Subscription to a confession of faith

The Protestant Reformation produced not only new churches but a new kind of document to define them. A confession of faith is a formal, public statement of doctrine, more extensive than a creed, intended for avowal by an individual minister, a congregation, a synod or an entire church, and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries produced them in quick succession as each Reformation tradition worked out and wrote down what it actually held. Lutheran churches settled on the Book of Concord, gathering documents including the 1530 Augsburg Confession and the 1577 Formula of Concord. The continental and Dutch Reformed churches produced the Three Forms of Unity; English and Scottish Presbyterians produced the Westminster Confession, drafted in the 1640s; and the Church of England settled on the Thirty Nine Articles of 1571. Confessional churches ask their ministers to subscribe to these documents before ordination, meaning to declare in a binding, public way that the confession states what the minister believes scripture to teach. The claim being made is a careful one: the confession is not held to outrank scripture, but to state accurately what the church, and the minister entering its ministry, take scripture to say, so that a congregation knows in advance what its minister will teach.

Subscription to a confession is also one of the clearest lines separating whole families of Protestant churches from one another, and it has produced real controversy inside the confessional churches themselves over how strictly it should be required. Colonial American Presbyterianism split over exactly this question in the 1720s: Scotch Irish ministers favored requiring unqualified subscription to the Westminster Confession, while New England Presbyterians, wary that binding a minister's conscience to a human document violated the principle that scripture alone should rule, wanted something looser. The Adopting Act of 1729 settled the dispute with a compromise, requiring subscription only to the confession's essential and necessary articles, leaving individual presbyteries to judge what counted as essential. A parallel controversy divided English Dissenters at Salters' Hall in London in 1719, where ministers meeting to advise a congregation worried about its pastors' orthodoxy split over whether requiring subscription to any human formula, even on a point as central as the Trinity, was itself a betrayal of scripture's sole authority. That same argument is what separates the confessional churches from the Baptist and Restorationist traditions today, which hold that a confession may describe what a congregation happens to believe but can never rightly bind a minister's conscience.