How Modern Confessions Build on the Ancient Creeds

When Barth drafted the Barmen Declaration, he was not writing a new creed. He was applying the ancient confession of Christ as Lord to the specific situation of the German church in 1934. When the Lausanne Covenant was written, it assumed and built on the Trinitarian and Christological foundations of the ancient creeds. Modern confessions do not replace the classical tradition — they stand on it and extend it into new contexts.

The Classic-Modern Relationship

The Apostles' and Nicene Creeds define the doctrinal core that any legitimate confession must affirm: the Triune God, the full divinity and humanity of Christ, the resurrection, the church, the coming judgment. A modern confession that contradicted any of these would not be a confession of the Christian faith at all. Legitimate modern confessions add to this core by addressing questions the ancient creeds did not — questions about Scripture's authority, the relationship of evangelism to social action, or the church’s response to political totalitarianism.

Continuity as Faithfulness

This continuity is not intellectual conservatism — it is faithfulness. The God confessed in the ancient creeds is the same God addressed by the modern confessions. The gospel summarized in the creeds is the same gospel the Lausanne Covenant commits to proclaiming to every people. The confession of Christ as Lord that opens every creed is precisely what the Barmen Declaration insists cannot be compromised by political ideology. Modern and ancient are not in tension; they are a tradition.

A Christian who knows both the Nicene Creed and the Barmen Declaration, both the Westminster Confession and the Lausanne Covenant, is equipped with a theological breadth that spans fifteen centuries of the church confessing its faith under diverse pressures. That is a rich inheritance — and a living tradition that is still being written.