Christians today should not live in the fantasy that they know more about the faith than those who came before them – there’s much to be learned in the Reformed tradition from the church’s confessional history.
And confessions written in the past have the authority to question and hold accountable the present-day church – to challenge contemporary Christians to consider to which things they want to commit and why.
That’s some of what Joseph Small, former director of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s Theology, Worship and Education Ministries, said Dec. 12 in a presentation he made as part of a conversation on confessional authority. General Assembly moderator Neal Presa convened that conversation on Unity and Difference, being held Dec. 11-13 at Princeton Theological Seminary, as a resource as the next General Assembly prepares to consider the question of whether Presbyterian ministers should be able to perform same-gender marriages.
Small, now retired and a consultant for the Presbyterian Foundation, presented a paper in which he contended that both liberals and conservatives err in how they approach the PC(USA)’s Book of Confessions – a book of 11 confessions, creeds and catechisms. In general, “our operative approach is to keep the confessions at the margins of our life together as we encourage and celebrate our theological diversity,” Small said.
Liberals view the Book of Confessions “as a museum, housing mildly interesting artifacts of what people used to believe.” And conservatives see it as a law code, which “can be employed to compel adherence to certain theological and moral norms.”
The confessions are neither of those, Small contends. In the Reformed tradition, churches felt compelled to confess their faith in particular times and places, and attempts to produce a single common confession to which all Reformed churches would agree have not won enduring support. “The strength of the Reformed approach is the impulse to be a confessing church as well as a confessional church,” Small wrote. “It is not sufficient to have confessions; it is necessary to confess the confessions we have” – to declare to the world what one believes and how one pledges to live.
Americans view Christian belief through a particular lens: they tend to look to the future and remain hopeful. “Now, in the midst of our church’s winter of discontent, we bravely talk about ‘the future God has for us,’ never acknowledging the possibility that the future God has for us may be judgment of our church, not vindication,” he wrote.
Small also warned of the dangers of showing “arrogance toward those who have preceded us” or of what the author C.S. Lewis described as “chronological snobbery.” He asked: “Do we really think that those who lived and died the faith before us have nothing to tell us?” By not transcending the assumptions of life in 21st century North America, “we become prisoners of the tiny cell of ‘here and now.’ ”
Small encouraged Presbyterians to think of the great gathering of Christians through the ages as being arranged in a circle, of believers from all times and places “carrying on a continuous conversation,” with Christ at the center.
In that conversation, the confessions “have a certain authority over us,” Small said, and “we are accountable to them.” The confessions can pose questions to current-day Christians, and those alive now can ask their own questions of the confessions.
In that dialogue, “we can be utterly honest about crusades and inquisitions, easy acceptance of Christendom and easy dismissal of the leadership of women, neglect of evangelistic mission and excess of missionary zeal,” he wrote. “But if we listen to our forebears we will also hear their hard questions addressed to us. Perhaps then we can be utterly honest about our own accommodations to the culture, our indifference to the proclamation of the gospel, our capitulation to consumer marketing techniques” and more.
The confessions also offer guidance for Christians for knowing when to say “no” to some things and “yes” to others, as Christians struggle to determine what is really from God and what is not, Small contended.
“The confessions may be particularly important at times when the church faces pressures from the culture, raising questions of identity distinct from the culture, or when the church faces conflict within, raising questions about the shape of evangelical identity, for these are precisely the situations that gave rise to most of our confessional standards,” he wrote.
During a question-and-answer session, Small said the first thing Presbyterians need to do in considering the confessions is “shut up and listen,” to read and reflect on the confessions rather than rushing to point out passages with which one might disagree.
“It’s impossible to talk about confessional authority in a church that doesn’t read the confessions,” Small said.
When asked directly whether it’s possible for the PC(USA) to move towards allowing ministers to perform same-gender marriages while also calling for more intense study of the confessions – or whether policy change would need to wait for more study – Small replied that “focusing on the confessions as a way of dealing with the issue of same-sex marriage is a dead end.” Both the confessions and the Bible presume that marriage is between a man and a woman, he said – so the issue will not be resolved “by liberals or conservatives by using either the Book of Confessions or Scripture as law books.”
The church’s conversation needs to be broader, Small said. “What does it mean now for us as Americans to live in a sex-saturated culture,” one in which “fewer and fewer people get married” and the percentage of children born outside marriage is on the rise?
Meanwhile, in the PC(USA), “we have imagined that the central issues of Christian faith and life are settled by voting in legislative assemblies. This is nuts,” Small said. “It’s absolutely nuts.”
