The Westminster Confession of Faith
The confession of faith drawn up by the Westminster Assembly in thirty-three chapters and presented to the English Parliament as its “humble advice”. It became the doctrinal standard of the Church of Scotland and of Presbyterian churches elsewhere.
Schaff prints the text from the edition whose title page calls it “The Humble Advice of the Assembly of Divines, now by Authority of Parliament sitting at Westminster, concerning a Confession of Faith”, presented to both Houses and printed in 1647 with its proofs from Scripture.
The first chapter is on Scripture. It names the books of the Old and New Testaments, excludes the Apocrypha from the canon, rests the authority of Scripture on God and not on the testimony of any church, and makes “the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture” the supreme judge of controversies. The third chapter is on God’s eternal decree and teaches the predestination of some to life and the foreordination of others to death, while denying that God is the author of sin or that violence is done to the will of creatures. Later chapters treat the covenants, Christ the mediator, justification, the church, the sacraments and the civil magistrate.
The Confession is a statement of what the Assembly taught and is cited in this wiki for that. Its legal standing differed by country: see the Westminster Confession for its approval in Scotland.
Cited in
- 1643 to 1649, firm date