Editor’s Note: This is the ninth essay in a series dealing with theological topics of interest and importance to Presbyterians. The essays are a response to the General Assembly Task Force Report on the Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Church, but also a considered effort to probe the Reformed heritage and find fresh theological language with which to move beyond the poles that divide us.
We in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) are no longer sure what it means to be a confessional church, even though that is part of our core identity. The Book of Confessions is part I of our church constitution, the Book of Order (part II) is built upon it, and these classic documents have shaped us throughout our history. The confessions, however, come mostly from times and situations very different from ours, making their truth claims hard for us to grasp and apply. Personal religious experience is now widely regarded as the basis of truth, and a maze of Christian denominations, worldviews, and religions confront us with competing truth claims. The result is confusion and skepticism about all truth claims. The easy way to handle our disputes is to ignore our confessions and our history altogether and/or use non-confessional dynamics to deal with one another. The crisis of our identity, then, is to be a confessional church living in a non-confessional church culture.
This essay considers (1) What makes a confession of faith indispensable for Christian believers? (2) What dynamics belong to a confessional church? (3) By contrast, what dynamics belong to non-confessional churches? The aim of the whole is to work through our current polarizations together as a confessional church.
What makes a confession of faith indispensable for Christian believers?
In every age and situation, “faith seeks understanding” (Anselm), Post-Modern/Pietistic or not. The cynical destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, for example, drives people of faith to make sense of its utter senselessness. The ordinary experiences of life — birth, growth, marriage, major turns of event, successes and failures, death — also drive people of faith to understand every moment in relation to the living God. Public or private, a confession of faith clarifies the theological insights that faith generates at the crucial moments of our lives.
For Presbyterians of all stripes, a confession of faith is trustworthy only if it is grounded in Scripture. The creeds and confessions of the PC(USA) are shorthand statements of the Gospel according to the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. With their ordination vows officers in the PC(USA) affirm that “the essential tenets of the Reformed faith as expressed in the confessions of our church” are “authentic and reliable expositions of what Scripture leads us to believe and do” (BO G-14.0405(3)). A strong confession doesn’t replace the Bible, but sends us back to it.
How, then, does a confession of faith help us with the Christian Church and the Christian life? A confession of faith is like an anchor that marks off the center of the gospel. When we drift too far away from that center, the anchor pulls us back Like an anchor, a confession of faith provides the Church both a secure center and, around that center, a range of faithful options and operations.
A confession of faith is also like a pearl, which always begins with a grain of sand. Within the oyster shell, a grain of sand is a foreign object. So the oyster weaves a sticky substance around the grain in order to contain or get rid of it. That effort in turn produces a pearl of great beauty. Like the grain of sand, a confession of faith is an irritant, a constant reminder, of what the gospel is at its core. To deal with the irritant, Christians, and a confessional Church, weave around it a life of great beauty and value.
For Presbyterian Christians God does not stand still but, like grace, is “new every morning.” Reminded of the gospel by our confessions, we do not have to cling too tightly to the past, resist the changes of the present, or fear the future. We can live confidently in a community that is both confessional and confessing at the same time, hence the phrase “reformed and always being reformed according to the Word of God” (ecclesia reformata et semper reformanda ex verbum Dei). So Presbyterian Christians worship together where the Word is preached and the sacraments are administered. We read the biblical witness to Jesus Christ on the one hand and our newspapers on the other. And at every moment of life our faith seeks what the Word of God is telling us about fellowship with and loving service to the living God.
What dynamics belong to a confessional church?
A confession of faith is important for what it does, not just for what it says. Most Reformed, Presbyterian confessions of faith arise in a moment of crisis (status confessionis) when the gospel itself is at risk. The crisis arises as often from within the Christian movement as from without, as we can see from our own confessions.
The Apostles Creed did not arise out of controversy, but, used for adult baptisms in the early church, it did define a Christian’s identity, always at risk in a pagan culture. The trinitarian affirmations of The Nicene Creed (325, 381) were confessed in the midst of urgent, internal questions about Jesus Christ and what the Scriptures tell us about redemption in his name: Is Jesus merely a useful means of creation, revelation, and salvation? Or is Jesus God as a human being, actually the creating, revealing, saving reality of God with us (Emmanuel)? Like Scripture, the Nicene Creed clearly opts for the latter.
Similarly, the 16th Century Reformation confessions and catechisms were beaten out in a time of church turmoil and controversy (Scots, 1560; Second Helvetic, 1561; Heidelberg, 1563). When the gains of the Reformation seemed to be lost during the mid-17th Century, the Westminster Assembly convened in London and confirmed the Reformation solas (Christ alone, Scripture alone, faith alone, grace alone, church alone), hence The Westminster Confession of Faith and catechisms (1647).
Still again, in the 20th Century, The Declaration of Barmen (1934) arose at a time when the Nazi government, with help from collaborating church members, tried to replace the gospel with its own National Socialist Agenda. The Confession of 1967 emerged at a critical moment of great confusion, change, and growing secularism, all of which called into question the gospel itself and the church’s role in American culture. An exception to this list of confessions may be A Brief Statement of Faith (1996), which aimed simply to unite two groups of Presbyterians after their reunion in 1983.
If the first step toward a confession of faith is a clear recognition that the gospel itself is at risk, the second step is to redefine the moment in terms of the Word of God, Jesus Christ, using simple, clear, straightforward language. When Jesus walked by the Sea of Galilee, he said to the fishermen there, “Follow me,” and redefined their lives in terms of his own present and future life. When the New Testament Church confessed, “Jesus is Lord,” they did the same. In both instances, the language focuses the Christian community on Jesus Christ as the way, the truth, and the life together with God. The confessions listed above do just that for the specific issues in dispute at their particular times, places, and situations.
Having confessed the gospel anew in the midst of a status confessionis, a confessional church will then take the third step of rallying all Christians everywhere and for all time to share this new confession. An authentic confession of faith addresses and enlists the “great cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1) to confess the truth of the Gospel for that time, that place, and that situation, using the language of that confession. All three steps toward an authentic confession of faith are manifest in The Belhar Confession (1982), a jewel from the Dutch Reformed Mission Church of South Africa.
Notice that, focused on the gospel at risk, a confession of faith can’t say everything, only what is pertinent to the moment. Even together, the confessions don’t cover all the topics of systematic theology.
Notice, too, a confession of faith aims to state the truth of the Gospel for all Christians everywhere and for all time. Confessions, notably those in the Reformed tradition, are not partisan documents in support of a sectarian cause. They are contributions to the entire Christian community.
Notice further that the PC(USA) Book of Confessions joins us with a number of very different confessional moments over the history of the Church, each one centered on the gospel of Jesus Christ. The hallmark of a confessional church is thus actively to confess the gospel by sharing in the different confessions within their own historical times, places and settings.
Notice, finally, what is binding about the confessions. We often — mistakenly — try to distill a confession within the confessions by reducing them to a list of fixed, abstract, seemingly timeless principles of theology. We may even try to enforce these timeless ideas as legal demands for correct belief. When we do so, we risk separating our closely held theological conclusions from the activity of confessing them, if not for ourselves then for others. We risk seeking uniformity among believers more than unity in Christ, and we obscure the need to discover fresh ways to confess the gospel faithfully in our own time. While the gospel of Jesus Christ itself is timeless, our confessing the gospel is always time-bound and binding from one time to the next. A confessional church will not wander far from its center.
By contrast, what dynamics belong to non-confessional churches?
The period of Modernity/Pietism (1650-1950/present) is dominated by the dynamics of a non-confessional church. Significantly, Reformed churches produced no major confessions between 1675 (The Helvetic Consensus Formula) and 1934 (The Barmen Declaration), the high point of Pietism.
Non-confessional churches, it must be said, also seek to nurture Christian faith and life with the central affirmations of the gospel. During the period of Pietism, the emphasis has fallen on the personal experiences of the inner self, mostly the private, individual acts of believing (Baptist), love (Methodist), or experiences of the Spirit (Pentecostal). Largely catch phrases provide the language (and theology) to face a particular need, challenge, or distress. For example, “the Bible alone is enough,” or “all we need is faith from the heart and love,” or “faith without works is dead,” or “the Bible is inerrant,” or the church can’t exist without “diversity and inclusiveness,” or more recently, “God is in control.”
The expectation is that all right-hearted Christians will readily agree with, hence repeat, these catchphrases verbatim. In close-knit groups, everyone knows the expectations. If much is at stake in the issue, the group uses peer pressure to enforce its opinion. Those who don’t agree will quickly find themselves on the outside of the group. These dynamics lean heavily toward uniformity of language and perspective. Movements are thus born, spread quickly, and take a self-perpetuating form (“the seeker church,” “the purpose-driven life,” “the emergent church”). They can end just as quickly, to be replaced by the next point of urgency and its catchphrase.
Three differences stand out between a confessional and a non-confessional church. A confessional church aims for unity in Christ more than uniformity of belief, by shaping its life around the heart of the gospel when the gospel itself is at risk. A non-confessional church aims for unanimity, or agreement to the point of uniformity, by shaping its life around the heart of the gospel in localized catchphrases repeated by all members of the group.
A confessional church cannot go too far from the center before the Gospel itself comes into jeopardy but leaves room for constructive dialog and a range of faithful possibilities. A non-confessional church typically sees confessions of faith as needless constraints but then presses for a uniformity of belief that sharply reduces the range of operations. In my experience, the dynamics lead to greater richness of expression among confessional than non-confessional churches.
Depth of insight is another key difference. Catchphrase theology may capture the passion of the moment but miss the mark on the larger issue. For example, “God is in control” comforted many Christians in the wake of the 9/11/2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City, asserting God’s power at the expense of God’s love/goodness. According to the theological issue known as theodicy, if “bad things continue to happen to good people,” God cannot be both all-powerful and all-good/loving at the same time. God’s power without love/goodness and God’s love/goodness without power were both offered as explanations after 9/11.
At the heart of the gospel, however, well represented in our confessions, the cross of Jesus Christ manifests both God’s power and God’s love/goodness at the same time. Alongside the sufficiency of God’s grace at every moment, God’s power is made perfect in weakness (2 Cor. 12:9). Without taking away from the power of God or from the awful impact of evil upon the lives of real people, Reformed Christians look for what God was doing — lovingly, graciously, powerfully — at the very center of the evil. The bottom line is not, then, control, but the God who without fail brings life, love, and goodness out of the places we least expect them, namely, out of death, evil, and destruction.
Though the PC(USA) is formally a confessional church, tension with non-confessional dynamics pervades our entire history in America. From colonial times until now Presbyterians have repeatedly divided and reunited, notably, New Side vs. Old Side (1741-1758), Cumberland Presbytery vs. the broader Presbyterian Church (1810-1896), and New School vs. Old School (1837-1864 in the South, 1837-1869 in the north). Regional differences complicate the separation and reunion of the Northern and Southern branches of American Presbyterians (1861-1983), but I believe non-confessional dynamics in both branches delayed the eventual reunion, the ‘spirituality of the Church’ in the South, and the modernist-fundamentalist controversy in the North, 1896-ca.1937. Both then and since then non-confessional pressures have urged us to ignore our confessions and/or to use the confessions for the sake of uniformity. My strong hunch is that our divisions reflect Pietistic, non-confessional impulses pressing for uniformity while our reunions reflect confessional impulses, which prefer unity.
In spite of appearances to the contrary, the PC(USA) has acted as a responsible, confessional church at a couple of points in the current controversy. The document Hope in the Lord Jesus Christ was authorized by the 2001 General Assembly and adopted in 2002, in direct response to the Confessing Church Movement that arose within the PC(USA) in 2000. Drawing on the Scriptures and The Book of Confessions, the General Assembly confessed plainly and overwhelmingly the heart of the gospel: “Jesus Christ is the only Savior and Lord, and all people everywhere are called to place their faith, hope, and love in him. … No one is saved apart from God’s gracious redemption in Jesus Christ” (Hope, lines 155, 160f). The Confessing Church Movement does not seem to recognize its own success in this matter, nor the Church’s sincere act of confession.
The theological work of the Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity, and Purity of the church is another confessional act recently set before the PC(USA). The Task Force Report (2005-6) duly notes the non-confessional tendencies of both the right and left wings of the PC(USA) to demonize each other, cut off authentic dialog, and limit forward progress on the issues. More importantly, the Task Force Report intentionally models for the whole Church how a confessional church functions. Studying the Scriptures and the PC(USA) confessions, the Task Force accomplished an authentic unity in Christ with a diverse group on the pivotal subjects of the Trinity, Christology, and Scripture.
The times may in fact be calling for a new confession. Christians far and wide today recognize that the Christian Church and Western culture are historically at a watershed moment, moving out of Modernism/Pietism into a new era. During such times as these, the Book of Confessions keeps the PC(USA) centered in Jesus Christ and the gospel in his name, and they set Presbyterians on the path to a faithful confession of the gospel in our own time. The question remains whether the PC(USA) will honor its own, confessional heritage, recover its identity, and vigorously confess the gospel in our time. In Christ, I believe it can, and along the way, overcoming its current divisions, make an important contribution to the larger church.
Merwyn S. Johnson currently is Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology Emeritus at Erskine Theological Seminary, Due West, S.C., and Visiting Professor of Theology at Union-PSCE in Charlotte, N.C.
