Confessing the Faith Yesterday and Today

Essays Reformed, Dissenting, and Catholic

Sell

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781621895718
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What is it to confess the Christian faith, and what is the status of formal confessions of faith? How far does the context inform the content of the confession? These questions are addressed in Part One, with reference to the Reformed tradition in general, and to its English and Welsh Dissenting strand in particular. In an adverse political context the Dissenters' plea for toleration under the law was eventually granted. The question of tolerance remains alive in our very different context, and in addition we face the challenge of confessing and commending the faith in an intellectual environment in which many question Christianity's relevance and rebut traditional defenses of it. In Part Two it is recognized that Christian confessing is an ecclesial, not simply an individual, calling, and that the one confessing church catholic is visibly divided over doctrine and practice. Suggestions for ameliorating this situation are offered, though the final resolution may be a matter for the eschaton. Until then Christians are called to witness faithfully and to live hopefully as citizens of heaven. In an epilogue the challenges and pitfalls of systematic theology as a discipline involving both confession and commendation are explored.

part one

Confessing the Faith in Context

The sum of the Gospel is that our Lord Jesus Christ, the true Son of God, has made known to us the will of His heavenly Father, and by His innocence has redeemed us from death and reconciled us to God.

Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531)

Introduction to Part One

To say that the Christian faith has been communicated in a variety of contexts over the preceding two millennia is to utter a truism. But what is it to confess the faith and, more particularly, what is the status of the classical Reformed confessions? These questions are discussed in the following chapter. In chapter 2 we meet some Puritans. The Puritans, as their name implies, sought further reform of the Church and purity of worship according to the Word of God. Of those who thought that these objectives were achievable within an established Church some favoured episcopal government, others presbyterian. The more radical Puritans, however, wishing to uphold the sole Lordship of Christ over his church, could not conceive how adequate reformation could be achieved under the auspices of a state church. Accordingly, they declined to opt into, or subsequently repudiated, the Anglican Settlement. They believed that the saints should be separate from the ungodly world, and that through lack of church discipline the parish churches were tainted by that world. Named “Separatists” from their invocation of the biblical verse, “come out from among them, and be ye separate” (2 Corinthians 6: 17), they were the harbingers of the Congregational and Baptist strands of later Dissent. I shall present examples of the variety of writings which flowed from the pens of early Separatists and Dissenters as they sought to confess the faith in their severely restricted socio-political contexts

Not surprisingly, a prominent concern of the Dissenters was their plea for religious toleration under the law, and the ways in which that case was made is the subject of chapter 3. In chapter 4 we jump across the centuries and come to our own time, where we find that issues concerning toleration and tolerance are still very much alive, albeit our context is very different from that of the Separatists and early Dissenters. It is a context in which the relevance of religion is denied by many—an issue discussed in chapter 5. This scepticism regarding religion is in some cases allied to the widespread realisation that the classical arguments for the existence of God, and the alleged “evidences” of miracle and the fulfilment of prophecy can no longer serve Christian believers as once they might have done. In this context what is required is a fresh approach to Christian apologetic method—as I make bold to argue in chapter 6.

chapter one

Confessing the Faith and Confessions of Faith

To the puzzlement (real or pretended) of some of our dialogue partners of other ecclesiastical traditions, the Reformed family has spawned not one but many confessions of faith. More than sixty such documents were devised during the sixteenth century, and the high degree of mutual consistency between them is a tribute to those theologians who energetically commuted between the Reformed centres of Europe, and corresponded with one another in Latin, the language common to scholars of the time. The Reformed are not alone in having produced numerous confessions of faith: the Baptists, for example, were not dilatory in this matter.1 It is more than likely, however, that more such documents have emerged from Reformed circles during the past century than from any other quarter.2

Confessions of faith embody doctrinal propositions which their authors hold to be true. At their best they achieve clarity, and there is much to be said for this. They are, moreover, corporate affirmations; they announce the things “commonly believed among us.” Again, they are, in the language of J. L. Austin, performative statements, for confessing is something that we do. Thus sentences beginning, “I/We believe . . .” are in the same category as sentences beginning, “I/We promise . . .” Confessions of faith also serve as doctrinal boundary-markers both explicitly, as when they counter the claims of Rome, for example, and implicitly, as when they do not affirm universalism or Arminianism. We might say that, like the Chalcedonian Formula of 451 with its four famous adverbs denying Arianism, docetism, and the like, confessions of faith erect doctrinal road blocks against untoward doctrines. As P. T. Forsyth observed, “There must surely be in every positive religion some point where it may so change as to lose its identity and become another religion.”3 At the same time, Forsyth elsewhere reminds us that “Revelation did not come in a statement, but in a person”; but he immediately adds, “Faith
. . . must be capable of statement, else it could not be spread; for it is not an ineffable, incommunicable mysticism.”4 In all of this we see both the importance of doctrinal affirmation, and are cautioned against elevating our confessional statements which, at most, are subordinate standards, above the One to whom they bear witness. If we forget that confessions of faith are subordinate we are on the way to idolatry; if we forget that they are standards, heresy may beckon.

Before proceeding further I wish to state something which is so obvious that only the most hard-line and blinkered of confessional purists would overlook it: formal confessions of faith are not the only means by which the Reformed have made, and continue to make, corporate confessional affirmations. For example, I have argued that the English Congregational branch of the Reformed family probably developed more ways of corporately confessing the faith than any other strand of that tradition.5 In addition to their Savoy Declaration of Faith and Order (1658) and subsequent documents,6 they sang their faith in the words of their pioneer hymns writers, Isaac Watts, Philip Doddridge, and others; they identified with the corporate confession when “giving in” their experience at their local Church Meeting prior to their reception as communicant members; they heard rehearsals of the orthodox faith in the personal confessions their ministers were required to produce at ordination and induction services; and they signed the locally devised covenant.

The phrase “locally devised” reminds us that these covenants were frequently contextually influenced. For example, that of Angel Street Congregational Church, Worcester, the scene of my second pastorate, was written in 1687, and it is unusually strongly trinitarian in doctrine.7 Why? Because already in that district some of the Presbyterian brethren were flirting with “Arianism.” A moral question, rather than a doctrinal one, was of concern to the saints at the seaside town of Ramsgate. In 1767 they wished to call the Reverend David Bradberry to be their minister. He had been converted under the ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Part One: Confessing the Faith in Context
• Chapter 1: Confessing the Faith and Confessions of Faith
• Chapter 2: Varieties of English Separatist and Dissenting Writings, 1558–1689
• Chapter 3: Separatists and Dissenters amidst the Arguments For and Against Toleration
• Chapter 4: Christianity, Secularism, and Toleration
• Chapter 5: The Use, Abuse,and Relevance of Religion
• Chapter 6: Confessing the Faith in the Intellectual Context
• Part Two: Confessing the Faith Ecclesially and Hopefully
• Chapter 7: Calvin’s Challenges to the Twenty-First-Century Church
• Chapter 8: Rectifying Calvin’s Ecclesiology
• Chapter 9: Receiving from Other Christian Communions and Overcoming the Hindrances Thereto
• Chapter 10: Eschatology
• Chapter 11: Confessing the Faith in Systematic Theology?