When the Church Says What Is So

Abstract

This article argues that Christian creeds and Lutheran confessions are, before anything else, truthful witness. They identify a community and order its teaching, but they do so by making determinate claims about God and God’s acts and by binding the church publicly to those claims. Their theological force depends upon their continuing answerability to a reality the church did not create. The argument distinguishes the semantic, performative, and participatory dimensions of confession. It treats historical situatedness without reducing truth to history, locates the Lutheran confessions under Scripture as norma normans, and distinguishes the identifying work of creeds from the reforming judgments of confessions. A selective post-Kantian genealogy then traces the movement of theological truth toward consciousness, value, existential appropriation, and communal grammar. The article concludes that confession becomes living witness as the Holy Spirit brings finite ecclesial speech into conformity with the apostolic Word.