“The context for understanding the Westminster Confession is, certainly, the exegetical and doctrinal heritage of the Reformation as presented through the interpretive glass of the English and Scot Reformed theology of the mid-seventeenth century, which was itself part of the larger phenomenon that has been called ‘international Calvinism'” (Richard A Muller and Rowland S. Ward, Scripture and Worship: Biblical Interpretation and the Directory for Worship,  9).

“Charles II once asked John Owen (1616-1683), “the prince of Puritans,” why he went  to hear the preaching of the unlearned tinker of Bedford, John Bunyan. Owen responded, “May it please your majesty, could I possess the tinker’s abilities for preaching, I would willingly relinquish all my learning” (Andrew Thomson, “Life of Dr. Owen,” in The Works of John Owen, 1:xcii, quoted in Joel R. Beeke and Mark Jones, A Puritan Theology, 712).

“One of the most fruitful ways of analyzing the continuities and commonalities, as well as the discontinuities and nuances of divergence and difference, between the Reformers and the writings of the Reformed orthodox or Puritan writers is to examine trajectories of exegesis–specifically to chart the rise of orthodoxy in and through the developing Reformed exegetical tradition” (Richard A. Muller and Bruce S. Ward, Scripture and Worship: Biblical Interpretation and the Directory for Worship, 3).