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What in the church is the reformed tradition?
Presbyterians regularly encounter a puzzling term used to characterize their church: the Reformed tradition. It may seem odd, in a time when many church members move easily from one denomination to another, to stress the particularity of one ecclesial tradition. Is Presbyterian emphasis on the Reformed tradition an anxious response to widespread confusion about purpose? Are Presbyterians desperately grasping the term Reformed in an attempt to carve out a distinctive presence on the Protestant landscape? In any case, why should Reformed be reserved for Presbyterians? Are not all Protestants Reformed, heirs of the sixteenth-century Reformation?
Mixed motives may lie behind the current use of Reformed tradition, but the expression is not new. Reformed has been used for centuries to designate one of the four major streams of the Protestant Reformation: Lutheran, Anabaptist, Anglican, and Reformed. In this narrower sense, Reformed churches are those bodies that grew out of the Reformation in Switzerland, following the spiritual and intellectual lead of Huldrych Zwingli in Zurich and John Calvin in Geneva. The Reformed family of churches and their shared tradition are not named after their founder (as in Lutheran), or a distinguishing practice (as in Baptist), or the location of their establishment (as in Anglican). But why are these churches and the tradition they embody called Reformed?
From the outset, the churches that followed the lead of Zwingli, and especially Calvin, were characterized by the conviction that each church is called to confess the faith in its particular time and place. As the Swiss influence spread, leading to the establishment of churches in France, the Netherlands, Hungary, Scotland, Poland, Italy and beyond, new churches generated confessions of faith as expressions of their freedom and obligation to proclaim the gospel in their own contexts. Thus, in the sixteenth century alone, Reformed churches produced over sixty confessions of faith. In the twentieth century, more than 35 churches adopted new confessions. This great variety of Reformed confessions is not simply an accident of history and geography, however.
The Reformed tradition has always been acutely aware of the dangers of idolatry, including the idolatry of creeds and confessions. Thus, Reformed churches rarely identify one particular historic confession as the authoritative expression of Christian faith for all times and places.
The Reformed stance toward confessions can be seen in the statement of Zurich’s Bullinger at the signing of the First Helvetic Confession in 1536:
We wish in no way to prescribe for all churches through these articles a single rule of faith. For we acknowledge no other rule of faith than Holy Scripture.... We grant to everyone the freedom to use his own expressions which are suitable for his church and will make use of this freedom ourselves, at the same time defending the true sense of this Confession against distortions.
Although there have been times when a Reformed church has embraced a single historic confession — often the Westminster Confession of Faith — Westminster itself attests that “all synods and councils...may err, and many have erred; therefore they are not to be made the rule of faith and practice, but to be used as a help in both.”
Distrust of a single confession, coupled with freedom to express the one gospel in diverse ways, focused in the particular needs of churches in different contexts, leads to the continuing Reformed practice of confession making. Churches belonging to the Reformed family have always been inclined to state their deepest convictions in every generation. All of this is stated succinctly in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s Confession of 1967. The preface begins with the conviction that “The church confesses its faith when it bears a present witness to God’s grace in Jesus Christ.” The need for present witness is a necessary feature of the church’s life, for “in every age, the church has expressed its witness in words and deeds as the need of the time required.... No one type of confession is exclusively valid, no one statement is irreformable.”
Present witness does not mean discarding previous witness, however. The Presbyterian Church’s The Book of Confessions contains eleven creeds, catechisms and confessions from the early church, the Reformation era and the twentieth century. In all of these confessions, “the church declares to its members and to the world who and what it is, what it believes and what it resolves to do” (Book of Order, G-2.0100). Affirming the convictions of those who have lived and died the faith before us is one form of the church’s present witness.
Churches in the Reformed tradition are churches that are “reformed and always to be reformed (ecclesia reformata semper reformanda) according to the word of God.” Reformed churches know that God has reformed the church and that God will continue to reform the church. Reform of the church is not mere change, however, and certainly not “modernization.” Reform of the church comes from the leading of God’s word, made present
in the power of the Spirit. |
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