The current resurgence of confessionalism in conservative Reformed churches in America has pretty much convinced me that any notion of Reformed identity is self-referentially incoherent, at least in terms of praxis. The strong desire to preserve and codify the meaning of “being Reformed” requires that the confessions become the rule of faith and the criterion of membership for these churches. If you disagree with the confessions, you aren’t Reformed, end of story.
However, this notion of being “Reformed” as a completed, settled criterion is utterly contrary to one of the foundational theological underpinnings of the Reformation, namely the the church must be always reforming. Semper reformanda has ceased to be a “Reformed” distinctive. If you suggest a “reformation” to any confessional standard, you have to take your toys and go home since you’re no longer “Reformed” and should find fellowship with other such “non-Reformed” Christians.
Oddly enough the current resurgence of confessionalism among Reformed churches has taken them to the opposite extreme of actual Reformation theology. The fundamental axiom of Reformation theology is the church’s fallibility and constant need of self-examination. This new confessionalism precludes any such theological self-examination taking place within Reformed churches. They effectively taken on the same magisterial and ideological quality that they charge the Roman Catholic Church with. Ironic.
You hit the nail on the head. I was raised in a confessional Lutheran church. They can be just as bad as the hard-line Calvinists. They don’t abide by “sola scriptura” – they abide by whatever Luther or Melancthon said, or what the Book of Concord said. If you come to an alternative interpretation of scripture, they run it past their confessions first.
If you spend any time in these circles, you’re likely to find people who go out of their way to bash Catholicism because they’re “the Bible plus the pope”, etc., etc., and yet they never notice that their unblinking confessionalism runs down a similar-looking road.
I don’t know much about the history of the Presbyterian Church, other than that theological in-fighting has been going on in those denominations for a long, long, time, and always over small, insignificant things that leave impartial observers shaking their heads in disbelief.
So it is with all repristinating Protestantisms. It certainly creates difficulties of coherence, but I don’t know if I’d say it’s outright incoherent. We can talk about “sola scriptura” without reading the “sola” as a strong “nothing else matters or informs our Christian life”. I think we can also read the “semper” of “semper reformanda” with an eye to past structures.
Recent confessionalization efforts can also lead to a renewal of “confessing” in the same sense that John Webster employs the term. (though I admit, in the examples that you give and criticize, this is not so much the case)
Yes, I’m referring to a specific phenomenon, not the more specific and nuanced proposals of theologians like Webster.
Yeah if you are going to be ideological and magisterial, Roman Catholicism is way sweeter than stinking Presbyterianism.
Descent into opressive authoriatarianism is the doom of any shade of catholicism, if the authority of that church is administered in any way outside the fear of The Lord, or without an attitude of servanthood.
That fear of God, and the cross of Christ, are the two elements that fuel the semper reformanda process. This constant revolution needs to be our eternal goal in earthly life, otherwise the result is a dark magisterium. We saw it with the Pharisees, we saw it with Rome, now we see it with Protestantism.
In your post, replace “Reformed” with “Christian” and make Nicea-Constantinople the confession, and you can make the same argument with the same conclusion. These Reformed confessionalists have only increased the number of limits in certain dogmatic loci, but limits are unavoidable. They can’t be chastised for doing what everyone does.
But “Reformed” and “Christian” are not terms of the same order. Nor, for that matter are “creeds” and “confessions.”
“They effectively take on the same magisterial and ideological quality that they charge the Roman Catholic Church with.”
At least the Roman Catholic Church issues no hypocritical denials about its “magisterial and ideological quality,” exactly the opposite of those who think they escape such a quality. The new confessionalism nevertheless takes off from the old; it is ahistorical to think that the mainline Protestant churches were not themselves confessional. Anglicanism is as magisterial and ideological as any other national church. Confessionalism WAS a Protestant bi-product, mainline or fringe…
“Reformed confessionalism” strikes me as an oxymoron – which is not to deny that productive theology can only proceed from particular traditions (though always in ecumenical conversation). But quite apart from the fact that Reformed theology, historically speaking, is multi-confessional, being Reformed, I suggest, is above all a habit of heart that is not aggressive-defensive, policing the boundaries and shooting on sight; rather it is inherently both respectful and critical of its own traditions, subject to the “yet more light and truth to break forth from His Word” (George Rawson, after John Robinson) – and, I would add, open to truth wherever it may be found. The Scots Confession of 1560 gets it nicely right:
“If any man will note in our Confession any chapter or sentence contrary to God’s Holy Word … it would please him of his gentleness and for Christian charity’s sake to inform us of it in writing; and we, upon our honour, do promise him that by God’s grace we shall give him satisfaction from the mouth of God, that is, from Holy Scripture, or else we shall alter whatever he can prove to be wrong.”
Hey Halden,
You must have missed it but yesterday emergent village ended the reformation:
And the third impression was, I laughed to myself and said, “The reformation just ended.” (laughing) But it did in a way.
http://www.emergentvillage.com/weblog/an-post-conference-reflection-with-phyllis-tickle
Must have been some kind of conference.
You must not be Reformed, Halden. ; )
Still, a few points of clarification might help your diatribe a bit.
1) What is observed on the blogosphere must be distinguished from what is actually practiced at the typical Reformed local parish. Subscription to the church’s particular confession is usually not required for membership. Officers, on the other hand, must state explicitly where they take issue with it.
2) You’re confusing “confessionalism” with “strict subscriptionism.” The latter, which is arguably intellectually dishonest, is indeed open to the paper-pope accusation.
But confessionalism is simply a body of folks saying that their confession encapsulates the warp and woof of Scripture better than anything else out there. I realize even this is distasteful to the majority of jellyfish Christians in the West today.
3) There are basically two meanings of Reformed: a) all Protestants except Lutherans; and b) the more narrow group of Protestants who adhere to one of the Reformed confessions of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries (three forms of unity, Westminster, etc.). The confessionalists of today, the majority of whom are not strict subscriptionsists, work from this latter premise and are actually being consistent and thus are doing nothing suprising by pointing out that, for example, Mark Driscoll isn’t Reformed.
4) Clearly, semper reformanda has not been attended to all that much. But it’s not antithetical to confessionalism, so much as it is to strict subscriptionism. Arguably one of the most vocal Reformed confessionalists (if not a strict subscriptionist) out there, R. Scott Clark, recently wrote in his Recovering the Reformed Confession: Our Theology, Piety, and Practice that it’s about time to write a new confession for today, one that follows the same trajectory of the old confessions but deals with various concerns that have arisen these past few centuries. He quotes R.B. Kuiper approvingly (As to Being Reformed, p. 90 [1926]): “When our Reformed fathers wrote the Confessions, they intended that these documents should be revised from time to time with a view to heresies that might in the future arise, and in accordance with the additional light on the truths of Scripture which the Holy Spirit might be pleased to give the church. I believe that the time has come for us to do something along this line” (p. 181).
How’s that for semper reformanda?
Aha. Now I see.
Try not to let the likes of GLWJ define for you what “confessionalism” is, either.