Confessing or just confessional?
The Presbyterian Layman May/June 2001 Volume 34, Number 4, May 30, 2001
A Confessing Church Movement is now emerging from the grassroots of the Presbyterian Church (USA). Some contend the movement is unnecessary.
These critics argue, quite correctly, that the PCUSA still maintains a list of approved creeds and confessions. What they fail to realize is that highlighting the denomination’s constitutional documents supports the key claim of the Confessing Church Movement: that while the PCUSA technically remains confessional, it is no longer faithfully confessing.
That distinction is crucial, for confessing movements arise when the Church has reached a confessional crisis. When Arius refused to confess the deity of Jesus Christ, Athanasius stood firm and the Nicene Creed was written. When the Roman Catholic Church became enmeshed in medieval culture, Martin Luther stood in the gap and sparked the Protestant Reformation, which produced profound confessional statements. And as the government assumed control of the churches in pre-World War II Germany, representatives of Lutheran, Reformed and United churches gathered at Barmen and wrote a theological declaration.
The 1930s German Landeskirchen never formally ceased to be bekenntnisse, “confessional.” That is, they never voted to repeal their great Lutheran and Reformed confessions. Unfortunately, those the Barmen Declaration identified as “the ruling Church party of the ‘German Christians’” had ceased to be bekennende, confessing.
Thus the authors of the Barmen Declaration faced criticism similar to that aimed at the PCUSA’s Confessing Church Movement, notably the insistence that since the Landeskirchen remained confessional a confessing movement was not needed.
Writing of themselves in the third person, Barmen’s authors affirmed that “nothing was farther from their minds than the abolition of the confessional status of our Churches.” Rather, the Declaration was motivated by “opposition to attempts to establish the unity of the German Evangelical Church by means of false doctrine, by the use of force and insincere practices.”
The Declaration then affirmed six “evangelical truths,” the first of which was John 14:6, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me.” The second was “Christ Jesus, whom God made our wisdom, our righteousness and sanctification and redemption” (I Cor. 1:30).
The parallels are striking. In its constitutional confessions, the PCUSA still officially acknowledges Jesus’ role in our redemption and sanctification. But by means of false doctrine and insincere practices, the denomination has promoted other redeemers. And in contradiction to the marriage covenant ordained by God it has, by majority vote of its presbyteries, baptized a secular social ordinance – same-sex unions.
In so doing, “the ruling Church party” of the PCUSA has moved from faithfully confessing faith in Jesus Christ to piously plainting that our confessional documents have not yet been repealed.
In response, the Confessing Church Movement is reminding yet another generation of Christians that while such movements remain deeply rooted in the historic Christian confessions, enormous differences exist between confessing churches and those that are just confessional.