Voting for Christian Liberty: The Making of Chapter 20 in the Westminster Confession of Faith

Presbyterians have long loved Chapter 20 of the Westminster Confession of Faith, perhaps especially presbyterians living on this side of the Atlantic. As a case in point, when some newly-minted Americans met in Philadelphia, in 1788, to create what they called a “Constitution” for the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, they quoted chiefly from this chapter.

Presbyterians have come to think that we are defenders of principles like “Christian Liberty and Liberty of Conscience,” which is the title of the Confession’s twentieth chapter. But in this lecture, I will argue that it ought to be something of a surprise to historians of theology that the Westminster Assembly decided to include a chapter on these topics at all. To my knowledge, it has not previously been noted that, in the noble line of Reformed catechisms and confessions, the Westminster Confession of Faith is the first to offer more than a cursory mention of the subject. As well, while it is widely noted that puritans and Scottish presbyterians had for decades clamored for more liberty, it has also not been noted that by the 1640s many of the theologians at the Westminster Assembly thought the abuse of liberty a more prevalent problem than the loss of it. Debates about liberty were heated in mid-seventeenth-century England, as they would be in later eighteenth-century America. Indeed, the majority of the Westminster Assembly’s members were slow to warm to the inclusion of “liberty of conscience” either as a concept or as a term worthy of endorsement.

As if this were not enough to bring you to the edge of your seat, let me also add that Chapter 20 is also noteworthy because it is one of only a couple that were amended in 1788 by the assembly meeting in Philadelphia. Given this troika of introductory teasers, you’ve probably already guessed that it is my intention in this brief lecture not so much to explain the meaning of Chapter 20 but its very presence in the Confession. And then after telling you how these words got into the document, I’ll suggest reasons why Americans took some words out.

I. Christian Liberty

 As it happened, and as the title of Chapter 20 betrays, the divines (or theologians) of the Westminster Assembly considered our most important liberties to be of two kinds.

First, “Christian liberty,”—discussed in paragraphs 1, 3 and 4—consists of privileges purchased for believers by Christ. For centuries discussions about Christian liberty could be found in biblical commentaries and theological treatises. These considered the changed relationship between laws and freedoms in the Old and New Testaments, or the weaker and stronger brethren discussed in Romans 14 and 15. A basic theological education, or a bit of sermon preparation, exposed preachers to the conversations embedded in traditions of exegesis.

The Westminster Assembly debated these subjects itself in the winter of 1646 but could not finish its work. It tackled the topic again in the autumn of that year. Still later, when the assembly added scriptural proofs to its chapter, it took four days to adopt the best ones. These are indications that liberty was a sticky topic. A small mistake in a scribe’s record points in the same direction. In recording these deliberations in the assembly’s minutes, chief scribe Adoniram Byfield first wrote that the gathering was debating the proofs “for” Christian liberty. He then erased these words and wrote that the assembly was debating texts “against” Christian liberty.[1] This curious muddle may indicate that as late as 1647 there were divines in the assembly who associated the idea of liberty principally with its abuse rather than its proper use.

Nonetheless, the assembly ultimately leaned into the idea of Christian liberty, emphasizing that our liberties are the greatest privileges of “believers under the Gospel.” Christian liberty includes liberties “from.” Liberty from sin: for Christ has purchased a deliverance from the guilt we carry, the wrath we incur, and the curse that condemns us. Liberty from Satan: for in Christ, we are not trapped by the evil of this world, held in slavery to our enemy, or subjected to the full power of sin. Liberty from suffering and death: for the believer knows that in Christ there is purpose in affliction, deliverance through death, resurrection power over the grave, and everlasting approbation for believers. In these freedoms from various miseries, as Robert Letham notes in his comments on this paragraph, “the edge … has been removed” for Christians from “the evil of afflictions, the sting of death, the victory of the grave, the curse of the moral law.”[2] And yet we should also see that in the final affirmation of freedoms “from” the reader is brought beyond the dramatic gifts of grace into the climactic gifts of glory: as one divine explained in 1645, “The life of grace and glory differ in this; The life of grace is to fight with our spirituall enemies: the life of glory is, we shall have no enemies to fight with.”[3]

Christian liberty also includes liberties “to.” Freedom in access to God, based in the reality that “Since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 5:1 ESV). Freedom in obedience to God, since we now have a love that “casts out fear,” and a capacity to serve in love, as children to a father, and not as slaves to a master (Rom. 8:14–15; 1 John 4:18).

Still considering the first paragraph of the chapter, and its outline of “Christian liberty,” we can add that Christian liberty also offers “comparative freedoms.” Old Testament believers shared with New Testament believers all of the freedoms previously mentioned. And yet, under the New Testament, believers enjoy more liberty with respect to law: for the New Testament church does not keep the ceremonial law of the Old Testament church. Drawing on the Epistle to the Hebrews, the assembly concludes that we have more courage in prayer than Old Testament saints: for in Christ, we come to the throne of grace with heightened confidence (Heb. 4:14, 16), and in Christ we enter the presence of God in greater boldness (Heb. 10:19–22). Finally, we have “fuller communications of the free Spirit of God, than believers under the law did ordinarily partake of.”[4]

It is principally on these liberties that the Westminster divines expected Christians to focus—a focus that is all the more striking given that these same men were in favor of fighting a war with the king, in part, to defend some of their civil liberties.

The topics of Christian liberty and liberty of conscience are found in the Confession only, and not in the assembly’s catechisms. In other documents the assembly would also comment on, and commend heartily, civil or political liberties. Nonetheless, the subject of civil liberties would not appear in the Westminster Standards or in the directories for public worship and for church government.[5]

II. Liberty of Conscience

 As you’ve already heard, the other kind of liberty mentioned in the Confession is “liberty of conscience,” treated in paragraph 2. In the Confession, this liberty of conscience is considered to be the believer’s freedom from human commands in arenas such as worship and doctrine. The most famous line of the chapter, and maybe of the Confession, is found here, in the statement about liberty of conscience, enshrined in paragraph 2 and beginning with the words, “God alone is Lord of the conscience.”

The debate over liberty of conscience, while not a new topic when Luther penned his 1520 The Freedom of a Christian Man, did gain a new urgency at the Reformation. Forty years later, and across the North Sea, Queen Elizabeth and her bishops offered a reform of the English church that left a complicated legacy. In his recent paradigm-shifting masterpiece, historian Anthony Milton has argued that all parties in the church—apparent winners as well as apparent losers—thought the Elizabethan religious settlement left room for further negotiation and development.[6]

The failure on the part of puritans to further conform the church to the norms of European Reformed churches, followed by the success of anti-puritan reforms by various English archbishops, gave increased rise to pleas for liberty of conscience by puritan ministers in England and to protests by presbyterian ministers in Scotland. Paragraph 2 and its insistence on the liberty of Christians from the doctrines and commandments of men has these disappointments and challenges in view.[7]

And yet, in spite of the background just mentioned, later events made “liberty of conscience” a controversial subject. In fact, by 1646 positive use of “liberty of conscience” was becoming scarce among the assembly’s divines and their puritan friends, for enemies of orthodoxy were waving the banner of “liberty of conscience” both in preaching and in print.

Indigenous antipathy towards liberty of conscience was, in part, a natural accompaniment to the established puritan practice of contesting the establishment. The exclusion of those furthest from the center of the England’s religious life meant that the most radical voices demanded greater toleration for themselves or for their friends—not just for mainstream puritans, but for Roman Catholics on the one side, and Seekers, Familists, and Ranters on the other. And the fact that you haven’t heard of these last few groups didn’t mean that they were any less worrying to Reformed ministers in the 1640s. An imported reason for the decline of calls for liberty of conscience on the part of the Reformed in England had to do with developments in the Netherlands. At the turn of the seventeenth century, the followers of Jacobus Arminius sensed their precarious position in most Dutch provinces and called for a wise liberty that would even protect the worst errorists of the day, such as Socinians.

The impact of these arguments reached England by the 1620s and Scotland by the 1630s. In the 1640s, Scottish professor Samuel Rutherford told his horrified students that—according to the Arminians—any religious pressure on the part of authorities beyond mere attempts at persuasion constituted an assault on liberty of conscience.[8] Tensions further increased at the beginning of England’s first civil war with a rise of sectarians and alleged “libertines”—a good translation of John Calvin’s preferred term for abusers of Christian liberty.[9]

The combination of these events meant that every Westminster divine would almost certainly have arrived at the assembly having already engaged with conflicting—and in their view, deviant—understandings of liberty of conscience. Politicians were impacted by these discussions too, and in 1644 the House of Commons, or a committee thereof, asked the assembly to consider how much “liberty” should be granted to those with “tender consciences.”[10] By 1646 the majority of the assembly’s divines understood the phrase “liberty of conscience” to be tainted—or rather, loaded by assumptions that openly espoused a toleration of all religious expressions.[11]

Some divines looked back in church history (and of course all wise theologians pay attention to church history) and argued that the shrewd genius of the emperor “Julian the Apostate”—a frequent figure in the discussion—was his effort to undermine Christianity in particular by tolerating all religion in general. Closer to hand, Henry Robinson’s Liberty of Conscience, printed in London and appearing in 1643, evoked a howl of protest among orthodox theologians for its advocacy of expansive liberty for the free expression of all ideas, including unorthodox ideas.

Perhaps no one at the assembly was more vocal in opposition to “liberty of conscience” than Samuel Rutherford who after attending the Westminster Assembly offered a book-length argument against the “libertines” who confused license and liberty.[12] In fact he was to offer a series of works arguing that most abuses of “Christian liberty” sailed under the flag of “liberty of conscience.” Arguments for “liberty of conscience” were not offered by the godly of ancient times, he argued.[13] He wrote against “pretended liberty of conscience,” and “wild and atheistical liberty of conscience.”[14] It did not occur to him to think of happy adjectives for “liberty of conscience.” He preferred to speak of “Christian liberty,” and not “liberty of conscience” at all.[15]

The minutes of the assembly suggest that in the debating chamber “liberty of conscience” was first mentioned as a matter of concern in September 1644.[16] Ten months later, readers of the assembly’s minutes can spot another illuminating moment, when the assembly passed a resolution against books on “liberty of conscience”—only for someone in the assembly to then think twice about the assembly’s vote and to recommend the words “pretense of” liberty,[17] thus distinguishing between a true liberty of conscience and false notions of such liberty.

Theological and practical concerns about liberty of conscience may also be heard again in 1646, for some did not think there was a safe way to talk about such liberty at all. And yet, in spite of vocal opposition, assembly records began to refer to a chapter entitled, “Christian Liberty and Liberty of Conscience.”[18] That title was then approved formally. And in spite of sermons and reports that continued to complain about “pretend Tendernesse of Conscience and Exemption from Ecclesasticall Judicatures” and those “alleaging tenderness of Conscience,”[19] the chapter began to take shape.

III. Voting for Liberty

In spite of negative comment and continued nervousness on the assembly floor, the gathering ultimately drafted sentences and voted on paragraphs on Christian liberty and “liberty of conscience.”

Perhaps George Gillespie illustrates how this was possible. He routinely referred to “liberty of conscience” in negative terms and in 1645 said he wished to hear no more about it.[20] And yet Gillespie was not entirely reactionary. He knew that the term could be deployed usefully. He knew there was a long history of abuses in the church that needed to be understood not only as violations of Scripture but also as attacks on the liberty of conscience of biblical believers.

In fact, he himself had earlier used the term positively in his first book, declaring that “liberty of heresie and schisme is no part of the liberty of conscience which Christ hath purchased to us at so dear a rate.”[21] It was a striking statement, offering language and ideas that were remarkably similar to lines found in Chapter 20.

When we read these lines, it becomes clear that, in the thinking of the majority at the Westminster Assembly, true “liberty of the conscience” has two sides. First, and expansively, the conscience is liberated from any teaching or command contrary to God’s Word on any subject. Here readers of the Confession are expected to recognize the spirit of Peter and the Apostles: “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29 ESV).

Second, and narrowly, the conscience is liberated from any teaching or command that is beside (that is, in addition to) the Word in matters of faith or worship. In this second category of freedoms, the assembly, famously, articulates a regulating principle for doctrine and worship, which can be reiterated any number of ways. Scripture is necessary for, and sufficient for, worship and doctrine. Scripture offers the norm, and has a norming force, for worship and doctrine. Worship and doctrine must reflect all, and only, of what God’s Word calls us to do liturgically and believe theologically.

But how did these lines get voted at all? First, they knew that the Bible itself gives a strong bulwark against turning liberty into license. This is what we hear when the assembly insists on Christ’s lordship when discussing liberty of conscience. After all, as James insisted, “There is only one lawgiver and judge” (Jas 4:12).

Second, given debate raging around the assembly, the curious decision to write so robustly about Christian liberty can only be explained as the sensible triumph of long-standing theological and ecclesiastical concerns over more immediate political and social pressures of the day. In spite of the rhetoric and politics of the mid 1640s, when given the opportunity to consider the topic in debate, a majority of assembly members convinced itself that it was necessary to insist on the church upholding a Christian’s liberty of conscience.[22]

IV. The Civil Magistrate

What remained for the assembly to do was to issue a warning against abuses of Christian liberty, and, many thought, to consider whether the civil magistrate should coerce those who took liberty too far.

As debate proceeded in the autumn of 1646, it became clear that a final sticking point with some members of the assembly was with the assertion—suggested by a committee—that the civil magistrate had power to punish “such as maintaine & publish opinions against the light of Nature” or that disturb the external peace of the church.[23]

You can see from the final paragraph that a majority eventually voted that the church could censure those who preached or printed opinions subversive to the light of nature. A smaller majority also voted, in addition, that so too could “the civil magistrate.”

Although this final motion passed, those opposed to the idea of religious coercion had a large enough voting bloc in the assembly that they were able to reopen the subject for a second debate. Now it’s possible that these opponents were more shrewd than they were numerous. They raised the subject as the first item of business on October 21, and as RTS professors can testify, there are some people who find early morning punctuality a problem. With numbers in the assembly so small, a coordinated effort could sometimes restart a debate on a matter already concluded. And the commute to Westminster Abbey could be bad; members were sometimes delayed by weather, and the autumn of 1646 was unusually wet, with reports of heavy rain and flooding not uncommon. However, even if they had the numbers to reopen the subject at the beginning of the day, by the time it came to vote they were not able to reverse the assembly’s earlier decision.

After the issue was voted this second time, the minority acknowledged defeat, and four of these men, all of them congregationalists, took the rare step of recording their negative votes, with one specifying that he was not only opposed to the assembly’s vote (which could be a protest against the way something was worded), but he was opposed to the “truth of it.”[24]

V. The Americans

The majority’s conviction that the civil magistrate should help the church root out heresy was itself rooted in a history that went back almost to Constantine and was common in all Western Christian countries.

If the positive power of the civil magistrate enjoyed a heightened degree of plausibility in 1640s presbyterian England, it’s worth mentioning that a similar spirit informed congregationalist New England. What has come to be known as “The Cambridge Platform” declared that “not only idolatry and blasphemy, but heresy and open contempt of the word preached, ‘are to be restrained and punished by the civil authority.’”[25]

The main reason why the majority of the Westminster Assembly’s divines considered it plausible to involve the civil magistrate in matters not only temporal and moral but also spiritual and theological was that various Old Testament texts refer to the involvement of civil magistrates in spiritual matters.[26] While the assembly expected support from a Christian magistrate, their prooftexts also note that even unbelieving magistrates appear to have played a role in advancing the true faith: a pagan king encouraged all people to obey God in Daniel 3:29, and in Isaiah 49:23 the Lord promises to make kings “foster fathers” and queens “nursing mothers,” apparently with non-Israelite monarchs in view.

Famously, the Synod of New York and Philadelphia, at their assembly in Philadelphia in 1788, removed the clause about the magistrate from paragraph 4.[27] Presbyterians moving to the New World had long ago lost the historic commitment to an established church and hopes for a coercive Christian magistrate. By this time, English-speaking presbyterians had tasted persecution for most of their history; in America, presbyterianism had been illegal in most colonies since their founding. As Charles Hodge noted many years later, “Presbyterians in this country have always been tolerant, from necessity, if not from principle.” He also acknowledged, with appropriate modesty, “It is not pretended that Presbyterians were so much in advance of their generation, that they would have been free from reproach in this matter, had they been in power.”[28]

An excellent discussion of other American confessional revisions will be offered by Kevin DeYoung in the forthcoming commentary on the WCF. A brief defense of these American revisions could highlight the following points:

First, in the age inaugurated by Pentecost, the analogue for Israel is the church. Believers are children of Abraham. The church is the new remnant of the old ekklesia. What is more—and this is the point missed by the assembly’s majority—the church is not Israel in the Promised Land, but Israel located in exile, waiting to go home when our own 70 years have come to fulfillment (e.g., 1 Pet. 1:1). The church is scattered throughout lands with governments that may show a tolerance of the Christian faith; in seasons they may demonstrate an enthusiasm for the Christian faith (e.g., Dan. 3:29, Isa. 49:23). Nonetheless, the ordered assembly of believers remains among the nations; the church of the Diaspora is not to be identified with any particular state or any state with a particular church.

This means, in the second place, that Old Testament passages offering accounts of Israelite civil magistrates in the Promised Land, reforming the church imbedded in the Promised Land, give us a model for the perfection of our final home, not a mandate for our current home—such as an established church in a coercive state. To miss this point is to make a serious redemptive-historical error, and to miss the typological and pedagogical purpose of Israel implanted in the Promised Land.

Thirdly, in biblical passages where errors in doctrine or worship are corrected by Old Testament Israelite magistrates, we learn that sin deserves punishment. We also see by means of the severity of the Israelite criminal code, and by means of the typology of the Israelite sacrifices, that sin against God deserves the punishment of death. We can further learn, by analogy, that the church, while not called to execute or incarcerate (note the previous two points), is by its discipline to hand people over to a spiritual death, unless they repent.

Fourthly, there are passages in the Old Testament where we see magistrates punish moral violations. From this we can learn, by a principle of general equity, that some sins require the attention not only of the church but also of the civil government. Nonetheless (in light of points one and two), unless a person has committed, say, a civil felony, church members are not to be handed over to civil magistrates by church leaders.

VI. Conclusion

 It has become faddish over the last year or so especially to announce that the truly Reformed must reject the American revisions regarding the magistrate and return to the ideal of a church established and backed up by the civil magistrate. It is pointed out that the Reformers believed in an established church, and thus Reformed theology, properly brewed and imbibed, should advocate for this as well.

The argument strikes me, in the first place, as one likely to miss the main point of the Reformation. While it is true that some Reformed theologians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including some Westminster divines, did address the subject of the civil state, our forefathers were reformers of the church first and only accidentally reformers of nations.

Second, and of historical significance, the establishment of the church was not so much the cause for which they fought as it was the air which they breathed during the centuries in which they lived. No one in their day would have thought the French Reformed church was less Reformed because they sought freedom rather than establishment.

I should say more, for I have, in the third place, a concern about emphasis. To embody the spirit of the Reformation—to “retrieve” it (in our now-customary academic parlance)—is not to prioritize the political realm but to pursue the boxed trifecta of orthodox doctrine: sincere piety, divinely-sanctioned worship, and biblically-shaped church government. To change my metaphor, these are the key ingredients for the usual recipe of the Reformed faith that has been served up for centuries, with, of course, a pinch of anti-popery tossed in.

This leads me to suggest, in the fourth place, that while the magistrate’s aid in suppressing error was important to presbyterians such as Samuel Rutherford and John Arrowsmith, and many with them, their increasingly noisy defense of this ideal may only highlight growing doubts among the Reformed, who found themselves focused on more basic and productive issues.

But here I am, contending in a space where no one is arguing. So let me conclude with the message of Scripture that the Confession itself so ably summarizes, and for which all the members of the assembly ultimately voted: true Christian liberty seeks to celebrate our Christian freedoms, embrace Christ’s Lordship, flee ungodly license, and heed the appropriate use of power. This is how we are to live as Christians. This too, is how we honor the One who purchased our liberties at the price of his own life.

[1] Chad Van Dixhoorn, ed., The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly, 1643–1653 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 4:457; emphasis added. Hereafter, MPWA.

[2] Robert Letham, “Christian Liberty in the Theology of the Westminster Assembly,” in Freedom, Courage and Truth: Papers Read at the 2011 Westminster Conference (Stoke-on-Trent: Tentmaker Publications, [2012]), 12. Emphasis original.

[3] Jeremiah Whitaker, The Christians great design on earth (London, 1645), 28.

[4] Emphasis added.

[5] Van Dixhoorn, ed., MPWA 5:34–35, 37–38, 40, 46–48, 234 (Docs 14, 15, and 83).

[6] Anthony Milton, England’s Second Reformation: The Battle for the Church of England, 1625–1662 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

[7] See also Letham, “Christian Liberty,” 13–17.

[8] Samuel Rutherford, Examen Arminianismi (Amsterdam, 1668), p. 709.

[9] See John Coffey, “The language of liberty in Calvinist political thought,” Freedom and the Construction of Europe: Volume 1, Religious Freedom and Civil Liberty, ed. Quentin Skinner and Martin van Gelderen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 298.

[10] Chad Van Dixhoorn, ed., John Lightfoot’s Journals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 461.

[11] Cornelius Burges, A new discouery of personal tithes (London, 1625), p. 11; and, The necessity of agreement with God (London, 1645), 35; Herbert Palmer, The Glasse of God’s Providence (London, 1644), 55–57, 62 (all “liberty of conscience” is “pretended”); Daniel Cawdrey, Vindiciae Clavium (London, 1645), 89; Robert Baillie, Errours and induration (London, 1645), 36; A dissuasive from the errours of the time (London, 1645), sig. *3r; Thomas Case, A model of true spiritual thankfullnesse (London, 1646), 25; Deliverance-obstruction (London, 1646), 36; Thomas Hill, The trade of truth (London, 1642 ), 33; William Greenhill, The Axe at the root (London, 1643), sig. A3v.

[12] Rutherford, A Free Disputation Against Pretended Liberty of Conscience.

[13] Rutherford, A Free Disputation, 253, 338.

[14] Rutherford, A Free Disputation, 265, 271, 337.

[15] Rutherford, A Free Disputation, 233; in expressing these convictions, Rutherford was also articulating the Scottish Kirk’s party line. See Crawford Gribben, “Samuel Rutherford and Liberty of Conscience,” in The Westminster Theological Journal, 71 (2009), 355–73.

[16] Van Dixhoorn, ed., MPWA 3:282, 286.

[17] Van Dixhoorn, ed., MPWA 3:615.

[18] Van Dixhoorn, ed., MPWA 3:774.

[19] E.g., Westminster Assembly, “The Papers and Answers of the Dissenting Brethren and Committee of the Assembly of Divines . . . For Accomodation,” 49; and “The Answer of the Assembly of Divines, to the Reasons of the Dissenting Brethren against the Proposition Concerning the Subordination of Congregationall, Classicall, Provinciall, and Nationall Assemblies,” 184, both in Westminster Assembly, The Grand Debate Concerning Presbitery and Independency ([London], 1652). These papers are to be edited, introduced and published by Reformation Heritage Books and the Westminster Assembly Project in the multi-volume series of Principal Documents of the Westminster Assembly. Volumes on the Larger Catechism and the Confession have already appeared, each edited by John Bower.

[20] George Gillespie, Wholesome severity (London, 1645), p. 38; for other negative comments from Gillespie, see George Gillespie, A sermon preached before the right honourable the House of Lords (London, 1646), p. 14; Aarons rod blossoming (London, 1646), 193. Phrasing identical to that in Aarons Rod is found in Samuel Bolton, The arraignment of errour (London, 1646), p. 264.

[21] Gillespie, Wholesome severity, sigs. A2v–A3r. For other positive reference to liberty of conscience, see his early A dispute against the English-popish ceremonies (Leiden, 1637), p. 9.

[22] Samuel Bolton, The True bounds of Christian freedome (London, 1645), p. 325; Francis Cheynell, A Plot for the good of Posterity (London, 1646), p. 11.

[23] Van Dixhoorn, ed., MPWA 4:316, 318.

[24] Van Dixhoorn, ed., MPWA 4:320.

[25] Charles Hodge’s paraphrase and quotation in his The Constitutional History of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1851), Part I, p. 37.

[26] For example, the Old Testament commends the punishment of doctrinal sins in the nation of Israel, such as the death penalty for encouraging others to engage in idolatry (Deut. 13:6–12; Zech. 13:2–3). Godly political leaders encouraged or required obedience to the God of Israel (Ezra 7:23, 25–28, Neh. 13:15, 17, 21–22, 25, 30, 2 Kings 23:5–6, 9, 20–21, 2 Chron. 15:12–13, 16; 34:33).

[27] Discussion of the 1788 Philadelphia amendment is curiously muted in the thirty studies consulted for this lecture. Scottish comments on paragraph 20.4 defend or expound the original 1646 wording, and even Scottish confessional commentaries written after 1788 make no mention of the American revisions; The Reformed Presbyterian Church, even in its North American and international churches, also defends the 1646 text. Most American commentaries and studies use the 1788 text and note the historic change from the original 1646 text, but make no effort to offer a biblical defense of the change. Exceptions include G. I. Williamson, The Westminster Confession of Faith (1964; Philipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 2004), 204, who defends the 1646 edition, and Chad Van Dixhoorn, Confessing the Faith: A Reader’s Guide to the Westminster Confession of Faith (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2014), 271–2, offering a brief defense of the 1788 revision.

[28] Hodge, Constitutional History, Part I, p. 154.