Walking in Fog
Confessions of Faith vs. Spiritual Direction
Should churches discuss, adapt, confess and publish their statements of faith? Or should they simply depend on the Spirit’s leading?
The first Brethren immigrants arrived in Pennsylvania in 1719. Franklin later recalled asking Michael Welfare, also known as Michael Wohlfahrt, why the group had not published a confession of faith. In Franklin’s account, Welfare explained:
When we were first drawn together as a society, it had pleased God to enlighten our minds so far as to see that some doctrines, which were esteemed truths, were errors, and that others which we had esteemed errors were real truths. From time to time God has been pleased to afford us further light, and our principles have been improving and our errors diminishing.
Now we are not sure that we have arrived at the end of this progression and at the perfecting of spiritual and theological knowledge. Instead, we feel that if we should once print our confession of faith, we should feel ourselves as if bound and confined by it, and perhaps be unwilling to receive further improvement, and our successors still more so, as concerning what their elders and founders had done to be something sacred—never to be departed from.
Franklin then reflected in his Autobiography:
This modesty in a sect is perhaps a single instance in the history of mankind. Every other sect, supposing itself in the possession of all truth and that those that differ are so far in the wrong, like a man travelling in foggy weather, those at some distance before him on the road he sees wrapped up in the fog, as well as those behind him, and also the people in the fields on each side, but near him all appears clear, though in truth he is as much in the fog as any of them.
Ever since the time of the first Christians, church groups have kept falling into the trap of fixing and establishing explicit rules, publishing their statements in an effort to save themselves from apostasy. All it takes, however, is humility, love, and total surrender to the LORD himself.
Once surrendered to him, the Spirit of the LORD leads the way and all one needs to do is follow. That is the only safe way.
The historical passages above are modernized adaptations of Franklin’s account, not verbatim transcriptions. Welfare’s words are known here through Franklin’s recollection. The closing two paragraphs are a later reflection, separate from Franklin’s account.