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Stated Clerk's column

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The Presbyterian Layman Volume 34, Number 1, Posted January 24, 2001

Kirkpatrick

Clifton Kirkpatrick
Second only to the Bible, the foundational witness to Jesus Christ in our denomination is the Book of Confessions. It is Part I of our Constitution, but it is often far less well known than the second part, our Book of Order. I want to use this column over the next few months to correct that because I believe our Book of Confessions is clearly our greatest constitutional treasure and is a wonderful source of wisdom and inspiration for our faith in Christ, who has led our church through the ages and who leads it today.

One of the identifying marks of Presbyterian and Reformed Christians is our use of confessions to state the foundational commitments of our faith to the world in which we live. In a time of religious crisis, John Knox and five colleagues drafted the Scots Confession in 1560 to state what they clearly believed. Reformed communities in the Netherlands, Germany and Hungary drew strength from the Heidelberg Catechism of 1563, as the Swiss did from the Second Helvetic Confession in 1566.

What is somewhat unique to the Presbyterian Church (USA) is that we do not have a single confession of faith but, rather, we have a book of confessions. Each confession was written in a particular age to express the eternal faith of the church in a particular context. In the period of the early church, the Nicene and Apostle’s Creed were written to make clear the faith of the Church in the pagan world. In the Reformation era, six confessions and catechisms were written that have been included in our Book of Confessions to make clear the witness to the gospel of Reformed Christians in the era of the Reformation. In the twentieth century, three confessions have been added: The Barmen Declaration, affirming the Lordship of Christ over the claims of the Nazis; the Confession of 1967, calling the church to a ministry of reconciliation in the turbulent ’60s and ’70s; and the Brief Statement of Faith, affirming the faith of the reunited Presbyterian Church in beautiful and poetic language.

What is important about our Book of Confessions is not every specific article, admonition or prohibition. Hopefully, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, we have learned new things about our obedience to Christ over the years. What is important are the common themes that express the central verities of the Christian faith in all the different contexts in which the church lives, moves and has its being. This is what we today call the “essential tenets of the Reformed faith.”

This broad, rather than narrow, way of understanding our confessions is not new to Presbyterians. In the Adopting Act of 1729, our General Assembly made it clear that officers were not held to a “fundamentalist” understanding of the confession (then only one, the Westminster Confession and catechisms), but to an upholding of its “essential and necessary articles.” Adopting a Book of Confessions, as our church did in the late 1960s, is itself an invitation to theological diversity and dialogue in the best spirit of the Presbyterian tradition. It also is a wonderful way to enable Christians in their diversity to discover the common themes such as the incarnation, the trinity and justification by grace through faith.

I invite you to join me in a serious study of our Book of Confessions. A particularly good resource for this is the study edition of the Book of Confessions, which can be ordered through Presbyterian Distribution Services.

Clifton Kirkpatrick
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