LOUISVILLE —
The latter half of the 20th century has been marked by “a
revival of confessionalism” that Christians should embrace,
a renowned student of the Book of Confessions told a joint
meeting of the General Assembly Council (GAC) and the Committee
on the Office of the General Assembly (COGA) Tuesday.
John Kuykendall, a former professor and president at Davidson
(NC) College and now interim president of Louisville
Presbyterian Theological Seminary, said creeds developed in
recent years by Christian communities in Africa and South America
“amplify, enrich and even challenge our own.”
This revival movement is a logical extension of the proliferation
of confessions in the Presbyterian Church (USA) in the past half-century,
Kuykendall said.
“For 200 years, we American Presbyterians had a love affair
with the Westminster Confession,” he said. “But in
the 1960s we finally recognized others, and our Book of Confessions
was born.”
The renewed interest in articulating what we believe has “accomplished
the traditioning of our faith,” he said, creating a “rich
inheritance to pass on to succeeding generations.”
Despite the difficulty of bringing contentious Presbyterians
into theological agreement, Kuykendall added, the effort to create
confessional statements is “a worthy enterprise.”
He said we are obliged to the church and to the world “to
put into words, to ourselves and for ourselves, and to anyone
else who is interested, what scripture tells us we believe and
therefore how we should behave.”
The growing body of richly expressed Christian confessions reminds
us, he said, that a “God’s-eye vantage point does
not belong to any one individual.” He said the proliferation
of statements of belief “have rendered moot the issue of
creedal subscription.”
With so many confessional statements in the contemporary mix,
it is virtually impossible nowadays, he said, “to confuse
creed with scripture — we simply have to subordinate our
words to the authority of scripture.”
Kuykendall urged Presbyterians to study the Book of Confessions
and “claim the richness of sources with recurrent themes
that typify our own heritage, and passages yet to come.”
He also called for dialogue with Christians of other cultures
and in other contexts.
“What might we learn from dialogues with other Christians
in other traditions and cultures?” he asked. “Our
Western European confessional tradition is neither complete nor
exclusive — we can never say ‘we finally got it right,
no others need apply.’”
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