I've taken a lot of heat from my Calvinistic Baptist friends for stopping using the word "Reformed" to describe them. (I should add, one of them has stopped using it themselves, I am on the very rare occasion persuasive).
I only bring this up, because today Dr. R. Scott Clark asked on his blog, "Who or What Defines 'Reformed?'" Same argument I've been making for quite awhile. Just wish I made it as well as he did.
This one's a keeper.
Friday, April 25, 2008
The Reformed Label
Posted by Hobster at 15:58
Labels: blogs, Calvinism, Theologians, theology
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3 comments:
I guess Jonathon Edwards wasn't reformed since he was a Congregationalist. One or two other Johns come to mind. :-)
Dad Friday.
The term "reformed" stems from the movement to reform the church, and if "reformed" is a set of the belief that the church need(s/ed) reforming. Neither the Dutch nor Presbyterian movement "reformed" the church's institution of baptism, rather they kept the paedobaptistic view of the church from which they broke from and... in generations that followed, adopted a half-way view of the new covenant to continue the practice.
So now, viewing baptism like the practice of circumcision, and subjected to "households" (whether or not said household members are willing and repentant) and thus supposedly place upon them the "promises of the covenant". One supporter has gone so far to quote Acts 16:34 (in part) to say "in the case of the Philippian jailer and his family, the text clearly speaks only of the faith of the jailer himself" suggesting that the household of the jailer didn't believe, but rejoiced none-the-less! Said individual goes on to say: "If the discontinuity of the new covenant is that only those who personally repent and believe in Christ are to be baptized and received as part of the church, why is that not clearly indicated in a text like this?"
Well this is a fine mess the paedobaptists have found themselves in. In one hand, rejecting the arguments of the paedocommunionists
stating "...understood the inspired apostle to require a profession of faith before approaching the Table", thus declaring that somehow while babies are not proper subjects of communion they are certainly of baptism. But this is the very same argument we baptists make about baptism. Time and again, far more times than the one passage relating to the Supper in 1 Corinthians, baptism is administered after one believes, after one repents etc. The New Horizon's magazine, from which those quotes were pulled had two sequential issues dealing with these sacraments (and yes, I call them that) and yet came to the exact opposite conclusion based upon the same kinds of evidence.
It is apparent therefore that if one wishes to make the argument that infants and children cannot partake of the elements of the Supper apart from "a profession of faith", why then do the fail to follow the overwhelming evidence that the same applies to baptism?
The argument from a covenantal standpoint cannot stand, for is it not the cup of the Supper which Christ called the "blood of the New Covenant", why claim that children are in this covenant if they are not to partake the one thing Jesus himself identified as belonging to the New Covenant? Upon what basis do we administer the "new circumcision" to infants and yet forbid them from the "new passover"?!
It is funny to read the article linked in your post wherein Clark writes "they insist that the adjective “old covenant” refers to everything that occurred before the incarnation (despite Paul’s definition of “old covenant” in 2 Cor 3 and despite the way it is used in Hebrews", pardon my language but this is crap. Perhaps he's referring to dispensational Baptist, who would reject the term "Reformed" to begin with, but few, if any, of the self-proclaimed Reformed Baptists YOU KNOW would ever suggest such nonsense. If this is Clark's reasoning for his claim, he should spend some time actually talking to Reformed Baptists before presuming to ever speak for them again. He writes: "...one must hold to every point of doctrine in the Reformed confessions in order to be Reformed", but which doctrine?
To turn his own words on their head, "who licensed R. Scott Clark to define definitively the adjective Reformed"?
Consider, finally, that the WCF came together in and about 1646, and the London Baptist Confession, nearly identical to the WCF except in a few areas (baptism specifically), and drafted with the help of the Presbyterians who crafted the WCF in 1689.
Clark cannot be suggesting that somehow the Three Forms of Unity, are somehow the be-all and end-all of all that is "Reformed"? Since he's not a presby, wouldn't he find problems within Presbyterian practice too? Somehow I believe that Luther, the founder of the "Reformation" is rolling over in his grave.
It is this kind of stupidity that infected the mind of Presbyterians and Dutch in ages past that sought and killed baptists.
If you have trouble using the word "Reformed" in relation to your brothers and sisters of baptist denomination, perhaps you should consider dropping the label from usage in relation to yourself, since it is, or will be, evident that you don't hold to Clark's truly-reformed "Reformedom" any more than I do.
It's sad, Hobs... very sad.
Wow Hobs - I actually came here looking for something you had written a couple years ago - and saw this.
I'm really quite surprised at you. I, like Micah, would ask who made Dr Clark the arbiter of the definition of reformed.
As Micah said, it refers primarily to the movement to reform the church to comply with biblical teaching. By claiming some sort of exclusive right to the term for the presbyterian church, Dr Clark (and by extension you) are in a sense making the claim that you have reached the pinnacle of Biblical truth, and that no further reformation can happen. (Unless it comes through the Presbyterian church through modification of the confessions apparently, from Dr Clark's update.)
I had heard about Clark's writing on this topic, and as I understand it he actually includes the Savoy declaration as well. I wonder - does he include that but specifically exclude the Platform of Polity? Because if not, then what he has really said is that the whole definition of being reformed hinges on infant baptism.
I don't know about you Hobs, but when I look at church history during the time of the reformation I don't see that Infant Baptism was the turnkey issue. In fact, it didn't even come up as a disputed issue until well after the time of the primary reformers.
What were their primary arguments? Seems to me it was largely a rejection of the established Church, a return to the Scriptures as the authoritative sufficient source for Doctrine, and a return to a biblical view of God, and of his work of Salvation.
But now, Dr Clark wants to anachronistically make being reformed all about issues that were not even a primary concern at the time. He wishes to draw a line between Baptists and Presbyterians because of secondary issues of the mode of baptism, and our view of membership in the churches and a couple of related covenantal distinctions - and you find this argumentation convincing.
It's bad enough when useful labels are corrupted by opposition - it's much more troubling when it comes from your own.
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