We Confess, Unless…

When people hear reformational Christians claim to be confessional, they wonder what that means exactly: “Do you go to confession?” This is not as mistaken a question as we might think—the words for “confessing” faith and “confessing” sins have been the same for centuries. At the time of the Reformation, debates about the nature of penance changed the understanding of both the confessional and other doctrines we confess when we confess the faith.1 Our beliefs formed an organic whole, so that changes in understanding one area of doctrine led to changes in another.

The early church had its baptismal candidates confess the Apostles’ Creed. Heresies arose, and the details of the creed had to be elaborated to ensure against error. Medieval councils further defined beliefs, including transubstantiation and priestly celibacy. Whatever the Reformers believed concerning the accuracy of the work of the medieval councils, they all considered the writing of confessions a legitimate practice. The first of the Reformation confessions—the Augsburg Confession—was actually written as an appeal to the pope and the emperor to tolerate (or even themselves confess!) the doctrine taught in the Lutheran churches. Reformed confessions were similar. The Reformed churches did not hesitate to require subscription to its confessions (i.e., that pastors and teachers agree to teach in accordance with the confessions) as later churches often have, even when those churches themselves have written confessions.

In later years, we have seen all these reasons serve as motivation for churches to write even more documents. Such documents might include a statement of belief for an individual to join the group, a new catechism, a device to correct pastors and teachers, an updated statement reflecting changes in belief or new understandings, a statement that can be appealed to with the civil authorities so that their practice may receive protection, or a document cementing the union of previously separate church bodies.

A SURVEY OF MODERN CREEDS AND CONFESSIONS

It will be helpful to survey some modern confessional developments to see both continuities and discontinuities between older and newer understandings of confessionalism. This is a small but broad sample.

The Baptist Faith and Message (1925, 1963, and 2000)

The Baptist Faith and Message was first adopted in 1925, with revised versions adopted in 1963 and 2000. E. Y. Mullins, a famous churchman whom Harold Bloom saw as a paradigm of American religiosity,2 drafted the first version with a preface. The Baptists held to a doctrine called “soul competency,” which meant something along the lines of each individual being able to discern what God was saying in Scripture without any intermediary. Ironically, this made the Baptists somewhat averse to the whole confessional process, and it was adopted with lots of caveats. One has to do with the limitations of human documents:

2. That we do not regard them as complete statements of our faith, having any quality of finality or infallibility. As in the past so in the future, Baptists should hold themselves free to revise their statements of faith as may seem to them wise and expedient at any time.

The good side of this is that the procedure for rectifying error is revision. This exemplifies a uniquely American principle of government: there is no finality in the founding document. The Constitution is subject to revision and amendment—the people have the right to change or abolish their governments—but the written document establishing that form of government must not be ignored or reinterpreted. When Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, he anguished over the fact that no such power was articulated in the Constitution, because he saw the danger of ignoring its specifications, even for a good cause. I have been heartened to see that some schools are teaching “The Constitution Is a Living Document—It Can Be Amended.” Revision, not reinterpretation, is the right way to change course.

Another caveat in the Baptist Faith and Message has to do with conscience:

4. That the sole authority for faith and practice among Baptists is the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. Confessions are only guides in interpretation, having no authority over the conscience.

I have to wonder whether this means a teacher is not to feel a twinge of conscience for teaching contrary to the confession. It doesn’t say a teacher cannot be disciplined, but it does seem to imply that one is guilty only if one is caught.

At the Diet of Worms, Luther stood against pope and emperor. He appealed to conscience, but he qualified that to refer to the conscience that was captive to the word of God. This has implications for confessions: we may not adopt those that violate the word of God, but we ought to wholeheartedly adopt those confessions when they uphold and clarify the teachings of Scripture, holding accountable those who submit to its mandates by joining a confessional church.

“Soul competency” is affirmed by name in the 1963 and 2000 prefaces, though the 2000 preface also mentions how “Baptist churches, associations, and general bodies have adopted confessions of faith as a witness to the world, and as instruments of doctrinal accountability.” The new preface also makes mention of the new threats it has faced over time and the hostility of the world to the very notion of truth. It appears that the recent committee saw that earlier versions weren’t explicit enough in mentioning the possibility of discipline.

The Barmen Declaration (1934)

The Theological Declaration of Barmen was written by Karl Barth as a response to the Nazification program that threatened the German Evangelical Church. Hitler’s primary interest was in promoting a renewed paganism based on ancient sources containing revelations to those of Aryan stock.3 But a program to Nazify the church could only help to weaken a rival institution. Germany was installing in the church its own authorities who wanted to make the church conform to the state. As Dr. Jaeger, the civil administrator of the church, said of the Lutheran confessions,

Confessions can change. The confession must in the course of time absorb new elements. As our final purpose and before us is the surmounting of the confession and the overcoming of religious differences within the German nation. At the end of the present line of development is the German national church.4

The Barmen Declaration rejected the idea that the church opposed the unity of the nation:

We reject the false doctrine, as though the church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation. (8.12)

This declaration, while having little direct political power, was a rare public statement of resistance.

Whatever it achieved for its own generation, the German Evangelical Church’s stand is a welcome counterexample to the narrative of the church’s willing assimilation into the Third Reich. Further instances of resistance in the German Church are hinted at in New York Times article headings from that era:

6,000 Reich Pastors Defy Nazis, Saying They Will Not Be ‘Muzzled’ / Lutheran Ministers Rebel against Dictatorship Set Up by Reich Bishop Mueller—Base Right to Disobey on the Augsburg Confession—Police Arrest Sunday School Leaders (January 8, 1934)

Religious Freedom Defended in Reich / Free Synod, in Barmen, Adopts Confession That Is Designed to Preserve Doctrine / ‘DICTATORSHIP’ ASSAILED / Erlangen Theological Faculty Warns Mueller Methods Are a Peril to Church (June 1, 1934)

REBEL CLERGY WAR ON NAZI SCHOOLING / Confessional Synod Declare Regime Systematically Seeking to De-Christianize Youth / BIDS PARENTS FIGHT IDEAS / Commission Formed to Combat Anti-Religious Influence of Hitler Youth Leaders (June 13, 1937)

Current accounts tend to downplay the existence of ecclesiastic resistance to the Third Reich. While it is probably accurate to say that the majority of Christians in Germany did cooperate with the state5 either out of conviction or fear, this makes the courage and sacrifice of those who did oppose the regime, whether congregations or individual pastors or laypeople, even more remarkable.

Confession of 1967

The Confession of 1967 was a confession of the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, a body that had been formed by a merger in 1958 of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America with the United Presbyterian Church of North America. The original plan was to draft an updated catechism to replace the Westminster Larger Catechism, but somewhere in the process, a decision was made to draft an updated confession of faith instead.

Whatever else could be said of the Confession of 1967, it made a hash of authority within the church. In the preface, we are told that “confessions and declarations are subordinate standards in the church, subject to the authority of Jesus Christ, the Word of God, as the Scriptures bear witness to him.” This sounds nice: Jesus Christ is more central to us than our written confession of faith. Isn’t that true for all Christians?

Think of how other legal documents work—say, a custody arrangement between divorced parents. I would hope that Jesus Christ mattered more to the parents than any custody arrangement; but what would happen if, at the beginning of such an arrangement, it was stated that Jesus Christ had authority beyond the written agreement? The two parents would now begin to appeal to him against the written agreement:

“Why did you keep Michael over Monday night when you were supposed to return him Monday afternoon?”

“I talked to Jesus, and he said I could keep Michael on Monday night.”

The statement that looked so idealistic is now the grounds for all kinds of new disputes, and a display of piety will be the strongest argument. If my reading of what the preface did to the authority of the confessions sounds theoretical, the text gets worse:

The Scriptures, given under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, are nevertheless the words of men, conditioned by the language, thought forms, and literary fashions of the places and times at which they were written. They reflect views of life, history, and the cosmos which were then current.6

An argument can develop where one side cites Scripture and the other side cites the Confession of 1967 to show how the Scripture cited is irrelevant because of its dated cultural understandings: “That made sense then, but we know better now.”

The Confession of 1967 contains a lot of discussion about reconciliation that seems more appropriate to the modern catechism that the committee was first called to write, rather than a confession.

This confession of faith is held by not just the liberal PC(USA) but by the more conservative break-off body, ECO: A Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians. (This may be so that they are seen as the continuing body of the national church, an understandable conservative impulse.) Perhaps in the future, they can strike out the dangerous sections or take a chapter from the Episcopalian playbook and relegate it to a “Historical Documents of the Church” appendix, as the 1979 Book of Common Prayer did to the Thirty-Nine Articles.

Calvary Chapel Distinctives (1993)

The Calvary Chapel movement began in 1965 with one congregation—Calvary Chapel of Costa Mesa, California—which was led by Chuck Smith and which became a major focus of the Jesus Movement. Chuck Smith had grown up in the Foursquare denomination, at Angelus Temple, founded by Aimee Semple McPherson. He studied at LIFE Bible College, and while Calvary Chapel is not affiliated directly with the Foursquare Church, it does share a common lineage and distinctive teachings.

Calvary Chapel’s beliefs can be found in Calvary Chapel Distinctives: The Foundational Principles of the Calvary Chapel Movement (Word for Today, 1993), written by Chuck Smith himself. It sets forth a sort of doctrine of the ministry and could easily serve as a catechism for pastors.

Smith writes: “In Scripture we find three basic forms of church government.” He finds the Presbyterian (elder-led) and Episcopal (bishop-led) in the New Testament and says the Congregational (congregation-led) form developed in church history, but noted that in Scripture, the congregation is never right (his examples tend to be Old Testament, with the congregation of Israel). He also mentions theocracy as a divine form of government in the Old Testament, where God is in charge and one man listens to God and has elders helping him. He says that Calvary Chapel was not founded with a Presbyterian but a more episkopos form of church government.

The chief practical example he gives of weakness in the Presbyterian model is in the denomination he was in before Calvary Chapel. He had once set chairs up in a circle rather than rows, and the worship time ended up being very dynamic. (If this document were in force in the Lutheran Church, nobody could ever put chairs in rows again!) He felt like the elders who tried to rein this in were quenching the Spirit. I can imagine the situation he describes as being convincing on some level—everyone knows what it is like to have authority figures micromanage and find fault with something that went well. The question is how well this model would work in a different context.

Scripture leaves us with options. When we choose on the basis of experience, we should look beyond our own personal experience with its limited set of circumstances. It might well be that a pastor is better at deciding such things for a smaller number of members, while past a certain size, policy cannot be decided so informally.

The Calvary Chapel movement has faced problems in recent decades—like child abuse allegations against pastors in the association—that were not foreseen in its early years. While boards can, at their worst, manifest dysfunctions that are “Spirit-quenching,” they can also represent a greater array of stakeholders, and create public policies that circumvent favoritism and protect the weak. If they don’t have that, then they will be completely defined by their episkopos.

North American Lutheran Church Common Confession (2005)

Drafted by the Lutheran Coalition for Renewal (Lutheran CORE), this confession was adopted by the North American Lutheran Church when it formed as a break-off from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Much of the material is a restatement of what can be found in the other Lutheran confessions. One notable section (6) is the one on marriage and family, which reads:

We believe and confess that the marriage of male and female is an institution created and blessed by God. From marriage, God forms families to serve as the building blocks of all human civilization and community. We teach and practice that sexual activity belongs exclusively within the biblical boundaries of a faithful marriage between one man and one woman.

This section has more recently been suggested by the church body for inclusion in all church constitutions, for the sake of preserving religious liberty. Recent changes in civil law have put churches under heavier scrutiny with regard to discrimination against the LGBT community. Because of First Amendment protections, they are generally safe from legal sanctions if their activities are the result of stated doctrines. If, however, they have not stated these doctrines in clear language, the same actions may be deemed individual or group prejudice, with no religious reason. (This is a modern example of a very old practice of including matters in a church confession to seek the protections afforded by civil law.)

The current situation has some parallels with older discussions of the church and war. Conscientious objector laws do allow an individual to cite church teaching as a reason for not serving in combat, but these are all-or-nothing policies. A church with consistent pacifist teachings will be able to shield a member from serving. A church with a just-war teaching, in which some wars are justified and some are not, will not be able to shield a member from serving.

Similarly in the past, some church bodies tried to hold to a conservative morality, but with some pastoral leeway. This is now seen as discriminatory. A church may excommunicate a member whose behavior violates church law, but it must treat all members the same. The scrutiny of civil law has the church writing confessions differently from how it might write them if it did not have these constraints. This situation that faces the NALC faces all church bodies. It will be interesting to see the various ways in which church bodies respond to this matter.

Future Confessionalism

There are two mistakes to avoid in assessing modern creeds and confessions. The first is to miss the continuity of purpose they have with older documents. The second is to allow this continuity to obscure what being confessional means for reformational Christians. When we talk of being confessional, we are pointing to something specific. Church bodies have written and used confessions before and after the Reformation for a variety of purposes, which we shall discuss below. Modern creeds are written for several purposes common to Christendom; but to be confessional in a reformational sense, they have to do more.

First and foremost, they have to treat their teachings as a body of doctrine (corpus doctrinae), where teachings are organically related, with the gospel as its beating heart. We see this in the Augsburg Confession. While many articles address abuses that have arisen in the church (e.g., Article XXVI regarding foods), others lay out key doctrines. Article IV speaks of justification, where human beings are “justified as a gift on account of Christ’s sake through faith,” while Article V speaks of the office of preaching: “To obtain such faith God instituted the office of preaching, giving the gospel and the sacraments. Through these, as through means, he gives the Holy Spirit who produces faith, where and when he wills, in those who hear the gospel.” There is a similar organic sense expressed in the Reformed Heidelberg Catechism, whose first answer regards belonging to Jesus Christ, sets the tone of the whole document. Seeing how doctrines relate to each other is crucial. Where this cannot be seen in a confession, the doctrines listed can look like a smorgasbord of teachings chosen by whim, perhaps a mere reflection of the times.

Second, they should be more careful in expressing reservations about our ability to come to truth. When a modern confession makes too much of our inability to say anything final, it allows a foothold for those who wish to deny they are under its authority—how can a bunch of erring humans tell me I’m wrong? Earlier confessions were more successful in avoiding this kind of challenge.

Rick Ritchie is a long-time contributor to MR.