What is a Reformed Church: Confession and being biblical

Confession: It is biblical

A Reformed church holds on to the historic creeds and confessions. But what relation do these creeds and confessions have to biblical truth? After all, if it functions as the constitution for the church, does this not make it above Scripture in terms of authority?

The struggle to understand how something that is not the Bible is the constitution has produced two responses to the question. The first response is to say that the confessions are held to because (quia) they are biblical. The second response is to say that the confessions are held to insofar (quatanus) as they are biblical. Both try to preserve the final authority of Scripture while having the confessions as the constitution of the church. The former has Scripture as authority, and then see the Confessions as authoritative because they are biblical, while the latter says that the confessions are authoritative, but only insofar as they are biblical.

How should a Reformed church think of the relation between the confessions and the Bible? The confessions are to be held both because they are and insofar as they are biblical. Just like the people examining a constitution, the confessions are periodically examined as to whether they are biblical. Thus, the confessions are to be held insofar as they are biblical. But just as most of the time after the period of examination of the constitution the people follow the constitution as the ultimate "law" of the land, so likewise in a Reformed church, the confessions are taken as authoritative because they are biblical, after the examination period is over. Therefore, like a constitution which could be amended, confessions could be amended if found wanting. But any such examination is not the everyday experience, which is that we follow the confessions as authoritative because they are biblical.

Of course, many today flock to the slogan "no creed but Christ." The problem is that itself is a creed. Everyone forms for themselves some form of creed and confession that they live by, as what they think Scripture teaches. Instead of living on an unspoken and unexamined creed, why not look at the Reformed creeds and confessions as those that have been tried and tested over the ages, and then live by them as you are convicted by the biblical truth in them?