Image: CRBC baptismal service (11.10.19) [in the baptistery of Louisa BC]
In his article in the book On Being Reformed: Debates over a Theological Identity (Palgrave
Pivot, 2018) [see WM 137] defending the propriety of Reformed Baptists to be considered
“Reformed” and distinguishing Reformed Baptists from those who are merely
Calvinistic Baptists, Matthew C. Bingham offers this succinct summary (pp. 47-48):
With the wider Reformed
tradition, Reformed Baptists affirm monergistic soteriology, an appreciation of
God’s meticulous providence, and a robust declaration that all things work “to
the praise of the glory of his wisdom, power, justice, infinite goodness, and
mercy” [2LBCF 5:1]. But alongside these things, and also in keeping with the
wider Reformed tradition, Reformed Baptists affirm the regulative principle of
worship, demand that a plurality of elders rule in the local congregation, and
recognize the need that local churches not be isolated from one another but are
instead called to hold “communion together” for their mutual “peace, union, and
edification” [2LBCF 26:15]. With the wider Reformed tradition, Reformed
Baptists embrace the Lord’s Day as the Christian Sabbath, understand the Lord’s
Supper to be more than a bare memorial but rather a means of grace given for
our “spiritual nourishment” (2LBCF 30:1], and recognize that the Lord of the
Decalogue has given therein a summary statement of his immutable moral law. And
with the wider Reformed tradition, Reformed Baptists understand all of
Scripture as covenantally structured, rejecting dispensationalism and seeing
the New Testament church as properly and fully “the Israel of God” (Gal. 6:16).
To this he then adds:
On these and other
points, those Christians subscribing to the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession
of faith identity, not with the nebulous and ill-defined “Baptist” community,
but rather with the Reformed tradition out of which their confessional document
emerged. The fact that seventeenth century churchmen who drafted the confession
would not have used the term “Reformed Baptists” to describe themselves was the
result of political and cultural, rather than theological, considerations and
should not dissuade contemporary Christians from embracing the term without embarrassment.
Ultimately, then, if pressed as to why I would eschew terms like “Calvinistic
Baptist” and stubbornly persist in calling myself “Reformed,” I would simply
have to say that I agree with R. Scott Clark and others when they remind us
that “Five Points” are not enough. A Calvinistic and Augustinian monergism does
not exhaust the confessional heritage to which I subscribe; for that I need a
better term: “Reformed.”
JTR
