Reformed Christianity have written, debated, confessed, and even divided over confessions and creeds for hundreds of years. In this session, the Reformed Theology and History Unit considers the complex and contested nature of confessions in the ecclesiology, theology, and history of Reformed Christianity. The first paper examines Karl Barth's lectures on the Reformed confessions during his formational tenure at Göttingen, considering how his own views on confessions was shaped by his study of both Lutheran and Reformed history within his German speaking academic context. The second paper turns to the American context and offers a ciritcal analysis of the Presbyterian concept of the church's spiritual nature. The final paper offers a constructive reading of Reformed Confessions within a global and plural context through a theology of confessional hospitality.
Karl Barth’s Theology of the Reformed Confessions characterized the Reformed confessional texts as more ethical in orientation and more horizontal in focus than the symbols of their Lutheran counterparts. He goes so far as to say that “this understanding of Christianity as the connection, grounded in God and effected in humans, of the invisible divine truth of life and the visible renewal of human life …” simply is “the positive Reformed doctrine of Christianity” (147-148). He builds there on earlier claims made in lecture cycles on Calvin and Zwingli about the ethical and horizontal distinctiveness of the Reformed tradition. This paper examines his source material to explore ways in which he does render early Reformed confessional concerns from 1523 onward but also in what ways his analysis was inflected by his engagement of Luther studies in 1923.
Common interpretations of the American Presbyterian doctrine of the “spirituality of the church” have been criticized by historians as a theological rationale for the church to avoid addressing racial injustice from slavery to desegregation. In this paper, I supply theological argument to complement these historical criticisms. Common interpretations of the “spirituality of the church” intend to offer a distinction between what political concerns the church can and cannot officially address. I argue that the common interpretations typified in the seminal figures of Stuart Robinson, James Thornwell, and Charles Hodge offer distinctions that are unable to offer guidance in the application of scriptural moral teachings that have social dimensions. As an alternative, I draw upon John Calvin’s and the Westminster Confession of Faith’s recognition that the moral law applies to church and state alike to undergird an understanding of the church that can address political concerns, without sponsoring a state church.
The double bind that Reformed catholicity presents is that churches confess catholicity but their "confusing provincialism" leads to an idealized catholicity that, Karl Barth warns in The Theology of the Reformed Confessions, becomes unity deferred. The symptom of this problem comes in the proliferation of multiple locally-grounded confessional statements. This presentation suggests that there needs to be a way to bring churches from different contexts to the table in a way that is hospitable to many, even if it does not mean uniformity or comfort. This presentation calls this way, “confessional hospitality.” Drawing on Jacques Derrida's dialectic between conditional and unconditional hospitality, confessional hospitality considers the possibilities for local churches to confront universal evils by learning how to talk with each other through Reformed confessions. Thus, confessional hospitality paves the way for a connectional unity without connecting it with a specific institution or structure.