The Tercentenary of the Westminster Assembly

Abstract

Coming to its three-hundredth anniversary, the Westminster Assembly encounters in the United States somewhat more congeniality than it has experienced in a considerable rather recent period. Were they aware of it, this might not greatly concern its members, for they did their work through good report and ill, in the strength of their own convictions. But the fact has significance. One reason for it is a change in the theological climate. After a predominance of other influences the understanding of the Christian gospel which the Reformation brought in and the Westminster divines held is again in the ascendant. This has occurred in a time like that of the Reformation and like the century of the Assembly, of violent political change, calamitous war, deep anxiety, widespread despair. In such times the Christian doctrines of the judgment and providential purpose of God, of the evil and absolute need of man, of God's revelation and sovereign redeeming grace, of a salvation beyond history, for which the men of Westminster stood and yet stand in their works, find sympathy denied to them in more prosperous and self-sufficient years.