Listen to this article | Produced by ElevenLabs with an AI voice.
Worldliness to a reared Calvinist is not a vague entity but a specifiable sin of a higher order. The privilege of predestination, of being one of the Elect, carried with it the command to “come out from among them and be separate.” It is only in light of my long incarceration within that principle under conditions of immigrant inferiority that my drive to reverse the order and get out there and be one of them can be at all understood.
The Blood of the Lamb, Peter DeVries[1]
The Reformed tradition and the churches that embody that tradition share in the faith of the one holy catholic apostolic church. They also share Protestant emphases on Scripture, justification, and the ministry of the whole people of God. However, within these commonalities, Reformed churches represent some distinctive perspectives on Christian faith and life. These perspectives, derived from readings of Scripture, lead Reformed churches to shared emphases in theology, worship, church life, and ethics. The Reformed tradition is not monolithic and Reformed churches are not uniform, but the tradition and the churches that identify with it embody three overarching themes that characterize Reformed thought and life: grace alone, the sovereignty of God, and the character of the Christian community. While these themes are not unique to the Reformed tradition, they receive identifiable stress and characteristic expression in Reformed faith and life.
The three themes are apparent in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s “Confession of 1967” and “A Brief Statement of Faith.” Both confessions are Trinitarian in structure, but with a twist. Rather than following the familiar pattern of the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds––God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit ––they follow the order of the “apostolic benediction” in 2 Corinthians 13:13: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.” The confessional use of this scriptural expression gives appropriate expression to Reformed emphases in Christian faith by emphasizing grace, sovereignty, and community within a rich Trinita-rian perspective. Recalling the opening of the Heidel-berg Catechism, A Brief Statement of Faith begins,
In life and in death we belong to God. Through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, we trust in the one triune God, the Holy One of Israel, whom alone we worship and serve.[2]
The Grace of the Lord Jesus Christ
Like many churchly terms, grace is heard regularly in sermons, prayers, and hymns, but it is not always accompanied by a clear understanding of what it means. We sense that it is a good word, having something to do with God’s favor, yet it may seem abstract and remote from real life. Is grace a substance, a religious commodity that we receive from God? Is it a characteristic, a spiritual capacity that God bestows on different people in varying quantities? Is grace a force, providing us with an impetus to holiness?
Although there have been times in the church’s history when people have spoken of grace as a particular benefit measured out to us by God, Christians have more often understood that “grace” is a shorthand way of referring to the fullness of the relationship that God creates with people. What does God have to do with us, and what is the character of God’s bond with the world? Is God detached from happenings in the world and aloof from our lives? Does God watch our every move, ready to judge and punish our sins? Or does God love us just the way we are, indulging our foibles and failings? Is God ready to intervene in our lives whenever we ask for something good? The answer to all of the abstract questions about the relationship between God and ourselves is found in the actuality of Jesus Christ. When we say, “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ,” we affirm that God’s Way in the world is expressed and known in Jesus Christ as God’s free, faithful movement toward us in love. We do not have to settle for intangible definitions of grace, for we have before us narratives of grace, told in the familiar contours of a human life. The opening of the Gospel according to John expresses this central truth in a few flowing words that embody evangelical truth.
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father … And from his fullness have we all received, grace upon grace . . .
(John 1:14,16, RSV)
The Nicene Creed, the first great ecumenical statement of the church’s faith, boldly professes that God’s gracious self-giving is made tangible in Christ, and that it is all for the sake of human wholeness. The Creed’s great declarations of incarnation, atonement, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension are not abstract doctrines, but summaries of the biblical accounts that are good news for us. The second major section of the Nicene Creed affirms faith in the one Lord Jesus Christ in two distinct movements: a movement that confesses the full divinity of the Son of God, and a movement that narrates the incarnation of Jesus Christ, the Human One. (Incarnation is not limited to Jesus’ birth; his becoming human encompasses the whole of life, death, resurrection, ascension, and coming again). The pivot that links the two movements is the very good news that it is all “for us and for our salvation.”
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten not made,
of one Being with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven,
was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary
and became truly human.
For our sakehe was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
in accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and
the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.[3]
Our salvation hinges on the reality that the Son of God is “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one Being with the Father” and that “he came down from heaven and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became truly human.” A Jesus Christ less than truly God or less than truly human could not have accomplished our salvation, would not have been “for us.” A century after the Nicene Creed, the ecumenical Council of Chalcedon made the point even more forcefully: Jesus Christ is “perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, truly God and truly hu- man, of one Being with the Father as regards his divinity and of one Being with us as regards his humanity.” Then, together with the Council of Nicaea, Chalcedon declares that this is “for us and our salvation.”
Jesus Christ is truly God to us and truly human to God. As one with us and for us, Jesus Christ lived God’s Way in the world fully, loving God and loving people with heart, soul, mind, and strength. His full love of God and full love of people is more than an example that we must strive to emulate, however. The love of God in Jesus Christ does something for us. As the Word became flesh, uniting God with us, so, in Christ, we are united to God. The incarnation is the union of the Word with us that brings about our union with Christ, so that we are united with him in his fulfillment of God’s Way in the world ––loving God completely and loving others as himself. Our self-imposed distance from God is overcome, for as God’s Son becomes one with us and we are made one with him, we who are in Christ can now love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Our self-imposed distance from others is overcome, for as God’s Son becomes brother to all, we who are made one with him can now love our neighbors, even strangers and enemies, as ourselves.
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ is at the center of our knowledge of God and our experience of God. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus––and our own experience of Christ––confirm that we are not loved because we deserve to be loved. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ is known most dramatically “in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). But that is not all. Paul goes on to say that, “if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life” (Romans 5:11). In Christ we know God as the One who takes the initiative to move toward us openly, freely, lovingly, uncondition-ally. Karl Barth speaks of God’s grace in Jesus Christ as “the demonstration, the overflowing of the love which is the being of God. … It is love in the form of the deepest condescension. It occurs even when there is no question or claim of merit on the part of the other.”[4] To speak of grace is to speak of the freedom of the Lover who does not require that the beloved meet certain conditions: “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son …,” says John (1 John 4:10).
Did the incarnate Son of God become one with only the best of humankind?
No. Scripture assures us that Christ Jesus, “being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness” (Phil. 2:6-7, TNIV).
Does Jesus parcel out love only to people good enough to deserve it?
No. Jesus says, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mark 2:17, TNIV).
Did Jesus die on the cross only for people worthy of his sacrifice?
No. Paul says, “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly” (Romans 5:6, TNIV).
Was Jesus raised from death only on behalf of people wise enough to appreciate his triumph?
No. Scripture proclaims, “it is by grace you have been saved, through faith––and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God––not by works, so that no one can boast” (Ephesians 2:7, TNIV).
Does the risen and ascended Christ care only for those of us who are always faithful?
No. Scripture assures us that “we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God” and that “we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are––yet without sin. Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” (Hebrews 4:14-16, TNIV).
All Christians agree that God’s love for us through the grace of Jesus Christ creates a new reality for human life: “For by grace you have been saved though faith” (Ephesians 2:8). However, some Christians stress the grace of Christ while others emphasize the human response of faith. Put another way, some concentrate on the gift that is given while others focus on the necessity of receiving the gift. The Reformed tradition comes down firmly on the side of grace, confessing that God’s free gift even creates our capacity for faith and elicits faith itself. The grace of Jesus Christ is not a potential reality, requiring human faith in order to become effective. If we were to claim that our faith is necessary to bring about the new relationship between God and us ––our salvation––then salvation would be our accomplishment, in Reformation terms our “work.” This would create for us the problem that comes with all forms of works righteousness: how could we ever be sure that our faith is good enough, true enough, faithful enough faith? The Reformed tradition proclaims that the distance between God and humankind is bridged by God alone, and that we are set free from constant striving to achieve sufficient faith to bridge the gap.
The Reformed tradition speaks of the free grace of Christ as “election.” God’s election is never to privilege. Letty Russell states that “the doctrine of election points to the need for identity as human beings in the world. Those who are nobody affirm their own self-worth as children of God by claiming that God has chosen them and enabled them to live faithfully. In this sense, to be chosen of God is to be granted full human identity and worth as a gift of God’s love.”[5]
The Reformed emphasis on Christ’s grace is liberating, setting us free from anxiety about the adequacy of our lives and the depth of our belief. Neither our works nor our faith can save us; neither is a necessary precondition to God’s love. Instead, both our faith and our works are expressions of gratitude for amazing grace. Our gratitude is expressed in more than thoughts and feelings, for as we are liberated for thankful response to God’s unrestricted love, we are also freed for gracious relationships with other people. As men and women who know the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, we no longer need to make calculations about the worth, power, or ability of other people as a precondition for our love. We, too, can live grace-filled lives as we, too, love all people freely and unreservedly.
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, not our faith, determines the relationship between God and ourselves. Yet the Reformed emphasis upon grace does not diminish our faith. Calvin devotes fifty pages of the Institutes to an exploration of the meaning and significance of faith.His brief definition of faith only hints at the depth of its meaning: “Now we shall possess a right definition of faith if we call it a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence toward us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit.”[6] Our faith is not simply belief, but “a firm and certain knowledge” that both believes and trusts in God’s goodness, leading to the fidelity of our lives. Our tendency to restrict “faith” to “belief” is an unfortunate consequence of a limitation in the English language. The Greek word translated “faith”–– pistis––has a verb form––pisteuo––while the English language does not. Because we cannot translate the Greek verb as “faithing” (I faith, you faith, he/she/it faiths) it is usually rendered in English as “believing” (I believe, you believe, he/she/it believes). The result is that faith’s trust and loyalty can become eclipsed by faith’s belief.
“Faithing” God is believing that “the Word became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14), trusting that from Christ “we have all received grace upon grace” (John 1:16), and being loyal to “the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29). Reformed concern for the truth about God is more than a fascination with intellectual orthodoxy. What we “faith” about the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ shapes how we understand God’s Way in the world, whether we can trust that way to be good, and how we live our way in the world in loyalty to the One who has placed us on his Way.
The Love of God
The Westminster Confession of Faith, a seventeenth-century English creed, declares that God “… is alone the fountain of all being, of whom, through whom, and to whom, are all things; and hath most sovereign dominion over them, to do by them, for them, or upon them, whatsoever himself pleaseth.”[7] Archaic language and an austere description of God’s relationship to the world add up, in their own way, to an expression of the Reformed emphasis on the sovereignty of God––the affirmation that God is the free and powerful source of all that is. Westminster’s words do not add up to the gospel’s full affirmation of God’s dominion over creation, however.
Few of us would deny God’s freedom and power, but few of us would use Westminster’s abstract, dispassionate descriptions of a distant deity, for they do not adequately express the richness of God’s dynamic freedom as we know it in Jesus Christ. Something seems to be missing, and that something is the love of God. Apart from God’s love, notions of absolute freedom and power are frightening. Calvin notes that “it will not suffice simply to hold that there is One whom all ought to honor and adore, unless we are also persuaded that he is the fountain of every good.”[8] If we divorce notions of God’s sovereign power from Jesus Christ, we end up with silly speculation (if God is all-powerful, can God make a rock so heavy that he cannot lift it?), or fatalism (human effort is pointless because God has determined everything), or despair (God’s power does not deal with human suffering). We avoid theoretical conjecture when we know God through God’s self-revelation in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Then we can seek to understand God’s sovereign power, not through dictionary definitions of omnipotence, but in Jesus Christ. What do we find when we seek? We find Christ crucified, and this rejected and executed one is “the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:24). Power and wisdom look different in the form of a cross.
In Jesus Christ, the power of God, we do not experience God’s sovereignty as compulsion. God is not a dictator, not even a benign despot. In Jesus Christ we know the God whose power is that of One who loves, seeks, calls, and saves. God does not have a monopoly on power, fashioning the world and all within it as pawns in a divine game, moved around the board according to a mysterious heavenly strategy. Neither, however, do we humans hold all the power, reducing God to a beggar at the door. The Lord proclaims,
For as the rain and snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I send it.
Isaiah 55:11, 12
The word of God is not simply a proposal, but a creative declaration that shapes reality. In the beginning, God speaks and the world comes to be: “God said … and there was” (Gen. 1). When the prophets announced, “the word of the Lord,” judgment occurred, and hope was fulfilled (e.g. Amos 1:2; Isaiah 40:1). When the Word became flesh, the glory of the Lord was revealed (John 1:14). God’s word is not an empty word, for it fulfills God’s purpose in the world.
The church’s confession of faith in “God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth” is far more than the postulation of intelligent design that brought the universe into being. Because the Creator is the God we know in Jesus Christ, we understand that the Creator continues to love and care for all creation. As Calvin puts it, “To make God a momentary Creator who once for all finished his work, would be cold and barren … we see the presence of divine power shining as much in the continuing state of the universe as in its inception.”[9] God’s providential care for creation is the love of God in Christ, “For in [Christ] all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace through the blood of his cross” (Colossians 1:19, 20).
Because the Creator of the cosmos is the Redeemer and Sustainer of the cosmos, God’s sovereign power is God’s sovereign love. “The power of God is essentially the power of redemption,” says Wendy Farley. “The power and will to redeem are more aptly symbolized by love than by models of domination, judgment, or control.” The issue is not one of abstract symbols or models, however, for “divine power is most clearly and poignantly seen in the Messiah, whose teachings, death, and resurrection manifest the love of God ‘made flesh’ in history.”[10] Jesus Christ, the power of God, cries out to us, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing” (Matthew 23:37). The desire of God, beckoning in love, displays divine power more forcefully than any speculative conception of power. The Reformed tradition’s emphasis on the sovereignty of God does not extol divine domination, but rather leads us to stand in awe before God’s reign of love in Jesus Christ.
The sovereignty of God is the love of God for the whole created order. Abraham Kuyper, a Dutch Reformed theologian, journalist, and prime minister of the Netherlands, expressed dramatically the Reformed understanding of God’s sovereignty over all of life: “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign overall, does not cry: ‘Mine!’”[11] God is sovereign over all creation, so that no part of life lies outside of his nourishment and care. While “separation of church and state” is an axiom of American political life, this does not mean that Christian faith and life are confined to a spiritual ghetto. Human divisions between the “religious” and the “secular” are illusory; God is not concerned only with so-called spiritual matters, while remaining indifferent to social patterns of racial bigotry, class inequity, abuses of political power, global warming, and market-driven consumerism. The Confession of 1967 declares:
God’s redeeming work in Jesus Christ embraces the whole of human life: social and cultural, economic and political, scientific and technological, individual and corporate. It includes the natural environment as exploited and despoiled by sin. It is the will of God that the divine purpose for human life shall be fulfilled under the rule of Christ and all evil be banished from creation.[12]
Reformed insistence that the sovereign love of God knows no bounds is not a modern innovation. “Our Song of Hope” in the twentieth century, and Abraham Kuyper in the nineteenth century, stand in a long line of Reformed affirmations. In the eighteenth century, Jonathan Edwards Jr. criticized the recently adopted constitution of the United States for allowing the continuation of slavery. “Africans are by nature equally entitled to freedom as we are,” he said. “They have the same right to their freedom which they have to their property or to their lives. Therefore, to enslave them is as really and in the same sense wrong, as to steal from them, or to rob or murder them.”[13] In the seventeenth century the Westminster larger Catechism detailed long lists of the duties required and the sins forbidden by the eighth commandment, “Thou shalt not steal.” Among the positive actions that the commandment requires are ‘justice in contracts and commerce … rendering to everyone his due … giving and lending freely … avoiding unnecessary lawsuits . . . and an endeavor by all just and lawful means to procure, preserve, and further the wealth and outward estate of others as well as our own.”[14] In the sixteenth century Calvin asserted that the kingdom of God “does not lead us to consider the whole nature of government a thing polluted, which has nothing to do with Christian men.”[15] Calvin’s thought and action on seemingly mundane matters such as economic justice, health care, education, and the environment have shaped Reformed thought and action through the centuries. Elsie McKee notes that in the Reformed tradition’s gratitude and reverence for the sovereign God, “God always comes first, but the honor owed to God is often most clearly manifested in how believers live their day-to-day vocations.”[16]
The Communion of the Holy Spirit
Christians within the Reformed tradition have always understood that faith is not the private possession of individuals but is lived out by persons in community. The Christian community––the church––is a fellowship of women and men called to live together within the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit. It is not simply a voluntary organization of like-minded people who gather together for mutual comfort and inspiration. The community of faith is called by Christ and lives in Christ: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” (Matt. 18:20), is Christ’s declaration that the normal form of the relationship between the triune God and us is between the triune God and us in community.
“Our World Belongs to God,” a contemporary testimony of the Christian Reformed Church, gives graceful expression to faith in God’s gift of new community:
At Pentecost, promises old and new are fulfilled.
The ascended Jesus becomes the baptizer,
drenching his followers with his Spirit,
creating a new community
where Father, Son, and Holy Spirit make their home.
Renewed and filled with the breath of God,
women and men,
young and old,
dream dreams
and see visions.[17]
As the new community “where Father, Son, and Holy Spirit make their home,” the church is called to embody God’s new Way of living in the world. When we confess the Apostles’ Creed saying, “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting,” we are not merely affirming a laundry list of unrelated doctrinal leftovers. Just as our confession of faith in God the Father and Jesus Christ is followed by narrative depictions of these movements of God among us, so the third article of the Apostles’ Creed narrates the presence of the Holy Spirit in our midst. God’s presence among us as Holy Spirit is the divine mission of establishing and sustaining the reality of human communion with God and with other people. Called together by the gracious love of God in Jesus Christ, the church is a communion, enduring through time and space, in which God’s forgiveness generates mutual forgiveness, and God’s faithfulness secures certain hope.
In the presence of the Holy Spirit the church is called to be holy, a distinctive, Spirit-shaped community in the world. The church’s response to the Spirit’s presence is always ambiguous; efforts to live as a new people are mixed with grand and petty conformities to the culture. Any actual church may be little different from other organizations in society, but despite obvious assimilation by the culture and accommodation to society’s values, the Spirit remains present as the movement of God to create a new and different human community in the world.
In the presence of the Holy Spirit the church is called to be catholic, rising above the limitations of race, gender, class, and nation, and overcoming every division of faith and practice, so that the community is whole. Again, the church’s response is ambiguous; some dividing walls are broken down while others are reinforced. Any actual church may be captive to exclusivist structures and divisive assertions of faith and live, but in spite of self-imposed restrictions, the Spirit is God’s presence among us to create a new space of freedom in the world.
In the presence of the Holy Spirit the church is called to be a community of forgiven people (the communion of saints) who live together in mutual forgiveness (the forgiveness of sins). The church is called to live now in anticipation of the final victory over sin and death (the resurrection of the body). The church is called to move beyond “the way things are” toward God’s Way in the world (the life everlasting). Even as we speak the words of the Creed, we know that for every sign of faithfulness there seems to be evidence of crass conformity to the prevailing spirit of the age. The church is a community of ordinary people, plainly guilty of the charge of hypocrisy; what we claim in our creeds falls far short of what we display in our life together.
The Reformed tradition does not make unrealistic claims for the character of Christian community, as if the church were divine, floating above the real world. Neither does the tradition fall into cynical dismissal of Christian community, as if the church were a mere organization, fully immersed in the real world. Dutch theologian G.C. Berkouwer expresses Reformed realism by noting that, “The credo ecclesiam does not direct our attention only to what ought to be and what ought to happen, but to what obviously has happened in the lives of [Christians].”[18] What has happened in Christian communities is a mix of faithfulness and infidelity, truth and falsehood, obedience and defiance, love and indifference . . . the list goes on. Yet the Spirit remains present, the call continues to be heard, and men and women continue to respond. The Reformed tradition provides us with two resources for faithful discipleship: utter realism about the church and utter trust in the presence of the Holy Spirit. Honesty and hope are the twin pillars that support Reformed community.
The Reformed tradition’s utter realism about the church and its confidence in the presence of the Holy Spirit led to the conviction that the church’s ministry and mission are the calling of the whole people of God. In the Reformed tradition, ministry is not the domain of a particular group of people called “clergy,” who lead a larger group called “laity.” This un-Reformed clergy/lay distinction obscures the reality that all specific ministries of the church are particular expressions of the ministry of the whole body of Christ. All Christians are gifted for ministry, and so there is a real sense in which all are ordained to ministry in their baptisms. This leads Reformed churches to establish organizational structures that engage the whole people of God. Within this foundational ministry of the whole people of God, persons may be called to perform specific functions that are important to the life of particular communities of faith. Church school teachers, choir members, treasurers, cooks, ushers and greeters, gardeners, and others are called formally and informally, and exercise their gifts on behalf of the whole congregation.[19]
However, some ministries are necessary to the spiritual health and faithful life of every Christian community. The whole church gives order to these necessary functions by regularizing their shape, their duties, their qualifications, and their approval. These “ordered ministries,” and the persons who are called to them, are grounded in Baptism and established in ordination––the whole church’s act of setting apart for particular service.
Following Calvin, the mainstream of Reformed ecclesiology recognizes three ordered ministries: deacon, elder, and minister. These three ministries represent two ecclesial functions: ministries of the Word and Sacrament performed by presbyters (pastors and elders) and ministries of service performed by deacons. These ministries are collegial and are exercised in community, through councils (sessions/consistories, presbyteries/classes, and general assemblies/synods). No minister, elder, or deacon is self-sufficient and no ministry is exercised apart from the other ministries or in isolation from the whole people of God. The structures of Reformed church order are designed to ensure that ordinary people are chosen by ordinary communities in the confidence that “through the ministers whom [God] has entrusted this office and conferred the grace to carry it out, he dispenses and distributes his gifts to the church; and he shows himself as present by manifesting the power of his Spirit in this institution, that it not be vain or idle.”[20]
Although Reformed churches have sometimes placed too much confidence in structures, the Reformed tradition’s intention has always been to shape Christian community in patterns of grace, love, and communion. The sixteenth-century confession of the Reformed churches “dispersed in France” expresses this intention clearly:
We believe that the [true church] ought to be governed in accordance with the order established by our Lord Jesus Christ, having pastors, elders, and deacons. In this way, pure doctrine can be maintained, vices can be corrected and suppressed, the poor and afflicted can be helped in their need, assemblies can be gathered in the name of God, and both great and small can be edified.[21]
Jürgen Moltmann gives more contemporary expression to the character of Reformed community through the concept of friendship. He says that the communion of saints, the community of faith and faithfulness, “is really the fellowship of friends who live in the friendship of Jesus and spread friendliness in the fellowship, by meeting the forsaken with affection and the despised with respect.”[22] Reformed Christians strive to make this more than a lofty sentiment by shaping church life in ways that are open to all, both within and outside of the community of faith, by remaining open to the presence of the Holy Spirit.
“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit” are not simply the words of a benediction or a statement of faith; they are the reality in which we live and move and have our being.
This essay is reprinted from To Be Reformed: Living the Tradition published by and with permission from Witherspoon Press, Louisville KY, 2010.
[1] Peter DeVries, The Blood of the Lamb (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1961), 45.
[2] A Brief Statement of Faith, The Book of Confessions, 10.1, 267.
[3] The Nicene Creed, The Book of Confessions, 1.2., 3.
[4] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, II.2. G.W. Bromiley & T.F. Torrance, eds., G.W. Bromiley, et al., trans. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957). 9f.
[5] Letty Russell, The Church in the Round (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993), 169.
[6] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion. Ed. John T. McNeill, ed., Trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960). 3.2.7., 551.
[7] The Westminster Confession of Faith, The Book of Confessions, 6.012, 124.
[8] Calvin, Institutes, 1.2.1., 40.
[9] Calvin, Institutes 1.16.1., 197.
[10] Wendy Farley, Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1990), 100.
[11] Abraham Kuyper, “Sphere Sovereignty” in James D. Bratt, ed., Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 488.
[12] Confession of 1967, Inclusive Language Text, 9.53.
[13] Jonathan Edwards, Jr., “The Injustice and Impolicy of the Slave Trade, and of Slavery” in William Stacey Johnson & John H. Leith, eds., Reformed Reader I (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993), 371.
[14] Westminster Larger Catechism, The Book of Confessions, 7.251, 218.
[15] Calvin, Institutes, 4.20.2., 1487.
[16] Elsie Anne McKee, “Calvin’s Teaching on Social and Economic Issues” in Edward Dommen & James Bratt, eds., John Calvin Rediscovered: The Impact of His Social and Economic Thought (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 21.
[17] “Our World Belongs to God: A Contemporary Testimony” (Grand Rapids: Christian Reformed Church in North America, 2008) paragraph 28.
[18] G.C. Berkouwer, Studies in Dogmatics: The Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976) p. 9.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Calvin, Institutes, 4.3.2., 1055.
[21] The French Confession of 1559, trans. Ellen Babinsky and Joseph D. Small (Louisville: Office of Theology and Worship, 1998) XXIX, 14.
[22] Jürgen Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 316.
