ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONFESSIONS 1 CON1-Q00A JANUARY 2005 CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY: CAPTION FIRST, INC. P.O. BOX 1924 LOMBARD, IL 60148 * * * * * This text is being provided in a rough-draft format. Communications Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. * * * * >> DAVID: Thank you for that answer. My name is David, and as I did my reading for this course, this question occurred to me: Did the making of creeds stop with the publication of the Book of Concord, or might there be a time in the future when a new creed or confession is adopted? >> DR. CHARLES P. ARAND: I see it's time to bring out the old crystal ball. Well, with regard to your first question, I would have to say no, the making of creeds and confessions does not necessarily stop with the Book of Concord. It may appear to have inasmuch as we have not added any new documents to the Book of Concord since 1580. But I wouldn't say that we would close the door on the possibility of a creed or confessional statement being adopted by the church at some future date. I'm not sure that I see that on the immediate horizon, but certainly, we have to be open to the working of the Holy Spirit within the church. Having said that, there have been any number of statements or documents that have been put forward by churches in the last 500 years, and, indeed, in the past 20 years, one can think most recently, for example, of the joint declaration of the doctrine of justification. The statement or the document adopted by the Lutheran World Federation and the Vatican. One can think of the *Barman Confession, a statement of the confessing Church over against the Nazis in World War II. There have been other statements like that. Within the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, we have adopted statements in convention from time to time, a brief statement back in the 1930's, a statement of biblical and confessional principles in the 1970's. But none of these documents have yet achieved the status, I suppose, of a confession on the order of the Augsburg confession. Why is that? I�m not so sure. I suspect, in large part, it�s because they have not received the same kind of acclamation or use or affirmation on the part of the entire church, be it all Lutherans or all Protestants, as those documents that are in the Book of Concord. I suspect that one really cannot plan for this to happen. It simply happens. Certainly, the Augsburg Confession wasn't planned in a sense of that when *Maleck was writing it he said, okay, this is going to be the foundational doctrine of the Lutheran church for the next 500 years. He wrote it for a specific situation. And then as history unfolded in the development of the Lutheran Church, it settled in, you might say, or took on a very prominent role identifying Lutherans of the Augsburg Confession. So we can't necessarily plan for something like that to happen. I think it depends, in large part upon the working of the Holy Spirit within the church. But it may well be that at some point in the future, a document or a text will be just so critical, perhaps in a particular historical context, that it does become a confession on the order of the others in the Book of Concord. I will admit that within Germany, there have been some Lutheran churches who have maybe included the *Barman declaration as an appendix to the book of Concord. They felt it was important for them to do so. We have not. It was not part of our particular historical context. But as a final word, whatever happens in the future, we have to realize the task of confessing Christ continues to go on. In fact, I would perhaps conclude this particular lesson by referring to the origin of Christian confessions by tracing it back to Christ himself. When you take a look at Matthew 11 through Matthew 16, the preeminent question that keeps arising within those chapters is: Who is this guy? The very presence of Jesus provoked the question: Who is He. So you get Herod saying, is this John the Baptist come back alive? You get people in Nazareth saying, hey isn't this the carpenter's son? Who does he think he is? Again in Matthew 16, Jesus himself asks, who do people say that I am. He then turns to his disciples and says � and asks, who do you say that I am. I would argue that with that question, Jesus called into existence the making of creeds and confessions. This was a question that only the disciples could answer. The world does not have that answer. So when Peter says, �You are the Christ, the son of the living God.� Jesus responds, �Blessed are you for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you but my Father who is in heaven,� and then goes on to say, �Upon this rock I will build my church,� namely, upon this confession. So with that question, Jesus called forth from the church the task of confessing Him. And I would argue that down through the centuries, this has been the preeminent task of the church. Every age will ask the question: Who is Christ, and why does he matter? And this is unique to Christianity. You see, no one asks the question: Who is Mohammad?� Everyone agrees, a human being and profit. Who was Buddha, or who is Confucius? Instead, the critical questions for those religious leaders is: What did they teach? Well, for Christianity, it's not what did Christ teach. It's who is He. So when you look at all the major councils �- let�s take one: the Council of Chalcedon in 451. The church gathered at a time when you had incredible social displacement. Rome had been sacked. The barbarians are knocking at the door. You had the migration of nations; namely, the uprooting of entire populations and moving around, incredible social problems. When they came together, what did they do? They confessed Christ, particularly by affirming the Nicene Creed. 1500 years later, how many people have ever heard of the migration of nations? How many people are familiar with the historical context of that day? But millions of people throughout the world confess Christ with the words of the Nicene Creed. The same thing applies at Augsburg. The emperor wanted a deal with raising and money raising troops to battle the Turks who were threatening the eastern doors or knocking at the eastern doors of the empire. When the evangelicals, that is, the Lutherans came together, they said, before we deal with that, we are first going to deal with the question of our faith. And so they confessed Christ within the Augsburg Confession. 500 years later, how many people are familiar with the political and imperial foreign issues of the 16th century? But over 70 million people confessed the faith of the Augsburg Confession. It's a confession that has influenced countless other people, including the Anglican 39 Articles of Faith. It has provided the basis for ongoing dialogues between Lutherans and Catholics down to the present day. So whether or not a new confession is born that will take its place alongside the others, I hope one does. But in the meantime, we have the task of confessing the faith for our day and age.