The Proper Use of a Confession | Theocast Clips

The Sufficiency of Christ and the Role of Confessions

But one of the things that has helped me the most in that we try and promote on this podcast that has transformed my mind more than anything is that the sufficiency of Christ and the sufficiency of what God has done for us in Christ, which is what the primary message of the confessions are, whether no matter what confession you may grab historically, those are the type of things that has transformed my mind.

Every time I read the confession, which I think people need to understand that when you hear us say this, they're like, yeah, but you guys, the Bible is sufficient. The Bible is where the power is. And in many, Justin, in many ways, we aren't trying to put something above the Bible.

Confessions, Systematic Theology, and Biblical Authority

And when I've heard people critique theocast and critique reform theology and in general critique confessions, they're basically saying you guys are putting authority that is above the word of God. The opening statement of our confession literally says that the only source of truth and power is what?

The word of God.

That's right. Yeah, I mean, we don't need to go down this road too far, but all the confessions are is an exercise in systematic theology, doctrine. What does the scripture teach about subject A, B, C, D on down the line?

And yeah, all we're doing, even with these theological categories and some of these things we talk about regularly, law and gospel, ordinary means of grace, covenant theology, etc. These are things, the redemptive historical framework of scripture, right?

These are things that come up out of the scripture. They come up out of the text that we then see, learn, understand, and then take those things and go back to the text with those tools. That's right.

And we can better understand the whole and how it hangs together. That's all we're doing. Right. It's a very cyclical thing in that respect, like it comes up out of it and then we go back to the text with this stuff.

That's right. Yeah. And so I think people just need to, you know, take a breath, calm down, it's okay. And you've got to study, everybody has to study the scriptures, everybody. We did an episode, right?

Like everybody's got a theological framework. The question is, is your framework any good?

Why Churches Need Confessions

Well, this goes back to, if I asked modern evangelical churches that are in these big mega churches, what does your church believe? Where are they going to go? The only place they can go is to their website, unless they're part of SBC or something.

And oftentimes that's going to be a statement of faith that the pastors have written.

Or copied, more than likely copied from somewhere else. And which is fine because, which is what we're doing. We are reusing, we're not coming up with anything new. I don't have any problems with them copying somebody else or using some another document.

The question is, how do you know what that, how do you know how sufficient that document is? Justin, most of those documents are less than 1500 words. Sure. They are quick, small sentences about theological things that are broad enough to be evangelical, but they're not clear enough to lead you to what we would say is a sufficiency in understanding your relationship between God and the church and God's sufficiency in saving you.

They're just, this is who God is. This is who the Trinity is. This is our understanding of salvation and it tends to be very Arminian in that way. The point of it is, is that the first time I took enough moment, enough minutes to sit down and read the confession, it was not that I had learned anything new.

The Confessional Distinction Between God's Work and Human Effort

It was a concise, clear understanding of who God was, who I am, and here was the clearest distinction. And this is where I would love for us to talk about, if we can, for the next few minutes. The distinction that the confessions were very clear to make is the role of God in Christ and our role, where the two play together.

The Christianity that I heard was all about what I must do to not only save myself, to keep myself safe and then improve myself in sanctification. What does the confessions do? Completely reverses all of those roles and places upon the shoulders of God and not on the shoulders of man.

Sure. Yeah. I think what we most often, by default and by what we've been taught, believe is that we need to cooperate with God in order to be saved and if you really boil it down, it's up to me. I need to choose this, I need to do this, rather than as a Reformed confessional Protestant.

We're going to say that it is God's work from beginning to end. And I mean, I would have said that many people that I was in church with 10 years ago would have said that, but I think it is only a confessional posture that really aims to live that out.

That it's only God and more pointedly, it's only Christ. It's what he has done in the place of the sinner. All we do is receive it and we need to be reminded of it all the time because we forget it all the time.