Journal: Journal of the Institute of Reformed Baptist Studies
Volume: JIRBS 02:1 (NA 2015)
Article: Christ Spiritually Present And Believers Spiritually Nourished: The Lord’s Supper In Seventeenth-Century English Particular Baptist Life
Author: G. Stephen Weaver, Jr.

JIRBS 2 (2015) p. 91

Christ Spiritually Present And Believers Spiritually Nourished:
The Lord’s Supper In Seventeenth-Century English Particular Baptist Life

G. Stephen Weaver, Jr.*

* G. Stephen Weaver, Jr., Ph.D., is senior pastor of Farmdale Baptist Church, Frankfort, KY. This article is adapted from his Orthodox, Puritan, Baptist: Hercules Collins (1647–1702) and Particular Baptist in Early Modern England (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015).

The eminent Baptist historian H. Leon McBeth was certainly correct in asserting that in the seventeenth century the “major controversy among Baptists concerned not the meaning of the Lord’s Supper but eligibility to participate.”1 Since most discussions about the Lord’s Supper in seventeenth-century Baptist life centered on who were the proper recipients rather than on the meaning of the Supper, there is comparatively much less data on Baptist views of the meaning of the Supper than one might suspect. For example, the earliest edition of the first confession of the Particular Baptists, the First London Confession of 1644, does not even mention the Lord’s Supper at all. The 1646 edition added the words “and after to partake of the Lord’s Supper” to the end of Article XXXIX which stated:

That Baptisme is an Ordinance of the new Testament, given by Christ, to be dispensed onely upon persons professing faith, or

JIRBS 2 (2015) p. 92

that are Disciples, or taught, who upon a profession of faith, ought to be baptized.2

This lack of attention to the Lord’s Supper was most likely, as James M. Renihan has suggested, because it was not a matter of controversy among the Particular Baptists at this time. They assumed, rather than argued for, the meaning of the Lord’s Supper. They most likely assumed a similar view of the Lord’s Supper as “the Independents with whom they were companions.”3 Preliminary evidence that these early Baptists shared a common view of the meaning of the Lord’s Supper with the Independents and Presbyterians is indicated by a comparison of their respective confessions of faith. The Savoy Declaration (Savoy) issued by the Independents in 1658 adopted unchanged the following statement from the Westminster Confession of Faith of 1647 (WCF).

Worthy receivers outwardly partaking of the visible elements in this sacrament, do then also inwardly by faith, really and indeed, yet not carnally and corporally, but spiritually, receive and feed upon Christ crucified, and all benefits of his death; the body and blood of Christ being then ...