This critical edition of the Westminster Confession of Faith is the latest offspring born in the wake of Chad van Dixhoorn's monumental edition of the minutes and papers of the Westminster Assembly – as found in the seven volumes of his 2004 Cambridge dissertation and in the five volumes published by Oxford University Press in 2010. As the second work in the series, ‘Principal Documents of the Westminster Assembly’, it follows at a decade's remove the critical edition of the Westminster Larger Catechism. Both volumes are edited and introduced by John Bower, and both are clearly labours of love and craftsmanship.

Many readers will be surprised at the Confession's complicated back story – the tale of a text generated by a large and sometimes fractious committee (the Westminster Assembly), often contested and even censured by those who commissioned it (Parliament), produced and published under political and wartime pressure and not always with perfect proofreading. Bower, however, proves fully up to the task not only in concisely guiding readers through the text's history but also in editing the text and introducing it.

The volume's historical introduction takes up roughly the first half of the book. The second half features not only the expected critical text, but also (in parallel columns) the full text of the four most authoritative early editions – three of which were printed for Parliament while the fourth is a definitive handwritten copy prepared by Cornelius Burges for delivery to Parliament in 1646. But there is also a tabular comparison of the Westminster Confession with the influential Irish Articles of 1615, as well as a critical text of the Assembly's aborted confessional revision of the Thirty-Nine Articles – a revision that stalled in the midst of article 16, when Parliament directed the Assembly to turn its attention elsewhere. Beyond these impressive texts and apparatus, the main introduction offers fully two dozen parallel-column tables that juxtapose the final text of the Confession with the text of chapters as first proposed.

Bower's quest for the most authentic text of the Confession verges on the obsessive – which, for a critical edition, is a commendable virtue. To that end, he has scrutinised the Assembly's minutes and papers (which are often disappointingly laconic) and supplemented those papers with extramural publications by Assembly members; and in reconstructing the textual history of the various early editions, he also sampled multiple copies of the same printing of those editions in search of ‘stop-press’ corrections. Unsurprisingly, orthography and punctuation are rigorously restored to their original if irregular forms, resisting the impulse to clarify, standardise or modernise.

Notwithstanding this marvellous array of apparatus, readers will likely be drawn in more by Bower's historical introduction, which repeatedly sheds light on background issues or events that influenced the final shape of the text of the Confession – and often in unexpected ways, particularly when the Assembly's theological and pastoral inclinations were likely to incur the displeasure of Parliament. There were many creedal topics, ranging from matters of church discipline and magisterial authority to matters of marriage and divorce, that even a supposedly sympathetic state authority could and did find threatening. Sometimes the Assembly clearly opted for non-threatening formulations, but in other instances Parliament simply vetoed whole chapters – though the so-called ‘Parliamentary Edition’, which appeared well over a year after the Assembly's text had been delivered and which bore various textual changes and deletions, was printed only once and ‘would never enter practical service in the English church’ (p. 182).

The express aim of Bower's introduction is to furnish ‘not a historical theology’ of the Confession but rather ‘a history of the writing of the confession's theology’ that will aid a historical understanding of its theology ‘by uncovering instructive in situ perspectives’ on its formulations (p. xv). The best sections truly excel at this task. This reviewer was particularly appreciative to learn of the competing invocations of conscience both as ingredient to the Confession's doctrines of Christian freedom, ethics and Christian living and as part of the rhetorical give-and-take between the Presbyterian and Congregationalist members of the Assembly, who regularly collided over doctrine and who equally defended their views as based on scripture and conscience. Similarly, there is much to learn behind the scenes (if not behind the text) about the efforts of the Assembly to regulate and reform matters of marriage and divorce – a notorious element of unfinished business, ever since the Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum of 1552, with its revision of marriage and divorce laws, had been left to languish after the death of Edward VI. Unfortunately, Parliament was just as intransigent with respect to the modestly progressive proposals in the Westminster Confession, such that these were among the chapters that were largely gutted or deleted. Nonetheless, the background that Bower provides is immensely illuminating of a vexed topic.

On only a couple of points is such illumination wanting – particularly in the case of antinomianism, given that seventeenth-century Antinomians were often the main spectre lurking in the wings of the Assembly's debates. Bower makes regular mention of the Antinomians, but treats them as if every reader will already know who they were. Historically, however, antinomians appear in many centuries – and they come in flavours. At least some details should have been furnished on this point, as well as on the theological dispute over the active and passive obedience of Christ – an important and contentious doctrine bearing on both justification and sanctification. Curiously, the doctrine is named and identified as of great import, but it is never really explained, even in brief. Here, readers (thinking especially of students) would do well to consult other recent guides to the Westminster Standards, including Robert Letham's The Westminster Assembly: Reading its Theology in Historical Context (2009) and J. V. Fesko's The Theology of the Westminster Standards: Historical Context and Theological Insights (2014), each of which features lucid and reasonably concise accounts of both topics.

Fortunately, these are minor blemishes. Overall, the critical text is acutely prepared and the historical introduction is readable, informative and engaging. Bower is to be commended for giving us an edition of the Westminster Confession that ought to be widely used for many years to come.