Tuesday, August 19, 2008

The Confession of the Church 7


These times in the Presbyterian Church (USA) require special attention to the word of God and the Confessions of the Church. In the introduction to his book, The Church’s Confession Under Hitler, Arthur C. Cochrane writes:

“First, a Confession of Faith involves a conflict not merely between theological schools within the Church but a conflict between the true and false Church, a conflict that divides the Churches. While love for the erring brethren may still prevail, the division is extremely painful and deep wounds are inflicted. … Secondly, a Confession of Faith is a decision in which ‘the first shall be last, and the last shall be first,’ and none may glory save in the Lord!”

At the end of March I wrote my last posting on the Confession of the Church with,
The Confession of the Church 6. I am now returning to that topic with four more postings. This is the first and covers the seventh point from the chapter “The nature of a confession of faith.”1

The seventh character of a Confession of Faith is:

It occurs when the Church is convinced that its faith and unity are ‘grievously imperiled’ by a heresy that has ripened and come to a head. This is the dogmatic character of a Confession.

Cochrane names the heresy. It belonged to the German Christians “who taught that in addition to God’s revelation in Christ attested by Scripture there is a natural revelation in nature and history …” For the German Christians that additional revelation in history and nature was found in “German blood, race, and soil, and in the event of the National Socialist revolution and rebirth of the German soul.”

Notice here the basic heresy was adding another revelation to the revelation that God had already given in Christ. This is a heresy whatever the additional revelation might be. And it has found a home in our own faith institutions. Our own heresy has its roots in the same errors that plagued the German Church during its modern history.


Cochrane points out that this was a heretical view that was “the culmination of the errors of the theology of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” And then he goes on to quote Pastor Hans Asmussen who gave the address to those gathered at the Synod of Barmen:

We are raising a protest against the same phenomenon that has been slowly preparing the way for the devastation of the Church for more than two hundred years. For it is only a relative difference whether, beside Holy Scripture, in the Church historical events, or reason, culture, aesthetic feelings, progress, or other powers and figures are said to be binding claims upon the Church.”

When some in the Church, in any age including our own, lift up additional revelation not based in Scripture it is they who break the unity of the Church, because in appealing to other foundations they divide the Church’s loyalty between two masters. Neither reason nor historical events; neither culture nor progress; there is no other foundation but Jesus Christ.


Anyone who goes too far and does not abide in the teaching of Christ, does not have God; the one who abides in the teaching, he has both the Father and the Son.” (2 John 9)


1 Those who formulated the Declaration of Barmen also laid out some practical steps for being the Church in a time of division and crisis. This can be found under Barmen as “III. Resolution of the Confessional Synod of the German Evangelical Church,” found in The Church's Confession Under Hitler. I will write on some of their practicalities when I am finished with this series.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You might want to point out the differences between what you're talking about here, and the Reformed understanding of something we Calvinists like to call "general revelation", revealed to us by the creation. (Assuming you know what that is, I suppose.)

Viola Larson said...

Paul in the first chapter of Romans gives a clear definition of what is called general revelation. “For since the creation of the world His [God’s] invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they [humanity]are without excuse.” Humanity may know there is an eternal creating God with power. However as Paul points out humanity, because of their sinfulness, rejects that knowledge and is under the wrath of God.

On the other hand God’s revelation of himself is always through Jesus Christ as he is known in Holy Scripture. He is for-shadowed and promised in the Hebrew Bible and made clear through the incarnation in the New Testament. We cannot know the purposes and the redemption of God outside of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. Therefore general revelation cannot be set along side God’s supreme and final revelation in the Incarnation.

There is of course some debate about general revelation as it is used in what is called natural theology. Luther and Thomas Aquinas are on different sides of that debate, but the ultimate proponent of God’s self revelation in Christ versus general revelation and natural theology is the Reformed theologian Karl Barth. And I stand on that side.

J. S. Whale whose wonderful little book Christian Doctrine every one should have, uses Barth as an extreme side of the issue, Spengler being the other side. But I agree here with Karl Barth in just the way Whale puts his thought:

“Indeed, natural theology is a contradiction in terms. Revelation altogether transcends human philosophy; it occurs in the mind of regenerate man, but it comes down Beyond, like a bolt from the blue. Its operation is exactly opposite to that of a fountain, [Spenglere].in that it comes down from above (senkrecht von oben) in certain events, of which the Bible is the record. God’s revelation is given; sinful man’s passivity is complete; even the faith by which he responds to the sheer gift of God in Christ is altogether God’s gift.”