“Sung, Not Signed”: James Denney on Confession, Unity, and the Freedom of the Gospel

Abstract

James Denney’s insistence that the church’s confession of faith “should be sung, not signed” encapsulates a theology of confession that is as provocative as it is neglected. This essay retrieves Denney (1856–1917)—conservative Scottish Calvinist, pastor, and Principal of the United Free Church College in Glasgow—not as a curiosity of Scottish church history but as a theologian whose work offers a coherent and still-urgent account of the church’s confessional vocation. Organized around Christ’s cross, Denney’s ecclesiology resists every temptation to deploy creeds and confessions as instruments of theological gatekeeping or institutional self-definition. Against such tendencies, he proposes their reorientation: from boundary markers to acts of doxological witness, from mechanisms of exclusion to expressions of trust in a gospel that exceeds the church’s own imagining. The essay traces Denney’s biography and pastoral career before examining his mature ecclesiology—on the nature and unity of the church, the function of creeds and confessions, and the promise and limits of ecumenism—setting his confessional minimalism in conversation with the Barmen Declaration (1934) and the Belhar Confession (1982). Together, these documents illuminate a pattern of Reformed confessional faithfulness in which the church’s identity remains open to the disturbing freedom of the gospel.

Few images in James Denney’s writing are as quietly subversive as his conviction that the church’s confession of faith “should be sung, not signed” (Moffatt 1921, p. ix). The remark is characteristic: lean, pointed, and loaded with theological consequence. To sing a confession is to offer it as doxology, as an act of gratitude and wonder before a God who exceeds every formulation. To sign one is to brandish it as a credential, a boundary marker, a litmus test for inclusion. The distinction matters because the temptation to do the latter—to deploy creeds and confessions not as witnesses to the gospel’s generosity but as mechanisms for policing theological boundaries, determining ecclesiastical belonging, and securing institutional identity against the pressures of a changing world—is not new, and it shows few signs of fading. Many churches, including those associated with the Reformed project, succumb to this temptation. It is precisely at this point that Denney’s voice invites a fresh hearing.

That Denney—a conservative Scottish Calvinist—should prefer the song to the signature is not a symptom of doctrinal indifference. It is the direct consequence of a theology organized entirely around the cross of Christ. For Denney, the crucified Christ is not merely the doctrinal centerpiece of Christian theology but its living organizational principle—the criterion by which every dimension of the church’s life, from its worship to its polity to its confessional practice, must be measured and, where necessary, reformed. No human formulation, however venerable, can claim to exhaust or to contain the God disclosed there. The church’s confessions are therefore most faithfully deployed not as instruments of theological gatekeeping but as acts of trust in a sovereign freedom that exceeds the church’s own imagining.

Despite producing a body of work that commanded the respect of contemporaries as formidable as P. T. Forsyth and H. R. Mackintosh, and despite exercising a pastoral and denominational influence that extended well beyond his classroom, Denney has largely receded from contemporary theological purview. This essay seeks to retrieve him, not as a curiosity of Scottish church history, but as a theologian whose work offers a coherent and still-urgent model of the church’s vocation.

That model, as the following pages argue, is shaped at every point by the cross, and its implications for the church’s confessional life are both clarifying and demanding. This essay proceeds by way of Denney’s biography and pastoral career before examining some themes that animate his mature ecclesiology—on the nature and unity of the church, the function of creeds and confessions, and the promise and limits of ecumenism. Throughout, it contends that Denney exemplifies what the Reformed project, at its best, has understood semper reformanda to mean: not the perpetual renovation of institutional structures but the continuous submission of all ecclesial life—including its most cherished formulations—to the judgment of the living Word.

What follows operates in two related but distinct registers. The first is historical and reconstructive: it seeks to establish what Denney himself believed about the church’s confessional life—what he affirmed, what he resisted, and how his views developed across the arc of his ministry and scholarship. The second is constructive and appropriative: it asks what those recovered instincts might contribute to the church’s theological self-understanding today, and how they are illuminated—and tested—by subsequent confessional developments in the Reformed tradition.

1. James Denney (1856–1917)

James Denney was born at Paisley near Glasgow on 5 February 1856, and spent his childhood at nearby Greenock, a coastal town in Scotland’s West Central Highlands. Very little is recorded about his mother beyond her maiden name, Barr, but his father, John, was a joiner by trade and a Reformed Presbyterian by conviction, serving as a deacon in the Cameronian (Reformed Presbyterian) Church. These early years in such a staunchly conservative context instilled in Denney a gravity about spiritual and theological matters. The most formative years of Denney’s intellectual life were those nine years between 1874 and 1883: first as an arts student at Glasgow University (1874–79), where he graduated with First Class Honors in classics and philosophy, and then as a student of theology at the Free Church College in Glasgow (1879–83). It was during these years—when he was exposed to some of the most acute minds of his generation—that Denney came to believe that the “life of the mind is answerable to the imperative of truth” and that reality is “freighted with moral and existential significance” (Gordon 2006, p. 9).

The Rev. William Malcolm Macgregor, a respected theologian who served as minister of St. Cuthbert’s, Edinburgh, remembered Denney as “a shy, austere, rather formidable figure” who was “by no means easy of approach. In the Theological Society, where others splashed in the shallows, theorizing and talking at large, he was able to push out into deep waters as one who knew his way. He had been by far the most distinguished student of his time in the University, and to us he appeared already a master in classics and philosophy, in literature and the history of opinion within the Church. He had also the most admirable gift of pregnant and witty and often demolishing utterance. And to this rich intellectual equipment he added an overawing sense of the religious realities in their dogmatic form” (Macgregor 1939, pp. 13–14).

2. Pastoral Ministry at Glasgow and Broughty Ferry (1883–97)

In 1883, after completing his studies and then being licensed to preach as a probationary minister,1 Denney applied unsuccessfully for a teaching position at the Free Church College in Calcutta. When St. John’s, Glasgow, sought a new missionary for their work at East Hill Street, Gallowgate, Denney commenced the role in July 1883. His responsibilities reflected the typical demands of nineteenth-century pastoral life: assisting with preaching at St. John’s, regularly preaching to the mission congregation, visiting and evangelizing, overseeing the Sabbath School, Sunday night lectures, and supervising other mission work. This involved a host of activities, including industrial training classes, engagement with savings banks, libraries, clothing societies, and Thursday night lectures on popular science (and other topics), which were preceded by “Musical Entertainment.”2 For all this, Denney received £130 per annum from various bequests, mission funds, and preaching engagements.

At East Hill Street, the young Denney quickly learned that “the smallest suspicion of patronage, of condescension or self complacency” (Denney n.d.-a, p. 6, DEN06-02) would be rightly met with a shut door. Nor was pastoral ministry about forcing theological propositions, whether from the Westminster Catechism or anywhere else, upon people. Rather, sustained by the confidence of one whose spiritual life was organized around Christ rather than self, Denney learned the value of intellectual freedom in exploring the gospel’s implications—a freedom he regards as indispensable both to his own integrity and to effective ministry.

A reading of the available sermon manuscripts from Denney’s days at Gallowgate reveals a definite growth in his theological articulations. Although still far from the form it would take in his more mature work, by 1885, there were clear signs that the fundamentals of the gospel would dominate his thinking and work. This is evident in his farewell sermon on Colossians 2.10, preached in June of the same year: “I felt constrained on this last occasion on which I could [speak to you] rather to present in one view the fullness of that Gospel [sic] which I came here to preach. … Everyone will make mistakes at times, even with the honestest intentions, and no doubt I have sometimes missed the truth, sometimes disguised it in foolish words, sometimes confused it with explanations, sometimes corrupted its simplicity by reasoning about it … but I would not address you for the last time on anything but what is fundamental in the gospel and in the plainest words” (Denney 1885b, p. 6, DEN07-27). What is “fundamental in the gospel” for Denney was “the death of Christ which is,” as he puts it, “the life of the Church. There is no gift of the Spirit until [Christ] is glorified, and He is glorified on the cross” (Denney 1885a, p. 2, DEN04-251). This conviction and theme would occupy his mind and mark his ministry until the end.

Denney left East Hill Street in June 1885 and exercised a preaching ministry in several churches until he received a pastoral call from Broughty Ferry East Free Church in February 1886, where, on March 22, he was ordained. He was 30 years old, and he could hardly have been called to a place more different than industrial Glasgow. By 1886, Broughty Ferry had transformed itself from “a watering place and little sea port” to an increasingly popular holiday town, attracting nineteenth-century professionals and holidaymakers to its “pleasant site, fine air and good sea bathing” (Anonymous 1882, p. 194). The church’s Minute Book reveals that Denney was a well-loved minister, not least because it was to him that “many owed their souls” (Taylor 1962, p. 189). By all accounts, Denney’s time at Broughty Ferry was positive, and the relationships he enjoyed with the congregation were mutually edifying. He described his relationship with the church session thus: “I had rich merchants, secretaries of financial companies, schoolmasters, shopkeepers, tradesmen and coachmen in my session, and we were as true a brotherhood in Christ as a minister could wish to have part in. There is no need that a different degree of education should separate [people]” (Denney 1920, pp. 107–8).

At Broughty Ferry, Denney inherited a distinguished pastoral legacy. Following in the footsteps of A. B. Bruce,3 he maintained the high quality of preaching to which the congregation was accustomed, evidenced by the fact that two series of his Broughty Ferry expositions served as the basis for his commentaries on 1–2 Thessalonians (Denney 1892) and 2 Corinthians (1894). Of these two collections, one commentator wrote: “These works show Denney to be, what in every sense he was, the scholar, thorough, accurate, impartial, critical, but also far more than that. He was a great moral and religious force, an eminent Christian doctor of his generation, a kind of national conscience to his ministerial brethren in all the Churches” (Walker 1918, pp. 50–51).

Within months of his induction, he married (on 1 July 1886) Mary Carmichael Brown, a Glaswegian who drew out of Denney a kindness and a tenderness that not a few who remember him testify did not come naturally to him. W. Robertson Nicoll noted that Mary not only gave her husband “the truest and most perfect companionship” but that she also “led him into a more pronounced evangelical creed. It was she who induced Denney to read Spurgeon, whom he had been inclined to despise” but of whom he “became an ardent admirer” and “a very careful and sympathetic student” (Walker 1918, pp. 51–52).

While he absorbed Spurgeon, Denney was no admirer of populist preaching, especially when it had a North American flavor. Following his visit to the United States in April 1894, where he delivered lectures at Chicago Theological Seminary, Denney wrote to his lifelong friend, Rev. John Paterson Struthers: “There are many things strong which I dislike—Baptist principles, belief in the millennium, premillennial notions, and in general the fads of the uneducated and half-educated man” (Moffatt 1921, p. 56). What Denney termed “fads” (Denney 1910, p. 124) were those things that occupied the church’s energy but were not of the substance of the faith.

One of the growing convictions Denney developed during his years at Broughty Ferry was that his primary responsibility as minister and community theologian was to articulate the core of the Christian faith. This, he believed, is what best equips people for their own spiritual and intellectual journey. Too often, sustained attention to peripheral matters becomes habitual, until those peripheries threaten to displace the center. No matter how demanding the quotidian pressures of ministry, Denney insisted that the theologian’s first obligation is to hold fast to “the starting-point” of Christian theology, which is “the revelation of God in Christ. … In a sense, then, it is Christ who is the great problem of the Christian theologian; our first task is to answer His own question, “Whom say ye that I am?” (Denney 1895, p. 17).

3. Denney as University Teacher (1897–1917)

In 1897, Denney accepted the position of Chair of Systematic Theology at the Free Church College in Glasgow—the institution where, fourteen years earlier, he had sat as a student. He was, from the outset, a formidable and demanding presence in the classroom. His lectures were distinguished above all by their unsparing directness: he had no patience for the evasions that theological education can so easily encourage, and no interest in survey courses that cataloged positions without committing to any. What he offered his students was not a map of the terrain but a position within it—one held with rigor, argued with precision, and always open to revision in the light of evidence.

Denney’s pedagogy was inseparable from his theology. The lecture room was simply another venue in which the gospel’s demands had to be worked out—on the student, on the teacher, and on the received tradition alike. He expected his students to think, to disagree, and to be prepared to defend their positions; and he modeled what he required. H. R. Mackintosh, who succeeded Denney as one of the most distinguished theologians of his generation, recalled that Denney’s lectures in systematic theology were remarkable for their refusal to retreat into historical description (Mackintosh 1917, pp. 488–94).

In 1900, Denney moved from the Chair of Systematic Theology to that of New Testament Language and Literature. This transition surprised some contemporaries, but it reflected both his deepening conviction that dogmatic theology must be grounded in careful exegesis of Scripture and his growing sense that the Bible itself, read without evasion, was the surest antidote to the theological fashions of the age. He wore his scholarship lightly in public but heavily in private, producing a series of articles, lectures, and studies in Pauline theology that drew on years of painstaking attention to the Greek text. He brought the same directness to his exegetical teaching as he had brought to dogmatics: the question was always, finally, what the text said, and what that meant for the church that had to preach it. In 1914, he was elected Principal of the College, a recognition of the authority he had long exercised informally among his colleagues and students alike. He served as Principal until his death in 1917.

Even when he took up a formal academic position, Denney did not use it as an excuse to retreat into the havens of a cloistered cleric; he kept in touch with the wider community and church, serving on various public committees and occupying a different pulpit just about every Sunday for nearly 20 years. He also poured himself out in service at a denominational level, serving for many years as clerk of the Senate and, from 1913, as convenor of the Central Fund Committee of the Church. His sustained correspondence with struggling pastors over more than two decades completes the picture: a scholar who remained, at every point, a pastor.

4. “The Pulse of Vital Religion”: Theology, Scholarship, and the Evangelical Vocation

Alongside the publication of biblical commentaries and dogmatic theology, and copious journal,4 encyclopedia, and newspaper articles,5 Denney was also committed to other work in Glasgow, not least among which was the fight for better housing for the poor. For Denney, theology is irreducible to ideas but is holistic, striving to draw together the disciplines of thought and the breadth of human experience: “It is no use being orthodox,” he once wrote, “unless you both feel and live your creed” (Moffatt 1921, p. 29). He insisted that for doctrine to be true it must be embodied and experienced; that is, while not based on experience, it must be certified by experience: “No dogmatic is worth reading or thinking about,” he wrote, “in which one cannot feel at all the critical places the pulse of vital religion” (Denney 1897, p. 426; See also Denney 1895, p. 17; 1911b, pp. 2, 275; Moffatt 1921, p. 109). And so he began his 1894 Chicago lectures with these words:

Theology is the doctrine of God: systematic theology is the presentation in a systematic form of that doctrine. But the doctrine of God, in the very nature of the case, is related to everything that enters into our knowledge; all our world depends upon Him; and hence it follows that a systematic presentation of the doctrine of God involves a general view of the world through God. It must contain the ideas and the principles which enable us to look at our life and our world as a whole, and to take them into our religion, instead of leaving them outside. (Denney 1895, p. 1)

This expansive understanding of theological work—one that refuses any divorce between the life of the mind and the life of faith—was not merely an academic posture for Denney. It was the animating logic of his entire ministry, which measured theological achievement by its power to serve the church’s evangelical vocation. For Denney, theology was never an abstract science but a lived vocation, one whose integrity could be tested only by its vitality in the pulpit, the classroom, and the ordinary life of the church.

Someone once said of Denney, “Had he lived to be a hundred years of age he could never have become a ‘fossil.’ What he gave to his [congregation,] students and readers was his latest thought at the time” (Walker 1918, p. 87). What he shared were those things that were alive to him. “The one conviction I have about teaching,” he wrote after seventeen years of teaching, “is that whenever one is learning enough to be interested himself, he need have no anxiety about interesting his students” (Moffatt 1921, p. 175). That is also why he had no qualms about burning most of his sermons when he left Broughty Ferry. Indeed, he once confessed: “If every scrap of sermon under this roof at this moment were to go up in a blaze, I would not singe the tip of a finger to save the best of them” (Moffatt 1921, pp. 53–54). This refusal to let yesterday’s work substitute for today’s obedience would also mark his engagement with the emerging critical scholarship of his day, as a combination of intellectual candor and spiritual immediacy shaped the way he received and responded to contemporary theological movements and challenges. This same refusal—to rest on inherited positions rather than submit them to fresh scrutiny—shaped his engagement with the higher-critical movements that were, by the 1890s, transforming the landscape of biblical scholarship.

Denney, a pronounced conservative, is clearly no biblicist; his own testimony to Christ is offered in critical and appreciative dialogue with the higher critics—Adolf von Harnack, Julius Wellhausen, Adolf Jülicher, Gustav Adolf Deissmann, Paul Wernle, Paul Wilhelm Schmiedel, Alfred Loisy, and others—well aware that there can be no discovery of “bare facts” about Jesus behind the stories of the Gospels.6

Denney hoped to “mediate,” wherever possible, between the mentality of our age and the “specific truth of Christianity”—that Jesus Christ is the self-revelation of God—in such a way that it resonates with what is most profound in human nature and experience; and to understand the modern mind, and the forces that have shaped its character and outlook, well enough to expose what is “false in it” while welcoming whatever in it is “profound and true” (Denney 1903, pp. 3, 4). He had what he once described as an “openness of mind and willingness to recognise and assimilate new truth” wherever such was to be found (Denney n.d.-b, p. 7, DEN06-67).

This mediating ambition was not, for Denney, a merely intellectual exercise. It had a direct point of application: the church itself. A theology that could not be preached, that could not animate worship, that could not equip the Christian community to bear credible witness in the world as it actually was, had, in Denney’s judgment, already failed its most basic test. It is this conviction that surfaces with particular clarity when he turns to address the church’s own self-understanding, its vocation as witness, and the institutional temptations that most threatened to obscure it.

Speaking from the floor of the 1912 General Assembly, Denney spoke of the need for a revived church and a revived sense of the value of the church itself: “Many have disparaged the Church in the past. But I am sure of this, that the Church is the great witness to Christ and spiritual things in the world, and that the witness of the Church as an institution, bearing its continuous testimony, is the thing on which the permanence of the Christian faith in the world depends” (Reith 1900–1916, p. 165). Notice that Denney is not defending the church’s institutionalism: he loved the church too much for that. Rather, he is reminding the church that its proper existence in the world depends entirely on its vocation as a witness. This is why “the Church is concerned in the first instance not with what it has to do, but with what God has done for it” (Denney 1910, p. 8). And the church’s first response to that action, according to Denney, is worship—and particularly worship that both rests on and points to God’s action in Christ.7

Denney lived in a time of great theological and philosophical flux, and when Presbyterian denominations were urgently grappling with the social implications of the gospel—its bearing on poverty, unemployment, slave labor, the morality of war, people trafficking, fair wages, substandard accommodation, and alcohol abuse, among others. Denney was concerned to bridge the gulf that modernity had opened up between the scholarship undertaken in universities and the work entrusted to the church. His commitment to “do the work of an evangelist” (Denney 1920, p. 176) meant that he had no interest in theological fads, insisting that “the propagation and … the scientific construction of the Christian religion … should never be divorced” (Denney 1902b, p. 283). Such habits arose from the conviction that responsible theology must attend to the world as it actually is: “We have to take [people] as we find them; we have to preach the gospel to the mind which is around us” (Denney 1903, p. 20).

5. “God Loves Like That”: The Cross as the Center of All Things

Denney’s preaching and scholarship were the epitome of clarity, and he expected no less from his students. He who vigilantly wrote out his sermons in full for fear that his speech would otherwise “degenerate into pure haverel” (Moffatt 1921, p. 31)8 once told his students: “Gentlemen, the first thing in a sermon is lucidity; the second is lucidity; and the third is lucidity” (Burnet 1935, p. 162). While we might not always agree with Denney, at least it is clear what he is saying. As A. M. Hunter observed, “In Denney you find what you do not find in many of our modern theologians … what is in theological writing perhaps the first of all the virtues—perfect lucidity of thought and expression. In a time when theological unclarity is sometimes hailed as profundity and the method of the expositor is often obscurum [per] obscurious, many of us thank God for Denney’s clarity” (Hunter 1949, p. 240).

This commitment to clarity was, for Denney, inseparable from his deepest theological conviction: that the gospel demands not ornament but precision, not rhetorical flourish but the kind of transparent speech that places Christ at the center. At the heart of all Denney’s theology stands the cross: it is “not Bethlehem but Calvary [which] is the focus of revelation in the New Testament” (Taylor 1962, p. 10).9 He recognized that Christ’s whole life was a revelation of God, but he believed that to preach Christ truly, it was necessary to represent his death as “the main part” (Denney 1911a, p. 398). Denney believed that all theology, ethics, apologetics, prayer—indeed, all of life—takes its bearing from that one place in history where God is most clearly manifest. Here, more than anywhere, sentimentalized love and notions of a Nazarean martyr are dissipated, Jesus’ teachings and healings receive their proper context, dignity, and interpretation, and the reign of God is secured in the world. Above all, here we see God—who God is, what God thinks of God’s self, and how God feels towards the world. So as stoutly Protestant as he was, Denney used to say that he envied the Roman Catholic priest his crucifix: “I would like to go into every church in the land, and, holding up the crucifix, cry to the congregation, ‘God loves like that’” (Taylor 1962, p. 10).

Denney’s presentation of Christ owes an uncompromising debt to the witness of the Second Testament, and particularly to Saint Paul.10 From Paul, Denney learned that Christ himself is the content of the Christian community’s kerygma, the sine qua non of his atoning action explicated as both propitiation and divine gift. In the Bible, Denney avers, “the Cross dominates everything. It interprets everything. It puts all things in their true relations to each other” (Denney 1902b, p. 315).

This theology of the cross was not, for Denney, a merely dogmatic conclusion. It had direct ecclesiological consequences. If the cross is the axis around which all Christian existence turns, then the church’s identity, its unity, its confessional life, and its ecumenical vocation must all be measured against it alone. It is from this christological center that Denney’s engagement with questions of church union and confessional subscription flows—and it is to these questions that we now turn.

6. “Sources, Not Laws”: Creeds, Confession, and the Unity of the Church

Reared in one of Scotland’s smallest and most conservative churches, Denney had an early prejudice for small independent denominations. But the more he studied the Second Testament, the more he heard its call for church unity. As a result, he devoted a significant part of his teaching years to working for the reunion of the Presbyterian churches in Scotland. Sadly, he died 12 years before such a union was partially realized in 1929.11

The unity of the church, Denney pressed, is found—or, rather, received—only in Christ, and is experienced by its members in the Spirit who is “the bond of union” (Denney 1895, p. 187). The church’s unity is not founded upon offices, constitutions, liturgies, doctrinal uniformity, ideology, creeds, confessions, or polity, for such things, Denney stressed, are not mentioned or imposed by the apostles. Moreover, the diversity of gifts reminds us that unity does not mean uniformity, which, Denney says, “suffocates all originality and enterprise in the Christian life” (Denney 1895, p. 190). And so, for Denney, the Second Testament puts no boundaries on the shape that Christian community might take. Such communities ought to reflect the particularities of their context—cultural, linguistic, liturgical, etc.—without sacrificing the christological core that unites them, and under whose judgment they continuously stand.

He believed that two things militate against the fellowship and unity of the church: (i) the composition of formal creeds and confessions, and (ii) a church based upon an order of clergy. Concerning the latter, Denney argued strongly against any “priesthood” within the church apart from the sole high priesthood of Christ (Denney 1895, p. 198; 1902a, p. 100; 1911b, p. 102; Moffatt 1921, pp. 102, 151–52). Concerning the former, it is worth noting that Scottish universities in Denney’s day had abolished confessional tests for professors, and there was a sense of new freedom in the intellectual community. This, at least for Denney, does not signal a free-for-all. The confessions, for Denney, remain valuable (he used to teach through The Shorter Catechism, for example, at Broughty Ferry). Still, they should not be seen as permanent legislative restrictions upon Christian experience. Neither should they be stubbornly clung to or sentimentally coddled as permanently defining shibboleths: “The creeds and confessions are sources, not laws, for theology. Faith comes to us, no doubt, as an inheritance, yet it is a new birth in every [person]; and he who lives by faith does not live under law” (Denney 1897, p. 427). So Denney believed that “the Church’s confession of faith should be sung, not signed” (Moffatt 1921, p. ix).12 The church ought not confess what it cannot—or would not—sing to God.

That Denney taught through the Shorter Catechism at Broughty Ferry is itself instructive. It confirms that his reservations about confessional subscription were not those of one who had held themselves at a safe remove from the tradition’s doctrinal formulations. He had lived with them, taught through them, inhabited their cadences. His critical stance arose from within the tradition, not against it from the outside. Whether his engagement with confessional documents shifted in tone or emphasis between his pastoral years and his academic appointments remains difficult to establish with precision from the surviving sources. The sermon manuscripts and correspondence from both periods suggest continuity of fundamental conviction rather than sharp revision. What does change, at least in register, is this: the pastoral Denney deploys confessional categories in the service of congregational formation, while the academic Denney subjects them to increasingly critical theological scrutiny, alert to the ways in which confessions can function ideologically—as instruments of boundary maintenance rather than evangelical witness. This development should not be overstated, however; the continuities across his career are at least as striking as any possible discontinuities. But it does suggest that Denney’s confessional minimalism was a theologically earned position, not merely a temperamental aversion to institutional constraint.

He was concerned that those creeds and confessions, originally crafted to help the church defend the gospel against perceived attacks, had gradually become ever more complex and binding on its members. As a result, the very notion of what it means to be the church had shifted. The body of Christ’s essentially organic and spiritual character was pushed into the background, and in its place there emerged a fundamentally sterile concept of the church. “It is always dangerous,” he warned, “when we call in the law, no matter in what shape, to defend the Gospel” [sic] (Denney 1895, p. 195). For Denney, creeds and confessions, including those of the Reformations, too often stood just beyond or adrift from the believer’s lived experience of faith. He would therefore have heartily endorsed the saying that “you can no more imprison the living, loving, Risen Christ in a form of words than you can capture a perfume in a net” (Jeffrey 1960, p. 259).

Denney did, however, propose an ecumenically motivated creed based on one germinal article. His proposal, which safeguards “everything which is vital to New Testament Christianity” while remaining “broad enough and solid enough for all Christians to meet upon” (Denney 1908a, pp. 399, 400), was simply this: “I believe in God through Jesus Christ His only Son, our Lord and Saviour” (Denney 1908a, p. 398).13 This commitment to a “minimal creed”—“simpler,” “less ambitious,” and less “speculative” than the Nicene Creed, or the Augsburg and Westminster Confessions—would, in his assessment, “do more than anything to meet the intellectual crisis in the Churches,” “bring an immense moral relief to many who are in the Church,” “remove obstacles which keep many outside of it,” restore the church’s “self-respect and its honour in the eyes of the world,” “provide the only reasonable intellectual basis for union,” and “not imperil the Christian relation to Christ” (Denney 1908a, p. 397; cf. Denney 1908a, p. 407; Moffatt 1921, p. 61). He also reminded the church that “our Church expressly gives those who sign its confession liberty to dissent from it on matters not entering into the substance of the Reformed faith” (Denney 1911b, p. 69). The substance of this faith, never in itself clarified, is binding on all: “the Church must bind its members to the Christian attitude to Christ, but it has no right to bind them to anything besides” (Denney 1908a, p. viii; See also p. 375).

What emerges from this analysis is a positive confessional theology, not merely a negative one. Denney is not simply against confessional maximalism; he is for something. Three convictions distinguish his mature position. First, the church’s confession is irreducibly christological in its content: it is a response to the one encountered in the gospel, not a self-description of the institution. Second, this christological orientation demands an evangelical economy of means—the confession should be as lean as the gospel’s own center, which is why Denney’s proposed creed comprises a single sentence. Third, confession is properly a doxological act: an offering to God rather than a credential displayed for ecclesial or theological inspection. These three convictions cohere: a christologically ordered, evangelically spare, and doxologically disposed confession is one that can genuinely be, in Denney’s memorable phrase, sung rather than signed.

7. Always Being Reformed: Confessional Particularity, Provisionality, and the Living Word

Denney’s proposals regarding creedal minimalism find a natural conversation partner in the broader Reformed project’s own relationship to confessional subscription. Two observations are particularly pertinent. First, unlike the ecumenical creeds and Lutheranism’s Concordia, Reformed confessions are typically marked by regional and temporal particularity.14 Second, Reformed confessional statements are—in principle—limited in insight, revisable, and surpassable.

The first of these harbors two further instincts—one negative, one positive. Negatively, it aligns with the Reformed rejection of “epistemological border control” (King 2009, p. 49). Responses to the Word of God in tempore et in loco will “not support any compulsion towards homogeneity which subjects all churches to the same self-understanding and expects an identical orientation in doctrine and life” (Weinrich 2000, p. 4). Positively, it relates to the Reformed conviction that confession is never a status quo but always an event that must continue to take place in each location as communities come under the testing of the Word. In contrast to how Nicaea, for example, has been utilized, which is representative of “the incremental hardening of confessions into creeds,” faith’s confession will be characterized by continuity and departure, both of which are fruits of the hearing of the one Word of God, hearing which admits a plurality “as wide as that already found in the biblical witness.” So Karl Barth: “The only thing one cannot do is to argue to oneself or to others that one’s own confession is the Reformed confession. Reformed confessions, as long as and to the extent that they are Reformed, will always be many and not one” (Barth 2002, p. 16).

The early Reformed held views that would later align with Barth’s observation. For example, when Heinrich Bullinger and Leo Jud signed the First Helvetic Confession (1536), they expressed concern about maintaining appropriate boundaries for confessional documents. They wanted to ensure that neither the First Helvetic Confession nor any other confession would be “forced on all churches and prescribed to them” or “catch someone in words and force them to behave in a particular way” (Pestalozzi 1858, p. 186. My translation). They also sought to underscore two crucial principles: the ultimate authority of Scripture and the freedom of the Christian conscience: “Through these articles, we do not wish to prescribe a single rule of faith for all churches. For we do not recognise any other rule of faith than Holy Scripture. … We, therefore, leave everyone free to use the expressions that they believe are most appropriate for their church, and we will also use this freedom” (Schaff 1877, pp. 389–90n2, My translation).

Here, due attention to contextually determined and hermeneutically responsible confession is recognized as an aspect of responsibility given by God. Implied here is a confession about the sovereignty and freedom of divine revelation, about the contemporaneity of the hermeneutical community’s faith, and about the belief that God’s Word creates the context and the context becomes the kairos of risk from which the community must not retreat and from which it must bear witness. Among the contents of that witness will be a confession, whether implicit or explicit, about the provisionality of all human speech vis-à-vis God (see Sell 1991; Barth 2002). The sheer fact of God’s livingness leads the confessing community to reject all moves to deify past articulations of the faith.

The Reformed situate themselves as interlocutors within an enduring theological discourse that recognizes temporal and spatial boundaries, even as they engage in doctrinal development across generations and cultures. This arises from an aversion deep in the tradition concerning idolatry, to converting human-created artifacts into supposedly sacred and immutable objects, to reducing the community’s life or uniting bond to “an institute of antiquities” (Barth 2000, p. 619). Here, catholicity is marked by both difference and livingness. This is why Pierre Maury, in a 1948 address to the Councils of the Presbyterian Alliance, observed that creeds and confessions cannot be written to order. Rather, they “are given by the Holy Spirit out of the pressure of a living, historical situation” (Sell 1991, p. 77). Two decades later, in 1966, the executive committee of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches declared that the Reformed “cannot treat as absolute any of the structures and confessions which we inherit; in our very loyalty, we must be ready to go wherever the Spirit leads, even if it be through that death which leads to new life” (Sell 1991, p. 78), a sentiment with which Denney would agree.

As Bullinger, Jud, Denney, Barth, Maury, and countless other Reformed thinkers have recognized, a hazard of penning a confession is that an institution is then tempted to build upon it, to trust in it, to look to it to do the work of safeguarding whatever it is that they, and especially those with institutional power, most value. Such a move is entirely at odds with how the Reformed, at least at their best,15 have understood their situation—as in essence, entirely vulnerable, finding their identity and continuity not in any earthly security but solely in that Word who calls it into being. Such communities recognize that to confess is to put safety last, to be entirely uninvested in their own perpetuity, to take up the sole vocation of the Word of God wherein there is neither norm, ideal, nor principle from which preconceived speech can be derived. To confess is to abandon all presumption of God’s mind, to disown all commandeering of privilege in God’s economy, to patiently abstain from claiming precognition of the judgment of God’s Word, to continually risk being judged by that same Word, to esteem the autonomy and freedom of God’s will, and to risk declaring in word and deed the grace who encounters us in ever fresh ways.

Second, confessions are “both necessary—for testimony and clarity, and against heresy—and revisable—in new circumstances, or in response to fresh insights” (Sell 1991, pp. 76–77). In other words, they are typically explicit about their own contextuality and time, and about their role as interpreters of Scripture in light of new learnings and contemporary challenges. Two twentieth-century confessions, drawn from very different historical crises and separated by half a century, serve to illuminate this principle and to demonstrate that it converges, in important respects, with the confessional instincts Denney had articulated a generation earlier. Denney is not merely a precursor to these two confessional documents; he is a resource by which they can be read and tested more carefully.

The first is Die Barmer Theologische Erklärung (The Barmen Declaration) (1934), drafted chiefly by Karl Barth and adopted unanimously by the First Confessional Synod of the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland (German Evangelical Church) in response to the German Christian movement’s attempt to align the church with National Socialist ideology. Its opening thesis cuts to the christological center with the same economy Denney prized: “Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death” (Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland 1962, p. 239). Against every attempt to supplement or displace this center—whether by ideology, racial theory, or national mythology—Barmen replies with a singular christological affirmation. It does not multiply doctrinal conditions; it identifies the one thing that cannot be surrendered without ceasing to be church. And its sixth thesis frames the church’s entire vocation in terms that Denney would have recognized immediately: “The Church’s commission, upon which its freedom is founded, consists in delivering the message of the free grace of God to all people in Christ’s stead” (Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland 1962, p. 242). Barmen, in other words, is not a fence erected around the church but a finger pointed away from it—toward the God who speaks in Christ, and toward the world for whom that speech is good news.

The resonance with Denney’s minimal creed is striking. Where Denney proposed that the church confesses “I believe in God through Jesus Christ His only Son, our Lord and Saviour,” Barmen insists that this Christ—and no other word, no supplementary authority, no competing loyalty—is the sole ground on which the church stands. Both are acts of christological concentration, stripping confession back to what cannot be negotiated. The difference lies in register and occasion: Denney’s formula is irenic, reaching outward to draw the widest possible circle of Christian fellowship; Barmen’s is polemical, drawing a line against a specific and devastating distortion. But the theological logic is the same. Confession, for both, is not the church’s self-description but its witness to the one who precedes, exceeds, and judges it.

The second example is the Belydenis van Belhar (Belhar Confession), first written in Afrikaans in 1982 and formally adopted in 1986 as a confession of faith by the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Sendingkerk (Dutch Reformed Mission Church) in South Africa. It not only condemned racism as “sin” (Art. 2.4) but declared that its theological justification represented a fundamental distortion of Christian faith, making the struggle against racism an essential Christian doctrine rather than a political option.16 In Belhar, the church confessed that as God’s “possession,” it “must stand where [God] stands, namely against injustice and with the wronged; that in following Christ the church must witness against all the powerful and privileged who selfishly seek their own interests and thus control and harm others” (Art. 4.3). The church must, therefore, “reject any ideology which would legitimate forms of injustice and any doctrine which is unwilling to resist such an ideology in the name of the gospel” (Art. 4.3) (Dutch Reformed Mission Church 2010, p. 222).

On first encounter, Belhar and Denney’s minimal creed appear to move in opposite directions. Where Denney’s proposal is deliberately spare—a single sentence designed to lower the confessional threshold and draw the widest possible circle of Christian fellowship—Belhar is theologically dense, naming particular sins, social arrangements, and ideological errors with forensic specificity. Where Denney’s formula is a scholar’s ecumenical proposal, offered quietly in the pages of a theological treatise, Belhar is a confession wrested from a community under systematic, state-sanctioned oppression—an act of ecclesial resistance as much as theological definition.17 And where Denney was suspicious of creeds and confessions that became binding on church members, Belhar has itself, in some Reformed bodies, been received in precisely this way: required as a condition of ordained ministry, its subscription demanded rather than sung. The irony is not lost. A document born of liberation has, in certain ecclesial contexts, been deployed as its own form of confessional gatekeeping—the very tendency both Belhar and Denney, each in their own way, are most concerned to resist.

Yet to stop at the differences would be to miss what is theologically most significant. For all its specificity, Belhar does not function—or at least is not intended to function—as a boundary marker in Denney’s pejorative sense. It functions, rather, as a witness: a communal act of testimony to the God who, in Christ, has made peace with the world, and who therefore refuses to sanction any human arrangement that diminishes those for whom that peace was won. It recognizes that the unity of the church, which is “both a gift and an obligation” (Art. 2.3) (Dutch Reformed Mission Church 2010, p. 220), can “be established only in freedom and not under constraint; that the variety of spiritual gifts, opportunities, backgrounds, convictions, as well as the various languages and cultures, are by virtue of the reconciliation in Christ, opportunities for mutual service and enrichment within the one visible people of God” (Art. 2.6) and that, therefore, “faith in Jesus Christ is the only condition for membership of this Church” (Art. 2.7) (Dutch Reformed Mission Church 2010, p. 220). In this sense, Belhar’s theological density is not opposed to Denney’s confessional minimalism but is its application in a specific historical crisis. Denney’s minimal creed insists that God is known “through Jesus Christ His only Son, our Lord and Saviour” (Denney 1908a, p. 398); Belhar insists that this same Christ is the one in whom the dividing wall of hostility has been broken down, and that a church which organizes its common life around the maintenance of that wall has not merely made a political error but a christological one. The christological center is the same; what differs is the historical pressure that forces its implications into the open.

Any honest engagement with this convergence must, however, also reckon with what it cannot easily absorb. Denney’s confessional minimalism was forged in a context of relative ecclesial privilege, in which the primary threat to evangelical faithfulness came from the inflation and rigidification of confessional requirements rather than the failure of confession to name concrete structures of oppression. Belhar, by contrast, arose from a context in which the church’s refusal to make precisely such naming a matter of confessional concern had made it complicit in systematic, racialized violence. In Reformed terms, that difference matters because confessions are historically situated ecclesial responses, not timeless abstractions: their authority is real, but always subordinate to the situations that call them forth. In such a context, a minimal creed that does not name the sin of apartheid—however christologically centered—risks functioning not as evangelical freedom but as its inverse: the luxury of those whose social arrangements are not themselves at stake in the confession. The irony Denney himself could not have anticipated is that his instinct against confessional gatekeeping could, in the hands of those who wielded such power comfortably, be domesticated into an argument for confessional silence.

This is not a refutation of Denney’s position but its most searching test. The question his confessional minimalism cannot finally evade is: minimal with respect to what, and from whose vantage point? Scholarship on confessional subscription and crisis confessions such as Barmen and Belhar helps clarify that confessions are not only doctrinal summaries but also acts of ecclesial discernment under pressure.18 Belhar’s answer is that the christological center Denney rightly identifies carries social and political entailments that cannot be indefinitely deferred without betraying the gospel they are meant to serve. A genuinely faithful confessional minimalism must remain permanently open to the pressure of that center as it presses outward toward historical specificity under conditions of injustice. Conversely, Belhar’s confessional density—however warranted by its historical moment—requires the check that Denney’s minimalism supplies: the reminder that no specific formulation, however justly wrested from historical struggle, may be elevated into a permanent boundary marker without risking the gatekeeping function that both Denney and Belhar, at their best, are most concerned to resist. The constructive proposal that emerges from holding these two in productive tension is this: faithful confession is neither indefinitely minimal nor inflexibly maximal but is calibrated to the demands of the christological center in particular historical situations—lean where the gospel’s hospitality is being constrained by confessional inflation, specific where the gospel’s claim on social arrangements is being evaded by confessional vagueness.

What Barmen and Belhar together demonstrate—across two continents, two historical crises, and fifty years—is a pattern that Denney’s own confessional instincts had anticipated. All three resist the temptation to make confession an instrument of institutional self-definition. All three locate the church’s confessional vocation not in the maintenance of doctrinal perimeters but in the generous, exposed, and always-provisional act of bearing witness to a sovereign grace that the church neither controls nor contains. Denney’s confession is minimal because the gospel’s hospitality is wide; Barmen’s is urgent because the church’s existence was under direct ideological assault; Belhar’s is specific because the gospel’s claim on concrete social arrangements is non-negotiable. These are not contradictory impulses but complementary ones—three faces of the same christological conviction, each rendered necessary by the particular demands of its historical moment.

The implications of this convergence extend beyond the immediate contexts of these documents. They point toward a broader pattern within the Reformed project—one in which the most faithful confessional acts have arisen not from the desire to secure institutional identity but from the compulsion of the gospel itself, breaking into particular historical situations and demanding a response. Taken together, Barmen, Belhar, and Denney do more than offer parallel examples; they sketch a trajectory for Reformed confessional life in which the church’s identity is held open to ongoing conversion. Confession here is not the final word of an institution about itself but a risky, doxological response to the prior and sovereign speech of God in Christ. If this is what is at stake in their convergence, then the consequences are not merely doctrinal but ecclesial and political: a church that confesses in this key acknowledges that its life is always provisional before the judgment and mercy of God. Its identity cannot be anchored finally in constitutional arrangements, doctrinal codifications, or patterns of social recognition, but must remain open to the gospel’s unsettling intrusion into concrete historical circumstances. Where such a posture is taken seriously, it cannot remain confined to the level of formulation; it presses into the church’s actual patterns of life, loosening inherited certainties and opening up a space in which the community itself must be understood as transitory, continually summoned and re-formed by the disturbing freedom of the gospel.

A community so marked by its “transitory character” (McCaughey 1997, p. 33) will risk dismantling the old alliances between throne (or parliament) and altar, and between “orthodoxy” and belief. It will become an unreliable ally for every political or theological system because, to be such a community, is to be engaged in ongoing renegotiation of practices and their fit with the gospel in unreliable circumstances. Such a commitment will occasion a crisis, especially for those who hanker after a kind of sturmfreies Gebiet [invulnerable area] in the world, whether it be in the form of ecclesiastical establishment or of theological, creedal, and/or institutional guarantees. But this is necessary if the community is to take seriously the gospel’s call to live “an exposed life … stripped of the kind of security that tradition, whether ecclesiological or institutional, easily bestows” (MacKinnon 1969, pp. 33, 34) and instead be a community of the Word.

For a community born of and for the service of the Word, and sustained by that same Word, the Word alone is the only constant. It is this conviction that informs Denney’s essay on “Preaching Christ”: “Changing conditions may demand for it different forms, but presumably under all forms there will be a vital continuity or rather identity in the substance which is preached” (Denney 1908b, p. 393). Such a claim is not confined to the level of abstraction; rather, it operates as a regulative principle for the church’s concrete forms of witness and proclamation. Every part of the church’s ministry must be determined by what another theologian referred to as “the christological question” (Bonhoeffer 1966, pp. 27–37)—“Who is Jesus Christ?” The church’s sole vocation is to be the unstable bearer of this live question.

8. The Freedom of the Gospel

To read Denney’s pastoral correspondence, to trace the arc of his sermons from Gallowgate to Broughty Ferry, and to follow the development of his theological work at the Free Church College is to encounter a theologian who refused to allow the church to treat its own confessional formulations as ends in themselves. For Denney, confessions are not walls but windows—provisional, contextually determined articulations of what the community of faith has heard from the Word of God, always subject to revision in the light of that same Word, always oriented toward the generous and sovereign freedom of God. It is entirely fitting, therefore, that they “should be sung, not signed” (Moffatt 1921, p. ix).

This conviction carries direct ecclesiological and ecumenical consequences. Denney understands that a church which mistakes its confessional inheritance for a boundary marker rather than a witness has, in effect, ceased to confess—it has begun to police. Against this tendency, he proposes not the abolition of confessions but their reorientation: from instruments of institutional gatekeeping to signs of the gospel’s hospitality, from markers of theological exclusion to expressions of trust in God’s freedom to work in human lives beyond the church’s own imagining. This is what Denney means when he called for a “minimal creed”—not doctrinal indifferentism, but evangelical clarity, and the kind of theological humility that the Reformed project, at its best, has associated with the ongoing pressure of the living Word.

The Reformed instinct to be semper reformanda is not, for Denney, a slogan of perpetual institutional renovation. It is a theological posture, a continuous act of submission to the judgment of God’s Word, which means receiving that Word’s verdict on the church’s own self-understanding, including its confessional articulations. Such a posture demands what Denney’s own life and ministry exemplify: the willingness to risk, to remain vulnerable, and to trust that the God who speaks in Christ is more than sufficient to sustain what the church, of itself, cannot secure.

In a theological moment characterized by institutional anxiety, confessional retrenchment, and the temptation to mistake doctrinal precision for faithfulness, Denney’s voice remains salutary. He reminds the church that “at bottom, the Gospel [sic] is not good advice, but good news” (Denney 1894, p. 214), and the church must neither contain that news nor adjudicate who may receive it, but simply bear witness to the God who, as Denney never tired of saying, “loves like that.”