A Confessional Church
A confession is a public declaration of what a church believes. Individual Christians certainly confess their own personal faith, but a confession of faith is more than a personal affirmation of faith. It is a statement of what a community of Christians believes. Such statements have not always been called confessions. They have also been called creeds, catechisms, affirmations, formulas, definitions, declarations of faith, statements of belief, articles of faith, and other similar names. Whatever their form, confessions of faith express what a body of Christians believe in common.
At the heart of all confessions of faith is the earliest confession of the New Testament church, "Jesus is Lord." Christians actually confess not what but in whom we believe. But the church discovered very early that in order to protect this simple confession from misunderstanding and misuse, it had to talk about the relation between Jesus and the God of Israel, and between Jesus and the Holy Spirit.
The earliest confessions about Jesus thus became a Trinitarian confession (Father, Son and Holy Spirit). All confessions of faith are subject to the authority of Jesus Christ, the Word of God, as the Scriptures bear witness to him. Confessions of faith in the Presbyterian Church are subordinate to the Bible.
Brookings Presbyterian Church is a member of a denomination of churches called The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). As a denomination we have adopted eleven historical confessions of faith that lead us in our understanding what Scripture leads us to believe and do. These confessions are:
The Nicene Creed (325 A.D.)
The Apostles' Creed (2nd Century A.D.)
The Scots Confession (1560 A.D.)
The Heidelberg Confession (1562 A.D.)
The Second Helvetic Confession (1561 A.D.)
The Westminster Confession of Faith (1649 A.D.)
The Shorter Catechism (1649 A.D.)
The Larger Catechism (1649 A.D.)
The Theological Declaration of Barmen (1934)
The Confession of 1967
A Brief Statement of Faith (1990 A.D.)
BOOK OF CONFESSIONS LINK
