession later talks about Christ's death, God's choice, the church, and baptism, every claim is walked back to chapter and verse.
The 1689 also states plainly what Christ's death accomplished: Christ, by His perfect obedience and the sacrifice of Himself, fully satisfied the justice of God on behalf of all those the Father gave Him.18 Not made satisfaction possible, fully satisfied. The debt is paid.
And on God's choice to save: those God predestined to life, He effectually (actually bringing about the result, not merely offering it) calls in His appointed time, by His Word and Spirit, out of their natural state of sin and death into grace and salvation through Jesus Christ.19 The initiative is entirely God's. The response is real, the person genuinely believes and repents, but the response is itself a gift God gives, not a contribution we make.
This confession became the doctrinal backbone of Baptist churches across the English-speaking world. When English Baptists later formed the Baptist Missionary Society in 1792 and sent William Carey to India the following year (the birth of the modern Protestant missionary movement), the 1689 was in his theological bloodstream.20 The mission to the nations came out of these convictions, not despite them.
If the church must not be fused to the state, how does the morality of Scripture reach courts and laws at all? Chapter 24 answers in three parts.21
The magistrate answers to God directly. Romans 13 calls the ruler "the minister of God" who "beareth not the sword in vain" (Romans 13:4), so his authority comes from God, not from the church, and his assignment is civil: punish evil done to neighbors, protect the good. Psalm 2 addresses kings as kings, "Be wise now therefore, O ye kings... Kiss the Son" (Psalm 2:10, 12). The moral law binds courts because it binds the men in them.22
Christians may serve inside that government. A Christian may lawfully hold the magistrate's office and wage war in a just and necessary cause.21 The Anabaptists (radical reformers who baptized believers again as adults (ana means again)) closed that door; the confession holds it open.
The church itself wields the word, not the sword. Its power is the keys (Matthew 16:19; 18:15-18): teaching, rebuke, and discipline up to putting a person out of membership. John the Baptist told Herod, "It is not lawful for thee to have her" (Mark 6:18), and it cost John his head, not Herod's. The church can shut a man out of the Lord's Table; it cannot touch his life or his property.22
Zurich crossed that line. The council that drowned Felix Manz punished no crime against a neighbor; it enforced a sacrament (a sacred rite of the church, such as baptism or communion) with the sword, and compelled faith is not faith.23
Christ's assignment has not changed since Matthew 28:18-20: go, make disciples of all nations, baptize them, teach them to obey everything He commanded. Read this century as English arguments about church government and you will miss what those arguments produced.5
The men arguing in London were not the first to act. A generation earlier, congregations that had given up on reforming the Church of England from the inside sailed for Holland and then for America, and in 1620 one of them planted a colony at Plymouth. Those were the Separatists, and the bonus section on them carries that story.5 By the time the Westminster divines sat down, churches on the other side of the ocean were already living with the answer the Assembly was debating, with no bishop, king or council to appeal to.
What that produced is on the record. John Eliot, a Puritan pastor in Massachusetts, learned the Massachusett language and printed the New Testament in 1661 and the whole Bible in 1663 in the Natick dialect, the first complete Bible printed in the Western Hemisphere.24 Roger Williams, banished from Massachusetts for saying the magistrate has no authority over a man's conscience, founded Providence, and the first Baptist church in the colonies was gathered there in 1638.25 In England the same convictions went into print, because men barred from pulpits could still write: John Owen defended the Nonconformists (English Protestants who would not conform to the state Church of England), ministers who would not submit to the state church, in books that outlived the ban.26
A movement anchored on the four convictions carried the gospel to the next people group. Both, not one or the other. And the same colonies that printed that Bible also jailed and hanged people over conscience.
No era of church history is clean. The Puritans sometimes confused the kingdom of God with English political order. Some of them persecuted Quakers in Massachusetts, banishing and imprisoning them from 1656, and executing four between 1659 and 1661.27 The Salem witch trials happened from June 1692 to May 1693 at the tail end of this era and were a moral disaster, resulting in the execution of twenty people and the imprisonment of many more.28
If Scripture is the final authority, then Scripture judges the Puritans too. They would be the first to say so. Their own confessions warn that councils and traditions, even their own, can err.
Something worth pausing on. The Puritans were often preaching into a world where Christian language could be carried as social inheritance rather than living faith.
Remember the diagnosis from Class 2: do not bear God's name to emptiness. The Puritan and Particular Baptist burden was aimed at hollow name-bearing: people could possess Christian words without bowing to Christ. Our mission field today is close in diagnosis; the answer remains preaching the gospel so clearly that false name-bearing is exposed and real faith awakened.29
The Puritans and Particular Baptists, between 1643 and 1700, did four things that we inherit:5
Read 2 Timothy 2:2 and notice the chain Paul describes: what you heard from me, entrust to faithful people, who will teach others also. Four generations in one sentence. The Puritans and Particular Baptists received, guarded, and handed off. That's the job. It's still the job.
Primary source: The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), especially Chapters 1, 8, and 10.30
Next class: the First Great Awakening, Edwards and Whitefield, and God filling an empty, inherited name with new birth.
anabaptist-britannica, Article body. Felix Manz drowned in the Limmat by order of the Zurich council, 5 January 1527. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Anabaptists ↩