Against Contempt for Confessional Christianity 

There are certain metaphors that give the game away. For example, when a man refers to his wife as a “ball and chain,” we should not laugh with him or commend his supposed wit. Rather, we should recognize immediately that he is mocking something sacred. A covenant ordered toward love, fidelity, and mutual self-giving has been reduced to a burden on autonomy, a regrettable impediment to self-expression. And yet this is precisely the metaphorical universe in which many contemporary Christian intellectuals now speak about the confessions and creeds that govern the church and its institutions. Doctrine becomes a shackle. Authority becomes a threat. Binding commitments become weights to be shrugged off in the name of intellectual emancipation. What is treated as courageous is not deeper obedience, but distance—distance from inherited authority, ecclesial constraint, anything that might make costly claims that inhibit our transitory desires.  

I write as a senior at Calvin University, a school that still bears the name of John Calvin while increasingly entertaining arguments that would have been appalling to the great reformer himself. Calvin University is a part of the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRCNA). There is a special irony in attending a Reformed institution where many treat the authority of the Reformed confessions as an open question, where fidelity to inherited doctrine must continually justify itself before the tribunal of our contemporary sensibilities. In classrooms and public fora alike, the confessions—authoritative church statements that define doctrine and, in Calvin’s case, serve as governance materials—are often spoken of with a tone of polite embarrassment—respected as historical artifacts, perhaps even admired for their rhetorical power, but regarded with suspicion and even derision. They’re certainly not regarded as binding authorities.  

Prominent voices, like former Calvin professor Dr. Nicholas Wolterstorff, defend this posture, warning that too firm an attachment to confessional authority risks reducing Calvin to a “tiny fundamentalist school.” This phrase distills a mindset now unfortunately widespread here, one that equates freedom with looseness and success with our ability to hire the sharpest of secular scholars so that our student body can become enlightened and modern, simply by learning to affirm anything and everything that makes someone feel good. An example of this thinking could be something like this: “Same-sex relationships make some people feel nice. Therefore, they must be good. So, if the church and its confessions clearly teach that a man cannot sleep with another man, and a woman cannot sleep with a woman, the only responsible thing to do is to leave the church so we are not bound by its ancient misunderstandings and outdated discipline. We cannot otherwise be free. It is 2026, and we know best.” 

This mindset rests on a profoundly distorted understanding of what freedom actually is. The freedom being defended is not freedom in truth, but freedom from truth; not freedom in obedience, but freedom from obedience; not the liberty of the redeemed, but the autonomy of the self enslaved to sin. It is a freedom defined negatively, by what it refuses to submit to, rather than positively, by what it joyfully serves. And this is precisely where the rhetoric turns not merely imprudent, but blatantly anti-Christian. The New Testament does not proclaim liberation from authority as the goal of redemption. It proclaims liberation from sin, from death, and from the tyranny of the sovereign self. 

In other words, true freedom is not freedom from the church’s authority; it is freedom within it. To suggest otherwise is not to refine the doctrine of liberty, but to abandon it. When Paul declares in Galatians 5 that “for freedom Christ has set us free,” he does not mean that the redeemed are released from all binding commitments. He means that they are liberated from the false masters that once enslaved them so that they might now live in glad obedience to the true master. Freedom, in Christian terms, is not the absence of obligation, but the right ordering of it. 

This is the very thing that the confessions exist to protect and proclaim. They are not arbitrary constraints imposed on unwilling minds; they are the church’s collective act of submission to the Word of God. They articulate, with humility and precision, what the church believes Scripture teaches, and they bind the church to that judgment across time. To reject confessional authority is therefore not some neutral administrative adjustment. It is a poorly conceived theological move with moral consequences. It signals that the present generation reserves the right to revise the church’s settled judgments whenever obedience becomes inconvenient. 

The common objections to the confessions follow predictably from this distorted account of freedom. We are told that they threaten academic freedom, that they inhibit moral progress, that they divide us rather than unite us. But these objections collapse, one after the other, once freedom is properly defined. Academic freedom, in any meaningful sense, has never meant the right to say or do anything whatsoever without consequence. Every intellectual community is governed by substantive commitments that shape inquiry. The question is not whether there will be constraints, but which constraints will be acknowledged as authoritative. Those who bristle at confessional limits rarely object to the far more pervasive constraints imposed by contemporary moral orthodoxies.  

Likewise, the claim that confessions impede moral progress assumes that moral clarity is achieved primarily through cultural development rather than faithful obedience. It treats the church’s past judgments as presumptively suspect and the present moment as morally privileged. This way of thinking would have us all look at Scripture through the lens of culture, rather than looking at culture through the lens of Scripture. This is not humility; it is chronological arrogance. Christians believe that the Holy Spirit does not guide the church by leading each generation away from the convictions of its predecessors, but by deepening its understanding of the truth that we already know. Development in doctrine is not the same thing as contradiction. To confuse the two is to place the church on a treadmill of revision, forever adjusting itself to the moral whims of each age. 

The appeal to unity fares no better. Unity, severed from truth, is not unity at all, but a temporary ceasefire maintained through deliberate vagueness and moral compromise. Confessions do not create division; they reveal it. They force disagreements into the open and demand resolution rather than suppression. The alternative is not harmony, but managed ambiguity, in which institutions pretend to agree by refusing to say what they believe. Such unity cannot endure, because it asks us to love a shallow peace more than the truth. 

What unites these objections is an allergy to authority that runs deeper than any particular doctrinal dispute. Confessions are feared because they speak clearly and bind publicly. They resist the therapeutic impulse to keep all commitments provisional. They insist that the church is not free to reinvent itself each generation, but is accountable to promises made that predate all of us. In this sense, confessions function like marriage vows: they restrict future options in the name of faithfulness. And like marriage vows, they are truly liberating precisely because they bind. 

This is why the rhetoric of embarrassment has become so common. People with misconceptions about prestige, growth, and cultural relevance begin to view confessional fidelity as a liability. The fear is not necessarily that the confessions are false, but that they are costly. They may exclude some potential students, alienate some donors, and possibly limit some forms of cultural approval. And so, defenders of looseness reassure themselves that they are choosing freedom over fear and breadth over parochialism. Wolterstorff’s sneer about a “tiny fundamentalist school” captures this anxiety perfectly. Size becomes the metric of legitimacy; faithfulness becomes suspect if it fails to attract more students.  

But the Christian tradition has never measured freedom by size or success. A church or institution that loosens its confessional commitments in order to appear expansive has not chosen freedom; it has chosen a different master. It has exchanged obedience for cultural relevance. In doing so, it teaches students and professors alike that the highest good is adaptability, that theological convictions are contingent on enrollment numbers, and that the church’s past is something to be managed rather than received. In other words, the confessions are the church’s past; loosening our commitment to them would communicate to the broader church that we can simply disavow our past when it becomes inconvenient for us. 

Unsurprisingly, John Calvin understood freedom far better than his modern admirers. For him, Christian liberty was inseparable from submission to God’s law. Freedom was not the right to dissent endlessly, but the grace to obey joyfully. The confessions that bear the theological imprint of his reformation were written not to constrain life, but to order it rightly. To invoke Calvin’s name while hollowing out the authority of the confessions is not reform; it is repudiation. 

If defending that vision renders a school “tiny” or “fundamentalist” in the eyes of the cultural and academic elite, then the charge should be worn as a badge of honor. It is better that Calvin University, and others like it, be a tiny, fundamentalist school that knows whom it serves than become a large, ambiguously religious institution unsure of what authority binds it. Better to be a university built on the rock of Scripture and the confessions than one built on the superficial altar of sand that is called “academic freedom.” The confessions are not a ball and chain. They are a covenant—public, binding, and liberating. 

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