The Importance of Confessionalism Amidst Cultural Decline

Steve Meister

On Sunday, June 28, 2015, two days after the US Supreme Court ruled on Obergefell v. Hodges, legalizing so-called “same-sex marriage”, a deacon came up to me before our evening service. “Pastor, there’s a camera crew here that wants to speak with you.” I went outside to find a reporter from a major broadcast TV network who asked me, “We have heard that some churches actually don’t agree with the recent Supreme Court ruling and wondered if you’d be willing to comment?”

I declined to comment on camera, but I did say to the reporter and his camera crew, “Our understanding of what the Bible teaches on marriage was written down in 1677, in agreement with what Christians have publicly confessed for centuries. Nothing the Supreme Court ruled on Friday has changed that.” That is not all I could have said, of course. In many ways, it barely scratches the surface. We could have discussed the key passages of Scripture that speak to men, women, sexual morality, and the purpose of marriage that our Confession summarizes in 2LCF Chapter 25.

But neither was referring to our Confession saying nothing. The Supreme Court did not change our understanding of Scripture’s teaching on marriage. Yet, sadly, we know that for many professing Christians it did. And the pressure to affirm the moral depravity of our culture is only growing, along with the churches capitulating to it. Do you know how every Christian or church that does justifies their belief? They claim they are just believing the Bible.

By our Confession, the church down through the ages comes alongside us, points to Scripture and reminds us of what it teaches, regardless of the pressure or pain to say otherwise. We can say to those who have capitulated and compromised that they are the divisive ones, having departed from what the church has taught according to Scripture. When we are slandered as bigots, we can say that we are neither motivated by prejudice nor do we speak with malice, since we are only saying what Christians have said according to Scripture for centuries.

Confessionalism is a great help in fighting pressures to make the Bible say something less costly than it does in our own generation. We have seen this same phenomenon, for example, in the departures from the Christian doctrine of God over the last century. On doctrines like divine impassibility, John Owen could write in the 17th century:

It is agreed by all that those expressions of ‘repenting, grieving,’ and the like, are figurative, wherein no such affections are intended as those words signify in created natures, but only an event of things like that which proceedeth from such affections.[1]

We can no longer make such a claim as Owen because the cultural pressure to deny impassibility has become too great. A.N.S. Lane remarked, “The difference between us and the Fathers is not so much that we are more skeptical about natural theology, rather that natural theology today favours a passible rather than an impassible God.”[2] With the rise of Romanticism, modern psychology – not to mention two world wars – it simply became too difficult to explain to our world why it is good that God is “without passions” (2LCF 2.1). So Christians instead departed from how the church has read the Bible and remade God in a more modern frame.

Now the temptation grows to reread Scripture in ways that denies “Marriage is to be between one man and one woman” (2LCF 25.1), the witness of our brothers and sisters from the past is all the more necessary. Recovering Confessionalism is not a distraction from ministering the gospel in our current cultural convulsions. It is a necessary bulwark for it. To garrison our hearts and churches against the opposition we face today, we need the testimony of the centuries to regularly remind us what Scripture has always taught.

Footnotes

¹ John Owen, The Works of John Owen (Edinburgh, Banner of Truth, 1968), 21:257.

² Anthony Lane, “Sola Scriptura?Making Sense of a Post-Reformation Slogan,” in A Pathway into the Holy Scripture: Edited by Satterthwaite and Wright (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1994), 303.

Picture of Steve Meister

Steve Meister

Pastor, Immanuel Baptist Church, Sacramento, CA