Westminster Confession

Impact

Although the Westminster Confession was designed for the reformation of the Church of England, it ultimately had little impact on that body. After the fall of the parliamentary regime and the restoration of the monarchy and the bishops of the Church of England in 1660, the Church moved steadily away from the Calvinism of the Confession. The Westminster Confession’s principal impact was on the Church of Scotland, other Scottish Presbyterian churches, and English Dissenting churches, particularly the Presbyterians. Congregationalists and Particular Baptists also accepted many aspects of Reformed theology, if not Presbyterian church order; although the specifically Presbyterian components of the Westminster Confession prevented them from adopting it in toto, statements of faith such as the Congregationalist Savoy Declaration of Faith and Order (1658) and the Particular Baptist Confession of Faith (1689) drew heavily from the Westminster Confession.

From the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, the reach of the Westminster Confession grew along with that of the British Empire, as Presbyterian, Congregational, and other Reformed churches in the English-speaking world adopted it in whole or in part as a statement of their faith, including churches in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. As the former British colonies in North America became independent, the Westminster Confession, like many aspects of the British religious tradition, remained a powerful force in shaping the new nation’s religion and has been adopted by many American churches. The Presbyterian Synod of Philadelphia adopted it in 1729, followed by the first official Presbyterian denomination in the newly independent United States, the Presbyterian Church of the United States, in 1788. However, the document has been substantially modified to weaken the power of the state over religious belief in the direction of liberty of conscience. A clause denouncing the pope as Antichrist (not reproduced in this excerpt) is also omitted or repudiated by most modern Presbyterians. For America’s largest Presbyterian denomination, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Westminster Confession has been supplanted by the Confession of 1967, although the Westminster Confession, along with the Westminster Larger and Shorter Catechisms, is included in the Church’s Book of Confessions. The Presbyterian Church in America, which broke off from the Presbyterian Church (USA) in part as a response to the theological liberalism it identified in the Confession of 1967, continues to use the Westminster Confession with modifications as its standard, as do many other more conservative Presbyterian bodies.