“Fine print” is the very small writing at the bottom of an agreement. Important facts are often placed there, where few people read them. The title means: these two facts are not even in the small writing.
What is this page about?
Statement of faith
A statement of faith is a short text in which a church says what it believes. Many churches put it on their website under “What We Believe”.
The five solas
“Sola” is Latin for “alone”. The five solas are a short list about the Reformation: Scripture alone, grace alone, faith alone, Christ alone, and glory to God alone.
A statement of faith is the one text that a church writes for people who do not yet belong. Nobody forces a church to write one. The church chooses what a stranger should know first. So it is fair to ask what is left out.
The author read real statements of faith in September 2026, word for word. No church is named here. The problem is a way of writing, not one church.
Three things must be said for the churches, because they are true.
- Nothing in these texts is false. The author did not find one false sentence. The whole problem is what is missing.
- Nobody seems to be hiding anything. In one case, the missing teaching was written clearly on another page of the same website.
- A short text cannot say everything. It is right for a church to begin with what Christians share.
So the question is not “Is someone lying?” It is smaller. A text names the Reformation. It leaves out the two things that divided the Reformation. Does it tell a stranger where he stands?
Open
Say it in the statement of faith.A church should say plainly, in the text for visitors, what it believes about baptism and the Lord’s Supper. This page agrees with this.
Enough
The short text is enough.A statement of faith is only a summary. The rest can come later. This page tests this.
The short answer
1. Something is missing, but it is mostly not hidden. It is filed in another place. The author read eight texts. Four say the teaching plainly. Two put it into one special word. One leaves it out and says it fully on another page. One never speaks of baptism or the Lord’s Supper at all, but it lists all five solas in Latin.
2. There is a pattern. Of the four texts that say it plainly, three are old public statements of faith or texts of a denomination, and one is from a church that openly calls itself Baptist. Not one of these four names the solas. The four texts that do not say it plainly are all from independent churches. Two of them name the solas. Eight texts are too few to prove anything. But it is worth noticing.
3. The solas cannot tell you where a church stands. All five are about how a person is saved or about where authority is. Not one is about baptism, the Lord’s Supper, or how a church is led. Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and the people who baptized again could all agree to all five. And they still wrote against each other.
4. The “five solas” are not a list from the Reformation itself. No text from the 1500s gives these five as a set. The list is a modern summary. That is fine. But it is a summary of the part of the Reformation that everyone agreed about.
5. About the baptism of babies, the Reformers did not disagree. The Lutheran statement of 1530 says that children must be baptized. Calvin said it was false that the early church did not baptize babies. The Dutch Reformed statement of 1561, the English church, and the Presbyterians all say the same. No Reformation statement of faith is on the other side.
6. There is an old statement of faith on the other side, and it is honest. In 1527 the people who baptized again wrote a statement at a place called Schleitheim. It says that baptism is for people who have turned to God and believe. It says that this “excludes all infant baptism”. It is the oldest text in this study and the most direct. It is the real parent of the modern teaching. But it is not the one named on the website.
7. Luther wrote a whole book against the modern teaching. See Dossier 21. He wrote: “True, one should add faith to baptism. But we are not to base baptism on faith”.
8. Almost nobody knows this: Luther and Zwingli met in 1529 and agreed about baptism, in writing. See Part 2.
9. They could not agree about the Lord’s Supper. See Part 2.
10. “The Lord’s Supper is a symbol” is not “the Protestant view”. There were three views, not two. See Part 3.
11. The whole missing teaching is often inside one word: “ordinance”. See Part 4.
12. Is it fair? The problem is the order of events. See Part 5.
This is my opinion. These texts are not open enough. But the reason is the wish to be welcoming, not the wish to lie. That is why it is so common and why few people notice.
Long ago, a statement of faith was like a border: “This is what we hold, and so this is what we do not accept.” Now it is like a front door: warm, short and welcoming. It leaves out anything that could make a new reader ask a hard question. And these two teachings are exactly the two that would.
The visitor reads that he has found the church of the Reformers. Months later, a friend tells him something different. He has found a church in the line of Schleitheim. That is a serious and honourable tradition. It has nothing to be ashamed of. It should only use its own name.
The members are served worst of all. They have a right to know whose children they are.
Luther and Zwingli agreed about baptism
In October 1529 a German ruler brought the two sides of the Reformation together in his castle at Marburg. Luther came with the Germans. Zwingli came with the Swiss. They were given fifteen points. Everybody signed fourteen of them.
Here are two of the fourteen.
it is therefore not merely an empty sign or watchword among Christians but, rather, a sign and work of God
The Marburg Articles, 3 October 1529, Article 9, on baptism
In simple words: So baptism is not only an empty sign among Christians. It is a sign and a work of God.
baptism of infants is right, and that they are thereby received into God’s grace and into Christendom
The Marburg Articles, 3 October 1529, Article 14
In simple words: It is right to baptize babies. In baptism they are received into God’s grace and into the Christian church.
Luther signed both. Zwingli signed both. People connect Zwingli’s name with the idea that the sacraments are only symbols. He signed anyway. He was a strong opponent of the people who baptized again.
What this means for the website
A modern independent church usually denies both of these sentences. So it is not choosing Zwingli’s city over Luther’s city. Both cities agreed about this, in writing.
No part of the Reformation held the modern teaching. A separate movement held it, and that movement never said that it stood in Luther’s line.
They could not agree on the fifteenth point, about the Lord’s Supper. But see how much they agreed on even there. Both sides said that it is a sacrament of the true body and blood of Christ. The point they could not settle was small: is Christ’s body present in a bodily way in the bread and wine?
At the end, the Swiss asked Luther to accept them as brothers. Luther said no: “it is clear that we do not have the same spirit”. Most people since then have thought that Luther was wrong. But it shows where he drew his line. And he drew it against men who had just agreed with him about baptism.
Three views of the Lord’s Supper, not two
Most people learn this: “Catholics believe that the bread becomes Christ’s body. Protestants believe that it is a symbol.” This is a mistake about history.
View one
Christ’s body is there in a bodily way.The true body and blood of Christ are present with the bread and wine, and people receive them with the mouth. This is Luther and the Lutheran churches.
View two
Truly given, received by faith.The bread stays bread. But Christ himself is truly given and truly received, by faith and not by the mouth. This is Calvin, the Dutch and Swiss Reformed churches, and the Presbyterians.
View three
A symbol and a reminder.The bread and wine stand for the body and blood. Nothing is given. The meal is something the people do to remember. This is the tradition of Schleitheim, and it is the usual view in modern independent churches.
People forget view two. But it is in every Reformed statement of faith. The Presbyterians wrote in 1647:
really and indeed, yet not carnally and corporally, but spiritually, receive and feed upon Christ crucified
The Westminster Confession, 1647, chapter 29
In simple words: People who receive rightly truly feed on Christ who died on the cross. They do this in a spiritual way, not in a bodily way.
The same text says that Christ is as truly present to the faith of believers as the bread is to their eyes. Not one Reformation statement of faith teaches that nothing is given.
Why does the mistake live so long? Because half of each old statement sounds like view three. One sentence says that the bread stays bread. But the next sentence says that believers truly receive Christ. If you quote only the first half, you get view three. The writers added the second half so that nobody could do that.
One word: “ordinance”
Many statements of faith speak of “the two ordinances of the church”.
Ordinance and sacrament
Both words are used for baptism and the Lord’s Supper. A sacrament is understood as something God gives to you. An ordinance, in modern use, is understood as something you do to show what you believe.
“Ordinance” looks like a simpler word for “sacrament”. It is not. A visitor who reads “the two ordinances” has just read a whole teaching about baptism and the Lord’s Supper. But he cannot know it.
To be fair, the word alone is not a sure sign. Some old statements use “ordinance” in an older and wider meaning. That is the problem: one word, two meanings, and no explanation.
Here are three real examples, quoted exactly. The churches are not named.
- One church lists all five solas in Latin. The words baptism, communion, Supper, ordinance and sacrament are nowhere in its text.
- One church says only that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are ordinances and that they are “not to be regarded as means of salvation”. It does not say who can be baptized or what the Supper is.
- One large church says nothing in its statement of faith about who can be baptized. But another page on the same website says: “The believer should be baptized again.”
Is it fair?
The problem is the order.
- Week one. The visitor reads a true text. He decides that he is among the children of the Reformers.
- Month three. His children have friends in this church.
- Month five. Someone tells him that his baptism does not count and asks him to be baptized.
Now he has three choices, and only one of them is comfortable. The others are hard only because of the order in which he learned things.
Information that comes after the cost of saying no has gone up is not really open information.
Fair arguments against this page
“A statement of faith is a summary. It cannot say everything.” This is right as a rule. But one church gives about eighty words to its teaching on the Bible. It has room for one sentence about who is baptized. And a teaching is not too small to print if a person must act on it before he can join.
“Nobody is hiding anything. It is on our baptism page.” This is true, and it is the most important thing the study found. But a visitor has no reason to look there. For him, it is the same as not printed. And the answer is easy: put a link in the statement of faith.
“The people who baptized again were Reformers too.” Yes. They belong to the history of the Reformation, and they paid a high price. But their statement of faith is Schleitheim. It is an honourable line. It is not the line named on the website.
“Every group shows itself slowly.” This is the best argument. But the church itself has decided that this point is not small. It believes that the visitor’s baptism was not a baptism. Then it cannot also say that the point is too small for its statement of faith.
What would fix it
This page does not ask any church to change what it believes. It asks the church to write its belief in the place where it writes its beliefs. Here is an example text. This page wrote it.
“We baptize, by putting under water, people who say for themselves that they believe in Christ. So we do not accept a baptism received as a baby as Christian baptism. We ask people who were baptized as babies to be baptized when they declare their own faith. We hold that the Lord’s Supper is a remembrance. The bread and the cup stand for the body and blood of Christ. On both points we differ from Luther, Calvin and the Reformation statements of faith. We hold our view on the authority of the Bible.”
The last two sentences are the best. They are open and true. A thoughtful visitor would respect them more than the solas.
Three questions test any statement of faith.
- Can a reader with no training tell if his baptism as a baby counts here?
- Will he hear something in his first year that could have changed his mind, and that this text does not say?
- Is every claim about history true when you check it?
- The five solas say nothing about baptism or the Lord’s Supper.
- Luther, Zwingli and Calvin all taught the baptism of babies. None of them taught that the Lord’s Supper is only a symbol with nothing given.
- The teaching of many independent churches comes from the Schleitheim statement of 1527.
- A church should say this openly in its statement of faith. Two sentences are enough.
Check it yourself
- Read the fifteen Marburg Articles of 1529. They are free online in English. Read Articles 9 and 14, then the names of the signers, then Article 15.
- Read Articles 1 and 3 of the Schleitheim statement of 1527. It is the honest text of the other side.
- Do this one. Choose five churches near you, and your own. Open only the page “What We Believe”. Look for the words baptism, communion, Supper, ordinance and sacrament. Ask: can I tell if my baptism as a baby counts here? Can I tell if anything is given in the Lord’s Supper? If your five churches are open about it, then this page’s finding is not true where you live. That is good to know.
The Bible words on this page come from the World English Bible. It is a modern translation, and anyone may copy it. The quick version and the full dossier use the King James Version, which is older and harder to read. The words are different, but the meaning is the same.
Want to read more?
The quick version says the same things in ordinary English and adds short exercises. The full dossier gives all the evidence and names every source.
Read the quick version → Read the full dossier →