The Westminster Standards are a rich and wonderful set of resources to help the church understand Scripture. They can for some, however, be daunting in their length and depth. This challenge is not merely a modern problem though, which is why David Dickson and James Durham composed The Sum of Saving Knowledge in 1650. This document was often published along with the Westminster Standards as a short guide to familiarize readers with what they might need to know to dive effectively into the confessional documents. Lamentably, The Sum has been without a good and usable edition in print for a long while.

David Whitla has addressed that problem by providing a very helpful and attractive edition for readers today. He has lightly modernized the language to make this document as accessible as possible. The binding and print job is also excellently done, giving us a beautiful little book that easily fits in your pocket.

Whitla has added even more value to this resource by formatting it for use in study groups and providing a separate study guide to facilitate discussion and exploration. That guide can be found for free here. This pair of resources is a wonderful aid to help us recover a sense of the values at the heart of Westminster confessionalism. Take up and read!

Purchase The Sum here!

David Dickson and James Durham, The Sum of Saving Knowledge, ed. David Whitla (Pittsburgh: Crown and Covenant Publishers, 2023).

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Post authored by:

• Harrison Perkins

  

  Harrison Perkins (PhD, Queen’s University Belfast; MDiv, Westminster Seminary California) is pastor of Oakland Hills Community Church (OPC), a member of the of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, a Senior Research Fellow at the Craig Center for the Study of the Westminster Standards, associate online instructor in church history at Westminster Theological Seminary, a visiting lecturer in systematic theology at Edinburgh Theological Seminary, and author of Reformed Covenant Theology: A Systematic Introduction.

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