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The quick version · Dossier 22

Not Even in the
Fine Print

You visit a church, like it, and go home and read the website. Under What We Believe you find the Bible called inerrant and final, salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, and quite often the five Latin solas of the Reformation listed one by one. So you conclude you have found a church in the line of the Reformers. Two things the page does not tell you: this church believes the baptism you received as a baby was not a baptism, and it believes communion is a symbol and nothing more. Both are positions the Reformers on that page condemned in writing. You will find out about the first one in about five months, when somebody kindly suggests you get baptized. This is the short version of whether that is fair.

About fifteen minutes. Plain English, three short exercises, no Latin and no article numbers. The full dossier audits six real statements of faith word for word, takes each of the five solas in turn, walks through the Marburg Colloquy of 1529 step by step, publishes the prompt that produced it, and gives you a method for auditing any church’s statement of faith yourself.
The situation

What this is about

A statement of faith is the one document a church writes for people who do not belong to it yet. Nobody makes a church write one. A church that writes one is choosing what a stranger should know first — which makes it fair to ask what it leaves out.

Six real ones were read for this page, word for word, in September 2026. No church is named anywhere, because the complaint is about a way of writing documents and not about any congregation — but every word quoted below is real and is quoted exactly.

Before anything else, three things should be said in the churches’ favour, because they are all true:

  • Nothing in these documents is false. Not one false sentence was found in any of them. The whole complaint is about what is missing.
  • Nobody appears to be hiding anything. In the one case where it could be traced, the missing doctrine was sitting fully written out, in plain words, on another page of the same website.
  • A summary is not a catalogue. A short document cannot contain everything, and a church is right to lead with what unites Christians rather than what divides them.

So the question is not whether anyone is lying. It is narrower: does a document that advertises the Reformation, and leaves out the two things the Reformation actually split over, tell a stranger where he stands?

What this page is not doing

It is not arguing that baptizing only believers is wrong, or that communion really is more than a symbol — those are separate arguments and they are in Dossier 21 and Dossier 14. It says nothing about whether the churches described are proper churches. It tells nobody whether to join a church, leave one, be baptized, or refuse. It names no living person or church. And the fact that Lutheran and Reformed authorities executed people for re-baptizing in the sixteenth century is recorded as a fact and defended by nobody.

One

The short answer

  1. The omission is real, and it is mostly not hiding. It is filing. Of eight documents read, four state the doctrine plainly, two bury it in a technical word, one leaves it out of the statement of faith and states it fully on a different page, and one does not mention baptism or communion anywhere at all — while listing all five solas in Latin with translations.
  2. The pattern is the opposite of carelessness. Of the four documents that say it plainly, three are denominational or historic confessions and the fourth is an openly Baptist congregation — and not one of the four mentions the solas. Of the four that do not say it, all four are independent or non-denominational, and two advertise the solas. Eight is too few to prove anything, and the full dossier says so. But it is worth noticing.
  3. The solas cannot tell you where a church stands, because they were never about the things that divided the Reformation. All five are about how a person is saved, or about where authority lies. Not one of them is about baptism, communion, or how a church is run. That is why Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Cranmer and the Anabaptists could all have signed all five — and still condemned one another.
  4. The five solas are not even a Reformation list. No sixteenth-century document sets these five out as a set of five. It is a modern summary of the Reformation, which is a perfectly good thing to be, but it means a church invoking “the five solas of the Reformation” is invoking a modern summary of the part of the Reformation everybody agreed about.
  5. On baptizing babies, the Reformers were not divided. They were unanimous, and three of them condemned the other view by name. The Lutheran confession of 1530 says children are to be baptized and rejects those who deny it. Calvin called the claim that the early Church did not baptize infants “a shameful falsehood”. The Dutch Reformed confession of 1561 condemns those who “condemn the baptism of the children of believers”. The English Articles, and the Presbyterians at Westminster, say the same. There is no Reformation confession on the other side.
  6. There is a confession on the other side, and it is honest about it. The Anabaptist Schleitheim Confession of 1527 says baptism is for those who have repented and believe, and adds that this “excludes all infant baptism, the highest and chief abomination of the Pope”. It is the bluntest document in the whole sample and the oldest. It is the real ancestor of the modern position, and it is not the one on the website.
  7. Luther wrote a whole treatise against the modern position, and it is not polite. In 1528 two pastors wrote to him because their people were being told their baptisms had not counted. His reply, still in print: “True, one should add faith to baptism. But we are not to base baptism on faith”; and of the man baptized on the strength of his own faith, that he is “not only uncertain, but also an idolator who denies Christ”.
  8. The thing almost nobody knows: Luther and Zwingli sat down together in 1529 and agreed about baptism, in writing. At Marburg they were given fifteen articles and agreed fourteen. Article 14, signed by both of them: “that baptism of infants is right, and that they are thereby received into God’s grace and into Christendom”. Article 9, also signed by both: baptism “is not merely an empty sign or watchword among Christians but, rather, a sign and work of God”. The modern non-denominational position denies both sentences, and the two great rivals of the Reformation signed them the same afternoon.
  9. The one article they could not agree was communion — and Luther then refused to shake hands. Article 15 records its own failure: they “have not reached an agreement as to whether the true body and blood of Christ are bodily present in the bread and wine”. Luther had chalked “This is my body” on the table under the velvet cloth. Asked to accept the Swiss as brothers he refused: “it is clear that we do not have the same spirit”. Most people think he was wrong to; his own colleagues did. But it tells you exactly where he drew his line, and the modern position is three articles beyond it.
  10. “Communion is a symbol” is not the Protestant view. It never was. There were three views, not two, and the middle one is the one nobody remembers. Westminster, the Presbyterian confession, says worthy receivers “really and indeed, yet not carnally and corporally, but spiritually, receive and feed upon Christ crucified” — Christ being as really present to their faith as the bread is to their eyes. The Dutch confession says what is eaten is Christ’s own body, “but the manner in which we eat it is not by the mouth, but by the Spirit through faith”. Not one Reformation confession teaches that nothing is given.
  11. The whole missing doctrine is usually stored in one word: ordinance. It looks like a homelier word for sacrament. It is not. A sacrament is held to be something God gives you; an ordinance is held to be something you do to show what you believe. A visitor reading “the two ordinances of the church” has just read an entire doctrine of the sacraments and cannot possibly know it. In fairness, the word is not a reliable clue on its own — Westminster uses it too, in an older and broader sense. Which is exactly the problem: one word, two historical meanings, no explanation.
  12. Is it fair? The unfairness is in the order, not the silence — and two sentences would fix it. Week one, he reads a true document and concludes he is among the Reformers’ heirs. Month three, his children have friends here. Month five, he is told his baptism does not count and asked to be baptized. He now has three choices and only one is comfortable, and the only reason the other two are uncomfortable is the order in which he was told things. A disclosure that arrives after the cost of disagreeing has gone up is not really a disclosure.
Where this page standsMy own view, and it is opinion: this is a real failure of candour, but the cause is marketing rather than dishonesty, which is why it is so common and so little noticed. A statement of faith used to be a boundary — here is what we hold, and therefore what we deny. It is now a front door: warm, short, welcoming, edited by the same instincts that edit every other page on a church website, and inclined to remove anything that would make a first-time reader ask a hard question. The two missing doctrines are exactly the two that would. And the sharpest form of the complaint is not that the visitor is misled about doctrine. It is that he is told he has found the church of the Reformers, and will discover months later, from a friend, that he has found the church of Schleitheim — a serious and honourable tradition with a confession of its own, which has nothing to be ashamed of except being passed off as something else. The people worst served are not the visitors. They are the members, who are entitled to know whose heirs they actually are.
Two

The first exercise: what does the document tell you?

Six real documents, quoted exactly. For each one, decide what a visitor could learn from it. Four choices: it says so plainly; it is buried in a technical word; it is left out here and stated on another page; or it is not there at all. Answer first, then read the note.

0 of 6 answered.

Three

The bit nobody expects: Luther and Zwingli agreed about baptism

In October 1529 Philip of Hesse got the two rival wings of the Reformation into a room in his castle at Marburg. His reasons were military: the Emperor was a threat, and an alliance needed the Protestants to be one church. Luther, Melanchthon and four others came from the German side; Zwingli, Oecolampadius, Bucer and Hedio from the Swiss. Fifteen articles were put in front of them. Fourteen were signed by everybody.

Here are two of the fourteen. Read the signature list underneath.

Article 9. “… that holy baptism is a sacrament which has been instituted by God as an aid to such a faith … it is therefore not merely an empty sign or watchword among Christians but, rather, a sign and work of God by which our faith grows and through which we are regenerated to life.”

Article 14. “… that baptism of infants is right, and that they are thereby received into God’s grace and into Christendom.”

The Marburg Articles, 3 October 1529. Signed by Martin Luther, Justus Jonas, Philip Melanchthon, Andreas Osiander, Stephan Agricola, Johannes Brenz, Johannes Oecolampadius, Huldrych Zwingli, Martin Bucer and Caspar Hedio.

Zwingli is the Reformer whose name gets attached to the idea that the sacraments are symbols. He signed both articles. So did Oecolampadius and Bucer. Zurich, Zwingli’s own city, had drowned a man in the river two years earlier for re-baptizing people; Zwingli was not a friend of the Anabaptists but their most effective opponent.

What that means for the website

A modern non-denominational church denies both of those sentences. It is not choosing Zurich over Wittenberg — Zurich and Wittenberg agreed about this, in writing, and both signed. There was no Reformation party holding the modern position. There was a separate movement holding it, two years earlier, whose confession called infant baptism the chief abomination of the Pope; and that movement never claimed to be standing in Luther’s tradition.

The one article they could not agree was the fifteenth, on communion — and even there, look at how much they did agree: that the sacrament is a sacrament of the true body and blood of Christ, and that spiritual partaking of that body and blood “is especially necessary for every Christian”. A modern memorialist cannot sign that either. The bit they could not settle was narrow: whether Christ is bodily present in the bread and wine.

Then, at the end, the Swiss asked to be received as brothers, and Luther refused. “Our spirit does not harmonize with your spirit. Rather it is clear that we do not have the same spirit.” Bucer spent years trying to repair it, Melanchthon was uncomfortable, and most people since have thought Luther wrong. That concession makes the point sharper rather than softer: on his most rigid day, Luther drew his line with unusual precision — and he drew it on the far side of people who had just agreed with him about baptism.

Four

The second exercise: which sola settles it?

Six questions a person might genuinely want answered before joining a church. For each, say whether one of the five solas settles it — and if so, roughly which kind. Answer first, then read the note.

0 of 6 answered.

The usual objection here is that sola scriptura does settle the baptism question, because infant baptism is not commanded in the Bible. Two things about that. The first is a genuine concession: there is no command to baptize infants in the New Testament, and no clear example of one. The second is the answer. Sola scriptura says where final authority lies; it does not say what Scripture means. Every man in the room at Marburg held sola scriptura, and they still could not agree what four words of it meant. A principle both sides of an argument accept cannot be the thing that settles the argument — so a church telling you it holds sola scriptura has told you something true and important, and nothing at all about which side of Marburg it is on.

Five

The other bit nobody expects: “it’s a symbol” is not the Protestant view

Most people are taught that Catholics believe the bread becomes the body and Protestants believe it is a symbol. That is a historical mistake, and it misdescribes most sharply the tradition a modern evangelical is likeliest to think of as his own.

View one

The body is bodily thereThe true body and blood are present in, with and under the bread and wine, and received by the mouth. Luther, and the Lutheran confession, which rejects those who teach otherwise.

View two

Really given, spiritually receivedThe bread stays bread. But Christ himself is really given and really received — not by the mouth, by faith. Something is handed over. This is Calvin, the Dutch confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, the Swiss, and Westminster.

View three

A symbol and a reminderThe bread and wine stand for the body and blood; nothing is given; the act is a remembrance and something the participant does. The Anabaptist tradition, and the ordinary view in modern non-denominational churches.

View two is the one that gets forgotten, and it is in every Reformed confession there is. The Presbyterians at Westminster in 1647:

“Worthy receivers … do then also inwardly by faith, really and indeed, yet not carnally and corporally, but spiritually, receive and feed upon Christ crucified … the body and blood of Christ being then not corporally or carnally in, with, or under the bread and wine; yet as really, but spiritually, present to the faith of believers in that ordinance, as the elements themselves are, to their outward senses.”

The Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter 29, section 7.

Read the last clause slowly, because it is the whole thing in a line: Christ is as really present to the believer’s faith as the bread is to his eyes. Not as a metaphor is present to a mind — as an object is present to a sense. And the Dutch confession of 1561 is just as strong: “what is eaten is Christ’s own natural body and what is drunk is his own blood — but the manner in which we eat it is not by the mouth, but by the Spirit through faith.” Calvin himself refused the alternative in terms: the Supper seals God’s promise “not by presenting a vain or empty sign, but by there exerting an efficacy of the Spirit”.

Why the mistake is so durable. Because half of each confession sounds memorialist. Westminster section 5 says the elements “still remain truly, and only, bread and wine”; section 7, two paragraphs later, says Christ is as really present to faith as the bread to the senses. The Heidelberg Catechism’s question 78 says the bread does not become Christ’s body; question 79, the very next entry, says believers truly share in his body and blood. Quote the first half of either and you get memorialism. The confessions wrote the second half precisely so that nobody could.

And in fairness to Zwingli, who usually gets blamed for view three: his own mature position held that Christ is truly, though not naturally, present to the believer. Modern memorialism is thinner than Zwingli’s. Its real home is Schleitheim, whose third article speaks of breaking bread “in remembrance of the broken body of Christ” and names nothing as given.

Six

The third exercise: sort six statements into three views

Six real statements, from 1527 to 2000. Put each in one of the three views above. Two are traps, and they are traps most people fall into. Answer first, then read the note.

0 of 6 answered.

Seven

The fair objections, and what can be said to them

Four objections, each put as strongly as its holders would put it.

“A statement of faith is a summary, not a systematic theology. You would not complain that it leaves out angels.”
Entirely right as a principle, and it fails on the evidence in three places. One: the church with no mention of baptism anywhere gives the doctrine of Scripture about eighty words, including “inerrant in the original writings” and “supreme and final authority in faith and life”. A document with room for that has room for one sentence about who gets baptized. Two: a doctrine is not too minor to print if you will ask someone to act on it before he can join. One church’s position paper says the believer baptized as an infant “should be baptized again” and calls the position unambiguous. Three: a document that says nothing about its history is a summary. A document that names the Reformation five times in Latin has made a claim, and a reader may check it.
“Nobody is hiding anything. It’s on our baptism page.”
This is true and it is the single most important thing the audit found. In the clearest case, the doctrine was stated on another page of the same site more plainly than in any of the statements of faith — “we do not baptize infants”, and the believer “should be baptized again”. Nobody is concealing anything; the doctrine is filed somewhere a visitor has no reason to look. For his purposes that is the same as not published. And it makes the fix trivial: a link from the statement of faith would end this complaint entirely.
“The Anabaptists were Reformers too. You are defining the Reformation as whatever Luther thought.”
Conceded without reservation. The Reformation was a family of movements, and the Anabaptists belong to its history as surely as Wittenberg does — they paid more for it than most. But two things follow that do not help. Zwingli’s own city produced a confession teaching view two, so not even the Swiss Reformed settled where the modern churches stand. And when you sort the actual documents, the third box contains no magisterial Reformation confession at all — only Schleitheim in 1527 and a Baptist confession in 2000. That is not a slur; it is a lineage, and an honourable one. It is simply not the lineage advertised.
“Every institution reveals itself gradually. You do not get a marriage’s difficulties in the prospectus.”
The best of the four. The answer is that this church has itself decided this fact is not a small one. It chose to publish a statement of faith, chose what went in it, and holds that the visitor’s baptism was not a baptism — a claim not about preference but about whether something happened to him, and whose act it was. Having decided that, it cannot also say the point is too small for the document where it says what it believes.
Eight

What would fix it

Nothing in this page asks a church to change a single thing it believes. It asks it to write down the belief it already has, in the document where it already writes down what it believes.

Sixty-eight words“We baptize by immersion those who profess faith in Christ for themselves. We therefore do not regard baptism received in infancy as Christian baptism, and we ask those who were baptized as infants to be baptized on their own profession of faith. We hold the Lord’s Supper to be a remembrance, in which the bread and the cup represent the body and blood of Christ. On both of these we differ from Luther, Calvin, and the Reformation confessions, and we hold our position on the authority of Scripture.”

The last sentence is optional and is the best one in the paragraph. It is candid, it is accurate, and it claims the authority the church actually appeals to instead of one it does not. It would earn far more respect from a thoughtful visitor than the solas do. Any church that added this would have nothing left to answer here.

Three questions are enough to test any statement of faith, and all three can be answered from the document alone. Can a reader with no theological training tell whether a baptism he received as a baby counts here? Is there anything he will be told in his first year that might have changed his mind, and that this document does not contain? And does every historical claim in it survive being checked against the documents it invokes? The full dossier has an instrument that runs those tests properly, and it is built so that a well-written document comes out clean — four of the eight documents audited do.

Nine

Check it yourself

Six things, all free, and the last one is the only one that tests what this page actually claims.

  1. 1. The Marburg Articles (3 October 1529), all fifteen. Twenty minutes, free online in English. Read this one. Articles 9 and 14, then the signature list, then Article 15. If Zwingli did not sign Article 14, this page is wrong and you will know inside half an hour.
  2. 2. The eyewitness report of the Marburg Colloquy. Twenty-five minutes, free. The chalk under the tablecloth, and the hand not given. Written by a man on Luther’s side, which makes his account of the refusal more telling rather than less.
  3. 3. The Augsburg Confession (1530), Articles IX, X and XIII. Ten minutes, free. Three short paragraphs: infant baptism with its rejection clause, the Supper, and the sentence about the sacraments not being merely “marks of profession among men”.
  4. 4. The Schleitheim Confession (1527), Articles 1 and 3. Ten minutes, free. The other side’s founding document and the most honest thing in the whole sample. Read it to see what a plain statement of this position looks like when written by people being hunted for it.
  5. 5. Westminster Confession chapter 29, sections 5 and 7 — read together — and Heidelberg Catechism questions 78 and 79, also together. Fifteen minutes, free. This is the item that settles the communion question for most readers. Read each first half alone, then the second half, and watch the meaning change.
  6. 6. Five churches’ own statements of faith, including your own. Do this one. Twenty minutes and no special knowledge. Pick the five nearest you, or the five largest in your city — but pick them before you read their pages, or an audit becomes an anecdote. Open the page called What We Believe, and only that page, because that is what a visitor reads. Search it for baptis, immers, commun, Supper, ordinance, sacrament. Then ask the two questions the visitor needs: can I tell whether a baptism I received as a baby counts here? and can I tell whether anything is given in communion, or only remembered? Then count how many of the five mention the Reformation or the solas, and see whether it is the same ones. If your five come back candid, this page’s finding does not hold where you live, and that is worth knowing and worth saying.

Want the whole thing?

The full dossier audits six real statements of faith word for word, takes each of the five solas in turn, lays out the Reformation record on both sacraments with every quotation dated, walks through the Marburg Colloquy step by step, explains what the word ordinance is carrying, publishes the prompt that produced it all, and ends with an instrument you can run on any statement of faith — including your own church’s.

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