The changes made to the Confession against the text of 1647

The Westminster Confession of Faith that is read on this site is that of 1647, as it was approved by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. It is not, however, the text to which many Presbyterian churches subscribe today: those of North American origin, and those born of their missionary work, use a revised text. This section shows, paragraph by paragraph, what was changed, when, by whom, and why.

There was not one revision but several, almost all of them American, and separated from one another by more than a century:

• 1648. The Parliament of England approves the Confession, but with omissions: it removes paragraph IV of chapter XX, paragraphs IV to VI of chapter XXIV, and the whole of chapters XXX and XXXI (church censures, and synods). It is the first revision, and it was made by the civil power. The Church of Scotland had approved the Confession entire the year before, and that entire text is the one followed here.
• 1729. The Synod of Philadelphia adopts the Confession and the Catechisms, but already with an exception concerning "some Clauses in the 20 and 23 Chapters": it declares that it does not receive them in any such sense as to suppose that the civil magistrate has a controlling power over synods, or power to persecute any for their religion.
• 1788. The Synod of New York and Philadelphia, on the point of constituting itself as the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, carries that exception into the text itself: it rewrites what concerns the civil magistrate in chapters XX, XXIII and XXXI, and removes from the Larger Catechism (answer 109) "tolerating a false religion" from the list of sins against the second commandment.
• 1886-1887. The two great Presbyterian churches of the country, the southern (1886) and the northern (1887), strike out the last sentence of chapter XXIV, paragraph IV, on marriage with the kindred of one's spouse.
• 1903. The northern church makes the most extensive revision: it strikes out the last sentence of chapter XXII, paragraph III; it rewrites the paragraph on the Pope (XXV, VI) and the one on the works of unregenerate men (XVI, VII); it adds two new chapters, "Of the Holy Spirit" and "Of the Gospel of the Love of God and Missions", and a Declaratory Statement which softens the doctrine of election.
• 1936. The Orthodox Presbyterian Church, on separating from the former, rejects the new chapters and the Declaratory Statement of 1903, but keeps everything else: the changes of 1788 and of 1887, and the two deletions of 1903 (the oath and the Antichrist). That is, in substance, the text used today by conservative North American Presbyterianism.
• 1953. The northern church replaces the whole of chapter XXIV, on marriage and divorce; the southern church does likewise a few years later.

Measured in words, the changes are few: the Orthodox Presbyterian Church itself reckons them at 145 out of the more than twelve thousand of the Confession. Measured in doctrine, they are not so few: they touch the relation between Church and State, the oath, marriage, and the Papacy.

This section has a thesis, and it is well to state it from the outset: these changes are not isolated retouchings, but the marks which a certain liberalism has been leaving upon the Confession. We do not mean only the theological liberalism of the late nineteenth century, which denies or lowers doctrines, but something earlier and more diffuse: the body of ideas, born between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, according to which religion is a private and voluntary matter, the individual conscience is the court of last resort, the State ought to be neutral between truth and error, and doctrine ought to be accommodated to the spirit of each age. What is intended here is to show where each of those ideas came in.

The course of events is instructive. In 1729 it is only an exception in the margin. In 1788 it enters the text, and at the hands of men of undisputed orthodoxy, who had no intention of yielding anything of the gospel. In 1887 the Confession is no longer changed out of a conviction about the State, but because the practice of the members had ceased to agree with it. In 1903 it is retouched in order to soften its Calvinism, in the course of union with a church of Arminian tendency. In 1953 what it teaches about divorce is rewritten. And in 1967 the church that was heir to the one which had made all those changes ceased to have the Westminster Confession as its sole doctrinal standard: it became one document among others within a book of confessions. Each step was small, and seemed reasonable to those who took it.

The conservative churches stopped before reaching that point: they rejected the gravest part of 1903 and did not accept the new chapter on divorce. But they keep the changes of 1788 and of 1887, and two of those of 1903, which indicates how far those ideas have come to seem natural to us.

To state a thesis does not dispense one from proving it. That a change is later does not show that it is an error: the Confession itself teaches that all synods and councils "may err, and many have erred" (chapter XXXI), and that the supreme judge of every controversy of religion is the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture (chapter I, paragraph X). The Westminster Assembly is no exception. For that reason each article gives the facts and the dates, the biblical texts on which the Assembly rested what was afterwards struck out, and the best argument of those who struck it out, before saying what, in our judgment, each change shows.

The first six articles follow the order of the chapters of the Confession. The last two deal with what does not fit within that order: the revision of 1903 as a whole, and the other method, that of the churches which have not touched the text but have ceased to require it.

It is interesting to see how far we are children of our own time, and how the drifts of society keep making their impact upon the Church and upon our approach to the Bible and to Theology (Romans 12:2). It is hard to find today believers belonging to this same historic stream, and even churches which claim to hold the Westminster Confession of Faith as their doctrinal basis, who truly believe everything that is affirmed in it.

This is not true of Presbyterianism alone. Most Lutherans, for instance, no longer believe what Luther taught concerning predestination and the bondage of the will in his lectures on Romans and in De servo arbitrio (The Bondage of the Will, 1525): later Lutheran theology came to teach an election "in view of foreseen faith", which is the opposite of what Luther maintained against Erasmus. And present-day Roman Catholicism likewise departs at many points from that of earlier centuries.

We should not overstate the case: this drift is not necessarily to 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. But in these matters we can indeed detect a slippery slope, on which we gradually lose our convictions in favour of the ideas in fashion. And in too many cases a terrible departure from the gospel and from Christ is implied as well. "...when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?" (Luke 18:8). It is not so hard to see the increase of what Paul already foresaw shortly before his death: 2 Timothy 4:3,4

Apostasy is not only something future: its principle was already at work in the days of the apostle (2 Thessalonians 2:7). Nor does it belong only to the past, nor can we confine it to the Roman Catholic Church. It is a danger against which the people of God are strongly and repeatedly warned in every age.

Sources. The text of 1647 is that of this site. For the revised text and its comparison with the original, the table of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the appendices of variants at Bible Research. For the revision of 1788, the study "A Tale of Two Texts", published in Themelios. For the sentence on marriage, Barry Waugh's thesis on chapter XXIV, paragraph IV (2002). For 1903, D. G. Hart and J. R. Muether, "Confessional Revision in 1903". The assessments are our own.