In Part 1 we met the idea that the elect are justified from eternity, before they ever believe, and we met John Gill, the Baptist most associated with it. Before we can judge Gill, we need to know what his own tradition had already said. The Particular Baptists did not stumble onto this question in the 1700s. They answered it, deliberately, in their confessions.
1644: a confession under suspicion
The First London Confession of 1644 speaks of justification in Article XXVIII:
That those which have union with Christ, are justified from all their sins, past, present, and to come, by the blood of Christ; which justification we conceive to be a gracious and free acquittance of a guilty, sinful creature, from all sin by God, through the satisfaction that Christ has made by His death; and this applied in the manifestation of it through faith.
Read that last clause slowly: justification is "applied in the manifestation of it through faith." Does faith receive justification, or merely manifest a justification that already existed? A hostile reader could take it the second way.
One did. The Scottish Presbyterian Robert Baillie wrote against the new Baptist congregations, and he had reasons to be suspicious. Some of the Antinomians of the 1640s were credobaptists, and the 1644 Confession had spoken plainly against "preparationism" (the teaching that sinners must pass through stages of conviction before they may come to Christ). To Baillie, a church that rejected preparation and spoke of faith "manifesting" justification looked like it was sliding toward justification before faith.
James Renihan argues that the Baptists heard the criticism and answered it. The language of the article was revised in the 1646 and 1651 editions of the Confession, making clear that they had never meant to confess justification from eternity.*
1689: the line in plain words
By the time of the Second London Confession (first published in 1677, adopted by the General Assembly in 1689) the Baptists left nothing to inference. Chapter 11, paragraph 4 reads:
God did from all eternity decree to justify all the elect, and Christ did in the fullness of time die for their sins, and rise again for their justification; nevertheless, they are not justified personally, until the Holy Spirit does in due time actually apply Christ to them.†
The decree is eternal. The personal justification is not. It happens when the Spirit unites a sinner to Christ, which is to say, when he believes.
But paragraph 4 does not stand alone. The Confession had been preparing for it since chapter 3.
Chapter 3: the roadmap of means
Chapter 3, "Of God's Decree," paragraph 6 is one of the most important sentences in the Confession for this whole debate:
As God hath appointed the elect unto glory, so He hath, by the eternal and most free purpose of His will, foreordained all the means thereunto; wherefore they who are elected, being fallen in Adam, are redeemed by Christ, are effectually called unto faith in Christ, by His Spirit working in due season, are justified, adopted, sanctified, and kept by His power through faith unto salvation; neither are any other redeemed by Christ, or effectually called, justified, adopted, sanctified, and saved, but the elect only.‡
Notice what God decrees. He does not only decree the end (glory). He decrees "all the means thereunto." And the means come in a sequence:
- The elect are fallen in Adam.
- They are redeemed by Christ.
- They are effectually called to faith, by the Spirit working "in due season."
- They are justified, adopted, and sanctified.
- They are kept by God's power through faith to final salvation.
Justification sits in the middle of the list, after the Spirit's calling "in due season." It is one of the blessings God decreed from eternity to give in time, by the means he chose. That is the whole Baptist answer in miniature: eternal decree, temporal application.
This paragraph also gives us a map for reading the rest of the Confession. Each step on the list has its own chapter: the fall (chapter 6), redemption by Christ (chapter 8), effectual calling (chapter 10), justification (chapter 11). We will follow that thread through the next two posts, with Gill beside us.
Chapter 6: the elect really fell
The first step on the map is easy to skip past, but it matters. Chapter 6 says that when our first parents fell, so did "we in them, whereby death came upon all." All Adam's posterity are "by nature children of wrath" (6.3), and paragraph 5 insists that even in the regenerate,
The corruption of nature, during this life, does remain in those that are regenerated; and although it be through Christ pardoned and mortified, yet both itself, and the first motions thereof, are truly and properly sin.§
The elect do not escape the fall. They fell in Adam like everyone else, and they stood under God's wrath by nature until God set them free.
This needs to be said carefully. The elect were chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world (Eph 1:4); the Confession never denies that, and neither do I. Election is eternal, and so is God's purpose to justify. But being chosen for justification is not the same as being justified. Until the Spirit applies Christ to them, the elect are, in the Confession's own words, children of wrath. There is a real guilt that a real justification must remove. That is the tension the rest of the Confession has to hold together: elect from eternity, condemned by nature, justified when they believe.
Next
The map now leads to Christ. How can a sacrifice made in the first century benefit believers who lived long before it, and does the Confession itself speak of that sacrifice as somehow eternal? That is where Gill finds his footing, in Part 3: Following the Thread from Christ to Justification.