I was interested in the last question who your personal hero of the Reformation was, so I tallied all of those just to see how it came out and John Calvin won. You might expect with 23 votes, but Luther was close second with 19. A Katie Luther had one vote, so if you had Katie with Martin that's 20. The next highest was John Knox with six, Malanthan with four, and Cranber with four, and Zwingli with three, and Arasmus, Ridley, Bucer, William the Silent, Fox, and Tyndall all with one. And one student had a hard time deciding, so he wrote Calvin, but I appreciate Luther a lot. Knox is great too. Zwingli is no lightweight. Gotta like Cranber? How about that, Tyndall? Lecture 18, the foundation for many generations, the Westminster Assembly, the large Catholicism of the Westminster Assembly, question 183, has the question for whom are we to pray? The answer is we are to pray for the whole church of Christ upon earth, for magistrates, and ministers for ourselves, our brethren, ye are enemies, and for all sorts of men living, or that shall live hereafter, but not for the dead. As we begin our class today, I would like for us to join in prayer, and I will read this answer to question 183 again with brief pauses so that each of you can pray silently to the Lord for these various categories that we have listed here. Let us pray. Let us pray for the whole church of Christ upon earth, and now pray for magistrates, and for ministers. Let each one of us pray for ourselves. Let us pray for our brethren, and for our enemies, and for all people living or that shall live hereafter. Amen. Have a little book here called the Westminster Standards, which is a facsimile edition of the 1648 First English printing of the Westminster Standards, means the catechisms, and the confession, and the directory or worship, all the major productions of the Westminster Divine, except for the form of government. The forward to this new printing of this old document is written by Dr. William S. Barker, professor of church history, and Dean at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia, and Dr. Barker begins his forward with these words. When I was a seminary student, my wife and I attended an adult Sunday school class taught by one of my favorite seminary professors in a local Presbyterian congregation. By the way, the seminary was covenant seminary, and the church he's talking about is covenant church. Although it was in a Presbyterian church, the class was composed of many highly intelligent young adults, who though evangelical Christians would probably have not turned themselves as reformed in doctrine. Over several months, the teacher conducted us through a systematic survey of the Christian faith simply by means of a steady exposition of scripture. My wife and I realized early on that without saying so, he was following the outline of the Westminster confession of faith. The rest of the class were enthusiastically absorbing his teaching, and without being conscious of it, were being persuaded to reform theology right out of the scriptures. We want to talk today about the Westminster Assembly and its reform theology and its various documents related to worship and church polity. The occasion for the call and meeting of the Westminster Assembly, we've already discussed in a previous lecture as we looked at the Puritan period in English history, but just to review that for a moment, we should remind ourselves that it was the time of the conflict between the Parliament and the Stuart King, Charles I, in the second quarter of the 17th century. The two major issues dividing the Parliament and the King were these, one representative government favored by the Parliament versus royal absolutism or the divine right of kings favored by King Charles, and the second issue was religious freedom, the freedom of the church to establish its own laws and its own practices and its own doctrine versus ecclesiastical tyranny, where the King and the hierarchy of the church would control the practices and life of the church. The father of Charles I, James I, had said at one point in debating with Puritans and Presbyterians, no bishops, no king. So he tied together in his mind the hierarchical prelacy, the prelacy of the Episcopal Church of England with the kingship. And so those issues finally came to a boiling point and resulted in civil war between the Parliament and the King in England. It was a time of theological and political turmoil, a period of the 1640s, one book by Christopher Hill on that period is called the World Turn Upside Down. Certainly England turned upside down from the conservative Anglicans, there were Roman Catholics there too, but meeting in secret, but the conservative Anglicans wanted to keep things pretty much the way they were in the church, to mainstream Presbyterians and congregationalists who could be identified as Puritans, to more radical Baptist and Quakers. Finally to the most radical fringe of the period, the sex called the levelers, the diggers, the fifth monarchy men and others who call for the overthrow of just about everything. In this time of turmoil and change, the long Parliament became the major political force working to create a new government first with the King and then after 1649 without the King, because in that year the King was put to death by the order of the Parliament and for about a dozen years there would be no King in England. The long Parliament not only was meeting to try to create a new government for England, but also a new church, or at least a reformed church, and to help with that task the Parliament called the Westminster Assembly in 1643. The Assembly began meeting on July 1st in London at Westminster Abbey, certainly one of the most famous churches in the world, perhaps along with St. Paul's in Rome, was in this church already 500 years old by this time or more that the Assembly began its deliberations on July 1st, 1643. Until the time of the Reformation Westminster Abbey had been a Benedictine Addy, or monastery, at the period of the Reformation it became a church of England, an Anglican church called a royal peculiar because the church was directly under the authority of the sovereign of England through the Dean and the local chapter, not under the Bishop of London. The Assembly first met in the chapel of Henry VII, which was a large chapel about as big as a normal church or even a large church on the eastern end of the Abbey, but when the weather turned cold, the delegates decided to move to this room called the Jerusalem Chamber, where there was, you can see a fireplace, and the deliberations of Westminster from that point on took place in this room, Jerusalem Chamber. You go to Westminster Abbey, you will not be shown this chamber as part of the normal tour, but some people have insisted on it and have been able to view the Jerusalem Chamber, which is the place where the Dean and the chapter now meet. The familiar twin towers on the western end of the Abbey, which so market for us today, were not constructed until the 18th century, so the Westminster Abbey did not look exactly like it does today when the Westminster Divines met there in the 1740s. Let me talk for a bit about the members of the Westminster Assembly.
These members were chosen by the Parliament. They were described as the most grave, pious, learned and judicious Divines. There were 121 English Puritan ministers chosen by the Parliament from the various counties and from the universities of England. Most were local pastors, some were teachers and military chaplains, but all were engaged actively in ministry. And these Divines were assisted after September 1643 by six Scottish commissioners, elected by the Church of Scotland, to go to Westminster. We'll look at those commissioners in a few minutes and by 30 laymen, 10 members of the House of Lords and 20 members of the House of Commons. The recent book by Dr. Will Barker called Puritan Profiles is a wonderful survey of 54 of the most influential of the Puritans of the period, most of whom were members of the Westminster Assembly. In that book, it helps a great deal to enable us to keep these Divines straight, so hard to see them as separate individual people because we usually think of them as a group, the Westminster Divines, but Puritan Profiles is a good place to start in your study of the lives of the Divines. The officers of the Assembly included William Twist and Cornelius Burgess. William Twist was the prolocutor, as he was called, or the presiding officer. He was a man of international reputation as a reform scholar. The Scott Robert Bailey described him as very learned, very good, beloved of all, but the unfitest of all the company for any action. Apparently, Bailey felt that despite Twist being a beloved figure, he wasn't very good in debate or in carrying things forward in the work of the Assembly. That may have been, but Robert Bailey tended to be rather impatient with almost anybody. He wanted things to move much faster than they did. At the opening of the Assembly, William Twist preached the first sermon. He preached on John 1418. I will not leave you comfortless. I will come to you. You can see why that was an appropriate text for a country that was attempting to recreate the church and that text promised God's presence with the Divines as they carried on their important work. William Twist did not live to see the end of the work of the Westminster Assembly. He died in 1646 during the sitting of the Assembly. A true scholar, he said when he was dying, now at length I shall have leisure to follow my studies to all eternity. Cornelius Virgius was the assessor or assistant to the prolocutor. He was sometimes called the turbulent doctor and on one occasion he was expelled from a time from the Assembly with the majority on British solemn league and covenant. There were different parties or groups or factions at Westminster but we should understand that these different parties were not different parties in terms of theology. They were all Calvinists. There were very few differences, minor differences among them as to theology but major differences among them as to church polity. So the big issue separating the Westminster Divines was what kind of church what kind of church polity should be created to replace the Church of England. We'll look first at the Episcopalians of the 121 Divines originally appointed by the Parliament. 28 did not attend at all. Mostly because they were Episcopalians loyal to the King and the King had not given approval for the sitting of the Westminster Assembly and so the Episcopalians felt that they could not take place or take part in the deliberations of the Assembly. The most famous of these Episcopalians invited to Westminster was Archbishop James Usher of Ireland. He did not attend but his influence on Westminster was great. His Irish articles of 1615 served as a model for the Westminster Confession of Faith.
Archbishop Usher was a strong and Zalus Puritan, a man whose writings are of great value. He wrote to preachers he said this it is not difficult to make easy things appear hard but to render hard things easy is the hardest part of the work of preachers. You can remember that when you start preaching that the hardest part is going to be to make hard things easy. Daniel Feetley was the one Episcopalian who did attend or at least a short time the deliberations of the Assembly but before long he was expelled as a spy for the King. That brings us to the Presbyterians. By that I mean the English Presbyterians. The English Presbyterians are probably the least well-known and yet did most of the work to produce the Westminster standards where people like Stephen Marshall, the noted preacher and William Goodge, the leader of Puritan clergy in London. The English Presbyterians were of two opinions there were those who felt that Presbyterianism should be held and established by divine right. This was called the Jure Divino theory of Presbyterianism. That is God has prescribed this in the Bible just as he has prescribed the doctrine that we are to believe he has set forth the one and only form of church polity acceptable which is Presbyterianism. There were other English Presbyterians who took a different view the Jure Humano view and that is that Presbyterianism is acceptable to the principles that the Bible sets forth but this group did not want to go as far as the first group and insisting that this is the only biblical form of church polity that can be allowed. There was another group at the assembly called the Erastians. They were not in favor of any particular church polity they probably would have accepted almost any form of church polity from Episcopacy to Congregationalism but they wanted church discipline to be in the hands of the state in other words a church any church would have to get the approval and permission of the state before it could exercise church discipline. The Erastians were a small but learned group in the assembly. There was John Seldon the classical scholar Thomas Coleman the most outspoken of the Erastian clergyman and John Lightfoot they were now in biblical scholar. The Erastians were supported by a majority in the parliament which never approved the parts of the confession relating to the civil magistrate because they felt the parliament felt that the confession did not recognize sufficiently the authority of the state in church matters. Securious thing you see but Westminster Assembly in one sense is an Erastian assembly because it was called not by a church but by the parliament to do the work of the parliament so the parliament had to approve the final product of the assembly and that produced a certain amount of tension all along the way between the devines and the lords and commoners of the parliament.
The next group is the independence or the congregation list led by an able and vocal group called the five dissenting brethren you see their names there some of those perhaps are known to you Thomas Goodwin and Jeremiah Burras that written great Puritan books these five men had gone into exile in the Netherlands in the 1630s and had close relations with churches in the Netherlands as well as with the congregation list the Puritans in New England. They were what we call non-separating Puritans they promoted the concept of congregational church polity but they wanted the churches to be linked in some sort of national church so they were not for separating from the national church but reforming the national church in a congregational direction with an association among churches and an association with the state the congregation list or the independence at Westminster had a very difficult road because they had to go between the Presbyterians who were insisting on uniformity in one form or the church in one form or the state and the more radical Puritans who wanted greater flexibility and plurality between those two groups were the independence of the congregation list like the men that I have listed here in the syllabus who wanted a national church connected with the state but with local autonomy and then we come to the Scots the Scots joined the assembly laid in 1643 after the solemn covenant was accepted they were not voting members but they were extremely influential because they were some very able men and also because they had been appointed by the Church of Scotland they represented Scotland both in the parliament and in the assembly and so their words carried the weight of the country of Scotland and the Church of Scotland some of these Scottish commissioners as they're called we've already been introduced to Alexander Henderson was the author of the solemn league in covenant George Gillespie was one of the youngest members of Westminster or ministers present at Westminster he was just 30 years old in 1643 when he went to Westminster his famous story about him the story is that when the devines were attempting to come up with their definition of God they were frustrated by the difficulty of finding a Senate that could encompass such a noble and grand topic as the definition of God and after some feudal attempts to come up with something they called on the youngest member of the committee to pray that being George Gillespie who began his prayer oh God thou art a spirit infinite eternal and unchangeable in thy being wisdom power holiness just as goodness and truth and the members of the committee quickly wrote the Senate's down and made it the answer to the question in the short of catechism what is God but don't ever use that story as a sermon illustration because it's not true it's a wonderful story and it perhaps tells us something about George Gillespie that it could even people could imagine that he would have been the one to come up with this statement that George Gillespie had already gone home to Scotland when the catechisms were debated so he wasn't there at the time use illustrations from church history and your teaching and preaching but be sure they're accurate and true Robert Bailey was another Scottish commissioner and we're very glad that he went to Westminster because his letters and journals give us a lot of information about what actually went on in the assembly he had a kind of a nose for news and even a occasional bit of gossip so some very interesting tidbits come out about the various members and what they were doing occasionally he mentions that somebody fell asleep during particular debate or someone was absent more than he should have been things like that which add a bit of spice to the record of the proceedings in the syllabus there is his description of the Westminster Assembly which is one of the most important statements that we have about Westminster because it is from a eyewitness participant at Westminster Samuel Rutherford was another Scottish commissioner whose book Lex Rex made him a markman at the restoration and there were four ruling elders appointed including two whose names are given in the syllabus Archibald Johnston called the Lawyer of the Covenant and John Mateland the Duke of Lauderdale who later changed sides and became a severe persecutor of the Covenantters in thinking of all of these delegates and commissioners Richard Baxter contemporary Puritan who was not a member of the assembly wrote if all of his compelians had been his archbishop Usher all the Presbyterians as Stephen Marshall and all the independents as Jeremiah Varas the divisions of the church might soon have been healed let's talk a bit about the work of the assembly although political conditions were revolutionary the theological work of the assembly was not part of the work of the assembly was preaching and prayer as we have read in the syllabus in the writing by Carothers called devotional exercises of the Westminster assembly there were regular monthly fast days or prayer days we would call them and times of special occasions of Thanksgiving and preaching it was not unusual to have a nine hour long service with two hour long sermons and two two hour long prayers sometimes wonder how the devines managed all of that but they seem to have done that regularly and with great joy in being able to set aside long periods of time for preaching and prayer the Westminster assembly spent its first three months revising the 39 articles of the Church of England those articles were Calvinistic in their force and content as we have seen that Westminster felt directed by the Parliament that it would be good to revise the articles to prohibit any non-reform interpretation so they set out on that work and made really very minor changes in the first 15 articles that's as far as they got before the circumstances intervened to move the Parliament to direct the assembly to get on with the real difficult work that was before them the assembly had as its task to reform the Church of England in four ways in church government in worship in confession of faith and in catechisms and they were to do this according to the word of God the assembly was an assembly of biblical exegetes and they had their Hebrew Bibles and their Greek Testaments and their Latin Bibles and their English Bibles and the tables before them and they constantly poured through the Scriptures as they debated and argued the various points that came before them they were to reform the Church according to the word of God and according to the example of the Church of Scotland and other reformed Churches abroad not only did they have the Scripture but they had the Presbyterian Church in Scotland and the reformed Church in the Netherlands to look to as examples of what a reformed Church really should be the work of the Westminster Assembly we call the four points of uniformity first was the form of Church government this was perhaps the most difficult and the most prolonged debate that took place at Westminster sometimes called the grand debate it was between Presbyterians and congregationless with the Presbyterians finally winning the debate but not without a great deal of struggle and some unhappiness on both sides with the other side and finally the form of Church government was produced which is a Presbyterian document but because of independent objections is not as fully Presbyterian as Presbyterians both before and after would have wished the directory of public worship was also an early product of the assembly notice that it is a directory that is a guide that word was chosen deliberately so guide for ministers to use in creating services of worship in the Church it's not a liturgy with the very words of the service imposed by a book of common prayer as the Church of England had the directory for public worship is not only a guide for Sunday worship but it is a comprehensive pastoral theology including sections on preaching visiting the sick and so on the regulative principle is much in evidence in the debate and in the product of the assembly the directory for public worship but one realizes how difficult it is to apply this principle to every situation as you go through the debate at Westminster for instance on the Lord's suffer how the Lord's sufferers to be served the Scots insisted that people come to the table in the front of the church and be seated like the disciples in Jesus were although some pointed out they probably were not seated the English insisted that people stay in the fuse and have the elements brought to them because they said the regulative principle required that everybody be served together not in successive seatings so both parties debated long and hard before a kind of compromise was agreed upon that it would be appropriate to sit at or about the table which could mean coming forward and sitting at the table as the Scots did it or staying in the fuse as the English did it but there was certainly a commitment on the part of all the divine to a basic biblical simplicity in worship the confession of faith is the part of Westminster that became the most well-known in the most famous even though the directory for worship and the book or form of government were the more urgent matters facing the divine in the 1640s one writer has said the confession was not only the conclusion of 125 years of Protestant theology it was also in a real sense along with other 17th century statements of faith the conclusion of 16 centuries of theological work so Westminster comes to the very end of a long period of theological activity particularly at the end of a century or more of great attention to theology during the time of the Protestant Reformation and Westminster sums up reform theology from the days of John Calvin down to the 1640s there are certainly differences between Calvin and Westminster but I would see those differences as differences in relatively minor points not as a major recasting of Calvin's thought and so I would take the exception with the writer of our textbook who on page 184 says while claiming to be a faithful interpreter of Calvin the Westminster confession of faith tended to turn the theology of the Geneva reformer into a strict system that Calvin himself might have had difficulty recognizing I think Calvin would recognize his theology at Westminster he probably would have said well why did you say it that way or why did you feel you had to include this or why did you leave that out questions like that but I don't think Calvin would have said I don't know what you're talking about here it certainly stands in line with Calvin's thinking the distinctive theological point at Westminster central theme is federal our covenant theology which had been developing within the reform camp for a number of years since the days of Swingley and that theme is not unknown in Calvin as well although at Westminster it becomes more prominent and tends to structure the whole organization of the Westminster confession the first time that covenant theology had been used in a credal way in such a major fashion after working on the confession for about a year and a half Parliament sent it back to the assembly for proof text Westminster divine seemed a bit reluctant to take it back after all they had debated it long and hard and they were not afraid to a fixed proof text but they realized that that too would be difficult work but they did it took them five more months to add all the scripture proof text 1500 biblical text generally well chosen and relevant although you can find some places where one would think they apparently went astray and then the final the fourth point of uniformity was the work on the catechism two catechisms the larger catechism which they described as more exact and comprehensive was to be a directory for ministers in teaching week by week so that they could teach their congregations the reform phase in a very effective and accepted manner Thomas Chalmers the 19th century Scottish minister called the larger catechism sanctification broken small the devines were said to have thought that the larger catechism would have been the most popular the most used of all their productions but as a matter of fact it probably is the least known of the productions at Westminster and the shorticaticism is much more popular for obvious reasons to us today the shorticaticism was written for new beginners or for children or in the frank words of the church of Scotland's introduction for those of weaker capacity we use it today as a standard for the ordaining of our ministers which perhaps says something about the difference of our time and the 17th century at least in the ability to memorize and commitment to the hard work of memorizing more lengthy passages the assemblies major work ended with the completion of the catechisms in 1648 the last plenary session was held on February 22nd 1649 1,163 meetings over five and a half years large group English ministers with a few Scottish ministers and elders had worked through all those years to give us the precious documents that we now have the assembly continued another four years until 1653 as a small committee or examining prospective ministers functioning almost like a committee of presbytery in that period when no church was really established in England and it was a time of great confusion and uncertainty the return of the king in 1660 undid the work of the Westminster Assembly in England it never really functioned in the church of England in any significant or national way but the English congregation list adopted the Westminster confession of faith in 1658 with some revisions on polity this is known as the Savoy Declaration from Savoy it was brought into New England where the New England Puritans adopted it in various forms and the English Baptist adopted it in 1677 with revisions both in polity and of course baptism known as the London confession later adopted by American Baptist churches as the Philadelphia confession in 1742 but it was adopted already long before by the Church of Scotland in 1647 and subsequently by Presbyterians in many lands I'd like to conclude by turning again to Will Barker's forward see tells about being a student at Covenant Seminary and going to Covenant Church and hearing Dr. Larry Harris teach the Bible but following the outline of Westminster confession Will says this this experience almost four decades ago a firm from the several points of importance to my subsequent ministry one that there is a system of doctrine contained in the scriptures two that the Westminster doctrinal standards confession of faith and larger and shorter catechisms faithfully set forth this system and three that steady regular exposition of the Bible will lead one to agreement with that system we're foreseeing that we're surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us