Being a confessional Christian is the way. Some might read this and think I am referring to being ‘Reformed.’ But that would be mistaken; the Reformed might think they have a corner on this language, but they don’t. What I mean when I say ‘confessional’ is being a Christian in the Christian existence who lives and breathes and does theology based on the confession that Jesus is Lord. Doing theology based on the premise that God has spoken (‘Deus dixit’), and only after that fact, that reality can a genuinely Christian theology obtain. Being confessional is to live life in echo of the Son’s Yes and Amen for us by the Holy Spirit; His Yes and Amen as Son of the Father in homoousial (consubstantial) fellowship (koinonia). It is to live the Christian life as if there are no “competitors” that we must flummox first; that we must defeat before we get on with the business of living the Christian life before God (coram Deo). That is, to be a genuinely confessional Christian is to live an unapologetic (and thus not apologetic) Christian life; and allow this attitude, this posture from within the life of the Right Hand, to shape the questions and answers we find as Christians who know their Shepherd’s voice. To live as a confessional Christian is to recognize that God alone either presents His own Self-interpretation, His own Self-revelation for us, vicariously including humanity in His priestly humanity or He doesn’t. It is to live in the after of the fact that He has in fact Self-revealed and given us, and gives us afresh anew, a capaciousness within Himself pro nobis (for us), in the capaciousness of Christ’s vicarious humanity to be for God, with God, and in God by the Holy Spirit. To be a confessional Christian is to live in this slavish bondage to the holiness of God for us in Jesus Christ; and from this spring, the fount of everlasting life bursts forever already from the belly of our beings in Christ.
As Christians, new and old, as they enter the fray of the Christian theological existence, they will find it very difficult, as if in a famine, to find the aforementioned type of confessional living that I think a genuine Christian existence requires of us. That is to simply repose in the viva vox Dei (‘living voice of God’) as we encounter that afresh anew through encountering His prosopon (face) in the living Word of God; in the Holy Scriptures, as those gain their ‘holiness’ insofar that Christ resurrects by the Spirit from every page turned.
The moral: Be a confessional Christian, it’s really the only way to live the Christian life with the type of telos, purpose that God has poemed in the lyrics of Christ’s eternal melody for us. Holy, Holy, Holy is the LORD God Almighty; who was, and is, and is to come. amen