Commentary on WLC Q. 182

The Holy Spirit remedies our spiritual ignorance, not by revealing to us any truth apart from or in addition to the Bible, but by opening our spiritual eyes so that we can discern the true meaning of what is already revealed in the Bible, and thus enabled to know the will of God concerning prayer.

J. G. Vos, The Westminster Larger Catechism: A Commentary, 523.

Westminster Standards & Apostles’ Creed

The Assembly’s failure to formalize the Apostles’ Creed into any of its documents has been characterized as “verging on a separatist mentality” and risked placing the Synod “outside the historic Christian tradition.” Regarding the Catechism in particular, [Ian] Green stresses that in departing from an article-by-article treatment of the Creed in its catechisms, the Assembly departed from “the known practice of the first generations of Protestant catechists.” Robert Letham concludes that leaving the Creed out of the Catechisms was tantamount to “studied indifference and deliberate exclusion.” However, a distinction should be made between objections to the Creed as an authoritative doctrinal affirmation and the Creed as an historical expression of faith “agreeable to the word of God.” Concerns of conscience over phrases in the Creed, particularly on Christ’s descent into hell, prevented many of the divines from receiving the Creed as a whole; yet most had no objection to its substance. In its postscript appended to the Shorter Catechism, the Assembly explains that “the substance” of the Apostles’ Creed is “fully set forth in each of the Catechisms, so as there is no necessity of inserting the Creed itself.”

John R. Bower, The Larger Catechism: A Critical Text and Introduction, 21.

Greater, Deeper, Fuller

But what if we don’t reduce love and goodness to chemicals in the brain, nor to the whims of powerful people who get to set the rules; what if love and goodness flow from the transcendent God? Returning to [John] Owen: “The sole reason why there is such a thing as love in the world among the creatures, angels or men, — that God ever implanted it in the nature of rational creatures, — was, that it might shadow and represent the ineffable, eternal love that the Father had unto the Son, and the Son unto the Father, by the Spirit. Our experiences shadow something greater, deeper, fuller than themselves.

Kelly M. Kapic, Christian Life, 68.