What’s in a Confession?

The great creeds of the early Church and the confessions of faith of Reformation Protestantism were invariably drawn up to answer questions and reject errors that threatened the Church at the time. For this reason no creed or confession is altogether comprehensive—although later Protestant ones, such as the Westminster Confession of Faith, are more complete than the creeds of the early Church.

By comparing a later creed or confession to its predecessors, one can often recognize the outline of doctrinal problems that afflicted the Church during the interval between them. Thus while the second-century Old Roman Creed (very close to what we call the Apostles’ Creed) says, “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth,” the Nicene Creed (325, expanded 381) puts it this way: “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible.” In the intervening years, Christians had to take a stand against the Gnostics and Marcionites, who taught that the visible world was made by a kind of lesser divinity called the demiurge, while God himself created only the invisible world of spirits. Thus the Nicene Creed adds the qualifying expressions “one” and “of all things visible and invisible.”

When a confession is written for our own time, one would expect it to clarify some of the themes that are most hotly contested today—certainly to speak clearly of the Person and Work of Christ, the authority of Scripture, and the doctrine of God itself. Therefore it is disappointing that the “Tentative Draft, Proposed New Confession of Faith” of the Presbyterian Church in the United States, instead of proclaiming where Southern Presbyterians take their stand on the vital doctrines under attack, shies away from clear definitions and gives us chiefly pious admonitions with which few men of good will could be expected to disagree. For this reason, even though the draft, properly interpreted, may not confess anything that is clearly false, it falls lamentably short of the purpose of a confession, which is to make it clear where Christians stand in the battle. Here are some examples:

Chapter I, “God,” makes no reference to the central truth of Christian theology, the Holy Trinity. It mentions the Son only as “Jesus of Nazareth,” and speaks vaguely of “his [i.e., God’s] Spirit.” It contains nothing that would have embarrassed an early modalist (one who believed that the persons of the Trinity were only temporary “modes” of God’s activity), a nineteenth-century Unitarian, or a modern liberal. Chapter II, “God and His People,” talks in vague terms of estrangement and alienation and says nothing about a real, historic fall of man in space and time. Of course any suggestion of a historic fall is anathema to natural man, but the doctrine of the Fall is the key to the Christian understanding of man as he is today.

Chapter IV, “God in Christ,” speaks ambiguously of Jesus’ coming in a way that does not contradict the doctrines of his Virgin Birth, but also does not affirm it. Because the Virgin Birth is often one of the first doctrines to be discarded by falling-away Christians, this evasiveness seems out of place in a contemporary “confession.” The humanity of Christ is stressed, but his divinity is only implied, e.g., “God was uniquely his Father, and he was uniquely God’s Son.” This would allow of an Arian or adoptionist Christology.

How much clearer are the Words of the Creed of Chalcedon (451): “Our Lord Jesus Christ, at once complete in Godhead and complete in manhood, truly God and truly man; … of one substance with the Father as regards his Godhead, and at the same time of one substance with us as regards his manhood; like us in all respects, apart from sin.” The Creed of Chalcedon requires some effort on the part of an uninitiated reader to understand it, but it rewards his effort because it says something clear and unambiguous, which is what a confession is supposed to do.

The Tentative Draft is not a confession at all, in the historic Christian sense of the word. It is a kind of lowest-common-denominator document, far less specific than even the “Confession of 1967” of the United Presbyterian Church, and constitutes a mandate for confusion far more than a confession of faith.

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