Westminster Confession of Faith (1646/1647)

Framed by the Westminster Assembly of Divines, sent to Parliament on December 4, 1646, and returned with its Scripture proofs on April 29, 1647. The General Assembly of the Church of Scotland approved it on August 27, 1647. It was written to be the common confession of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and it became the doctrinal standard of Presbyterian churches around the world. Adapted by the Congregationalists at the Savoy (1658) and by the Particular Baptists in 1677/1689, it is the parent of much of English-speaking Protestant confession.

B. B. Warfield called it “the ripest fruit of Reformed creed-making, the simple transcript of Reformed thought as it was everywhere expounded by its best representatives in the middle of the seventeenth century.”¹

Background

By 1640 the Church of England was Reformed in its Articles but increasingly ruled by men who were not. Under Archbishop William Laud, Arminian theology, altar-centered ceremony, and the silencing of Calvinist preaching advanced together. Harry Lee Poe notes that in 1626 King Charles prohibited further preaching on the Arminian-Calvinist debate, a proclamation that, in the words of an account Poe quotes, “became the stopping of the Puritans mouths, and an uncontrolled liberty to the tongues and pens of the Arminian Party.”² Laud himself ranked the altar above the pulpit:

I say the greatest, yea greater than the pulpit, for there it is “Hoc est Corpus Meum,” This is my body; but in the pulpit, it is at most “Hoc est Verbum Meum,” This is my word. William Laudquoted in Poe, “The Primacy of Preaching”

Warfield describes how the alignment hardened: “it was King and prelate on the one side, against Parliament and Puritan on the other.”³ The Long Parliament abolished the bishops and called a synod of divines to advise it on the settlement of the Church. That synod met at Westminster Abbey on July 1, 1643. Its first assignment was a revision of the Thirty-Nine Articles.

Then the war changed its task. Needing a Scottish army, Parliament entered the Solemn League and Covenant in September 1643. The three kingdoms bound themselves to the reformation of religion “according to the word of God and the example of the best reformed Churches,” so that their churches might be brought “to the nearest conjunction and uniformity in religion, confession of faith, form of Church government, directory for worship and catechizing.”⁴ A new confession for three nations was now required. Work began in committee on August 20, 1644, and the whole was laid before Parliament on December 4, 1646.⁵

Connections to the Wider Reformation

Westminster was not a new beginning. It was the English Reformation finishing what it had started. Warfield sets the Assembly within Protestantism’s “second age,” whose task was:

to work out to its legitimate issue what had been auspiciously begun in the great revolution of the preceding period; to secure from disintegration what had been won in that revolution; to protect it from reaction; and to repel the destructive forces set in motion against it by the counter-reformation. B. B. WarfieldThe Westminster Assembly and Its Work

The Confession is joined to the Reformation at several points:

The English Reformation. Warfield explains that in England, “on its official side, the Reformation was fundamentally a contest between the King and the Pope.” Henry VIII put the crown where the Pope had been, and a century later Parliament and the Puritans had to fight the crown for the Church. Westminster’s first labor, the revision of the Thirty-Nine Articles, shows what it was building on.

Ireland and Dort. The divines drew “particularly” on the Irish Articles of 1615, believed to be Ussher’s work. From these they took “the general arrangement of their Confession” and much of its treatment of its chief articles.⁶ The Arminian controversy settled on the Continent at the Synod of Dort (1618–1619) was the same controversy Laud had carried into England. The Confession’s chapter on God’s eternal decree answered it.

Scotland. The Scots who sat with the Assembly were heirs of John Knox and the Scots Confession of 1560. Their General Assembly welcomed the new Confession as “a great strengthening of the true reformed religion against the common enemies thereof.”⁷

The Reformed world. Warfield insists the divines wrote “in the full light of the whole body of Reformed thought,” for “intercourse between the British and the Continental Reformed was constant, and the solidarity of their consciousness was complete.”⁸

Motivating Convictions

Scripture alone, and Scripture sufficient. The Confession opens with what Warfield called “probably the finest single chapter in any Protestant Confession.”⁹ Its authority “dependeth not upon the testimony of any man or church, but wholly upon God” (1.4). It holds “the whole counsel of God,” to which nothing is to be added “whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men” (1.6). And it is the final court of appeal:

The supreme Judge, by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture. Westminster Confession1.10

Free grace. Against the Arminianism that had been protected from the pulpit, the divines confessed that God “freely and unchangeably” ordains whatever comes to pass (3.1), and that he justifies sinners “not for any thing wrought in them, or done by them, but for Christ’s sake alone” (11.1). This is sola fide in its mature confessional form.

Worship by God’s word, not man’s. Laud’s altar and ceremonies were answered by chapter 21: God “may not be worshipped according to the imaginations and devices of men … or any other way not prescribed in the holy scripture” (21.1). And “God alone is Lord of the conscience” (20.2).

Truth taught at home. The Westminster standards were meant for families as well as pulpits. Thomas Manton’s epistle, printed with the Scottish editions, passes on a pastor’s counsel to every head of a household:

First, let them read and learn the Shorter Catechism, and next the Larger, and lastly, read the Confession of Faith. Quoted by Thomas MantonEpistle to the Reader

Costs and Hardships

The Assembly was born in defiance and worked through war. It met, Warfield records, “in defiance of an inhibitory proclamation from the King.”¹⁰ Outside the Jerusalem Chamber, as Poe puts it, “the Puritans and their allies in Parliament exchanged their Bibles and pulpits for swords and pikes.”¹¹ The cost had begun long before. Under Elizabeth’s bishops, Poe writes, “large numbers of Puritans suffered the consequences of their convictions and accepted suspension or deprivation.”¹²

Then the settlement collapsed. Parliament never fully adopted the Assembly’s work, the army set the Covenant aside, and in 1660 the king and the bishops returned. Warfield’s verdict is blunt: “so far as the successful issue of their labors depended on alliance with a friendly state, their work, as regards England at least, had failed.”¹³

The men who held its doctrine paid for it. Under the Act of Uniformity of 1662, “some 2,000 ministers refused their assent” and “were expelled from the church in the Great Ejection.”¹⁴ McBeth reckons it “about 20 percent of English clergy,” Presbyterians and Congregationalists among them.¹⁵ In England, Warfield notes, the Confession “became the Creed of the Non-Conformists” — a creed of the ejected and the outlawed.¹⁶

Warfield drew the lesson. The Assembly’s tie to the state “was not the strength of the Assembly, but its weakness,” because its work was religious, not political:

Whatever real authority the formularies it had framed possessed, was inherent in them as sound presentations of truth, not derived from extraneous sources. And by the inherent power of their truth they have held sway and won a way for themselves to the real triumph of the voluntary adhesion of multitudes of Christian men. B. B. WarfieldThe Westminster Assembly and Its Work

Read the Confession

Creeds and Confessions