Thursday, May 20, 2004 AD
"Who do you say that I am?"
Extraordinary stuff here from Hermann Sasse (from We Confess Jesus Christ, p.77f.), looking at how confession of faith is distinct from prayer and praise. Sasse demonstrates this by referring to the first Christian confession of faith, that by St Peter at Caesarea Philippi (Matt 16:13ff):
It was not human curiosity and not the theorizing interest of speculative theology that put the question to which this confession was the answer. Jesus Himself asked His disciples, "Who do you say that I am?" It is not enough that they follow Him. He does not call for a hymn, or for giving praise to His person, or for an evaluation of Him, but for a thoroughly sober judgment of fact...
What gives this first confession, indeed all churchly confessions, its weight is not the person who speaks it, or the emotion or conviction with which it is spoken. It is only its content, so great and overwhelming that no man and no human reason could ever have thought it out. This "flesh and blood has not revealed ... to you, but My Father who is in heaven."
In this sense and only in this sense is a creed "the church's answer to what God has given in revealing the Christ." The church's confession is the answer to the question that is implicit in this revelation, a question Jesus Christ Himself put to the group of disciples that was growing into the church, and so it is the question He puts to the church of every age: "Who do you say that I am?" With this question the Lord calls forth the making of creeds and thereby the church's formulation of dogmas. He did not wish to be followed as someone unknown, to be bowed down to as some numinous appearance. He wanted to be believed in as the Messiah promised by the prophets, the Son of Man of Daniel 7 and the Servant of God in Isaiah 53.
To preserve this primal confession clear and whole, to understand it ever more deeply, to explain it, and to preserve it against misunderstanding and misuse - this is why the church has continued to formulate confessions. The Nicene Creed, the Creed of Chalcedon, the Augsburg Confession, and the Formula of Concord want to do nothing more than this. There is no genuinely churchly confession that does not intend to be an answer to the question which is put by our Lord to every generation of the church: "Who do you say that I am?"
