The Old Paths
CONFESSIONAL CHRISTIANITY
Written doctrine is not an antique. It is the ground men stand on when they set out to reform an economy, raise households that outlast them, and hand their children a culture ordered to honor Christ.
“Stand in the ways and see, and ask for the old paths, where the good way is, and walk in it; then you will find rest for your souls.”— Jeremiah 6:16
Definitions First
What Is Confessionalism?
A confession of faith is a church’s public, written summary of what it believes the Bible teaches. To be confessional is to hold that summary openly and be accountable to it — not as an authority over Scripture, but as an honest declaration of how we read it, tested by centuries of the church’s wisdom.
Reformed confessionalism stands in the stream of the Protestant Reformation: the sovereignty of God in all things, salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, Scripture as the final authority, and every sphere of life lived under the lordship of Jesus Christ. Not the church only. The household, the shop, the ledger, the school, and the commonwealth.
Every church has a confession. The only question is whether it is written down where you can read it, or hidden in the preferences of whoever currently holds the microphone. We prefer ours written, signed, and old enough to have outlived its critics.
None of this is antiquarian. Confessional Christians do not keep these documents in order to win arguments about the seventeenth century. We keep them because a man who knows what he believes can actually build: a business that will not bend, a household that will not drift, a church still standing when he is gone. Doctrine that never leaves the study is not doctrine. It is a hobby.
The Case for Written Doctrine
Why Confessions Matter
They Summarize Scripture
A confession does not replace the Bible; it states plainly what the Bible teaches, so a church can be honest about what it believes rather than hiding behind vagueness.
They Guard Against Error
Every generation faces old heresies in new clothes. The confessions are the church’s tested fortifications — doctrinal walls built by councils and assemblies that already fought these battles.
They Bind Generations
A written confession lets a father, his son, and his grandson stand on the same ground. It turns doctrine into inheritance — something a household and a church can actually hand down.
They Create Accountability
“No creed but Christ” in practice means “no accountability but me.” A public confession lets members hold officers to a fixed standard — and lets you know exactly what a church will teach your family.
Where It Begins
The Creedal Foundation
The Reformed confessions do not float free of history. They stand on the ecumenical creeds the whole church has confessed for over fifteen hundred years.
Early Church
The Apostles' Creed
The ancient baptismal summary of the faith.
A.D. 325 / 381
The Nicene Creed
The church’s confession of the Trinity and the deity of Christ.
c. 5th century
The Athanasian Creed
The fullest ancient statement of the Trinity and the Incarnation.
A.D. 451
The Definition of Chalcedon
Christ: one person, two natures — truly God, truly man.
Our Standards
The Historic Reformed Confessions
RBA is built on the four great confessional streams of the Reformed tradition. Expand each to learn its story and read the documents themselves.
Produced by the Westminster Assembly in London — over a hundred pastors and theologians laboring for years — the Westminster Confession of Faith, with its Larger and Shorter Catechisms, is the doctrinal standard of historic Presbyterianism. It remains the most comprehensive and carefully worded summary of Reformed theology in the English language, covering Scripture, God’s decrees, covenant theology, Christ the Mediator, the law of God, worship, and the civil magistrate.
Read the Westminster ConfessionThe doctrinal standards of the continental Reformed churches: the Belgic Confession (1561), written by Guido de Brès, who sealed it with his martyrdom; the Heidelberg Catechism (1563), the warmest pastoral summary of the faith ever written, framed around comfort in life and death; and the Canons of Dort (1618–1619), the church’s definitive answer on sovereign grace — the source of what later generations summarized as the five points of Calvinism.
Read the Three FormsDrafted by English Particular Baptists and published openly once persecution lifted in 1689, this confession deliberately follows the Westminster Confession nearly word for word — a public declaration that Reformed Baptists stand in the same doctrinal stream, differing on baptism and church polity while confessing the same God, the same gospel, and the same covenant theology.
Read the 1689 ConfessionDrafted at the Savoy Palace in London by Congregationalist divines including John Owen and Thomas Goodwin, this is the Westminster Confession revised for Congregational church government. Like the Particular Baptists who followed them thirty years later, these men held to Westminster closely and deliberately, altering what they had to on polity and leaving the doctrine of God, sovereign grace, and covenant essentially untouched. It became the confessional standard of the New England Puritans and the churches they planted across the American colonies.
Read the Savoy DeclarationA Wider Table
The standards above are ours. They are not the only honest ones. Confessional Lutherans and confessional Anglicans hold historic Protestant standards of their own, and they are not strangers here. Neither is the evangelical who came up without a confession behind him but who has refused to make peace with this age, who has not surrendered on Christ’s lordship, on the family, or on the fight he did not pick.
This is a Protestant table, and we will not pretend the differences among us are trivial or water down what we confess. But if you love the old paths and want to build for Christendom rather than against it, pull up a chair.
The collected doctrinal standards of the Lutheran churches, published in 1580 on the fiftieth anniversary of the Augsburg Confession. It gathers the Augsburg Confession (1530) and its Apology, Luther’s Small and Large Catechisms, the Smalcald Articles, and the Formula of Concord. Lutherans and the Reformed have argued sharply since the sixteenth century over the Lord’s Supper and the person of Christ, and we will not pretend those differences are small. But this is serious, historic, confessional Christianity, written by men who feared God and would not trim their doctrine to suit the age.
Read the Book of ConcordThe doctrinal articles of the Church of England, given final form in 1571 out of Thomas Cranmer’s earlier work. Read plainly, they are substantially Reformed: original sin, justification by faith alone, predestination and election, and the supremacy of Scripture over the church. Paired with the Book of Common Prayer, they shaped English-speaking Christianity for four centuries. Confessional Anglicans who still hold them stand a good deal closer to Geneva than most people assume.
Read the Thirty-Nine ArticlesPlenty of good men were raised in churches that handed them a Bible and a worship band and no confession at all. That is not a disqualification, it is a starting line. If you already know the age is lying to you about God, about your family, and about your work, you are further along than you think. Begin with the Nicene Creed, then work through the Westminster Shorter Catechism, one question at a time. It was written to be taught to children and it has outlasted every fashionable theology that sneered at it. Doctrine is not a gate we use to keep men out. It is the inheritance we are trying to hand back.
Start with the Shorter CatechismConfession in Practice
Doctrine That Rebuilds
RBA members identify with a historic confessional standard, and business listings display it. That single line on a profile tells you more than any mission statement: what a builder believes, who holds him accountable, and what tradition his household is planted in. Commerce runs on trust, and trust runs on truth.
But the label was never the point. Confession is the foundation. Reformation is the work. Men who confess the same God and answer to the same standard can do together what none of them can do alone: keep Christian capital circulating among Christian builders instead of funding their own opposition, apprentice sons under masters who fear God, and raise firms sturdy enough to hand down alongside the catechism.
That is the reformation we are after. Not a nostalgia society for old documents, but an economy, a generation of households, and in time a culture and a commonwealth ordered to honor Christ. The confessions are how we know what we are building toward, and how our grandchildren will know whether we were faithful.