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 Gallican Confession, 1559;
• The Scots Confession, drawn up by John Knox in 1560;
• The Belgic Confession[1] drawn up by Guido de Brès[2] 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[3] 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[4] of 1823.

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