Baptists have always utilized confessions of faith to express their understanding of the Christian life. Leon McBeth's Baptist Heritage describes several ways in which Baptists used confessions.
What ways were you particularly interested in?
Are these still valid uses of confessions today?
How can they be abused?
How do they relate to the other notion that Baptists hold called the "priesthood of the believer?"
4 comments:
Good thinking Abraham.
Some Baptists did use their confessions to proclaim "Baptist distinctives," however. Although the 1677 confession did illustrate that Baptists were in accord with the Westminster Assembly others before and after did advocate strictly Baptist ideas such as Believer's baptism and two church offices, pastor and deacon as opposed to the Presbyterian system of four officers.
Dr. Dain
(For some reason I can not sign in my old account and have tried to retrieve my password and things but it doesn't seem to work. oh well)
I think that they have become something that they were not orignally intended for. I think they are fastly approaching creeds They have become something that show what Baptist stand for and almost if you do not believe this to the "T" you are not a baptst. I am not sure if that was the orignal intent or not. But certainlly Baptist starting out I think might have used this to show what they believe to avoid the herisy tag. They intended ot to show they were not that much different.
Kris,
Good thoughts. It seems to me that in previous days Baptists "owned" confessions of faith. That is to say that the individual could utilize the confession as they thought that it was helpful in describing what they believed. Now, in the current environment, the confession "owns" the individual Baptist so that there is no freedom to express the faith other than what the party line dictates.
Dr. Dain
Ya it as if some have forgot that the denomination of Baptist were meant for people to do their own thinking, not the other way arround. It is like someone woke up and said well I think I will do the thinking for the reast of my denomination. Not as drastic but I think that was tried by the early catholic church. k I will get off my soap box... maybe
Post a Comment