The Nature of Confessional Authority

In a series of studies for the E.A.C.C. writers from the Asian Churches applied themselves to the question ‘Confessing the Faith in Asia Today’. One feature common to their concern was the need to distinguish sharply between a confessing church and a confessional church. In their missionary situation the second term was treated with suspicion and mistrust as an expression which characterised a church that was inflexible in its attitudes and was therefore unable to enter into a living dialogue of faith with its indigenous situation so that the Gospel could be meaningfully expressed. This sharp contrast is understandable since the Asian churches have not been notable for the ways in which the Gospel has become indigenous to their cultural situation. It has, in the past, tended to be an imposition on a new situation, of a relevant Gospel couched in alien terms with more than a suggestion that the terms in which the Gospel was expressed was to be identified with the reality of the Good News. As a result a cultural hiatus has ensued which has vitiated a great deal of the cutting edge of the Gospel.