They put us into conversations with the longer and wider community of the people of God as we try faithfully to interpret the gospel and to witness to it. And so, they are secondary to that which they endeavor to understand. Now, it boggles the mind just to imagine what one would have had to say to convince the Scottish divines that they were wrong. A wise person would probably have mailed a letter and then booked passage for the next day to a new world. But, in principle at least, the point is made.
Confessions are subordinate standards.
There is another, related limitation on the authority of confessions. This is its way of affirming what we have read in 2 Timothy. Now for a brief application. In our own time, the confessions and their authority are contested territory. Some wish simply to dispense with confessions and some accord to the confessions a higher authority than the confessions claim for themselves.