Introduction to Reformed Christianity

A few years ago, a professor from Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary north of Boston, Dr. David Wells, published a book that fell like a bombshell on the playground of the american’s theologians.  And the name of the book was No Place for Truth.  Now the subtitle, I think, is significant, as he wrote in the subtitle, Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology?  And in this book that caused quite a stir in the evangelical world, Dr. Wells outlined his concern for the demise of confessional theology in the life of the Church today.  And I’d like to begin this subject by reading a brief comment from that book by Dr. Wells.  He makes this statement, “The disappearance of theology from the life of the Church and the orchestration of that disappearance by some of its leaders, is hard to miss today, but, oddly enough, not easy to prove.  It is hard to miss in the evangelical world in the vacuous worship that is so prevalent.  For example, in the shift from God to the self as the central focus of faith, and the psychologized preaching that follows this shift, in the erosion of its conviction, in its strident pragmatism, in its inability to think incisively about the culture, and in its reveling in the irrational.

I recently attended a meeting in Philadelphia of the board of an organization known by the acronym “ACE”, which is the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, which was brought together in the first place largely through the stimulus provided by Dr. Wells’ book.  For this group is concerned to help call the Church back to its confessional foundation, understanding that Christianity HAS a theology.  Now the purpose of this series that we’re beginning today is to give an overview, kind of a glimpse of the essence of that theology that is called “REFORMED THEOLOGY,” as distinguished from other branches of historic Christianity.  Now we won’t have the time and the opportunity to go into all of the details of reformed theology, but I want to give sort of a compendium, an introduction to the main ideas that we find in reformed theology.   

And the first thing that I want to say today is that reformed theology is a THEOLOGY.  Now that sounds rather redundant, I realize that, but I want to make this distinction clear: that there is a difference between “religion” and “theology”.  One of my favorite illustrations of this comes from a personal experience that I had several years ago when I was invited by the faculty and the administration of a college in the Midwest that was a Christian college.  And they were without a president at the time, and as a result, the school was going through a period of self-evaluation.  And they asked me to come to address the faculty on the subject “What is a Christian College?”  And when I appeared on the campus, the dean greeted me and gave me the cook’s tour of the facilities and as we were going through the faculty office building, I noticed that one of the doors had the name stenciled across the top of the door, “Department of Religion.”  And I didn’t say anything, I just sort of filed it back in my mind for a few moments and then later on that evening when I addressed the faculty on the question “What is a Christian College?” before I began my message, I asked them a question.  I said, “I noticed this afternoon that you have here at this institution a Department of Religion.  And my question is, “Has this department ALWAYS been called the ‘Department of Religion’?”  And there was an elderly professor in the back of the room who raised his hand and said, “No, it used to be called the ‘Department of Theology,’ but we changed it about thirty years ago to the ‘Department of Religion‘.”  And I said, “Well, why did you change it?”  And he didn’t know.  And I asked the rest of the faculty and they began to GUESS why they changed it.  They said, “Maybe to make it easier for our students to transfer academic credits from our institution to other universities,” and so on.  But I took off on that point to address the question, “What is a Christian college?” or  “What is Christian education?”  And I reminded my colleagues that evening that there is a PROFOUND difference between the study of RELIGION and the study of THEOLOGY. 

Now, for those of you that are watching this presentation, I have put on my blackboard a brief diagram where I distinguish between two approaches to the question of faith.  One, I call “God-centered” and the other I call man-centered.  And the illustration that I use here has a circle with the word “theology” in it and a line underneath it coming to a sub-circle which says “anthropology”.  And the purpose of my diagram is to show that in a God-centered approach to faith, the discipline or the study of humanity, the science of anthropology,  is subsumed under the science of theology.  This reflects something of the way in which university courses were structured in the Middle Ages, when it was said that “Theology was the ‘queen’ of the sciences.”  The idea being that all OTHER disciplines in education are subsumed under the search for ULTIMATE TRUTH that is found under the nature and the character of God.  And it assumed that the study of humanity was always to be pursued in light of our understanding of God.  Since man is created by God and that we are the image-bearers of God, to have a proper understanding of what it means to be human, we have to first study the prototype rather than looking at the reflection of that.  And then BELOW the center line, I have the man-centered approach to things, indicated by a circle that reads “anthropology” and then under THAT is a smaller circle that says “religion.” 

If we go to secular universities today and study “religion”, usually that study will take place in the department of sociology or of anthropology.  And the difference is this, the study of theology is the study of GOD Himself, first and foremost.  The study of religion is the study of particular type of human behavior.  We notice that there are all kinds of religions in the world, and that when people are involved in religion, they’re involved in certain characteristic things like prayer and worship and sacrifice and singing and devotions and that sort of thing, all of which belong to the trappings of human religion.  And when we study religion from a human perspective, we are examining how people who have certain beliefs about the supernatural behave in their personal lives and in their cultic lives.   But when I say at the outset that reformed theology, when I say that reformed theology is a THEOLOGY, not a religion, I mean by that that it is not simply a way of behaving that we can determine by studying the affairs of men.  But rather, it is a belief system, it is a belief system that is indeed an entire life and world view with GOD at the center.

Now we live in a culture that has certain axioms and adages that are popular in the nomenclature of the day.  And, you know, you’ve heard it said that, “it doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you are sincere.”  And that idea communicates that what God is really concerned about with us is that we be “religious.”   It doesn’t matter what the religion is, as long as we’re sincerely religious.  Well, that idea is on a collision course with biblical Christianity, because in the first instance, the Bible acknowledges that man is incurably religious, he’s homo religiosis, and that wherever we look in the world we find all kinds of manifestations of religion. 

When the Jewish people were called by God and consecrated and set apart to be a holy nation, they were not the only religious people in the world.  All the nations around them had their peculiar religions.  But when God made His covenant with His people, and called them to be holy, to be different at the very beginning of His law, He made certain things absolutely clear, the first thing is “Thou shalt have NO OTHER GODS before Me” and the second, “Thou shalt not make unto thyself ANY GRAVEN IMAGE.”  At the very beginning of the Old Testament Covenant at Sinai was an emphasis on faith that was to be different from other religions, a faith that would be focused and centered on the character of God Himself.  Now we know what happened very early in the history of Israel in the Old Testament. 

We recently had a conference in Orlando on the essentials of the Christian faith where I called attention to an incident that is recorded for us in the 32^nd chapter of the book of Exodus, and I’ll read a part of this episode to you beginning at verse 17.  We read this, “Now when Joshua heard the noise of the people as they shouted, he said to Moses, ‘There is a noise of war in the camp.  It is not the noise of the shout of victory, nor the noise of the cry of defeat, but the sound of singing that I hear.’”  Now imagine this scenario: Moses is just now returning from Mount Sinai; he has been alone with God, conversing with God, as it were face to face.  And when he comes down from the mountain, he meets Joshua, and Joshua comes to Moses and he says, “I hear this loud noise coming from the camp.”  And Joshua’s first instinct was to guess that there was some kind of war going on because you don’t hear this kind of whooping and hollering and shouting from a mass of people except on the field of combat.  But as he drew closer, he said, “Wait a minute, it’s not the sound of victory, it’s not the sound of defeat.  It’s the sound of singing that I hear.”  And he realized that he was approaching the whole assembly of the people of Israel as they were gathered for RELIGIOUS OBSERVATIONS, singing lustily in their celebration of their religion.  But it was a celebration that centered on a golden calf…a golden calf that the people had imposed and begged the high priest, Aaron, to make for them, that they could have a god like the other nations.  A god that was tangible, a god they could see, a god that was contemporary, a god that was relevant, a god they could get excited about.  And the first high priest consecrated by God Himself acceded to the demands of the people and built them a golden calf.  Now in the meantime, while this was going on, initially, Moses, as you recall, had been on Sinai in a relationship with God.  And God KNEW what was going on at the foot of the mountain.  Moses didn’t.   Listen to what God says to Moses in verse 7: “And the LORD said to Moses, ‘Go get down, for your people whom you brought out of Egypt have corrupted themselves.  They have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them, and they have made themselves a molded calf and worshiped it and sacrificed to it.  And they said, “This is your god, O Israel, that brought you out of the land of Egypt.”’  And the LORD said to Moses, ‘I have seen this people, and indeed it is a stiff-necked people.  Now therefore, let Me alone that my wrath may burn hot against them and I will consume them.’”

Now the people were engaged in RELIGION, but the religion they were celebrating was a religion that had a theology of this world, a theology that distorted and corrupted the very character of God; a theology that moved away from true and honorable worship of God to the worship of creaturely, manmade things.  And God said to Moses, “Look at this.  They’re worshiping this calf, and they’re saying, ‘This is the god that brought us out of the land of Egypt.’” As if that calf made by their own hands could have delivered them from anything.  They prayed to the calf.  They offered worship and sacrifices to this calf and the calf was deaf; the calf was dumb; it couldn’t see anything; it couldn’t do anything.  It was not omnipotent, but IMPOTENT.  But it was a SUBSTITUTE for the Living God.

Now in the first chapter of Romans, the Apostle Paul says that God has revealed Himself through the things that are made so clearly and so manifestly that EVERYONE in this world KNOWS the eternal power and deity of God.  And yet the primary sin of the human race is to take that knowledge of God and to push it down, to do what the Apostle says in Romans, “To suppress the truth and hold it in unrighteousness, and then EXCHANGE that truth for a LIE, and serve the creature rather than the Creator.”  The exchange is between the incorruptible, transcendent, holy God who is for the corruption of creaturely things.  In other words, friends, the most BASIC sin that WE, not just pagans in far off aborigine [sic] lands or in primitive tribes commit, but that WE commit is the besetting sin, the proclivity for idolatry.  And idolatry involves RELIGION.  But even the Christian religion can be idolatrous when we strip God of His true attributes, and place at the center of our worship, something other than God Himself. 

Now if we’re going to look at the essence of reformed theology, I have to say to you that THE most strict focus of reformed theology is on THEOLOGY, on the knowledge of the true God.  We live in a day where people say theology doesn’t matter.  This is what David Wells was decrying in his book No Place for Truth.  What counts is “feeling good,” being “ministered to in our psychological needs,” having a place where we can “feel the warmth of fellowship” and have a “sense of belonging and of relevance.”  And theology is something that divides, something that stirs up controversy and debates.  “We don’t need doctrine,” we’re told, “we need life.”  Well, at the heart of reformed theology is the affirmation that THEOLOGY IS LIFE, because theology is the KNOWLEDGE of GOD.  And there’s no more important knowledge that exists to inform our lives than the knowledge of God. 

This is what the Protestant Reformation was all about.  There were scandals in the priesthood.  There were problems  of immorality both among the Roman Catholic people AND among the Protestant people.  And Luther at that time said that Erasmus attacked the pope in his belly.  He said, “I have attacked him in his doctrine.”  And Luther even admitted, he said, “We find scandalous behavior among our own people, but what we’re trying to do FIRST is come to a sound understanding of God.”  Because our lives will never be reformed; our lives will never be brought into conformity with Christ until we first have a clear understanding of the original form of the model, of the ideal; of true humanity that is found in Christ.  And that’s a matter of theology.  So we start with the clear acknowledgement that the reformed faith IS a theology, a theology that permeates the whole structure.

 (using some comments from RC Sproul Material on reformed theology)*