REVIEW OF JAMES RENIHAN'S "TRUE CONFESSIONS"

Did you know that some of the most significant differences between the 1689 Confession and the Westminster Confession occur with reference to the doctrine of God, revelation and the incarnation? Did you know that the 1689 Confession does not teach that divine truth can be found in the “good and necessary consequence” of Scripture, as the Westminster Confession had put it? Did you know that the 1689 Confession includes the imputation of Christ’s active and passive righteousness as an element of justification, but that the Westminster Confession does not? Did you know that the 1689 Confession moved back from the Westminster Confession’s teaching on reprobation? Or that the 1689 Confession removes almost all references to the “covenant of works,” all reference to the religious duties of the magistrate, the Westminster Confession’s teaching on engagement and divorce, and the Westminster Confession’s forbidding of private communion?

In what must be a candidate for the book of the year, James Renihan, a professor in the Institute of Reformed Baptist Studies at Westminster Seminary California, has prepared an incredibly thorough study of the origins of four seminal Calvinistic Baptist documents – the documents best known as the 1644 Confession, the 1689 Confession, the Baptist Catechism and the Orthodox Catechism. Each of these texts is presented in a single column, with earlier documents in columns alongside, allowing the reader to easy identify changes across the tradition of Reformed confessional texts. The whole book is full of surprises, but effectively demonstrates that the Calvinistic Baptist confessional and catechetical documents emerge from the mainstream of English Reformed life. This is an outstanding work that should be carefully studied by everyone with an interest in puritan theology and its contemporary application.

James M. Renihan, True Confessions: Baptist Documents in the Reformed Family (Owensboro, Kentucky: Reformed Baptist Academic Press, 2004), ISBN-13 978-0-9760039-1-5, 294pp., soft cover spiralbound