About Study Reformed

What are the Reformed standards?

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Reformed churches wrote down what they believed Scripture teaches, in two forms. A confession is a continuous statement of doctrine, set out in numbered chapters and sections — the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646) is the best known in English. A catechism teaches the same doctrine as questions and answers, meant to be learned by heart — the Westminster Shorter Catechism (1647) opens by asking “What is the chief end of man?”

These documents were written to be read together. The Shorter Catechism compresses into a sentence what the Confession spends a chapter on, and the Larger Catechism sits between them. Nearly every claim carries proof texts: the Scripture references the authors gave as its warrant. Reading a confession without them is reading half of it.

They are also not the only ones. The Dutch churches confess the Three Forms of Unity; English Congregationalists revised Westminster into the Savoy Declaration (1658), and Baptists revised Savoy into the 1689 London Baptist Confession. Set those side by side and the disagreements — and the far larger agreement — become visible in a way no single document shows.

What this site adds

The texts themselves are freely available in many places. What is harder to find is the apparatus around them, which is what this site is for:

• Proof texts, made navigable. Every Scripture reference links to an index of 4229 citations, so you can ask the question backwards: given this passage, where do the standards appeal to it?
• Historical commentary. The expositors below wrote to explain these documents to their own congregations. Their comments sit beside the text they comment on, rather than in a separate book.
• Cross-references and comparison. Each question links to the places the other standards treat the same doctrine, and comparison pages set whole documents side by side — down to a word-level diff between Westminster, Savoy and the 1689.
• Study tools. A teaching guide in 24 lessons, printable handouts and a presenter mode for small groups, and — for a signed-in reader — private notes, highlights, and a memorisation deck on a spaced-repetition schedule.

Where the texts come from

Everything here is in the public domain. The confessional texts come from the Creeds.json corpus and from transcriptions of the printed editions; the commentaries are nineteenth-century and earlier printings. Transcription errors are corrected as they are found, and the loaders are checked against the source data on every deploy.

The Book of Church Order is the Presbyterian Church in America’s own constitutional document, included because it is the polity these standards are actually practised under. It is reproduced as published, and is not a confession.

Who made it

Study Reformed is built and maintained by Martin J. Gallagher. It is free, has no advertising, and does not sell anything. It carries no tracking beyond anonymous page analytics. If it is useful to you, you can support the running costs; there is nothing to unlock by doing so.

Soli Deo Gloria.