Why the Modern Era Produced So Many New Confessions

For roughly three centuries after the great burst of Reformation-era confession-writing settled down, the pace of new, widely adopted Christian confessions slowed considerably. Established traditions largely worked from their existing confessional documents — Westminster, the Book of Concord, the Three Forms of Unity — rather than producing fresh ones. Then the twentieth century arrived, and the church found itself writing new confessions again, repeatedly, in response to a series of crises the older documents had never anticipated.

Crises the Reformers Never Imagined

The Reformation-era confessions were forged answering questions specific to their moment: how should the church relate to civil authority, what does Scripture teach about salvation, how should Christians worship. They were not written to address totalitarian ideologies that would attempt to co-opt Christian language for explicitly racial and nationalist purposes, a genuinely new kind of threat the church confronted in the twentieth century for the first time. They were not written for a church that had become, within a few decades, a truly global reality spanning every continent roughly equally, rather than a primarily European and North American institution with foreign missions attached. And they were not written to address state-sponsored systems of racial injustice defended, in some cases, using explicitly theological arguments.

Each of these genuinely new circumstances produced, in time, a new confessional response.

Three Confessions, Three Crises

The Barmen Declaration of 1934 answered the first of these crises directly: a German church movement attempting to fuse Nazi racial ideology with Christian doctrine, producing something its opponents judged to be false teaching requiring the church's clearest possible rejection. It was theology written under the pressure of watching one's own church institutions be captured by an ideology masquerading as faith.

The Lausanne Covenant of 1974 answered a very different kind of modern development: the emergence, following decades of decolonization and indigenous church growth across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, of a genuinely global evangelical movement that needed shared confessional language capable of uniting believers across cultures the earlier, more geographically narrow confessional traditions had never needed to address together.

A third confession from this same era, though not part of this specific network, illustrates the pattern further: the Belhar Confession, written in South Africa in 1982 directly out of the church's struggle against apartheid, confessed that racial division within the church constituted sin requiring active repentance and reconciliation — a conviction earlier confessional traditions, forged in different centuries facing different questions, had never been called to state so explicitly.

And a Fourth, Closer to Our Own Moment

More recently, the Unity Creed of 2020 answered yet another distinctly modern circumstance: a church simultaneously scattered by a global pandemic and fractured by deepening cultural polarization, prompting a fresh confessional statement of the unity Scripture calls believers toward even amid circumstances the Reformers or the twentieth century's earlier confession-writers never faced.

A Pattern Worth Noticing

What unites this modern cluster of confessions is not shared doctrinal content — Barmen addresses totalitarianism, Lausanne addresses global mission, the Unity Creed addresses ecclesial fracture — but a shared pattern of response: each was written because its authors recognized that a genuinely new circumstance had arisen that the church's existing confessional inheritance, however excellent, had not been designed to address. This is not a departure from the confessional tradition the Reformers established; it's a continuation of exactly the instinct that produced Augsburg, Westminster, and the Three Forms of Unity in the first place — the conviction that when the church faces something genuinely new, faithfulness sometimes requires saying, plainly and in writing, what the moment demands.

The confessional tradition, in other words, never actually stopped. It simply waited for circumstances significant enough to call it back into active use — and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as it turned out, provided no shortage of those.

Explore each confession in this modern cluster: the Barmen Declaration, the Lausanne Covenant, and the Unity Creed.