Confession of faith

Faith on the lips

In Scripture faith does not stay hidden in the heart; it is spoken.

that if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with your heart you believe and are justified, and with your mouth you confess and are saved.

Romans 10:9-10

The verb Paul uses, homologeō, and its noun homologia (ὁμολογία), are often explained as ‘saying the same thing’: repeating what God has said, and saying it together with all who share the faith. Timothy "made the good confession before many witnesses" (1 Timothy 6:12), and Hebrews urges, "let us hold firmly to what we profess" (Hebrews 4:14). Wesley notes on Romans 10:10 that "Confession here implies the whole of outward, as believing does the root of all inward, religion" Wesley. In the age of persecution the church gave the honoured title ‘confessor’ to those who suffered for Christ without denying him.

Confessions as documents

The church has also written its confession down. If the ancient creeds are brief summaries shared by the whole church, a confession of faith is usually a fuller statement in which one church or tradition answers the questions of its own day from Scripture. Many were written in the Reformation era. In 1530 the Lutheran princes presented the Augsburg Confession to the emperor at the Diet of Augsburg Augsburg Confession; in 1527 Swiss Anabaptists agreed on the Schleitheim Confession Schleitheim Confession; the Reformed churches produced, among others, the Belgic Confession (1561) and the Westminster Confession (1646); and English Particular Baptists based their Second London Confession on Westminster Second London Baptist Confession.

These confessions did not invent a new faith; they built on the creeds. The Belgic Confession opens with an echo of Romans 10:

We all believe with the heart, and confess with the mouth, that there is one only simple and spiritual Being, which we call God

Belgic Confession, art. 1

What authority they have

Protestants do not set their confessions beside Scripture. Scripture is the rule that measures everything else; a confession is a ‘subordinate standard’, itself measured by Scripture. In many Presbyterian churches ministers and elders vow at ordination to receive the Westminster Confession as containing the doctrine taught in Scripture, and the first Presbyterian presbytery in Korea adopted the Twelve Articles in 1907 together with the Shorter Catechism Twelve Articles. Lutherans hold to the Book of Concord (1580), and in 1784 John Wesley abridged the Thirty-Nine Articles into twenty-four articles for the Methodists in America.

Baptists have written many confessions but generally treat them as declarations of what a body of churches believes, insisting that nothing but Scripture binds the conscience. Some churches keep no such documents at all, under the banner ‘no creed but the Bible’. The Catholic and Orthodox churches rely less on confessional documents of this kind than on the ancient creeds, the councils and the church's teaching as a whole. For the Reformed confessions see The Reformed confessions; a statement of faith taught by question and answer is called a catechism.