Westminster Confession of Faith

The Westminster Confession of Faith sets out a Reformed account of Christian belief in a sequence of connected chapters. It begins with Scripture and the knowledge of God, then develops its teaching on creation, sin, salvation, and the life of the Church. The later chapters extend that account into worship, conscience, church government, and the relationship between religious and civil authority. Its compact statements assume that these subjects belong together: a claim about salvation has consequences for assurance, a claim about Scripture for authority, and a claim about the Church for shared practice.

The Westminster Confession became a defining doctrinal standard for Presbyterian churches and a point of reference for other Protestant confessions. Its connected account of belief and practice helps explain the assumptions behind much Presbyterian preaching and devotional writing. Read a chapter as an argument in miniature, with its Scripture references open and neighboring chapters in view. Comparison can be especially useful: the Baptist Confession shares much of this theological language while changing particular conclusions. The civil and ecclesiastical arrangements of the seventeenth century also matter, especially where later Presbyterian revisions depart from the text included here.