The Promising Tradition is about confessing Christian doctrine for the sake of the Gospel which makes and keeps God s people free for him. There are times and occasions when men and women of God are called to take the witness stand and confess the Gospel as the sole-sufficient norm of Christ s Church. For us, in our little corner of the kingdom, confessors of the Promising Tradition recognize that now is such a time. Confessing is serious and, from a human point of view, a dangerous business, as Luther and the Reformers found out in their time of in statu confessionis . The first danger of confessing is that confessors themselves are in imminent danger of losing their souls.
Sin crouches as much at their door as it does anywhere else.
They can become easily prone to self-righteousness, to hatred, to character assassination, the very things they recognize in their opponents. Confessing can only be done in profound humility before the Lord of the Church. It is done for the sake of the Gospel, that the sole, sufficiency of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, get the new and fresh hearing that it alone deserves in the life of the community of faith. It is done, also, for the sake of the opponents. They are God s children, too, and confessors dare never forget that.