The true and commendable use of various church professions, or confessions of faith, is, 1. To be an instruction to the more ignorant how to understand the Scriptures in most of the most weighty points. 2. To be an enumeration of those doctrines, against which no minister shall be allowed to preach, and according to which he is to instruct the people. 3. To be a testimony to all neighbour or foreign churches in a heterodox, contentious, and suspicious age, how we understand the Scriptures, for the confuting of scandals and unjust suspicions, and the maintaining communion in faith, and charity, and doctrine.
Quest. CXLIV. May not the subscribing of the whole Scriptures serve turn for all the aforesaid ends without creeds, catechisms, or confessions?
Answ. 1. By subscribing to the Scriptures you mean either, generally and implicitly, that all in them is true and good (though perhaps you know not what is in it). Or else particularly and explicitly, that every point in it is by you both understood and believed to be true.
In the first sense, it is not sufficient to salvation: for this implicit faith hath really no act in it, but a belief that all that God saith is true; which is only the formal object of faith, and is no more than to believe that there is a God (for a liar is not a God). And this he may do, who never believed in Christ, or a word of Scripture, as not taking it to be God's word; yea, that will not believe that God forbiddeth his beastly life. Infidels ordinarily go thus far.
In the second sense, (of an explicit, or particular actual belief,) the belief of the whole Scripture is enough indeed, and more than any man living can attain to. No man understandeth all the Scripture. Therefore that which no man hath, is to be exacted of all men, or any man, in order to ministration or communion. While, 1. No man can subscribe to any one translation of the Bible, that it is not faulty, being the work of defectible man. 2. And few have such acquaintance with the Hebrew, and Chaldee, and Greek, as to be able to say that they understand the original languages perfectly. 3. And no man that understands the words, doth perfectly understand the matter. It followeth that no man is to be forced or urged to subscribe to all things in the Scriptures, as particularly understood by him, with an explicit faith. And an implicit is not half enough.
2. The true mean therefore is the ancient way, 1. To select the essentials for all christians, to be believed particularly and explicitly. 2. To collect certain of the most needful integrals, which teachers shall not preach against. 3. And for all men moreover to profess in general that they implicitly believe all which they can discern to be the holy canonical Scripture, and that all is true which is the word of God; forbearing each other even about the number of canonical books and texts.
And it is the great wisdom and mercy of God, which hath so ordered it, that the Scripture shall have enough to exercise the strongest, and yet that the weakest may be ignorant of the meaning of a thousand sentences, without danger of damnation, so they do but understand the marrow or essentials, and labour faithfully to increase in the knowledge of the rest.[393]
[393] 1 Cor. viii. 1-3; xiii. 1-4; Rom. viii. 28.
Quest. CXLV. May not a man be saved that believeth all the essentials of religion, as coming to him by verbal tradition, and not as contained in the holy Scriptures, which perhaps he never knew?
Answ. 1. He that believeth shall be saved, which way ever he cometh by his belief; so be it it be sound as to the object and act; that is, if it contain all the essentials, and they be predominantly believed, loved, and practised.