The Creedal Imperative E-Book

Carl R. Trueman

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 355

Beschreibung

Recent years have seen a number of high profile scholars converting to Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy while a trend in the laity expresses an eclectic hunger for tradition. The status and role of confessions stands at the center of the debate within evangelicalism today as many resonate with the call to return to Christianity's ancient roots. Carl Trueman offers an analysis of why creeds and confessions are necessary, how they have developed over time, and how they can function in the church of today and tomorrow. He writes primarily for evangelicals who are not particularly confessional in their thinking yet who belong to confessional churches—Baptists, independents, etc.—so that they will see more clearly the usefulness of the church's tradition.

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“It is commonplace among many church leaders to dispute the need for confessions of faith on the grounds of the supreme authority of the Bible. In this timely book, Trueman demonstrates effectively how such claims are untenable. We all have creeds—the Bible itself requires them—but some are unwritten, not open to public accountability, and the consequences can be damaging. Trueman’s case deserves the widest possible hearing.”

Robert Letham, Director of Research, Senior Lecturer in Systematic and Historical Theology, Wales Evangelical School of Theology; author, The Holy Trinity and Union with Christ

“In its creeds and confessions, the church affirms its allegiance to the God of the gospel and commits itself to think, speak, and govern its life in ways shaped by the gospel. This lively book, full of vigorous argument and biblical good sense, tells us why.”

John Webster, Professor of Systematic Theology, University of Aberdeen

“The apostle Paul once told Timothy that a minister was to be kind, able to teach, patient, and gentle (2 Tim. 2:24). In The Creedal Imperative, Carl Trueman demonstrates that he is not only able to teach the Word and how it has come down to us throughout history, but also how to do so with kindness, patience, and ­gentleness—precisely the qualities that are needed to convince in our creedless, ahistorical, and shallow age. As one whose entire ministry of preaching, teaching, and writing has been taken up with the Word as confessed in the great creeds and confessions of Christendom, I wholeheartedly recommend this book.”

Daniel R. Hyde, Pastor, Oceanside United Reformed Church, Oceanside, California; author, God in Our Midst; Welcome to a Reformed Church; and Why Believe in God?

“Herein is a truly inspiring vision, that churches be freed from the vapid, the fickle, and the dysfunctional by a deeper enjoyment of the faith we have received. Trueman has shown that use of the creeds is both necessary and beautifully enriching. Informative and compelling, this book has what it takes to do great good.”

Michael Reeves, Head of Theology, Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship (UCCF); author, Delighting in the Trinity and The Unquenchable Flame

“I know of few people better equipped to write this book. As both a scholar and a pastor, Trueman combines his expertise as a historian with some important biblical observations to make a convincing case for The Creedal Imperative. This book will prove to be immensely useful in today’s ecclesiastical climate.”

Mark Jones, Senior Minister, Faith Vancouver Presbyterian Church; coauthor, A Puritan Theology

“Trueman, again, has given us a stimulating book. He manages to demonstrate the relevance of creeds by showing how new the old ones are. The book is not only a must-read for those who stick to creeds without knowing why or those whose creed it is to have no creed, but for everyone who tries to practice the Christian faith.”

Herman Selderhuis, director Refo500, The Netherlands

“This is an engrossing survey, sparklingly contemporary yet eruditely historical. But it is also an urgent wake-up call, which, if heeded, would deliver Evangelicalism from its current isolation, shallowness, and confusion—and from the autocracy of private empire-builders. Informative, readable, and stimulating all at once.”

Donald Macleod, Emeritus Professor of Systematic Theology, Free Church of Scotland College

“Trueman states that creeds and confessions are both necessary for the well-being of the church and are, in fact, required by the Bible. His arguments are wide-ranging and include biblical exposition, lessons from church history, and modern cultural factors that may be unconsciously influencing one’s view of the issue. In addition, there is the typical Trueman humor and odd examples sprinkled throughout the book. In the end, I agree with him and will require this book for my seminary course on creeds.”

Robert J. Cara, Chief Academic Officer, Hugh and Sallie Reaves Professor of New Testament, Reformed Theological Seminary

“Today there is a challenge to the authority of the church including the authority of Scripture. The Creedal Imperative speaks to the necessity of creeds and confessions, which tend to save us from attempts to privately interpret the Scripture. Trueman demonstrates how creeds and confessions are strategic checkpoints, intended not only to enable us to express our beliefs, but also to keep us from misunderstanding God’s truth. Properly used, creeds and confessions, under the authority of God’s Word, enable us to hear God’s voice—they are our speaking what we understand God has spoken to us in Scripture. For those who maintain, ‘We have no creed or confession but the Bible,’ this book is a must-read. For those who understand the place of creeds and confessions in the life of Christian faith, this book is also a must-read. It is all about understanding God’s truth. I commend Trueman for his careful demonstration of clear exegesis, sound theology, understanding of church history, and, consequently, his ability to understand the times in which we live. You will be blessed by this book.”

Charles H. Dunahoo, Coordinator, PCA CEP; author, Making Kingdom Disciples; Changing Trends in Missions; and Foundation and Authority

“Though it might sound a bit hackneyed for a book commendation, this is a book I would love to have written! Carl Trueman’s case for what he terms ‘the creedal imperative’ of the Christian faith is spot-on. Trueman not only identifies but also deftly rebuts a number of traditional as well as more recent objections in contemporary culture to creeds and confessions. On the one hand, he shows the untenability of the ‘no creed but Christ, no book but the Bible’ position of many evangelical Christians. And on the other hand, he defends the use of creeds and confessions that summarize and defend the teaching of Scripture without supplementing Scripture or diminishing its authority.”

Cornelis P. Venema, President, Professor of Doctrinal Studies, Mid-America Reformed Seminary

The CREEDAL

I M P E R A T I V E

The Creedal Imperative Copyright © 2012 by Carl R. Trueman

Published by Crossway 1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Cover design: Studio Gearbox Cover images: Thinkstock Interior design and typesetting: Lakeside Design Plus

First printing 2012 Printed in the United States of America

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-2190-4 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-2191-1 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-2192-8 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-2193-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Trueman, Carl R.

The creedal imperative / Carl R. Trueman.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4335-2190-4 (tp)

1. Creeds. I. Title.

BT990.T78 2012

238—dc23

2012013405

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

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Dedicated with gratitude to the students and friends at Cornerstone Presbyterian Church who have attended the monthly “Tabletalk at the Truemans’” over the years, where many of the ideas in this book

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 The Cultural Case against Creeds and Confessions

2 The Foundations of Creedalism

3 The Early Church

4 Classical Protestant Confessions

5 Confession as Praise

6 On the Usefulness of Creeds and Confessions

Conclusion

Appendix: On Revising and Supplementing Confessions

For Further Reading

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Allan Fisher and Justin Taylor at Crossway for encouraging me in this project and waiting patiently as I missed a couple of deadlines. At Westminster, I have benefited from conversations about the nature of confessionalism with my friends, Tara, Sandy Finlayson, Greg Beale, Peter Lillback, Dick Gaffin, and David Garner. I must also thank Catriona, John, and Peter for providing such a happy home and escape from work.

Introduction

A colleague of mine loves to tell the following story about a church he used to visit. The pastor there had a habit of standing in the pulpit, seizing his Bible in his right hand, raising it above his head, and pointing to it with his left. “This,” he declared in a booming voice, “is our only creed and our only confession.” Ironically, the church was marked by teaching that included the five points of Calvinism, dispensationalism, and a form of polity that reflected in broad terms its origins as a Plymouth Brethren assembly. In other words, while its only creed was the Bible, it actually connected in terms of the details of its life and teaching to almost no other congregation in the history of the church. Clearly, the church did have a creed, a summary view of what the Bible taught on grace, eschatology, and ecclesiology; it was just that nobody ever wrote it down and set it out in public. That is a serious problem. As I shall argue in subsequent pages, it is actually unbiblical; and that is ironic and somewhat sad, given the (no doubt) sincere desire of the pastor and the people of this church to have an approach to church life that guaranteed the unique status of the Bible.

The burden that motivates my writing of this book is my belief that creeds and confessions are vital to the present and future well-being of the church. Such a statement may well jar with evangelical ears that are used to the notion that Scripture alone is to be considered the sole, supreme authority for Christian faith and practice. Does my claim not strike at the very heart of the notion of Scripture alone? Does it not place me in jeopardy of regarding both Scripture and something outside Scripture, some tradition, as being of coordinate and potentially equal authority? And is there not a danger that commitment to time-bound creeds and confessions might well doom the church to irrelevance in the modern world?

These are, indeed, legitimate concerns, and I intend to address these, and more, in the coming pages. Here, however, I want to place my own cards on the table. Every author writes from a particular perspective, with arguments shaped to some extent by personal commitments, background, and belief. Thus, it seems entirely appropriate to allow the reader insight into my own context and predispositions in order to be better prepared to understand what I am going to say.

I am a professor at a confessional Presbyterian seminary, Westminster in Philadelphia, and a minister in a confessional Presbyterian denomination, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. In other words, I am a confessional Presbyterian. The terms “confessional” and “Presbyterian” are crucial for understanding both institutions. To take the latter term first, “Presbyterian” means that I am committed to a Presbyterian form of church government, whereby the church is ruled at a congregational level by a session, or committee, of elders; at a regional level by a presbytery of ministers and elders drawn from the churches in the area; and at a national level by a General Assembly of ministers and elders drawn from all parts of the country. When I became a minister in my denomination, I took vows to uphold this form of government both in what I teach and in the respect I give to the various courts of the church.

More significant for this book is the adjective “confessional.” This means that I am committed to the idea that the Presbyterian confessional position, as stated in the Westminster Standards, represents a summary of the teaching of the Bible on key points such as who God is, who Christ is, what justification means, and so on. When I became a minister, I took a solemn vow to that effect. This points to another aspect of being confessional: my vows connect to a structure of church government such that, if I am found to be teaching something inconsistent with what I am pledged to uphold, I can be held to account. If necessary, in the worst situations, I can even be removed from public office in the church.

Notice, I said above that my vow reflects the fact that I believe the statements in the Westminster Standards are a summary of Scripture’s teaching, not that I believe the Westminster Standards to represent teaching supplemental to Scripture, or independent of it. Rather, they summarize what is already there in Scripture itself.

Now, this position is not without its problems. How, one might ask, do I avoid making the Standards a kind of a priori framework into which Scripture is made to fit? In other words, is there not a danger here of tail wagging dog, of treating the summary as the grid by which I read Scripture? I will address these, and similar, questions later. At this point, my purpose is simply to let readers know the position that I occupy so they can understand the perspective from which this book is being written. In sum, I not only believe that creeds and confessions are good for the church, I am also committed by vow to uphold the teaching of a particular confession. This indicates that the status of creeds and confessions is not for me simply a matter of intellectual interest; I am committed to the notion at a deep, personal level.

The fact that I am a confessional Christian places me at odds with the vast majority of evangelical Christians today. That is ironic, because most Christian churches throughout the ages have defined themselves by commitment to some form of creed, confession, or doctrinal statement. This is the case for the Eastern Orthodox, for Roman Catholics, and for Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican Protestants. Some streams of Baptists have also had confessions; and many independent churches today that may not think of themselves as confessional have brief statements of faith that define who they are and what they believe. Furthermore, as I shall argue later, even those churches and Christians who repudiate the whole notion of creeds and confessions will yet tend to operate with an implicit creed.

Despite this, it is true to say that we live in an anticonfessional age, at least in intention if not always in practice. The most blatant examples of this come from those who argue that the Protestant notion of Scripture alone simply requires the rejection of creeds and confessions. Scripture is the sole authority; of what use therefore are further documents? And how can one ever claim such documents have authority without thus derogating from the authority of Scripture? These arguments have a certain specious force, but I will argue in chapters 1 and 2 that, while the reasons for anticonfessionalism are manifold, many of them are driven more by cultural forces of which too many are unaware. Awareness of these forces, by contrast, may not automatically free us from their influence but can at least offer us the opportunity of subjecting them to critique.

I do want to make the point here that Christians are not divided between those who have creeds and confessions and those who do not; rather, they are divided between those who have public creeds and confessions that are written down and exist as public documents, subject to public scrutiny, evaluation, and critique, and those who have private creeds and confessions that are often improvised, unwritten, and thus not open to public scrutiny, not susceptible to evaluation and, crucially and ironically, not, therefore, subject to testing by Scripture to see whether they are true.

Anticonfessionalism among evangelicals is actually closely related to their putative rejection of tradition. For many, the principle of Scripture alone stands against any notion that the church’s tradition plays any constructive role in her life or thought. Some regard this as one of the principal insights of the Protestant Reformers: Rome had (and has) tradition; Protestantism has Scripture. The sixteenth-century Reformation was thus a struggle over authority, with church tradition being pitted against the supremacy of Scripture; and modern evangelicals stand in lockstep with their Protestant forebears on this matter.

A few moments of reflection, however, indicate how misleading and, in fact, untrue is the claim that Protestants have the Bible rather than tradition. Most evangelicals, for example, will typically use Bible translations, and such translations, be they the NIV, RSV, ESV, or KJV, stand within established traditions of Bible translation, linguistics, lexicography, etc. Further, beneath these translations lie the original Hebrew and Greek texts; so traditions of textual understanding also underlie these translations and, even for those linguistic geniuses who are more comfortable with just the Hebrew and Greek, these various traditions will shape the choice of text, the way the languages were learned, and the kind of choices made on matters of obscure grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. Thus, “Scripture alone,” whatever else it means, cannot mean Scripture approached in a vacuum.

And we can take this reflection on tradition a step further. All Protestant pastors, even the most fundamentalist, will, if they are remotely competent, prepare their sermons with the help of lexicons, commentaries, and books of theology. As soon as they take down one of these books from their bookcases and start to read it, of course, they are drawing positively on church tradition. They are not simply reading the Word of God; they are reading the thoughts and reflections on that Word offered by someone else and articulated using words, sentences, and paragraphs that are not found anywhere in the Bible. Indeed, as soon as one uses the word “Trinity” from the pulpit, one is drawing on tradition, not Scripture.

In fact, tradition is not the issue; it is how one defines that tradition, and how one understands the way it connects to Scripture, which are really the points at issue. Indeed, this was the crux of the Reformation, which was not so much a struggle between Scripture and tradition as between different types of traditions. In a famous exchange between a leading light of the Catholic Reformation, Cardinal Sadoleto, and the Reformer, John Calvin, Sadoleto argued that the Protestants had abandoned the church tradition. Calvin responded that, on the contrary, the Protestants had the true tradition; it was the Catholic Church that had moved away from the truth. The point was simple and well-made: the tradition that transmitted the correct understanding of Scripture from generation to generation belonged to the Protestants.

Here is not the place to debate the veracity of Calvin’s claim regarding the content of tradition; suffice it to note that he understood the Reformation not as Scripture versus tradition but as scriptural tradition versus unscriptural tradition. Thoughtful Protestants then, and ever since, have understood the Reformers as arguing for what we might call a tradition that is normed by Scripture. In other words, Protestants know that they use language and conceptual terminology not found explicitly in the Bible; but they understand such are useful in understanding what Scripture says and, at the point where they are found to be inadequate for this task, or even to contradict Scripture, there they must be modified or abandoned.

The same is true of the creeds and confessions of the church, which are, one might say, the most concentrated deposits of tradition, as affirmed by the church. These documents are often referred to as normed norms or, to use the Latin, norma normata, in contrast to Scripture which is the norming norm, or norma normans. What that means is that the creeds and confessions represent a public statement of what a particular church or denomination believes that Scripture teaches in a synthetic form. By synthetic, I do not mean “false,” as in, say, a synthetic fiber like nylon, which is designed to look like cotton but is not really cotton. I mean rather a presentation that is not simply a collection of Bible verses but rather a thematic summary of what the Bible teaches. Thus, in the Nicene Creed, we have an explication of the identity of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which is considered to represent what the Bible as a whole teaches on this subject. The important point to note is that such statements are public, and thus open to public scrutiny in the light of what Scripture teaches. Thus, they can be accepted or rejected, modified or clarified, as and when they are found to be wanting; the context and means for such change we will discuss elsewhere. Here, I simply want the reader to note the synthetic and public nature of the documents.

This book consists of six chapters. In chapter 1, I look at some of the powerful currents within modern culture that serve to make the whole idea of creeds and confessions somewhat implausible. I do not intend to reduce evangelical objections to such secular forces, but I believe that an understanding of such forces can be of great help in clarifying why the case for confessionalism can be difficult to make at the present time.

In chapter 2, I look at the biblical teaching on a number of related points (the importance of language, the reality and unity of human nature, Paul’s emphasis on doctrine, on eldership, on a “form of sound words,” and on tradition). My conclusion is not only that creeds and confessions are plausible, given biblical teaching, but that Paul actually seems to assume that something like them will be a normal part of the postapostolic church’s life. In other words, there is a sense in which the claim to have no creed but the Bible is incoherent, given the fact that the Bible itself seems to teach the need for creeds.

In chapter 3, I outline the ecclesiological developments of relevance to the case for creeds and confessions. In particular, I focus on the Trinitarian/christological discussions between the Council of Nicaea in 325 and the Council of Chalcedon in 451. I also touch on the Apostles’ and the Athanasian creeds. Two important lessons I draw from this study relate to doctrinal complexity and the importance of the church. As to the former, history teaches that many Christian doctrines can only exist in a stable form within a relatively complex network of related doctrines. Christian theology, in other words, always has a certain ineradicable complexity, which has serious implications for the modern evangelical predilection for simple and very brief statements of faith. As to ecclesiology, it is clear from the early church that terms such as “heresy” really only have a meaningful content when connected to a church that has a specific confession.

In chapter 4, I deal with major Protestant confessional standards: the Anglican Articles and Homilies; the Lutheran Book of Concord; the Three Forms of Unity; the Westminster Standards; and the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith. This chapter is of necessity highly selective. Protestantism has produced a vast amount of confessional material, and so I have chosen to focus on those with which I am most familiar. In choosing these, I do not intend to imply that Arminians, General Baptists, Anabaptists, and others do not have confessions and cannot be confessional. I hope that anyone from these traditions who reads this book will see that the principles of confessionalism are not confined simply to those confessions I happen to have mentioned.

In chapter 5, in order to do justice to the doxological origins of Christian creeds and to underline the important function that such have played, and can continue to play, in the life of the church, I focus on creeds and praise. Too often we think of these documents in a negative sense, as if their sole purpose was simply to keep people out of the church and to offer a dry-as-dust account of the Christian faith. By contrast, creeds are central to Christian doxology.

In chapter 6, I make the case for the usefulness of confessions by highlighting a number of advantages to having them, from limitation of church power to a proper pedagogical structure for church life. After the conclusion, I also include an appendix, addressing the vexing question of the possibility and practicality of confessional revision.

In writing this book, I come to my subject as one convinced that confessional Christianity captures a very important aspect of biblical teaching on the church. I was an evangelical for many years; discovering confessional Presbyterianism in my early thirties was a liberating experience. Nevertheless, I am aware that there can be a rather distasteful, not to mention sinful, tendency among many confessional writers to look down with scorn and derision on those who are not confessional. I trust that I have not written in that spirit; rather, I hope that this book will go some way to persuading nonconfessional Christians who love the Bible and seek to follow Christ that confessionalism, far from being something to fear, can actually help them to better protect that which is so dear to them.

The astute reader should now be able to see the case I want to make in this book: I want to argue that creeds and confessions are thoroughly consistent with the belief that Scripture alone is the unique source of revelation and authority. Indeed, I want to go somewhat further: I want to argue that creeds and confessions are, in fact, necessary for the well-being of the church, and that churches that claim not to have them place themselves at a permanent disadvantage when it comes to holding fast to that form of sound words which was so precious to the aging Paul as he advised his young protégé, Timothy. Linked to this latter point, I want to make the case that it is at least arguable, based on Scripture, that the need for creeds and confessions is not just a practical imperative for the church but is also a biblical imperative.

1

The Cultural Case against Creeds and Confessions

In the introduction, I briefly mentioned the standard, knee-jerk reaction against creeds and confessions, often found in evangelical circles, that such documents supplant the unique place of the Bible, place tradition on an equal—or even superior—footing with Scripture, and thus compromise a truly evangelical, Protestant notion of authority. While I will offer a more thorough response to this line of objection later, I did note that all Christians engage in confessional synthesis; the difference is simply whether one adheres to a public confession, subject to public scrutiny, or to a private confession that is, by its very nature, immune to such examination.

Before proceeding to a more thoroughgoing exposition of the use and the usefulness of confessions, however, it is worth spending some time reflecting on other reasons why creeds and confessions are regarded with such suspicion these days. While the objection to them is often couched in language that appears to be jealous for biblical authority, there are also powerful forces at work within our modern world that militate against adherence to historic statements of the Christian faith. As the goldfish swimming in the bowl is unaware of the temperature and taste of the water in which he swims, so often the most powerfully formative forces of our societies and cultures are those with which we are so familiar as to be functionally unaware of how they shape our thinking, even our thinking about what exactly it means to say that Scripture has supreme and unique authority. It would be a tragic irony if the rejection of creeds and confessions by so many of those who sincerely wish to be biblically faithful turned out to be not an act of faithfulness but rather an unwitting capitulation to the spirit of the age. It is some of the forces that shape this spirit that I address in this chapter.

Three Assumptions

My conviction that creeds and confessions are a good and necessary part of healthy, biblical church life rests on a host of different arguments and convictions; but, at root, there are three basic presuppositions to which I hold that must be true for the case for confessions to be a sound one. These are as follows:

1. The past is important, and has things of positive relevance to teach us. Creeds and confessions are, almost by definition, documents that were composed at some point in the past; and, in most cases, we are talking about the distant past, not last week or last year. Thus, to claim that creeds and confessions still fulfill positive functions, in terms of transmitting truth from one generation to another or making it clear to the outside world what it is that particular churches believe, requires that we believe the past can still speak to us today. Thus, any cultural force that weakens or attenuates the belief that the past can be a source of knowledge and even wisdom is also a force that serves to undermine the relevance of creeds and confessions.

2. Language must be an appropriate vehicle for the stable transmission of truth across time and geographical space. Creeds and confessions are documents that make theological truth claims. That is not to say that that is all that they do: the role, for example, of the Apostles’ and the Nicene creeds in many church liturgies indicates that they can also fulfill doxological as well as pedagogical and theological roles; but while they can thus be more, they can never be less than theological, doctrinal statements that rest upon and express truth claims about God and the world he has created. They do this, of course, in words; and so, if these claims are to be what they claim to be—statements about a reality beyond language—then language itself must be an adequate medium for performing this task. Thus, any force that undermines general confidence in language as a medium capable of conveying information or of constituting relationships is also a force that strikes at the validity of creeds and confessions.

3. There must be a body or an institution that can authoritatively compose and enforce creeds and confessions. This body or institution is the church. I will address the significance of this in more detail in subsequent chapters, but it is important to understand at the outset that confessions are not private documents. They are significant because they have been adopted by the church as public declarations of her faith, and their function cannot be isolated from their ecclesiastical nature and context. This whole concept assumes that institutions and institutional authority structures are not necessarily bad or evil or defective simply by their very existence as institutions. Thus, any cultural force that overthrows or undermines notions of external or institutional authority effectively removes the mechanisms by which creeds and confessions can function as anything other than simple summaries of doctrine for private edification.

If these are the presuppositions of confessionalism, then it is clear that we have a major problem, because each of these three basic presuppositions represents a profoundly countercultural position, something that stands opposed to the general flow of modern life. Today, the past is more often a source of embarrassment than a positive source of knowledge; and when it is considered useful, it is usually as providing examples of what not to do or of defective, less advanced thinking than of truth for the present. Language is similarly suspect: in a world of spin, dishonest politicians, and ruthless marketing, language can often seem to be—indeed, often is—manipulative, deceptive, or downright wicked, but rarely transparent and something to be taken at face value. Then, finally, institutions, from multinational corporations to governments, seem to be in the game of self-perpetuation, bullying, and control for the sake of control. They are never seen as entities that exist in practice for the real benefit of others. Thus, the big three presuppositions of confessionalism fly in the face of the values of contemporary culture, and confessionalists clearly have their work cut out to mount a counterattack. And such a counterattack begins with the simple truism of every successful campaigner, from wartime leaders to the coaches of high school track teams: know your enemy. In this context, knowing the enemy may also help us to realize how, in our defense of the unique authority of Scripture, our understanding of what that means is sometimes shaped more by the hidden forces of the world around us than by the teaching of Scripture and the historic life and practice of the church.

Devaluing the Past

Science

Numerous forces within modern culture serve to erode any notion that the past might be a useful source of wisdom. Perhaps the most obvious is the dominance of science. I am not, of course, referring to the content of science. Science undergirds almost all of those things which make life bearable, from electric lightbulbs to cancer treatment. To say science is the enemy is not, in this instance, to be antiscience. Rather, I am thinking of the kind of cultural mindset that science helps to cultivate and reinforce.

Science, by its very nature, assumes that the present is better than the past and the future will be better than the present. Again, this is not in itself a bad thing. It is surely part of what drives the laudable curiosity that motivates scientists and leads to major breakthroughs; and there is much evidence that this—the fact the present is better than the past—is, indeed, the case. As one who teaches history, I am often asked by students in which period of history I would most have enjoyed living. My answer is simple and straightforward: this one, the here and now. Call me a weakling if you like, but I would much rather live in an era with analgesics, antibiotics, and flush toilets than in earlier periods where pain killers were unknown, medicine usually involved swallowing some kill-or-cure snake oil made by a wrinkled old crone with dubious personal hygiene, and the “facilities” were little more than a hole in the ground on the edge of the village. By and large, in areas where it is relevant, science has made the world a better place. The evidence is not all one way, however: the Holocaust, for example, is one instance where science was clearly used to destroy rather than enhance life, and that on a huge scale. But, by and large, science has brought with it huge gains, from medicine to dishwashers.

The problem is that science also comes loaded with a certain philosophical bias, and that is, as stated above, that the past is inferior to the present. It has a built-in narrative of progress, whereby everything—or at least almost everything—just keeps getting better; and the problem is that this tends to inculcate a broader cultural attitude that applies the same kind of expectation in other areas. Throw concepts like evolution into the mix, and you have a gravitational pull within the culture toward the future, built on the assumed inferiority of the past.

This narrative of scientific progress instills a belief not simply in the superiority of the present in relation to the past but also in its uniqueness. This time in which we live has so much more knowledge, displays so much more sophistication, and is so much more complicated than the past. Thus that past is consequently of no real use in addressing the problems or issues of the present, so great is the difference between them. One would not, for example, use a horse and cart to transport fuel from an oil refinery to a petrol station. Nor would one today consult a seventeenth-century textbook on surgery to find out how to remove a burst appendix. So why would one turn to some confession written in the fourth or the seventeenth century to find a summary guide to what Christians today should believe?

Some years ago, I was exposed to precisely this attitude while teaching a class on the ancient church. At some point, I mentioned that a certain professor from another institution was going to be visiting campus to deliver some lectures on the Westminster Standards, that is, the Confession and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms. A student immediately asked why she should bother attending these because “some documents written in the seventeenth century seem to have very little to do with” her ministry. I asked her if she had read these apparently irrelevant documents recently. She said she had not. I then pointed out to her that these documents had been regarded by many people as vital and vibrant expressions of the Christian faith since their composition. Given this, and their connection to historic traditions and trajectories of church life and Christian thought, I suggested with every ounce of tact and gentleness I could muster that she might perhaps better ask herself not so much what relevance they have to her ministry but what relevance her ministry had to the church. Her assumption was simple: the past could not really speak in any meaningful way to the present. She was truly a child of the scientific age.

Technology

Closely related to the role of science in cultivating an attitude that downgrades the importance of the past is that of technology. A simple example should make this point clear. My mother lives in an old weaver’s cottage in the Cotswolds. In what is now her living room, there is a stone fireplace and, in that fireplace, there are a series of small holes, roughly an inch in diameter, now plugged with wood, which indicate where the weaver would have had his loom. It is easy to imagine a scene in the early nineteenth century in which the weaver was hard at work making cloth when one of his children wandered into the room and inquired as to what exactly he was doing. No doubt, the weaver would have sat the child down and explained how the loom operated, how the shuttle carried the woolen thread from one side to the other and slowly but surely formed a sheet of fabric. The flow of knowledge from the older generation to the younger was clear; this was no doubt repeated many times in preindustrial societies around the world, where children typically grew up to follow in the footsteps of their parents and were thus more or less apprenticed to their parents from an early age.

Now, jump forward nearly two hundred years to a scene in the same room. I am sitting there, trying to set up my mother’s DVR to record a Gloucester versus Leicester rugby match and, try as I might, I cannot get the machine to do what I want it to do. In walks my niece and asks what I am trying to do. After I explain to her what is going on, she sighs, rolls her eyes, picks up the remote control, and with what seems to me to be two touches of the buttons, has the machine set up to record the match. With a shake of her head, she walks back into the kitchen.

Notice what has happened here, and what the significance of these two encounters is: the flow of knowledge has been reversed. No longer is the younger dependent upon the older; rather, the older is dependent upon the younger. Technology, because it is constantly and rapidly changing, inevitably favors those who have been brought up with it, and who have the kind of young, agile minds that develop new skills quickly and easily. You cannot easily teach a middle-aged historian, any more than an old dog, new tricks; and that means that technology will always favor the young.

This is just one anecdote and, as my secretary will tell you, I am among the more—ahem—technologically challenged men of my generation; but the general point is a good one. The technological world, particularly given the rapidity with which it is constantly changing, creates an environment where the assumption is that older people are going to be dependent upon the younger. Taken by itself, perhaps, this might not be so significant; but combined with the impact of science as a whole upon cultural attitudes, it undoubtedly plays its role in the bias against age, and thus against the past, which is a hallmark of the modern world and which is not incidental in the general antipathy among Christians for creeds and confessions.

Consumerism

A third cultural force that militates against respect for the past is consumerism. As with science, there is much that could be said here, but I will restrict myself to the most salient aspects of the phenomenon.

Consumerism can be defined as an over-attachment to material goods and possessions such that one’s meaning or worth is determined by them. This definition is reasonably helpful but misses one key aspect of the phenomenon: it is not just the attachment to material things, it is also the need for constant acquisition of the same. Life is enriched not simply by possessing goods but by the process of acquiring them; consumerism is as much a function of boredom as it is of crass materialism.

What has this to do with rejection of the past? Simply this: consumerism is predicated on the idea that life can be fulfilling through acquiring something in the future that one does not have in the present. This manifests itself in the whole strategic nature of marketing. For example, every time you switch on your television set, you are bombarded with advertisements that may be for a variety of different goods and services but that all preach basically the same message: what you have now is not enough for happiness; you need something else, something new, in order to find true fulfillment. I believe that this reinforces fundamentally negative attitudes toward the past.

Think for a moment: how many readers of this book are wearing clothes they bought ten years ago? How many are using computers they bought five years ago? Or driving automobiles more than fifteen years old? With the exception of vintage car collectors, the economically poor, and those with absolutely no fashion sense, most readers will probably respond in the negative to at least one, if not all three, of these questions. Yet when we ask why this is the case, there is no sensible answer. We can put a man on the moon, so we could probably make an automobile that lasts for fifty years; most of us do little on computers that could not have been done on the machines we owned five years ago; and we all throw away clothes that still fit us and are quite presentable. So why the need for the new?