The Second London Baptist Confession of 1689 functions as a major achievement of Reformed theology, demonstrating historical and doctrinal continuity with the wider Puritan tradition. Yet, where the framers of the 1689 Confession departed from the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Savoy Declaration, they did so with a strong theological purpose. Nowhere is this deliberate departure more evident, or more consequential, than in Chapter 7, “Of God’s Covenant.” Although their Presbyterian brethren formulated a single Covenant of Grace which was carried out under two different economic systems, the early Particular Baptists believed it to be biblically necessary to have a covenantal structure which faithfully maintained the supremacy of the New Covenant. The fact that the gospel is said to have been ‘revealed by farther steps’ until its complete establishment is shown in Chapter 7, Paragraph 2 of the 1689 Confession to prove that the Covenant of Grace is not a single covenant with two administrations, but rather a redemptive promise which was gradually made known throughout the Old Testament and which was finally put into effect through the blood of Jesus Christ.
Historical Background of the 1689 Confession
To understand the deliberate modifications the framers of the Second London Baptist Confession made in Chapter 7, one must first survey the theological scene of seventeenth-century English Puritanism. When the Particular Baptists began drafting their confession, the Reformed establishment had already set its theological agreement at the Westminster Assembly in 1646 and later modified it in the Congregationalists’ Savoy Declaration of 1658. Central to this consensus was a specific formulation of covenant theology that unified the Old and New Testaments under a single redemptive economy. The Westminster divines articulated that the Covenant of Grace was essentially one unified covenant administered differently throughout redemptive history—first under the law through promises, prophecies, and physical ordinances like circumcision, and later under the gospel through the New Testament sacraments.[1] To the Presbyterian establishment, this idea of “one covenant under various dispensations” was not simply an abstract conceptual construction; it offered the essential theological support needed in order to regard Old Covenant circumcision as equivalent to New Covenant baptism, and thus provided a justification for the practice of paedobaptism and for the continuation of a mixed, state-church system.[2]
This historical situation placed the early Particular Baptists in a theological dilemma. On soteriology, justification, and orthodox Calvinism, they agreed with the Westminster divines and sought to publicly demonstrate their solidarity with the wider Reformed tradition. Yet they firmly denied the sacramental implications of the Presbyterian covenantal system, since identifying the physical offspring of Abraham with the spiritual offspring of Christ necessarily undermined the teaching of regenerate church membership. To resolve this tension, Baptists such as Nehemiah Coxe constructed a distinct biblical theology that severed the Presbyterian link between the Old and New Covenants.[3] As modern scholarship shows, early Baptists did not invent a novel hermeneutic; rather, they developed a distinct branch within the larger Reformed family tree.[4] Coxe and his contemporaries maintained the exclusive and regenerate character of the New Covenant by emphasizing that the Covenant of Grace had been shown progressively through the types and shadows in the Old Testament but was only formally put into effect at the cross.[5]
The theological accuracy shown by the framers of 1689 is most clearly seen in their careful editorial alterations to the Westminster text on the way in which this covenant is carried out. While the Westminster Confession had explicitly described the Covenant of Grace as a single entity administered in different ways “under the law” and “under the gospel”, the Baptist framers completely deleted the two-administrations approach.[6] The gospel, on the other hand, is said in Chapter 7, Paragraph 3 of the Second London Baptist Confession to have been “revealed by further steps until its full discovery was completed in the New Testament.”[7] This precise phrasing served as a sharp theological boundary. The Baptists held that the Covenant of Grace should be regarded as a promise rather than as a covenant which had to be enacted by law, and on this basis they believed it to have remained formally unratified until Christ’s blood had been shed.[8] Consequently, the Old Testament covenants—including the Abrahamic and Davidic—were understood not as earlier administrations of the Covenant of Grace itself, but as subservient, typological steps progressively revealing the gospel until its eschatological fulfillment in the New Covenant.[9]
The basis on which this Baptist approach is built starts right after the fall of man, with a contrast between the broken Covenant of Works and the first appearance of redemptive grace. When God gave Adam the command in Genesis 2:16–17, He entered into a covenant of life with him on the condition of perfect obedience. When the commandment was broken, mankind fell into a condition of sin and death, so that it became impossible to be made right with God by the law. Nevertheless, God did not at once formally establish a new covenant of redemption with Adam; rather, He made a prophetic statement. In Genesis 3:15, known as the Protoevangelium, God pronounces judgment upon the serpent, declaring, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”[10] This verse marks the dawn of the Covenant of Grace. As John Calvin observes, this singular promise of a conquering seed forms the foundation upon which all subsequent hopes of salvation rest, providing Adam and Eve the necessary object of saving faith.[11] However, the 1689 framers meticulously recognized the legal nature of this event. In Chapter 7, Paragraph 3, they accurately categorize Genesis 3:15 not as a legally enacted covenant, but state that the covenant was “first of all [revealed]…in the promise.”[12] There is no covenantal ratification ceremony, no mutual oaths, and no explicit covenantal terminology employed in the text. According to Reformed dogmatics, this original promise contained the substance of the gospel, yet it remained organically in seed form, awaiting progressive historical expansion.[13] Therefore, the Old Testament saints were genuinely saved by faith in this promise, even as the formal, legal establishment of the New Covenant remained an eschatological reality yet to be enacted in time and space.
The promise of grace was gradually developed through the various types and shadows in the Old Testament, but the prophetic writings clearly foresaw a radical change in the eschatological realm which would break off the continuity of the Old Covenant. The nature of this discontinuity is most clearly set out in Jeremiah 31:31–34, a passage which forms a fundamental basis for the Baptist view of regenerate church membership.Through the prophet Jeremiah, Yahweh declares that the coming New Covenant will be fundamentally “not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke.”[14] The Mosaic Covenant, with its role as a national and educational system, was by nature susceptible to being broken; it required perfect obedience without itself providing the necessary grace to ensure that obedience. On the other hand, the New Covenant is marked by the internalization of the law and by the infallible regeneration of its members. As Samuel Waldron observes in his exposition of the 1689 Confession, the Old Covenant could be broken by its physical members, but the New Covenant secures the actual salvation of all who are in it, because God Himself writes the law upon their hearts.[15] This precise exegetical distinction explains why the Baptist framers refused to view the New Covenant as merely a renewed administration of the Old. The New Covenant is exclusively redemptive. As Rob Ventura’s exposition notes on the confessional view of this passage, the New Covenant guarantees forgiveness of sins and experiential knowledge of God for every participant, from the least to the greatest.[16] It follows that the visible church must consist entirely of confessing believers if all the members of the New Covenant are to know the Lord, thus removing the Presbyterian basis for having a mixed covenant community consisting of believers and their unregenerate offspring.[17]
Exegesis of Hebrews 8
The historical realization of the eschatological expectation described in Jeremiah 31 is to be found in the Epistle to the Hebrews, thus giving definitive exegetical support to the ‘revealed by farther steps’ approach. In chapter 8 of Hebrews the author proves the obsolescence of the Old Covenant by showing that Christ’s mediatorial work is superior. The theological crux of the Baptist argument depends upon Hebrews 8:6, which declares that Christ “is the mediator of a better covenant, which has been legally enacted (νενομοθέτηται, nenomothetētai) on better promises.”[18] This specific legal verb is critical to our understanding. As John Owen forcefully argues in his exposition of Hebrews, a covenant may be promised and its benefits applied retroactively—as was the case for the Old Testament saints who were saved by grace through faith—yet a testament is not legally established until the death of the testator.[19] The shedding of Christ’s blood at Calvary was the definitive, historical enactment of the Covenant of Grace. Before the cross, the gospel existed as an unratified promise, progressively revealed through the typological scaffolding of the Old Testament covenants.[20] However, when the substance of those shadows arrived, the scaffolding was removed. [21]The 1689 framers understood that one cannot equate a covenant’s promise with its official, legal ratification.[22] Consequently, the Baptists correctly applied the inaugurated eschatology of Hebrews 8 by holding that the Covenant of Grace was not completely established until the New Testament, thus cutting off any remaining Presbyterian connection which would have allowed unregenerate physical children to be included in the New Covenant community.
The covenantal distinctions mentioned in Chapter 7 of the Second London Baptist Confession were never intended to stay within the realm of academic theory; instead they form the essential theological foundation for the local church’s way of life, its purity, and its practices. As James M. Renihan shows in his analysis of the earliest documents and epistles surrounding the Confession, the 1689 framers were driven by a deep pastoral impulse, seeking to promote the spiritual health as well as unity of their congregations amid intense outside pressures.[23] For the Particular Baptists, a pure church was inextricably linked to a precise covenant theology. Because they understood that the Covenant of Grace was inaugurated exclusively in the New Covenant, and because Jeremiah 31’s prophetic witness guaranteed that every member of this New Covenant would have a regenerate heart, the logical ecclesiological conclusion was unavoidable. The church—as the visible manifestation of the New Covenant community—must be composed solely of professing believers.[24] To administer the covenantal sign of baptism to unregenerate infants, as their Presbyterian brethren practiced, was not purely a sacramental error; it was a fundamental compromise of the New Covenant’s exclusive, spiritual nature.[25] Therefore, the 1689 Federalism framework of “revealed by farther steps” is the direct theological justification for regenerate church membership, guaranteeing that the local body of Christ is a community of the genuinely redeemed rather than a mixed multitude of the faithful and the unregenerate.[26]
The “revealed by farther steps” approach fundamentally determines the hermeneutical and homiletical responsibilities of the Christian pastor. Since a preacher realizes that the Old Testament covenants served as typological scaffolding and not as the substance of the Covenant of Grace, there must be a clear distinction made between Law and Gospel in the sermon. The Mosaic administration, which was a covenant of works promising life in the land of Canaan and therefore breakable, was intended to function as a pedagogical ministry of condemnation in order to show the extent of human depravity and the impossibility of achieving self-justification.[27] Hence preachers who work within the framework of the 1689 federalist view are protected from the mistake of applying a moral interpretation to the stories in the Old Testament; the patriarchs and the law are not shown simply as moral role models to be copied, but rather as intentional signs in the redemptive history pointing forward to a higher and already-inaugurated reality.[28] Because the promise of Genesis 3:15 was progressively expanded but remained legally un-enacted until Calvary, every Old Testament text must be driven to its eschatological fulfillment in the blood of Jesus Christ.[29] This makes certain that the pulpit ministry remains relentlessly Christocentric; the law is preached in its terrifying purity to slay the sinner, so that the gospel of the newly enacted covenant may be offered in its absolute sufficiency to save.[30]
Practical Application: Pastoral Care and Assurance
Apart from ecclesiology and homiletics, the exact covenantal statement in the 1689 Confession provides the final objective basis for a believer’s assurance of salvation. Within a paedobaptist system in which the Covenant of Grace includes both the regenerated and the unregenerated, membership in the covenant is by nature changeable. A person might be baptized into the covenant community, acquire the privileges it brings, and yet ultimately abandon the faith and thereby be punished by divine wrath.[31] The fact that this situation exists necessarily leads to subjectivity and instability in pastoral counseling. However, by defining the Covenant of Grace as exclusively the enacted New Covenant, the Baptist framers secured the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints upon an unbreakable foundation. As Mitch Lush points out in his explanation of this chapter, the New Covenant is not a conditional arrangement which depends on human fidelity, but an absolute and one-sided promise guaranteed completely by the mediatorial work of Jesus Christ.[32] Because the New Covenant is established upon “better promises” (Heb. 8:6) and guarantees the intrinsic regeneration of every member, true covenant membership is synonymous with eternal security. Pastors counseling doubting believers point them not to a breakable covenant that requires ongoing performance to maintain status, but to Christ’s completed, enacted testament.[33] The believer’s assurance is thus intrinsically tied to the “revealed by farther steps” framework; because the covenant is legally established exclusively in the blood of the Savior, those who are brought into it by faith can never be cast out.[34]
Conclusion
The Second London Baptist Confession of 1689 was not simply a repetition of the Westminster Standards nor a break with historic Reformed orthodoxy; it was instead a necessary biblical improvement of our understanding of redemptive history. The Particular Baptists were able to build a theological fortress around the supremacy of the New Covenant by altering Chapter 7 to state that the Covenant of Grace was gradually ‘revealed in further stages’ rather than being administered under two testaments. In the past, the exact way of expressing this idea allowed men like Nehemiah Coxe and Benjamin Keach to demonstrate that they held the same views concerning salvation as their Presbyterian colleagues, even though they rejected the sacramental errors which underpinned a state-church system. On biblical grounds, this method correctly shows the gospel progressing from the initial promise referred to in Genesis 3:15, through its extension in terms of types in the Old Testament, to its formal and legal establishment in the blood of Jesus Christ as stated in Hebrews 8. In practice the Covenant of Grace serves as the fundamental foundation of regenerated church membership, of Christ-centred preaching, and of the personal assurance of the struggling believer; it is not a weak agreement that can be broken by children who are not regenerated but an infallible testament guaranteed by a perfect Mediator. Because it has recognized this glorious progression in the redemptive history, the modern church is in a position to worship the God who, in wisdom, had concealed His grace in shadows until the fullness of time, when He put it into effect forever in His Son.
[1] Pascal Denault, The Distinctiveness of Baptist Covenant Theology: A Comparison Between Seventeenth-Century Particular Baptist and Paedobaptist Federalism (Birmingham, AL: Solid Ground Christian Books, 2013), 61–63.
[2] Samuel D. Renihan, From Shadow to Substance: The Federal Theology of the English Particular Baptists (1642–1704) (Oxford: Centre for Baptist History and Heritage, 2018), 18-20.
[3] Nehemiah Coxe and John Owen, Covenant Theology: From Adam to Christ, ed. Ronald D. Miller, James M. Renihan, and Francisco Orozco (Palmdale, CA: Reformed Baptist Academic Press, 2005), 54.
[4] Richard C. Barcellos, The Family Tree of Reformed Biblical Theology: Geerhardus Vos and John Owen, Their Methods of and Contributions to the Articulation of Redemptive History (Owensboro, KY: Reformed Baptist Academic Press, 2010), 86-103.
[5] Richard C. Barcellos, ed., Recovering a Covenantal Heritage: Essays in Baptist Covenant Theology (Palmdale, CA: Reformed Baptist Academic Press, 2014), 93-99.
[6] The Westminster Confession of Faith, 1646, 7.5–6.
[7] The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith, 1689, 7.3.
[8] Denault, The Distinctiveness of Baptist Covenant Theology, 67-69.
[9] Renihan, From Shadow to Substance, 201-204.
[10] Gen. 3:15 (ESV).
[11] John Calvin, Commentaries on the First Book of Moses Called Genesis, trans. John King, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2003), 170-171.
[12] The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith, 1689, 7.3.
[13] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend, vol. 3, Sin and Salvation in Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 199.
[14] Jer. 31:32 (ESV).
[15] Samuel E. Waldron, A Modern Exposition of the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith, 5th ed. (Welwyn Garden City, UK: EP Books, 2016), 134-136.
[16] Rob Ventura, ed., A New Exposition of the London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689 (Geanies House, UK: Christian Focus Publications, 2022), 136-139.
[17] Denault, The Distinctiveness of Baptist Covenant Theology, 132-135.
[18] Heb. 8:6 (ESV).
[19] John Owen, An Exposition of the Epistle to the Hebrews, ed. W. H. Goold, vol. 6 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1991), 64-65.
[20] Coxe and Owen, Covenant Theology: From Adam to Christ, 138-140.
[21] Samuel D. Renihan, “The Case for Credobaptism,” Place for Truth, October 31, 2014, https://www.placefortruth.org/blog/case-credobaptism.
[22] Denault, The Distinctiveness of Baptist Covenant Theology, 73-75.
[23] James M. Renihan, To the Judicious and Impartial Reader: Baptist Symbolics Volume 2 (Cape Coral, FL: Founders Press, 2022), 21-26.
[24] Denault, The Distinctiveness of Baptist Covenant Theology, 140-142.
[25] Waldron, A Modern Exposition of the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith, 121.
[26] Coxe and Owen, Covenant Theology: From Adam to Christ, 142.
[27] Waldron, A Modern Exposition of the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith, 119.
[28] Barcellos, The Family Tree of Reformed Biblical Theology, 82-84.
[29] Denault, The Distinctiveness of Baptist Covenant Theology, 108.
[30] Ventura, ed., A New Exposition of the London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689, 147.
[31] Denault, The Distinctiveness of Baptist Covenant Theology, 148-150.
[32] Mitch Lush, “Of God’s Covenant,” in A New Exposition of the London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689, ed. Rob Ventura (Geanies House, UK: Christian Focus Publications, 2022), 149.
[33] Waldron, A Modern Exposition of the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith, 120-121.
[34] Coxe and Owen, Covenant Theology: From Adam to Christ, 143.