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| Benjamin Keach was pilloried for writing a catechism |
Keach, a Calvinist theologian
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| Benjamin Keach (29 February 1640 – 18 July 1704) was a Particular Baptist preacher and author in London whose name was given to Keach's Catechism. |
Given Keach’s importance within the denomination, his solid commitment to Calvinism was very influential. Consider, for example, his final major work, Gospel Mysteries Unveiled, published only three years before his death in 1704. This work was originally a series of sermons which exhaustively expounded all of Christ’s parables and similitudes. The discussion of the parable of the lost sheep (Luke 15:4-7), for instance, ran to sixteen sermons and well over a hundred pages in the four-volume edition that was issued in the 1810s. Now, in his fifteenth sermon on this particular parable, Keach presents an understanding of regeneration and conversion that was common to most Calvinistic Baptists of his day and served to distinguish them from other denominational bodies like the Presbyterians who were fast moving out of the Calvinist orbit.
The parable of the lost sheep
Keach begins by observing that this parable clearly teaches that “lost sinners cannot go home to God of themselves,” but must be carried to him on the shoulders of Christ. To Keach this doctrinal conclusion was clear first of all from the reference to the lost sheep being placed on the shoulders of the shepherd. When other passages of Scripture talk of the “finger of God” (Luke 11:20) or the “arm of the Lord” (Isaiah 53:1), these anthropomorphisms are to be understood as references to God’s power. Likewise, Keach reasons, the mention of the shepherd’s shoulders in Luke 15:5 must be a reference to “Christ’s efficacious and effectual power,” especially, given the nature of the parable, as it relates to “regenerating and converting.”  |
| James Tissot - The Good Shepherd (Le bon pasteur) - Brooklyn Museum |
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| Depiction of the Good Shepherd by Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne showing the influence of this parable. |
Regeneration is wholly God’s work
Keach then adduces further Scriptural proof that regeneration was wholly God’s work, a work in which men and women are entirely passive. There was, for example, John 15:5, where Christ informed the apostles, “without me ye can do nothing.” This verse clearly has to do with the living out of the Christian life, but Keach evidently sees principles embedded in it that also apply to entry into that life. Keach understands Christ’s statement “without me” to be a reference to Christ’s “almighty arm … made bare” and his “power exerted.” If it be true, therefore, that Christ’s power is vital for the presence of “acceptable fruit to God” during the Christian life, how much more is it the case that this power is required for “a sinner’s implantation into Christ.” Yet, because the verse has to do with living a fruitful Christian life, which involves effort on part of both the believer and Christ, it does not really substantiate Keach’s assertion that the sinner is passive in regeneration. |
| Keach Pilloried at Aylesbury |
God inclines, bows, and subjects the stubborn and rebellious will to believe and receive the Lord Jesus Christ
The next verse that he cites, John 6:44a—“No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him”—is much more germane. The drawing involved here, according to Keach, is “the sublime and irresistible influences of the holy God upon the heart, by which he inclines, bows, and subjects the stubborn and rebellious will to believe and receive the Lord Jesus Christ.” Keach rightly links this verse with one later in the same chapter: “no man can come unto me, except it were given unto him of my Father” (John 6:65). That which is given, Keach emphasizes, is what enables a sinner to come to Christ: the gift of the indwelling Spirit, the affections of a new heart, grace, faith, and divine power.
The children of God are born of God, not of man
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| An illustration of normal head-first presentation by the obstetrician William Smellie from about 1792. The membranes have rupturedand the cervix is fully dilated. |
The third text that Keach cites is yet another Johannine one, John 1:13. The children of God, this verse asserts, are born “not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” Regeneration is not based on one’s physical lineage, nor on one’s “legal privileges” (so Keach reads “nor of the will of the flesh”). Nor is the new birth accomplished by any “power of man’s will, for “before a vital principle is infused” into a person, all that he or she can do are “dead works.” The “plain and evident” declaration of this verse is that “God is the efficient or great agent in regeneration.”
The preacher cannot render his preaching effective
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| The painting Savonarola Preaching Against Prodigality (1879) shows the Florentine preacher Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498) denouncing frivolous possessions and activities, in preparation for a bonfire of vanities by Ludwig von Langenmantel. |
The Baptist preacher then quotes a series of Pauline verses—Romans 9:16; Titus 3:5–6; 2 Corinthians 3:5; 4:7; Philippians 2:12–13—as further confirmation of his position. With regard to the two texts from 2 Corinthians, Keach especially emphasizes that when it came to preaching, it was not the preacher who could effect the change about which he had been talking. It is not “in the power of the most able minister in the world, that the word preached becomes effectual; no, no,…it is from God” that preaching receives the power to change the hearts of men and women.
In regeneration the unbeliever's enmity towards God is taken away and replaced by love and delight for God
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| "The Regeneration of Mother Earth", Contemporary Folk Art Painting by Jeanne Fry |
In the next section of this sermon Keach provides additional arguments in support of his perspective on regeneration. These are based on a variety of Scripture texts, most of them drawn from the New Testament. It is in this section of the sermon that Keach defines what he understands regeneration and conversion to be. Regeneration he describes as “the forming of Christ in the soul,” a new creation or a new birth, which is accomplished by the agency of the Holy Spirit. Keach believes that regeneration takes place when the Holy Spirit comes to indwell a person, and a new nature, that of Christ, is formed within the heart of that individual. By this means the enmity towards God that grips the heart of every unbeliever is taken away, and a love and delight for God as their chiefest good imparted. Moreover, just as an unborn child contributes nothing towards its formation in the womb, so are “sinners wholly passive in regeneration.”
In conversion, Christ seeks us first
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| Constantine's conversion, by Rubens. |
When Keach comes to define conversion he includes what he had already said about regeneration and thus appears to blur the distinction between the two terms. Conversion, he states, involves a “two-fold act”:
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| The Conversion of Saul on the road to Damascus as painted by Michelangelo |
(1) Passive, which is the act of God’s Spirit, by which he infuseth a vital principle, and gracious habits, or divine qualities in the soul: in this act the creature is wholly passive. Christ…infuses life in the dead soul, as he did to dead Lazarus.
(2) Active, whereby through the power of that grace, the sinner being quickened, is capacitated to believe, and return to God: being acted, we act; for the Holy Spirit…so moves the soul, and the soul acts, and moves towards God. …first the sinner’s heart is turned, and then the sinner returneth, then, and not till then: if Christ sought us not first, and found us not first, and took not us up first by his arms and shoulders of divine power, we should never seek, find, nor return to him.
The passive act is wholly an act of God to which humans contribute nothing
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| Benjamin Keach, Pillory |
Although this passage shows Keach failing to observe a clear distinction between the two terms, his meaning is clear. What he calls the “passive” aspect of this “two-fold act” is what he has already termed “regeneration.” It is wholly an act of God, to which human beings contribute nothing. The Holy Spirit comes into the soul, and gives it both the power and the desire to turn to God. Thus, it is in regeneration that “the seed of actual conversion is sown” in a person’s heart. In conversion, on the other hand, the individual is vitally involved as his or her newly-given capacity to turn to God is now exercised.
Keach’s pulpit ministry was characterized by vigorous evangelism and regular calls to the unconverted
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| Billy Graham by Boris Chaliapin (1904 – 1979) |
Keach’s pulpit ministry was characterized by vigorous evangelism and regular calls to the unconverted to respond to Christ in faith. According to C.H. Spurgeon, in speaking to the lost Keach was “intensely direct, solemn, and impressive, not flinching to declare the terrors of the Lord, nor veiling the freeness of divine grace.” Typical of Keach’s evangelistic appeals to the unconverted is the following, cited by Spurgeon to illustrate the above statement:
Christ is able to save you
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| Allegory of Salvation by Antonius Heusler (ca. 1555) |
Come, venture, your souls on Christ’s righteousness; Christ is able to save you though you are ever so great sinners. Come to him, throw yourselves at the feet of Jesus. Look to Jesus, who came to seek and save them that were lost… You may have the water of life freely. Do not say, “I want qualifications or a meekness to come to Christ.” Sinner, dost thou thirst? Dost thou see a want of righteousness? ’Tis not a righteousness; but ’tis a sense of the want of righteousness, which is rather the qualification thou shouldst look at. Christ hath righteousness sufficient to clothe you, bread of life to feed you, grace to adorn you. Whatever you want, it is to be had in him. We tell you there is help in him, salvation in him. “Through the propitiation in his blood” you must be justified, and that by faith alone.
Here we see the Baptist evangelism at its best: cleaving to Christ alone for salvation and intensely desirous that others might truly know this joy.
Source: Haykin, Michael A.G. "LECTURES 1–2: THE ENGLISH PARTICULAR BAPTISTS, 1640s–1740s." Pages 23-29.
