Sometimes when people describe churches like St. John’s, they use the term “Confessional” Lutheran. It’s a reference to our holding to the Lutheran Confessions, a collection of documents also known as the 1580 Christian Book of Concord. In fact, in their ordination vows, all our pastors promise to teach according to it. But why? Isn’t this adding to God’s Word, which Revelation 22 expressly speaks against? The Formula of Concord, a document within the Book of Concord, actually addresses this very question.
Written in 1577 to work toward peace and unity among the various churches of the reformations, the Formula of Concord opens by confessing (1) “We believe, teach and confess that the only rule and standard according to which all doctrines and teachers alike ought to be tried and judged are the prophetic and apostolic Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments alone,” citing Galatians 1:8. Other writings old and new, no matter how beloved they may be, “shall not be held to be of equal authority with the Holy Scriptures.”
So, if Scripture is our only final authority, then why have additional confessions? (2) The New Testament apostles dealt with false teachers and misguided Christians by drawing up short, plain confessions of what they did believe, teach, and confess. And soon after, the Apostolic, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds continued that tradition and were almost immediately “unanimously held as the universal Christian faith and confession of the orthodox churches.”
(3) So, creeds and confessions serve to keep us in line with the Scriptures. They are not authoritative in the same way the Holy Scriptures are, but they are subordinate “witnesses” to how Scripture has been read and applied in the past and how we aim to do the same now. When people ask you, “what do you believe?” whatever your answer is, it’s a confession. And for Confessional Lutherans, that answer is recorded in the 1580 Christian Book of Concord.
Today, just about every Christian tradition claims to be “biblical,” but that can mean a lot of different things. For Confessional Lutherans, it means Scripture is the first and final authority, and it means we pay attention to how faithful Christians of the past have read it, taught it, and lived by it, so that we can have a guide for how to figure things out in our own situation(s).
Formula of Concord Quotations taken from The Christian Book of Concord, translated by Solomon D. Henkel and Brs., published by the Evangelical Lutheran Tennessee Synod, Newmarket, VA, 1854