As an institution, there is a need to define what the Church is and what it is to believe, and so confessionalism is a must. There is also a need to define the boundaries of what it means to be within the institution. The simplest mark that anyone can have regarding these ideas is the confession that Jesus is Lord, as per Romans 10. This was the confession of the early Church.
As time goes on and the Church continues to grow, there are more false teachers coming into the Church and bringing chaos. Codifying the confession of the Church became necessary. The Catholic Creeds are the early statements made by the Church to make clear the basic teachings of the Church. If there isn’t a creedal, or confessional statement, how can the Church purge the heresy from within? How can we tell the difference between someone who would be in orthodoxy if there are no doctrinal statements that are the standard by which to test and judge.
Historical Creeds
The first of these creeds is known as the Apostles’ Creed. As a creedal statement, it is the most basic form of the Gospel message that there is in Christianity. As Al Mohler has said in his book on the subject, “People may believe more than this Creed, but no Christian believes less than this Creed.”
What is amazing about the Apostles’ Creed is that it is really a historic statement about the Gospel that includes the Trinity, virgin birth, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the completeness of the work of Christ, the reality of the new heavens and new earth (with new bodies), the forgiveness of sins, the unity of the Church, and life eternal.
For such a short and memorable statement, there is a lot of theology packed into it. There are also all the necessary statements within it is make a dividing line between orthodox Christianity and Islam, Judaism, Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and anything else that does not have those foundational truths at its center. The first doctrinal gate into orthodoxy is the Apostles’ Creed.
Next, there were debates about the nature of Christ and what He accomplished on the cross. There are clearly false doctrines about Christ Himself that show themselves in the lifetime of the Apostles. The First Letter of John is an argument against Proto-Gnostics who were denying the reality of the humanity of Christ. Paul was fighting the Judaizers in their statements that Jesus’ work wasn’t quite enough and needed something else added to it. Even if the Judaizers said that Jesus was God, the fact that Christ’s work fell short is indeed a failure to understand fully the person of Christ and the work that only Christ could do.
From these early forms to more advanced forms that include Arianism (the denial of the Deity of Christ) to Gnosticism (the Denial of the Humanity of Christ), there would need to be more clear statements of orthodoxy that had to be created and agreed upon to continue to keep the Church faithful to the Scriptures.
The next Creeds to be written were the Nicene and Athanasius Creeds. These creeds are primarily about the nature of God and the nature of Christ. While the Apostles’ Creed mentions the three persons of the Trinity, the Nicene Creed looks to define the trinitarian nature of God and how each person works. Because there is a Trinity, this also means that some definition about the nature of Christ must also be defined and understood, which happened at Chalcedon.
With these Catholic Creeds setting the bar of orthodoxy, there was a split between the East and the West around 1000 A.D. From there, the sides have continued to make definitions and sense out of more than the Bible teaches. Unfortunately, these sides, primarily Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox, have created and defined doctrines and dogmas that undermine the teaching of the Bible and the early creeds that followed the time of the Apostles. While, in some sense, these churches do fall within the broad parameters of the Catholic Creeds, they have created a tradition on the same level as the Scriptures, which has led them to lose the Gospel, or to add to it.
However, it is only logical that as the Bible is studied and meditated on, definitions and ideas would become more narrow and more precise in the definition of doctrines. Not that things that are defined are on the same level as the gospel or any fundamentals, but that things may become clearer as all the cogs in the theological machinery are brought out to be studied.
Therefore, a split between East and West is inevitable. Not necessarily because one side or the other had jumped ship, but because the secondary doctrines make it hard for people to worship together or govern the church or any number of things that need to be done in the life of the Church. All Christians can agree on the same gospel, even if they may not agree on important things that have a bearing upon church order.
As time goes on, the Roman Church, through dogmatic statements and the notion of a living tradition, has lost its way and wandered from the original gospel that was codified within the Catholic creeds. By adding a sacramental system to the gospel of salvation and setting itself up as the ultimate authority, the Church needed to be reformed, but as the Reformers found out, Rome did not possess the ability.
The Reformation
This then progresses the timeline to the era of the Reformation. Various reforms were attempted before the start date attributed to Martin Luther and his posting of the 95 Theses. It wasn’t until the advent of the printing press and the ability to gather a large following quickly that the Reformation was truly possible.
As the Reformers, especially those of the first and second generation, were now looking to bring back biblical Christianity, there arose a need to write and distribute new confessions of faith that reflected what these groups believed was the real message of the Bible. Luther and Zwingli had a meeting to work through doctrine, Calvin wrote “The Institutes of the Christian Religion, and various other groups met. There was a resurgence of confessional writing and adoption going on. Even the Roman Catholic Church came together to make explicit what was to be taught and believed in the Council of Trent. While there were councils and synods before this period, during the Reformation, there was an explosion of confessional writing. The Heidelberg Catechism and Belgic Confession both came out of Geneva, Switzerlan within the first 50 years of the start of the Reformation.
Reformation and Confessionalism in England
In fact, within the first 20 years of the Reformation, England broke away from the authority of Rome and created its own Church. While King Henry VIII spurred on this English Reformation for unrighteouss reasons (the seeking of divorce from his wives) this intiated English confessions of faith to come into the picture.
The first confessional document of the Church of England was the “Thirty-nine Articles of Religion.” It was a thoroughly reformed confession headed up by the First Archbishop, Thomas Cranmer.
While the Church of England had the Thirty-nine Articles, John Knox and his contemporaries wrote “The Scots Confession” for the Scottish Presbyterian Church. There were other confessional statements throughout the United Kingdom. From the time of the Thirty-nine Articles, for nearly a hundred years there would be changes in the Church as there were in the government with various acts of Parliament and kings and queens ascending the throne. These would enforce their preferences on the Church of England and the surrounding territories within the British Isles.
Then, in 1643, the Nation of Scotland and the Nation of England signed “The Solemn Covenant” between the Kingdoms of England and Scotland.’ This document was made to preserve the Church of Scotland from encroachments by the Church of England. From this period came the 1646 Westminster Confession of Faith. Atthat time there were disagreements about the way the church was to be governed. The congregational churches that believed in church independence and sovereignty wrote the Savoy Declaration. Then the Baptistic congregational came to write London Baptist Confession, which was officially printed in 1689, and is the confession to which this author subscribes.
From and Towards a Confessing Church
As we survey the history of the Church, we see that it has been confessional. The confession of Christ has been the bedrock of the Lord building the Church for the last 2000 years. As Peter confessed that Jesus was the Christ, the son of the living God, so Christians from the day of Pentecost to today have made that same confession. As the Church has grown, there has arisen a need to define what is means to be labeled a Christian.
Confessions are biblical, historic, and as we shall see in the next of this series, practical.
