The Confession of the Church 10

In this, my last posting on the nature of a Confession of faith, taken from Arthur C. Cochrane’s book, The Church’s Confession Under Hitler, I intend to simply quote the author. The text is extremely important; hopefully others will be encouraged to read this book with some interest in the history of that period in Church History and some thought toward the future.

I intend to follow this series up with another on how the Confessing Church survived as a Church within a heretical Church. The information will come mostly from a document attached to the Declaration of Barmen found in The Churches Confession Under Hitler. As I have stated in a footnote, “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.”

The 10th characteristic of a Confession of Faith:

“A Confession of Faith possesses a relative and subordinate authority and freedom. They are founded upon and limited by the absolute and unique authority and freedom of God’s word in Holy scripture. When the Church confesses Jesus Christ as attested in Holy Scripture in the name of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church and in continuity with the Fathers, when its confession fulfills both the dogmatic and ethical requirements of a Confession, and when it comes forth with an unequivocal Yes and a No, such a Confession exercises authority. …”

Referring to the confessional authority as spiritual authority Cochrane goes on to write of the nature of that authority:

“The authority of the creeds and Confessions is not due to the fact that they have been adopted in the constitutions of certain Churches. Conversely, the authority of a Confession is not abolished or lessened by the fact that certain Churches have refused to recognize their validity in Church law.”

Cochrane asks the important question, “Who will deny that the ecumenical Creeds and the Confessions of the Reformation still exercise authority even in so-called confessionless Churches?”

Cochrane shows how the true Confession of Faith is in fact a Christological act. He writes:

“The primary condition of a Confession, the possibility of a Confession, is not that men decide to confess Christ for a variety of reasons—say, for the sake of a Church union—but that Christ for no reason at all, that is, in his sovereign freedom, has decided to confess himself to us. A Confession is Christological not only in the fact that its articles are related to Christ but in the sense that he is the confessor. The Church confesses only in him! The Confession occurs not when we think we have discovered the truth, but when the truth has found us.”

Cochrane writes of the possibility of another or new Confession of Faith by the Church in other lands in his and now our day. He asks some questions. I will finish with some of his questions:

“Are we on the threshold of a day when the Church knows that its only weapon and defense will be its Confession of Faith? Are we conscious of some great heresy by which our Churches are ‘grievously imperiled’ and of some great truth by which we are possessed? Are we prepared to make dogmatic and, much more important, ethical decisions as a Church, and for the sake of them to lose our life in order to find it?”

The Confession of the Church 1
The Confession of the Church 2
The Confession of the Church 3
The Confession of the Church 4
The Confession of the Church 5a
The Confession of the Church 5b
The Confession of the Church 6
The Confession of the Church 7
The Confession of the Church 8
The Confession of the Church 9