34 Facts About Westminster Assembly

Westminster Assembly of Divines was a council of divines and members of the English Parliament appointed from 1643 to 1653 to restructure the Church of England.

Westminster Assembly was called by the Long Parliament before and during the beginning of the First English Civil War.

Westminster Assembly worked in the Reformed Protestant theological tradition, known as Calvinism.

The Westminster Assembly held to Reformed covenant theology, a framework for interpreting the Bible.

The Westminster Assembly's Confession is the first of the Reformed confessions to teach a doctrine called the covenant of works, which teaches that before the fall of man, God promised eternal life to Adam on condition that he perfectly obeyed God.

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The Westminster Assembly was almost entirely English; Parliament appointed Englishmen for the counties of Wales, but the French stranger churches sent two ministers in place of any from the Channel Islands.

Westminster Assembly was strictly under the control of Parliament, and was only to debate topics which Parliament directed.

Westminster Assembly members were not permitted to state their disagreements with majority opinions or share any information about the proceedings, except in writing to Parliament.

Twenty-two appointed members of the Westminster Assembly died before 1649, and they along with those who did not attend for other reasons were replaced by another nineteen members.

Westminster Assembly resolved, after some debate, that all the doctrines of the Thirty-Nine articles would need to be proven from the Bible.

Westminster Assembly members were prone to long speeches and they made slow progress, frustrating the leadership.

The Westminster Assembly was unable to resolve conflicts between those who would not be bound by creeds and those who wished to retain the existing language that the creeds be "thoroughly received and believed".

The commissioners were given the opportunity to become full voting members of the Westminster Assembly but declined, preferring to maintain their independence as commissioners of their own nation and church.

The Westminster Assembly would spend a quarter of its full sessions on the subject of church government.

The majority of the Westminster Assembly members supported presbyterian polity, or church government by elected assemblies of lay and clerical representatives, though many were not dogmatically committed to it.

The entire Westminster Assembly was Erastian in the sense that the body had been called by Parliament and was completely under state control.

Those labelled "Erastian" at the Westminster Assembly believed the civil authority, rather than church officers, should hold the power of church discipline.

The Westminster Assembly began with the issue of ordination, as many of the divines were concerned about the rise of various sectarian movements and the lack of any mechanism for ordination of ministers of the established church.

The next day, the Westminster Assembly finally began to establish a prescription for presbyterian government.

Westminster Assembly's rise to power as a result of his military victories made the idea of a strictly presbyterian settlement without freedom of worship for others very unlikely.

Parliament at least wanted to know which sins in particular were grave enough to trigger excommunication by the church; the Westminster Assembly was reticent to provide such information, as the majority considered the power of the church in this area to be absolute.

The Westminster Assembly published a protest, provoking the Commons to charge it with breach of privilege and to submit nine questions to the divines on the matter.

The General Westminster Assembly ceased to function under Cromwell and the kings who succeeded him from 1649 to 1690.

The Westminster Assembly recommended a psalter, translated by Francis Rous for use in worship.

The Westminster Assembly continued to meet primarily for the purpose of examination of ministers for ordination.

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Westminster Assembly was a product of the British Reformed tradition, taking as a major source the Thirty-Nine Articles as well as the theology of James Ussher and his Irish Articles of 1615.

The recorded debates of the Westminster Assembly are full of citations of church fathers and medieval scholastic theologians.

The Westminster Assembly's Confession did not teach such a view, and its language is much more amenable to a particular redemption interpretation, but there is a general agreement among scholars that the Confession's language allows an hypothetical universalist interpretation.

The Westminster Assembly Confession was the first major Reformed symbol to explicitly mention the covenant of works, in which God offered Adam eternal life on condition of perfect obedience.

The Westminster Assembly divines set these two covenants against each other as the two major ways in which God deals with people.

Work of the Westminster Assembly was repudiated by the Church of England during the Restoration in 1660.

The ideals of the dissenting brethren of the Westminster Assembly were significant in the rise of denominationalism, the doctrine that the church is found in several institutions rather than a single one in a given location.

Confession produced by the Westminster Assembly was adopted with amendments by Congregationalists in England in the form of the 1658 Savoy Declaration, as well as by Particular Baptists in the form of the 1689 Baptist Confession.

The Westminster Assembly's Confession was particularly influential in American Protestant theology.