Faithful Steward Ministries and FSM Women's Outreach

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Have you ever encountered someone who makes a statement something like; well I believe that… Then ask them what is the foundation of their belief and you get that deer in the headlights look?

They have no foundation, they have nothing they can turn to to say this is what I believe and why. Maybe they heard it on the radio or it is what everyone else believes. Certianly they have done nothing on there own to research their belief(s).

This applies to “Christians” also. The idea that anyone would join a church that ascribes to a particular confession of faith (or other statement of beliefs) and not fully support said confession makes no sense to me. It is like supporting a politial party that goes against all Biblical principles just because you do not like the other canidate. Hereto we can disagree, not undrestand or not fully support a specific point of said confession. However, I do not see how anyone can be in total disagreement and have true fellowship with the members of the church.

In this article the author looks at one chapter of the LBC 1689, chapter 19, The Law of God. He speciffically breaks down the use of the term the Law of Nature used therein.

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I. INTRODUCTION

As Carl Trueman has recently reminded us,¹ mere tacit affirmation {implied agreement} of the words of confessions does not a confessional Christian make.² The historic doctrinal formulations are, by nature, dogmatic assertions, a topical summary of Scriptural truth.³ Therefore, the meaning of the words therein must be affirmed and believed and said meaning must be understood within the historic context in which they were first employed. The words of the historic confessions were intentionally and carefully chosen because they already possessed precise and established meaning. Therefore, “They are not empty placeholders onto which the reader can impose any meaning he chooses,” says Trueman. If the opposite were the case then the purpose of confessions, namely, to guard the deposit of truth (2 Timothy 2:14), would be undermined. A reader-response style confessionalism guards nothing except the immediate, subjective sentiments of the individual reader. 

It is essential to understand the imported meaning of confessional terms, the original intent of the authors, so that Christians can honestly subscribe to them with the same intentionality and care with which they were formulated. This is what it means to be truly confessional. 

Accordingly, this article endeavors to expound on the meaning of chapter 19 of the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (SLC), specifically its use of “the light of nature” or “law of nature,” otherwise known as the natural law, as understood in the seventeenth-century context. As will be shown, the particular use of natural law concepts and terms in the SLC situates the seventeenth-century English Baptist codifiers squarely within the broader Reformed consensus at the time. 

CONTINUED @ SOURCE