Introduction

This revision is the first thing the Westminster Assembly did. Before drafting the Confession of Faith, before even taking up the government of the Church, it spent its first three months on the Thirty-nine Articles, the confession of the Church of England since 1563. It is the link between the confession England had and the one the Assembly would go on to write, and it is almost never published together with the Standards. That is why we include it here, among the annexed documents.

The Assembly met for the first time on 1 July 1643. On the 5th, the two Houses of Parliament ordered it to examine the first ten articles, “to free and vindicate the Doctrine of them from all aspersions and false interpretations”; later they committed to it the nine following. But on 12 October, when fifteen had been finished, Parliament commanded them to lay aside the remainder and take up the government of the Church. By then the Solemn League and Covenant had been sworn, which bound the three kingdoms to one and the same confession, and the Assembly was afterwards charged with drawing it up. The Confession finished, the House of Commons ordered on 7 December 1646 that these fifteen articles be presented to it as well, and in 1647 they were printed, with the Scripture proofs in the margin and the signatures of the prolocutor, Charles Herle, and of the two scribes.

The preface the Assembly set before them explains its limits: Parliament had only asked it to clear and vindicate the articles, not to recast them, so it altered less than it would have wished, “conceiving many things yet remaining to be defective, and other expressions also fit to be changed”. Even so, the changes are many, and they nearly all run in the same direction: making precise what the Anglican wording left open. Where article 9 said that man is “very farre gone from” original righteousness, the revision says that he is “wholly deprived of” it, and adds that Adam’s first sin is imputed to us; where it said that concupiscence “hath of it self the nature of sinne”, it says that it “is truely and properly sin”. Article 10 affirms that the grace of God works in us so effectually “as that it determineth our Will to that which is good”. Article 7 declares that the moral law is the ten Commandments “taken in their full extent”. Article 6 drops the list of the apocryphal books and the phrase about the books “of whose authority was never any doubt in the Church”, and affirms instead that Scripture was given by the inspiration of God. And article 3, on the descent into hell, now explains the phrase: Christ continued in the state of the dead and under the power of death until his resurrection.

The weightiest change is in article 11, on justification. The 1563 text was brief: we are accounted righteous for the merit of Christ, by faith, and not for our own works. The Assembly turned it into a definition: we are justified, that is, accounted righteous and forgiven, “his whole obedience and satisfaction being by God imputed unto us”, and receiving by faith Christ with his righteousness. Those words cost days of debate, because some members, Thomas Gataker among them, would not accept that Christ’s obedience to the law is imputed to us, but only his death. The Assembly kept the formula, and it is the same doctrine that chapter 11 of the Confession would later set forth. The article also adds a sentence against the antinomians, who were then a great concern in London: God does not forgive the impenitent who go on in their sins.

The revision never became the confession of any church. The Assembly itself called it “a Piece several ways imperfect”, and said that in the Confession it had left out nothing in the articles that deserved to be retained. According to Alexander Mitchell, who edited the minutes of the Assembly in 1874, fourteen of these articles (all but the eighth, on the three creeds) were included among the propositions that Parliament presented to the king in the Isle of Wight. Their value today lies elsewhere: they let us watch the Assembly at work, phrase by phrase, on a text it knew by heart, and see what it sought to correct before writing its own confession.

That is why we present it compared. In each article, on one side stands the text of the Church of England as it lay before the Assembly, that of the 1638 edition, and on the other the revision; what the Assembly removed is struck through, and what it added is underlined. Differences of spelling and punctuation between the two editions are not marked. Beneath come the Scripture proofs from the margin of the print.

The text we publish is that of the London print of 1647, as transcribed from the copy in the Thomason collection, with the Assembly’s preface and the signatures. The few illegible gaps in the preface have been filled from the reading of Mitchell, who transcribed the same copy. Seven marginal references cannot be read with certainty in that transcription (some lack a figure): we reproduce them as they stand, without a link, until they can be checked against the facsimile.