The Westminster Confession
Reformed theology codified
The Westminster Assembly meets from 1643 to 1649, convened by the English Parliament during the Civil War that will end with Charles I losing his head. Its mandate is to reform the Church of England along Presbyterian lines — to produce the doctrinal, liturgical, and governmental documents that a genuinely Reformed English church would need.
The assembly includes over a hundred English ministers, Scottish commissioners, and parliamentary observers. It meets for over a thousand sessions — the most sustained piece of theological work in the English-speaking world.
Its products are extraordinary: the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Larger and Shorter Catechisms, the Directory of Public Worship, the Form of Church Government.
The Confession and Catechisms become the doctrinal standards of Presbyterian and Reformed churches across the English-speaking world — in Scotland, in Ulster, in America, in Australia, in Korea, in sub-Saharan Africa. They are still in use today as confessional standards in hundreds of denominations.
The Shorter Catechism's opening exchange is among the most famous in Christian history:
Q: What is the chief end of man? A: Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.
To glorify God and to enjoy him forever. Not to obey God. Not to serve God. To glorify and to enjoy — the two words together forming an understanding of the Christian life that refuses to separate duty from delight, service from joy.
The Westminster Divines, working in the middle of a civil war, produced this sentence. It is still the best answer to the question anyone has given.
“What is the chief end of man? Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”
— Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q&A 1, 1647 AD
“Who do I have in heaven? There is no one on earth who I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart fails, But God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”
To glorify God and to enjoy him forever.
The Westminster Divines could have said: to obey God, or to serve God, or to submit to God. All of these are true. They said enjoy.
John Piper built a theology on this: God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. The enjoyment is not the reward for glorifying him — it is the glorifying. When we delight in God most deeply, we display his worth most clearly.
The person who obeys God while finding him dull is not glorifying him. The person who delights in God — who finds in him the satisfaction that nothing else finally provides — is saying something about God by the quality of their delight.
Are you enjoying God? Not performing religion, not maintaining practices, not managing your spiritual life — are you enjoying him?
If not, what is in the way? And what would it take to move it?