Although most of us have lived in communities that used the name "Christian Reformed" for almost a century, our very familiarity with it is evidently helping to make us uncertain enough about what it is supposed to mean to suggest that we take a fresh look at its meaning. The recent publication of two rather scholarly books also reveals that kind of uncertainty. James D. Bratt's Dutch Calvinism in Modern America is much more clearly focused on the Dutchness than on the Calvinism of the movement (Review in the June, 1985 Outlook). An even more surprising evidence of confusion is the failure of John Bolt's Christian and Reformed Today to treat its Biblical foundation as a fundamental characteristic of the movement (Review in the November, 1985 Outlook).

The 16th Century Biblical Reformation⤒🔗

October's ending with Halloween (the ancient pagan festival which the church tried, with doubtful success, to Christianize as "All Saints' Day") has also come to be remembered as the day on which Martin Luther in 1517 nailed his 95 theses to the door of Wittenburg's castle church. That public protest became a kind of "birthday" of the great Protestant Reformation.

Luther's action was a result of an extended spiritual struggle. Young Luther, who seems to have been a typical child of his time, was studying to become a lawyer. After being shocked by the death of a friend and being himself struck to the ground by a bolt of lightning, he resolved to leave his law study and become a monk to seek salvation for his soul. Driven more urgently to face the question, "How may I get right with God?" he found the church giving him no clear, satisfying answer, but only increasing his sense of guilt and depression. As a student, monk, priest, preacher and professor, he was led more and more to study the Bible until, by the Holy Spirit's guidance, he found especially through study of such books as the Psalms, Romans and Galatians, the truth and assurance of salvation by faith in Jesus Christ. The Biblical "righteousness of God", which at first frightened and baffled him because he thought of it only as condemning the sinner, he now saw as the "righteousness" which God gave the sinner through faith in Christ (Romans 3:21ff). This tremendous discovery, as it gave comfort, hope and joy to his own soul, became the theme of his preaching and teaching. Believing, preaching and teaching this message of the Bible brought him into collision with the teaching and practices of the church, especially when Tetzel, the high-pressure salesman of indulgences, began peddling his promises of God's mercy by money payments in the vicinity. Dr. A. Skevington Wood, in the fascinating biography of Luther entitled, Captive to the Word, traced Luther's religious experience and becoming a reformer to his increasing guidance by and dependence on the Bible. His "discovery of the Scriptures" was "the decisive turning point in his career, and destined him to become a reformer" (p. 11). Dr. Wood showed how, in one development of the conflict after another, he was driven to take his stand on the Bible as his authority, to find that his opponents who tried to base their opposition on mere church tradition were unable to answer him. "It was the Bible that made him a reformer" (p. 61). Thus he came to the three "sola's" ("only's") of the Reformation: "only the Bible," "only grace" and "only faith."

Luther, in his rediscovery of the gospel of salvation through the Scriptures, was also following (and influenced by) the great founder of his order of monks some 1100 years earlier, St. Augustine. Although Augustine's mother was a Christian, his father and he were pagans. Early becoming dissatisfied with paganism, he joined the Manichean heretics, and was eventually converted to Christ at about 32 years old. A.D.R. Polman, in a fascinating book entitled The Word of God According to St. Augustine, divides the story of Augustine's conversion and career generally into two stages. While he at first saw Christ as Example and the Bible as "no more than a starting point," presently "his deeper understanding of man's sinfulness and blindness caused him to shift the stress to the role of Christ as Savior and to His great acts of salvation" (p. 13). His deepening appreciation of Christ as the Savior was accompanied by a deepening appreciation of the Bible, no longer as a mere introduction to Christ, but as the guide through the Christian's whole pilgrimage through life to the heavenly city. Luther, in his being led by the Bible into the Christian faith and growth in that faith, was following the same road as the church father, Augustine.

John Calvin, who was born about 25 years after Luther, was led into the faith of the gospel under Luther's influence and considered himself in a large measure, a faithful follower of Luther. The errors and corruption of the old church had become only too obvious and many voices were now being raised in revolt against it. As a result, religious and social life was in a state of great confusion and was threatened with total anarchy by the excesses of some of them. Excesses and violence such as those of the communist polygamists who seized Munster and cohorts in Amsterdam (some of whom were even nudists) were giving occasion for slander of the whole reform movement and providing excuses for persecution by Roman Catholic authorities. This threatening situation moved the young Calvin to write his first edition of Institutes to state clearly and simply in an address to the French King Francis, what the reformers who sought to be guided by God's Word really believed. This work, which Calvin continued repeatedly to revise and enlarge, became the greatest and most influential textbook of the Protestant Reformation and helped to establish Calvin and his school as its leading teacher. Benjamin Warfield, in a remarkable essay on "John Calvin the Theologian" (in the appendix to his volume on Calvin and Augustine, pp. 481f.) wrote of Calvin,

In one word, he was distinctly a Biblical theologian ... the Biblical theologian of his age. Whither the Bible took him, thither he went: where scriptural declarations failed him, there he stopped short. It is this which imparts to Calvin's theological teaching the quality which is its prime characteristic and its real offence in the eyes of his critics – I mean its positiveness. There is no mistaking the note of confidence in his teaching, and it is perhaps not surprising that this note of confidence irritates his critics. They resent the air of finality he gives to his declarations, not staying to consider that he gives them this air of finality because he presents them, not as his teachings, but as the teachings of the Holy Spirit in His inspired Word ... And it was just because he refused to go one step beyond what is written that he felt so sure of his steps. He could not present the dictates of the Holy Ghost as a series of debatable propositions.

In other words, it is just because Calvin labored so diligently to say neither more nor less than his careful study found the Word of God saying that he became and remains to this day probably the Reformation's greatest and most influential teacher.

The Bible's Own Claim←⤒🔗

This dependence and emphasis on the Bible was not a mere peculiarity of the personal experience and reaction of the Reformers, but an explicit claim and requirement of the Bible itself. God's dealing with His people is not only a personal revelation, but one expressed, defined and secured by words in a Book. The Bible is the Book of the Covenant - The "Old" and "New Testaments" may be just as accurately translated "Old" and "New Covenants." Examples of this principle, which are far too numerous to list, include the stress on God's spoken and written commandments in Deuteronomy 4, and the insistence that Joshua (1:8) must live by the Book of the Law, to successfully lead his people. Isaiah (8:20) must lay down the principle of God's revelation in opposition to false religions:

To the law and to the testimony! If they do not speak according to this word, they have no light...

Our Lord constantly grounded His work and gospel on "It is written" and "that the Scriptures might be fulfilled." Especially startling is His proof of His resurrection first by the Scriptures and then by His own appearance (Luke 24:25ff., cf. 37ff.). For deliverance from the coming demoralization of life and society, the Apostle Paul directs Timothy to "the holy Scriptures which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus." These inspired Scriptures are given to "thoroughly equip" God's people "for every good work" (2 Timothy 3). These, as not the product of man's "interpretations," but of the Holy Spirit, are the remedy for all kinds of false human opinions (2 Peter 1:20, 21 ff.). Our Lord will judge all men according to what they have done with the "words of the prophecy of this book," and their tampering with these will exclude them from His kingdom (Revelation 22:7, 18, 19). The Apostle Paul writes in 2 Thessalonians 2:14 that he thanks God,

that when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but as it actually is, the word of God, which is at work in you who believe.

The Return to Traditionalism←⤒🔗

Many of the present problems in our own churches and others are rather clearly traceable to the fact that this basic characteristic of the Reformation as neither more nor less than a return to the Word of God is being lost from sight even by most of those who still claim the name "Reformed." In the over 4 centuries since the Reformation, its Biblical teachings, where they are still known, have come to be regarded and even taught as a tradition, of the fathers, often in much the same way as the Roman church had come to continue its traditions! The problem is not really being introduced only by those who are revolting against the traditions. It was already often present in those who had considered themselves faithful preservers of the traditions. In a ministers' conference discussion of the need, especially in missionary efforts, to show from the Bible what we must believe, an elderly minister and home missionary interjected that we didn't have to go to that trouble; professors did that for us in the seminary! When we let the gospel teachings be reduced from God's Word to mere human traditions we repeat the very errors from which our forefathers were delivered in the Reformation. If we are satisfied with doing that, we should not be surprised if our message loses its conviction and appeal and our churches, deprived of the spiritual food of God's Word (1 Peter 2:2ff.), sicken and die, as the church before the Reformation was doing.

Holding God's Word for what It is←⤒🔗

To be "Reformed" properly means to believe, teach and practice neither more nor less than what God's Word says. If we are going to understand, experience and share that faith, we must learn, like the Reformers, to put that fact up front and give it all possible emphasis.

Personal experience has perhaps made me more sensitive to that fact than some others might be. The son of a minister, I attended no Christian school until the second year of college. And most of my education was in the very "progressive" or Liberal California public school system. Of the many teachers encountered during those years I recall only one who gave clear indications of being an evangelical Christian. I recall an interesting English teacher, also a teacher in the Congregational church Sunday school, who remarked that he sometimes envied the Catholics. They knew what they believed, while he didn't. Another said that she used to think she would develop some philosophy of life, but now, although she was becoming an old woman, she had none. Another, who later became the principal, told us that we did not have the moral standards of right and wrong that our parents did, and that our children would not have ours. We were taught that the mark of a real education was to learn to question everything and to accept nothing on mere authority. Growing up with the home and church trying to teach me the Christian faith and the schools teaching the opposite for a dozen years, whom was I to believe? (It is, perhaps, not surprising that my father observed that I was his strongest reason for trying to get a Christian school – and those early educational experiences were later my own reasons for doing the same.) Early being inundated by this kind of skepticism and relativism (as our churches today are being threatened by them), I was forced to face the fact that mere tradition is not an adequate reason for believing anything. We either receive God's revelation as what it claims to be and is, or we stay in the dark. (Especially Paul's argument in 1 Corinthians 1 and 2 highlights these alternatives. And our Lord in John 7:17 assures us that he confirms in the life of His people what He says: "If anyone wants to do His will, he shall know concerning the doctrine, whether it is from God...") If, or as we, by the grace of God, receive His Word for what it is, we must frankly build on that and not build on something other or less than that – some mere human opinion or tradition among a multitude of others.

In early experiences in the ministry in a struggling little congregation far removed from most of our churches and their traditions, I learned to work through our Heidelberg Catechism with the question whether and to what degree it expressed the Bible's teaching. That study then and later proved extremely valuable in preparing one to preach and teach the Biblical doctrines as neither more nor less than God's Word. Later it proved even more so when I faced the extraordinary need and opportunity to serve as the only evangelical navy chaplain on an island in the Philippines among up to ten thousand men. Previously serving in a church next to a navy base, I had few illusions about what to expect as a minister in the chaplaincy. To my surprise, confronting the extraordinary opportunity to try to bring the Word of God to the most diverse group of people imaginable, as not a mere "ethnic" or church tradition, "but as it is in truth the Word of God, which also effectually works in you who believe" (1 Thessalonians 2:13) brought some of the most moving experiences of a lifetime. I recall 5 of that diverse group of sailors who envisioned going into the ministry when the time of service was over. Regardless of who is bringing God's Word, God confirms His Word when it is brought for what it is.

Later experiences, whether one were facing the missionary outreach of the gospel (as we did for a time in mainland China) or those in the neighbor­hoods of our churches, again and again simply confirmed that God honors His Word when we seek to bring it as His. And that principle which has to characterize our missionary effort is just as foundational to our effort to give our children the kind of Christian education to which the Lord has committed us. Our guide and message has to be neither less nor more than the Word of God and we must like Paul seek to be faithful in bringing all of it as "the whole counsel of God" (Acts 20:27). God has honored and confirmed His Word and He always will. Prayerfully seeking to know, live by, and share His Word is what it means to be a Reformed Christian.