Establishment and Freedom in American, Westminsterian Confessionalism

Kevin DeYoung has a piece up at Themelios arguing that the 1788 American revisions to the Westminster Confession of Faith surrounding the civil government’s relationship to the church are substantially and irreconcilably different from the original 1647 version. Stephen Wolfe’s rejoinder I think gets the better of it: removal doesn’t imply denial. The 1788 version of the WCF only ceased requiring ministerial belief in the government’s responsibility to ensure doctrinal purity in the church, enforcement of Christianity in society, and the establishment of a national church. The revisions don’t rule those views out. Back in 2019 (pre-Christian nationalism debates) I wrote

“The 1788 version [of the WCF] does not explicitly contradict the 1647 version, it just does not specifically hold [its assertions], which means someone who agrees with 1647 may faithfully subscribe to 1788. The 1647 version of the WCF… taught that the civil government was also instituted by God, and therefore there should be no separation of church and state in a Christian society. Since both church and government were instituted by God for the ordering of society there were levels of interaction and accountability between the two. The 1647 WCF is not Erastian, but neither does it grant secular authority over the church.”