The Value of Confessional Commitments

James Ritchey

As office bearers in the Reformed and Presbyterian Church, the Lord has blessed us with a wealth of riches. First and foremost, He has blessed us with His Word. And the Bible is, as Christians and as church officers, our ultimate authority.1 There is no higher standard than His Word, and it is to be, as our own Confessional Standards declare, “The supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined.”2 All this to say, if we are going to be officers in Christ’s church, we need to be Bible men.

The Lord has also gifted us with the benefit of church history, and with the confessional formulations of the church through the ages. This perhaps reached its zenith in the seventeenth century with the publication of The Westminster Confession of Faith and its subsequent catechisms.3 Our denomination has adopted as its confessional statement the Westminster Standards, and we hold these standards to be an excellent summary of the truths of Scripture which has not been surpassed even today. The Standards have lost none of their relevance, and even as the challenges of today have changed, they still form a coherent and biblical response. Indeed, as the Standards were expertly crafted by men sitting under the Scripture who prayed and wrestled and debated over their formulations, the value of these formulations still shine through today.
Paul tells Timothy to “Follow the pattern of the sound words that you have heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. By the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, guard the good deposit entrusted to you.” (2 Timothy 1:13-14, English Standard Version) One of the ways in which we hold fast to the pattern of truth set forth in the Scripture and “guard the good deposit” is by formulation of our doctrines and holding to those formulations. The Lord, we hold, has preserved His Word through the ages, and as He has given to His church men to pour over that Word, He has in His providence gifted us with churchmen to form consensus documents such as our Confession of Faith and its Catechisms.
We hold that the Confession is not the Scripture, and it is not infallible. Certainly if Scripture were to correct us in regard to something in the Confession, we would be conscience bound to amend the Confession. However, even after a few hundred years, the Confession is still seen as a faithful summary of Christian and biblical truth.
Though I doubt this is a controversial statement in the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, I would argue that holding to our Confessional Standards (though, of course, this is subservient to the Word of God) helps us to keep the main thing the main thing. As the Confession sets forth clearly Scripture’s teaching on important doctrines from the doctrine of Scripture, to the doctrine of God, the doctrine of man, the doctrine of Christ, the doctrine of salvation, the doctrine of the

1 This is simply to echo what is set forth in Westminster Confession of Faith chapter 1. For example, WCF 1.4 tells us the origin of Scripture’s authority over us: “The authority of the Holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed and obeyed, dependeth not upon the testimony of any man, or Church; but wholly upon God (who is truth itself) the author thereof: and therefore it is to be received because it is the Word of God.”

2 WCF 1.10.
3 We also greatly benefit from other confessional standards such as The Three Forms of Unity.

church and of the last things, etc... this keeps us grounded in Scripture’s teaching. It keeps us from drifting into man-made doctrines and distinctives, and it keeps us God-centered. Cornelius Van Til rightly said, “Our theology should be God centered because our life should be God centered.”4 The Christian life, in other words, ought to have a vertical, Godward orientation; so too does Christian theology have a Godward orientation. Our Confessional commitments far from hampering our commitment to the Scripture actually help us to stay connected to the Scripture as it has come about as the fruit of biblical reflection. So too, our Confessional commitments help us to remain fixed on God and to keep away from manmade and man-centered distinctives.

This is highly important, as it is often a temptation to drift toward our own opinions more so than what has been revealed to us in the Bible. It can also be our tendency to craft new forms of legalism, from whatever side of the “rightward” or “leftward” perspective and drift from the Gospel message. As the Gospel message is central to the Bible, as we vow to uphold the Westminster Standards, we are also by implication vowing to uphold the centrality of the Gospel message as it is set forth in the Scripture.

Again, the Westminster Standards are not the Bible, and they are not inerrant or infallible. It is only the Scripture which is said to be “breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” (2 Timothy 3:16-17) The Bible is the inspired, inerrant, infallible and sufficient Word of God. It was out of a desire to formulate and systematize precisely the doctrines of the Scripture from which the Westminster Standards came. And it is out of a desire to preserve the “pattern of the sound words” in the Bible within our denomination and churches that we adhere to the Westminster Standards.

We are always growing in our understanding of Scripture, but again, our Standards remain a faithful and relevant exposition of the teaching of the Scripture even in this age. Certainly, its teaching on the Scripture presents a counter to the epistemological commitments of our day. Its teaching on the nature of man has much to say to the present day confusion over identity. Its teaching on Christ and salvation presents a counter to the universalistic ideas of salvation and calls us once more to embrace the One who is “the way, and the truth, and the life.”

In closing, I think these words from John Murray present to us good summary of why the Standards are valuable today:

Oftentimes it is pleaded that the Christian message must be adapted to the modern man. It is true that the message must be proclaimed to modern man, and to modern man in the context in which he lives and in language he can understand. But it is much more true and important to plead that modern man must be adapted to the gospel. It is not truth that the doctrine of the Confession is irrelevant to the modern man. It is indeed meaningless to him until he listens to it. But when a man today becomes earnest about the Christian faith, when he gives heed to

4 Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology (The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company: Phillipsburg, NJ, 1979), 1.

Scripture as the Word of God, when he faces up to the challenge of unbelieving ways of thought and life and demands the answer which Christianity provides, he cannot rest with anything less than the consistency and vigour which the Confession exemplifies. Unbelief is potent and subtle, and the believer requires the truth of God in its fullest expression if he is to be furnished to faithful witness and confession.5

5 John Murray, “The Importance and Relevance of the Westminster Confession,” found in The Collected Writings of John Murray: Vol. 1: The Claims of Truth (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1976, 2015), pgs. 316-322; quote taken from pg. 322.