Confessional Subscription

“Do you believe and confess…?”

This question is put twice to every church worker upon his or her installation into a field of labor. The question is put first with regard to the Scriptures. The question is put a second time with regard to the ecumenical creeds and the 16th-century Lutheran Confessions. By answering in the affirmative, church workers express their commitment — subscription — to the Scriptures and their commitment to be guided in their reading of the Scriptures by the witness of the church set forth in the Lutheran Confessions.

Now, it is understandable that church workers declare their commitment to the Scriptures, but why do we also ask to them to subscribe to certain confessional writings? How did this practice come to be?

Crisis of authority and identity

By the time of his death in 1546, Luther had been the unquestioned leader and theological teacher of the Reformation for nearly 30 years. The preface to the Formula of Concord (1577) draws special attention to this point when it speaks of Luther as the one through whom “the teaching about the chief articles of our Christian religion (which under the papacy had been horribly clouded by human teachings and ordinances) had been explained and purified again from God’s Word” (FC SD Introduction 1).

While Luther was alive, one could write to him for an opinion about how to interpret the Scriptures on a given point or ask him for help with a theological or pastoral question. Pastors and princes alike turned to him as the acknowledged leader of the Reformation and its authoritative interpreter of the Scriptures. Luther’s death, however, left a vacuum of leadership and with it a crisis of authority. Controversies and divisions soon broke out within the Lutheran ranks over the interpretation of the Scriptures.

Significantly, the heirs of Luther’s Reformation did not turn to medieval solutions by establishing an authoritative administrative structure to decide such questions or by establishing mandatory worship practices to provide a basis for its unity and common identity. Instead, those who had become part of the Reformation followed the example of the Early Church, which defined itself by its commitment to the Scriptures – and to a particular reading of the Scriptures – with creed-like statements as their common confession of the faith.

So, exactly to what do we commit ourselves by subscribing to these Lutheran confessional statements?

Commitment to read the Scriptures together

First, subscription to our confessional writings commits us to reading the Scriptures within the company and fellowship of the Christian church.

It recognizes that we do not read the Scriptures in isolation from one another. Instead, we read the Scriptures as part of a larger conversation with our fellow Christians wherein we listen to what they have discovered and learn from their insights.

Thus, by subscribing to the confessions, we acknowledge that we are not the first ones in the history of the world to read the Scriptures. Countless numbers have studied them before us and left us a witness as to what they discovered in the Scriptures. Our subscription acknowledges that they have bequeathed to us a reliable exposition of the Scriptures. For this reason, we subscribe to these writings because they faithfully set forth what the Scriptures teach about the Gospel and all its articles.

The confessional writings also serve as a corroborative witness for our own reading of the Scriptures. That is to say, when I read the Scriptures, I might check to see whether or not the confessions corroborate my reading. If they do not, I may want to re-read the Scriptures to avoid a heretical conclusion by misreading them. If the confessions corroborate my reading of Scriptures, then I am on the right track as I am in the good company of those who have gone before me and who bequeathed to me this faithful exposition of the Scriptures’ doctrine.

In this way, confessional subscription recognizes and acknowledges that we are part of a larger community of believers that extends throughout time and place. To read the Scriptures in isolation from this community runs the danger of developing and arriving at one’s own individual interpretation of the Scriptures. We can see today how this has fragmented and splintered the church into countless denominations (currently in the neighborhood of 45,000).

Confessional subscription thus serves the faithful interpretation of Scripture for the sake of the church’s unity and its identity. It is for this reason that C.F.W. Walther, the first president of The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, wrote his influential article explaining why our pastors and teachers subscribe unconditionally to the Lutheran confessional writings. Unconditional subscription to the confessions as faithful witnesses of Scripture means that we commit ourselves to being accountable both to the Scriptures and to each other (and the wider church) for what we teach.

Commitment to the overarching witness of Scripture

Second, our subscription to the creeds and confessions of the church commits us to reading the Scriptures as a whole — from beginning to end. The confessions provide us with something of a roadmap for doing so. This map shows us where we are going and highlights the main features that we will see along the way. To that end, the creed summarizes the Scriptures in terms of the Father’s work of creation, the Son’s work of redemption within creation and the Holy Spirit’s work of renewing creation.

The Lutherans of the 1530s and 1540s captured this idea of creeds as a guide to the whole of Scripture by speaking of their content as a “body of doctrine.” We might think of it as an outline or silhouette of a human body. We can see in the shape of the body, the head, a torso, two arms and two legs. The confessions refer to these key features as the “chief articles” of the Christian faith.

The distinctively Lutheran confessions of the 16th century emulated the creeds by outlining the body of scriptural teaching and identifying its chief articles to address the needs of their day. Luther’s Small and Large Catechisms (1529) set forth what Christians need to know for their lives as Christians. The Augsburg Confession also described the shape of the Christian faith and life, and it served as a public statement about what Christians teach over and against the distortions of biblical teaching that the reformers encountered in the Medieval Church.

Commitment to the organic unity of Scripture

Third, our subscription to the creeds commits us not only to reading the Scriptures as a whole. but as an organic whole. All the articles of faith are interconnected within the body. In the Early Church, some of these disputed articles pertained most famously to the relation between the pre-incarnate Son of God and the Father, while others pertained to the relation between the incarnate Son’s divine nature and His human nature. We might consider these basic teachings as the torso that outlines and defines the entire body.

The Lutheran Reformation addressed other members that belonged to the body of doctrine and their impact upon the body. For example, a serious injury to the foot prompts us to turn all our attention to healing it. At the same time, that individual member of the body cannot be dealt with in isolation from the entire body. A cut to the foot may not kill the body, but it can introduce an infection into the entire body.

In the 16th century, the Lutherans maintained that the head of the body — the article of justification by faith in the promises of the Gospel — had come under attack. The Smalcald Articles show how various ritual practices (related to the Mass) and institutional arrangements (the view of the papacy as the head of the church by divine right) had attacked the “head” of the body of Christian teaching, namely, our justification on account of Christ. And the Formula of Concord shows how the doctrine of original sin has a bearing upon the articles on creation, redemption, sanctification and our bodily resurrection.

Reading together

Subscription to our confessional writings commits us to reading the Scriptures together as a church. This does not mean that they will answer every question that arises or that there is nothing left to discover in the Scriptures. Our creeds and confessions provide a comprehensive but not exhaustive restatement of the Scriptures. But by reading the Scriptures with them, we place ourselves within the trajectory of their teaching by which we in our day continue the conversation begun by those who have gone before us a conversation that culminates in the confession of the Gospel.

The Rev. Dr. Charles P. Arand serves as professor of systematic theology at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis. (Lutheran Witness, October 2021, 18-20)