Even if you have been barely listening to decisions made in the Christian Reformed Church over the past several years, you have heard the term “confessional church” tossed around. You might have quietly wondered what exactly this means. What does it mean to be “confessional”? What are these documents we refer to as “confessions”? Perhaps you already know the answers to these questions but, if not, I hope to offer a brief introduction suggesting that confessions are historical, biblical, communal, and ecumenical.
Each of the confessional documents we will examine in this column—The Belgic Confession, The Heidelberg Catechism, and the Canons of Dordt—arose in a particular historical situation. Quite often, after the Reformation began, the purpose of these documents was to clearly point out differences between the beliefs of the Reformers and those of the Roman Catholic Church. The historical nature of these documents, however, in no way suggests that they are irrelevant to the church today.
These documents, which were often born in times of conflict, summarized various biblical teachings—doctrines—to clearly demonstrate that their answers to the questions of their time were grounded in Scripture. As summaries of biblical teaching, the confessions are not more important or even have the same importance as the Bible. Rather, they are based on the Bible. Thus, insofar as the teachings in the confessions accurately reflect the teaching of the Bible, we continue to affirm them as doctrines we believe.
Confessions—doctrines we believe—are also communal reflections on theological topics. We are not lone wolves. We are part of a community known as the Christian Reformed Church, a little denomination that is part of the larger body of “Reformed” churches, which are part of the still-larger body of Christ. Our confessions reflect a sort of “group thinking” on important issues, a consensus among us regarding how to understand particular theological topics. For example, the Canons of Dort were composed to defend the Reformed emphasis on the sovereignty of God in salvation against a perceived challenge to that doctrine by the followers of Jacob Arminius. The Canons were not written in isolation, but by a consensus of Reformed thinkers coming together to consider what exactly “we believe” about these teachings.
The teachings in the confessions, therefore, are teachings that we, as a body, agree on. They help identify us by telling us who we are and are not and what we do and do not believe. In that way they also form a boundary around us, offering a standard of orthodoxy for our group.
It is worth remembering that this sort of thinking can be abused. It is good to affirm together that our interpretation of various biblical truths is correct. But particularly at the confessional level, we must do so with humility, what Richard Mouw calls “convicted civility.” In other words, we should not suggest that those who interpret Scripture differently than we do are either not Christians or, worse yet, going to hell. That knowledge belongs to God alone.
The final aspect of confessions is that they are ecumenical. That is, we hold some of the teachings in our confessions in common with others in the wider body of Christ. For example, most of the first half of the Belgic Confession is widely shared throughout the Christian Church. Thus, our confessions are communal in the sense that they draw us together as Reformed, and that they bring us together with Christians from many different backgrounds who confess with us, “We believe!” In the next article, we will examine the first of these statements of faith, the Belgic Confession.[1]