3 Minutes in Baptist History (09.25.2024)

The Philadelphia Baptist Association and their confession of faith.

On September 25, 1742, an association of Particular (or Calvinistic) Baptists in the New World published what later became the most widely used summary of doctrinal beliefs among Baptists in America - the Philadelphia Confession of Faith (link to original text).

Prior to this publication, Baptists in America and in England commonly appealed to the Second London Confession of Faith (officially published in 1689) as their standard. In fact, the Philadelphia Confession (link to modern text) is an almost identical republication of the Second London. The only original differences are two additional chapters or articles (23 and 31) in the Philadelphia Confession.

It is a historical reality that nearly all Baptists today are the spiritual and doctrinal descendants of seventeenth-century English Baptists and eighteenth-century Separate-Baptists in New England, who believed (among other things):

1. Salvation is entirely of the Lord.

2. Personal repentance (turning away from sin) and faith (believing in Jesus as Savior and Lord) are essential to salvation.

3. Only credible believers should be baptized and admitted into the membership of local churches.

4. Every Christian has the obligation and privilege of joining in meaningful membership with a local church comprised of believers who share these same convictions.

Baptists have historically cared very much about doctrine and the right articulation and practice of it. The original purpose of Baptist associations was to unite local Baptist churches under a shared set of doctrines and practices. One of the main reasons why broader Baptist cooperatives (such as the American Baptist Convention or the Southern Baptist Convention) did not adopt a confession of faith until the early twentieth century is because local associations were the formal relationship structure where Baptist churches voluntarily joined with one another to the exclusion of other churches that were not aligned with them.

Though some Baptist churches today have no explicit confession of faith, and many that do have one almost never make any reference to it in the life and function of the church, such a thing would be quite strange to our Baptist forebears. When a Baptist church was formed in the seventeenth century or the eighteenth or the nineteenth, the members committed to one another on the basis of at least two documents (and often three) - a confession of faith and a membership covenant (the third was a church constitution or structure of function).