A Westminster Bibliography Part 4:
Epistemological Background
Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,
10
Epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, is that branch of philosophy which is concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge, its presuppositions and basis, and the general reliability of claims to knowledge.1 The Puritans realized that thought, intelligent conversation, and the proper conveying of truth requires more than proper nouns. They therefore rejected nominalism and were what might be called "biblical realists."2 The Puritans had a revelational view of truth. They maintained that God revealed certain truth about himself, his creation, his providence, and mankind via the propositions of Scripture. The Westminster divines therefore believed that the proper method or procedure for systematizing beliefs concerning God, science, immortality, etc., would be to arrange in a systematic way the information revealed in the inspired writings. The first statement in the Westminster Confession of Faith is thus a complex epistemological statement by which all the documents produced by the Assembly must be interpreted:
"Although the light of nature, and the works of creation and providence, do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God, as to leave men inexcusable; yet they are not sufficient to give that knowledge of God, and of his will, which is necessary unto salvation: therefore it pleased the Lord, at sundry times, and in divers manners, to reveal himself, and to declare that his will unto his Church; and afterwards, for the better preserving and propagating of the truth, and for the more sure establishment and comfort of the Church against the corruption of the flesh, and the malice of Satan and of the world, to commit the same wholly unto writing; which maketh the holy scripture to be most necessary; those former ways of God's revealing his will unto his people being now ceased."3
The quoted statement intimates the sufficiency of Scripture by noting the insufficiency of everything else. The Confession without question states that Scripture is necessary to a salvific knowledge of God's will. The Confession proceeds, after listing the sixty-six accepted books of the Protestant canon, to state, "All which are given by inspiration of God, to be the rule of faith and life."4
The Confession of Faith might have started with a statement about who God is, who man is, or some combination of those. Instead, it began with a statement concerning Scripture. The reason for that is easily understood: the Westminster divines regarded the Scripture alone [sola Scriptura] to be the basis of their epistemology. The term "sola Scriptura" is often used to denote the adherence to Holy Scriptures as the solitary rule of faith and practice. This epistemology exists whenever one accepts Scripture at face value and interprets it according to a grammatical-historical method.5
The divines could not properly speak of either God or man (or anything else for that matter) without first determining what counted as evidence or proof for their assertions. The first statement quoted above demonstrates that the Westminster divines did not consider unaided reason a sufficient guide for such assertions. Man cannot know God sufficiently to know his will apart from Scripture. Scripture, the divines maintained, is therefore necessary to a knowledge of the will of God.
The same chapter of the Confession asserts that the Scriptures are not only necessary; they are also sufficient:
"The whole counsel of God, concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man's salvation, faith, and life, is either expressly set down in scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men."6
The Assembly intended to make true assertions about the Trinity, the Ten Commandments, the nature of the mediatorship of Christ, etc. But upon what basis could they hope to begin? Is anything so sure and certain that even sensory distortions or Cartesian demons could not overthrow it?7 Is there any truth so basic or any propositions that are self-authenticating? The men of the Westminster Assembly, following the lead of Augustine, maintained that a given proposition cannot be both true and untrue at the same time and in the same way. They presupposed that the statements of Scripture are sufficiently clear that a person can learn all he needs to know for salvation. They also maintained that Scripture is a coherent whole such that one place of Scripture will not truly contradict another place in Scripture.8 Scripture is thus self authenticating.
Because of its radical view of the competence of each believer to interpret Scripture according to his own conscience, the Independent movement conceived that the history of the church was of little value in determining the nature of the church. They viewed the church as the people of God, redeemed by Christ, who covenant together as an autonomous body to observe the ordinances, worship God, and present the gospel to those who are unregenerate and consequently outside the membership of the local assembly.
The Presbyterians, on the other hand, condemned the act of separation from the national church which was inherent in the Independent thought. Further, they rejected the Independent and Separatist interpretation of Scriptures insofar as the interpretation condoned discrimination in the admission of church members to only those willing to sign a church covenant or who could demonstrate their heart-state to the satisfaction of other private members. Because the Independents (especially Nye) condemned classes and synods as not only unnecessary, but positively evil, the Presbyterians viewed their system (or lack of a system) of church government as offering no control over heresies or abuses arising in particular congregations.9
It seemed to the Separatists that England's visible church "indiscriminately embraced the flagrantly wicked along with the good or sincerely repentant."10 Their conception of the church was of something quite different. To the Independent way of thinking, the church should be "gathered" by means of a church covenant. This type of a gathering would assure as nearly as possible, or so they claimed, a regenerate church membership within the local church. This practice also gave rise to the idea that an assembly should be formed by gathered saints rather than by the authority of either a bishop or a presbytery. The Independent, even when he admired Presbyterianism, was convinced that the Presbyterian system lacked the emphasis on the "experimental" or "experiential" elements of what he believed he saw in the New Testament.
This understanding of the individual conscience led the Independents to assert that there can be no authority between the believer and Christ. Although the Independents claimed that Scripture was a higher authority, they made Scripture subject to the interpretation of every believer's conscience. Synods and classes might advise, but they could not command. In fact, the Independents were finally forced by events to admit that a multiplicity of sects must necessarily result from the variableness of human judgment and the supposed obligation of worshipping God according to the dictates of the conscience rather than the dictates of God's Word. Freedom to worship God as he pleased became license to worship God in any way the believer saw fit.11
We will discuss the Millenarianism of the Independents in some detail in Part 5, but it would be well to clarify at this point the necessary affinity between the Congregational (Independent) vision concerning the immediacy of Christ's relationship to the church and the Millennial Age in which his universal reign would be manifested. The Independent form of the Church sought to anticipate in its policy of gathered churches the state of the Church in that coming Thousand Years. The Independents' withdrawal from established Churches was dictated by the strategic hope that a broader reformation of the entire Church would necessarily follow in an apocalyptic fashion. The Presbyterian Puritans, although they also looked toward a purer age of the Church in which Christ would exercise his authority through established synods, were not committed to the "New Testament only" or apocalyptic view of the Church which was required in order to sustain the Independent view.
The Assembly set forth its understanding of the puritan principle of worship in Chapter 21 of the Confession of Faith. We read in §21.1,
"But the acceptable way of worshipping the true God is instituted by himself, and so limited by his own revealed will, that he may not be worshipped according to the imaginations and devices of men, or the suggestions of Satan, under any visible representation, or any other way not prescribed in the holy Scripture."
The puritan assembly believed that their philosophy of worship came by good and necessary consequence from their basic epistemology of sola Scriptura. The Westminster divines regarded the inscripturated Word as both necessary and sufficient to inform man how God should be worshipped. WCF §1.6 states,
"The whole counsel of God, concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man's salvation, faith, and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture; unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men."
The article goes on to clarify that the Assembly was not claiming that Scripture speaks directly to the details of every man's calling. Rather, the divines explained that they wrote regarding "the worship of God, and government of the church;" the areas to which the three neglected documents speak.
The Assembly touched the issues of the polity and discipline of the church in several places of the Confession. Chapter 20 refers generally to those who may "be called to account, and proceeded against by the censures of the church." WCF §25.3 states,
"...unto this catholick visible church Christ hath given the ministry, oracles, and ordinances of God, for the gathering and perfecting of the saints in this life, to the end of the world; and doth by his own presence and Spirit, according to his promise, make them effectual thereunto."
Further, in article 6 of the same chapter, the Confession informs us that there is no other head of the church but the Lord Jesus Christ. The Confession's final consideration of church polity is in chapter 31, regarding synods and councils.
The Westminster Confession of Faith gives some foundational insight into the Assembly's basic philosophy of worship and church polity, but explains very little by way of detail. The reason for the omission is that most of the details are contained in the three neglected documents. In those documents we find a wealth of information regarding how the Assembly thought their basic sola Scriptura epistemology would work itself out in the details of public and private worship and the form of church government.
The Westminster Assembly clearly viewed the church as subject to the Scriptures and not as authoritative over the Scriptures. Yet the necessity remains for men to interpret the Scriptures. What principle or principles should be paramount when determining which Scriptures to bring to bear on a particular subject? How does one view the relationship of Scripture and history? Obviously, affirming that the church is subject to the Scriptures will mean little without agreement on what the Scriptures teach. There were, in fact, some foundational disagreements over interpretive principles in the assembly and those disagreements led to differences that affected the Westminster documents themselves. Those differences, especially as they impinged upon the view of history that undergirded church polity, will be taken up in part 5 of A Westminster Bibliography.
1 D. W. Hamlyn, "History of Epistemology," Encyclopedia of Philosophy (8 vols. in 4; New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1972 reprint of 1967), III, 8-9.
2 Nominalism maintains that only individual sense objects can be known. Realism maintains that the "X" that is immediately in the mind is the real object of knowledge. The Puritans followed a sort of scholastic realism with respect to the imagination. Therefore they did regard the "content" of the imagination (or fancy as they often referred to it) as significant. They thus concluded that just as one can have an adulterous imagination, he can also have an idolatrous imagination. WLC 109 contends that it is possible, though forbidden, for men to make a representation of God "either inwardly in our mind, or outwardly in any kind of image or likeness of any creature whatsoever." See John K. LaShell, "Imagination and Idol: A Puritan Tension" in WTJ XLIX (Fall 1987), 305-334.
3 WCF, I:i.
4 Ibid., I:ii, (emphasis added).
5 See infra, section on Hermeneutics.
6 Ibid., I:vi, (emphasis added).
7 Rene DesCartes claimed that sensory data were subject to distortion and therefore unreliable (for instance, when a stick enters the water it appears to bend but for some reason I do not believe it really bent). But any proposition could be deceptive if there were a demon that spent all his time in an effort to deceive DesCartes. He finally concluded that the only thing of which he could be certain was that even if he were deceived he must still be thinking in order to be deceived. But if he was thinking then he must exist. Thus his famous dictum "Cogito ergo sum" or "I think, therefore I am."
8 "[Scripture] is to be received, because it is the Word of God," (WCF, I:iv); "Our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth, and divine authority thereof, is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit, bearing witness by and with the word in our hearts," (WCF, I:v); "those things that are necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them," (WCF, I:vii); "The infallible rule of interpretation of scripture is the scripture itself; and therefore, when there is a question about the true and full sense of any scripture, (which is not manifold, but one,) it must be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly," (WCF, I:ix).
9 Edward H. Bloomfield, The Opposition to the English Separatists, 1570-1625. (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, c. 1981), 93.
10 Edmund Sears Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of A Puritan Idea, (New York: New York University Press, 1963), 100.
11 Henry William Clark, History of English Nonconformity from Wiclif to the Close of the Nineteenth Century. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1965 reprint of 1911), I, 337.
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