Gafcon GB and Europe Editorial.
“We want you to know, your majesty, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up”. Daniel 3:18.
“…if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Romans 10:9
What is a “confessing Anglican”?
This term, and its variant “confessional”, has been used for some time by Gafcon, for example in the Jerusalem Statement of 2008:
“It is a confessing fellowship in that its members confess the faith of Christ crucified, stand firm for the gospel in the global and Anglican context, and affirm a contemporary rule, the Jerusalem Declaration, to guide the movement for the future”.
The Plano Statement of 2025 uses similar language in saying:
“Gafcon is a confessional fellowship of Anglicans held together by the theology, liturgy and vision of the Reformation Formularies.” (See more on Gafcon 25 and the Plano Statement in our March 2025 News section).
This word, though not explicitly referenced, carries connotations of the Lutheran “Confessing Church” associated with Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1930’s Germany. As a new film about his life has just been released, it’s worth thinking again about that time and what we can learn from it today.
The word “confessing” carries two main meanings. The first is about theological interpretation. Is the Bible, and theological writing that comes after it, an essentially human enterprise, just recording different opinions about God and how to live, and commenting on them, as an academic exercise, and perhaps as a way of following one of a number of “spiritual path” options? Or is the Bible actually God’s truth revealed graciously to humanity, culminating in calling humanity to repentance and faith in Christ and following him as Lord? As Anglicans we know, sadly, that many in the established churches take the first of these viewpoints, while the “confessing” Christian is one who takes the second option – believing and acting on the gospel!
Eric Metaxas’ biography of Bonhoeffer (Nelson, 2010) puts it like this:
“Theological liberals…felt it was ‘unscientific’ to speculate on who God was; the theologian must simply study… the texts and the history of those texts. But the Barthians [followers of neo-orthodox theologian Karl Barth] said no: the God on the other side of the fence had revealed himself through those texts, and the only reason for these texts was to know him.” [Metaxas, Bonhoeffer, p61].
There continues to be a battle for orthodox, “confessing” Anglicans today in this area of theology. Many theological colleges and Diocesan lay training courses follow a non-confessional approach, often interpreting the Bible in service of a human agenda rather than listening to its teaching and applying it in faith and obedience. But it would be a mistake to limit the implications of being a confessing Anglican to theological debate. For Bonhoeffer and his friends, confessing Christ involved a battle of worldviews and politics in the world outside the church bubble, to the extent that Bonhoeffer would lose his life.