Westminster Theological Journal welcomes contributions on biblical, theological, and historical subjects. Contributors should attendto the guidelines given below.

Please note: The editors do not give advice on how to write or organize an article. It is assumed that authors submitting manuscripts will have expertise in the field and be familiar with academic writing. For students new to the discipline, the editors recommend Pat Thomson and Barbara Kamler, Writing for Peer Reviewed Journals: Strategies for Getting Published (New York: Routledge, 2013) as a useful guide to publishing research content.

General Information

1. A manuscript should be submitted in what the author intends as its final form and should conform to the guidelines given below. If a manuscript departs from these instructions in major ways, it may be returned to the author for corrections before it is considered for publication.

2. The manuscript should be submitted electronically in Microsoft Word format (i.e. doc and docx). Please note: We no longer accept manuscripts mailed to the journal.

Submissions should be emailed to:
Dr. Randall J. Pederson, Managing Editor
The Westminster Theological Journal
email: wtj@wts.edu

3. A statement certifying that the article is not being submitted simultaneously to another journal should accompany the manuscript. Articles that have appeared or are to appear elsewhere, whether in English or in another language, should not be submitted.

4. Except for the specific instructions given below, the directives of the most recent editions of The Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) and The SBL Handbook of Style (SBLHS) are to be followed. The American style of spelling is to be used, and the preferred authorities on spelling are Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary and Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. When there is more than one way of spelling a word, the first one listed in these authorities should be used.

5. Authors of articles selected for publication will receive first page proofs, which they are expected to read carefully, check against the original manuscript, correct, and return promptly. The editors will accept no changes at this stage other than clear errors that might appear in the page proofs over against the original manuscript.

Form of the Manuscript

1. Manuscripts should normally be between 6,000-10,000 words, including footnotes, in the fields of Reformed theology, history, or exegesis. Shorter manuscripts are also welcomed when the topic warrants it, and longer manuscripts may be considered where the importance of a full discussion requires it. We do not publish devotional essays, poems, translations, or non-scholarly literature.

2. The manuscript file should contain the name of the article and the author’s name; however, the author’s contact information should not appear within the manuscript file itself. In a separate document, either by email or a printed document, the author should include the following: name, date of submission, title of article, mailing address, email address, phone number, and statement certifying that the article is not being submitted simultaneously to another journal.

3. All lines are to be double-spaced, including those of footnotes and indented quotations. There should be no single-spacing or one-and-a-half spacing. Text should always be ragged right, never justified, and there should be one space after a period and not two. Margins of at least 1.25 inches are to be left on all sides of the document. Font is to be Times New Roman, font size 12.

4. Special material (e.g., complex lists, tables, charts, diagrams) should be produced in documents separate from the main article; however, the location of such material in the main text should be indicated clearly (e.g., “insert here chart 1”). Charts and tabular material of a particularly complex nature may be submitted in JPEG or PDF format.