When the strongest criticism I can make of a book is that the author used an obscure word (complexify, p. 45) that says something about the strength of a work.1 Let me say at the outset, I really like this book. This is a topic in which I am much invested. The Heidelberg Reformation Association is devoted to recovering the Reformed confession. So I read this book with great interest. The question with which I began is this: Will this book help or hurt the project of attracting people to the Reformed confession (considered as the documents and the Reformed theology, piety, and practice more broadly)? The answer is that this book will be most helpful. After finishing the concluding Q&A section, I wonder if there are any objections to Reformed confessionalism that Blair has not addressed?
Survey
This work is a brief introduction (144 pages, including endnotes), in five chapters, followed by what is effectively a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section. It is part of the Blessings of the Faith series edited by Jason Helopoulos.
- Introduction
- What Is Confessionalism?
- Why Do We Confess?
- Confessions Yesterday and Today
- The Blessings of Confessionalism
- Confessionalism and the Health of the Church
- Questions and Answers on Confessionalism
Each chapter ends with study questions, making this book an excellent candidate for small groups, Sunday school classes, high school, college, and seminary courses.
The book begins with a fine introduction by Kevin DeYoung, who writes,
A typical knock on Presbyterian and Reformed Christians is that though supreme in head, they are deficient in heart. We are the emotionless stoics, the changeless wonders, God’s frozen chosen. But such veiled insults would not have impressed the apostle Paul, for he knew that the opposite of order in the church is not freeflowing spontaneity; it is self-exalting chaos. God never favors confusion over peace (see 1 Cor. 14:33). He never pits theology against doxology or head against heart. David Garland put it memorably: “The Spirit of ardor is also the Spirit of order” (p.10).
That is nicely said.
In the introduction, the author presses us to move beyond biblicism, i.e., the attempt to read the Bible in isolation from the church, without the help of the church’s creeds and confessions. “Being biblical is imperative, yet to understand the answers to these questions [e.g., what is holiness? etc.] we’ll need to move beyond the bare words of Scripture. We do so not add to Scripture but to draw out its meaning” (p. 16). This is just right.
In chapter one he ably shows that to be confessional is to follow the pattern of Scripture itself which has numerous and clear examples of confessional statements and language. He helpfully distinguishes between creeds, confessions, and catechisms (pp. 24–27), while showing that they are integrally related.
One of the themes that Smith pursues throughout the work is the relation between confession and Scripture. He is at pains to set at ease the heart of the American evangelical (and Bible-church fundamentalist) who worries that creeds might supplant Scripture. He explains clearly that it was those who gave us the Reformed confessions who also gave us sola Scriptura. They were every bit as concerned as we might be to keep Scripture in its place as the unique and final authority for the Christian faith and the Christian life.
In chapter two he notes that God’s people have always been a confessing people (p. 33). Throughout the gospels we see people confessing Christ. Smith says, “The creeds, confessions, and catechisms developed by the church through the centuries can be seen as answers to Jesus’s question in Matthew 16” (p. 35).
In chapter three he grounds the rise of creeds and confessions in the church’s historic response to severe doctrinal challenges. The early church confessed what it did against the Arians because of what our Lord Jesus said about himself (pp. 47–48). What was implicit in the church’s teaching became explicit under the pressure created by various heterodoxies. The creeds of the church were an early, organic development, however, beginning with the rule of faith, which is traceable not only to the earliest post-apostolic fathers (e.g., Ignatius of Antioch) but to the Apostle Paul (p. 50–51). In this chapter he also surveys briefly the development of the ecumenical creeds and Reformed confessions.
Here (pp. 61–66) and again later (p. 105), he addresses the questions of whether 1) the confessions of the church ought to be amended and supplemented (yes) and 2) whether we ought to write new confessions. To this he gives a very cautious yes. This reviewer agrees.2
In chapter 4, on the blessings of being confessional, I expected a short list. What we find is an extensive list of 11 (if my math holds) reasons why being confessional is a blessing. Being confessional gives us a firm foundation, direction, balance, discernment, excellent summaries of the faith, organization and clarity, a connection to something bigger than ourselves, confidence, comfort and assurance in the face of doubt, the blessing of reading the Bible better than is often done in non-confessional settings, and leads us to maturity.
In this chapter and in the FAQ section, he also addresses briefly but helpfully some ways that confessions can be abused.
In some ways chapter 5 seems like an extension of chapter 4, as the author continues his case for the blessedness of being confessional. Under this head he points us to the ways the being confessional fosters the health of the church by giving us perspective, shaping the leadership of the church, and by fueling the unity of the church.
It is not clear why the FAQ section is not listed as a chapter since it is a substantive part of the book. As valuable as the rest of the book is, this section does what a good FAQ section ought to do. It answers briefly and clearly questions that people frequently ask or might reasonably ask. It would extend this review unnecessarily to try to survey the questions and answers but let me highlight just one answer. In answer to a question about proof texts in the confessional documents (pp. 116–17) Smith notes that there are challenges in adding proof texts to confessional documents.
For example, when the divines from the Westminster Assembly submitted the Westminster Confession of Faith to the English parliament on December 4, 1646, their work did not come with biblical proof texts. The minutes from the Assembly show that the divines thoroughly discussed the various biblical texts that serve as the basis for their doctrine. But originally, the Assembly did not want to include biblical proof texts with their confession because they believed that proof texts run the risk of implying that they are the only biblical texts on which a doctrine is built (pp. 115–16).
He explains that the teaching of the church is “often built on a whole host of biblical texts, since Scripture interprets Scripture” (p. 116). He defends the judicious use of proof texts but with a historically informed caution.
Questions
As I read the book the only minor question I had was the way Smith uses the noun confessionalism. He uses it throughout the work mainly as a synonym of confessional, but when he explains what it means to be confessional he explains it as I would: using the church’s confession as the ecclesiastically sanctioned interpretation of God’s Word on select topics which is intended to form the church’s vocabulary and teaching on those issues and to serve as guardrails for the church’s theology, piety, and practice.
This is a truly helpful book. It is well written, engaging, and thoughtful. It should be in every library of every Presbyterian and Reformed church, as well as in libraries of Christian schools, Christian colleges, and Reformed seminaries.
notes
- According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word complexify first appears in the 1830s in the writing of William Taylor. It also appears in some writing, in the early 20th century, about Teihard de Chardin.
- See R. Scott Clark, Recovering the Reformed Confession (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2008), 181–91.
©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.
D. Blair Smith, Reformed Confessionalism. The Blessings of the Faith (Philipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2025).
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R. Scott Clark
R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.
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