Confessions in the Presbyterian Church
John Roxborogh
How Confessions function for the church today is a product of what they were
trying to say and how we decide to relate to them. With old confessions
and new we have to address intention and relationship.
Reformed churches wrote a lot of confessions in their early history to say what
sort of Christians they were. Churches emerging out of a turmoil of religious
choice needed to define themselves, including over against one another.
Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists and Catholics all needed statements about their
points of difference to justify their separate existence. These confessions
later get used for other purposes - theological cohesion, passing on the
tradition, and restraining innovation.
Confessions are one way of saying who we are and what we believe. They can be
personal: "I confess that Jesus is my Saviour and Lord". They can sum up who we
are together as a Christian church. Ancient creeds like the Apostles Creed and
the Nicene Creed belong to the universal Church. They can be very formal
documents, they can be spontaneous, but they always exist first of all for a
particular need at a particular time. They can be statements shared in worship
to evoke faith and give identity. They can function as legal documents binding
leadership and church to a particular theological understanding. They may prove
to have enduring relevance. They may not.
Theological statements are not the only documents needed to say who we are. We also need statements on organisation and leadership, and on acceptable patterns of worship. At the Reformation, theology, organisation, and worship all needed to be spelt out if the church was to be reformed. We are also defined by what we do, especially by the story of our mission outside of our own community.
In the Presbyterian tradition we have a
Book of
Order to say how we are organised, the
Directory for Worship (previously called the Book of Common Order or
of Common Worship - think of “order of service”), to say how we worship, and the
Westminster Confession, as a statement of belief. Ministers and elders
relate to these documents by signing the
Formula
(in the light of the
Declaratory Act), which says they accept these documents with the
proviso in the Declaratory Act that they do not have to agree with things in the
Westminster Confession that are not part of the fundamentals of the Reformed
faith.
When the Formula was drafted core Christian beliefs did not seem to be in doubt.
In the late 19th century the major Presbyterian churches in Scotland,
starting with the United Presbyterians in 1879, and then the Free Church of
Scotland in 1892 and the reunited Church of Scotland in 1929 acted to resolve
widely felt problems with the Westminster Confession. These first “Declaratory
Acts” were followed by the Synod of Otago in 1893. In America some Presbyterians
rewrote parts of the Confession they did not like, but in Scotland and New
Zealand it was felt to be easier to change the relationship of ministers and
elders to the Confession than to change the Confession itself.
The scholarly French Reformer, John Calvin (1509-1564), was trained in law and
philosophy and his Institutes of
Christian Religion
began as a catechism which was expanded and restructured to deal with
controversies which arose during his time at Geneva before he died in 1564.
Written in Latin and translated into French and polished throughout his life it
provided a comprehensive statement of Reformed thought which remains readable
and relevant. It is a key factor in the ongoing influence of his ideas. Calvin also wrote
Ecclesiastical Regulations in 1541 which he negotiated with the Genevan
city council. He provided a model pattern of worship based on what he had
experienced in Strasbourg. He also set
up an academy which trained pastors from all over Europe. His theology, system
of organisation, and emphasis on education and the Christian discipline of
society as a whole is part of our spiritual DNA. John Knox from Scotland was one
of those deeply influenced by his time with Calvin, but there were also others
from Holland and Hungary as well as France who carried Calvin’s teaching and
example with them and developed it in other political contexts.
After
Knox returned to Scotland, he shared in the writing of the
Scots Confession and the
First Book of Discipline in 1560 to chart
what the Reformed church in Scotland should believe and how it should be
organised. His primary concern with worship was to ban the mass and to follow
the model (Knox's Liturgy) he had
developed earlier in Frankfurt and Geneva. After his death in 1574 Scottish Church
organisation was further solidified in a Presbyterian direction following the
Second Book of Discipline
(1578).
During the English Civil War the English Parliament set up a committee to revise the English Book of Common Prayer’s 39 Articles, but in 1643 the Solemn League and Covenant brought Scotland on to the side of Parliament in its struggle with Charles I and the “Assembly of Divines” was augmented with Scots commissioners and given a wider brief to prepare a confession and other documents for the church nationwide. The Westminster Confession, its two catechisms, and its documents on worship and organization were adopted by the General Assembly in Scotland, replacing the Scots Confession of 1560. Modified versions of it were later accepted by British Congregationalists and British Baptists.
But not Anglicans.
The death of Cromwell and the return of Charles II returned episcopacy to both
Scotland and England and followers of the Covenants were persecuted. Thirty
years later after
William of Orange was offered the crown Scottish Presbyterians offered him loyalty
whilst Scottish
Episcopalians refused to renounce their vows to the previous King, James VII. As a result Presbyterianism was reinstituted in 1690. The Church of
Scotland as the “church by law established” was once again Presbyterian in
government and the Westminster Confession was the
document to
hand which defined its theology.
Although questions arose, including for theology students, the Confession was not a focus of
serious debate in either the Free
Church (from 1843) or the Church of Scotland, or at first among the other Presbyterian groups
whose members were among the migrants coming to New Zealand from 1840 onwards.
The significant exception to this in the story of Scottish theology was John
Mcleod Campbell whose work on the Atonement has been rediscovered by James and
Thomas Torrance, but he made less impact in his lifetime. Thomas Chalmers who led the Free Church left out of his affirmation of the
Confession the bits which appeared to restrict his freedom to offer salvation in
Christ to all. Others shared this concern, and something of Chalmers' tendency to
let the problems go, but fifty years later the same result was achieved by the Declaratory
Acts.
Today we are looking at other solutions again to the question of how we indicate what is the theology that defines who we are, what are the sorts of documents that we need for that, and how we should relate to them. It is widely accepted that as a "subordinate standard" the Westminster Confession on its own is of limited value. When we have new theological questions, or even old ones, we draw on all the resources available to us and make the best decisions we can. The Confession barely registers as a guiding source for our need to be faithful in our own time, and it is clear we need to reach a theological solution to our theological concerns as the political one we have inherited has run its course.
The committee which reported in 2002 believed
that despite differences in the church, there is a mind and a will to express
our faith together and that the context for that should be one of worship. It
also believed that it is impossible to understand who we are without reference
to the Westminster Confession and that it, alongside other confessions which have
arisen in Reformed history (including the Scots Confession and the Barmen
Declaration), need to be explicitly affirmed in an appropriate way.
Websites
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Common_Order (The Order of Geneva or Knox's Liturgy)
http://www.presbyterian.org.nz/about/statements-of-faith/westminster-confession-1646
http://www.presbyterian.org.nz/for-parishes/book-of-order
http://www.presbyterian.org.nz/for-ministers/worship-resources/the-directory-for-worship