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.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Status Confessionis →