Westminster Assembly

Right there in 1 Corinthians 10, verse 31.

And I know I'm going to get some backlash for quoting this from my spirit-filled friends and maybe some love for my Baptist friends when I share this, but I have to agree with the Westminster Divines, which answered this.

What is the chief end of man? as to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

Not to experience the full manifestation of the gifts, although that's cool.

Because he is working for God, and this other man, this other Christian, recognizes that he also is in the service of God in a different sense, then he owes it to the Lord to sustain that minister in his work.

Anthony Tuckney was one of the members of the Westminster Assembly.

He's an especially interesting member of the Westminster Assembly because he chaired the committee that drew up the catechism questions in the Westminster Larger Catechism about the Ten Commandments.

And there, in the Westminster Larger Catechism, question 108, it talks about the Second Commandment requiring that people support the ministry and the maintenance thereof.

That's speaking about financial maintenance, right? Also, Westminster Larger Catechism 109 speaks of the second commandment forbidding simony and sacrilege.

So you have at Westminster, a huge kind of national church idea.

The whole context of the standards is the Solemn League and Covenant and the Westminster Assembly being called before that to set the standard for the church for the whole nation.

The nation, therefore, is kind of, it's the Commonwealth at prayer, right? It's the kind of the whole bounds of the nation ought to be the bounds of the church, ideally.

Now, Of course, the Puritans would have differed already from what we now know as Anglicans, though at the time I'll often call them the churchmen, because there wasn't really a Puritan-Anglican distinction before that, or I would argue until about 1689.

I'm Joshua, your host.

And on this day, launch day, we're delighted to bring you a special bonus episode of the podcast with Dr. Chad Van Dixhoorn, who is a longstanding friend of the banner, a banner author, and who was kind enough alongside the first episode on question one to join us for what we're calling Behind the Scenes at the Westminster Assembly.

So Dr.

Van Dixhorn, Chad Van Dixhoorn, thank you for joining us again.

I'm delighted to be with you.

It's wonderful to have you with us.

You've spent many years working on the Westminster Assembly and the documents that it produced.

So thank you for being willing to clue us into what was really going on.

As you know, I have loved the study of the assembly and the standards for a long time.

I did a little edited version of William Beveridge's short history of the Westminster Assembly many years ago and did a bibliography of the assembly with David Hall many years ago, edited that three-volume set with Christian Focus Publication through their mentor, imprint on the Westminster Confession into the 21st century, sort of on the 350th anniversary around that of the assembly.

This volume is, the way I would describe it is, if Chad Van Dixhorn's wonderful commentary is sort of a 101 entry-level description of the content And I mean that as a compliment, because as someone who studied the confession for 45 years professionally, I learned things reading Chad's commentary that I that I had not known before.

But if you're a Sunday school teacher and you're wanting to start out with the commentary on the confession, Chad's is a great one to start with because he actually read.

And it had study notes with it.

Well, the Westminster annotations are an elaboration of the Geneva Bible study notes that were written, a number of them, by members of the Westminster Divines, and it was commissioned by Parliament.

And so it's a wonderful whole Bible commentary by many people that participated at the Westminster Assembly, and our authors dip into that.

I was given a copy of the Westminster Annotations by the elders of First Presbyterian Church in Jackson when I came to RTS, and it sits on my shelf in my office.