A confessing Christian

Attended a Reformation Day Conference at First Evangelical Reformed Church at the invitation of a friend. This year's conference day title is "The Biblical Basis and Historical Rationale for Confessions". The speaker, Chris Coleborn - rightly pointed out several important principles that a confessing Christian should be aware of; these include: the recognition of our spiritual inheritance, instructing the church (particularly our young) in confessional creeds and being witnesses to the world through proclaimation of propositional truth.

I do, however, have something more - and maybe, different - to add.

Firstly, what does it mean to confess Christ?

The Protestant Reformer Martin Luther brilliantly puts it: "If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point whichthe world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing him. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved, and to be steady on all the battlefield besides is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point".

In a nutshell, confessing Christ means articulating the Christian faith within a socio-political-cultural context. By this I mean that as Christians, we need to be mindful of where we are placed in and the battlefields of our times. Francis Schaeffer rightly noted that part of the reason the church was unable to convey its message to its subsequent generations (during the 60s) was that because the church was simply living on a memory of a Christian past that was ebbing away. As a result, many orthodox churches found that they could not connect with their young; the remaining option then - instead of reforming - was to embark on the megachurch church movement path, a path that Os Guinness compares to "Dining with the Devil" (I will critique this movement in a later post).

In my opinion then, creeds - if merely treated as propositional assertions - are likely to do more harm than good, especially if they are unable to provide subjective evidence of Christian truth. This is where I do think the postmodern movement has a valid point to make, in that our understanding of truth is always relative to the subject involved. The words "I believe" that we often recite in our creeds are perfect examples of the subjective nature of our faith (that is not to say that objective truth does not exist).

Truth then, is both propositional and personal. The over-emphasis of one over the other is fallacious and will only result in disastrous consequeces. Furthermore, unless some form of qualitative distinction can be made and demonstrated by self-professing Christians, then our confession of faith (no matter how elaborate) would only mean that our words ring as hollow and carry no resonance beyond the four walls of our church.

So what can be done then? This will be the subject of my next post. By the way, I do think FERC is doing an admirable job in training its young (I was told that the kids learn the Heidelberg Catechism during Sunday School class). This is something worth emulating.