Eyedoc84
Puritan Board Sophomore
Sure, but I don’t understand your insistence that there is a contradiction when it can easily be read harmoniously. Especially considering they were meant to be complementary documents, not independent ones.Of course. And I am the first to recognize the superiority of the Divines to me in every conceivable way. However, they were not infallible. To say that they could have missed a small discrepancy is not outside the realm of possibility, nor should we find it incredible or upsetting. In the end, all I have to work with are the words they left behind. None of them or their contemporaries are around for me to inquire of them what they meant. At bare minimum, in my opinion, they did not do us any favors using different language between the WCF and the WLC when using the same topic. We cannot deny that one says "does not so belong" and the other says "does not belong."
I’ll also add that Manton recommended that families learn the catechisms before the Confession. Surely some of that is due to the teaching nature of catechisms, but if you learned WLC before coming to the WCF, your perceived difficulty may not be as apparent.