Our December e-newsletter included a History Spotlight entitled “The Pilgrim’s Reformed Faith Background.” We received a response from a reader asking whether the residents of Plymouth Colony knew the Westminster Confession of Faith. Below is our response to this interesting question:
The Westminster Assembly (1643-1653) was a product of the English Civil Wars (1642–1651). In the wars, the “Royalists,” who supported Charles I were opposed by the “Parliamentarians,” who were dominated by Puritans and Scottish “Covenanters.”
The Westminster Assembly was a council of theologians and parliament members who were called by the Puritan-influenced Long Parliament (1640-1660) to put together recommendations on how to reform the Church of England to more closely resemble the Reformed churches of Scotland and other Protestant nations.
The Westminster Confession of Faith was formulated by the 1646 session of Westminster Assembly. It was created utilizing the Protestant theological thought and development that had occurred in England as well as Europe. It also incorporated the legacy of historic creedal Christianity stretching back to the early church councils and fathers.
The New England colonies had been founded in the two decades prior to the English Civil War. The vast majority of the adult population were first generation settlers. Most had left England due to their disagreement with the religious policies of the royal government and church establishment. So, they followed the conflict in England, and the proceedings of the Westminster Assembly, including the promulgation of the Westminster Confession of Faith, with great interest.
Much of the Westminster Confession of Faith was adopted by New England churches.
In 1648 the delegates of the Congregational churches of New England gathered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and adopted as their common declaration of faith the Westminster Confession minus chapters 25, 30, and 31 regarding church polity, for which chapters they substituted a separate document prepared by them called The Cambridge Platform of Church Discipline (which provided for Congregational rather than Presbyterian church polity).
In 1658, Congregationalists in England adopted the Savoy Declaration, which consisted of the Westminster Confession slightly modified to conform with the Congregational church polity. After the publication of the Savoy Declaration in England, a 1680 synod of the New England Congregational churches held in Boston adopted and published the Savoy Declaration with the Cambridge Platform for a common Confession of Faith.
Parliament responded to the Confession by adopting a Presbyterian form of government for the Church of England but lacked the power to implement it. Upon the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, all of the documents of the Westminster Assembly were repudiated and Episcopal church government was reinstated in England.
When the Presbyterian Church in the United States was formed in 1788, it adopted (with minor revisions) the Westminster Confession of Faith, as well as the Larger and Shorter Catechisms (1647), as its secondary standards (the Bible itself being the only infallible rule of faith and practice).
Explore resources concerning The Westminster Assembly and documents produced by the Assembly – The Westminster Assembly Project and Westminster Standards. The title page of the Westminster Confession of Faith printed in 1647 reads “The Humble Advice of the Assembly of Divines Now by Authority of Parliament Sitting at Westminster Concerning A Confession of Faith: With the Quotation and Texts of Scripture annexed.”