In our day it is especially important to be confessional.  When we looked at the dismal state of theology in the American Church, we saw significant and disheartening errors in the average Christian’s views of Scripture, God, man and sin, salvation, the Church, and current issues like extramarital sex, abortion, gender identity, and homosexuality.  Basically all of these errors are clearly addressed in the confessions, so adherents to the confessions can easily avoid them.

Teach and urge these things. If anyone teaches a different doctrine and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching that accords with godliness, he is puffed up with conceit and understands nothing. He has an unhealthy craving for controversy and for quarrels about words, which produce envy, dissension, slander, evil suspicions, and constant friction among people who are depraved in mind and deprived of the truth, imagining that godliness is a means of gain.

-1 Timothy 6:2-5, ESV

In our series on Reformed theology, we have covered the Reformed view of salvation through the five solas and the five points of Calvinism.  But salvation is only one part of theology, so Reformed theology must go beyond the five solas and Calvinistic soteriology (salvation) by subscribing to a theologically-holistic Reformed confession.  Therefore a Reformed church must not only be Calvinistic but confessional. This post will look at the impIortance of confessions and the relation between the need to be always reforming with the need to follow a historic confession in order to avoid straying from what Scripture clearly teaches.

The Importance of Confessions

From the earliest days of the Church, defining what we believe has been extremely important.  Throughout the epistles, we see evidence of various heresies that dogged the Church, requiring divinely-inspired reiteration of what Scripture teaches.  One extra-persistent early heresy was Arianism, which denied the divinity of Christ.  In large part to refute this, the early Church adopted the various creeds: the Apostles’ Creed, Nicene Creed, Athanasian Creed, and Chalcedon Definition.  When we consider this context, it is easy to see why these creeds so strongly affirm Christ’s divinity.  Each generation faces new challenges to the faith, forcing the Church to strongly state what Scripture clearly teaches about those specific topics.  An example in our day is the challenge to biblical manhood and womanhood from feminism, homosexuality, and transgenderism.  To address this, a pair of ecumenical councils quite similar to Nicaea produced the Danvers and Nashville Statements that we addressed here.  Since such statements address particular heresies, they are somewhat limited in their scope.  But by the Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church had strayed so far from the teachings of Scripture into a wide variety of heresies that a complete and robust definition of what Scripture teaches on all of faith and life was required.  As the Reformation spread, different groups began to form with varying interpretations regarding secondary doctrines, so those groups needed to define their beliefs.  This as the origin of the various confessions of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries which ultimately became the defining documents of various Reformed denominations.

We have need of the same comprehensive definition of beliefs. Many Christians do not venture beyond soteriology in defining their doctrines, thus leaving themselves open to various errors.  They chant “no creed but Christ”, and therefore stumble into all manner of heresy.  Lacking a Scriptural foundation, they ultimately worship a god so different than the God of the Bible that their worship is idolatry.  The confessions like the ancient creeds prevent such errors by keeping us grounded in the faith, providing vital guardrails against new and strange teachings.  It is true that only Scripture is inerrant and timeless while the confessions are the product of men.  However, this does not prevent them from being useful to us.  Error comes not only from the denial of what Scripture clearly teaches but from new and creative interpretations of Scripture. There is nothing new under the sun, so any new error derived from a creative interpretation is likely just a restatement of an error that has appeared at some point in Church history.  Therefore, most of these errors are addressed in the Reformed confessions.  But when we ignore Church history, we exalt ourselves over our spiritual ancestors as if we are far wiser and more enlightened than they were, only to fall prey to the folly that they have already so wisely and eloquently addressed.  The errors of Rome at the time of the Reformation were so pernicious and comprehensive that God was especially gracious to gift the Church at the time with many wise scholars well versed in Scripture to create the confessions. We would be foolish to ignore them.

The Reformed Confessions

Last time, I mentioned the importance of John Calvin documenting all of the doctrines that characterized the Reformation—not just soteriology—in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, which was essentially the first Reformed systematic theology.  Others built upon this by codifying what Scripture teaches on all topics of faith and life.  As the different Reformed groups began to distinguish themselves from each other, it became vital to distill these beliefs down into a single, Scripture-based document that all of the ministers within the group could agree on.  These were their confessions, which laid out their beliefs on Scripture, God, man, sin, the church and sacraments, civil authorities, the home, and eschatology (the end times).  They are often accompanied by catechisms, which are sets of questions and answers used to teach what the confession contains.  Together, these form a robust theology for faith and life.  The confessions were so important to this period that it has been called “confessionalization”.[1]  They became even more important during the rise of liberalism and the Enlightenment of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, at which point many churches abandoned the robust theology of the confessions in favor of conversion-focus and individual experience.[2]  That mentality has persisted to this day such that many churches reject the notion of confessions altogether, dismissing them as antiquated human works of little value today.  But the historic confessions provide a necessary bulwark against the liberalism of mainline denominations and the individualistic emotionalism of seeker-sensitive American evangelicalism just as they have historically defended the Church against Roman Catholicism and other heresies.  Therefore, to be truly Reformed is to be confessional.

To be confessional requires understanding the Reformed confessions enough to subscribe to one of them.

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