The Vander Pol Confession

This past semester I took a class with Dr. Clark called Reformed Confessions in which he was going through the Three Forms of Unity (The Heidelberg Catechism, The Belgic Confession of Faith, and The Canons of Dort). Part of the assignment for this class was to draft up our own confession covering all the major loci of theology (Doctrines of God, Scripture, Man, Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Church, and Eschatology). This exercise had a twist in that there was a word count limit of 1000 words. This forces you to really think about what is important and how it can be said in as concise a way as possible and yet still carry with it the emphasis that you desire. What was also necessary to include were the Scripture proofs for what you were writing.

Although this was a tough exercise at times (especially when trying to shave off those final 100 words or less!) it was also extremely edifying and overall a pleasure to do. Let me encourage you to do something of a similar exercise. This really forces you to write down what you believe, and why you believe it from Scripture. This also, at least for me, caused me to think about what I feel needed to be addressed concerning what I believe about a particular doctrine in light of the church's past, present, and future struggles. I really feel that this will be very edifying for you and if you do it with your spouse or family it can get you talking about things you might not have thought much about.

At the link below is the confession that I submitted to Dr. Clark. Nothing has changed in the body of the confession, all I did was add a title and page numbers (the title would have counted against my word count and I was already at 998!).

The Vander Pol Confession

What I was attempting to do with my confession was make it relevant to Reformed churches today particularly in light of the Federal Vision controversy as well as those who deny the Covenant of Works and the Covenant of Redemption. I wanted to make it clear those things which I believe concerning those doctrines, but I could not take out those things which have historically defined Reformed Theology because those are still important today. Whether or not I was successful or not in my goals, I don't know, but I liked what I came up with.

In the future I might add a couple of articles and reword things to make it clearer, but I hope I can make this document something that I will keep as a current record of those things which I believe Scripture to say.

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UPDATE: I had the link to the PDF document wrong so it wasn't working. Sorry about that. It is now fixed.