By Jeff Gissing, at jeffgissing.com
All creeds and confessions are created in a context, and that context is important both in understanding them and applying them to the life of the church. Some creeds and confessions manage to plumb the depths of the faith in a way that remains true across many times and many cultures.
Others, are profoundly limited in their ability to rightly confess the faith outside of the immediate context in which they were written. The Belhar Confession is an example of such a confession–it served well in its immediate context, but is not robust enough to carry the weight of the church’s confession to the world. It’s not without merit, so we’ll consider those before we consider it’s weaknesses.
Strengths
First, it speaks clearly to the issue of the racism and systemic injustice codified in the South African Apartheid system. Apartheid was an evil system–a profound rejection of the image of God in humanity as well as Christian gospel that affirms all people to be equally condemned before God apart from Christ–black and white, male and female, Jew and Greek.
Second, Belhar comes from the global south. It represents the witness of Christians outside of our predominantly european tradition. As reformed theologian Kevin DeYoung notes, “It is a brief confession and in many ways quite beautiful, a doctrinal statement filled with some precious truths that the white church in South Africa had tragically lost.”
Third–and this is a strength and weakness simultaneously–it is mostly an extended arrangement of Scriptures. In one sense, the Confession is biblical–in the sense that it is comprised of mostly biblical witnesses. At the same time, it is also–at points–sub-biblical in that I query the way in which the witness of Scripture is arranged in this confession.
Weaknesses
As mentioned above, Belhar is an extended biblical quotation. However, one of it’s weaknesses is that it’s theological framework does not align with that of classic reformed theology or the Canon of Scripture
Related article: In Overwhelming Vote, GA Approves Belhar
3 Comments. Leave new
It seems that the PCUSA’s entire process of adopting Confessions is problematic.
In the PCUSA, you have a Book of Confessions, which includes a large number of documents that the church vaguely approves of. There are too many of these to keep track of, and they do are not necessarily consistent with each other, so they don’t have a great impact on what is taught in any individual church.
In contrast, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the Presbyterian Church in America (where I am a ruling elder) just have the Westminster Standards. However, each pastor and ruling elder must understand these standards and accept them as a faithful expression of Christian doctrine, and his teaching reflects that.
So for example, pastors in the PCA or OPC would not think of performing marriages that are wildly out of accord with the Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 24, and they certainly wouldn’t advocate for such a practice year after year at General Assembly until they wore down the opposition.
Proof-texting with Scripture is not a confessional process; it is cherry-picking, one of the primary logical fallacies.
It’s hard to see the point of a proliferation of confessions that rarely if ever get used in the life of the church anyway (has anyone read the Scots Confession lately? The Second Helvetic?) It seems more sensible to have just a few, but ones which actually are read and taught and have a function.