A Westminster Bibliography Part 6:
The Westminster Transactions
Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,
10
INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTIONS
The Westminster Assembly of 1643-16521 composed numerous documents during its tenure. Most Presbyterians are at least somewhat familiar with the three major documents which the Assembly of the Westminster divines produced. The Assembly created what may be called "the doctrinal capstone of the Reformation" in its Confession of Faith. The divines also completed two catechisms: the Larger Catechism was finished first, with the Shorter Catechism being finally prepared to send to Parliament on November 19, 1647.2
In addition to the three well-known documents, the Assembly also produced a number of other documents. Its Psalms of David in Metre, with revisions by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, is still in use in many places.3 The Assembly also produced three other lesser-known documents which we will examine in the remaining parts of this study.4 The documents were The Form of Presbyterial Church Government and Directory for the Ordination of Ministers, The Directory for the Public Worship of God, and The Directory for Family-Worship. Those three documents dealt with the subjects of church government, public worship, and family worship, respectively.
The main transactions of the Westminster Assembly may be viewed under four heads:
I. Debates resulting in the Directory for Public Worship.
II. Debates resulting in the Form of Presbyterial Church Government.
III. Debates concerning the "Erastian Controversy."
IV. The composition of the Confession.
Rather than taking a strictly chronological approach to the history of the Westminster Assembly, we will be taking a "bibliographic" approach. We will examine the events and debates in a logical, rather than a chronological, order. Since the controversies and issues in the Westminster Assembly generally dealt either with some documents or with advice to Parliament, it will help clarify the significance of the events somewhat if we see them in their documentary setting. The discussions and debates relating to the various documents necessarily overlap somewhat, but we will content ourselves with accuracy, though we will not follow a strict chronology of events.
Hopefully we will see how the various documents produced by the Westminster Assembly were products of specific ideas, attitudes, debates, and philosophies present in the Assembly. There were political, epistemological, and hermeneutical forces at work in the Assembly, as we saw in previously articles. In this and subsequent articles we will trace how those considerations came to have a bearing upon the Directory for Public Worship, the Form of Government and the Confession of Faith.
THE DIRECTORY FOR WORSHIP
We must remember that the Assembly of divines was originally called together to revise and reform the Thirty-nine Articles together with the government and liturgy of the Church of England. On Thursday, October 12, 1643, however, the Assembly received an extended commission. The extension was due primarily to the insistence of the Scottish Commissioners after Parliament adopted the Solemn League and Covenant. It then became necessary to write not only a common Confession, Catechisms and Form of Worship, but to construct a plan of church government directly from the Scriptures.
The Assembly appointed several committees to do the actual drafting of the documents. It became clear early on that there would be struggles among the various factions over the questions of church government. The Assembly was very much agreed, however, on questions of doctrine and worship. They therefore determined to approach the more debatable subject by degrees. Their gradualistic approach also ensured that the document's structure would be more methodical. They began with Christ as the very fount of authority in the church. Christ is the head of the church and all other authority in the various offices flows from him.
Urgent as the need was to prepare some form of worship to take the place of the recently supplanted Book of Common Prayer, it was impossible to avoid debate over the questions of church government. Thus the differences over church polity occupied the first two years of the Assembly. When the dust settled over "the church question," the result was a document known as The Grand Debate. But the preliminary discussions respecting the offices of Apostles, Pastors, Doctors or Teachers, Ruling Elders, and Deacons also resulted in the new Directory of Worship.
All factions in both the Assembly and the Parliament agreed to enforce the new Directory in place of the Prayer Book. The Assembly began the work on the Directory on May 24, 1644, and finished on December 27 of the same year. They sent it to Parliament on December 27 and Parliament passed it into law after final revision on March 13, 1644/45. Parliament immediately ordered it to be printed and brought into use.5
Preaching
The Directory is not truly a liturgy in the sense of having set forms or prescribed prayers. It is what the name implies: general directions for public worship, the sacraments, and the ordinances of preaching, prayer, and praise. The brief chapter called Preaching should be required reading in every seminary. In two and one half pages the Directory distills the essence of puritan homiletics. The chapter may have been equaled on the subject, but it certainly has never been surpassed. It is obviously the result of the experiences of men who not only talked about preaching, but preached; and had become masters of the sacred art of rhetoric.
All sermons should consist of doctrine, reasons, and use (those readers familiar with Puritan preaching will recognize the form). The doctrine should be raised from the text of the sermon and it must be: 1. the truth of God; 2. grounded upon the text; and 3. that doctrine which is principal in the text and most designed to edify the hearers. The doctrine must be expressed in plain terms. The arguments, or reasons, should be solid and convincing. The illustrations should be "full of light" and convey the truth of the text in such a way as to cause the hearers to delight in it. Objections of tender consciences should be also handled under reasons.
Finally, and most importantly, the preacher "is not to rest in general doctrine, although never so much cleared and confirmed, but to bring it home to special use, by application to his hearers." A sermon without application is merely a lecture. The Assembly recognized that this is the preacher's hardest work - "to the natural and corrupt man it will be very unpleasant." Yet they also realized that this is the portion of the sermon calculated to cause the preacher's hearers to "feel the Word of God to be quick and powerful, and a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart; and that if any unbeliever or ignorant person be present, he may have the secrets of his heart made manifest, and give glory to God." Some of the applications are: for information in the knowledge of some truth, for confuting false doctrine and warning of error, for exhorting to duties, for dehortation, reprehension, and public admonition with warning against the dangers of sin, for applying comfort to the afflicted heart, and for giving some marks by which the hearers may examine whether they have attained to the graces, performed the duties, etc. All in all, the sort of preaching described by the Directory is quite different from the twenty minute "sound bite" found in most American churches.
The other sections of the Directory are quite free from minute regulations or impositions. The Directory sets forth the essentials of public worship in terms of broad guidelines. While the Directory does not deny the lawfulness of stated forms of prayer, its concern is to stir up the gift of public prayer in the minister. Neither, on the other hand, should ministers settle for the slothfulness of merely extemporaneous, non-devout or unpremeditated prayers.
Prayer
Up to the time of the adoption of the Westminster Directory, the Scots frowned upon "read prayers" at least in part because extemporary prayer had been prohibited on pain of deprivation in Laud's Service Book (1637). Also discountenanced was the use of the Gloria Patri and the Apostles' Creed in the administration of the Sacraments. At least some Scottish ministers must have been in the habit of bowing [their heads?] in silent prayer upon entering the pulpit. None of these things are either allowed or disallowed by the Directory; yet the Act by which the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland adopted the Directory said in part, "That this shall be no prejudice to the order and practice of this kirk, in such particulars as are appointed by the books of discipline, and acts of General Assemblies, and are not otherwise ordered and appointed in the Directory."6
Scottish Practices - Readers
Since the time of Knox the Scottish Church had used "Readers" to conduct the portion of worship which preceded the sermon - the opening prayer, the lessons (readings) from Scripture, and singing of a Psalm. The Westminster divines found no scriptural warrant for the office of "Reader" and seemingly against at least the early wishes of the Scots, enacted that the Minister should conduct the entire service. Baillie wrote,
"Here came the first question, about Readers: the Assemblie has past a vote before we came, that it is a part of the Pastor's office to read the Scriptures; what help he may have herein by these who are not pastors, it is not yet agitat. Alwayes [Nevertheless] these of best note about London are now in use, in the desk, to pray, and read in the Sunday morning four chapters, and expone some of them, and cause sing two Psalms, and then to goe to the pulpit to preach. We are not against the ministers reading and exponing when he does not preach; bot if all this work be laid upon the minister before he preach, we fear it put preaching in a more narrow and discreditable roume than we would wish."7
The Scots lost the office of Reader which, it could be argued, was only a temporary expedient of the Second Book of Discipline at any rate. But on more substantial matters, they often carried the day. Against the virtually universal English custom, it was enacted that baptism was never to be administered in private, but always in "the place of Public Worship, and in the face of the Congregation."
The Lord's 'Table'
Yet another phrase in the Directory seems to be a compromise of sorts. The Scots were insistent upon their own custom of arranging themselves at the table in receiving the Lord's Supper. They then served one another the elements as at an actual meal. The Scots finally obtained their usage. Though posture or placement may be regarded as a circumstance with respect to receiving the Lord's Supper, it must be remembered that reception of the elements in a kneeling posture was one of the five nocent ceremonies which the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland had only recently thrown off. While kneeling may have been regarded by some as indifferent in theory, it was not indifferent in use due to the offense it caused the Scots. By the same token, the Scots regarded the innovative idea of carrying the elements about the church building to bring them to the communicants as totally without any scriptural warrant. The rule finally read, "The Table...being so conveniently placed, that the Communicants may orderly sit about it, or at it." Accordingly, when the Scottish Assembly adopted the Directory, they added:
"That the clause in the Directory of the Administration of the Lord's Supper, which mentioneth the Communicants sitting about the Table, or at it, be not interpreted as if, in the judgment of this Kirk, it were indifferent, and free for any of the Communicants not to come to, and receive at the Table; or as if we did approve the distributing of the Elements by the Minister to each Communicant, and not by the Communicants among themselves."8
Finally, a subsequent Act of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland abolished all festival days and affirmed, "there is no day commanded in Scripture to be kept holy under the Gospel but the Lord's Day, which is the Christian Sabbath."9
As Leland Ryken has expressed so well:
"...puritan Worship resembles the plays of Shakespeare. Shakespeare was content with the scantiest of stage props and built scenery and imagery into the texts of the plays themselves. In a similar way, the Puritan got rid of the 'stage scenery' of the Catholic/Anglican worship and relied on verbal imagery and symbolism, most of it based on the Bible.... Once we grant the validity of the verbal image it becomes clear that the Puritan worship service did not starve the imagination or even the senses of the worshipper."10
The Directory, in its main features, continues to be followed by virtually all sections of English speaking Protestants who do not use a liturgical service. While it will be immediately granted that churches do not self consciously follow the Directory and that more and more Protestant churches are adding unbiblical elements of worship to their public services, yet the Directory has exerted a profound influence even in those quarters.11
Professor Doctor Benjamin B. Warfield well summarized the significance of the Directory:
"At this distance of time we may look upon it dispassionately; and, so viewed, it can scarcely fail to commend itself as an admirable set of agenda, in spirit and matter alike well fitted to direct the public services of a great Church. It is notable for its freedom from petty prescriptions and 'superfluities' and for the emphasis it places upon what is specifically commanded in the Scriptures. Its general tone is lofty and spiritual; its conception of acceptable worship is sober and restrained and at the same time profound and rich; the paradigms of prayer which it offers are notably full and yet free from over-elaboration, compressed and yet enriched by many reminiscences of the best models which had preceded them; and it is singular among agenda for the dominant place it gives in the public worship of the Church to the offices of reading and preaching the Word. To both of these offices it vindicates a place, and a prominent place, among the parts of public worship, specifically so called, claiming for them distinctively a function in inducing and expressing that sense of dependence of God and of subjection to Him in which all religion is rooted and which is the purest expression of worship; and thus justifying in the ordering of the public services of the churches the recognition of the Word as a means, perhaps we should say the means, of grace. It expends as much care upon the minister's proper performance of the offices of reading and preaching the Word, therefore, as upon his successful performance of the duty of leading the congregation in prayer and acceptably administering to it the Sacraments. The paragraph of the Preaching of the Word is in effect, indeed, a complete homiletical treatise, remarkable at once for its sober practical sense and its profound spiritual wisdom and suffused with a tone of sincere piety, and of zeal at once for the truth and for the souls which are to be bought with the truth."12
1 The Assembly met in numbered sessions through February 22, 1648/49. Subsequent to that date, the Assembly became little more than a committee for the examination of ministers. On June 2, 1648, the minutes reflect that Stephen Marshall moved that a letter of thanks be written to the Church of Scotland for their "constancy and faithfulness in the cause of God wherein they and we have been engaged." However, no activity on the part of any of the Scots Commissioners is recorded in the minutes after November 9, 1947. On that date "Mr. Rutherford took his leave of the Assembly." See Mitchell and Struthers, eds. Minutes of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, (Edmonton: Still Waters Revival Books, 1991 reprint of 1874) 487-88. Hereafter Minutes.
2 Minutes, 491.
3 Words-only versions of the Psalter are available from Trinitarian Bible Society and Presbyterian Heritage Publications. The TBS edition is compact, fairly rugged, and priced under five dollars. The PHP edition is larger print and contains the explanatory notes of John Brown of Haddington. A Words and Music edition is available from the Reformed Presbyterian Church of Ireland. The RPCI edition utilizes a "split-leaf" design which allows any Psalm-tune to be used with any Psalm of the same meter. This concept is easily facilitated since the Psalter has a common meter (Iambic Heptameter) rendition of all 150 Psalms.
4 A fourth document, The Grand Debate, is the subject of a planned dissertation and will be mentioned only briefly in this thesis.
5 Parliament made the Directory mandatory for use after August 1645.
6 Act of the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland, assembled at Edinburgh, February 3, 1645. Cited in The Confession of Faith, (Glasgow: Free Presbyterian Publication Committee, 1985) 371-72. Hereafter Confession.
7 Baillie, II, 122-23.
8 Confession, 372.
9 Warfield, 50-51.
10 Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1986), 125.
11 For a discussion of the Psalter produced by the Westminster Assembly, see Laing's Appendix to Baillie's Letters, a chapter in S. W. Carruthers' The Everyday Work of the Westminster Assembly, three sections in Beveridge's A Short History of the Westminster Assembly and chapter five of The True Psalmody (Naphtali Press Anthology, v. 4).
12 Warfield, 51-52.
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