Confessional Subscription can be categorized as follows:
Among the Reformed (Reformers) - they held to full confessional subscription recognizing its subordinate standard to the Scriptures, but in respect to its superiority of qualifying ministers. Lutherans had the most strict subscription enforced, and required "a subscription to all and everything " contained in the Augsburg Confession.
Among the Dutch Reformed - The earliest form of full subscription expressed by the Dutch was without exception. The Form of Subscription at Dordt remained in full issue until 1816.
Among the Scottish Presbyterians - when in relation to the creeds and the ministers who must subscribe to be part of the Scottish church, there could be no "public contradiction" to the confession. They used a number of confessions culminating in the Westminster Confession.
Among the Westminsterians - "unqualified verbal subscription without exception" to the standards for ministers (1647-1690). After that it was written AND oral.
You have Full Subscription, and then there are varying degrees of unbelief from the confession in that regard. Then it becomes and issue of theological traditionalism and its degrees to what the church has always taught and preached.
The historic position on full subscriptionism is/was that all the articles of the standards are both essential and necessary for the church to accurately go about its practice in duty before Christ, and that all the articles are essential and necessary to express the Reformed system of doctrine found in the confessions.
I don't know of many (or any) good papers on this on the net. I've worked on the idea of theological traditionalism here:
The Illumination of the* Holy Spirit & Theological Traditionalism
Linear Mode
