Appendix C
THE STRANGE LEGACY OF THE WESTMINSTER ASSEMBLY
And when they brought out the money that was brought into the house of the LORD, Hilkiah the priest found a book of the law of the LORD given by Moses. And Hilkiah answered and said to Shaphan the scribe, I have found the book of the law in the house of the LORD. And Hilkiah delivered the book to Shaphan. And Shaphan carried the book to the king, and brought the king word back again, saying, All that was committed to thy servants, they do it. And they have gathered together the money that was found in the house of the LORD, and have delivered it into the hand of the overseers, and to the hand of the workmen. Then Shaphan the scribe told the king, saying, Hilkiah the priest hath given me a book. And Shaphan read it before the king. And it came to pass, when the king had heard the words of the law, that he rent his clothes. And the king commanded Hilkiah, and Ahikam the son of Shaphan, and Abdon the son of Micah, and Shaphan the scribe, and Asaiah a servant of the king's, saying, Go, enquire of the LORD for me, and for them that are left in Israel and in Judah, concerning the words of the book that is found: for great is the wrath of the LORD that is poured out upon us, because our fathers have not kept the word of the LORD, to do after all that is written in this book (II Chron. 34:14-21).
Israel had lost the law of God and had forgotten its details. Covenant-breakers had ruled over them in terms of different laws. This is not so remarkable as it sounds. Christians today have almost equally short memories because they are not interested in Church history, which they allow humanists and liberals to write for them.
Very few Presbyterians know much about Presbyterian Church history. This includes Presbyterian pastors. They have not been told that the Presbyterian foundational documents were written mainly by Anglicans who had never been inside a Presbyterian Church. They do not know that Scottish Presbyterian Church government has never been conducted in terms of the judicial documents officially printed by the Scottish Presbyterian Church, which in fact have no legal status. They are unaware of the origin of the Westminster Assembly: called into existence by politicians who were in the midst of what is known as the English Civil War, and who needed someone to show them how, in the absence of bishops, to ordain chaplains to serve the armed forces, so that the military could defeat a King who favored bishops. The politicians' ecclesiastical goal was this: "Weak King-no bishops." Their political goal was this: "No bishops-weak King." The Westminster Assembly was a wartime gathering whose fate would be sealed, in England at least, by the military first, the politicians second, and the Church third.
Oliver Cromwell The Assembly was dependent on the success of one man above all others: Oliver Cromwell. If he lost on the battlefield, they might literally lose their heads. In his hands was the future of Puritanism in England and, to a lesser extent, Scotland. He was the central figure. Yet in the neo-Puritan movement, pioneered by the British Isles' Banner of Truth Trust in the early 1960's, Cromwell's name is rarely mentioned except in passing (very fast passing). This, too, may seem strange. But it is not strange at all, for the Banner of Truth suffers from the problems that faced the Puritan movement after the restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1660. It has neither an army nor any political influence. It has adopted post-1660 Puritan theology, which excludes politics as adiaphora (things indifferent to the faith), ignoring the fact that Puritan covenant theology originally included civil government as one of the four forms of oath-bound covenantal government: personal, ecclesiastical, familial, and civil.(1)
Today, on both sides of the Atlantic, the spiritual heirs of the Westminster Assembly affirm the radical Whigs' secular ideal of universal religious toleration, an ideal that appalled every member of the Westminster Assembly, an idea affirmed only by one man in that era, Roger Williams, whose 1644 book was ordered burned by the Parliament that had called the Assembly into existence. Nevertheless, it was Cromwell who first brought religious toleration for non-Anglican Protestants in England, a fact ignored at the time by the New England Puritans and forgotten ever since by spiritual heirs of the Westminster Assembly. This horrified the Assembly's members. All but five of them had opposed Cromwell's ecclesiastical ideal--independency--and the Assembly's great work was undermined in England because of the immediate political results of that ideal.
To make sense of these anomalies, and several more that we will get to shortly, we must first consider the origin of the Westminster Assembly.
The End of the Old Order The Arminian Archbishop William Laud had attempted in the spring of 1637 to impose Anglicanism on Scotland, something that James I had also attempted to do before his death in 1625, but had failed to accomplish. Laud would also fail, and great was the failure thereof. The Scots refused to accept Laud's new worship service book. A Scottish rebellion began on July 23, 1637, when a group of young women at the St. Giles Church in Edinburgh broke up the services led by the local bishop. Resistance to both the Archbishop and the King escalated throughout 1638. That a group of unordained young women launched the Presbyterian revolt that brought on the English Civil War--better described as the Premature Revolution--is, on the face of it, a wee bit peculiar.
Charles I invaded Scotland in the spring of 1639. His army lost. He was forced to sign a truce, but it soon became clear that the peace would not last long. The next year, he called Parliament into session to raise money to fight a looming war. Parliament met in April, 1640. Not having been called into session since 1629, Parliament refused his request for money. The King dissolved Parliament in May, 1640: the Short Parliament.
The Scots invaded that summer. They won the war in August and settled into the six northern counties. They imposed daily monetary penalties until a permanent settlement could be arranged. The King did not have the money. He therefore consented to another Parliamentary election in November, 1640. With the Scots tying down what remained of the King's forces, the "Presbyterians" (anti-prelates) did well in the election. The King settled with the Scots in late 1641.(2) He never found a way to settle with his new Parliament, which executed him in 1649, and sat until Oliver Cromwell replaced it in 1653: the Long Parliament.
In between the two 1640 Parliaments, Archbishop Laud had imposed a system of 17 new Church laws aimed at strengthening the bishops and the King. One law damned to hell anyone who would oppose the King. Clergymen also had to swear an oath never to change the Church of England. The Church voluntarily abandoned this oath after the Scots won, but by then it was too late for episcopacy.(3) Laud had tried to repair a weakened dam to resist a tidal wave. The tidal wave struck in November, 1640.
When Parliament assembled, it immediately arrested the long-persecuting Archbishop. The system of Church courts and civil sanctions that had been imposed by the bishops was now abolished--as it turned out, forever. But no one could be sure of that in late 1640. In January, 1643, prelacy was abolished.(4) But, as in the case of Geneva over a century earlier, abolishing the bishops created a judicial vacuum. Geneva's civil council had filled the absent bishop's social function with Calvin.(5) Parliament needed more than one man to replace national episcopacy.
The exercise of monopolistic ecclesiastical power through civil government still existed as a social ideal. It had existed for over a millennium. Historian William Haller writes of the pre-1644 era in England: "Practically everybody agreed that there could be but one true religion and that the church should be maintained by the state. The continuance of ordered society was as yet inconceivable without the Christian church, and the church was inconceivable except as a single comprehensive institution uniform in faith and worship."(6) The one exception was Roger Williams, but no one in 1643 knew about him outside of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Rhode Island. Four years later, they could imagine alternatives--many alternatives.
At the beginning of 1645--the year in which Cromwell gained military supremacy--Parliament executed Laud. His King was executed four years later. James I's phrase, "No bishop-no king," proved to be quite accurate in the 1640's.
Root, Branch, and Synod Some 15,000 petitioners in London signed what became known as the "root and branch petition," which was submitted to Parliament on December 11, 1640.(7) It called for the complete abolition of episcopacy, with "its dependencies, roots and branches."(8) On January 12, Parliament received a similar petition from 11 counties signed by 14,000 people.(9) But Parliament did not respond. The King still had the power to dissolve it, and the members were unwilling to take action on these petitions. In May, Cromwell and other Independents introduced a bill to abolish the episcopacy. Parliament debated it in June, but did not pass the bill.(10) The majority still believed in a national Church under the general authority of the State, but they did not know what to substitute for episcopacy. They leaned toward Presbyterianism to the extent that they understood it. Over the next four years, they would help create it. Then they would abandon it.
The root-and-branch petition revealed that there were some in Parliament who were willing to disrupt the traditional ecclesiastical order. But the critics of episcopacy had a problem: almost everyone in Christendom believed in the necessity of a civil government covenanted under God and ruled by a godly civil magistrate. But if not episcopacy, then what? No one was sure.
Apocalyptic Expectations
Since the days of Foxe's Book of Martyrs (Acts and Monuments of These Latter and Perillous Days, 1563), there had been an almost universal belief in England that Protestants, under a godly king and (said the Anglican bishops) a godly episcopacy, would rout the Antichrist, meaning the Roman Church.(11) This apocalyptic expectation was appropriated by the Puritans in the late 1630's and early 1640's, but the saving agent would be a reformed Church, not the Church of Archbishop Laud. They believed that this could be accomplished speedily, if only the true Church could be substituted for Laud's brand of Anglicanism.
Parliament called into existence the Westminster Assembly in mid-1643 in earnest and apocalyptic expectation that this Assembly would speedily provide the theological and judicial framework for the true Church to fulfill the Book of Revelation. Parliament wanted reform, and wanted it fast. But reform did not come fast. These great expectations of creating a godly people and a godly social order were dashed within two years, and smashed as an ideal within a decade. Writes William Lamont: "The disenchantment of 1645 can only be understood against the background of the inflated hopes of 1641."(12)
In July, 1641, Parliament passed and the King signed an act that abolished the Church's Court of High Commission, which had possessed the authority to impose corporal and financial punishments.(13) When the King in August, 1641, agreed not to disband Parliament as his price to get Parliament to allocate the funds to pay off the resident Scottish army, Parliament began to consider calling a synod of theologians to advise them regarding Church reform. It took over a year and a half even to get them assembled.(14)
Synod: Yes or No?
In late December, 1641, Parliament voted to imprison 12 bishops, members of the House of Lords.(15) In January, the King marched troops to Parliament and tried to arrest five members of the House of Commons. This attempt failed. The King then withdrew and left London.(16) The next month, though preparing for war with Parliament's forces, the King signed Parliament's act that forbade all temporal power to bishops, meaning their right to serve in the House of Lords.(17) But the King resisted every attempt by Parliament to call a synod, and his cooperation was needed to legalize the act. When Parliament threatened an ultimatum to the King in June, 1642, one section of which insisted on the synod, the King resisted.(18) The Civil War broke out in July, and this further delayed their plans to call the Assembly.(19) The bill to call it passed in November, 1642.
The King had insisted that the Assembly be appointed by the Church.(20) Parliament knew that this would guarantee episcopacy. Instead, Parliament appointed the attendees. The representatives of the House of Commons from each county appointed two attendees per county.(21) Then the House of Lords was allowed to appoint 14 more.(22)
To gain legitimacy for both the Assembly and Parliament's right to convoke it without the King's permission, Parliament had to make sure that the Assembly was truly representative. Also, Parliament could not interfere excessively in its operations.(23) The pro-Presbyterian group exercised effective control over 40 percent of Parliament's 51 committees that dealt with religion.(24) Parliament formally summoned the Assembly on June 24, 1643. The King's victories over Parliament's military forces came in the following month. So, there is no substantial evidence that the Assembly was a payoff to the Scots for joining the war against the King.(25)
By then, Parliament had no doubts about the need to abolish episcopacy. In its July 12 ordinance (it was not technically a law, since the King had not signed it) to form the Assembly, Parliament identified the Church's system of bishops as "evil."(26)
The Divines Gather, 1643-48 The Assembly's Divines were above-average clerics.(27) Twenty-five had been cathedral clergy. Thirteen had been royal chaplains.(28) Their educational attainments were high: 87 percent had a bachelor's degree, 85 percent had a master's degree, 37 percent had a bachelor of divinity, and a quarter had a doctor of divinity.(29) This, in a Church of 10,000 ministers(30) in which illiterate pastors were common. For example, only half of the congregations in Norfolk and Suffolk had pastors who could read.(31) Half of the Divines had published at least one book, mostly since 1641.(32)
When in attendance, the delegates were paid four shillings a day by the government.(33) Parliament appointed 121 ministers and 30 laymen: 20 lords and ten commoners drawn from Parliament itself. As the years dragged on, fewer and fewer attended; they had difficulty assembling a quorum of 40 after 1645.(34)
The Factions
Among the attendees were four Scottish ministers and two laymen, plus three scribes.(35) Not being English, the Scots did not have a vote in the Assembly, but they were influential.(36) They were not merely representatives of the Scottish Church but of the Scottish nation itself, as Treaty Commissioners for the Solemn League and Covenant between the two nations, which had not been ratified at the time the Assembly opened. They arrived on September 15, 1643, ten days before England ratified the Solemn League and Covenant. They met with the Assembly only as private men without a vote; they met with Parliament separately and directly, as national agents.(37) The fact is, as John R. de Witt has commented, "what is often considered to be the quintessentially Presbyterian gathering was in fact not a presbyterian assembly at all. Rather, it was an English body whose clerical members were all Puritans and ministers in the Church of England, who had been episcopally ordained."(38) One of the Scottish attendees, Robert Baillie, later wrote: "You know this is no proper Assembly, but a meeting called by the Parliament. . . ."(39)
The Assembly met at Westminster Abbey in London. At least five Independents were in attendance, balancing the four non-voting Scots. All five had lived in Holland during Laud's reign.(40) Between these two small factions at each end of the ecclesiastical spectrum--one of them not voting--the battle would be fought . . . interminably, from Parliament's point of view. Here were well over a hundred fully convicted Puritan theologians and ministers who made their livings talking, usually to a passive audience that did not talk back. This many God-convicted men in one assembly guaranteed a very long assembly, though neither they nor Parliament suspected this in mid-1643. It met for almost 1,200 meetings for almost five years.(41) While they were meeting, the first modern political revolution was taking place around them.
The Debates Begin
The Assembly first came together on July 1, 1643. It leaned strongly toward the Presbyterian position, but the Independents succeeded in delaying the development of a recommended system of Church government for many months. The Assembly debated endlessly. The Presbyterians probably thought that debate would persuade the Independents. If so, they were naive. The debates went on. The Scottish attendees complained of this endless delay.(42) The majority could have ended debate, but they allowed it to continue. This delay would seal the fate of English Presbyterianism.
The Presbyterians wanted a State Church with ministerial control over ordination and excommunication. Parliament wanted the power to appoint the ministers; some members wanted no excommunication at all (the Erastian party).(43) The Independents wanted local church autonomy and civil toleration for Protestant churches. There was no middle ground.
The five Independents appealed to Parliament and went into print in January, 1644, with An Apologeticall Narration.(44) This was a self-conscious decision to appeal to the general public in a matter affecting both Church and State. The battle of the theological pamphlets had begun in earnest in 1641, accelerated rapidly in 1642 when the war began (paralleled by the initial appearance of political pamphlets),(45) and would soon become a flood.(46) This pamphlet war was unprecedented in the history of man. Writers appealed to people who could legally vote in civil elections, yet tens of thousands of those who read the pamphlets did not have the vote. They would demand the vote within three years.(47) Some of these non-voters wrote their own pamphlets. The Church could no longer control the range of theological opinion. The State would soon no longer be able to control the range of political opinion.(48)
Among the growing army of pamphleteers in 1644 was Roger Williams, who had come to England in 1643, just as the Assembly opened. He wanted to secure a charter for Rhode Island and a printer for his writings.(49) He achieved both goals. In mid-July, 1644, two weeks after the crucial battle of Marston Moor, at which Cromwell defeated the King's troops, Williams' publisher released his Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, for cause of Conscience, pleading for toleration of all sects. He was safely en route back to Rhode Island when it appeared. Parliament promptly ordered it burned.(50) It has become one of the two most famous pamphlets of that era. But Parliament did not burn John Milton's Areopagitica, another plea for toleration published that year, which is the other famous pamphlet.
The flood of pamphlets on both sides soon destroyed the old system of licensed publications. The King had tried to control publishing through licensing before 1642; Parliament tried in 1643;(51) but neither side was successful.(52) While the Westminster Assembly was debating the fine points of Puritan theology, the political theory of English Protestantism was beginning to unravel in full public view.
Presbyterian Worship and Order The pamphlets in 1644 put pressure on the Assembly to get something completed and approved by Parliament. The Assembly hurried--by its standards--to finish the Directory of Publick Worship: from late May to November. Nothing in the Directory of Publick Worship was uniquely Presbyterian. The final committee had been made up of Independents and Presbyterians,(53) so the Directory was a compromise document.
The Directory prescribed a detailed list of liturgical requirements, including the outline of an introductory prayer that fills three small-print pages. This prayer would, before the conclusion of the service, be followed by two more. Prayers on fast days at the Westminster Assembly lasted from one to two hours.(54) It was also Scottish practice in that era to begin the service with a half hour to reading from the Bible.(55) Sermons lasted well over an hour. There was also psalm singing. It is not surprising that the Puritans rejected Calvin's insistence on weekly communion: not enough time. Scottish Presbyterian worship, as with Puritan worship generally,(56) was marathon worship. It reflected the Scottish landscape: only the most hardy could survive.(57)
One section raised questions for the future: "The ignorant and the scandalous are not fit to receive the sacrament of the Lord's Supper."(58) This meant that the Church would control access to the sacraments in a State Church. This alienated those who, following Swiss physician Thomas Erastus (1524-83), believed that the sacrament is a sanction and a means of discipline, and who refused to allow the Church on its own authority to close communion to anyone. Despite opposition from Parliament's Erastians, Parliament approved the document in January, 1645.(59) It was received by the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Church the next month. But because the document was written to overcome the objections of the Independents, including politicians in Parliament, it was only loosely and mildly Presbyterian; nevertheless, it became a foundational though unofficial document for Scottish Presbyterianism. It was never officially ratified.
Church Government
Also in February, 1645, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland voted to accept a modified version of the Westminster Assembly's Propositions Concerning Church Government and Ordination of Ministers,(60) known later in Scottish Presbyterian circles as the Form of Presbyterial Church-Government.(61) Because the Confession of Faith was still over a year in the future when the Assembly finished this document, there was no mention in it of verbal subscription to any Confession, either by members or ministers. This was to have enormous importance for the history of Presbyterianism, most notably during America's Presbyterian conflict. This was the issue of the binding oath of allegiance. Neither the Form of Government nor the Confession of Faith ever said what the role of the oath is. Neither announced what the role of the Confession is. Such an announcement would have tied Parliament's hands, and Parliament was clearly unwilling to have its hands tied. It had arrested Laud in 1640 for having imposed such an oath, even though he had revoked it before Parliament assembled. It executed him in January, 1645, the month before the Scottish Assembly ratified the Form of Government. The Westminster Assembly in 1645 was not going to get Parliament to accept a comparable oath of allegiance to the Form of Government when no Confession of Faith existed. By the time the Confession was submitted, Cromwell and the Independents controlled Parliament.
The Form of Government did not say exactly how local church officers should gain their office. It said only that "Christ hath appointed" them (Of the Officers of the Church). The Church is allowed (though not necessarily required by the Bible) to be governed by Assemblies: congregational, classical (i.e., presbyteries), and synodical (Of Church-Government, and the several sorts of assemblies for the same). There was not one word about a required statement of faith in the section on ministerial ordination, despite the fact that the 12-part section is called, Concerning the Doctrinal Part of Ordination of Ministers. This is one of the strangest features in the history of Presbyterianism.
In The Rules for Examination are these, we are told that the prospective candidate must read the original biblical languages. If he is found deficient in this, he must be examined to see if "he hath skill in logick and philosophy." He must write an essay in Latin. He must be familiar with "authors in divinity." No authors are mentioned. All of the specifics of ordination were exclusively formal; nothing theologically substantive appears anywhere in the document.(62)
Parliament Resists
The English Parliament never did ratify this document. In late summer, 1645, Parliament did authorize the Ordination of Ministers.(63) In March, 1646, Parliament voted to decree a modified form of Presbyterianism throughout the land. The Scottish commissioners complained that the system did not allow presbyteries to bring judgments on congregations under their jurisdiction; the presbyteries were advisory only(64)--rather like the Westminster Assembly was for Parliament. Then Parliament's Presbyterian faction introduced legislation to suppress blasphemy and heresy, which was not adopted until May, 1648, when there was no possibility of enforcing it.(65)
In early spring, 1646, a conflict broke out between Parliament and the Assembly over excommunicable sins. For all sins not listed by Parliament, Parliament demanded that provincial lay commissioners, functioning as bishops, determine who was subject to local congregational discipline. Parliament refused to accept the Assembly's full list of sins. The Assembly protested: Church elders alone should have this authority. Parliament then voted the Assembly guilty of breach of privilege, a serious offense. Parliament demanded that the Assembly prove that Church courts are autonomous from the State. Parliament wanted to retain the authority to sanction the elders: an Erastian State Church, with Parliament on top.(66) The Assembly wanted a Puritan State Church, with the elders autonomous from the State, and with the State compelled by law to enforce their judgments: Church on top. This was never sorted out to either authority's satisfaction. Parliament backed off from its high-handed demands after the King surrendered to the Scots in May.(67) Parliament then directed the Assembly to get on with the writing of the Confession of Faith.
Chapter XXX of the Confession embodies the Presbyterian view, but it was never accepted by Parliament.(68) The divisive issue was Church sanctions: Who has the right to impose them?(69) By 1646, there was no doubt regarding who would make this decision: Oliver Cromwell and his associates.
This Man Cromwell Oliver Cromwell was a military genius. His most significant innovation came as a result of his insight into the weakness of cavalry tactics in his day. After a victorious cavalry charge, the victors pursued their defeated victims, or else stopped, dismounted, and collected booty from the bodies. A victorious cavalry officer could get only one effective charge out of his forces. Cromwell taught his men to stay in the saddle and stay in formation after a charge. Using this tactic, his cavalry brought victory to Parliament's forces at the battle of Marston Moor on July 2, 1644. Parliament's army of about 27,000 men defeated the King's army of 18,000,(70) turning what initially appeared to be a defeat into a stunning victory.(71) The royalists lost between 3,000 and 7,000 men (estimates vary), while Parliament's army lost 300.(72) Cromwell followed that victory with four more years of victories.
Cromwell was an ecclesiastical Independent. He rejected the Anglican Church's system of bishops, but he also rejected Presbyterianism. He was a member of Parliament. At first, he served militarily under the Earl of Manchester, an Englishman of such strong Presbyterian sentiments that he had been appointed one of the Parliamentary lay delegates to the Westminster Assembly.(73) Initially, there was no friction between Cromwell and Manchester. Then, in early 1644, with the entry of the Scots into the Civil War on the side of Parliament, Scotsman Lawrence Crawford arrived. He became a major-general in Manchester's army. He believed that the Solemn League and Covenant, ratified by Scotland in August, 1643, and by Parliament the following month, should be enforced: a State Church. For him, this meant a Presbyterian Church. His presence led to a falling out between Manchester and Cromwell.(74)
Cromwell and the Scots
In the Solemn League and Covenant, both the Scottish and English Parliaments agreed that they would preserve "the reformed religion in the Church of Scotland, in doctrine, worship, discipline, and government, against our common enemies," and called for the reform of religion in England and Ireland "in doctrine, worship, discipline, and government, according to the word of GOD, and the example of the best reformed Churches; . ." (Sec. I). This, in the eyes of the Scots, meant the establishment of Presbyterianism as the State-enforced religion of the British Isles with no toleration for other churches. They had pressured Parliament for something like this as early as April, 1641.(75) They were so determined on this point that in April, 1643, they sent two commissioners to the King offering to join his side against Parliament if the King would agree to impose Presbyterianism on England. He rejected their offer; he preferred to seek aid from the Irish, in return for religious toleration.(76) At that point, the Scots offered their aid to Parliament.
It was clear that the Scots had a not-so-hidden agenda in all this: Presbyterian supremacy by force of arms. The Solemn League and Covenant added that "incendiaries, malignants, or evil instruments, by hindering the reformation of religion, dividing the king from his people, or one of the kingdoms from another," who opposed this covenant would "be brought to publick trial, and receive condign punishment, as the degree of their offences shall require or deserve, or the supreme judicatories of both kingdoms respectively, or others having power from them for that effect, shall judge convenient" (Sec. IV).
This punishment clause, in the eyes of the Independents, justified the execution of the King in 1649. He had become the malignant, evil instrument who was hindering the reformation of religion. The Scots, however, by then had switched sides: officially in the name of the Solemn League and Covenant and the Scottish National Covenant; unofficially because the King, an inveterate liar, was in the Scots' custody as a captive in late 1648, and to get back in power, he had sworn to use his authority to impose Presbyterianism on England.
Cromwell disagreed with the Presbyterian view of Church government and the Scottish interpretation of the Solemn League and Covenant. The victory at Marston Moor provided him with the Parliamentary influence he needed to be given his own army, the New Model Army, which was formed in 1645. This army was dominated by Independents. They were led spiritually by chaplains who were Independents, not ordained by any hierarchical church. The men listened to sermons that emphasized spiritual liberty and the necessity of a conversion experience.(77) Haller writes, "the triumph of the army confirmed the break-up of ecclesiastical order so that every resulting particle or fragment of the church as a whole, whether parish congregation or gathered flock, was left actually independent of every other and a law to itself."(78) Cromwell's victory over the King at the battle of Naseby on June 14, 1645, made it clear that the ecclesiastical goals of the Scots at the Westminster Assembly would not be achieved in England. The Civil War, militarily, was over, unless the Scots should intervene on the side of the King. They did: in 1647. Cromwell defeated them, too. That doomed Presbyterianism in Cromwellian England, 1649-58. (The refusal of English Presbyterians to accept the Confession of Faith as confessionally binding after 1662 doomed English Presbyterian in post-Cromwellian England.)
The Confession of Faith The Westminster Confession of Faith was not handed to Parliament until December, 1646. The Parliament demanded Scripture proofs. These were supplied in April, 1647. In August, the Scottish General Assembly ratified it. The Larger and Shorter Catechisms were never ratified by Parliament; the Scottish General Assembly ratified them in July.
The final form of the Confession was never approved by Parliament. The Confession was renamed Articles of the Christian Religion, and several chapters were not approved: XXX, Of Church Censures; XXXI, Of Synods and Councils; and Section 4 of Chapter XX, Of Christian Liberty. That is, the Articles were not Presbyterian. They were accepted by the House of Commons in 1649, but they were never granted the force of law.(79) In short, having spent almost five years struggling to hammer out the basis of the reform of the Church of England, the Westminster Assembly had accomplished nothing judicially relevant in England. It did, however, establish what became an unofficial Church tradition for the Scots: a mild form of Presbyterianism that had been written by English theologians and modified to deal with the objections, first, of ecclesiastical Independents in the Assembly (July of 1643 to April of 1645) and, second, the demands of a Parliament increasingly controlled by Independents (1645 to 1648). On December 6, 1648, Col. Pride, in Cromwell's absence, marched on Parliament, ejected about 40 members of Presbyterian persuasion, leaving 80 members in power. This was Pride's Purge; it removed Presbyterianism from what came to be known as the Rump Parliament. Cromwell, upon his arrival in London that evening, said he had not approved Pride's action but accepted it gladly.(80)
In 1649, the year Parliament accepted the Articles, it beheaded the King. This attacked the covenantal foundation of Scottish Presbyterianism, which had declared in The National Covenant (1639): ". . . we perceive, that the quietness and stability of our religion and kirk doth depend upon the safety and good behaviour of the King's Majesty, as upon a comfortable instrument of God's mercy granted to this country, for the maintaining of his kirk, and ministration of justice amongst us; . . ."(81) Scotland re-covenanted with Charles II when he arrived from the Continent in June, 1650, and swore an oath to the covenant.(82) His oath turned out a decade later to be as worthless as his father's similar promises had been. Cromwell invaded Scotland and defeated Charles II's forces.(83) Under Parliament (1649-53), and then under Cromwell's Protectorate (1653-58), followed by the Restoration of Charles II (1660), the accession of James II (1685), the Glorious Revolution (1688), and the arrival of William III (1689), the State Church of Scotland would not be protected in the way those signatories had imagined in 1639. That covenantal world of State Church monopoly was over in Anglo-American politics.
A Transformed Scottish Legacy The Westminster Assembly had intended to complete its ecclesiastical work with the Directory for Church Government, but this document was never ratified by Parliament or the Scottish Church.(84) It has been forgotten since the eighteenth century.(85) The Form of Presbyterial Church-Government and the Directory of Church Government were not formally acknowledged by the Presbyterian Church as judicially authoritative until 1921, in the era of modern ecumenism.(86) The Free Presbyterian Church, formed in 1843, had acknowledged them, but only as "regulations," not as "tests,"(87) i.e., oath-bound subscriptions.
The bizarre nature of the history of Presbyterianism should by now be obvious. Its strictly liturgical (1644) and ecclesiastical (1645) documents were co-designed by what would today be called Congregationalists. The five Independents did not withdraw from the Westminster Assembly until April, 1645.(88) Work on the Confession of Faith began the month after the Independents departed.(89) The Confession was designed by the Presbyterians to overcome resistance by their opponents in the Parliament. As it turned out, this self-restraint proved useless. The English Parliament never accepted the ecclesiastical sections of the Confession.
Other oddities of the five-year effort of the Assembly are also worth mentioning. Scotland's Solemn League and Covenant (1643) had been signed in preparation for entry into a war against the King, whose safety the 1639 National Covenant had promised to uphold. Scotland became a military ally of Cromwell and the Independents, who rose to power and then destroyed the judicial basis of the Scottish National Covenant: first by executing the King; second, by imposing Protestant religious toleration on the realm, including Scotland. As it turned out, a group of Englishmen established the foundational documents of Scottish Presbyterianism. In 1648, the year after the Assembly completed the annotated Confession, England went to war with Scotland.
The Scottish Church did not formally ratify the Westminster Assembly's documents on Church government. In any case, these documents were only vaguely Presbyterian, and even those sections that can be regarded as Presbyterian are merely authorized, not defended as expressly biblical.(90) While the General Assembly of 1647 accepted the Directory of Church Government, this had to be ratified in 1648. By 1648, there was little possibility of England's adopting the documents. The Scottish Church dropped the matter, although it ratified the Confession of Faith and the two catechisms. After 1649, the Scottish Church's General Assembly could no longer publish its acts: under Cromwell, then under Charles II and James II. Only in 1688, after the Glorious Revolution, did the Scottish Church regain its independence. But in that year, it re-ratified only the Westminster Confession of Faith.(91) In practice, the Form of Presbyterial Church-Government did serve as a de facto rule, but it was far less Presbyterian than earlier Church rules. The Church had downgraded its standards in 1647 for the sake of a compromise document. Spear sees this as evidence of the Scottish Church's good faith in signing the Solemn League and Covenant.(92) This may help to explain what they did in 1647. It does not explain why they put up with it after 1688.
Two generations later, Scotland would not be known so much for its Presbyterianism as for its common-sense rationalism (unitarian), whose empiricist methodology would be adopted by Presbyterian theologians, and for its world-famous empiricist skeptic, David Hume. In 1787-88, American Presbyterians voted to remove the section of the Confession authorizing the civil magistrate to call a synod like the Westminster Assembly. Had this view of civil authority prevailed earlier, the Church International would not have the Nicean creed, and Presbyterians would not have the Westminster Confession of Faith.
From State Church to Protestant Sect Free speech became dominant in the New Model Army, which was formed in 1645. Cromwell continued to defeat the King's forces, bringing the day of political judgment closer to the Presbyterians. Let us review the history briefly. In 1646, the Westminster Assembly submitted the Westminster Confession. Parliament had the Assembly add supporting Bible proof texts. In May, 1647, Parliament officially received the amended Confession, but by that time, Cromwell and the Independents were dominant militarily. In late 1647, the defeated King made an alliance with the Scots.(93) In 1648, Parliament was in the hands of Cromwell's supporters. A Scottish army invaded England in July, 1648, hoping to put the King back on the throne. This army was completely defeated by Cromwell by October,(94) and with it, English Presbyterianism.
The English Presbyterians had been trapped by the decision of the Scottish Presbyterians to defend the King and a Throne-Church theocratic order, which had been affirmed by the language of the Solemn League and Covenant (Sec. VI). English Presbyterians could impose Church unity only by force, but the only significant force available was Cromwell's New Model Army, which opposed Presbyterianism.(95) Haller writes: "The advance of the army under Cromwell's leadership meant the final defeat of the work of the Westminster Assembly."(96) He concludes: "The English people were never again to be united in a visible church of any sort."(97) After the Restoration, English Presbyterianism refused to accept the Westminster Confession of Faith as binding, and in 1719, the denomination went unitarian.
This historical reality made American Presbyterianism an ecclesiastical structure very different from Scottish Presbyterianism in 1645. The eighteenth-century English Whig ideal of religious toleration had been long preceded by the Puritan Independents' ideal of religious toleration, at least for non-prelates. The Presbyterian Church of Scotland in 1643 had been a State Church, with the Church dominant over the State.(98) All Presbyterians in the 1640's assumed the legitimacy of this arrangement. The State was expected to back up the pastors. The civil magistrate, said the Confession, has the duty "to take order that unity and peace be preserved in the Church, that the truth of God be kept pure and entire, that all blasphemies and heresies be suppressed, all corruptions and abuses in worship and discipline prevented or reformed, and all the ordinances of God duly settled, administered, and observed" (XXIII:3). But Cromwell would not enforce this under the Protectorate, and surely Charles II and, after 1684, his quasi-Papist brother James II would not. Yet Scotland was under the King's authority. Negative sanctions against theological deviance would henceforth be exclusively ecclesiastical--something that no Presbyterian would have imagined in 1646. Religious toleration, beginning surely with the defeat of the Scottish army in 1648, steadily became the ideal of Anglo-Scottish-American Presbyterianism.
After 1647, the Presbyterians had a monumental problem. The Church's foundational documents had been written to gain the acceptance of a civil assembly that included non-Presbyterians--as time went on, a growing number of non-Presbyterians. The documents did not fit together. The Form of Presbyterial Church-Government (1645) had no required statement of faith, i.e., no theological stipulations. It required no oath from Church officers or members. The Confession of Faith (1647) also did not mention Church oaths. It did not specify how its own stipulations were to apply judicially. The burning question should have been this: What was the covenantal relationship between these two completely separate documents? But no one in authority asked it in 1648, and no one in authority has asked it since.
Conclusion The Westminster Assembly was both political and ecclesiastical, for there was no separation of Church and State in the seventeenth century outside of Rhode Island. The Assembly's politically assigned task in 1643 was to hammer out a religious settlement, in an era in which a three-way revolution would be fought over ecclesiology: Independents, Presbyterians, and Anglicans. By the end of the Assembly, there was no agreement about theology, either. In 1643, England was Calvinistic; the Arminian bishops were gone. By 1648, when the bulk of the Assembly's work was completed, England was a confessional cacophony: Calvinists, Arminians, Socinians (unitarians), experientialists, ranters, ravers, and all points in between. In just five years, while the Assembly debated the fine points of Calvinism, Calvinism's near-monopoly disappeared forever in England. After Charles II returned to the throne in 1660, Calvinism faded away except in the Empire's outposts: Scotland and North America.
The Westminster Assembly's assigned task was to provide advice for Parliament for reforming the Church of England. What it actually accomplished was to formalize Scottish Presbyterianism. It was asked by Parliament to suggest Church government reforms. "Doctrinal matters lay wholly in the background."(99) What it actually accomplished was the production of the most comprehensive theological confession in Protestant history, but with very few specifics on Church government. Parliament rejected the Assembly's handful of suggested ecclesiastical reforms, yet ratified its theological system. Then it refused to legislate this theological system. A year after the completion of the annotated version of the Confession in 1647, England went to war with Scotland, whose national Church was the only immediate ecclesiastical beneficiary of the Assembly's work, which in turn had sent representatives to the Assembly as a result of the 1643 treaty between two nations. Finally, in 1660, after the Puritan political revolution had ended in total failure, Charles II ascended to the throne, re-established bishops in 1661, who then, with Parliament's assent, re-imposed Anglicanism's Thirty-nine Articles of Religion. So, in the final analysis, Parliament had allocated money to an elite group of intellectuals for five years to complete what they had expected to be about a six-month wartime project, which was followed by a war between the former allies.
All things considered, the Westminster Assembly can be described fairly as a representative government project, a model of what politicians can achieve with the public's money. It achieved the opposite of everything it had announced as its goals.
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Footnotes:
1. Richard Baxter divided his Christian Directory (1673) into these four covenantal units of government.
2. David Stevenson, The Scottish Revolution, 1637-1644: The Triumph of the Covenanters (New York: St. Martin's, 1973), ch. 7.
3. Michael A. R. Graves and Robin H. Silcock, Revolution, Reaction and the Triumph of Conservatism: English History, 1558-1700 (Auckland: Longman Paul, 1984), p. 293.
4. Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, "The Westminster Assembly and Its Work" (1908), in The Westminster Assembly and Its Work (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker, [1931] 1991), p. 10.
5. R. J. Rushdoony, "Calvin in Geneva: The Sociology of Justification by Faith," Politics of Guilt and Pity (Fairfax, Virginia: Thoburn Press, [1970] 1978), p. 271. This essay was originally published in the Westminster Theological Journal.
6. William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), p. 6.
7. Larry Jackson Holley, The Divines of the Westminster Assembly: A Study of Puritanism and Parliament (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1979), p. 15.
8. "The Root and Branch Petition," in The Puritan Revolution: A Documentary History, edited by Stuart E. Prall (Garden City, New York: Anchor, 1968), p. 97. See also the collection of Parliamentary documents related to the Westminster Assembly in David Hall, "Parliamentary Background of the Assembly," in To Glorify and Enjoy God, edited by John L. Carson and David W. Hall (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1994), p. 269.
9. Holley, Divines, p. 22.
10. Ibid., pp. 32-34.
11. William M. Lamont, Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603-60 (London: Macmillan, 1969), chaps. 1-3.
12. Ibid., p. 108.
13. Wayne Renwick Spear, Covenanted Uniformity in Religion: The Influence of the Scottish Commissioners upon the Ecclesiology of the Westminster Assembly (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1976), p. 29.
14. Holley, Divines, chaps. 2, 3.
15. Ibid., p. 56.
16. Spear, Covenanted Uniformity, p. 43.
17. This was the Clerical Disabilities Act: ibid., p. 29.
18. Holley, Divines, p. 77.
19. Ibid., p. 82.
20. Ibid., p. 96.
21. Ibid., pp. 151-53.
22. Ibid., p. 159.
23. Ibid., pp. 118-27.
24. Ibid., p. 132.
25. Ibid., p. 137.
26. "An Ordinance Calling for the Assembly," Glorify and Enjoy, p. 292.
27. For brief biographies, see Holley, Divines, Appendix XX.
28. Ibid., p. 237.
29. Ibid., p. 167.
30. Ibid., p. 160.
31. Ibid., p. 167.
32. Ibid., p. 206. For a 36-page bibliography, see ibid., Appendix XIX.
33. "An Ordinance for Calling the Assembly," Glorify and Enjoy, p. 293.
34. Spear, Covenanted Uniformity, pp. 60-61.
35. For biographies, see ibid., pp. 92-106.
36. Peter Toon, Puritans and Calvinism (Swengel, Pennsylvania: Reiner, 1973), pp. 57, 62. See also Spear, Covenanted Uniformity.
37. Warfield, Westminster Assembly, pp. 31-34.
38. John Richard de Witt, "The Form of Church Government," in Glorify and Enjoy, p. 146.
39. Cited in ibid., p. 147.
40. Holley, Divines, p. 170. These were Bridge, Nye, Goodwin, Burroughs, and Simpson.
41. Edwin S. Gaustad, Liberty of Conscience: Roger Williams in America (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1991), p. 59.
42. William Haller, Liberty and Reformation in the Puritan Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), pp. 115-16.
43. Lamont, Godly Rule, pp. 113-21.
44. Reprinted in William Haller, Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution, 1638-1647, 3 vols. (New York: Octagon, [1934] 1979), II:305-39. For Haller's commentary, see volume 1, ch. 6.
45. Margaret A. Judson, The Crisis of the Constitution: An Essay in Constitutional and Political Thought in England, 1603-1645 (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, [1949] 1988), p. 9. Cf. ch. 10: "The Issues Become Clear."
46. For a list of the pamphlet responses of attendees of the Assembly, see Haller, Tracts, I:51. For a list of replies by Independents, see Tracts, I:52.
47. A. S. P. Woodhouse, ed., Puritanism and Liberty: Being the Army Debates (1647-9) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1951] 1965).
48. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (New York: Viking, 1972); Hill, Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the 17th Century (New York: Schocken, 1958).
49. Gaustad, Liberty of Conscience, pp. 57-58.
50. Ibid., p. 85.
51. Haller, Liberty and Reformation, p. 134.
52. Ibid., p. 139.
53. William Maxwell Hetherington, History of the Westminster Divines (Edmondton, Canada: Still Water Revival Books, [1856] 1991), p. 179.
54. Iain Murray, "The Directory for Public Worship," Glorify and Enjoy, p. 186.
55. Ibid., p. 177.
56. John Cotton, when preaching in England's city of Boston, would preach for two hours in the morning, conduct two hours of questions and answers, and then do it again with new material in the afternoon. Yet his church was the best-attended parish church in England. Carl Bridenbaugh, Vexed and Troubled Englishmen, 1590-1642 (New York: Oxford University Press, [1967] 1976), p. 296.
57. We are not among the survivors, including those who call for a return to the Westminster standards without understanding what they were expressly designed to achieve liturgically.
58. The Directory for the Publick Worship of God, in The Confession of Faith (Publications Committee of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, 1970), p. 394. Notice that it says "the ignorant," not "the heretical." The assumption of the primacy of the intellect undergirds this rule: the exclusion of baptized minors and, by logical extension, the retarded and the senile.
59. Haller, Liberty and Reformation, p. 216.
60. Reprinted in Spear, Covenanted Uniformity, Appendix B.
61. Confession of Faith, p. 396.
62. The Form of Presbyterial Church-Government and of Ordination of Ministers, in Confession of Faith, pp. 397-416.
63. Iain Murray, The Reformation of the Church (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1965), p. 205.
64. Toon, Puritans and Calvinism, p. 63.
65. Haller, Liberty and Reformation, p. 217.
66. De Witt, "Form of Government," Glorify and Enjoy, pp. 158-60.
67. John de Witt, Jus Divinum: The Westminster Assembly and the Divine Right of Church Government (Kampen, Holland: Kok, 1969), pp. 225-26.
68. De Witt, "Form of Government," Glorify and Enjoy, p. 162. For a detailed treatment of these debates, see de Witt, Jus Divinum.
69. Spear, Covenanted Uniformity, p. 124.
70. Maurice Ashley, Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan Revolution (New York: Collier, 1958), p. 63.
71. Antonia Fraser, Cromwell: The Lord Protector (New York: Knopf, 1974), pp. 120-29.
72. Ibid., pp. 128-29.
73. Robert S. Paul, The Lord Protector: Religion and Politics in the Life of Oliver Cromwell (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, [1955] 1964), pp. 72-73.
74. Ibid., pp. 73-75.
75. Holley, Divines, p. 30.
76. Ibid., p. 104.
77. Haller, Liberty and Reformation, ch. 6.
78. Ibid., p. 219.
79. Toon, Puritans and Calvinism, p. 59.
80. Fraser, Cromwell, pp. 269-70; Paul, Lord Protector, pp. 181-82.
81. The Confession of Faith of the Church of Scotland, in Confession of Faith, p. 349.
82. Graves and Silcock, Revolution, Reaction, p. 422.
83. Ibid., pp. 422-23.
84. Spear, Covenanted Uniformity, p. 245.
85. Ibid., p. 327.
86. Ibid., pp. 329-30.
87. Ibid., p. 328.
88. Haller, Liberty and Reformation, p. 217.
89. Toon, Puritans and Calvinism, p. 57.
90. Spear, Covenanted Uniformity, pp. 337-43.
91. Ibid., pp. 324-26.
92. Ibid., p. 347.
93. Haller, Liberty and Reformation, pp. 314, 319.
94. Fraser, Cromwell, pp. 242-61.
95. Haller, Liberty and Reformation, p. 319.
96. Ibid., p. 341.
97. Ibid., p. 355.
98. Jane Lane, The Reign of King Covenant (London: Robert Hale, 1956), provides a hostile account, but one based on the judicial reality of Church authority over civil authority.
99. Warfield, Westminster Assembly, p. 12.