Interview originally posted on Reformed Baptist Fellowship and copied here by permission.

Pastor David Charles interviews Dr. James Renihan, Academic Dean of Reformed Baptist studies at Westminster Seminary in California. Dr. Renihan has edited a recent book entitled TRUE CONFESSIONS - Baptist documents in the Reformed Family. This is the first of several.

Historically, have Confessions and catechisms
been important to Evangelical and Baptist churches?

Yes. And this is demonstrated in several ways, reaching all the way
back to the Fathers. As heresies began to invade the church, it was
deemed best to express the Christian Faith by way of creeds,
confessions and catechisms. The creeds and confessions functioned
in essentially the same way–they gave definition to the church’s beliefs;
catechisms served to teach doctrine, especially to the young and to the
“catechumenates”–the new disciples of the church. These were never
considered by the orthodox to be impositions, but rather as opportunities
to state the nature of the “faith once delivered to the saints.” This “faith”
was not equated with the bare words of Scripture, but rather with the
system of doctrine taught in Scripture. As the centuries passed, this
practice was continued–Philip Shaff’s great work The Creeds of
Christendom demonstrates how the true church has always adopted and
used creeds, confessions and catechisms. More particularly for our own
history, there have been a regular succession of creeds, confessions and catechisms produced by the Baptists and other baptistic groups such as the 16th century Anabaptists of Europe. There is a long history of the use of these documents in the church of Christ.

Given that American Evangelism seems so fractured at this time, do you really think a book like TRUE CONFESSIONS will be helpful?  After all, doctrine divides.

Well, Paul says that there is ONE Lord, ONE faith, ONE baptism. It seems to me that he thought of doctrine (’faith’) as a unifying element of the life of the church. Can we ever claim that our formulations exactly reflect the doctrine of the Word of God? I think the obvious answer is no. But this does not prevent us from seeking to express it as clearly as possible. True Confessions is an attempt to demonstrate the doctrinal unity that has existed between what we call Reformed Baptists and the other reformational Protestant churches. We are, in all of the most important ways, one with them in the content of our faith. And beyond this, these documents also demonstrate our unity with the true church of Jesus Christ throughout all of the centuries since the Apostolic age. It is a mistake to think that our doctrine begins in 1689, or even at the reformation. To the contrary, these Confessions adopt the specific technical language of the great ecumenical creeds of the church. We are one with all who have confessed Christ in truth.

What were some of the surprises that you had in editing TRUE CONFESSIONS?

I don’t think that I had any real surprises while editing these documents. But I suspect that others will have some as they work closely with the text. Most obviously, and following on what I wrote before, those who claim, for example, that the 1st LCF is the most authentic and untainted Baptist document will be shocked to see how dependent it is upon paedobaptist documents! Even those earliest of English Baptists were glad to share in the unity of the faith with others before them. I suppose one interesting and maybe surprising point that needs to be remembered about the 1st LCF, in its 1644 edition, is that it was edited by untrained, essentially arm-chair theologians. They did fairly well for themselves, though the language was tightened up in the 1646 revision, when some University trained men (Benjamin Coxe, Hanserd Knollys) had joined forces with them.

Some claim that the theology of the 1st LBC is different than the 2nd. Has your research shed any light on these claims?

There is no basis in historical fact to make this claim. It is the result of the opinions of amateur historians, who have spent little or no time in the sources, reading their theologies back into the 1st LCF. There is no reputable scholar anywhere–and by this I mean an individual who is widely read in the primary sources of the Baptist literature of the 1640s-1700–who supports the notion that the Confessions reflect differing theologies. It is too much like the Calvin vs. the Calvinists debate. Ironically, at least the men who continue to articulate that view (though it has been blown out of the water by Richard Muller and a host of others) have a lengthy period of time over which they seek to study. Those who posit differences between the 1st and 2nd Confessions must do so knowing that some of the same men and churches issued both Confessions, and they (the 17th century men) explicitly state that the matter of doctrine in both Confessions is the same. I guess some 21st century students know better than eye-witnesses, and more than eye-witnesses–they were the participants!