For the earliest believers in the God of Abraham, confession, sharing aloud what they held as sacred, was a way remembering all they had witnessed. Before God they declared: “You saw the suffering of our forefathers in Egypt; you heard their cry at the Red Sea. You sent miraculous signs and wonders against Pharaoh…. You made a name for yourself, which remains to this day” (Nehemiah 9:9-10). Before one another they remembered: “We believe that Jesus died and rose again and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him” (1 Thessalonians 4:14). Whereas some might view the confessions of the church today as formal treatises or ancient documents, the intent was the same: The church confesses what it needs to remember, what it longs to remember. We confess the promises of God; we confess the actions of God. We confess, and our identity is forged. For what we choose to remember in doctrine and history, faith and belief, boldly informs who we are.

Confessing is, therefore, much more than formal subscription to words spoken in history. It is learning to voice the unchanging story of the gospel beside the situation and mission of the church today. It is the utterance of dynamic truths and the active process of living by them. Confessing God the Father moves those who confess into a particular history, people, and reality, and then compels us to move further and further into the identity it places before us. With Simon Peter, the church confesses of Christ the Son: “We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God” (John 6:69). And with Christ, the church confesses the Spirit.

Yet for the Church in history and for many today, none of these are easy words. Nor are they words from which one can pick and chose with whim and preference. They are spoken with the knowledge that they must inform all of life, regardless of the life in which we find ourselves. Michael Horton clarifies, “While it is certainly possible to have a church that is formally committed to Christian doctrine—even in the form of creeds, confessions, and catechisms, without exhibiting any interest in missions or the welfare even of those within their own body, I would argue that it is impossible to have a church that is actually committed to sound doctrine that lacks these corollary interests.”(1)  In other words, rightly functioning, confession and mission, doctrine and life exist hand in hand. Karl Barth was equally insistent upon the missional corollary of true confession. “A declaration may be bold and clear, and centrally Christian… but so long as it remains theoretical, entailing no obligation or venture on the part of him who makes it, it is not confession and must not be mistaken for it.”(2) To use one of Christ’s own metaphors, true confessing does not produce words that fall like seeds on shallow ground, but seeds that grow into great trees where others can come and rest in their branches.  Confession is an action in a very real sense of the word.

It was with such an understanding that Dietrich Bonhoeffer declared a state of status confessionis for the church under Nazi Germany. Status confessionis, literally, “a state of confessing,” is a dire situation in which the church must stand up for the integrity of the gospel and the authority of the God it confesses. For Bonhoeffer and others, the Nazification of the church was an issue so threatening to the veracity of their confession of Christ that no dissimulation or concession was possible. Bonhoeffer recognized that the Nazi persecution of Jews demanded a serious response from the church. But more so, he recognized that the church was called “not only to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to jam a spoke into the wheel itself” and bring the engine of injustice to a halt.(1) Confessing Christ was a theology that could not be held without obligation.

And so it remains today. In the Christian story, God has given us a great history to remember, and God has called us to remember it dynamically together. “If you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9). Confessing Christ as Lord, one’s identity is cast with a sense of the same urgency and intentionality as those who have gone before us. It is not an individual, one-time act, but a communal, ongoing activity. Confessing Christ is an active declaration of the church universal and the church before us, a profound claim upon the whole of life and the whole of the church. Like the savior we boldly proclaim, who is unchanging and timeless but also specifically relevant to time itself, what we believe God has done in history calls us to faith and mission today. In a world that would seek to dethrone him, confessing Christ as Lord dynamically continues to tell us who we are and what we thenmust do. This is the invitation of Christ to the world: not a legal transaction, a stodgy list of creeds and rules, but a new way of life in the Father, by the Son, and through the Spirit.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

  (1) Michael Horton, “Creeds and Deeds: How Doctrine Leads to Doxological Living” Modern Reformation Magazine, Vol. 15, No. 6.
(2) Karl Barth, “The Doctrine of Creation,” Part 4 Church Dogmatics Vol. 3. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark Publishers, 1960), 84.
(3) Dietrich Bonhoeffer, A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), 132.