HistoricalChristian.Faith

The Westminster Confession of Faith on the Old Testament Canon

Dates: c. 1647 (the Confession of Faith drawn up by the Westminster Assembly of Divines — The Humble Advice of the Assembly of Divines, completed 1646 and presented to the English Parliament in 1647, adopted by the Church of Scotland in 1647) · Wikipedia
Verdict on the deuterocanon: NO — the hardest line on the timeline: the Apocrypha "not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the canon of the Scripture; and therefore are of no authority in the Church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved, or made use of, than other human writings." Where the Thirty-Nine Articles (1571) had kept the deuterocanon as edifying reading "for example of life," the Westminster Confession strips it of even that standing and ranks it with ordinary human books — the flat Reformed exclusion the Anglican line had stopped short of.

Claims & evidence

WCF 1.2: the canon is the books "given by inspiration of God"

Chapter 1, "Of the Holy Scripture," names the canon by enumeration. Section 2 opens:

Under the name of holy Scripture, or the Word of God written, are now contained all the books of the Old and New Testaments, which are these:

— Westminster Confession of Faith, 1.2.¹ There follow the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament — Genesis through Malachi, the Hebrew-sized canon — and the twenty-seven of the New, after which the section closes: "All which are given by inspiration of God, to be the rule of faith and life."¹ The operative criterion is inspiration: a book is canonical because it is God-breathed, the rule of faith and life — not because the church has long read it, the reception-test that had carried the disputed books into Augustine's and Trent's canon. The list itself is the Masoretic-sized Old Testament the Reformers had returned to.

WCF 1.3: the Apocrypha given no canonical authority — ranked with "human writings"

The very next section turns to the disputed books by name and refuses them every standing the older confessions had left them:

The books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the canon of the Scripture; and therefore are of no authority in the Church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved, or made use of, than other human writings.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, 1.3.² Two clauses do the work. The first denies canonicity on the ground of inspiration — "not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the canon" — making the Apocrypha's exclusion follow directly from the test stated in 1.2. The second strips their standing: "of no authority in the Church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved, or made use of, than other human writings." That second clause is what sets the Confession apart from every earlier Protestant "No" on this timeline. Jerome, Rufinus, Luther, and the Thirty-Nine Articles had all kept the deuterocanon as edifying reading — read in church "for example of life," "profitable and good to read," though not to prove doctrine. Westminster removes that middle rank: the Apocrypha are not a lower tier of churchly reading but "human writings," to be approved or used no differently than any other uninspired book.

Harder than the Thirty-Nine Articles: the rank, not just the doctrine, removed

The contrast with the Anglican formulary a lifetime earlier is exact and deliberate. Article VI of the Thirty-Nine Articles had drawn the same Hebrew-sized canon, but assigned the deuterocanon a named, positive sub-canonical use: the Church "doth read" these books "for example of life and instruction of manners," withholding only their power to "establish any doctrine."³ The Westminster divines, working in the Puritan Reformation of the 1640s, cut the doctrinal cord and the liturgical one: the books lose not only their authority to prove doctrine but their appointed place as church reading. This is the soft, Jerome-style "No" of the earlier Reformers hardened into a flat exclusion — the position that would shape later Protestant Bible-printing, the British and Foreign Bible Society resolving in the early nineteenth century to issue Bibles without the Apocrypha at all.³

Notes

• NO — the hardest line on the timeline. Every prior Protestant and patristic "No" (Athanasius, Jerome, Rufinus, Luther, the Thirty-Nine Articles) had kept the deuterocanon for reading in some graded "ecclesiastical" or "read but not canonical" tier. The Westminster Confession is the first to deny even that, leveling the Apocrypha down to "other human writings" — the mirror image of Trent's leveling them up into the canon under anathema a century before.
• The criterion is inspiration, not reception. Where Augustine and the councils had weighed a book by the breadth of its churchly use, and Jerome by the Hebrew measure, Westminster rests the canon squarely on divine inspiration — the Reformed sola Scriptura reading of 2 Timothy 3:16 — so the Apocrypha's exclusion is stated as a corollary of its not being God-breathed, not merely of its absence from the Hebrew table.
• Why it mattered doctrinally. Reducing the Apocrypha to "human writings" of "no authority" pulls the ground out from under the contested proof-texts the disputed books carried — 2 Maccabees 12 for prayer and offerings for the dead, Tobit 12 for almsgiving that "saves from death" — weighed in the Arguments on the summary timeline. A book that may not be "made use of" any differently than other human writings cannot found a doctrine of purgatory or of atoning almsgiving; the canon ruling and the doctrinal stakes are one move.
• Provenance. Chapter 1 is quoted from the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646/1647) in its received text. The date 1647 follows the Confession's presentation to the English Parliament and its adoption by the Church of Scotland; the Assembly completed the document in 1646.

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