Westminster Assembly

The Westminster Confession of Faith begins with one of the most well articulated statements concerning the doctrine of Scripture. And incorporated right into the Confession is an ever so brief clause on how one might do theology. The clause was placed there to be an expression defending the...

In our last post we considered Paul’s warning to believers in the Galatian churches, ‘If you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another’ (Ga 5.15). And we noted that, sadly, this warning needs to be repeated to every church in every generation. The family of God...

B. B. Warfield – Not a Solitary Theologian Due to a need for brevity, many articles on Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield (1851-1921) focus on his theology and his devotion to his wife, whose illness kept the couple close to home. Because of this, he is often seen as a solitary man leading an...

Richard Vines was a member of the Westminster Assembly and was considered one of the Assembly’s finest preachers. He preached a sermon on Ephesians 4:14-15 before the Mayor and court of Aldermen of London in 1644 entitled “The Impostures of Seducing Teachers Discovered.” Apparently not everyone was...

What is essential in an adequate list of Divine attributes? Summarizing the attributes of God is a difficult task, and hardly two lists of divine attributes agree. In this light, many people have asked, “Where is the love of God in the Westminster Shorter Catechism?” The fourth question describes...

A doption has been occasionally undervalued and neglected in church history. Yet Paul treated adoption as the end to which the Father predestined his elect (Eph. 1:5). Adoption is the sum of our privileges, or our “inheritance,” in Christ. Our adoption is in Jesus Christ, the natural son, that we...

Whitney G. Gamble, Christ and the Law: Antinomianism at the Westminster Assembly (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2018). T his series of books introduces readers to historical figures and backgrounds surrounding the Assembly that produced the Westminster Confession of Faith and Larger...

I am currently preaching a sermon series on the Gospel of John. There are some passages in that Gospel that appear to betray the grace of the gospel by presenting a legalistic view of salvation. Since Scripture cannot contradict itself, we know that these passages don’t teach legalism. How then are...

During the time of the Protestant Reformation, the Reformers came to the conclusion, in the face of defection and departure from biblical orthodoxy, orthopraxy, and doxology within the medieval Roman Catholic Church, that there needed to be a means whereby a true Christian church could be...

Editor's Note: This is the final post in a four-part series on the life and relevance of Samuel Rutherford ( 1600-1661) . Find previous entries here . Rutherford as a Preacher There is no getting around the fact that Rutherford was an exceptional preacher. Historian Robert Wodrow even goes so far...