Abstract
Engaging with the arguments of Clark and Hart, this chapter explores the various ways in which some major Reformed confessions have changed over time. The authors ask whether it is possible for contemporary Protestants to be Reformed in the senses in which the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ecclesiastical assemblies who drafted the original confessional documents—and the members of those churches—understood the term “Reformed.” The authors argue that if being Reformed in this way is not possible, then greater latitude ought to be extended to various contemporary groups which want to self-identify as Reformed.
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Notes
- 1.
David Van Biema, “10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now: The New Calvinism,” TIME, March 12, 2009.
- 2.
John J. Murray, Catch the Vision: Roots of the Reformed Recovery (Darlington, UK: Evangelical Press, 2007); Colin Hansen, Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist’s Journey with the New Calvinists (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008); J. Todd Billings, “Calvinism’s Comeback?” Christian Century 126:24 (1 December 2009), pp. 22–25; Josh Burek, “Christian Faith: Calvinism is back,” Christian Science Monitor, March 27, 2010.
- 3.
See, most obviously, Iain H. Murray, The Puritan Hope (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1970).
- 4.
D. G. Hart, Calvinism: A history (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 304.
- 5.
R. Scott Clark, Recovering the Reformed Confession: Our theology, piety, and practice (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2008), p. 4.
- 6.
Willem J. van Asselt, “Calvinism as a problematic concept in historiography,” International Journal of Philosophy and Theology, 74:2 (2013), pp. 144–150.
- 7.
http://www.pcusa.org/search/?criteria=reformed, accessed on July 1, 2014.
- 8.
Heinz Schilling, “Confessional Europe,” in Thomas Brady Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy (eds), Handbook of European history, 1400–1600, Vol. 2, Late Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation (Leiden: Brill, 1995), pp. 641–675; Wolfgang Reinhard, “Pressures towards confessionalization? Prolegomena to a theory of the confessional age,” in C. Scott Dixon (ed.), The German Reformation (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 177–178; Alec Ryrie, “‘Protestantism’ as a historical category,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth series, XXVI (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 59–77, pp. 60, 65; van Asselt, “Calvinism as a problematic concept in historiography,” pp. 147–148.
- 9.
Ryrie, “‘Protestantism’ as a historical category,” pp. 66–67.
- 10.
Ryrie, “‘Protestantism’ as a historical category,” p. 66.
- 11.
Ryrie, “‘Protestantism’ as a historical category,” pp. 67, 72.
- 12.
van Asselt, “Calvinism as a problematic concept in historiography,” p. 147.
- 13.
van Asselt, “Calvinism as a problematic concept in historiography,” p. 146.
- 14.
van Asselt, “Calvinism as a problematic concept in historiography,” p. 148.
- 15.
van Asselt, “Calvinism as a problematic concept in historiography,” p. 148.
- 16.
John Leith, Creeds of the churches: A reader in Christian doctrine from the Bible to the present (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1982), p. 127.
- 17.
The Act, Declaration and Testimony (1761) does not specifically mention the reason for adopting the name “Reformed Presbyterian,” but the introduction indicates the subscribers were preparing a Testimony for the true, covenanted, and re-established national kirk. “This designation (Reformed Presbytery) they assumed as expressive of their attachment to the Reformation cause, and of their desire, through divine aid, to contend for all those scriptural attainments, both in Church and State, to which these nations were so solemnly pledged”; Historical Testimony (1831). The authors are grateful to Dr. Daniel Ritchie (University College Dublin) and Dr. Thomas Donachie (Queen’s University Belfast) for advice on Reformed Presbyterian history.
- 18.
As in, for example, Clark, Recovering the Reformed Confession, p. 3.
- 19.
Ryrie, “‘Protestantism’ as a historical category,” pp. 66–67.
- 20.
The harmony of protestant confessions, ed. Peter Hall (London: John F. Shaw, 1842).
- 21.
William A. Shaw, A history of the English Church during the Civil Wars and under the Commonwealth, 1640–1660 (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1900), vol. 1, pp. 365–372.
- 22.
Act approving the Confession of Faith, session 23, 27 August 1647, as reprinted in The Westminster Confession of Faith (n.p.: Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, 1967), p. 15.
- 23.
Records of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, 1706–1788 (New York: Arno Press, 1969), pp. 539, 546–547.
- 24.
Clark, Recovering the Reformed Confession, p. 165.
- 25.
WCF 20:4 (Scottish text); WCF 23:3 (Scottish text).
- 26.
http://www.opc.org/documents/WCF_orig.html, accessed July 1, 2014.
- 27.
Clark, Recovering the Reformed Confession, p. 28.
- 28.
It is, arguably, implied in the WCF.
- 29.
This is borne out in James T. Dennison’s Reformed Confessions of the 16th and 17th centuries in English translation: Volume 1, 1523–1552, volume 2, 1552–1566 and volume 3, 1567–1599 (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformed Heritage Books, 2008, 2010, 2012).
- 30.
Darryl G. Hart, “J. Gresham Machen, Inerrancy and Creedless Christianity,” Themelios 25:3 (2000), 24; idem, A Secular Faith: Why Christianity Favors The Separation of Church and State (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 2006), p. 221. Clark has argued that theonomy represents a “profound alienation from our confession,” even though its modification and slight extension of the confession’s view of civil government is much less radical than the abandonment of its claims by the “truly Reformed”; Clark, Recovering the Reformed Confession, p. 63.
- 31.
Hart, Calvinism, pp. 9–10.
- 32.
See especially Meredith G. Kline, Kingdom prologue (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2006), and idem, The Structure of Biblical Authority (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1972); David VanDrunen’s many works on natural law and the two kingdoms, including Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms: A Study in the Development of Reformed Social Thought (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), and idem, Living in God’s two kingdoms: A Biblical vision for Christianity and culture (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010).
- 33.
Crawford Gribben, “Samuel Rutherford and liberty of conscience,” Westminster Theological Journal 71:2 (2009), pp. 355–373.
- 34.
Clark, Recovering the Reformed Confession, p. 10.
- 35.
Louis Berkhof, Systematic theology (1939; Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1958), p. 466.
- 36.
Darryl G. Hart, Calvinism: A history (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), pp. 83–90. See also T.D. Bozeman, The precisianist strain: Disciplinary religion and antinomian backlash in Puritanism to 1638 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 64–68, for more detail on this inward, pietistic turn.
- 37.
Clark, Recovering the Reformed Confession, p. 163.
- 38.
The adjective “extreme” was chosen over “radical,” because the etymology of the latter refers to the roots of something. Yet, if the original neo-Calvinist, Abraham Kuyper, was willing to give up the label Reformed in order to believe and teach that heretics should not be put to death by the State, then neo-Calvinists such as Nelson Kloosterman must be identified in some other way, since he argues that contemporary advocates of two kingdoms theology are not Reformed because they do not subscribe to Article 36 of the Belgic Confession.
- 39.
Joseph Butler (1692–1752), a Presbyterian-turned-English Bishop, denied that ordinary objects ever survived change.
- 40.
In Rutherford, see pp. b4, 30–31, 99–100, 189–191. The reasoning behind the claim that any rejection of religious duties for the civil magistrate would have amounted to an Anabaptist state, was the close connection in these anti-antinomian puritans’ minds between antinomianism and Anabaptism. And given the widespread puritan belief that Anabaptists believed and practiced “anarchy,” the conclusion followed for most puritans that only Anabaptists would have held such an antinomian view of the civil magistrate as the contemporary American Presbyterian and Reformed do.
- 41.
Abraham Kuyper, “A Pamphlet Concerning the Reformation of the Church,” The Standard Bearer 62, no. 15 (1986): 342. See http://standardbearer.rfpa.org/sites/default/files/1986-05-01.pdf.
- 42.
For example, Meredith Kline has recently been one of the most successful recruiters of Baptists to the Presbyterian position because, while he was careful to guard the intent of the confession, he used a line of exegetical argument that had real, theological integrity. Most public debates of the last few decades between Baptists and Presbyterians have found the Presbyterian position under substantial attack because Presbyterians use the ecclesiology of Westminster Larger Catechism 31 (which is in complete agreement with Baptist ecclesiology) to turn around and argue for the Presbyterian sacramental theology of WCF 28.
- 43.
John Owen, The Works of John Owen, ed. William Goold (Edinburgh: Johnstone and Hunter, 1850–1853), 14: 314.
- 44.
Owen, Works, 14: 314–315.
- 45.
Darryl Hart, Deconstructing Evangelicalism: Conservative Protestantism in the age of Billy Graham (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004).
- 46.
Clark, Recovering the Reformed Confession, p. 17.
- 47.
Clark, Recovering the Reformed Confession, p. 154.
- 48.
Hart, Deconstructing Evangelicalism, passim.
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Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland. 1967. Act Approving the Confession of Faith, Session 23, 27 August 1647. In The Westminster Confession of Faith, 15. N.p.
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Caughey, C., Gribben, C. (2018). History, Identity Politics, and the “Recovery of the Reformed Confession”. In: On Being Reformed. Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95192-8_1
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