The Westminster Assembly of Divines, convened in 1643, represents one of the most consequential intersections of theological conviction and political resistance in the English-speaking world. Called by the English Parliament during the upheaval of the English Civil War, the assembly’s mandate was to settle questions of ecclesiastical governance for both England and Scotland — questions that were never merely academic. How the church was governed bore directly on how the state could claim authority over conscience, and the Scottish Presbyterian commissioners who traveled to London understood this with absolute clarity.
The Scottish Commissioners
Scotland sent a delegation of ministers and ruling elders who exercised influence far beyond their numbers. The ministerial commissioners — Samuel Rutherford, Alexander Henderson, Robert Baillie, and George Gillespie — were among the most capable theological minds of the Reformed tradition. They were joined by ruling elders including the Earl of Cassilis, Lord Maitland, and Sir Archibald Johnston of Warriston. These were not passive observers. The Scottish contingent came to Westminster with a defined agenda: the establishment of Presbyterian polity as the standard for church governance across both kingdoms, displacing both the episcopal system they had fought against in Scotland and the rising tide of English Independency that favored congregational autonomy.
Rutherford’s role was especially prominent. Already a veteran of persecution under the Stuart crown — having been confined to Aberdeen for his opposition to episcopacy — he used the assembly’s proceedings as both a theological and political platform. It was during this period that he published Lex Rex: The Law and the King, his celebrated treatise on constitutional government, written in direct response to John Maxwell’s monarchist arguments. The timing was not incidental. The assembly provided an environment where fundamental questions about the source and limits of political authority were being debated in real time, and Rutherford’s contributions shaped the discussion on both ecclesiastical and civil planes. His life and intellectual legacy are treated more fully in Samuel Rutherford: Life, Persecution, and Scholarly Influence, and the arguments of Lex Rex itself are examined in Lex Rex: The Law and the King by Samuel Rutherford.
Presbyterian Polity as a Resistance Framework
The Scottish commissioners’ advocacy for Presbyterianism was not merely a preference for one church structure over another. Presbyterian polity — with its graded courts of session, presbytery, synod, and general assembly — built institutional checks on power into the very fabric of church governance. This stood in direct opposition to episcopacy, where authority flowed downward from bishops appointed by the crown, giving the monarch effective control over the church. The Scottish delegation understood that a church governed by crown-appointed bishops was a church that could be weaponized against the people’s liberties.
This principle had immediate political implications. If ecclesiastical authority was not the king’s to bestow, then the boundaries of royal prerogative were narrower than monarchists claimed. The assembly thus became a proving ground for ideas about limited government and magistrate accountability — ideas that the Scottish tradition had been developing since John Knox’s confrontations with Mary Queen of Scots. Knox’s legacy as a forerunner of resistance theology is explored in John Knox and Resistance to Tyranny.
The Scottish commissioners’ arguments also intersected with broader Reformed political theology. The continental tradition of resistance theory, articulated in works like the Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, provided a framework in which lesser magistrates — civil officers below the sovereign — held a duty to resist tyrannical commands. The Westminster Assembly brought this continental tradition into direct contact with English constitutionalism, and the Scottish delegation served as the primary conduit. The continental roots of this doctrine are examined in Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos and John Calvin and the Doctrine of Lesser Magistrates.
Conflict with English Independency
The assembly was not a unified body. The Scottish Presbyterians faced significant opposition from English Independents who favored congregational autonomy — each local church governing itself without subordination to a higher ecclesiastical court. While both parties opposed episcopacy and the king’s ecclesiastical overreach, their visions for what replaced it diverged sharply. The Presbyterians saw the Independent model as an invitation to fragmentation and doctrinal chaos; the Independents saw Presbyterian courts as a new form of the very centralized ecclesiastical authority they had fought to dismantle.
This internal struggle shaped the assembly’s output. The Westminster Confession of Faith, the Larger and Shorter Catechisms, and the Directory for Public Worship all bore the marks of compromise and contest. Yet the doctrinal standards produced by the assembly became foundational documents for Reformed Protestantism worldwide — and the Scottish commissioners’ insistence on covenantal theology and constitutional church governance left an indelible stamp on those documents.
Lasting Influence on Resistance and Constitutional Thought
The assembly’s significance extends well beyond seventeenth-century ecclesiastical politics. The principles debated at Westminster — that authority is bounded by law, that rulers are accountable to the governed, that institutions must contain structural checks against the concentration of power — flowed directly into the political philosophy that shaped the American founding. Scottish Presbyterian emigrants carried Westminster’s theological and political commitments to the colonies, where they became foundational to American constitutional thought. This transatlantic transmission is traced in John Witherspoon and Presbyterian Theological Influence on American Founding and Presbyterian Church and American Revolutionary Resistance to Tyranny.
The assembly also illustrates a key principle: institutions matter. The Scottish commissioners did not simply articulate ideas about liberty and resistance — they fought to embed those ideas in institutional structures with real authority. The Presbyterian courts they championed were designed to distribute power, create accountability, and protect conscience against state overreach. This institutional emphasis connects directly to the broader tradition of popular sovereignty and consent of the governed and to the constitutional framework that undergirds the duty of self-defense as a moral and political obligation.
The Scottish commissioners worked within a hostile political environment to advance constitutional principles, accepted the costs of principled resistance, and contributed to institutions designed to outlast any individual ruler. Their effort reflected a conviction that liberty depended on structured, durable institutions rather than individual rulers or transient majorities. The broader context of Scotland’s religious and political struggles leading up to the assembly is covered in Scottish Church History and Religious Resistance (1603-1637).