Mere Orthodoxy – The Triumph of Confessionalism in the EPC
My first article as a contributing writer to Mere Orthodoxy is live: The Triumph of Confessionalism in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. This is one-part write up of what’s been going on in the EPC over the past few years, especially related to same-sex attraction, and one-part explanation and defense of a confessional approach to church life.
C. S. Lewis famously introduced Mere Christianity metaphorically, comparing the Christian faith to a house. Each room in the house represents different Christian traditions, furnished with all their distinctive beliefs and practices. The hallways connecting the rooms in the house, on the other hand, represent the basics of the Christian faith common to all true believers and churches. Lewis points out that people aren’t supposed to live in hallways, but in their rooms, although the hallways serve the all-important purpose of connecting the rooms so that they share the one house.
American evangelicalism is generally content to live in the hallway, usually with minimal doctrinal statements only touching the core elements of the Christian faith, or perhaps including a distinctive practice or view for their congregation (e.g. believer’s baptism, the return of Christ). The benefit to this prioritizing of the core is that it allows evangelical churches to cast as broad a net as possible for inclusion, avoids staking out sectarian positions, and grants pastors greater flexibility in articulating their own views (of course, this version of evangelicalism is itself a room, just sparsely furnished, its minimalism a form of position-staking that it is only “non-sectarian” in comparison to other evangelicals and Protestants). Evangelicalism asks what the center of the Christian faith is, and then makes that center its home.
Confessionalism, by contrast, asks “How does scripture direct us to furnish the whole room?”
