Do We Really Need Another One?
The Presbyterian Church has ten confessions which are essentially commentaries on the Bible. I have been reading an article in Theology Matters by Richard Burnett who states, “Confessions arise as a result of a crisis in the church that requires a decision to be made.” One of our Confessions is The Second Helvetic Confession . Did you ever wonder what happened to the first? I learned that there never was a confession called “First”, but the first confession in the 1500’s was The Heidelberg Confession . This confession was considered by Lutherans to be too reformed in spirit and demanded that the writer be convicted of heresy. Heinrich Bullinger wrote The Second Helvetic Confession in 1561 as a defense of the Heidelberg and it exonerated the author. Of course, confessions go back the creation of the Apostle’s and Nicene Creeds . These were written by the early church fathers in 2nd and 4th centuries respectively, to combat heretical views that were arising the early