The Westminster Assembly
Westminster Abbey · first sat July 1, 1643 · 1,163 numbered sessions to February 22, 1649, and a shadow existence to 1653 · the most productive theological assembly in the history of the English-speaking church.
t met in defiance of a royal proclamation forbidding it, in a country at war with
itself, to settle the religion of three kingdoms. It sat for five and a half years,
from nine in the morning until two in the afternoon, through plague and battles and the
deaths of twenty-two of its own members, and it produced a confession, two catechisms,
a directory for worship, and a form of church government.
And it failed. The church it was convened to reform rejected its work within twenty years and has never adopted it since.
That paradox is the most interesting thing about the Assembly, and this page is mostly about how both halves came to be true.
What it was, and was not. The Assembly was not a synod of the church. It was an advisory body to Parliament, created by parliamentary ordinance, and it could take up only what Parliament referred to it. Its members were nominated by Parliament rather than elected by churches, and its conclusions were recommendations that Parliament was free to amend or ignore.
For the documents themselves, see the Confession of Faith, the Larger Catechism, and the Shorter Catechism.
Why Parliament Called It
Both Houses had passed a bill for an assembly in June 1642 and Charles I had withheld his assent. A year later, with king and Parliament openly at war, Parliament passed an ordinance on June 12, 1643, calling the Assembly on its own authority.
The stated purpose was assistance in settling a government for the Church of England most agreeable to God's holy Word and most apt to procure and preserve the peace of the church. The immediate task assigned was modest: revise the Thirty-Nine Articles. The first weeks were spent doing exactly that.
Charles issued a proclamation forbidding the Assembly to meet. It met anyway, on July 1, 1643, in the Chapel of Henry VII, after a sermon by William Twisse, whom Parliament had named prolocutor, preached to both Houses and a great crowd. In winter the divines moved into the Jerusalem Chamber, which is where most of the work was done.
The Men in the Room
The ordinance named 121 ministers, together with ten peers and twenty members of the Commons as lay assessors. Not all attended. The king had forbidden it and some obeyed; three bishops were named and none took part in the main work. Sixty-nine gathered for the opening session, and the usual attendance across the years was around sixty.
It was nonetheless an extraordinary gathering. Twisse presided until his death in 1646, when Charles Herle succeeded him. Anthony Tuckney, Herbert Palmer, Edmund Calamy, Stephen Marshall, John Lightfoot, William Gouge, Thomas Goodwin, and Jeremiah Burroughes sat among them. Twenty-two of the divines died before the numbered sessions ended.
They also worked hard. Sessions ran five hours a day, and the plenary meetings were only part of it — the detailed drafting was done in committees, of which there were a great many, meeting in the afternoons.
The Solemn League and Covenant
Everything changed in September 1643, and it changed for military reasons.
Parliament was losing the war and needed the Scots. The price of a Scottish army was the Solemn League and Covenant, by which the three kingdoms bound themselves to preserve the reformed religion in Scotland and to reform religion in England and Ireland according to the Word of God and the example of the best reformed churches. The English signed knowing what the Scots meant by that; the Scots signed knowing the English had left themselves room.
Scottish commissioners joined the Assembly — Alexander Henderson, Samuel Rutherford, George Gillespie, and Robert Baillie among the divines, with Lord Maitland and Archibald Johnston of Wariston as lay commissioners. They had no vote. They shaped the outcome anyway, out of all proportion to their number, by argument and by persistence and by the political weight of the army standing behind them.
The revision of the Thirty-Nine Articles was abandoned. The Assembly would now write new standards for three kingdoms.
Four Parties
- Presbyterians, the clear majority, perhaps sixty or seventy of those regularly attending, formed by the Elizabethan Puritan tradition of Cartwright and Travers and by the Scottish example.
- Independents, few but formidable — the Dissenting Brethren, led by Thomas Goodwin and Philip Nye, who held for the autonomy of the local congregation and published their Apologeticall Narration in 1644 to take their case to the public.
- Erastians, smaller still, who held that the civil magistrate is supreme in the church. Their great spokesman was John Selden, the finest legal and oriental scholar in England, who sat as a member for the Commons and was more than a match for most of the divines.
- Episcopalians, named in the ordinance but effectively absent, having obeyed the king.
The Presbyterians could outvote the others in the Assembly. They could not outvote Parliament, where the Erastians had powerful friends, or the New Model Army, which was increasingly Independent. That is the whole political story of the Assembly in three sentences.
The Long Debate
Doctrine proved comparatively easy. Church government took years, and the sharpest question within it was excommunication: does the church possess, by Christ's own appointment, the authority to exclude a person from the sacrament, or is that a civil censure requiring the magistrate's consent?
Selden argued that excommunication as a church ordinance lacked scriptural warrant, citing rabbinic sources and the history of the early synods to show that discipline had required the magistrate's approval. Gillespie and the Presbyterians answered that the keys are Christ's delegated spiritual sword, given to the church and not to the state, and that a church which cannot fence its own table has no discipline at all.
On March 20, 1646, the Assembly voted seventy-six to twenty-nine that excommunication is the church's own ordinance.1 Parliament then declined to ratify the full presbyterial system, and by ordinance reserved to itself appellate authority over church discipline. The divines had won the argument in the room and lost it in the building next door.
This is the same question that runs under every assembly in this section — Zurich in 1523, the Diet of Augsburg in 1530, Dordrecht in 1578, and Dort in 1618. Who governs the church? At Westminster the church gave the clearest answer of the four, and the state overruled it.
What It Produced
The Directory for Ordination, sent to Parliament in April 1644, and propositions on church government through that autumn.
The Form of Presbyterial Church Government (1644–45).
The Directory for the Publick Worship of God (1645), which replaced the Book of Common Prayer — not a liturgy but a guide to the ordering of worship, with the sermon at its center.
The Confession of Faith, completed and presented in December 1646, with the Scripture proofs following in 1647.
The Larger Catechism, forwarded October 22, 1647, and the Shorter Catechism, presented to the Commons on November 25, 1647.
A metrical psalter, the work on which fed into the Scottish Psalter of 1650.
Four of those documents are still in use. That is a remarkable return on five and a half years, particularly for a body that was simultaneously advising Parliament on ordinations, examining ministers, and keeping monthly fasts with both Houses.
What Became of It
The last of the Scottish commissioners left on November 9, 1647. On February 22, 1649, after 1,163 numbered sessions, Parliament converted what remained of the Assembly into a committee for trying and examining ministers, and in that form it held weekly sittings until the Long Parliament was dissolved in April 1653.
It was never formally dissolved. It simply expired with the Parliament that had made it.
In England its work lasted only as long as the Commonwealth. At the Restoration in 1660 the whole settlement was revoked, and the Act of Uniformity of 1662 ejected some two thousand ministers who would not conform — the Great Ejection, and the end of Puritanism as a force within the Church of England.
In Scotland it was another story entirely. The General Assembly of the Church of Scotland adopted the Confession in 1647 and the catechisms in 1648, and the Scottish Parliament ratified them. From Scotland they traveled with Presbyterian emigration to Ulster, to the American colonies, and across the world.
The Irony
An English assembly, called by an English Parliament to reform the English church, produced standards that the English church never adopted but have come to govern Presbyterian churches on every continent.
It is worth asking why, because the answer is not simply political misfortune.
The Assembly was the creature of a Parliament that wanted a reformed church but not an independent one. It could deliberate only on what was referred to it. Its conclusions were advice. When it concluded that Christ had given the keys to the church rather than to the magistrate, it was telling the body that had created it that the body that had created it had exceeded its competence — and no assembly constituted that way wins that argument.
The paradox is that this is precisely why the standards traveled so well. Because they were never successfully enforced by an English state, they arrived everywhere else as a confession rather than as a statute, adopted by churches that chose them. The Confession has outlived the Commonwealth, the Restoration, and the establishment it was written to reform, and it has done so in churches that had no parliament behind them at all.
Why It Matters
It produced the high-water mark of English Reformed theology. Nothing before or since in the English-speaking world has gathered so much theological ability for so long on one task.
Its standards are still confessional law. Presbyterian churches worldwide subscribe the Confession and catechisms, and the Shorter Catechism remains the most widely learned Reformed catechism in English.
It tested the crown rights of the Redeemer against a real state. The vote of March 1646 and Parliament's refusal to ratify it are the clearest case in the Reformation of a church stating the principle plainly and being overruled — which is why later Presbyterians, from the Covenanters to the Disruption of 1843, kept returning to it.
It shows what the Puritans were actually like. Not a sect of killjoys, but a body of learned pastors arguing for five years about the government of the church, sitting five hours a day in a cold room while their country tore itself apart, and writing for children a first question about enjoying God forever.
