Introduction
Can you be a five-point Calvinist and still not be Reformed? Many believers love the doctrines of grace yet assume that affirming five points settles the question. In this episode the pastors explain why the word Reformed reaches further than soteriology, why confessional churches are anchored to a document rather than to a gifted personality, and how creeds and confessions function less like chains and more like the rails that keep a train safely on track. For anyone trying to understand what marks out a confessional Reformed Baptist church from the wider Calvinistic resurgence, this conversation offers a clear and pastoral answer.
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Transcript
Keywords: Reformed Baptist, confessional theology, Second London Confession, John Piper, John MacArthur, cessationism, regulative principle of worship, covenant theology, Protestant confessions, theological boundaries
Speakers: Pastor Jim Butler, Dr. Richard Barcellos, Pastor David Charles
Calvinism, but with more to say
Pastor Jim Butler: So the next question, and I think it is excellent: what distinguishes a confessional Reformed Baptist church like Free Grace Baptist Church from Calvinistic Baptist churches associated with figures like John Piper or John MacArthur? The question assumes a distinction between a Reformed Baptist church and a Calvinistic Baptist church. I agree, we can call Calvinism the Reformed faith, but I also agree that we need to nuance it.
Pastor David Charles: Yes, we would want to say more, even as we use the word Calvinism. The Canons of Dort are a hundred years after Calvin, and that is just the Reformed faith dealing with a contemporary issue. They did not formulate the five points out of nothing. They were responding to something that was troubling the church.
Pastor Jim Butler: So the question is, what is the difference between a confessional Reformed Baptist church and a Calvinistic Baptist church, with John Piper as the example.
Why John Piper is not Reformed: the confession’s first chapter
Pastor David Charles: I have been on both sides of John Piper. I appreciate the man. He is a wonderfully gifted man in so many ways, and he has done a lot of good for American evangelicalism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. However, with men like him, there are departures from what we recognize as the Reformed faith. Now, if you are going to reduce Calvinism to the five points, that has precedent. But even there, speaking of Piper directly, my own background was Pentecostal, raised, baptized, and catechized, and later charismatic, so I know there is a distinction. I have said, look, if you cannot subscribe to our first chapter, you do not get to claim to be Calvinistic or Reformed, because the previous ways of God revealing himself have ceased.
Dr. Richard Barcellos: That’s right.
Pastor David Charles: So Piper is out right there. Then the question is, well, is it just cessationism? It is, but it is because cessationism is part of a larger understanding. As Dr. Renihan puts it, when you read our confession, you have to read it horizontally. One point is part of a whole. And thank God for Baptist churches that are becoming Calvinistic. I rejoice in that. What they are doing is seeing that it really is all of grace. It is grace, it is grace, it is grace.
More than five points: covenant, Sabbath, and worship
Pastor David Charles: So how would we distinguish ourselves from them? You can go through the catalog of theological concerns, whether it is the covenant or the law. The covenant of works, for one.
Dr. Richard Barcellos: The covenant of works, because Piper does not, as far as I know, hold to that.
Pastor Jim Butler: And chapter 22, the Sabbath.
Dr. Richard Barcellos: The law, the Sabbath, the regulative principle of worship.
Pastor David Charles: The regulative principle of worship, yes. And since we are talking more narrowly about Baptists, I think even the General Baptists, who have no historical relationship with the Particular Baptists, held to something close to, if not identical to, the regulative principle of worship. That is a Baptist instinct going back to the English Puritans. The regulative principle means that God regulates our worship by what he has commanded. If that is not a fundamental aspect of your church’s worship and identity, you are not Reformed. Even Calvin was clear on this. He said how impossible it is to convince the world that what they offer in worship, however much zeal they bring to it, God does not accept. That is Calvin. If you brought Calvin to the present and had a conversation with him, once he got over being unhappy that there are people calling themselves Calvinists, he would say, so you agree with me that we can only worship God as he has commanded in Scripture. That is at the front end of his thinking. So I only begrudgingly recognize the label Calvinistic Baptist, because it reduces Calvinism, or Calvin himself, in a way that loses something. We all use shorthand, of course.
Pastor Jim Butler: Sure. But there is a distinguishable difference between a Calvinistic Baptist, narrowly defined, and someone like John Piper. We are not picking on him, but there is a difference.
Dr. Richard Barcellos: Or John MacArthur, a dispensationalist who held to the five points.
John MacArthur, dispensationalism, and what Reformed means
Pastor Jim Butler: A dispensationalist is not going to affirm chapter 7 of our confession, and certainly not chapter 19. So what I think I am hearing is that confessional Reformed theology is Calvinistic. Soteriologically we affirm Calvinism, but Reformed theology is a larger thing. Did not Sproul say that Reformed theology is covenant theology?
Dr. Richard Barcellos: What did the Reformation historically produce? Reformed documents, documents reflecting the principles they were arguing for, in the great Protestant confessions and catechisms. It is better to understand what a Reformed Christian is in terms of confessional adherence. Do they hold to one of the classic confessions? And by the way, the issue is not whether these men are saved.
Pastor Jim Butler: Right, it is an intramural debate over who gets to call themselves Reformed. It seems to come down to that.
The Second London Confession: mature Protestant doctrine
Dr. Richard Barcellos: When I say Reformed, I am basically making it the same as Protestant confessional, holding to one of the confessions that came out of the Protestant Reformation. To drill down further, when I say I am a Reformed Baptist, I am saying I hold to the Second London Confession as the most mature expression of my understanding of Scripture, which happened to come at the end of the seventeenth century, the most perfected Protestant document. I am kind of kidding and kind of not.
Pastor Jim Butler: And they leaned on their predecessors. It is very clear. You can see where they tightened up the language, where they went with Savoy on some issues and did not go with Westminster. They leaned on those documents in an informed way and took the best fruit.
Calculated changes, not arbitrary ones
Dr. Richard Barcellos: That is a good way to put it. They leaned on others, but by the time 1677 comes around, when our confession was first issued, they changed some terms. Did they do it carelessly? Let me put it this way: there was historical and theological context for changes like subsistences instead of persons. The evidence from the primary documents is that these were calculated changes, not careless ones. Dr. James Renihan has shown that most, if not all, of their changes are historical, theological, and contextual, and that they got them from the paedobaptists.
Pastor David Charles: Right, because they were right.
Dr. Richard Barcellos: It was a more mature reflection on certain issues in light of heresies that were circulating. So when I read someone who says they changed it here, it is arbitrary, or it is uniquely Baptist, I disagree. There may be a few changes like that, but most are not. They are borrowing from someone else’s arguments. I get genuinely frustrated when outsiders look at our document and say, look at this strange change, you Baptists are odd, when I know for a fact they are borrowing from paedobaptist literature. They are borrowing from your men.
Built on a confession, not a personality
Pastor David Charles: There is something else, going back to your original question. Calvinistic Baptist, right? Are there really churches that would denominate themselves only as Calvinistic Baptist? No. And that is helpful. Particular Baptist churches are confessional churches. We recognize John Piper as a gifted, faithful brother, and so on, but our churches are not organized around a personality or a movement. What is at the front end, and what brings up the rear, is our theological commitment, rooted in something that goes back to the creeds and to the apostles.
How confessions protect the church from its pastors
Dr. Richard Barcellos: So at your church, and I have been to your church several times, and you to mine, I hope, and I think this is the case, that our people are not trained to say, but Pastor David does not hold that view. I hope they would say instead, we do not confess that. Our understanding of Scripture is summarily contained in our confession of faith. Our boundaries are not Jim Butler, David Charles, and Richard Barcellos. Otherwise it becomes a kind of Protestant papalism, a private popery, where everything rests on Pastor Jim says, or Pastor Cam says.
Pastor David Charles: Evangelicals have been rightly taught to have an allergic reaction to papalism. And often, when they encounter us, the creeds, confessions, and catechisms sound like popery to them. One of the things I tell people who are looking at our church, and I mean this in the best sense, is that those creeds and confessions protect the church from me. They are anti-popery. And I say this without a giggle: the pope is antichrist. But that spirit is still very much alive. We all want a pope.
Pastor Jim Butler: Is that Luther? No, Hodge says every man has a pope in his own bosom, a desire to lord it over others.
Dr. Richard Barcellos: And as a pastor, yes, I could lord it over my people. It feeds pride and it subjects people to the wrong authority. The authority is not your pastor. I tell my people this all the time. You should not be driving to church wondering what he is going to say this week.
Pastor Jim Butler: Are we going to get tongues this Sunday?
Dr. Richard Barcellos: You should know what your pastor is going to do. You do not know the text or the particular words, but you know he is going to expound a text and relate it to our Lord, to believers, and to unbelievers. Somehow he is going to do that, and that should be an anchor for your soul. Instead of driving to church wondering what will happen this week, you should already know.
Pastor Jim Butler: Within the safeguards of a confession that has stood the test of time.
Dr. Richard Barcellos: That hedges you in.
Pastor Jim Butler: You are not going to get a woman preacher this Sunday.
Pastor David Charles: Or next Sunday.
Pastor Jim Butler: Any Sunday. It is a protective thing. And in churches that do not have a confession, the pastor becomes the pope, whether openly or not. He is the one who runs the show.
Rails, riverbanks, and the gifts Christ gave
Dr. Richard Barcellos: I have a friend who used to be at a large church, and I think it was either an unspoken or even a written rule that in the various Bible studies held by the church, you could not contradict the pastor.
Pastor David Charles: Wow. Well, I keep reflecting on how people respond to these things. They ask, isn’t that restrictive? And I say, it is restrictive like the rails for a train are restrictive.
Pastor Jim Butler: Right. Not all restriction is bad.
Pastor David Charles: Exactly. And I ask them, what happens when the train is not on the rails? What do we call that? They say, a train wreck. Or a derailment.
Pastor Jim Butler: I do not see the ecclesiastical equivalent being any different.
Pastor David Charles: I love fishing on a riverbank. I am not getting near a swamp, because I do not know what I am going to step in. Boundaries are good, especially the boundaries God has given us in his word as it has rightly been interpreted for two thousand years. What kind of arrogance says we can do it better?
Pastor Jim Butler: Or that we do not need the gifts Christ gave to his church. Ephesians 4 legitimizes and expects creedalism and confessionalism. If Jesus gives gifts to the church in an Athanasius, an Augustine, a Calvin, or a Luther, who are we to say we do not need those gifts, that we can do it on our own? We are not called to reinvent the wheel.
Pastor David Charles: Amen.
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