THE WESTMINSTER CONFESSION INTO THE 21ST CENTURY

I just finished the first volume of The Westminster Confession of Faith into the 21st Century, ed. Ligon Duncan. It is excellent. I plan to finish the other two volumes by year's end. Students of the Confession should be exceedingly thankful for such quality work! Dr. Richard Gaffin's essay "Westminster and the Sabbath," Dr. Morton Smith's essay "Theology of the Larger Catechism," and Dr. Michael Horton's essay "Finney's Attacks on the Westminster Confession" should be required reading for every elder in the Presbyterian and Reformed tradition.

Here's an excerpt from the Rev. Dr. David W. Hall's essay "The History of Westminster Assembly Commemorations" which was particularly motivating to me, emphasizing the light and heat of the Puritan-Reformed tradition:

Of the Confession of Faith as an accurate and vital compilation of Christian truth, Warfield contended, that as such, the Westminster Confession of Faith could not in its influence:

lack in spiritual quality. It is the product of intellect working only under the impulse of the heart, and must be a monument of the religious life. This is true of all the great creedal statements, and preeminently true of the Westminster Standards. Their authors were men of learning and philosophic grasp; but above all piety. Their interest was not in speculative construction, but in the protection of their flocks from error . . . . In proportion as our own religious life flows in a deep and broad stream, in that proportion will we find spiritual delight in the Westminster Standards.

Benjamin Warfield challenged his contemporaries with this: ". . . the nicety of its [Westminster Confession] balance in conceiving and the precision of its language in stating truth, will seem to us scholastic only in proportion as our religious life is less developed than theirs." When Warfield saw others attempting to lessen the influence of the Confession of Faith and lower its standard, he felt "an inexpressible grief [to see the Church] spending its energies in a vain attempt to lower its testimony to suit the ever changing sentiment of the world about it" (13).