Commentary on the American revision of the WCF

In this section we will be adding the various revisions that have been made to the Westminster Confession of Faith over time.

It is interesting to see how, without doubt, we are children of our own time, and how the drift of society keeps impacting the Church and our approach to the Bible and to Theology (Romans 12:2).

It is hard to find believers belonging to this same historic stream, and even churches that claim to hold the Westminster Confession of Faith as their doctrinal basis, who truly believe everything that is affirmed there.

This is not only true of Presbyterianism. The great majority of Protestants no longer believe the same things that our brethren died for in the days of the Reformation. Most Lutherans, for instance, do not believe what Luther wrote and taught. Roman Catholics, too, are increasingly drifting away from the Catholicism of earlier centuries, with the traditional conservatives and the more liberal Catholics now sharply opposed to one another.

Let us not overstate the case: this whole drift should not necessarily be interpreted as an apostasy from Christ. In certain cases it may be no more than an "apostasy" from the original position of the denomination itself.

Someone might reply that the Bible is our only source of authority, which is true, and that the positions of our denomination, or the teachings gathered in the Westminster Confession of Faith in particular, are not infallible.

What is true is that in these matters we can detect a slippery slope on which we gradually lose our convictions in favour of the ideas in fashion.

In too many cases, however, a terrible departure from the gospel and from Christ is indeed implied as well. "...when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?" (Luke 18:8). It is not hard to see the growth of what Paul had already foreseen shortly before his death: 2 Timothy 4:3,4

The Great Apostasy is not something future (2 Thessalonians 2:7), nor something that belongs to the past, nor can we limit it exclusively to the Roman Catholic Church. Apostasy is the degenerative principle proper to every institution, against which we are strongly and repeatedly warned in relation to the people of God.