Westminster Confession

The Westminster Confession of Faith is a Reformed confession of faith produced by the Westminster Assembly, an assembly of English and Scottish divines convened by the Long Parliament in 1643.¹ Completed in late 1646 and submitted to Parliament, it was adopted by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and became the doctrinal standard of Presbyterian churches worldwide.¹ English Congregationalists revised it as the Savoy Declaration (1658), and Particular Baptists revised it again as the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith.²

Historical Origin

The Westminster Assembly was convened by an act of the Long Parliament passed June 12, 1643, its original call embracing “ten lords and twenty commoners as lay members, and one hundred and twenty-one divines,” with twenty more ministers added afterward, representing “all shades of opinion as to Church Government.”¹ Boettner gives a close but not identical count: “one hundred and twenty-one ministers or theologians, eleven lords, twenty commoners, from all the counties of England and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, with seven commissioners from Scotland,” its work extending “over a period of five and one half years.”³ Hodge dates the body’s sessions from “1st of July, 1643, to 22d of February, 1649.”¹ The Confession itself was substantially finished sooner: Waldron dates it as “completed in the final days of 1646 and submitted to Parliament,” noting the exact year commonly cited varies “depending on which of several events is chosen to mark its origin.”²

Westminster Standards

Alongside the Confession, the Assembly produced a Larger Catechism and a Shorter Catechism, together with a Directory of Public Worship and a Form of Church Government; the five documents together are known as the Westminster Standards.¹ Waldron notes the Shorter Catechism in particular “exercised an influence equal or superior to” the Heidelberg Catechism among later Reformed churches.²

Reception and Influence

The Confession and Catechisms “were immediately adopted by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland,” and became, together with the catechisms, “the doctrinal standard of all the Presbyterian bodies in the world of English and Scotch derivation.”¹ English Congregationalists gave the Confession a lasting but distinct legacy of their own: gathered at Savoy in London in 1658, they “declared their approval of the doctrinal part of the Confession and Catechisms of the Westminster Assembly, and conformed their own deliverance, the Savoy Declaration, very nearly to it,” so that later Independents “in a manner laid aside the use of” their own Savoy Declaration and used the Westminster Assembly’s Catechisms instead.¹ The Confession also shaped New England Congregationalism directly: synods meeting at Cambridge, Massachusetts (1647-1648), Boston (1679-1680), and Saybrook, Connecticut (1708) each endorsed or adapted it as the doctrinal basis of their own platforms.¹

Relationship to the 1689 Baptist Confession

The Savoy Declaration was itself revised a second time by English Particular Baptists. Waldron calls the result, the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith, of “greater historical importance” than the Savoy Declaration: “this Baptist revision of The Savoy Declaration and Westminster Confession was (probably) originally framed in 1677,” and “adopted in London in 1689 by representatives of perhaps 100 Calvinistic Baptist churches.”² It was later adopted, with two minor revisions, by the Philadelphia Association in 1742, becoming known as the Philadelphia Confession of Faith.² Waldron summarizes where the Baptist revision actually departs from its Presbyterian source: it “differs from the Westminster on issues of church, state, covenant, and baptism primarily,” while retaining the great majority of the Confession’s own doctrinal statements unchanged.²

Related Doctrines

References

Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 7, “Creeds and Confessions.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸
Samuel Eldon Waldron, Faith, Obedience, and Justification: Current Evangelical Departures from Sola Fide (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2005), 122-123. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1932), 248-249. ↩