The Complexities of Confessionalism

I spent about six hours on Thursday with Peter Leithart, Rob Rayburn, and two other members of the Pacific Northwest Presbytery, the purpose of which was to seek to better understand Leithart’s views on topics such as baptism and justification, as well as to talk more broadly about the nature and usefulness of confessions within the life of the church. Plenty has already been said by way of debating the doctrinal issues surrounding the Federal Vision (so I'll not get into that here), but I think a conversation about confessions and catechisms is necessary, and it was this portion of our meeting that I found especially interesting.

This will take some time to qualify and explain, but the position of someone like Rayburn is not that the Westminster Standards ought to be set aside or ignored, but rather that the way we treat them in the PCA inevitably (and lamentably) leads to their being set aside and ignored. When a candidate for ordination stands on the floor of presbytery and insists that he has no exceptions to the Confession or Catechisms, it often demonstrates just how little he has really engaged with them, and how unimportant they have become to us as ministers and to us as a church.

Rayburn plans to illustrate his position at an upcoming meeting of presbytery by submitting to the credentials committee a 20+-page document listing every single scruple he has with respect to the Westminster Standards. I know what you’re thinking: “How can any minister claim to be a Reformed churchman and yet take that many exceptions to our church’s teaching?” But before we become too dismissive, consider this statement:

The third commandment requires, that the name of God, his titles, attributes, ordinances, the Word, sacraments, prayer, oaths, vows, lots, his works, and whatsoever else there is whereby he makes himself known, be holily and reverently used in thought, meditation, word, and writing…. (WLC 112).

Notice that one of the ways that God makes himself known, according to our Larger Catechism, is by the casting of lots, and moreover, that such lot-casting must be used with holy reverence. Or consider this:

This covenant of grace is frequently set forth in Scripture by the name of a testament, in reference to the death of Jesus Christ the Testator, and to the everlasting inheritance, with all things belonging to it, therein bequeathed (WCF vii.4).

The prooftext for this statement is Hebrews 9:15-18 which, in the King James Version, renders the Greek word diatheke as “testament.” Not only is this rendering disputed (I believe it should be rendered “covenant” as it is everywhere else in the New Testament), but it is also the only prooftext for something that is said to happen “frequently.”

One final statement:

It is the duty of Christians to marry only in the Lord. And therefore such as profess the true reformed religion should not marry with infidels, papists, or other idolaters: neither should such as are godly be unequally yoked, by marrying with such as are notoriously wicked in their life, or maintain damnable heresies (WCF xxiv.3).

The unmistakable assumption here is that Catholics are not Christians. Now this is much stronger than the way we usually put it, which goes something like this: “Those who heartily embrace Rome’s teaching are not Christians, yet there are true believers within the Catholic Church.” Sure, WCF xxiv.3 is not as strong as calling the pope the antichrist (we graciously took that bit out), but it still equates Catholics with “infidels and other idolaters” to the point that no true believer can marry one.

Rayburn’s point in bringing up these kinds of statements from the Westminster Standards is to point out that hardly any ordained PCA minister actually believes them, and yet very few have taken an exception to them before their presbyteries. Does this not demonstrate how low our regard is for our church’s official teachings?

Setting aside the fact that Rayburn does not believe Leithart’s teachings to be in conflict with the Standards (a point about which we strongly disagree), I do think he makes an interesting point. Why should we have confessions or catechisms that contain loads of statements that we all agree are not intrinsic to the Reformed system of doctrine? Why include “in the space of six days” if it can be disagreed with? Why affirm that Paul wrote Hebrews if none of us really believes he did? Why say that the Bible frequently calls the covenant a testament if the claim is false on its face? Why forbid images of Jesus of Nazareth if virtually every children’s Bible or Sunday School curriculum violates this?

The Reformed churches need a new confession. I’ll go further, the Reformed churches need a new confession that can realistically be subscribed to strictly, one that is both shorter (achieved by trimming the unnecessary fat) and longer (addressing the myriad of questions that have arisen since the seventeenth century, such as Pentecostalism, Dispensationalism, and Open Theism). While I’m feeling bold, I’ll go further even still: the Reformed churches need a new confession that can be subscribed to by all of us, thus effectively putting an end to the need for the PCA, the OPC, the URC, and other Reformed denominations that have no good reason to remain separated from one another.

Of course, how this would work, who would compose it, and whom it would include and exclude are all separate but serious questions. But can we really question the need?