The Contradictions and Tensions in the Reformed Confessions
"Whatsoever Comes to Pass" An Examination of the Logical Contradictions and Tensions in the Westminster Confession of Faith and the 1689 London Baptist Confession Introduction: Reading the Confessions on Their Own Terms The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646) is not a sloppy document. It is arguably the single most carefully worded doctrinal statement to come out of the Reformation, the product of five years of debate among more than a hundred divines at Westminster Abbey, cross-checked line by line against Scripture and against centuries of Augustinian and Reformed precedent. Any serious critique of it, or of the confessional documents modeled closely upon it, has to start by admitting that. It would be easy, and cheap, to catch the Confession in a contradiction by misreading it, by quoting a clause out of its qualifying context, or by assuming a definition of "freedom" or "cause" that the divines never intended. That is not the approach taken...