A Public Standard, Not a Private Opinion

The Protestant Reformation produced not only new churches but a new kind of document to define them. A confession of faith is a formal, public statement of doctrine, more extensive than a creed, intended for avowal by an individual minister, a congregation, a synod or an entire church, and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries produced them in quick succession as each Reformation tradition worked out and wrote down what it actually held. Lutheran churches settled on the Book of Concord, gathering documents including the 1530 Augsburg Confession and the 1577 Formula of Concord. The continental and Dutch Reformed churches produced the Three Forms of Unity; English and Scottish Presbyterians produced the Westminster Confession, drafted in the 1640s; and the Church of England settled on the Thirty Nine Articles of 1571. Confessional churches ask their ministers to subscribe to these documents before ordination, meaning to declare in a binding, public way that the confession states what the minister believes scripture to teach. The claim being made is a careful one: the confession is not held to outrank scripture, but to state accurately what the church, and the minister entering its ministry, take scripture to say, so that a congregation knows in advance what its minister will teach.