The language of testimony

It is rare to find Christians articulating statements of faith in the public square. We tend to treat them as 'internal' documents within the Church that differentiate us one from another. This is but another example that we have accepted the unexamined assumption of our culture that these things belong to the private realm of belief and taste, and not to the public world of knowledge and truth.

Lesslie Newbigin expresses brilliantly what a public confession of faith looks like in engagement with the world.

As a member of the Christian church and from within its fellowship, I believe and testify (and the shift to the first person singular is, of course, deliberate) that in the body of literature we call the Bible, continuously reinterpreted in the actual missionary experience of the church through the centuries and among the nations, there is a true rendering of the character and purpose of the Creator and Sustainer of all nature, and that it is this character and purpose that determines what is good. Because I so believe and testify, I reject the division of human experience into a private world, where the "good" is a matter of personal taste, and a public world, where "facts" are regarded as operative apart from any reference to the good. (Foolishness to the Greeks p88-89)

This is a creed that I can, and must, confess.