REFORMATION OUTTAKES | The Importance

REFORMATION OUTTAKES The Importance of Being Written: Scribes at the Westminster Assembly

by Zachary Purvis

SPECTERS HAUNT THE HISTORY of church committees. Today’s disciplined clerks, as we know them, harken back to yesterday’s unseen scribes. Every reader of ecclesiastical documents and every lover of polity, decency, and good order remains in their debt. For without them, there would be no surviving record of church business.

No committee—therefore no associated team of clerks or scribes—is more important for post-Reformation theology, piety, and practice in the English-speaking world than the Westminster Assembly, which met from July 1643 to April 1653. True, the assembly was not a church committee, but a political one. In the midst of an English civil war that was part of a wider war of the three kingdoms—England, Scotland, and Ireland, all ruled by Charles I—England’s Long Parliament set up in London an advisory body of ministers, divines, to reform the church. The advisory body had to admit members of Parliament (MPs) from both the House of Commons and the House of Lords to sit in on plenary sessions. But Protestants remember the assembly primarily for the documents it produced known as the Westminster Standards: the Confession of Faith, the Shorter Catechism, the Larger Catechism, and the Directory for Public Worship. Indeed, Presbyterians the world over still receive and subscribe (write their name beneath, both literally and figuratively) to these confessional and catechetical statements as legal and constitutional, as constitutive of the public official teaching and governing of the church.

By the end of the assembly’s first day on July 1, 1643, the need to record carefully all that would be said and done was obvious. On the second day, Parliament appointed two scribes “to set down all proceedings”: Adoniram Byfield and Henry Robrough.1 Though divines themselves and indispensable pieces of the Westminster puzzle, these two men were not, properly speaking, voting members. This fact was made all too clear to them in the debate as to whether they should be permitted to sit with their hats on in the assembly, as did other members. To forbid scribes to wear hats would make them easily identifiable but would also be insulting to them. More important, hats would help keep them warm—and comfortable, behatted scribes might take better notes.2

Take notes they did. There are rough minutes of assembly proceedings in early modern shorthand, revised minutes in a more polished hand, and registers

Adoniram Byfield (1602–1660) Westminster Assembly scribe

Assertion of Liberty of Conscience by the Independents of the Westminster Assembly of Divines by John Rogers Herbert

In this painting, Philip Nye argues that the form of church government advocated by the Presbyterians was “thrice over pernicious, to civil states and kingdoms.” He was immediately “cryed down,” according to Robert Baillie, who kept a journal of the proceedings. of votes and decisions—550,000 words in all. More than one historian has sighed in agony over Byfield’s penmanship: “hurried and abbreviated in style”; “an execrable seventeenth-century hand in extraordinary abstruseness and complexity”; a rough scrawl made worse by incomplete sentences, erasures, and insertions.3 Occasionally, Byfield’s personality peeks out from the textual mass, but it is difficult to observe and fleeting—like sunshine against the London fog. When Anthony Tuckney, master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, complained that Parliament could be as harsh in rule as the king had been, Byfield put down his pen but indicated that the speech continued— the rest was better left unrecorded.4 He found a speech on Matthew 18 by Philip Nye, the leading Congregationalist at the assembly and one of its most called-to-order speakers, to be “little to the purpose.”5 He amused himself by writing the name of Paul Best, who was jailed for denying the Trinity at the Gatehouse Prison in front of Westminster Abbey’s Great West Door, as “Paul Beast.”6 Nevertheless, Byfield and his coworkers are mostly invisible in the documentary evidence; they are record-keepers, not record-makers.

Of course, these scribes were not the only divines to jot down what happened inside Westminster Abbey and its famed Jerusalem Chamber, where committee work took place. The churchman John Lightfoot, one of England’s learned Talmudic scholars alongside John Selden, who was also at the assembly, kept an elegant journal into which he entered summaries of the assembly’s opening months.7 Robert Baillie ignored rules about confidentiality by sending dispatches of assembly proceedings across Scotland and Europe.8 George Gillespie also took copious notes, sometimes relocating the order of speeches in his narrative, and he seems to have enjoyed doing so, writing home to Scotland to say that London was the best place on earth.9

The minutes produced by the scribes offer a fuller, stranger, more remarkable account: snapshots of impassioned debates, piercing examinations, heartfelt resolutions—hours of nettlesome discussion over many days are often condensed into a few fragmentary lines. The pace of the assembly, and the toil of the scribes, was exhausting. Stephen Marshall, the most frequent preacher before Parliament and the most frequent speaker at the assembly, commented: “All our discourses are recorded by the scribes so far as their pens can reach them.” 10 Rarely, the scribes miscounted the vote; when they did, it caused, in Lightfoot’s words, “a great deal of heat.” 11 Twice Cornelius Burges, one of the most important members of the assembly, required the scribes to “improve” his sensitive speeches.12 For their immense labors, the scribes received the same pay as the other divines, although sometimes they were able to supplement their meager stipends. In 1645, for example, when the Directory for Public Worship went to print, under

Byfield’s supervision, the proceeds were split equally among the scribes and the two parliamentary houses.13

These minutes provide more than mere antiquarian interest. Not only do they reveal how the assembly worked, but also—and most importantly for the church, then as now—they illuminate what the divines meant when discussing points of profound doctrinal import: the obedience of Christ, the eternal decree, the nature of Christian liberty and liberty of conscience, among others. John Bower’s verdict is apt:

It is chiefly through the assembly’s minutes and papers, aided by other sources such as Parliament’s journals and a steady stream of contemporary published works, where the assembly’s day-to-day work to create order amid civil war and ecclesiastical chaos is to be found. It is here where the history of the confession’s text unfolds.14

In antiquity, unheralded scribes copied out the Scriptures; from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, long-forgotten copyists made possible great books by scholars that are still read today. Likewise, the scribes at the Westminster Assembly left behind a long and winding trail of paper, as challenging as it is rewarding to follow. We have an ideal guide to their world: the sublime five-volume edition of the Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly (MPWA) by Chad Van Dixhoorn.15 When we read through it, we can become better readers of the church’s confession. For that reason, we might even fill our ministers’ libraries with the MPWA, to make available scholarly tools for pastoral reflection and study—a motion, perhaps, for the next committee.

Zachary Purvis (DPhil, University of Oxford) is lecturer of church history at Edinburgh Theological Seminary.

1. John Lightfoot, Journal of the Proceedings of the Assembly of

Divines, ed. John Rogers Pitman (London: J. F. Dove, 1824), 3–4. 2. The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly, 1643–1652, ed. Chad Van Dixhoorn, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2012), 2:281 (Nov. 7, 1643; Session 90) (hereafter MPWA). 3. C. A. Briggs, “The Documentary History of the Westminster

Assembly,” The Presbyterian Review 1 (1880): 130; Robert

S. Paul, The Assembly of the Lord: Politics and Religion in the

Westminster Assembly and the “Grand Debate” (Edinburgh:

T&T Clark, 1985), 73. 4. MPWA 2:287 (Sept. 9, 1644; Session 281). 5. MPWA 2:351 (Oct. 1, 1644; Session 294). 6. MPWA 2:642 (Aug. 5, 1645; Session 480); 2:663 (Sept. 11, 1645; Session 501); 2:665 (Sept. 15, 1645; Session 503). 7. Lightfoot, Journal; MPWA 1:61. 8. Robert Baillie, The Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie, ed.

David Laing, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Robert Ogle, 1841), 108;

Chad Van Dixhoorn, “Scottish Influence on the Westminster

Assembly: A Study of the League’s Summoning Ordinance and the Solemn League and Covenant,” Scottish Church History 37 (2007): 58. 9. George Gillespie to Robert Murray, May 21, 1645, in Baillie,

Letters, 507. 10. Paul, The Assembly of the Lord, 562 (spelling modernized). 11. MPWA 1:57 (spelling modernized). 12. MPWA 2:80 (Sept. 8, 1643; Session 49); 2:128 (Sept. 15, 1643; Session 56). 13. Journals of the House of Commons 4:10–11 (Jan. 4, 1645). 14. John R. Bower, The Confession of Faith: A Critical Text and Introduction (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage, 2020), 51. 15. See note 2.

II. Converse

Discussing from perspectives of the present

GLOBAL THEOLOGICAL FORUM Arab Christianity, Science, and the Doctrine of Scripture

an interview with Wageeh Mikhail

Rev. Wageeh Mikhail (PhD) is the engagement director of ScholarLeaders International (ScholarLeaders.org). Prior to this role, Dr. Mikhail served as director of the Center for Middle Eastern Christianity at the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cairo, Egypt. He has published and spoken widely on medieval Arab Christianity.

Dr. Mikhail, please tell us a little bit about yourself, your academic interests, and what you are currently working on.

I studied theology at the Cairo Evangelical Theological Seminary, Westminster Theological Seminary, and at Calvin Seminary. I received my PhD from the University of Birmingham in the UK. My passion is to see the gospel reconciled to the Arab culture. That is why I focused throughout my studies on Arab Christian literature written in the Middle Ages. Arabic-speaking Christians in the Middle Ages left behind invaluable literature in which they responded to the intellectual questions Muslim polemicists offered against Christianity. This was the first Christian response to Islam in history. Arab Christians offered logical, pastoral, and biblical answers in reverence and respect. Not only did they offer a reason for the hope within, but they also played an indispensable role in building the Arab/ Islamic civilization under the Abbasid Dynasty, pioneering the translation movement from Greek and Syriac into Arabic. My passion is to highlight their answers, role, and theology, for I am convinced that the church in the Arab world exists today because of their faithfulness and testimony for which they paid a costly price. I currently serve with ScholarLeaders International, whose mission is to “encourage and enable Christian theological leaders from the Majority World—Africa, Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East—for the Global Church.” I lead several projects related to Christianity and Islam.

In recent centuries in the West, much thinking about the doctrine and reliability of Scripture has centered around science. How reliable is the Bible, given the discoveries of modern science? How would you characterize the key issues related to the doctrine of Scripture for Arab Christianity, both historically and more recently?

The theological issues discussed in the Western world are not necessarily of significance to the church in the Muslim world, because Islam raises different

questions than those raised by atheism or secularism. The sociopolitical challenges that millions of Christians face in the Muslim world leave them puzzled at the issues discussed in the West. Surely, this is not to dismiss some theological issues discussed in the West. But it is to assert that different contexts demand different answers to different questions. So, for example, Christians in the Muslim world are not so much concerned with science and Scripture, because in a Muslim context the first thing that comes to mind regarding the Bible is the allegation of corruption (Taḥrīf). Muslim polemicists, as early as the eighth century, have been accusing the Jews and the Christians of altering the Scripture. This allegation has some Qur’anic basis (see 2:24; 3:71, 78, 187, 6:91, 7:162).

Let us consider the example of ‘Ammār al-Baṣrī (a ninth-century Arab Christian theologian), who in refuting this allegation imagines a conversation or debate with a Muslim thinker who brings forth this allegation. ‘Ammār begins with the presupposition that the Christian religion has been established through wondrous miracles. There had been no earthly incentive or use of swords. Rather, those who had embraced Christianity had done so by divine compulsion through signs. It followed, then, that the written gospel that had been instrumental in the spread of Christianity was also confirmed on the basis of the same compulsion. This necessitated that the gospel be true and that full trust be given to its content. ‘Ammār agrees with his interlocutor that there are various interpretations of the Christian Scriptures, but he notes that this does not mean that the text has been altered. Rather, the very existence of different interpretations is a strong argument against those who accuse the Scriptures of having been corrupted. For if they had been corrupted, ‘Ammār argues, then it would be natural to expect all interpretations to agree. According to ‘Ammār, even the accusation of falsification is not legitimate. He bases his case on the fact that Christianity was confirmed by divine signs and not by earthly incentives. This strategy was common in Arab Christian apologetics during the ‘Abbasid caliphate.

Another example concerns the Paraclete (παράκλητος), the comforter promised in John 14:16–17. Muslim polemicists have taken this as a reference to Muhammad and argue that this word has been intentionally changed from periklytos (the praised one; i.e., “Ahmad” in Arabic, the name of Prophet Muhammad) to paraklytos (the comforter; i.e., the Holy Spirit). This argument has been proven to be absurd on a logical and a linguistic basis. The pioneer theologian who refuted this allegation was Patriarch Timothy I (AD 728–823), patriarch of the Church of the East, in his dialogue with the Abbasid Caliph al-Mahdi (AD 745–785). In a two-day meeting with the patriarch, the caliph raises many issues and objections against Christianity. Timothy answers creatively and gently, and he decisively refutes all allegations against Christianity, one of which was the Paraclete argument. Timothy clearly answers:

If Muhammad were the Paraclete, since the Paraclete is the Spirit of God, Muhammad would, therefore, be the Spirit of God; and the Spirit of God being uncircumscribed like God, Muhammad would also be uncircumscribed like God; and

Codex Arabicus (Mt. Sinai, Egypt) Overlying text in Arabic (ca. 900)

he who is uncircumscribed being invisible, Muhammad would also be invisible and without a human body; and he who is without a body being uncomposed, Muhammad would also be uncomposed. Indeed, he who is a spirit has no body, and he who has no body is also invisible, and he who is invisible is also uncircumscribed; but he who is circumscribed is not the Spirit of God, and he who is not the Spirit of God is not the Paraclete. It follows from all this that Muhammad is not the Paraclete. The Paraclete is from heaven and of the nature of the Father, and Muhammad is from the earth and of the nature of Adam. Since heaven is not the same thing as earth, nor is God the Father identical with Adam, the Paraclete is not, therefore, Muhammad. (Mingana, Timothy I)

What can the global church learn from Arab Christianity, particularly in regard to the doctrine of Scripture?

The church in the Arab world has a wealth of knowledge awaiting to be shared with the global church, especially regarding answering questions raised solely by Muslims. Not only does the church in the Arab world have fourteen hundred years of answers to Islamic objections on the credibility of the Bible, but the church in the Arab world has also been specially blessed by having numerous Bible translations that go back to as early as the eighth century. The Arabic Bible has been penetrating the Arab culture due to the incredible work of Arab Christians who worked hard to bring the word of God in the new lingua franca, and in a culture dominated by accusations against the Christian Scripture. Ibn al-ʿAssāl, a Coptic thinker and translator from the thirteenth century, provided a wonderful scholarly Arabic translation of the Gospels. He even created his own textual apparatus symbols, centuries before Western theologians introduced textual criticism!

Yet, it remains that the best gift with which the Arab church has been blessed is the fact that her culture is the same as the Bible. Biblical figures of speeches, parables, and idioms are easily understood by the average Arabic-speaking Christian because they share the same culture. The Bible is a divine text inspired in a Middle Eastern context, part of which is the Arabic-speaking community. The late Professor Kenneth E. Baily, who wrote repeatedly on this point, provides an insider Arabic perspective on the parables of Christ.

In Arabic, there is no single word for “Bible.” Instead, we say “al-Kitāb al-Muqaddas.” This literally reads as “the Holy Book.” The Scriptures in the Arab context have been under attack since the eighth century, and for this exact reason, al-Kitāb al-Muqaddas is so precious. It has been established in the Arab culture because of those who stood firm facing many challenges, and in doing so they paid the ultimate price: their blood. Because of this state of affairs, al-Kitāb al-Muqaddas is not to be taken lightly. It is the word of God that made its way to our culture as early as the Day of the Pentecost (Acts 2: 11).