The First and Second confessions and the Catechism originating from Particular Baptist authors and churches, themselves share common ground, for they consistently teach the same system of theology. Though expressions are different in each, there is fundamental agreement between them. Together they present a summary of the faith of their churches for a period of fifty years and beyond.

In 1616, Henry Jacob, a puritan minister of the Church of England forced into exile in the 1590s, returned to London to gather an independent congregation of believers. This church is often referred to as semi-separatist since Jacob maintained positive relations with many ministers serving within the established Church. Little did Mr. Jacob know that his flock would give birth to a movement that would ultimately become known as the Particular Baptists.
Just over two decades later, after Jacob had emigrated to Virginia and been followed in the ministry by John Lathrop and then Henry Jessey, stirrings in the congregation led to the formation of a new congregation, organized on the principle of believer’s baptism. By 1644, there were seven young assemblies in London, each holding a strong commitment to credobaptism within the covenantal framework of predestinarian theology.
These churches bore a superficial resemblance to the Anabaptists of the European continent, simply because they rejected paedobaptism. While there was no influence or connection with these groups from across the Channel, the misdeeds of some Anabaptist sects during the previous century raised fear and suspicion among leading politicians and theologians in London. The presence of separatist congregations formed without authority or recognition from the Church of England was a novelty, by some considered to pose danger to the status quo. Perhaps these seven congregations would repeat the past and foment rebellion or worse.
Matthew Bingham, in his book Orthodox Radicals tells the story well. The Westminster Assembly, meeting at that time to move forward the reformation of the Church of England, demanded that the leaders of these “baptistic congregational” churches provide evidence of their orthodoxy. The situation was tense and dangerous, the result being the publication of a confession of faith, released in the final quarter of 1644. From the perspective of the seven assemblies, this confession was an attempt to find and express common ground with each other (since representatives of each church openly signed the document) and also with the paedobaptist puritans in the national church. It was important to demonstrate orthodoxy in order to relieve the stress of the situation.
Notable observers, including several participants of the Westminster Assembly, examined the published confession. While they found minor faults with it, they begrudgingly acknowledged its orthodoxy, though at least one suspected that it was only an attempt to hide more nefarious doctrines and practices. In response to some of these critiques, the representatives of the new churches revised their document and released a new version in 1646. The changes reflect the original purpose—finding common ground. In many cases, words and phrases were altered directly in response to the appraisals of the paedobaptists. Even their language about baptism was softened! This First London Confession became the basis for the spread of their views around the kingdom. It was adopted by many congregations as they sprang up in different places.
The original seven London churches were outward looking, desiring to spread the good news of Christ to others in the nation. Around 1645, the church frequently identified with its long-serving pastor William Kiffen sent a man named Thomas Collier to the West Country (counties such as Devon, Wiltshire and Somerset). His task was to preach and plant churches, and he was quite successful in doing this, becoming the most prominent leader of the baptized churches in the West. In the early 1670s, Mr. Collier began to exhibit serious doctrinal deviations, and Christians in the churches he planted became deeply concerned.
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We can follow the example of those who have gone before us. This is how we can pray Psalm 137 today. We call on and plead with God to be faithful to his promises. And we know that all of God’s promises find their Yes and Amen in Jesus (2 Corinthians 1:20). The exiles by the waters of Babylon appealed to God’s Word revealed in Scripture and we do the same today. And we have so much more – we have the Word himself who has revealed the glory of the Father (John 1).

Where were you on May 2, 2011? I was at an Usher concert with a few friends. It was a great concert, and I enjoyed hearing Usher perform several hits from his newest album, Raymond v. Raymond. The concert, though, is not the reason I remember that day. I remember May 2, 2011 because of what happened after the concert. As my friends and I left the venue, we noticed a lot of people excitedly looking at their phones. We assumed they were just reliving the concert we all just experienced. Until, that is, a pick-up truck with a huge American flag in the back drove by and a man shouted from the window, “Osama’s dead! We got him!” On May 2, 2011, Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. special forces, and people halfway around the world broke out in jubilant shouts.
What was behind that? How did the killing of a stranger thousands of miles away provoke joy and excitement in the parking lot of an Usher concert? To state it succinctly, celebration broke out in that parking lot because the death of bin Laden represented the satisfaction of a communal grief and rage that was occasioned by an act of true evil.
What about Psalm 137? How could a group of people unflinchingly state, “Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock” and then have the audacity to write such a statement down? More to the point, how does a psalm that celebrates little ones dashed against rocks (Ps. 137:9) belong in the same Bible where Jesus says, “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 19:14)? In Psalm 137, the Bible confronts our modern sensibilities and gives us significant pause. The goal of this article is not to sanitize the passage by reading it allegorically, nor is the goal to assert that this passage is an aberration from the biblical witness. Instead, a careful and faithful reading of Psalm 137 leads us to Christ and, in so doing, provides us with the means by which we can engage with evil and suffering in our world today.
The Bible is a strange book. It’s okay to admit that. Psalm 137 was likely written in the 6th century BC in ancient Hebrew. The cultural and historical setting in which Psalm 137 was expressed is far removed from the United States in 2021. And yet, Christians recognize that presiding over the cultural and personal diversity that led to the Bible is a sovereign, powerful, and single Author. When we encounter passages that highlight cultural distance, our first reaction ought to be a humble curiosity.
Where does Psalm 137 fit in the story of history? The first question a humble curiosity asks is one of context. Indeed, context will provide the key to understanding Psalm 137. Where does Psalm 137 sit in history, in the literary story, and in the redemptive story of Scripture? The historical setting of the psalm is apparent in the very first verse:
By the waters of Babylon,there we sat down and wept,when we remembered Zion.
Robert Alter, a professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, writes of Psalm 137 that, “This psalm was almost certainly composed shortly after the deportation of the Judahites by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E.”[1] Psalm 137 is one of the few psalms which makes clear its own historical context. The psalmist writes of the community of exiles sitting down by the waters of Babylon to weep. The city of Babylon and the surrounding country was known at that time for its extensive system of canals. The Jewish exiles likely retreated to different places of this system in order to gather as a community and, as this psalm makes clear, give voice to their grief.
But why grief? These original Jewish singers of this psalm lived through the capture of Jerusalem, the looting and destruction of the Temple, and their forced exile to Babylon. 2 Kings 25 describes the siege of Jerusalem lasting for two years. The siege resulted in a famine so severe that it led to mothers boiling their children for food (Lam. 4:9-10). The king at that time, Zedekiah, was captured. The Babylonians killed his sons in front of him and then put his eyes out so that the last thing he ever saw was the murder of his sons. The Temple was looted and burned down, along with the palace and all the houses of Jerusalem.
Psalm 137, then, is a song of lament. It is a communal expression of grief, an opportunity for the Jewish people to gather and tell the truth of their oppression. Their lament is further occasioned, however, by a more immediate context. In the midst of their weeping, their Babylonian captors goad them on, “Sing us one of your Zion songs.” These Zion songs are scattered throughout the Psalter and scholars have identified several of them. One of them is Psalm 48, which opens with, “Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised in the city of our God! His holy mountain, beautiful in elevation, is the joy of all the earth, Mount Zion, in the far north, the city of the great King. Within her citadels God has made himself known as a fortress.”
Can you imagine the scene Psalm 137 depicts? The people of Judah are gathered along the canals of Babylon, lamenting the death and destruction visited upon them. And then, like taunting schoolboys, their captors jeer at them: “Sing us one of your songs! How about that one that says Zion is the city of the great king? The one that says God has made himself known as a fortress?” A hermeneutic of humble curiosity necessarily entails empathy, particularly since Christians are grafted into the story of Israel. The story of these Jewish exiles in the 6th century BC is our story. We weep with them.
Where does Psalm 137 fit in the literary story of Scripture? History is not the only important context we must examine. The Bible is a book written by one Author through many individual authors. Where does Psalm 137 fit within that picture? Here it is helpful to introduce the idea of a canonical reading of Scripture. In the 19th and 20th centuries, it became popular among scholars to attempt to trace the various sources of the Bible to disparate authors. Instead of recognizing the unity of Scripture, scholars sought to dissect Scripture, particularly the Old Testament. A professor of Old Testament at Yale University changed this with the introduction of the “canonical reading” of the Bible. Brevard Childs asserted that it was most helpful to approach the Bible as it is received by faith communities. In other words, rather than dissecting Scripture into many individual parts, Childs recognized the Bible as a united literary document which deserved study as such. A canonical reading of the Psalms, then, considers questions such as the arrangement of the psalms and how the book functions as a literary whole.
Scholars have generally identified five ‘books’ within the Psalms. Psalm 137 is located in Book V of the Psalter. This final section of the Psalter consists of Psalms 107-150. O. Palmer Robertson describes Book V as “the climactic praises of the consummation of the kingdom” (emphasis in original).[2] Interestingly, the Psalm itself sits within a trio of Psalms that serve as a hinge between two larger collections within the book. Psalms 120-134 are known collectively as the Songs of Ascent.
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Written by R.C. Sproul |
Friday, May 20, 2022
The union of believers is grounded in the mystical union of Christ and His Church. The Bible speaks of a twoway transaction that occurs when a person is regenerated. Every converted person becomes “in Christ” at the same time Christ enters into the believer. If I am in Christ and you are in Christ, and if He is in us, then we experience a profound unity in Christ.

“One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty . . .” We say it. We argue about it (especially the “under God” part). But is it true? In reality, how united is the United States? The “more perfect union” sought by Lincoln is hardly perfect in terms of harmony. We are a nation—morally, philosophically, and religiously—deeply divided. Yet there remains the outward shell of formal and organizational unity. We have union without unity.
As it is with the “United” States, so it is with the unity of the Christian church. The “oneness” of the church is one of the classic four descriptive terms to define the church. According to the council at Nicaea (325 AD), the Church is one, holy, catholic, and Apostolic.
Few church bodies today give much regard to being Apostolic. Fewer still seem concerned with the dimension of the holy. When these two qualities become irrelevant to the minds of church people, it is a mere chimera to speak of catholicity and unity.
The church, organizationally, is hopelessly fragmented. Since the birth of the “Ecumenical Movement,” the church has seen more splits than mergers. The crisis of disunity is on the front pages following the Episcopal Church’s decision to consecrate a practicing, impenitent homosexual to the role of bishop.
Is unity a false hope? Is it, in its historic expressions, merely an illusion?
To answer these questions we must consider the nature of the unity of the church.
In the first instance, the deepest and most significant unity of the Church is its spiritual unity. Though we can never separate the formal from the material with respect to the Church’s unity, we can and must distinguish them.
It was Augustine who taught most deeply about the distinction between the visible church and the invisible Church. With this classic distinction Augustine did not envision two separate ecclesiastical bodies, one apparent to the naked eye and another beyond the scope of visual perception. Now, did he envision one church that is “underground” and another one above ground, in full view?
No, he was describing a church within a church. Augustine took his cue from our Lord’s teaching that until He purifies His Church in glory, it will continue in this world as a body that will include “tares” along with the “wheat.” The tares are weeds that grow along with the flowers in Christ’s garden.
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