The Value of Confessions

Here's an excerpt from The Value of Confessions, Douglas Kelly's contribution to the January issue of Tabletalk.

"To this day, Christian Churches, especially in the Reformation tradition, use a powerful tool for 'maintaining the form of sound words' and for spreading the gospel to the world—their confessional documents. The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century represented a major rupture in the medieval church, one in which more than one-third of Europe had to go back to the 'drawing board' to formulate their testimony to the rest of the world.

That drawing board was Holy Scripture, which consecrated pastor-scholars searched out on the basis of a fresh knowledge of the original languages, and also on the basis of a commitment to traditional Augustinianism and the church fathers. Hence, they saw themselves as true (or Reformed) catholics, not primarily a new denominational grouping, although they did wind up in new denominational connections owing to the fierce resistance of the Roman Catholic hierarchy to any serious reform."

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