Reformed Baptist (1689)

Four of the six readings here are simply Westminster’s, because the 1689 Confession borrowed Westminster’s words for them: grace monergist to the edge, the gifts ceased, authority Scripture alone, and Israel and the church one people under one covenant of grace.

The Table reading is what makes this tradition itself, and it lands in the middle where the map names nothing. The Confession says believers at the Supper “really and indeed, yet not carnally and corporally, but spiritually, receive and feed upon Christ crucified”, which is Calvin’s language and well above bare remembrance. Yet the same churches baptize only professing believers, and usually preach the Supper as a memorial.

The baptism difference is not a detail bolted onto a Presbyterian frame. Presbyterians baptize infants because believers’ children belong to the covenant as Abraham’s did; the 1689 rewrote that chapter to say the covenant does not pass down by descent. It is entered by faith, and the sign belongs to those who have it.

Worship is free and deliberately so. Nothing enters a service that Scripture does not call for, and each congregation governs itself, so there is no prayer book, no bishop and no imposed order. The result is plain, long on preaching, heavy on singing everyone can join.

The older name for this stream is Particular Baptist, and the word carries the doctrine: particular redemption, the teaching that Christ died to save a particular people rather than to make everyone savable. The General Baptists, who held that He died for everyone, were the other English Baptist family, and the two ran side by side for two centuries. Government is congregational, with elders and deacons and nobody above the local church.