Journal: Journal of the Institute of Reformed Baptist Studies
Volume: JIRBS 08:1 (NA 2023)
Article: Benjamin Keach And The Everlasting Covenant: Baptist Expositor Of A Puritan Doctrine
Author: Daniel D. Scheiderer

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Benjamin Keach And The Everlasting Covenant: Baptist Expositor Of A Puritan Doctrine

Daniel D. Scheiderer*

*Daniel D. Scheiderer is pastor at Grace Baptist Church, Chambersburg, PA, and Adjunct Professor of Systematic Theology at International Reformed Baptist Seminary, Mansfield, TX. He is author of Still Confessing (Founders, 2020). This article is largely taken from his dissertation, “Eternal Covenant: The Trinitarian Shape of an Historic Baptist Doctrine” (Ph.D. diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2022), 20–51. For a similar survey, devoted to John Gill and demonstrative of the pactum’s reception in succeeding generations of Baptists, see Daniel Scheiderer, “John Gill and the Continuing Baptist Affirmation of the Eternal Covenant,” The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 25, no. 1 (2021): 65–90.

The covenant of redemption was first explicitly articulated in the middle of the seventeenth century and has largely been a staple in Reformed theological discourse ever since, as seen in such authors as John Owen, Charles Hodge, and, most recently,

J.V. Fesko. Baptists, likewise, have affirmed the concept of an eternal, or everlasting, covenant since their earliest days, though, for some, its expression has been slightly modified. This article aims to demonstrate the early Baptist reception and contribution to the discussion of the everlasting covenant by outlining the work of Benjamin Keach as he used the doctrine in debates over soteriology. The reasons for using Keach are manifold, but three stand as primary. First, Keach was the most voluminous writer of the first century of Particular Baptists.1 Many influential

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Particular Baptists came before him, both in Britain and the American Colonies, but none wrote and published the great quantity he did. Jonathan Arnold calls him “the most prolific theologian among his group of Dissenters—responsible for more than fifty mostly book-length publications.”2 His output for and reception by the Particular Baptists mark Keach as a key figure in understanding how the everlasting covenant was expressed in the earliest years of the Baptist movement.

Second, Keach fits within the larger Puritan contingent. Great debate certainly surrounds the nomenclature, but there are at least two reasons for placing Keach among the Puritans. First, he substantially agreed with the confessional standard of the Puritans: the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647). This confessional statement laid out the doctrinal standard of all who could be reasonably labeled Puritans: Presbyterians, Independents/ Congreg...