According to the Westminster Confession of Faith (1.8), Scripture has been “kept pure in all ages” by the special care and providence of God. The same idea is echoed in the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1.8). For some, this assertion means that textual criticism, as usually practiced by those in the field, is not only unnecessary but also illicit. If it is true that God has kept his word pure in all ages, it is maintained, there is no need for humans to employ scientific methods to recover that word as is done with other books through the process of textual criticism. Rather, the singular form of the text that God has seen fit to preserve for the church (normally argued to be the textus receptus) is to be received as a whole by the believer, thus eliminating the need for textual criticism and, further, calling into question its very legitimacy as applied to Scripture.
This paper considers the meaning of the phrase “kept pure in all ages” by examining the text-critical discussions of men who authored the Westminster Confession of Faith. I argue that it is only by attending to the explicit text-critical discussions of the Westminster divines themselves that we can understand properly their bibliological convictions as expressed in the Confession. Accordingly, this paper considers several New Testament text-critical discussions found in the sermons and exegetical works of select Westminster divines and examines the manner in which they explored and resolved text-critical problems as they encountered them. It will be shown that Westminster divines actively and explicitly used modern text-critical principles in their handling of textual problems and thus did not believe that the doctrine of providential preservation precluded the practice of textual criticism.