Introduction

Of all the documents produced by the Westminster Assembly, the Confession of Faith is the best known and the one of widest reach. It is the central work of the Assembly, which the other documents accompany: the Catechisms teach it, the Directory applies it to worship and the Form of Government, to the Church. It is also one of the last great Reformed confessions and, for many, the most complete: the ripe harvest of a century of Reformation, in which the best of the confessions that preceded it is gathered up.

It was not written in haste. For more than two years, between 1644 and 1646, over a hundred divines debated it sentence by sentence, sometimes for days over a single clause, until they presented it to Parliament in December 1646. In 1647, at the request of Parliament itself, the proofs of Scripture were added for every assertion, and that same year the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland adopted it as the confession of its Church.

Its 33 chapters run through the whole counsel of God: Scripture, God and his decrees, creation and providence, the fall, God's covenant with man, Christ the Mediator, the application of redemption, the law, worship, the Church and the sacraments, the civil magistrate and the last things. And it is no accident that it begins with Scripture and not with God: before saying anything about him, the Confession establishes whence it knows it. Everything else rests upon that foundation: "The whole counsel of God, concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man's salvation, faith, and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men" (WCF 1.6).

Its influence has had no equal in the Reformed world. For almost four centuries it has been the doctrinal standard of presbyterian churches throughout the world, and it was also the model from which the Congregationalists started in the Savoy Declaration (1658) and the Baptists in the London Confession (1677 and 1689), who reproduced it almost entire, changing only what separated them from it. Whoever reads any of these confessions reads, in large part, that of Westminster.

A confession does not take the place of Scripture. It is, as the churches that adopted it always called it, a subordinate standard: with it the Church confesses what she believes Scripture teaches, and the Confession itself acknowledges that above it stands "the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture", who is "the Supreme Judge, by which all controversies of religion are to be determined" (WCF 1.10). But precisely for that reason it is so valuable: at a time when many Christians cannot say with precision what they believe, the Confession offers them an orderly, complete and Scripture-proved exposition of the whole faith, which enables them to know it, defend it and hand it on.

Here the original text of 1647 is offered, as the Assembly approved it. The modifications that some churches afterwards introduced into it, such as the American revision of 1788, are set out separately, in the section on revisions. The Confession is preceded by the oath taken by the members of the Assembly and the list of those who composed it.