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Well, welcome. Tonight, we're
going to be discussing why we as a church will be studying
the Westminster Confession of Faith. And also, we'll be getting
into some of the historical background of this important doctrinal statement. We want to know what we say we
believe. And we want our congregation
to know the perspective that we as elders will be teaching
from. And the Westminster Confession
is our subordinate standard. That means that underneath scripture,
the doctrine contained in this confession is our standard for
faith and practice. We believe it's an accurate summary
of biblical teaching and a sound guide for us as we seek to obey
God and teach his truth. Now, some people are skeptical
of confessional statements. They say they want no creed but
the Bible. But there has not been a time
in the history of the church where we haven't had a confession
of faith. As William Hetherington rightly
states, thus a confession of faith is not the very voice of
divine truth, but the echo of that voice from souls that have
heard its utterance, felt its power, and are answering to its
call. And since she has been instituted
for the purpose of teaching God's truth to an erring world, her
duty to the world requires that she should leave it in no doubt
respecting the manner in which she understands the message which
she has to deliver. Without doing so, the church
would be no teacher, and the world might remain untaught,
so far as she was concerned. Now, as we approach the matter
of what a church should believe and teach, we need to think through
the four sources of authority, sometimes called the Wesleyan
quadrilateral. The four sources of authority
are scripture, number one, tradition, number two, Reason, number three,
and then finally experience, number four. And we'll be dialed
particularly into that second category, tradition, on these
Wednesday evenings, more than we are on a Lord's Day morning,
for instance. Scripture is in a class of its
own. That's our first, primary, ultimate,
only infallible authoritative source for what we believe and
how we live. Scripture is the very Word of
God and there is nothing like it. It is life-giving. It is our daily bread. But we
don't just receive the scripture as if it falls directly out of
the sky and immediately gets downloaded into our brains. No,
we receive the scripture as it has been divinely and infallibly
preserved and handed down to us by God through our fathers
in the faith. And these fathers have not only
handed down the Word of God to us, and praise God they did that,
but the church has also been interpreting and applying the
Word of God for 2,000 years now. Heresies that have cropped up
have been refuted. We don't have to go re-figure
out Christology. Confusions that have abounded
among believers have been clarified through the iron sharpening iron
of brothers and sisters figuring these things out. Teaching has
been refined and polished over time. And all of this is called
the tradition of the church. The tradition is not infallible,
and at times it must be corrected by the word of God. But tradition
is a great help to us. And there is sometimes this sentiment,
like I mentioned earlier, of why would we need church tradition?
We have the Bible, that's God's word, who cares about man's words? But the people saying this are
men as well. And when they preach and teach
and evangelize and address problems in their homes and churches and
communities and answer the ethical challenges of the day and pray
and answer their children's questions and so forth, when these people
do all those things, they don't only quote chapter and verse
from the Bible. No, they interpret and apply
the word of God. They use the reason God has given
them. They speak from their own experience
as followers of Christ. And they probably also use the
things that they've been taught by other men. And so to think
that only our interpretations and our applications and our
reason and our experiences and our lifetime are legitimate,
And all the interpretations and experiences of our brothers and
sisters who've gone before us are irrelevant because that's
just tradition. That's just words of men. Well,
that's quite hypocritical. God's word says that in a multitude
of counselors, there is safety. We need our brothers and sisters
in Christ to help us refine our thinking. And the tradition of
the church is a great deposit of riches. given to us for this
purpose. When we gladly receive the tradition,
then we are, as Isaac Newton said, standing on the shoulders
of giants. The book of Hebrews says that
the saints who have gone before us, though being dead, speak
to us today. Not literally, like Saul calling
up Samuel from the grave, but through their holy lives and
their testimonies that they have left, they speak to us. So tradition
is a great gift. And one of the sparkling jewels
in this great treasure chest of church tradition is the Westminster
Confession of Faith. And that is what we are studying
here as a church. And though tonight is more background
and history, most weeks we won't really be studying the confession
as if it is our main interest. Rather, we'll be using the confession
as a lens through which we can better see and understand and
enjoy in the great doctrines of the faith. Affirming and studying
a confession of faith also helps us to identify who we are and
who we are aligned with. We do not exist on a theological
island. We are not the first ones to
discover these great truths. And we want to identify who our
brothers are that also believe like we do. By affirming that
we hold to the Westminster Confession of Faith, we are reminding ourselves
and others, visitors or those who might be curious about our
church, other brothers and sisters in Christ who are part of the
broader body of Christ outside of our congregation, our community,
we are telling them who we most closely line up with. We're telling
them that when we affirm the Westminster Confession of Faith,
we are the descendants of the Puritans in heart and mind. We are part of that group of
churches generally called Reformed and Presbyterian. Having a confession
of faith that we actually believe and teach also helps us not only
to identify who we are and who we are aligned with, but also
who we are not. and who we do not align with.
For instance, when we say that we affirm the Westminster Confession
of Faith as our subordinate standard, we're very clearly saying that
we're not Roman Catholic. We're also saying that we're
not another distinct type of Protestant, such as Lutheran
or Baptist. We're of course not saying that
Lutherans and Baptists aren't our brothers in Christ, not at
all. Many of them are faithful, godly men and women that we can
learn from. We're just saying that we see
things on, mainly on secondary and tertiary issues, we see things
differently. But also it's important. that through our affirming and
teaching the Westminster Confession of Faith, that we make sure we're
not confused with other groups who might bear the name of Reformed
or Presbyterian, who have descended the slippery slope into liberalism,
and even in some cases, atheism at what looks like a breakneck
pace. For instance, the PCUSA, calls itself a Reformed and Presbyterian
body. That is the largest, I believe,
of Presbyterian denomination in the United States. But this
PCUSA also affirms feminism, sodomite marriage, and the killing
of babies in their mother's wombs. So learning in detail what we
believe helps us draw the boundary lines that need to be drawn,
even sometimes among those who would use some of the same labels
that we might use. Now, we would wish, of course,
that there were no boundaries whatsoever between those who
are part of the visible church. That's our great desire, and
we know we're going that direction. We are one holy Catholic and
apostolic church, and one day there will be, praise God, no
divisions between any parts of her members. But sadly, and I'm
not talking about the faithful Lutherans and Baptists here,
but people like the PCUSA, for instance, and others of that
ilk, when so-called Christians exist to oppose Christ and his
word, seemingly at every turn, then we have to draw sharp distinctions
at times. And knowing and believing the
historic faith that has been passed down to us from our fathers
helps us to do that. Knowing and believing the doctrine
contained in the Westminster Confession helps us to know when
to draw those boundary lines. 20th century Presbyterian minister
Ian Paisley once said this. He said, when you go to any,
he's speaking to pastors here, young men who want to be pastors
and who are pastors. He says, when you go to any little
country town to start a church, you let people know you're against
something. You let them know you haven't
come as a sob voice sissy to be another pulpit ornament two
times on Sunday. That you're not a soft peddling,
fence straddling, cream puff pie preacher. That you're a man
of God with fire in your belly and you're going to preach the
word with power. Amen. Now we don't want to be
known primarily for what we oppose. We want to be as open and Catholic
in the lowercase c since that word charitable to our brothers
and sisters in Christ as we can. But we also want people to know
that we do in fact, oppose wickedness and every opinion that is raised
against the knowledge of God. So that's one reason why we want
to proclaim and study this confession. A confession also helps us to
hold ourselves accountable. It is something that we as elders
have agreed to, and it can help us, it can help rein us in if
we start to walk down an unwise or dangerous road. The confession
serves as guidelines and boundaries for us. It can serve as an arbiter. between us. If there's a disagreement
or confusion and we just can't find unity in our interpretation
of the Bible, we can say, well, what does our subordinate standards
say? What did our fathers in faith
come and over a series of several years work out and agree on? This is where we can find our
common ground if we are having trouble interpreting or applying
a particular doctrine. Now, does that mean we absolutely
affirm every jot and tittle of this confession? No, it does
not. There are groups that do. They're called full subscriptionist
or strict subscriptionists. And that's fine, that's great.
That's just not where we've decided that we need to be as an elder
body and as a church. We do require full subscription
to the Bible, of course, as well as to the Apostles' Creed. And
among us elders, we do require the elders to have a good faith
subscription to the Westminster Confession. And if our elders
have some minor areas of exception to the confession, they have
to be clearly stated and allowed by the other elders. Members,
on the other hand, of King's Cross do not have to affirm the
Westminster Confession of Faith, but they do have to commit to
receiving the teaching of the church, which will in large measure
be in line with this confession. And to be clear, there are a
lot of things also that our confession doesn't address that we are confronted
with today and need to be clear on. A lot of ethical things,
for instance, like birth control, like in vitro fertilization,
LGBTQ issues, cloning, and so on. These are all things that
don't receive direct named address in the confession of faith. And
there are also theological things that the divines didn't delineate
because either everyone agreed at that point, or they were just
assumptions, or because the debates hadn't got as detailed in certain
areas as they have now. The tradition of the church didn't
stop in 1646 when this document was written. No, the tradition
of the church goes all throughout the church's history, however
long it is until Christ returns. We are still adding to this treasure
trove. So this isn't a dead document
that only can stay in the past and has no relevance or cannot
be added on to with other statements that we would affirm as a body
today. For instance, the inerrancy debate
of the 20th century, it was not something that the Westminster
divines dealt with in the particular terms that we now use today.
the specific distinctions regarding how exactly we understand the
new birth, what makes us and what I would call traditional
Puritan Presbyterians different from the federal visionists,
some of those questions weren't being asked in the ways they
are today, or they weren't being asked so clearly as they are
now. The lines weren't drawn so clearly.
So the confession isn't the end all be all of our church's belief. We hope to have a prophetic witness
in this world and a teaching ministry from this pulpit and
in our homes that expands beyond the confession, but the confession
is important and it is a great place for us to dive into and
study what our fathers have said and how we can apply this truth
to us as we seek to live out and understand and obey God's
word. We have freely chosen this as our confession and we freely
submit to it. Just like a congregation chooses
elders, they're not chosen by someone outside of the church
and imposed on the church. but just like a congregation
chooses her elders and then voluntarily submits to their leadership insofar
as they are seeking to submit to Christ, so we also freely
choose the confession and submit to it insofar as it reflects
and distills the doctrine of the pure word of God. So that's
a little bit about the why of having and studying a confession
and the importance of confessions and the church tradition. in
the continuing life of Christ's bride. Now, a little background
on the Westminster Confession of Faith in particular. First
of all, we ask ourselves, well, when did the Protestant Reformation
begin? What date do we normally regard as the beginning of the
Reformation? And of course, those of us who
love church history would say 1517. That's the day that Martin
Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg.
But our confession here is from 1646. And we still call it like
a reformational document. But the reformation had begun
over a century before the Westminster Confession was written. And England,
which is the country where the Westminster Confession was produced,
England itself had been Protestant in some sense for a majority
of that time, between 1517 and 1646. Henry VIII was, in a sense,
the first Protestant king, but really the first truly convinced
Protestant monarch. who had real spiritual Protestant
blood flowing through his veins was Edward VI, who reigned a
hundred years before the Westminster Confession of Faith was drafted.
In 1563, the Church of England wrote and adopted the Thirty-Nine
Articles, which was a reformed confession of faith that is still
a subordinate standard of several Anglican bodies. However, after
Edward, the godly king, England was subjected again to the Roman
Catholic rule of Bloody Mary, who killed hundreds of faithful
Protestant men and women, hundreds of our heroes in the faith. And
things really didn't get a ton better right away, somewhat better
for sure, but it still wasn't amazing for the Protestants under
Elizabeth I, or James I, and then things got much worse again
under Charles I. And around the time that the
Church of England began reforming in the 1500s, there arose this
group of Christians that we call Puritans. The Puritans were believers
who were absolutely committed to the Protestant faith, to the
word of God, to Reformed theology, to warm-hearted devotion to Christ
through the power of the Spirit, and to seeking to line up their
personal lives, their families, their congregations, their larger
church body, their society, and their civil government to God's
word. Everything must be submitted
to God and we must joyfully walk out our obedience to him in every
sphere of life. That's kind of just the seedbed
of Puritanism right there. Puritanism was really the theology
of the Reformation refined and applied to every area of life. Puritans were men and women who
lived in the beginning in the second or third generation after
the beginning of the Reformation onwards until the latter half
of the 17th century. Maybe a little bit, we could
see Puritan influence still creeping into the 18th century. And of
course the influence still exists today, but historically defined,
we would say second or third generation after the Reformation
begins through the latter half of the 17th century. There's
a stereotype that exists that Puritans were a people with a
haunting fear that someone somewhere might be happy. But this is probably
the most incorrect stereotype that I have ever encountered.
Puritans loved their Lord. They loved life. They were hardy
workers. They enjoyed recreation. They
loved the church. They played games with their
children. They enjoyed alcohol, which was
given to make Mary the heart of man. They embraced and enjoyed
all the blessings of marriage and godly intimacy. They were
not people who hated joy. They loved joy. They also loved
learning. God created, governs, and redeems
the world. And because of that, the Puritans
wanted to know all about this world that he created. They didn't
only study theology. They weren't eggheads. So these
Puritans promoted learning. They founded educational institutions,
and they worked toward having an educated society. For instance,
early New England, which in many ways was founded by Puritan-minded
and hearted men, had a higher rate of literacy than most other
Western lands, even to this day. Well, by the time of the 1630s
and 1640s, the Puritans had become a significant group but they
were still mostly outside of the power structures of England,
with the very important exception of the House of Commons. The
king and some lords and certain significant church leaders did
not like them. Archbishop William Laud made
it his mission to make life difficult for the Puritans and discourage
anyone from becoming like them. Worldlings never want to hear
the prophetic word of God's people. And they are even turned off
by our joyful submission to God's law. So the Puritans really became
public enemy number one in England during this time, 1630s. and
around that era. In fact, about one third of the
ministers who would make up the Westminster Assembly had actually
spent time in prison for living out their beliefs regarding the
claims of Christ. Think about that. There is no
Reformed or Presbyterian or any type of Christian church body
in the West today that has that type of statistic. Think of if
one-third of PCA ministers had spent time in prison for their
beliefs. Just think of how different that would be. It's just amazing
to think about one third of the Westminster divines had been
imprisoned for some length of time for their beliefs. Chad
Van Dixhorn, who's a contemporary theologian, said that jail was
a kind of sabbatical for the Puritans. That's how they viewed
it. They redeemed that time. It was
like a sabbatical. A sabbatical is when a minister
takes time off from his regular pastoral duties to refresh himself
in the Lord and usually to write something for the benefit of
his people and for the broader church. So, like Paul, the Puritans
made the most of their jail time. They wrote books in jail. Think
of that most influential Christian book, Pilgrim's Progress, that
was written by John Bunyan while he was in jail for preaching
the gospel. They wrote books. They labored
in prayer while they were in their prison cells. They sent
pastoral letters to people, just like Paul, talking about writing
in chains, sending these letters to people. Some of these Puritan
letters have survived today. And you wouldn't even know from
reading them that they were suffering under the terrible conditions
of 17th century prison. But they did things of that nature.
That's warm-hearted Puritanism. That's what we want to revive.
Not, of course, the going to jail, but the being willing to
suffer all things for the sake of Christ and for the upbuilding
of his kingdom. But while the Puritans were experiencing
persecution in England, their Scottish counterparts were also
beginning to suffer from Archbishop Laud's overreach. The Scottish
church was convictionally Presbyterian and would not submit to episcopacy. That's the notion that there
is a separate office in Scripture of bishop who rules in the church
over several congregations within a region. This is an office that
the episcopacy advocates believe is above that of local church
pastor. And the Scots would not have
anything to do with this. They were not going to have some
state-appointed bishop that did not really believe the Word of
God that wasn't born again telling them what they could or could
not preach from their pulpits. So they wouldn't have anything
to do with this. Nor would the Scots Covenanters have anything
to do with other Anglican impositions, such as the prayer book. Well,
the English Puritans, they didn't want Episcopacy or mandatory
prayer book usage either. Most of them, like their Scots
brothers, were also Presbyterian in their conviction, even though
bishops still existed in the Anglican church. So the Scottish
covenanters, and they're named that because of their commitment
to the national covenant, which opposed Charles I's unbiblical
impositions on the church, the covenanters began to fight back. And not just with their sermons
and their speeches and their writings, but they've actually
began to fight back at one point militarily against English overreach. And in the years leading up to
the Westminster Assembly, they actually had made a couple of
invasions into England. Now they were very much driven
to this because they were not willing, most of them, to pick
up arms at first. But when Archbishop Laud and
the other men that he sent, when they came armed into Scotland
to attack and arrest and kill perhaps the Covenanters who were
having clandestine meetings, because they were forced like
those heroes in the book of Hebrews to meet in dens and caves of
the earth to worship their God, they began to fight back to protect
their families and their churches. But they had actually, coming
up to the Westminster Assembly, they had begun to make some invasions
into England itself. So there's a lot of unrest happening
on this one little island. and there were still more complexity
and problems to come. The Scottish covenanters not
only fought against English overreach, but they agreed to join forces
with the English parliament to fight against the King Charles
I. There's a civil war happening
here and other nations are getting involved. Ireland actually ends
up getting involved too. And some people during this,
just absolute mess, they end up switching sides, switching
loyalties, betraying each other at times, and it just gets crazier
and crazier. There is very little political
peace, very little ecclesiastic peace, and very little national
or international peace on the British Isles. And out of that
environment of unrest, the Westminster Assembly is called in 1643. Its
initial goal was not narrowly defined, but people knew that
the ministers had to do something. The shepherds of Christ's sheep
had to do something to protect Christ's flock. They had to do
something to fix things and bring peace and purity to the church. The nation, the kingdoms, needed
moral and theological direction and footing. Politicians and
pastors and parents needed to know which way God would have
them go during this time of unrest. All around the British Isles,
there was division, unity, I'm sorry, division, disunity, and
strife. And what was needed was unity
in the truth. So Parliament, which was much
more sympathetic with the Puritan cause than the King was, Parliament
called over a hundred Puritan-minded evangelical Calvinistic ministers
together, along with some laymen and a handful of commissioners
from Scotland and put them to work. Said, figure out where
we need to go. Lead us and guide us, shepherd
us through this time of crisis. Some of these men have remained
well-known. amongst our little Presbyterian and Reformed community
at least, men like Jeremiah Burroughs and Samuel Rutherford. But many
of these men that went to the Westminster Assembly, we know
very little about today, past their names. But the heritage
they left for us in the Westminster Confession of Faith is a wonderful,
wonderful gift. It is one of those sparkling
jewels out of that treasure chest of church tradition. One of my
professors at the Baptist seminary I went to, this is not a man
who affirms Westminster. I remember him saying in class
one day that second to the Bible, there is no better work of theology
that exists than the Westminster confession of faith. Those are
big words from a Baptist pastor. So I'm delighted that we can
learn from this as a church. I'm praying for God's blessing
on our endeavors, and I'm looking forward to diving in more deeply
very soon.
WCF: Background & Introduction Pt. 1
Series Westminster Conf. of Faith
In this lesson we discuss why we will be looking at the Westminster Confession of Faith in detail and the importance of Church Tradition. We then look at the historical background leading up to the calling of the Westminster Assembly.
| Sermon ID | 65252035434904 |
| Duration | 30:29 |
| Date | |
| Category | Midweek Service |
| Language | English |
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