A good confession that is well-known offers a tool to help Christian churches identify other churches with whom they may have much in common, and with whom they might profitably plant churches or engage in doctrinally rich gospel ministry. Of course, it is only a tool. As with hammers, so with confessions: it is not enough to have it; it matters how we hold it.

ABSTRACT: The theologians gathered in 1643 for the Westminster Assembly did not intend to write a new confession of faith. But due to war, politics, and the internal workings of the assembly, those gathered eventually produced a document, divided into 33 chapters, that joined the classical doctrines of the Christian faith with the full harvest of Reformed theology. The Westminster Confession of Faith would soon become the most famous and influential confession produced in the English language. Today, its doctrines still shape churches throughout the English-speaking world and beyond, setting before God’s people truths worth studying, praying, and singing.

A new confession was not necessary to deal with doctrinal problems in seventeenth-century England. Ever since Arminianism had emerged in the late sixteenth century and been exported to England, the country’s “Calvinist” ministers insisted that the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England already spoke with a Reformed accent.

Nor would a new confession be needed to deal with church government. After all, Puritans — and almost everyone at the Westminster Assembly was a Puritan! — always found some workaround or another to deal with heavy-handed bishops of the English church.

A new confession was not even needed to address the problem of worship. If worship was to be purified, and along the way, simplified, that work would have to be done in some other document. In fact, some other document would also be best to deal with any necessary changes in church government too, if it came to that.

Nonetheless, a confession was written. It is easily the most famous doctrinal formulation ever produced in the English language. It is the single text, next to the Bible, most influential in the history of Scottish, American, and Irish Protestant church life. Through missionary endeavors and church expansion, it has also had a profound impact on the churches in many other nations. In its various forms (first Presbyterian, then Congregationalist in 1658, and finally Baptist in 1689), it has perhaps outstripped the use made of the Thirty-Nine Articles by worldwide Anglicans.

This article explains why the authors of this confession assembled, what they accomplished, what their confession teaches, and why the Westminster Confession of Faith is still worthy of our attention today.

Why Westminster Assembled

First called “The Assembly of Divines,” the Westminster Assembly had been convened by the parliament of England to reform the church. England’s rebel parliament was at war with its king, Charles I, over matters political, economic, and religious. The assembly of divines, or theologians, was appointed to deal with matters doctrinal, governmental, and liturgical — it was called to create theological solutions to theological problems.

There were long-term problems in England, beginning in the reign of Edward VI (1547–1553) and, by and large, getting worse during the long reigns of Elizabeth (1558–1603), James (1603–1625), and Charles (1625–1649). Each had insisted on having the last word in any dispute about the life of the church. For Charles it meant compromises with Arminianism and Catholicism. For James it meant enlarging the role of bishops. For Elizabeth it meant reducing the quantity of preachers and preaching. And those who objected that these monarchs were usurping the role of ministers, and sometimes usurping the role of Christ himself, were punished harshly: fines were levied, preachers were removed from their pulpits, and faithful men were exiled, imprisoned, or maimed, some losing their tongues or ears, others being branded with hot irons on their faces.

There were also short-term problems leading to war, almost too complicated to describe. King Charles I ruled over three countries: England, Scotland, and Ireland. His mismanagement of each — and especially the over-extension of his “executive,” or royal, powers — eventually alienated his monied subjects (concerned about uncontrolled methods of taxation), his parliaments (worried about arbitrary government), and many of his more Reformed subjects (convinced of the tyranny of Charles’s bishops). By the end of the 1640s, each country had not only been devastated by civil war, but had exported troops to one or more of the king’s other dominions: Irish soldiers found themselves fighting in Scotland, the Scots marched into England, and the English slaughtered the Irish. The result in some places (such as England) was the highest percentage of lives lost in recorded history, not even surpassed by the horrors of World War I or II.¹

It is in this context that the assembly met to play their part in extinguishing the fires of war, which had been stoked, as assembly members saw it, by the king and his leading bishops. Many of the 120 ministers called together in July of 1643 had suffered for teaching the whole counsel of God, with perhaps a third of them having survived stints in prison (the Puritan equivalent of a sabbatical). With the onset of war, a few did thrive financially, but most suffered hardships, and many lost family, friends, libraries, or homes due to the ravages of war.

I mention these problems because it explains why the assembly was called. We need to know this too because it tells us what kind of men came: these were men who had followed in the footsteps of their Savior, despised and rejected by men, themselves men of sorrows and acquainted with grief. We need to know these things because, with bloody battles all around, God enabled these men to produce a confession of faith that was at once wise to the subject of suffering, and yet savoring of the gospel of peace.

How the Assembly Worked

The members of the Westminster Assembly worked in deadly earnest, and at an unsustainable pace. In the first five years of its existence, the assembly met five, sometimes six days per week; in that same period, the gathering allowed itself only two weeks of holiday. But that is not all. It became quickly apparent that the cash-strapped parliament was (understandably) more worried about paying its soldiers than its theologians. Thus, members who moved from around the country to attend the assembly were, on top of their duties in the assembly, forced to serve as pastors in London churches just to make ends meet. Although many men at the assembly had been academics at some point, every member of the assembly was serving or had served as a pastor. So they did not necessarily, at least at first, need to build every sermon from the bottom up. But in addition to morning meetings, where the assembly met as a whole, and afternoon meetings, where the gathering met in committees, members preached two or three times per week or more, with the more ambitious ones also writing books in their spare time.

The Divines

The gathering was led by the bookish but learned William Twisse, who offered one of the first major attacks in England against the theology of Jacobus Arminius. His assistants were learned men too — Cornelius Burges (an understudied Puritan if there ever were one) and John White, famous both as “father” of Massachusetts and as the minister whose earnest prayers, powerful preaching, and a profitable brewery turned the town of Dorchester into England’s Geneva, a story ably told by the social historian David Underdown.²

Everybody who was anybody in the Puritan world was there too: William Gouge, Stephen Marshall, and Edmund Calamy were present as England’s most famous preachers in the 1630s, 1640s, and 1650s. The congregationalist Thomas Goodwin was there with his friends the learned William Bridge and the influential Philip Nye. Old Testament scholars like Lazarus Seaman and John Lightfoot were crammed into the Jerusalem Chamber too, as were the authors of works of popular devotion, like Henry Scudder, famous for his runaway best seller, The Christian’s Daily Walk. Thirty politicians were present also: having seen the populace so badly treated by prelates throughout the land, members of parliament were convinced they needed to keep a close eye on the preachers they had brought to Westminster Abbey.

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