The Scots Confession governed the Church of Scotland for eighty seven years, until the General Assembly set it aside in 1647 in favour of the Westminster Confession of Faith, the fuller and more systematic document the Westminster Assembly in London had just produced. The change was not a repudiation. The Scots Confession's substance, a thoroughly Calvinist doctrine of election, grace and the church, was not in dispute; what Westminster offered was a more comprehensive and more precisely worded confession, suited to a church now negotiating its place within a three kingdoms settlement rather than fighting for survival against an established Catholic monarchy.
The older document did not disappear from Scottish confessional memory. It is still printed in the subordinate standards of several Presbyterian churches descended from the Scottish Reformation, cited for its historical witness even where Westminster carries the binding doctrinal weight.
Its most quoted passage is not a doctrinal proposition but a plea for correction. The authors asked that if any man should find in their confession an article or sentence contrary to God's holy word, he would inform them of it in writing, and they undertook to amend what they had written or to satisfy him from Scripture. That is a note of theological humility which stands out sharply against the more confidently systematic confessions that followed, including the one that replaced it, and it is the sentence Scottish churches most often reach for when they want to say what kind of document their first confession was.