In April, 1645, after much delay on the part of the Assembly, the House of Commons formally instructed the Assembly to proceed with its work on the confession. On April 21, a committee – presumably not the committee organized to draft the new Confession of Faith – reported on the Thirty-Nine Articles, recommending a review of the document. In response, the Assembly ordered this committee to determine which, if any, of the Articles should be considered “useful…till a Confession of Faith can be drawn up by this Assembly.” The committee on the Articles was to meet that day, and the committee on the new confession was called to meet on the following Wednesday – but it was only on May 12 that a somewhat reconstituted committee was finally named. A first draft of the chapter on Scripture was written by the committee and presented for discussion and debate on July 7. Debate continued through July 18. At that time, three subcommittees were formed to deal with specific doctrinal topics. After a year of work, on September 25, 1646, the first nineteen chapters of the confession were delivered to the House of Commons for consideration, with the remaining fifteen chapters following on November 26. Parliament required that each section of the confession be illustrated with proof-texts – a labor that took the committee until April, 1647. After another year of close consideration of the text, the confession was adopted for England by Parliament in June, 1648. The Scottish Parliament ratified the confession in 1649.
We, also, have clear and precise documentation concerning the drafting of several of the major sections of the confession. A smaller sub-committee was named on May 12, 1645, in order to expedite the drafting of individual chapters of the confession: it was composed of Thomas Temple, Joshua Hoyle, Thomas Gataker, Robert Harris, Cornelius Burgess, Edward Reynolds, and Charles Herle. In response to the Assembly’s request of July 4 that “the sub-committee for the Confession of Faith…make report to the Assembly on Monday morning of what is in their hands concerning…the Scriptures,” the first chapter of the confession, “Of Holy Scripture,” was presented to the Assembly by Dr. Thomas Temple on Monday, July 7, 1645. Debate on the text of the chapter ran from July 7 through July 18 of 1645.
From: Scripture and Worship: Biblical Interpretation and the Directory for Public Worship by Richard A. Muller and Rowland S. Ward; The Westminster Assembly and the Reformed Faith – a series; Carl R. Trueman, series editor (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2007), pp. 33-34. The quotation is taken from Chapter 3, “‘Inspired by God – Pure in All Ages’: The Doctrine of Scripture in the Westminster Confession,” which was written by Dr. Muller.
Richard A. Muller is P. J. Zondervan Professor of Historical Theology at Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Among his many other books is his monumental four-volume Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics.
Rowland S. Ward is pastor of Knox Presbyterian Church in Melbourne, Australia. His other books include The Bush Still Burns and God And Adam: Reformed Theology and the Creation Covenant.
