During the late 20th Century, American evangelicals placed renewed emphasis on the spiritual disciplines through influential writings like Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline, Dallas Willard’s The Spirit of the Disciplines, and Donald Whitney’s Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life. These books, with combined sales in the millions, have exerted a generational influence regarding Christian practices in the church and the academy. Each of these influential books appeals to Scripture and history for warrants and examples of various spiritual disciplines, yet one stream of historical writing that received scant attention in these important books is the confession of faith.
Newer, longer, and narrower than the Church’s ecumenical creeds, confessions of faith may seem an unlikely source for spiritual reflection. How might an examination of denominational confessions of faith enrich our understanding and practice of spiritual disciplines?
This paper proposes turning to a 19th Century Baptist confession, The New Hampshire Confession, for a new (old) way of identifying and encouraging the practice of, and reflection on, spiritual disciplines. Among denominational confessions, New Hampshire is rare in that it names five specific practices, provides a biblical grounding for each discipline, yet leaves a place for other disciplines. This paper argues that The New Hampshire Confession is an overlooked source of spiritual theology that offers terminological cohesion to contemporary reflection on the spiritual disciplines.