What Is the Westminster Confession of Faith?
BY CAMPBELL MARKHAM | The Westminster Confession of Faith takes a little under an hour to read. Here’s why you should take the time to get to know it.
Every church has a statement of faith, a summary of the church’s basic beliefs about the Bible, God, Jesus Christ, humanity, and salvation.
The Apostles’ Creed, which our church aims to recite together at least monthly, is a brief statement of faith that Christians have been saying since the second-century AD. (Creed comes from the Latin verb credo which means “I believe.”)
“We believe the Bible, that’s all,” can have a lot of different meanings.
Some say that we don’t need statements of faith: “We believe the Bible, that’s all.” The problem is that many anti-Christian cults—such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Mormons—also “believe in the Bible.” But though they use the same Bible words that are familiar and precious to Christians—God, Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit, atonement, redemption, resurrection, heaven—the meaning that they attach to these words is very different to what the Bible means by these words, and to what right-thinking Christians have believed from the first.
Other churches have claimed that they have “No creed but Christ.” But of course this four-word statement is a creed. And it provokes a vital question…