Being "Confessional"

Why do we call ourselves a "Confessional" Lutheran Church?

In our congregation, we are fond of referring to ourselves as a “conservative, confessional church.”

Most of us are familiar with conservatism. In the case of our church, it means we are connected to our past, and interpret the Bible with the conviction that it is God's revealed, true, and inerrant (without any errors) Word. We reject those who call the Bible a human invention, or a mixture of the divine and the human.

The word “confessional” is not so commonly understood. Normally, we think of a confession as something a person does as an admission of guilt. “Confess” has a root meaning of “acknowledge together.” In matters of error, we state that we have, indeed, done what's wrong -- we “fess up.” On Sunday mornings we “acknowledge together” our sin against God in the “Confession of Sins” in the hymnal.

But confession also has a another powerful meaning: It can also mean declaring what we believe. When we say, “Jesus Christ is Lord,” we are making a confession. We are “acknowledging together” that we believe that Jesus is the Lord.

Christians have always made confessions of what they believe. Lutherans have always been bold to publicly “confess” what we believe based on the teachings of the Bible. We don’t play games. If someone wants to know exactly what we believe or where we stand on some Biblical issue, we are eager to “confess” those beliefs to them. The earliest written “confessions of faith” that we hold to are the Creeds (statements of belief). These are The Apostles' Creed (337 AD), The Nicene Creed (325 AD), and The Athanasian Creed (1200 AD). Each of these is a summary of Christian, Biblical teaching (doctrine). Again, if someone would ask us what we believe, we could recite the Creeds as a concise “confession” of our beliefs.

During the time of the Reformation, in the mid-1500s, various interpretations of the Bible were being used by the parties involved. Martin Luther and his fellow-reformers went to Scripture to assemble statements of faith. They arranged these statements according to topic (in other words, they put all the passages that talk about Baptism together in one spot, and those passages that deal with God’s Law, and the Lord’s Supper, etc.). A formal, written “confession” pulls all these references together into a unified article which people can then read and agree on.

Six of these written “Confessions” were drawn together and, along with the three Creeds were bound into a book called, “The Book of Concord” (“Concord” means “agreement.”) These six written “confessions” of what we believe are: The Augsburg Confession (1530), The Apology To The Augsburg Confession (1530). [“Apology” here doesn’t mean that we were apologizing for writing the Augsburg Confession. The word “apology” can also mean “explanation”], The Smalcald Articles (1537), the Small Catechism (1529) [we all know that one!], The Large Catechism (1529), and The Formula of Concord (1579).  If you would like to read these confessions, they can be found here.

All who claimed the title Lutheran (or “Evangelical”, as Lutherans were called at the time) were asked to subscribe to (agree with) the Holy Scriptures as the source and norm of all Christian teaching and this “Book of Concord” (also called “The Lutheran Confessions”) as being correct expositions or explanations of Scripture. Pastors, other church workers, and congregations of The Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod are required to do the same if they wish to become and remain a part of The LCMS.

But there is one other way (besides agreeing with these confessional writings) that we can make a “confession” of our faith. We can do it by how we live our lives as God’s people in the world. Our confession of faith involves all we say, think, or do. It includes our confession of sins, since this acknowledges our guilt before God. It involves doing everything in life under the cross of Christ, directing ourselves toward a heavenly end. Confession's goal is to give all praise, honor, and glory to God.