Introduction

For more than 350 years most of the original manuscript minutes of the Westminster Assembly have remained unpublished. These official minutes record the debates of the English, Scottish and French theologians at plenary sessions of the Assembly as well as the Assembly’s inner workings and resolutions. The large three-volume manuscript of the minutes is housed in Dr Williams’s Library, London. These volumes contain 550,000 words and span the years 1643 to 1652.

While much of the third volume was published in the late nineteenth century, it was based on an imperfect transcript. This project intends to publish all three volumes of the original manuscript minutes in Dr Williams’s Library, in addition to the recently discovered papers of the Assembly.

The publication of The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly will more than triple the available sources on the Assembly and will fill a major gap in our understanding of the Assembly and its documents.

The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly

In the middle of the seventeenth century, civil war erupted in England between Charles I and his parliament. The Long Parliament’s activities were radical during the war, perhaps mostly so in the area of religion. Infamously, it beheaded the Archbishop of Canterbury and permitted the defacing of religious images. But Parliament also destroyed the entire system of church law, church courts, and church government by archbishops and bishops, replacing it with a system of democratic synods ruled by ministers of equal rank. Parliament went on to abolish the Anglican liturgy and neuter its doctrinal standards, the Thirty-nine Articles.

Although Parliament issued the legislation, it was the Westminster Assembly that masterminded many of these changes in the church. The Assembly was appointed by Parliament in 1643 in the hopes of solving the religious problems of the civil war. It comprised thirty political observers and roughly one-hundred and twenty puritan theologians.

The revolutionary church designed by the Assembly did not survive Oliver Cromwell’s rise to power, let alone the restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1660. But for almost a decade these theologians regulated the church and the universities. While Parliament could evict anyone from a church, chapel, or college, only the Assembly could decide who would enter these institutions. The Westminster Assembly selected or approved heads of colleges and all candidates for college fellowships.

Historians, new discoveries, and the Assembly

At least twenty scholars over the past two centuries have produced one or more works on the Assembly. A similar number of books have been written about the theologians themselves, and hundreds of works have been written about the texts that the Assembly authored. Unfortunately, many of these studies suffer from a compartmentalized approach to the Assembly. The different disciplines that write about the Assembly rarely talk to one another. Ecclesiastical historians dominate the scene, usually preoccupied with the Assembly’s debates over church governance.

The historiographical weaknesses in the literature are particularly evident because new material has come to light since the most recent scholarly monograph on the Assembly was written almost two decades ago. Many of the Assembly’s original papers have been located, as well as a lost journal by an Assembly member which fills a crucial gap in the Assembly’s records or minutes. A typescript of the Assembly’s minutes has also been completed—three volumes of speeches, motions, and resolutions, which give us the story of the Assembly from behind the scenes.

Collectively these documents place the Assembly’s work on a new footing and suggest that the Assembly has been profoundly misunderstood. The main focus of the Assembly was not church government. And the reason for the Assembly’s many problems rested as much with Parliament’s underpaying and overworking its theologians as it did with the theologians’ own weaknesses and inexperience. These texts tell us a story that has not been heard before, and they also tell us something of what these religious revolutionaries thought and how they argued for changes in the church.

The Project

Because these documents are generally deemed illegible and yet are important to theologians and church historians, an edition of the Westminster Assembly’s minutes and papers is in progress which will contain an introduction and editorial notes to aid readers from different academic disciplines.

The Contents of the Minutes

The minutes of the Assembly arguably constitute the most important unpublished religious text of seventeenth-century Britain. They were almost entirely written by a scribe named Adoniram Byfield. The only surviving portrayal of Byfield, if it can be called that, is a small line engraving. Aside from Byfield himself (who is dressed as a Quaker), the engraving features a devil blowing on a windmill attached to Byfield’s hat, with the words, “Pryde,” “Coveteousne,” “Hipocrysy,” and “Lust” on the four sails of the windmill. The devil is saying “He do’s my business bravely” while Byfield confesses that “Needs must when the Devel drives.”It is rather doubtful that Byfield was driven by the devil, but he was able to write with what appears to be superhuman speed and endurance, as the contents of the minutes reveal. There is a remarkable coherence to the speeches in the first two volumes of his minutes and very little censorship of the material: Byfield records almost everything said at the Assembly, and thus the minutes provide us with an unguarded extemporary comment on religion and politics during the central decades of the seventeenth century.

Of course the scribe records what was, for the divines, the most important material: the biblical, theological, and historical arguments marshalled to revamp the churches of England and Scotland. But Byfield also relates to us what the divines thought about patristic, medieval and Reformed writers, and his notes record the astonishing breadth of responsibility assigned to or assumed by the Assembly—from the exchange of prisoners, to correspondence with foreign churches, to Bible translation.

Byfield’s minutes tell the story of collisions with Parliament, frustration with the rise and toleration of religious sectaries, and the friendships and tensions between French, Scottish, and English theologians at the Assembly. The minutes also make mention of thousands of persons, mostly clergy, and include comments on women, the prison system, censorship, marriage practices, price-fixing, sieges, sickness, and an attempt to move the University of Oxford to London.

The Proposed Edition

Unlike the fragmentary edition of the minutes which exists, the proposed edition of this text would extend to four volumes, including a full introduction, a critical text of the minutes with editorial apparatus, and appendices. Since scholars from diverse disciplines will be looking at this text, all Greek, Hebrew, and Latin passages will be translated, and enough information will be included in the introduction and notes to make the text intelligible to historians of church and state and to students of historical theology and biblical exegesis. The proposed editing conventions have been approved by six British palaeographers. The archives with Assembly manuscripts have been located which will help identify the persons mentioned and the books and authors cited in the minutes. The project is thankful to have the full support of the trustees of Dr Williams’s Library, which owns the manuscript minutes of the Assembly.

The Importance of the Assembly

The history of the Westminster Assembly and the works that it produced are tremendously significant for the early modern period. The Assembly is key to understanding the religious context of the British Revolution and civil wars. The gathering has been neglected by historians of the Anglican Church who view the 1640s and 50s as the worst chapter in their church’s history. However, it has been the constant focus of attention for historians of puritanism, for this is the only time in the history of England when puritans ruled the country. Internationally, the Assembly continues to be studied by historical theologians as the last and largest of the post-Reformation synods.

The Assembly and its documents are also important for the self-understanding of religious communities today. While the Assembly’s bid to reform the church was an English failure, it was a Scottish and Irish success. Today over twenty-five million Presbyterians subscribe in some fashion to the Confession of Faith produced by the Westminster Assembly. Other Protestant traditions have adopted slightly altered versions of the Assembly’s documents as their own, and look to the Assembly for inspiration.

For these reasons, the editors think a complete text and introduction of the Assembly’s minutes and papers would inform a broad community of historians and theologians and provide additional insight into ecclesiastical traditions that are vibrant and active today. With the essential team members already in place, it is hoped that the minutes and papers could be ready for a professional indexer in 2010.