On confessions...
This whole kerfuffle over who is and who is not properly called "Reformed" has gotten me thinking about the whole notion of confessions, what they are useful for and what they cannot replace.
This is a basic truth that should be embraced by all Reformed Christians, all confessional Christians, of all sorts: The Reformation did not spring out of the Reformed confessions, the Reformed Confessions came out of the Reformation. Luther did not hammer a copy of the Belgic Confession to the church door in Wittenberg. The issues at hand, and I would say the issues still at hand, are issues of what is the Gospel, how is sinful man reconciled to God, where does the authority of the church come from. Those are still issues that we must stand firm for, and that is why Together for the Gospel exists. The men on that stage, a godly men, all Reformed, all unified for the Gospel hold to different creeds and confessions but they all agree on the truth of the Gospel, and that is what the Reformation was and is all about.
I love the Reformed confessions (and yes the 1689 LCF is a Reformed Confession). I have copies of the Westminster Confession on my bookshelf, and it is a useful tool just like commentaries and theology books. But it is just a tool, a guide that does not replace the Bible but rather serves to lay out a series of beliefs. They are not magical, they are not inspired, they are only authoritative where they serve as church or denominational confessions but they always come under the authority of the Scripture and where they fall short of that standard, they err.
2 comments:
This whole conversation got me thinking about "The Trail of Blood." I do not believe that the Catholic church is a true church, nor that it was during the time of Luther. He only wanted to Purify it not start his own denomination because he believed they were the church at one time.
But Jesus said He would build His church and He would be with it always. There has always been a true church of Jesus Christ on earth. Preaching and hearing the true gospel and rightly administering the ordinances. (both Luther and Calvin defined true churches as such) So perhaps Arthur, we can shed our Reformed tag, and say we don't need to reform the religion that we are a part of because we are a part of what has always been the true church? (Walks like a church, acts like a church, is a church.) Interesting to note that Luther was never re-baptized, accepting/recognizing the authority that Christ gave the church to baptize as inherent within the Catholic church.
Certainly Luther and Calvin and many of the other Reformers clung to infant baptism and other incorrect views of the sacraments. It seems that the sacraments take on a life of their own, becoming an end rather than a mean. But the church was in darkness for a thousand years, and the sheep were not being fed the Word of God. Your question may get to the issue of the visible versus the invisible church. There were always and will always be God's people on earth, but for the time before the Reformation the visible church had lost the Gospel. What the Reformation accomplished was to return the Word as the sole authority over the church, the assembly of the believers.
I guess for me, being Reformed is more than clinging to a particular confession or about particular men. I don't hold to Reformed theology because Luther did, or Calvin or even Spurgeon but because as a system of theology it is the best comprehensive explanation of the Biblical record. Paedobaptists have lost the idea of the Reformation, replacing the soul of reformed theology (sola scriptura and justification by faith alone) with symbols (holding to this confession or that one, sacramentalism, etc.) The problem isn't with being Reformed, but with forgetting why we are (or why we need to be) Reformed in the first place.
Or maybe that doesn't make any sense.
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