Confession of faith

A Confession of Faith is a statement of doctrine very similar to a creed, but usually longer and polemical, as well as didactic.

Confessions of Faith are in the main, though not exclusively, associated with Protestantism. The 16th and 17th centuries produced many, including:

• The Sixty-seven Articles of the Swiss reformers, drawn up by Zwingli in 1523;
• The Schleitheim Confession of the Anabaptist Swiss Brethren drawn up in 1527 - (this confession was neither Catholic nor Protestant);
• The Augsburg Confession of 1530, the work of Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon, which marked the breach with Rome;
• The Tetrapolitan Confession of the German Reformed Church, 1530;
• The Smalcald Articles of Martin Luther, 1537
• The Guanabara Confession of Faith, 1558, the first Protestant writing in the Americas. By the martyr French Huguenots Jean du Bourdel, Matthieu Verneuil, Pierre Bourdon and André la Fon at the site of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
• The Gallic Confession, 1559;
• The Scots Confession, drawn up by John Knox in 1560;
• The Belgic Confession drawn up by Guido de Bres in 1561;
• The Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England in 1562;
• The Formula of Concord and its Epitome in 1577;
• The Irish Articles in 1615;
• The Westminster Confession of Faith in 1647 was the work of the Westminster Assembly of Divines and has commended itself to the Presbyterian Churches of all English-speaking peoples, and also in other languages.

See also

• The Savoy Declaration of 1658 which was a modification of the Westminster Confession to suit Congregationalist polity;
• The Baptist Confession of 1689 which had much in common with the Westminster Confession, but differed from it on a number of distinctions held important by the English Calvinistic Baptists;
• The Confession of Faith of the Calvinistic Methodists (Presbyterians) of Wales of 1823.

References

This article incorporates text from the public domain 1907 edition of The Nuttall Encyclopædia.