What I would like to do now is talk just a little bit about the forward movement from the New Testament to bring us up to our own confession of faith. Last night we were looking at the Old and the New Testaments and you probably notice that the creeds that are found in the New Testament itself are fairly short. And yet we come to our confession of faith and it's quite extensive. What happened that led to this change where we move from things that are fairly brief in the New Testament to something that's much longer? The first thing to say is, even within the Bible itself, we notice this forward movement and progression, because the creeds in the New Testament are expanded over the basic creed that we find in the Old Testament, the Shema, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, which was the unifying confession of the Jewish Church in the New Testament because of the coming of Christ itself, it must expand the statement of one God because now Christians believe that Christ is God, not denying the doctrine of God the Father. And we begin to walk down the road of Trinitarianism, but we also need to explain the person of Jesus Christ as God-man. Now, As we move forward from the New Testament, we find that really the first five centuries of church history are the era of the great creeds of the church. They're all written by about the year 500. And then from 500 to the middle of the 1500s, a thousand year period, we don't really have any creeds that are written. Now let's ask the question, why is it that the great creeds were written in the first five centuries. Well, some of the answers we anticipated last night in one or two of the questions that were asked, the distance and the isolation of communities, The world was a much larger place before modern transportation and communication, and it took a great deal of effort to travel between places. And it was really important for Christians, as they recognized the universality of their faith, that is that every Christian church and every individual Christian was to believe the same thing, it was really important to develop means by which they could confess their common faith. One of the things that we see even in the New Testament is that it was possible for what we might call local doctrines to develop. And what I mean by that is some teacher somewhere who is not well versed in the Scriptures and in theology that comes from Scripture begins to develop a new doctrine, a new idea, and he works it out and he teaches it in one locality, and that is probably multiplied in many different places, so that you have these isolated, variant strands of Christianity developing. Many times those things ended up as heresies. The churches of Galatia are an example. Colossians is another example, even within the New Testament, where you have these different variations of Christianity appearing and they need to be opposed. You may know that modern liberals today want to make a big deal of all of the different kind of local Christianities that existed because they want to say it wasn't until the Council of Nicaea in 325 that a formal doctrinal structure of Christianity was developed. Now, I think that that's nonsense. It's a helpful way for them to be able to attack Orthodox Christianity and to assert that their version of liberal Christianity is just another form of ancient Christianity. It simply isn't true. The Apostles' Creed developed as a means of trying to unite and express the common faith of the churches around the rim of the Mediterranean Sea. You see, one of the questions that was asked is this, what is the Catholic faith? Now, we should never be afraid of that word Catholic. It's a good word. In our culture it has come to be identified with the Roman Church. I try to say, rather than say Roman Catholic, I try to say the Romanist Church to distinguish it because I want to recover the use of the word Catholic for ourselves. In fact, just as an aside, have you ever seen the Reformation polka? Or heard it? It's a little take on the song Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. And someone wrote a song about Luther and the Reformation to that tune. And if you Google it, you can find it on YouTube. There's a really well done cartoon about it. And one of the lines in the Reformation polka, that's all you have to Google, is that Catholic is spelled with a lowercase c. that Luther taught us that. And I think that that's a great little line there. And that's what we need to remember when we recite the creeds. We say we believe in the Holy Catholic Church. It's not the Roman Church. It is the universal church that belongs to Christ in all ages. Well, the question was, what is the Catholic faith? What is the faith that is necessary for all Christians to believe? Vincent of Laronne who was a monk, Laurent is a little island off the south coast of what is now France in the Mediterranean Sea. He suggested that we may determine what is the Catholic faith in three ways, that which has always been believed everywhere and by everyone. Now, Vincent, and it's in a little work that he did called the Commonitory, which is really fascinating to read, Vincent himself recognizes that there have always been errors and so in a sense there is no faith that has always been believed everywhere by everyone because there's always been dissenters from the faith. And so in one sense his definition doesn't work but in another sense I find it to be very helpful because it argues for that which was shared by the great majority of Christians in many places in different times. And it's interesting, when you come to the Reformation era and you begin to get into the defense of the Reformation on the part of the Reformers, in several places they go back to Vincent's definition, always, everywhere, and by all, and what they say is, This is what we believe. You Romanists have departed from this. You are the ones who have gone down the by-path meadow. But we can prove to you that what we believe is that which has been held always, everywhere, and by all. Now, the Apostles' Creed seems to be the first attempt to express the basic doctrines of Christianity, and that's what it is. In fact, last night, you remember, we ended by very quickly looking at how the New Testament expands on the Jewish creed, there is one God, and it basically, all of the elements that it adds to the creed are the elements of the Apostles' Creed. It is an expression of the basic doctrines of Christianity. Now, as the centuries move onward and as local doctrines develop, it became really important to address some of these local doctrines, especially the ones that were attacks on or deviations from the most foundational beliefs of the Christian faith. And we find in the beginning of the fourth century a great controversy erupting in Alexandria, one of the great ancient cities of Christianity, Alexandria being in Egypt, over the nature of the deity of our Lord Jesus Christ. And you probably know something of what was happening there. There was a man named Arius and a man named Athanasius, and they were battling over whether or not Christ was truly God. The council was called in Nicaea. Nicaea is a little town in Turkey today. It's north of Istanbul. If you were to look at a map of the Mediterranean, Turkey is the country that's above the eastern end of the Mediterranean. And Istanbul is up on the west coast of Turkey. It's a city that half of it is in Europe and half of it is in Asia. But if you keep moving up the coast towards what is now Ukraine, you'll come to the city of Nicaea, and that's where the council was held. This council was a great debate about the deity of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the bishops who met at the Council of Nicaea came to the conclusion that we must assert that he is of the same substance with the Father, not similar substance with the Father. After They produced a creed which is called the Nicene Creed. It was slightly altered about 60 years later and the Nicene Creed that we use is the one that comes from the 380s. The next great creed that was issued in the church is the Chalcedonian definition or the Chalcedonian statement which comes from the year 451. Now, this was a defense of the incarnation. It was still questions about who Christ is. Heresies were spreading or not all of the potential heresies had been headed off at Nicaea. And it was necessary to come to some conclusions about what the Bible says about the person of Christ. Now, we said last night that he is one person with two natures, a divine nature and a human nature. And this was difficult to grasp, but was finally settled and defined for us at the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451. You see, the problem or the reason that these creeds continue to be developed is that as the centuries pass, heresies develop in the church or problems arise and it's necessary to come together and ask the question, what does the Bible say and how can we express this? What boundary can we draw? Now, these are not minor or non-essential doctrines. It's very important to understand the doctrine of the Trinity. If we don't understand it, we don't worship the true God. It's very important for us to know who Jesus Christ is. That he is truly and fully God in every sense of the term, and truly and fully human in every sense of that term. Yet he is one person. It is essential. If you deny his deity, or you deny his humanity, or if you undermine each of them by overemphasizing the one or the other, you don't have a true Christ who will save us. And so, as these problems developed in the church, bishops came together, they debated, they discussed, and they gave to us these formulas, always on the basis of what the Word of God says. The last of the great creeds of the early era is called the Athanasian Creed. I really like it a lot, although it's not the most useful for churches to recite, and the reason is that it's quite long. Now, the Athanasian Creed was not written by Athanasius. We're pretty sure about that. It's never cited by Athanasius. It's never cited by any of his contemporaries. Rather, it seems to come out of southern Gaul in the 5th century. In fact, if you were to read Vincent's Commonotory, you'll find that there are passages in there that are almost identical to the Athanasian Creed. And so, some have suggested that perhaps Vincent of Lorraine was the author of the Athanasian Creed. It is, I think, perhaps the best statement of the doctrine of the Trinity and of the person of Jesus Christ that has come down to us from the ancient church. And I wish that it was something that we could recite on a regular basis in our churches because it is really excellent in the way that it expresses itself. Now, we should ask the question, why were these creeds necessary or perhaps why should we be interested in them? You know, one of the objections that sometimes arises to the use of the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Chalcedonian definition, and the Athanasian Creed is that they are also used by Rome and they're also used by the Greek Orthodox churches. Does that mean if we accept and we employ these creeds that then we are accepting Rome and the Orthodox as brothers in Christ? Well, I think that that's a fair question and we need to answer it. And the answer to that question comes from the Reformation. You see, when the Reformation comes in the life and ministry of Luther, and it begins to spread. Zwingli introduces Reformation in Zurich and then Geneva is reformed and along comes Calvin and then the Reformation spreads to much of the rest of northern Europe. You'll find that all of the reformers and all of the reformed churches and the Lutheran churches accepted all of these statements of faith as true definitions of the doctrine that is contained in the Word of God. They didn't have an objection. They understood, and they accepted Vincent's rule, always, everywhere, and by all, and they considered Rome and the Orthodox churches of the East as the ones who had deviated from this rule. Someone has said this, the Reformation was, in many ways, a dispute over how to interpret the church fathers. And I think that that's a true observation. You know, one of the questions that was thrown at the Reformers, and it continued to arise even 150 years after the Reformation, you'll find John Owen writing on this, the question was, where was your church before Luther? The Romanists, in defense of their own church, argued that they had a continuity that could go all the way back to the New Testament. that they could demonstrate a historical succession. And they approached the reformers and they asked the question, what's your history? What do you have to prove? Where were you before Luther? The way that our fathers answered that question was to say, we are the true continuation of the fathers. You went down, to use Bunyan's language, a by-path meadow. The very fact that two groups exist, the Orthodox in the East and the Romanists in the West, is a demonstration that you both can't be proper heirs. You have to remember that in the 11th century, around 1050, the East and the West finally split. There had been, for a long, long time, tensions between the Greek-speaking church in the East and the Latin-speaking church in the West. And finally, the Bishop of Constantinople and the Bishop of Rome mutually excommunicated each other around 1050. And now you have a formal division between those two churches, the Greek church and the Roman church. And the Reformers came along and said, look, you don't agree with each other. That's a demonstration that at least one or the other of you have to be wrong. And we are the ones who have come along and we understand what the doctrine of the fathers was all about. And we are returning to that doctrine of the fathers. They pointed their fingers and they said, look, the Orthodox say Rome is wrong. And Rome says the Orthodox are wrong. Come and join us. And the reformers came along and they said, no, no, no. All of you misunderstand. We understand. We teach. We believe what the fathers actually believed. You see, we need to remember that a thousand years had passed between the Athanasian Creed, which is the last of the great early church creeds, and the Reformation. And even though Rome and the Orthodox say that they believe and do what the early church did, the Reformers challenged that idea and we may challenge that idea as well. And that's why the great creeds of the Church, the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Athanasian Creed, the Chalcedonian Statement, all may be understood truly in a Protestant sense, and that's what the Reformers sought to do. Now, if we talk about this movement from the Athanasian Creed to the Reformation, we have a thousand year period that passes in which there's no great creeds that are issued by the church, no confessions of faith. What happened? Well, the Eastern Church was very much settled on the four great creeds and they were happy with them and there were no major controversies that erupted in the Eastern Church. In the Western Church, In many ways, politics, national politics became the dominant focus of attention in the Roman Church. And it's interesting that you had a development within the Roman Church between two groups. The theologians who worked with the Scriptures and sought to ground the doctrine and practice of the Church on the basis of what the Scriptures say and the canon lawyers who were men who were more interested in tradition and more interested in the power that was claimed by the Pope and the Magisterium, the bishops of the Roman Church. And in some ways that thousand-year period in the Western Church is internally a conflict between the theologians who worked with the Bible and the canon lawyers who worked with tradition. And the canon lawyers won. because they were in support of the people with power, the Pope and the bishops. And usually, if you're in power, you like the people who will give you support. And so tradition becomes much more important in the Western Church than does theology. And the church that the Reformers left behind was a church that had developed as a result not of theology, not as a result of careful exegesis of Scripture, but as a result of tradition and its defense from the canon lawyers. Now when the Reformation came, when People began to study Greek and Hebrew again, looked beyond the Latin translation of the Bible, the Vulgate, and began to read it for themselves. They recognized that the canon lawyers had been wrong, that tradition had muffled the sound of Scripture, and it was necessary to return to theology. the Reformation becomes an attempt to deal with the Bible rather than with the traditions that had been inherited by the church and to propose a system of theology that is drawn from scripture itself. Now in order to answer this question, where was your church before Luther, they recognized that they couldn't simply ignore 1,500 years of church history. And so they had to develop a response that carefully nuanced the relationship that they had with those who went before them. And they came to the fathers of the church and the creeds of the church and they argued that the fathers largely understood the scriptures rightly and that the creeds of the church accurately portray to us, they state for us, the doctrines that are found in Scripture. And if you take the time to read any of the Reformers, you'll find that every one of them, to a man, accepted all of the creeds of the early church. They gladly incorporated into their own confessional statement these creeds. They confessed them. They recited them in their churches. It was very important for them to make this connection with Christians who had gone before them. But at the same time, they recognized that tradition in the church, the canon lawyers, had been so powerful that exegesis and theology had been lost and it was necessary to respond to all of the false practices and the false doctrines that had been accumulated in the Roman Church and they did this by means of detailed confessions of faith. You see, you have in the Old Testament a simple confession, there's one God. You have in the New Testament an expanded confession that deals with the one God and the person and work of Jesus Christ. You have creeds in the early church that expand on those things because they help to define for us in response to heresies developing in the church, the nature of the doctrine of the Trinity, and the nature of the person and work of Jesus Christ. And then you come to the Reformation era and you have longer confessions, but they're necessary because of that thousand-year period and all of the false doctrines and false practices that had come along in Rome. You see, it makes sense that our confessions are expanded, that they address far more than the early creeds both in scripture and even of the early church present to us because it was necessary for those things to happen. So that you begin to see in the Reformation that all of the Reformation churches issued confessions of one kind or another. In the 1530s, the Lutherans are releasing the Augsburg Confession, which becomes one of the standards in the Lutheran Church. In 1560, the Heidelberg Catechism comes out of the German city of Heidelberg, a careful statement about the truth of the gospel. The Belgic Confession, a little bit further north, is published. The Helvetic Confession, which is a product of the Swiss churches, all of these appear in the 1560s. In 1559, the Church of England finds it necessary to issue the Thirty-Nine Articles, which were the doctrinal statement or the confession of faith of the Church of England. All of these are much larger than the creeds that we have studied, but that is because they need to clarify and challenge Rome and the Orthodox. Many doctrines in the Middle Ages had been altered by the canon lawyers and it was important for these reformed churches to maintain, to refute the false doctrines that had developed in the Middle Ages Interestingly, they all maintain the language and the doctrines of the early creeds. Now just by the way, it's really interesting, if you have any of the Banner of Truth Puritan sets, if you take the last volume of the sets off your shelf, I know that Pastor Doug has some over there in his study, if you take the last volume out and look at the index of names, and start to look up in the index of names medieval theologians and then read what the Puritans say about them, let's say Bernard of Clairvaux or Aquinas or my mind is blank right now, any of the other great medieval theologians, what you'll find is that our Puritan and Reformed fathers speak well of them. They have no room, no place for the canon lawyers. You find Calvin, for example, speaking of the needle-headed scholastics. Now what he means by that are these men who weren't so much concerned with Scripture and theology, but were concerned with the developing traditions of the church. They have no place for them. But the men who worked with Scripture, wrestled with the Bible, were men who were esteemed and appreciated. Sometimes you'll find, for example, with Bernard of Clairvaux, one of the Puritans says, he was a good man in bad times. They recognize that there are some deficiencies in the theology of Bernard, but still he was a man who tried to work with Scripture and put together sound theology. It's really interesting to notice how they viewed the Middle Ages, very differently sometimes from the way that they're portrayed today. In fact, One of the approaches, let me back up. Many of the ancient heresies begin to reappear in England in the 16th and 17th centuries, during the Puritan era. And the Puritans, oftentimes, rather than developing and printing new responses to these ancient heresies, argued that the best thing to do is simply to reprint the works of the fathers, or even the medieval theologians, as a means by which to refute the new doctrines. The new doctrines are really the old doctrines in new dress, and there's no need to write something new against them. When something old was written against them, that was really good. Likewise, you'll find, if you've ever read John Owen's work on conversion, on regeneration, on the work of the Spirit in bringing us to faith in Christ. It's really interesting. He has a very long chapter that is largely a reprint of St. Augustine's Confessions in which Augustine tells the story of his own conversion and Owen uses that as an example of what true conversion is all about. Now, Owen has a hidden agenda in using that material. It's not just that it's a great piece of ancient literature that helps us to understand what the nature of true conversion is all about, what repentance is, what turning away from sin is, what faith in Christ is. And a good translation of the Confessions of Augustine will do that for you. It's really, really fine. But the hidden agenda is Owen wanted to use Augustine to say, Augustine is one of us. You Romanists, you have it wrong. You may revere him and appreciate him, but you misunderstand him, and we want to recover him as one of our own." And that's the hidden agenda that Owen has in his use of Augustine. You see, the reformers, the Puritans, all looked back at what went before them. They understood the problems that were present today, but they determined that the best way to address those problems was to identify themselves with the best theology, the best men of the past. And this is exactly what our fathers, Baptist fathers, did as well. The Baptists begin to appear in England in Well, there's two groups of Baptists. Maybe you remember a couple years ago we talked about that. There's the general Baptists who appear first. They were the Arminian Baptists. I just want to mention them but pass by them at this point because they're not really important for our thinking. But the particular Baptists, the Calvinistic Baptists, appear in the late 1630s and really come to the fore in the 1640s. And because of the dangerous situation in which they lived, they sometimes were put in jail, sometimes opposed and persecuted, and they needed to give some clear identity, explanation of who they were. They took up the same practice and it began to issue confessions. So in 1644, they issue a confession that we call the First London Confession. It was revised in 1646, reprinted again in 1651 with an appendix. And then in 1677, the same men in the same churches issue a second Confession of Faith. It's the one that we have adopted, the Second London Confession. We call it the 1689, interestingly enough, but it was really published in 1677. In fact, it was never actually published in 1689. That's the anomaly of the whole thing. You wonder how did it get the name the 1689 Confession? Well, it got that name because in 1689 there were just over 100 churches that met together in London in September of that year and formed a General Assembly and they adopted it. And there's a very famous statement that many times is printed with the confession. We, the ministers and messengers of upwards of 100 churches in England and Wales, etc., and there are 37 names attached to it. That was the statement that was made at the General Assembly adopting the confession. A lot of people think that it was edited at that assembly. It was not. It had been printed 12 years before in 1677. But that's the second London Confession that belongs to us. It's written on the basis of the Westminster Confession and the Savoy Declaration. It does what all good confessions do, what the First London did, what the Second London attempts to do, what all of the Reformed confessions do. It tries to demonstrate commonalities rather than distinctions from other Christians. The whole purpose for the Baptists, of publishing both of their confessions was basically to say, we believe the same things that you do. Yes, we have our distinctive views. We don't worship along with you because we believe in believers' baptism. We believe that the Church ought to be constituted along those lines. But in all the rest of our doctrines, we believe what you believe. Please look at us and recognize that we are Orthodox Christians. Maybe I should say that it was really important for them to emphasize this because in 1643 and 1644 many of their opponents, and I almost said enemies, and enemies would be an accurate word, but many of their opponents wanted to charge them with treason against the state. They wanted to charge them with all kinds of immoralities. There were many, many charges that were leveled against the early Baptists that were utterly and absolutely false. And it was a very dangerous situation. They were subject to arrest, not in England, to death, although potentially that could have happened. And it was really important for them to make a statement to say, we believe what you believe. We are the same as you are. Now, maybe, let's see, we're going to take a 10 minute break between each session, is that right? So, let me stop right here and give you a chance to ask some questions. I think that when we come back from the break, what we'll do is we'll just look at, in the Second London Confession, how they actually incorporate some language from the Nicene Creed, the Chalcedonian Creed, and the Apostles' Creed. And then we'll talk about what it means to subscribe to a confession of faith. But before we do that, we have about five minutes. Let's have some discussion, questions, whatever might be helpful.