Westminster Confession of Faith

Parliament summoned the Westminster Assembly in 1643, in the middle of the English Civil War, to advise on reforming the doctrine, worship and government of the Church of England along more thoroughly Reformed lines. It sat for nearly six years at Westminster Abbey, drawing together over a hundred English clergy along with a smaller group of Scottish commissioners whose support Parliament needed against the king and who pressed hard for Presbyterian church government rather than the compromise many English members preferred.

The Confession itself was largely finished by 1646, after the Assembly had already produced a Directory for Public Worship and forms of church government, and its thirty-three chapters move from Scripture and the decrees of God through creation, providence, the fall, covenant and Christ's mediation to justification, the church, the sacraments, church censures, synods and the last judgment, a complete Reformed system rather than a response to one dispute.

Two shorter catechisms, the Larger and the Shorter, followed to put the same doctrine into a form for teaching. The Assembly worked entirely under Parliament's authority and never had power to impose anything on its own; whether its work would govern the English church at all still depended on a political settlement that the war had not yet decided.

The Confession never achieved the purpose Parliament had set it. The English church it was meant to reform was restored to episcopacy in 1660, and the document that had been meant for London became instead the possession of Scotland, where the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland adopted it in 1647 in place of the shorter Scots Confession of 1560, and of the Presbyterian churches that later spread from Scotland across Ireland, North America and beyond through emigration and mission. Ministers and elders in Presbyterian churches historically subscribed to the Confession as containing the system of doctrine taught in Scripture, a formula that binds the substance of the document while leaving room for disagreement on points many churches came to treat as secondary, an arrangement that has itself been a recurring source of dispute over how strict subscription should be.

American Presbyterianism revised the chapters on the civil magistrate after independence, since the original assumed an established church with state power behind it, an assumption no American Presbyterian body could accept. The Shorter Catechism drafted alongside the Confession, opening with the question what is the chief end of man, became the standard by which Presbyterian and other Reformed households taught children their faith for some three centuries, memorised long after most of those children had stopped reading the Confession itself.