THE CONFESSION OF 1967 AND 
THE BOOK OF CONFESSIONS

Douglas F. Ottati

[Posted here 5-15-02; also published in Network News, Spring 2002.]

The Confession of 1967 or "C-67" (as we affectionately and more efficiently often call it) was adopted together with the other documents that formed the first Book of Confessions of The United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America.

The United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America acknowledges itself aided in understanding the gospel by the testimony of the church from earlier ages and from many lands. More especially it is guided by the Nicene and Apostles Creeds from the time of the early church; the Scots Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Second Helvetic Confession from the era of the Reformation; the Westminster Confession and Shorter Catechism from the seventeenth century; and The Theological Declaration of Barmen from the twentieth century.1 

[Footnotes are at the end of this page; click on any footnote number to go to that note.  Click on your browser's "back" button to return to your place in the text.]

 

Essentially and very briefly, what happened was this. After years of study and debate, the Church decided to remove from its confessional standards the (Westminster) Larger Catechism and to include the Westminster Confession, the Shorter Catechism, C-67, and six additional documents. The Larger Catechism was reinstated when the United Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) reunited with the Presbyterian Church in the United States in 1983, at which time southern emendations also were added to the text of The Westminster Confession of Faith. The Book of Confessions took on its present shape when A Brief Statement of Faith was added in 1991.

It might easily be argued that, doctrinally speaking, the most significant thing the United Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) did in 1967 was to approve a Book of Confessions (plural).2 The net effect of this decision to has been to put the Church in conversation with a rather diverse collection of witnesses from different places and times and, indeed, one general thesis of my essay is that this has had comparatively salutary consequences for the way in which the Church regards its confessions. Specifically, I believe that the decision to adopt a Book of Confessions encourages us to understand our confessional authorities as particular, ecumenical, and living or dynamic standards. A second general thesis is that it is difficult to imagine the text of C-67 that was finally adopted by the Church apart from the decision to adopt a Book of Confessions.

I. Understanding Our Confessions

For many years, The Westminster Confession of Faith functioned as the sole confessional standard of the major Presbyterian bodies in the United States. But, of course, the actual standard was not the historic text of 1647. It was that text revised early and often to reflect the practices and judgments of American Presbyterians. (See, for example, the paragraphs of the Confession having to do with the civil magistrate, marriage and divorce, "The Gospel of the Love of God and Missions," and "The Declaratory Statement" concerning predestination and God's love for all humankind as well as the election of those who die in infancy.)3 That is, when Westminster was the sole confessional standard, there were strong and regular pressures to revise it when it appeared to be at odds with the church's current faith, practice and/or theology. This changed when the Presbyterian Church adopted the Book of Confessions.

Historically Particular Statements

Pressures to revise specific confessions moderated with the adoption of a collection of documents from different places and times. There now seems little reason to revise the documents themselves in order to achieve what could only be an artificial uniformity and/or strict agreement with current faith and practice. Thus, for example, in the current Book of Confessions, the claim in A Brief Statement of Faith that the Spirit calls women and men to all ministries of the church stands in flat opposition to the insistence of the Scots Confession that "the Holy Ghost will not permit [women] to preach in the congregation."4

A presumption entailed by the adoption of the Book of Confessions is that the collection of confessional standards is at least relatively diverse, and that it quite properly reflects historical and theological differences in the church's confession. Moreover, behind and beneath the comparatively strong pressures to revise Westminster, lay a tendency which, from a Reformed viewpoint, can only be described as troubling. It seems comparatively easy to mistake a document which functions as a sole confessional standard for "the rule of faith and practice," even when the document itself says that the products of synods and councils are not to be understood as constituting such a rule.5 At the very least, it seems rather easy to mistake a single confession for the authoritative "Cliff Notes" on the Bible and so, in practice, to displace the Bible itself. This danger was significantly reduced by adopting a somewhat diverse Book of Confessions. For now, precisely because the confessions are not entirely self-consistent and uniform, it becomes more difficult to claim that they ever could function as an entirely self-consistent rule.6 Practically speaking, then, a diverse collection of confessions encourages us to take them for what, from a Reformed perspective and as a matter of self-description, they really are, namely, authoritative yet fallible and subordinate standards that point to the one true Word.7

Indeed, as C-67 itself makes clear and as is apparent to virtually anyone familiar with the entire collection, the several documents in the Book of Confessions are the particular statements of specific churches at particular places and times. They point to the same Word, but they do so on different occasions, in different cultures and different idioms, and in the face of different problems and different crises.8 "The Confessional Nature of the Church," a paper commended for study by the 198th General Assembly in 1986 and mandated to be published with the Book of Confessions by the 209th General Assembly in 1997, makes a similar point.

This multiplicity of confessions, written by many people in many places over such as great span of time, obviously means that the Reformed tradition has never been content to recognize any one confession or collection of confessions as an absolute, infallible statement of the faith of Reformed Christians for all time. In the Reformed tradition confessional statements have authority as statements of the faith of Reformed Christians at particular times and places, and there is a remarkable consistency in their fundamental content. Some have had convincing power for a long time. Nevertheless, for Reformed Christians all confessional statements have only a provisional, temporary, relative authority.9

When confessional statements are recognized to be historically particular, their authority is provisional because they are understood to be "the work of limited, fallible, sinful human beings and churches" which reflect the biases and scientific and cultural limitations of a specific circumstance. Their authority is temporary because Christians are to ask what God is doing and how we may be faithful and obedient "in every new time, place, and situation." And, the recognition of their historical particularity also fits with another, classic point about their authority; it is relative because church confessions "are subordinate to the higher authority of Scripture."10

Another point worth emphasizing is that the Book of Confessions itself is inherently ecumenical. This is true, on the one hand, because the collection incorporates elements of the plurality of Reformed Christianity into the life of the Presbyterian Church. True, the nine documents produced by Reformed churches that are included in the Book of Confessions do not reprise the full diversity of Reformed Christianity, but they point toward this diversity more clearly and forthrightly than any one of them could on its own. Written into the constitution of the Church itself, as it were, is an explicit recognition that, through the centuries, there have been multiple strands within the Reformed tradition, multiple ways of being Reformed. Again, "The Confessional Nature of the Church" makes a similar point.

The Book of Confessions as a whole enriches our understanding of what it means to be Reformed Christians, helps us escape the provincialism to which we have been prone, and expresses our intention to join the worldwide family of Reformed churches that is far bigger and more inclusive than our particular denomination.11

Moreover, within Reformed circles at least, these ecumenical aspects to the Book of Confessions are also rather traditional. The first official standard of Presbyterianism, the Scots Confession of 1560, did not function alone. Additional Reformed documents were also used and approved by the Church of Scotland, including Calvin's Geneva Catechism of 1545, the Heidelberg Catechism of 1563, and the Second Helvetic Confession of 1566. Indeed, Knox's Book of Common Order did not include the Scots Confession but the confession adopted by the English-speaking congregation at Geneva in 1556, and the First Book of Discipline required communicants to be familiar not only with the Scots Confession but also with the Apostles' Creed.13 Since 1567, the Hungarian Reformed Church has recognized both the Heidelberg Catechism and the Second Helvetic Confession, and in 1581 Theodore Beza put together A Harmony of Confessions of Faith drawn from Reformed churches in Europe which even included a revised form of the Lutheran Augsburg Confession.14

A third point is that the adoption of the Book of Confessions entails the assumption that the confessional standards of the church are living and dynamic, subject to emendation, revision, and addition. The adoption of C-67 (a new document) together with a collection of older documents was itself a significant demonstration of this assumption (as were the earlier revisions of Westminster). So was the addition of A Brief Statement of Faith in 1991.

The profoundly Protestant and negative point, of course, is that the church's confessions are fallible and therefore subject to revision and correction, or as C-67 puts it, "no one statement is irreformable."15 The profoundly positive point is taken up in the first sentence of C-67. "The church confesses its faith when it bears a present witness to God's grace in Jesus Christ."16 That is, it is the business of the church to confess, to bear witness today and in every time and place.

In every age the church has expressed its witness in words and deeds as the need to the time required. The earliest examples of confession are found within the Scriptures. Confessional statements have taken such varied forms as hymns, liturgical formulas, doctrinal definitions, catechisms, theological systems in summary, and declarations of purpose against threatening evil.17

In this sense, and with all intentional reference to The Theological Declaration of Barmen, which also was adopted into The Book of Confessions along with C-67, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) understands itself to be a "confessing church." A faithful and present witness - this is the engine or dynamic that makes for a living confessional heritage from the New Testament and Nicea to Heidelberg, Westminster, Belhar, and beyond.18

That the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) affirms a Book of Confessions means that it understands itself to confess a faith that has been handed down through the ages, and that it understands itself to confess this faith in its own particular time and place. Both the continuity and contemporaneity of this living activity come through in the final paragraph of the Preface to C-67. "God's reconciling work in Jesus Christ and the mission of reconciliation to which he has called his church are the heart of the gospel in any age. Our generation stands in peculiar need of reconciliation in Christ. Accordingly, this Confession of 1967 is built upon that theme."19 Among other things, then the Book of Confessions stands as an encouragement for us to do in our own time and place what other Christians and their communities have done in theirs. A collection of confessional statements from different times highlights a tradition of Christian confessing through the ages. Only this tradition is not a matter of static and rotely repetitive uniformity, but a matter of living witness. It is a matter of asking, on the basis of the what prophets and apostles said yesterday and informed by the church's confessions in many ages, how we shall witness today. It is a matter of asking what God is doing here and now and how we may respond faithfully and obediently.20

II. The Dependence of the
Confession of 1967 on the
Book of Confessions

With these observations, we have already touched upon two additional features of C-67. Both are connected with the fact that it was the first confessional document written expressly for inclusion in the Book of Confessions. Taken together, I believe they indicate that some central features of the text of C-67 are virtually unimaginable apart from the broader collection.

A Thematic Confession

The first feature is clearly stated in the Preface. C-67 recognizes that confessional statements have taken varied forms, that there have been "hymns, liturgical formulas, doctrinal definitions, catechisms, theological systems in summary, and declarations of purpose against threatening evil."21 Moreover, "this Confession is not a 'system of doctrine,' nor does it include all the traditional topics of theology."22 C-67 is a thematic confession built upon the theme of reconciliation. As such, one may argue that it seems ill-suited to be the sole confessional standard of a church. This is true as well of the Theological Declaration of Barmen, which also is not systematic, and which, in any case, encouraged Lutheran, Reformed, and United churches "to remain faithful to our various Confessions."23 Surely, it is true, too, of the somewhat lyrical and liturgical "Brief Statement of Faith," whose Preface says that it is "not intended to stand alone, apart from other confessions of our church," and that "it does not pretend to be a complete list of all our beliefs, nor does it explain any of them in detail."24

Whatever the original intentions may have been when the Special Committee on a Brief Statement of Faith was first appointed in 1958, it may be argued that, in 1967, the Church was freed to approve a thematic document precisely because C-67 did not pretend to be a sole confessional standard for the Presbyterian Church. Instead, as we have seen, the document affirmed that the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America is not guided by C-67 alone, but is "aided in understanding the gospel" by a number of testimonies and witnesses "of the church from earlier ages and from many lands."25 Moreover, some of these testimonies and witnesses are indeed theological systems in summary which touch upon virtually all of the traditional topics of Reformed theology, e.g., the Scots Confession of 1560, the Second Helvetic Confession, the Westminster Confession of Faith. The Church therefore could be assured that, as a whole, the Book of Confessions outlines the full complement of theological topics that Reformed churches historically have found important for understanding Christian faith and the gospel. Apart from this broader collection, then, it seems unlikely that the Church would have approved a confession that had taken the form of a thematic document built on reconciliation as an especially appropriate way to witness to the heart of the gospel at the time.

This brings us to another feature of C-67 that also seems significantly dependent on the presence of additional documents in the wider collection and on a heightened awareness that confessions are particular standards which quite properly reflect the specific challenges that the church confronts at a particular place and time. C-67 includes an explicit interpretation of the then-current circumstance of the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. It presents a definite theological reading of what was at stake.26

Arguably, something like this is at least an implicit feature of any confessional statement. So, for example, as can be surmised from their prefaces, readings of particular challenges and circumstances stand in the background of the Scots Confession of 1560 and also the Heidelberg Catechism. (For the Scots, the long-awaited opportunity to form a Reformed church and to make known "to the world the doctrine which we profess and for which we have suffered abuse and danger."27 For Frederick III, the need to standardize and improve the instruction of young people as well as the general population in sound Protestant doctrine during a time of controversy and disagreement.28) Moreover, Barmen clearly focuses on the threat to the Lordship of Jesus Christ posed by the "German Christians" and the coercive interventions of Nazis in church affairs.

The judgment that "our generation stands in peculiar need of reconciliation in Christ" is, on the one hand, simply the classical theological insistence that all persons are sinners, that sinners are subject to divine judgment, and that good and abundant life is available in Jesus Christ. In their sin, people are turned against God and one another. They become exploiters and despoilers of the world. "They lose their humanity in futile striving and are left in rebellion, despair, and isolation."30 But "in Jesus of Nazareth, true humanity was realized once and for all."31 Reconciliation in Jesus Christ brings about new life in community. It overcomes divisions that separate people from God and from one another.32 This is a statement of the heart of the gospel. It is true in every age, and so it is also true in every age that humanity stands in need of reconciliation in Christ.

In C-67, however, what makes "our generation" stand "in peculiar need of reconciliation in Christ" is a series of intense and damaging divisions that the writers found to be especially prominent in their own time and place. These particularly urgent problems are taken to be clues to the will of God in the then-current situation as well as to our faithful and obedient response. And, in fact, to recognize these problems as well as their intensely divisive and alienating pattern is to discover the peculiar appropriateness of a witness to the gospel in 1967 that is built upon the reconciliation theme.

The explicit and definitely theological reading of circumstances comes in the section on "Reconciliation in Society," and it emphasizes four alienating divisions.33 1) God's reconciling love overcoming the barriers and boundaries that separate us calls all people to receive one another as persons, and it highlights the divisive issue of discrimination based on racial or ethnic difference. 2) As the ground of peace, justice, and freedom, God's reconciliation in Jesus Christ commends to the nations the search for cooperation and peace, particularly in an age of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons when we divert so many resources from constructive uses and instead risk the "annihilation of mankind." 3) Jesus' identification "with the needy and exploited" which makes "the cause of the world's poor the cause of his disciples" encourages the church to engage economic affairs and to denounce and work to overcome "enslaving poverty in a world of abundance." 4) The new life in Christ and its meaning for interpersonal relationships of mutuality, joy, responsible freedom, and respect underscores alienation and anarchy in sexual relationships in an age of birth control, effective treatments for infection, pressures of urbanization, exploitation of sexual symbols, and world overpopulation.34

My point here is simply that in highlighting these four urgent issues, C-67 presents an explicit reading of the specific challenges facing the church and its witness to the gospel at that time. Indeed, if the divisive pattern of these issues shows the appropriateness of the theme of reconciliation, the reconciliation theme also serves to highlight these particular and divisive issues. The relationship between theological norm and situational analysis is therefore both explicit and circular. Moreover, the willingness of the writers of C-67 to present a text of this sort accords with the tendency of a collection of confessions from different places and times to highlight the particularity of the church's confessional task.35

Conclusion

NOTES

1 Book of Confessions: Study Edition [Part I of the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)] (Louisville: Geneva Press, 1996), 9.04.

2 The text of C-67 drew most of the conservative critical fire. The Presbyterian Lay Committee, Inc. was formed in the spring of 1965 to oppose C-67 as well as to work for conservative policies in the denomination, and the more moderate group "Presbyterians United for Biblical Confession" pressed for revisions in the text of the new confession. At a special general synod of the Bible Presbyterian Church, the Rev. Carl McIntyre declared that modernism had triumphed through the adoption of the new confession. See The New York Times (December 28, 1966). Nevertheless, some conservative forces clearly recognized that the change to a collection of relatively diverse confessional documents had deep theological significance. Thus, in his pamphlet entitled "The New Confession: Comments on 'The Proposal to Revise the Confessional Position of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.' or The Confession of 1967" Mariano Di Gangi of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia asked, "When there are differences between the various documents in the Book of Confessions, which is to take precedence over the others?" He also complained that people who commit themselves to a collection of confessional documents do not commit themselves to "a clearly-defined body of truth" or a "system of doctrine." In fact, although I favor a diverse collection of confessional witnesses, I think Di Gangi's implication that the Book of Confessions cannot furnish a single, detailed and self-consistent rule is exactly correct. See the following section.

3 BOC, 6.129, 6.131-9, 6.188-93. It should be noted that most of these changes were truly significant, and that the latter two clearly contradict the plain sense of some rather important passages in the historic text of 1647.

4 BOC, 10.4, 3.22. Consider, too, the subtle differences in the ways in which the Second Helvetic Confession, the Westminster Confession of Faith, and the Confession of 1967 articulate the relationship between the Word of God and the texts of scripture. Along these lines, one may argue that, although it is helpful to have an inclusive language text of C-67 for liturgical purposes, the original text of C-67 in the Book of Confessions ought to be retained. And, the reason why is not just that some judge the inclusive version we no have not to have grappled with all of the theological issues presented by the original text. For example, in her contribution to this volume, Heidi Hadsell points out that the original text of C-67, so jarring with its specifically masculine language, reminds us of the near total absence of women in the Confession and also shows women how difficult it is to see oneself in non-inclusive language.

5 Which is just what the Westminster Confession does say. See BOC, 6.175.

6 Not that some haven't tried and even, to a degree, succeeded. See The Book of Order: The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Part II (Louisville: Office of the General Assembly, 1999), G. 60106. "Persons refusing to repent of any self-acknowledged practice which the confessions call sin shall not be ordained and/or installed as deacons, elders, or ministers of the Word and Sacrament."

7 BOC, 9.03. Today, it should also be emphasized that it is the entire Book of Confessions, rather than anyone's summary of or Cliff Notes on the collection, which forms the authoritative confessional standard for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

8 BOC, 9.02, 9.43.

9 BOC, p. 359.

10 BOC, pp. 359-60.

11 BOC, p. 362.

12 BOC, 1.3.

13 BOC, pp. 25-6.

14 Edward A. Dowey, Jr., A Commentary on the Confession of 1967 and An Introduction to the "Book of Confessions" (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1968), pp. 31-2.

15  BOC, 9.03. See also the Westminster Confession of Faith (6.175). I should admit to my personal affection for the balanced and yet colorful language of the Scots Confession in BOC 3.20.

As we do not rashly condemn what good men, assembled together in general councils lawfully gathered, have set before us; so we do not receive uncritically whatever has been addressed to men under the name of the general councils, for it is plain that, being human, some of them have manifestly erred, and that in matters of great weight and importance.

For the Scots, councils, creeds, confessions, catechisms and the like are to be confirmed by the "plain Word of God" (3.20). The Preface to the Scots Confession indicates that the authors intended their own work to be subject to this same standard when it asks anyone who notes a chapter or sentence that is "contrary to God's Holy Word" to "inform us of it in writing." Although, in practice, a politically realistic objector might have deemed it wise to book passage to a new world before posting his letter.

17 BOC, 9.02. See also Edward A. Dowey, A Commentary on the Confession of 1967 and An Introduction to the Book of Confessions, p. 29.

18 The Belhar Confession was officially adopted by the Synod of the Dutch Reformed Mission Church at Belhar, Cape Town, Republic of South Africa on September 22 - October 6, 1982 and it rejects apartheid on theological and moral grounds.

19 BOC, 9.06.

20 See also "The Confessional Nature of the Church," BOC, p. 360.

21 BOC, 9.02.

22 BOC, 9.05. See also 9.06.

23 BOC, 8.08. See also 8.02-4, 8.06.

24 BOC, p. 339.

25 BOC, 9.04.

26 This is also the place to mention a related point. In her paper on "Reconciliation and Poverty in C-67," Annie Rawlings notes that C-67 encourages the church to be "instructed by all attainable knowledge" as it seeks to discern God's will and to respond appropriately. See BOC, 9.43. C-67 intimates the importance of empirical studies, of situational analyses and interpretations of circumstances, for a theological ethic.

27 BOC, p. 31.

28 BOC, pp. 57-8.

29 BOC, 9.06, 9.43-7.

30 BOC, 9.12.

31 BOC, 9.08.

32 BOC, 9.20-6, 9.31.

33 BOC, 9.43-7. Arnold B. Come regarded the inclusion of a social ethic within the scope of God's reconciling work in Christ as the most original and distinctive contribution of C-67, and he also claimed that the four areas mentioned here "are critical to world-wide human existence." However, Charles C. West noted that "C-67 does not have a full political or social ethic, even as it does not have a full systematic theology." See Arnold B. Come, "The Occasion and Contribution of The Confession of 1967" and Charles C. West, "Comment on Reconciliation in Society" in Journal of Presbyterian History, vol. 61, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 23, 27, 127. Regardless of whether or not one considers the social ethic in C-67 extensive, it seems clear that C-67 does indeed contain an explicit and definitely theological reading of circumstances.

34 Beverly Wildung Harrison claimed that C-67 did well to emphasize the importance of just relationship but lamented the addition of the notion of God's "ordering" at this point in the text of the Confession. See "Human Sexuality and Mutuality: A Fresh Paradigm," Journal of Presbyterian History, vol. 61, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 143-4, 150. This also points to a larger question raised by Gene TeSelle in his contribution to this volume about the chrstocentric character of C-67 and the doctrine of creation. In general, creation comes in for little emphasis in the Confession and it seems fair to say that the Confession has more to say about history than nature. Moreover, 9.16 has a rather anthropocentric ring. "God has created the world of space and time to be the sphere of his dealings with men." Interestingly, however, although the Confession says relatively little about creation, it seems unable to deal with the issues of racial discrimination and sexuality without references to creation.

35 Edward A. Dowey, Jr. noted that the Committee chose the name "Confession of 1967" at its final meeting in order to draw explicit attention to their understanding that this is a confession uttered at a given time and place in a concrete situation. "Creedal Reforms in the UPUSA Church," an audiotape made at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia in 1965 and available in the William Morton Smith Library.

36 Letty M. Russell, "Forms of a Confessing Church Today," Journal of Presbyterian History, vol. 61, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 100.

37 The important thing is to engage an extensive and living heritage. This accords with Edward A. Dowey's observation that Westminster alone is neither modern enough nor ancient enough to represent the Presbyterian heritage. "Creedal Reforms in the UPUSA Church," an audiotape recorded at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia in 1965, and available in the William Morton Smith Library.

Published here by permission of the author.

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