CONFESSIONS AND CONFESSIONAL AUTHORITY IN THE REFORMED TRADITION

Joseph D. Small

______

People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It’s not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories re-written.

-- Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting1 ______

The United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. adopted the in, well, 1967. It also adopted, as its confessional standard, a – a collection of , confessions and catechisms from the early church, the sixteenth century Reformation and its seventeenth century development, and the twentieth century. Presbyterians have never known quite what to do with this anthology. This shouldn’t come as a surprise because it has been a long time since Presbyterians knew what to do with any confession at all.

I was ordained in 1966, in the last annual batch to be examined under Westminster only. Nostalgia for those days when a single confession provided theological clarity and cohesion is misplaced, because Westminster was essentially a dead letter by the mid twentieth century. We young ordinands were assured that we had only to assent to “the system of doctrine” in the Westminster Confession, so any doubts we might have had about particulars could simply be laid to rest.

I am told that Westminster was still significant in the southern Presbyterian Church, but I know this was not the case throughout the Presbyterian Church, U.S. I was ordained in the UPC to a call in the PCUS Presbytery of the Potomac. I can recall, virtually verbatim, my examination for reception into that presbytery:

“Mr. Small, you are from the northern church, which is about to adopt a Book of Confessions. Mr. Small, the are the sole confessional standards in the Presbyterian Church U.S. Mr. Small, do you believe the Westminster Confession of faith to be an adequate confession for today?” “No.” “Would you care to elaborate on that?” “No.” 2

At that point a presbyter moved that the examination be arrested and sustained. It was, and I was then a member of the Presbytery of the Potomac.

This should not be taken to indicate that the presbytery didn’t care about theology, or that it was not committed to the theological integrity of the church. It is simply that Westminster was not essential or even central to that concern and commitment.

Now, in our church, we have a collection of eleven creeds, confessions, and catechisms. We have just approved a new translation of Heidelberg, we are likely to add the Confession of Belhar, we continue to take vows to be instructed, led, and guided by the confessions, and to sincerely receive and adopt their essential tenets. Our Book of Order tells us that they declare to ourselves and to the world who and what we are, what we believe, and what we resolve to do. And yet, our operative approach is to keep the confessions at the margins of our life together as we encourage and celebrate our theological diversity.

There are two common, mistaken ways that Presbyterians deal with the confessions. The liberal error is to see The Book of Confessions as a museum, housing mildly interesting artifacts of what people used to believe. The preferred term for liberals these days is “progressives,” a term that implies a turn away from the past toward a future of progress that overcomes the past’s errors and short-comings. Inconvenient convictions from the past can be dismissed as hopelessly culture-bound (while, presumably, the progressive present is free from influence by our culture). The conservative error is to see The Book of Confessions as a law code. The preferred term for conservatives these days is “evangelicals,” which indicates fidelity to a trans-denominational, trans-confessional cluster of theological, moral, and missional values. The confessions can be consulted in order to discover laws, regulations, and precedents to enforce already held values.

The liberal error leads to a naïve appropriation of the “hermeneutics of suspicion” that easily dismisses the confessions. A well-known Presbyterian blogger recently posted an entry extolling the virtues of heterodoxy rather than orthodoxy. In his post he equated heterodoxy with diversity, an unalloyed good, and orthodoxy with uniformity, an obvious bad. He went on to say that “It is also important to remember that ‘orthodoxy’ was established by the winners of human debates, not handed down to us from on high.” Not content merely to dismiss the creedal trajectory of the early church he went on to say, “The same goes for the contents of the biblical canon, for that matter.”

It has become fashionable to say that “history is written by the winners,” and therefore we must recover the suppressed voices of defeated minorities. Elaine Pagels, for instance, contends that gnostic gospels were suppressed and forcibly eliminated by an ecclesiastical apparatus that would not tolerate the idea that people could find God by themselves. She also asserts that the recently discovered, so-called “Gospel of Judas” contradicts everything we have known about Christianity, presenting us with a version of history and of beliefs that is more in tune with 3

modern struggles than the doctrines imposed at Nicaea.

It is true enough that history’s winners shape the future, and it is true enough that winning does not always indicate veracity or righteousness. But “winners of human debates” often win, sometimes after long struggles, because their views come to be recognized as true and just. It is also true enough that losers of human debates often lose because their views come to be recognized as false and harmful. Who would assert that we should recover the discredited voices of racism, embodied in European pogroms, South African apartheid, and American segregation? Who would contend that the “orthodoxy” of racial equality is simply a viewpoint established by the winners of a human debate who now suppress and eliminate the misunderstood voice of racial bias?

The conservative error leads to reducing the confessions to an assemblage of statutes and regulations that can be employed to compel adherence to certain theological and moral norms. Opposition to the ordination of gay and lesbian persons created a Book of Order regulation referring to “anything the confessions call sin.” The 2012 General Assembly was marked by an appeal to a provision in Roberts Rules of Order in order to quash debate on a motion concerning same-sex marriage that conflicted with several confessional sentences that assumed marriage between a man and a woman.

It is true enough that the confessions articulate standards of faith and life, and it is true enough, as our Book of Order states, that while confessional standards are subordinate to Scripture, “they are, nonetheless, standards” that may not be “ignored or dismissed.” It is also true enough that the confessions were never intended to be registers of discrete elements that can be extracted from the whole and employed as incontrovertible precedent in a legal brief. Should the Second Helvetic Confession’s mention of the perpetual virginity of Mary dictate our understanding of incarnation? Or should the church’s social witness conform to the multiple protocols for the relationship between superiors and inferiors in the Larger Catechism’s treatment of the fifth commandment?

Confessing the Faith

The confessions are neither museum pieces nor legal compilations. What, then, are they? It will be helpful to begin with the originating confessional history of the Reformed tradition before moving to a theological-ecclesial understanding of The Book of Confessions in the PCUSA.

The name “Reformed” for a family of churches derives from a distinctive appreciation of what it means to confess the faith, and a characteristic understanding of the role of confessions in reforming the church. Zwingli, Calvin, and their contemporaries believed that the one holy catholic and apostolic church finds appropriately diverse expression in local contexts. Churches that followed their lead were characterized by the conviction that all churches are called to 4

confess the faith in tempore and in loco – in their particular time and place. As the influence of the Swiss reformation spread, and churches were established in France, the , Hungary, Scotland, Poland, Italy, and beyond, multiple confessions of faith were adopted as expressions of the freedom and obligation to proclaim the gospel in each context. Because of this profusion of personal, local, and national confessions, early Reformed Christians were dismissively called “the confessionalists.” In the sixteenth century alone, more than sixty confessions were produced by Reformed churches.2 This confessional practice has continued to the present; the World Alliance of Reformed Churches has published a representative sample of more than twenty-five Reformed confessions from the twentieth century.3

Commitment to a living confessional tradition is the reason that sixteenth and seventeenth century attempts to join all Reformed churches in one common confession, or to produce a “harmony” of all Reformed confessions, were unsuccessful, and why an early twentieth century discussion of the desirability and possibility of a universal Reformed confession found few supporters.4 With the exception of the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds, Reformed churches have rarely identified one historic confession as the authoritative expression of Christian faith for all times and places. The Reformed stance toward confessing the faith is evident in the statement of Heinrich Bullinger at the signing of the First Helvetic Confession in 1536:

We wish in no way to prescribe for all churches through these articles a single rule of faith. For we acknowledge no other rule of faith than Holy Scripture. . . . We grant to everyone the freedom to use his own expressions which are suitable for his church and will make use of this freedom ourselves, at the same time defending the true sense of this Confession against distortions.”5

There have been times when individual Reformed churches have embraced a particular historic confession to express their faith and guide their action – often the Westminster Confession of Faith in English speaking churches and the or the in churches of European origin – but even then it is understood that confessional practice entails the recognition of confessional mutability. The Westminster Confession expresses this understanding clearly by noting that all councils may and have erred, and that therefore creeds and confessions “are not to be made the rule of faith or practice, but to be used as a help in both.”6 The composition of confessions is an element in confessing the faith, and so remains an essential element of Reformed faith and life.

Even as a particular church speaks, it should not imagine that its confession of faith belongs to itself alone, however, or that its contextual witness takes place in isolation from other churches. Historically, Reformed churches in particular places were bound to churches in other places by patterns of mutual responsibility, and so churches did not make confessions unilaterally. The of 1560 invited critique from other churches, and the Dutch (1618-19) included delegates from Reformed churches in other countries. At its 5

best, the Reformed tradition’s deep commitment to the catholicity of the church encourages shared witness, not solitary declaration. Reformed churches are not always at their best, however; Reformed dispersion has led to confessional independence so that more recent confessions have been made in isolation from other churches.

Confessions are understood as a crucial element in the continuing reform of the church. Reformed churches understand themselves as “reformed and always to be reformed [ecclesia reformata semper reformanda] in accordance with the word of God [secundum verbum Dei].” Reform of the church is not mere change, certainly not modernization, and never a product of the church’s own achievement. The church is always to be reformed, not to imagine that it can reform itself, in accordance with the word of God, that is, in harmony with the clear witness of Scripture. Because Reformed confessions are subordinate standards, always accountable to Scripture, they are authoritative only to the extent that they are faithful expressions of the primary apostolic witness. The Reformation motto sola scriptura is often misunderstood to mean “Scripture alone”; it actually signifies that Scripture is the normative authority against which all other authorities are measured, including the confessions.

The strength of the Reformed approach is the impulse to be a confessing church as well as a confessional church. It is not sufficient to have confessions; it is necessary to confess the confessions we have. Confessions – whether historical or contemporary – must be affirmed by the present community as faithful articulations of the scriptural witness, and therefore as living expressions of the church’s faith and life. Contemporary affirmation of confessions is not merely formal, as if taking vows, examining candidates, and including them in liturgies were sufficient. Confessing the confessions means declaring to ourselves and our children, and declaring to the world, who we are, what we believe, and how we resolve to live. As Douglas John Hall puts it, “To confess something is to own, avow, declare, reveal, or disclose what in the depths of the soul one considers truly to be the case.”7

The Presence of the Past

It is essential to stress the confessing of both historical and contemporary confessions. We are, for both better and worse, Americans. Throughout our history we have been people who look forward, to the future, not behind us, to the past. American future orientation has been characterized by an optimistic faith in progress: every day, in every way, everything will get better and better. And so, as the novelist Gore Vidal declared, “The past, for Americans, is a separate universe with its own quaint laws and irrelevant perceptions.”8 Since the introduction of The Book of Confessions a majority of Presbyterians has identified the most recent as their favorite – The Confession of 1967 was preferred until A Brief Statement of Faith in 1991, at which time it became favored. The underlying assumption is that newer is better. But notice that the American gaze into the future is no longer characterized by optimism. Popular culture is 6

an accurate barometer: movies and novels no longer imagine progress; their vision is dystopic. The future is presented as a lawless reversion to savagery: Mad Max has replaced Star Trek; Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake has supplanted Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos. But note: dystopias are invariably pictured as reversion to the unpleasantness of the past. Technology has turned on us, and so we are thrown back to the past, where life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Hobbes).

The church remains ever hopeful, of course, but it too often places its hope in an imagined future for itself rather than in God’s future. 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. In the meantime, the church, in its evangelical as well as its liberal form, continues to believe that it must free itself from the burden of the past. Evangelicals imagine that we must shed the weight of centuries as we return to the pristine Christian community of the New Testament, while liberals imagine that we must expose centuries of racism, patriarchy, and eurocentrism in order to construct the pristine Christian community of a new era. Little wonder that we are unsure what to do with confessions of faith from past centuries, thinking them a heavy load to carry around the church.

Perhaps we can begin to unburden ourselves by pondering a historian’s distinction between tradition and traditionalism. Jaroslav Pelikan of Yale says that, “Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition is the living faith of the dead.”9 Traditionalism is an uncritical repetition of an accumulated past, while tradition is a lively conversation with those who have lived and died the faith before us. We are part of a communion of saints, mothers and fathers in the faith who have lived within the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit. Their experience and their wisdom are not inferior to our own; we do not stand at the apex of the history of God’s Way in the world.

There is a danger in any age, surely including our own, of arrogance toward those who have preceded us. Perhaps it only seems that our conceit is particularly presumptuous, but we are not content merely to dismiss past centuries, for we now snub Christian thought and life from bare decades ago. It is what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery, the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.”10 Do we really imagine that the issues and problems we face are unique to our time and place? Do we really think that those who have lived and died the faith before us have nothing to tell us? Do we really believe that our thoughts and actions are at the pinnacle of human achievement, superior to all that has preceded us?

Karl Barth ties our relationship to those who have lived and died the faith before us to the fifth commandment, “Honor your father and your mother.” “It is obvious,” says Barth, “that before I myself make a confession I must myself have heard the confession of the Church . . . 7

And for that very reason I recognize an authority, a superiority in the Church: namely, that the confession of others who were before me in the Church and are beside me in the Church is superior to my confession.”11 The authority of our parents in the faith contained in The Book of Confessions is only human authority, but it is genuine human authority in the church, recognized and transmitted to us as “authentic and reliable expositions of what Scripture leads us to believe and do” (W-4.4003c).

If we recognize the arrogance of turning a deaf ear to the voices of our forbears, we can, in Lewis’ words, “pass to the realization that our own age is also a ‘period,’ and certainly has, like all periods, its characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those widespread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them.”12 So tradition, the living faith of those who have gone before us, need not be a weight that we must shed in order to be free and faithful in Christ. Tradition itself can be liberating, freeing us from captivity to the limited perspective of our time and place. Without the capacity to transcend the taken-for-granted assumptions of twenty-first century North America, we become prisoners in the tiny cell of “here and now.” Ignoring the church’s tradition because we fear that the past may oppress us only subjects us to the tyranny of the present. The Book of Confessions’ Brief Statement of Faith calls upon the church “to hear the voices of people long silenced.”13 Among the long-silenced voices we need to hear are the voices of all who have gone before us in the living of Christian faith.

Presbyterians are Reformed Christians, and this makes us heirs to a particular view of the contemporary church’s relationship to its confessional tradition. We do not understand tradition as an evolutionary “development of doctrine” in which the church’s apprehension of the gospel becomes fuller in each succeeding age. Neither do we identify a particular period in the tradition with a pure understanding of the gospel, whether the patristic church or the sixteenth century Reformation. Instead, we Reformed Christians are called to understand ourselves as participants in a continuous theological and doctrinal conversation that endures through time and space. Perhaps a set of images will be helpful. Imagine that all Christians throughout history are gathered in one place. If we thought of tradition as a progressive development of doctrine, the gathered Christians would be marching forward in a column, with us at its head. Although we contemporary Christians might benefit from the wisdom of those behind us in line, we would think of our doctrinal formulations as more developed, better expressed, embodying fuller truth. In this arrangement, those of us in the vanguard would pay some attention to those in our wake, but we would understand ourselves as building upon their foundation in order to construct a more developed expression of faith and faithfulness.

On the other hand, if we thought that some periods in the church’s life were purer and more faithful than most, we would still see gathered Christians stretched out in a line. Only now we would think of it as a broken line of detours and wrong turns. We would have to leap back 8

over most of those in the line in order to reach an authoritative point in the past, a model to which we would strive to conform. Most voices in the past would be expressions of error; only in heeding the true word from the faithful moment could we restore our church’s fidelity.

But as Reformed Christians we are invited to picture the great gathering of Christians as arranged, not in a line, but in a circle. Believers from every time and place face one another, carrying on a continuous conversation. The colloquy occurs through Christ, the circle’s center. Today’s church brings its insights into an ongoing discussion with those who have gone before; all voices are necessary to the conversation. Ancient voices are not honored merely because of their proximity to Christian beginnings, sixteenth and seventeenth century voices are not heeded simply because they stand at the beginnings of the Reformed tradition, and contemporary voices are not privileged because they have access to the intellectual tools of modernity.

As part of the great circle, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) plays an active role, both as a speaker and as a listener. We give voice to recent convictions in the Confession of 1967 and A Brief Statement of Faith (1991). Yet we are attentive to voices from other times and places, listening to them before we speak. As we listen, we overhear conversations among our forebears as well as carry on our own conversation with them. There are times when we listen in on their discussion, times when we pay particular attention to one of their voices, and times when we participate actively. At least that is how we are invited to understand ourselves as part of the “communion of saints.”

Christian conversation across time and space is more than a casual exchange of opinion. The conversation is a consultation about the gospel, a discussion about the shape of our proclamation and the form of our mission. It is now a discussion about our proclamation and our mission, of course, but our proclamation and mission are rescued from solipsism by the voices of our forebears. Throughout the centuries, Christians throughout the world have had to decide how they would speak and live the gospel. Their witness, available to us in creeds, confessions, and catechisms, is indispensable to our faithful witness. There is a sense in which they speak to us in

The Authority of the Confessions

The confessions of our church – the living faith of our forebears – have a certain authority over us. After all, these creeds, confessions, and catechisms have received the approbation of generations as well as the ecclesial recognition and approval of our own church. We are accountable to them. Our first task is to be questioned by the confessions, not as an exercise in servitude, but precisely as a liberating denial of the tyranny of the present. Being questioned by the tradition is not our only responsibility; we also subject the tradition to our own questions. We are not traditionalists, so we can be utterly honest about crusades and inquisitions, easy acceptance of Christendom and easy dismissal of the leadership of women, neglect of 9

evangelistic mission and excess of missionary zeal. 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, the abandonment of shared conviction and community in easy acquiescence to the individualism, localism, particularism, and privatism of our time. The historical particularity of the creeds, confessions, and catechisms situates them, but it does not confine them, or weaken their voices. While each reflects “a particular stance within the history of God’s people,” their distinctiveness gives their voices timbre and resonance. The context of confessions is more likely to commend them than to dismiss them. It is not inconsequential that the Nicene was the first formal creed of the church, and that it remains the only creed used ecumenically by the majority of Christians throughout the world. The Apostles’ Creed, while restricted to churches emerging from the Latin West, nevertheless gives voice to the baptismal unity that overarches the fragmentation of the churches. Sixteenth and seventeenth century confessions and catechisms articulate not only the affirmations of the Reformation, but the foundational perspectives of the Reformed tradition in which we stand. Twentieth century confessions are expressions of the Reformed conviction that the church is called to bear a present witness to the gospel in every time and place.

The particularity of creeds, confessions, and catechisms does not create a hierarchy or a weighting system, but it does modulate each of their voices so that we hear distinct tones and characteristic inflection in the words they speak. As we listen to the discrete accents of the confessions we become attuned to features that help us to hear and respond.

The Nicene Creed occupies a singular place among all the confessional statements of the churches. It is not simply age or ubiquity that set it apart, although these are significant attributes. Instead, Nicaea presents us with a certain “dogmatic irreversibility.” The church, at a particular time in its history, was presented with a critical choice in which it determined that fidelity to the gospel required one articulation rather than another. The choice made at Nicaea gave expression to the fundamental Trinitarian, christological, and soteriological witness of the church, and so decisively determined the future of Christian thinking, professing, and confessing the faith. The affirmations of the Nicene Creed shape the affirmations of the creeds, confessions, and catechisms that follow. There is a sense in which later confessions can be seen as contextualized implementations of the Nicene (and Apostles’) Creed. Its voice resonates deeply throughout The Book of Confessions and within the church’s ongoing conversation with the confessions.

Confessions are not timeless abstractions. Their historical particularity does not seal them in time capsules, however. Rather, as time and place give specific witnesses to the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, they open a free 10

arena for lively conversation about the shape of present witness to the gospel. Two features of our confessions are worth our special attention

Saying “Yes” and Saying “No”

When we listen to that part of the tradition given voice in The Book of Confessions, what do we hear? We hear expressions of the search for distinguishing marks of faithful Christian community. Those who have gone before us asked and answered questions about where to draw identifying lines between faithful and unfaithful confession of God, between faithful and unfaithful living out of that confession. Christians in Nicaea and Rome, in Geneva, Heidelberg, and Edinburgh, in Barmen and Portland, shaped Christian faith and faithfulness by saying “Yes” to some things and “No” to others. Genuine confession of faith is always both affirmation of truth and denial of untruth. “If the Yes does not in some way contain the No,” said Karl Barth, “it will not be the Yes of a confession. . . . If we have not the confidence to say damnamus [what we refuse], then we might as well omit the credimus [what we believe].”14

The identity of a religious community as Christian entails renunciation of what is not from God as well as affirmation of God and God’s new Way. Sometimes the “No” is explicit, as with Barmen and the Confession of 1967; at other times it is implicit, as with the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds. But always, in the community’s struggle to define itself in fidelity to the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, it must say “Yes” to its perception of God’s Way in the world, and “No” to the ways of the world apart from God.

Barmen says “Yes” to something that the church too often forgets:

The Church’s commission, upon which its freedom is founded, consists in delivering the message of the free grace of God to all people in Christ’s stead, and therefore in the ministry of his own Word and work through sermon and sacrament.

We may hear those words and nod casually, “Of course.” Until we are confronted with Barmen’s accompanying “No”:

We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church in human arrogance could place the Word and work of the Lord in the service of any arbitrarily chosen desires, purposes, and plans.15

Can it be that an institutionalized church – our institutionalized denomination and its institutionalized congregations – places the gospel in the service of our own desires, purposes, and plans? Is it possible that our rhetoric about the primacy of the church’s mission is a justification for pushing the Word and work of Christ aside in a rush to promote our own 11

purposes and achieve our own plans? Is it conceivable that our “seeker friendly” worship submerges Word and Sacrament in our desire to become attractive once again? Those are not questions with simple answers, but our attention to the wisdom of our forebears may awaken us to the reality that we cannot say “Yes” to everything, and that if we say “Yes” to our Lord it will mean saying “No” to the dream wishes of our chosen desires, purposes, and plans.

The Nicene Creed calls us to confess our belief in:

One God, the Father, the Almighty . . . one Lord, Jesus Christ the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father, . . . the Holy Spirit, the lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified, . . .

To say “Yes” to these central affirmations of Christian faith is to do far more than recite a comfortable liturgical orthodoxy. Does it mean saying “No” to an understanding of God as “creator, redeemer, sustainer” in sequential or alternating modes? Does it mean refusing a picture of Jesus as the tragic hero or moral exemplar of pop historicism? Does it rule out a generalized Spirit who bypasses the embarrassment of christological particularity? Does all of this say “No” to the monistic deity of bourgeois Protestantism by proclaiming Holy Trinity?

The church’s confessional tradition is more than a mildly interesting survey of the past. The confessions confront us at a deeper level than documentaries on the History Channel or A&E. A Brief Statement of Faith gives clear voice to a theme that runs throughout Reformed confessions when it affirms that the Holy Spirit gives us courage “to unmask idolatries in Church and culture.”16 Our confessions are one instrument of the Spirit’s work as their “Yes” and “No” challenge us to say our own “Yes” and “No,” calling us away from easy acquiescence to cultural realities and from lazy conformity to churchly assumptions.

The task of defining the appropriate center of Christian faith and faithfulness, and their appropriate boundaries, is not unique to some generations while absent from others. Rather, it is an ever-present and continuous process that draws from the past experience of the church as it presses toward hope in the future that God is bringing to be. Christopher Morse puts it well: “Memory and hope, story and promise, occur inseparably in the apostolic tradition. To keep the memory from blocking the hope (the temptation of conservatives), and to keep the hope from severing itself from the memory (the temptation of liberals) is the task of all dogmatics that seeks 12

to be attentive to apostolic tradition.”17 Christian tradition, and particularly that part of the tradition expressed through The Book of Confessions, is the memory and the hope of our parents in the faith as they tried to determine the proper shape of a Christian community that proclaims the gospel, nurtures the faithful, worships, preserves the truth, promotes social righteousness, and displays to the world the coming reign of God.

The conflicts among us – both the big and the little ones – are evidence of our struggle to define the character of Christian community. What will we say “Yes” to and what will we say “No” to? What is essential if community is to be Christian? What is important if Christian community is to be identifiably Reformed? What is a matter of pastoral and ecclesial discretion? We don’t agree about these things, of course. But we are not the first people to ask the questions. We do not have to bear the weight of these problems alone.

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. Since we are challenged by the same issues that challenged the confessions’ framers, we can listen and learn from the ways they understood the crises, and the ways they responded. And as we listen to those who have gone before us, we may even discover that we are able to listen more openly to those who are with us now.

1 Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (New York: Penguin, 1981) p. 22. 2 Arthur C. Cochrane, ed., Reformed Confessions of the Sixteenth Century (Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003) 3 Lukas Vischer, ed., Reformed Witness Today (Geneva: World Alliance of Reformed Churches, 1982) 4 Karl Barth, Theology and Church: Shorter Writings 1920-1928 ( New York NY: Harper & Row, 1962) 5 Phillip Schaff, ed., 1877. Creeds of Christendom (New York: Harper & Bros.1.877) p. 389f. 6 Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), The Book of Confessions: Study Edition (Louisville KY: Geneva Press, 1999) p. 210. 7 Douglas John Hall, Confessing the Faith (Minneapolis MN: Fortress Press, 1996) p. 8. 8 Gore Vidal, The Golden Age (New York: Vintage, 2000) p. 445. 9 Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984) p. 65. 10 C.S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955) p. 207. 11 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2, The Doctrine of the Word of God (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956) p. 589. 12 Lewis, p. 208. 13

13 The Book of Confessions (Louisville: Office of the General Assembly, 2002) A Brief Statement of Faith, 10.4, line 70. Hereafter, all confessional references will appear in brackets within the text, according to the numbering system in The Book of Confessions. 14 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956) pp. 631, 630. 15 The Book of Confessions, The Theological Declaration of Barmen, 8.26f. 16 A Brief Statement of Faith, 10.4, line 69. 17 Christopher Morse, Not Every Spirit (New York: Trinity Press International, 1992) p. 48