THE STORY OF THE

WESTMINSTER CONFESSION
OF FAITH

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.
For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors and Christian leaders, we asked Chad Van Dixhoorn,
professor of church history at Westminster Theological Seminary, to share the story of the Westminster
Assembly and Confession.
The Westminster Assembly had not planned to write the Westminster
Confession of Faith.

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.

“The confession brought together the classical

doctrines of the Christian church and the full
harvest of Reformed theology.”

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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.

THE PROCEEDINGS
After a summer of revising the Thirty-Nine Articles (it turns out that, given
the chance, Puritans were willing to improve upon it), the gathering
suddenly found its work interrupted. The English Parliament was doing
poorly in its war against the king, but it managed to sign a treaty, the
Solemn League and Covenant, with like-minded Scottish Presbyterians to
the north. Scottish rebels had controlled a significant army, and promised
to send it south to help the English if only they would pledge to more
thoroughly reform the Church of England. And thus it happened that the
scores of ministers in the assembly were joined by ministers of the Church
of Scotland, such as George Gillespie and Samuel Rutherford, as well as by a
few members of the Scottish nobility.

“One topic flows into the next, like water through a

series of locks.”

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It was the presence of these Scottish members and the promise of the
Solemn League and Covenant that led the Westminster Assembly to create
new texts for all of Charles’s churches, including a new confession of faith.
But the first task in the autumn of 1643 was to figure out how to address the
shortage of ministers in the church. The assembly first asked what a pastor
is, what he is to do, and how he is to be installed or ordained, concluding
(for the first time in English history!) that all ministers are pastors (rather
than the bishops only) and that all pastors must be preachers, for prior to
this point preaching was an optional extra for an ordained clergyman.

In 1644, the assembly addressed the practicalities of worship, creating a do-

it-yourself Directory for Public Worship in place of the already-assembled
liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer. The assembly also produced a
mostly new psalter — an unpopular work that was more literal and less
singable than the one it was supposed to replace.

With both of these works in hand by 1645, the assembly pivoted back to the
subject of church governance in what would prove to be an especially
tempestuous year. The assembly had largely decided in 1643 that it would
abandon episcopacy (church government through bishops). It then debated
whether, with bishops put out to pasture, the church would be governed by
the elders of congregations only (Congregationalism), or, as the majority
eventually decided, by both congregational elderships and regional
elderships — the latter “Presbyterian” option allowing for broader input on
matters that affect all the churches of a given area, such as the testing and
ordination of ministers, alleged abuses of church government, and the grave
censure of excommunication (the assembly assumed that if a member was
removed from one church of Christ, he was removed from the whole church
of Christ).

The gathering’s work on church governance not only exposed a fissure

among the godly men called to serve in the gathering; it also created a
division between the majority in the assembly and the House of Commons
(the lower and larger of the two houses of parliament). When it came to
church discipline, all members of the assembly assumed that if someone
unrepentantly refused to confess the faith or live the life of a Christian, then
it was the task of the elders to suspend that person from the Lord’s Supper.
The House of Commons, filled with people who had tried to protect godly
people, including themselves, from the severe censures of the bishops, were
unwilling to allow local elderships to exercise church discipline. The final
text approved by parliament for use in 1646 was shorn of its biblical support
and allowed for the meddling of the state in the government of the church,
leading to heated debates, crushed spirits, and strained relations between
the politicians and the pastors.3

THE RESULT
The interesting thing about these conflicts both within and without the
assembly — and I did not even begin to mention the many other errors that
cropped up during the chaos of the civil war, such as errors about the
Trinity or justification, to choose two accessible examples — is that the
Westminster Assembly was forced to write with an increased alertness
about a wider range of doctrinal errors. 4 It forced additional precision about
a wider range of topics, thus expanding its usefulness and its shelf life for
later users of these texts.
The Westminster Assembly, which finally fizzled out in 1653 due to changes
in the English army and government, does not offer a story of unending
success. But it did manage to reform much of the ministry of the church. 5 It
also produced about 140 papers, letters, and explanatory documents, many
of them recently recovered and even now being made available. 6 The year
1646 was the turning point, the moment when the assembly realized that
even if it were to produce the best of texts, it might never be used in the
Church of England itself. But 1646 was not all bad news. It was in that year
that the assembly completed the Confession of Faith it had been developing
alongside its Directory for Church Government. It offered a low point for
church polity, but 1646, and then 1647, offered a high point for theology.

The Confession of Faith

As John Bower explains in his recent book on the Westminster Confession
of Faith, the confession was produced in two parts, brought together in 33
chapters and printed for parliament’s consideration in 1646. 7 The
confession married the classical doctrines of the Christian church and the
full harvest of Reformed theology at the close of the long Protestant
Reformation. Opening chapters discussed foundational topics: Scripture,
God, and God’s decrees. Everything that follows is a subset of those decrees:
creation in one chapter and providence in all the remaining chapters,
including the very special providence of divine salvation, a salvation
lingered over in fulsome detail.

“Churches use confessions as a kind of prenuptial

agreement between elders and their congregations.”
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The history of the fall of man into sin, God’s single covenant of grace, and
the accomplishment of redemption in Christ is then followed by the effects
of man’s fall, God’s regenerating grace, and the application of redemption
by the Holy Spirit. One topic flows into the next, like water through a series
of locks. Chapters 11 and 12 consider God’s acts of grace in justification and
adoption, after which chapter 13 treats God’s work of grace in sanctification.
These discussions in turn warrant a reflection on faith and repentance. The
shape of repentance is fleshed out in chapter 16, a chapter on good works
(one of the finest in the confession as a whole). And since our problems in
producing good works generate real pastoral problems, the following
chapters discuss the perseverance (not mere preservation) of the saints and
the assurance of salvation.

The confession then moves to the closely intertwined topics of law and
liberty, with liberty connected to worship, worship to oaths and vows, oaths
and vows to the civil magistrate, the magistrate to marriage, marriage to the
church, the church to sacraments. Of course, it is in the context of the Lord’s
Supper that discipline must sometimes be done, so the supper chapter is
followed by the censures chapter, and since elders do not always get that
right, the sections on censures are followed by a chapter on synods and
councils, where appeals about injustice can be made. The final two chapters
deal with final things.8
The English parliament thought that the confession offered synods too large
a role in church government compared to the civil magistrate. American
Presbyterians would later decide that the confession offered synods too
small a role in church government compared to the civil magistrate. The
Scottish Kirk thought the assembly got it just right and officially adopted
the Confession of Faith, an unedited version of the assembly’s Directory for
Church Government, and the assembly’s Directory for Public Worship, as
well as its enormous Larger Catechism and justly famous Shorter
Catechism.

Using Confessions Today

Mostly through Scottish and Irish Presbyterian missionary emigration to
America, and then through Presbyterian missions worldwide, the
assembly’s Shorter Catechism and the Westminster Confession of Faith
received a wide readership.
The catechism has been deployed as a teaching tool worldwide, and highly
valued for its clear-sighted structure, deliberately designed to implant
Christian doctrine in the minds and hearts of Christian people. 9 Unlike in
previous catechisms, every question stands independent of previous
questions — the catechism is arranged in a logical system, but one does not
need to follow a series of questions and answers for a question to make
sense. Similarly, every answer offers a distinct doctrinal aphorism, or a
pithy standalone statement: never simply “To glorify and enjoy God,” but
always “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.”
Individuals, families, and churches read through the catechism, seeking to
understand what it meant. Then they began to memorize its truths and the
passages appended to prove each point from the Scriptures themselves.
The Confession of Faith has also been used for teaching and as doctrinal
standards in Presbyterian churches (and in revised form in other churches).
Churches use confessions as a kind of prenuptial agreement between elders
and their congregations, as churches commit themselves to finding leaders
who teach the doctrines that they have learned to love from God’s word, and
as their leaders agree to teach the truths of the confession, once they
discover that this confession is the confession of their own heart.

“As with hammers, so with confessions: it is not

enough to have it; it matters how we hold it.”

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But this only scratches the surface of the usefulness of a confession.
Confessions are useful for promoting honesty. I grew up with some dear
Christian people who believed in “no creed but the Bible.” They never meant
to deceive anyone, but their claim was not true. They had a precise creed,
and anyone who taught against it would quickly find this out. They had
simply failed to recognize and write down their creed. Confessional
Christians are showing their own self-awareness and are being open about
what they believe.

Confessions have a kind of ecumenical purpose. The Westminster

Confession of Faith is an old confession, and so a large number of Christians
have heard of it, and many churches use it. 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.

Best of all, a good confession promotes doxology. A few bullet points on a

website will do this a little. “Our church believes that sinners are saved
through faith alone.” If that is the full summary of a church’s statement
about the saving grace of God, we can be thankful for what it says. We can
dwell on the fact that this church is willing to talk about sin and not merely
about weakness. We can flag helpful words like alone, which reminds
readers to magnify the Lord for our salvation and not ourselves.
More is accomplished by the recent New City Catechism with, for example,
one of its compound questions, “What do justification and sanctification
mean?” and the corresponding answer: “Justification means our declared
righteousness before God, made possible by Christ’s death and resurrection
for us. Sanctification means our gradual, growing righteousness, made
possible by the Spirit’s work in us.” With respect to justification, forgiveness
is not mentioned, but declared righteousness is, and we are told how — and
not for the first time in the catechism.

But set this new work beside one of the Westminster Assembly’s
productions. Even the Shorter Catechism offers a fuller treatment of the
topic:

Q. What is justification?

A. Justification is an act of God’s free grace, wherein he pardons all our sins, and
accepts us as righteous in his sight, only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to
us, and received by faith alone.
Here there is more to chew on. This is glorious — these are doctrines to
confess, to sing, to pray.

I think every Christian should learn to pray the Scriptures, to study a

passage and consider how it might be reframed as awe-filled praise, humble
thanks, and hopeful petition. But Christians also do well to pray over
doctrine, and here the Confession of Faith offers densely catalogued
material for praise.
1. For recent tellings of these events with a focus on the long-term struggles, see D.D. Hall, The
Puritans: A Transatlantic History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019); and M.P.
Winship, Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2019). ↩
2. D. Underdown, Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (1992;
repr., London: Pimlico, 2003). ↩
3. For a narrative of some of these events, albeit focusing especially on ecclesiological contests
in the assembly, see R.S. Paul, Assembly of the Lord: Politics and Religion in the Westminster
Assembly (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1984); and C.B. Van Dixhoorn, “Politics and Religion in
the Westminster Assembly and the ‘Grand Debate,’” in Insular Christianity: Alternative
Models of the Church in Britain and Ireland, c. 1570–c. 1700, eds. R. Armstrong and T.
O’hAnnrachain (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2013), 129–48. ↩
4. For a sampling of these errors, see C.B. Van Dixhoorn, “Post-Reformation Trinitarian
Perspectives,” in Retrieving Eternal Generation, eds. F. Sanders and S. Swain (Grand Rapids:
Zondervan, 2017), 180–207; and C.B. Van Dixhoorn, “The Strange Silence of Prolocutor
Twisse: Predestination and Politics in the Westminster Assembly’s Debate over
Justification,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 40, no. 2 (Summer 2009), 395–418. ↩
5. See C.B. Van Dixhoorn, God’s Ambassadors: The Westminster Assembly and the Reformation
of the English Pulpit, 1643–1653 (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage, 2017); and C.B. Van
Dixhoorn, “God’s Physicians: Models of Pastoral Care at the Westminster Assembly, 1643–
1653,” in Church Life: Pastors, Congregations, and the Experience of Dissent in Seventeenth-
Century England, eds. M. Davies, A. Dunan-Page, and J. Halcomb (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2019), 82–100. ↩
6. C.B. Van Dixhoorn, The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly, 1643–1653, 5 vols.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). ↩
7. J. Bower, The Confession of Faith: A Critical Text and Introduction (Grand Rapids:
Reformation Heritage, 2020). ↩
8. For a fuller account of the confession’s teaching, see C.B. Van Dixhoorn, Confessing the
Faith: A Reader’s Guide to the Westminster Confession of Faith (Edinburgh, 2014); C.B. Van
Dixhoorn, The Oxford Handbook of Reformed Theology, eds. S. Swain and M. Allen (Oxford,
2020); F.R. Beattie, The Presbyterian Standards (1896; Greenville, SC: Southern Presbyterian
Press, n.d.); J. Fesko, The Theology of the Westminster Standards: Historical Context and
Theological Insights (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014); A.A. Hodge, The Westminster
Confession: A Commentary (many editions; recently, Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 2013); R.
Letham, The Westminster Assembly (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2009); and R.
Shaw, The Reformed Faith: An Exposition of the Westminster Confession of Faith (many
editions; recently, Fearn, UK: Christian Focus, 2008). ↩
9. The leading study of the assembly’s largest catechism is J. Bower, The Larger Catechism: A
Critical Text and Introduction (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage, 2010). ↩