What Do You Mean by 'Reformed'?

Traditions are no good when they're left on the shelf.

As a child, I felt that my toys were meant to be preserved and protected, so much so that I often felt great anxiety over their safety. I was reticent to let my friends touch many of my toys; if I allowed them to at all, it only came after I gave them many rules for handling my prized possessions. My Lego sets, once built, had to be kept together—many of them sat on my shelf to be admired. By the time I was in my teens, many of my favorite childhood toys and stuffed animals had sat on the shelf for years, collecting dust.

My toys were for looking, not touching.

As I transitioned into adulthood, I collected many of my favorite toys and stored them in protective bins to hold onto for my future children. I couldn’t wait to pass on my Legos and Power Ranger Megazords. I took great pride in preserving my late brother’s metal Hot Wheels from the 70’s. For over 15 years, I protected these toys, knowing that my kids would one day look at them with the same admiration, respect, and sense of protection that I once did.

I’ve never been more wrong about anything in my life.

Within weeks of passing my old Legos on to my then-five-year-old, all the sets were disassembled and rebuilt into his own custom creations. To this day, those pieces remain scattered among the whims of his imagination. Many of the Megazords are now banged up, with pieces missing or broken. Several of my brother’s old Hot Wheels have been damaged or are probably under a bookshelf somewhere, only to be discovered 15 years from now when we finally get some new furniture.

Until recently, I had a tough time watching my kids play with my old toys. I considered their use of those toys reckless, rude, and disrespectful. I would even get angry with them because they didn’t treat those toys the way I thought they should. With a raised voice, I’ve found myself saying, “Don’t you know how special these toys are?! You need to be so careful with these! I can’t trust you if you won’t keep these in one piece!”

Then, just a few weeks ago, it finally hit me: toys are meant for playing, not protecting. How can I prevent my kids from using toys the way they are intended? My brother wouldn’t want his old Hot Wheels sitting in a container on the shelf; he would want them to be played with, just as he did when he was young!

I’m the one in the wrong, not them.

I have existed in the world of Reformed theology for just over a decade. In that time, I have learned that many call themselves Reformed who view the tradition the same way I once viewed my old toys: the Reformed tradition is meant for admiration and study from a distance, but don’t get too close. There is a fear that people will be too rough with the tradition and break it. Keep your hands off, because the tradition must be kept in pristine condition.

The tradition is for looking, not touching.

Yet the Reformed tradition, like my old toys, is meant to be used in the hands of the people it was made for. This means we should be comfortable with our tradition getting banged up from time to time, because we recognize that it is no good if it is left collecting dust on the shelf. If the Reformed tradition is being used as it was intended, then today’s reformers would be committed to developing our tradition in light of the new issues and circumstances we find ourselves in today.

Reformed? Neo-Calvinist? What Does it All Mean?

It is a mistake to reduce the Reformed tradition to a few sweeping theological characteristics. Theologians have noted the inadequacies in attempts to neatly summarize the tradition.¹ While Western Evangelicals have tended to reduce the Reformed tradition to summary doctrines such as the Five Solas, TULIP, or predestination, this perspective proves insufficient in light of the breadth of global Reformed witness. André Biéler, a twentieth century scholar of John Calvin, said that emphasizing the doctrine of predestination as if it “set its seal on the whole of the religious and secular life of the original Calvinist communities is a considerable exaggeration—strongly contradicted by the facts of that age.”² As Biéler expressed elsewhere:

Our Reformer did not intend to constitute a body of doctrines to remain valid for all times. Our faithfulness to Calvin therefore does not permit us merely and lazily to repeat mechanically his words in a new historical situation. It requires, on the contrary, that Christians make in their new circumstances the effort of submission to the Word of God in all things, following Calvin’s magnificent example.³

Unlike many theologians before him, Calvin never intended to “confine the encounter of God and humanity within a coherent, permanent theological system.”⁴ Instead, he recognized that our individual and social circumstances are in “constant upheaval” and thus necessitate a disposition that drives people to confront their “living Lord” rather than living by predetermined systems. It is the duty of Reformed churches to “receive constantly afresh the enduring teaching of the Word of God, to examine repeatedly afresh the real nature of economic, political, and social situations in which it exists, and to invent freshly produced responses in order to adapt the teaching to that reality.”⁵

As the generative source for the Reformed tradition, Calvin’s best instincts have taken root across the world within various theological systems, including the Three Forms of Unity (The Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Canons of Dort) and the Westminster Standards (The Westminster Confession of Faith and its Larger and Shorter catechisms). The tradition has influenced theologians as different as Charles Hodge and Willie James Jennings, Abraham Kuyper and Allan Boesak, or Herman Bavinck and Friedrich Schleiermacher.

Seen in this way, the Reformed tradition is more than a doctrinal system (though it is not less than that); it is also an impulse, one that constantly seeks to understand and interpret Scripture in reference to the life and witness of the Church in the world.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, these impulses of the Reformed tradition took shape in a new expression that we now refer to as neo-Calvinism. Confronted by the new demands presented by industrialization, globalization, and modernization, the neo-Calvinist tradition is committed to developing Reformed theology to meet the demands of every age and place.

Emerging from the work of Dutch theologians Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck, neo-Calvinism maintains that the Reformed tradition is not a petrified artifact for mere study and preservation. One of the most grievous errors for a neo-Calvinist is to remain stuck in the past, offering nothing of value to address the problems we face now. Abraham Kuyper expressed this in his criticism of what he called conservatism: “[T]he conservatism we must condemn wants to hold on to what it is as it is. True conservatism seeks to preserve what is in terms of what it will become in Christ, that is, resurrected from the dead.”⁶

When a church cements itself to old doctrinal expressions and forms, it will become “self-condemned” because it forces itself “outside of their own time at the cost of having any influence on the life that surrounds them.”⁷ Kuyper found this problem to be pronounced among the Reformed theologians of his day, who had become “spiritually sluggish” because they had added nothing new to the tradition handed to them and had instead “placed their theological thinking in an idle mode.”⁸ If necessary, the Reformed must be willing to prune their own tradition so that they might not merely copy the past but nurture it to uniquely “bud and to blossom once more” for the demands of “these modern times and… the demands of the times to come.”⁹

In agreement with Kuyper, Herman Bavinck likewise set himself against that dead expression of orthodoxy that has nothing new to say to the demands of the present age. For Bavinck, the Reformed must “never give the impression that for them orthodoxy per se is the highest truth. However high we may estimate the confessions of the church, they are a ‘standardized norm,’ subservient to Holy Scripture, and thus always remain subject to revision and expansion.”¹⁰

Bavinck observed that the Reformed had too often glorified the past while mimicking foreign expressions unfaithful to one’s own context. It is “absurd to believe that during the brief period of Reformation, all error has been banished,” for Reformed theology “wishes no cessation of progress and promotes multiformity.” This mistaken nostalgia was most evident in the Presbyterian Churches. As Bavinck attested, “All the misery of the Presbyterian Churches is owing to their striving to consider the Reformation as completed, and to allow no further development of what has been begun by the labor of the Reformers.”¹¹

Neo-Calvinism, then, elevates the Reformed impulse to constantly retrieve and reapply itself in light of Scripture to the demands of the present world.

Reforming the Tradition

At our best, the Reformed tradition serves as a “challenge to [the Christian tradition as a whole] to be faithful to the gospel.”¹²

Wherever the Reformed tradition has locked itself up as a mere replication of the past, preserved itself as a cultural artifact, remained pristine in middle-class comforts, or been used as little more than an object for study in the academy, it has abandoned its prophetic calling to the world and sold its birthright for a captivity of its own making.

While being fully committed to Reformed orthodoxy, today’s reformers cannot help but feel a kind of holy discontent with the ways things are, for we wish to see the world as it will be in the resurrection of all things.

Will Reformed churches have answers for the expressive neo-liberalism that is crushing our social fabric? Will we finally develop tangible solutions to social issues surrounding racial and economic injustice? Can we address the exploitation of capitalism and the false hopes of socialism with alternative communal economies in our local churches? Will our anthropology develop to offer a beautiful vision for sex and gender for the public square that is neither bound to conservative ideologies nor progressive individualism? Will we produce a hopeful political theology that confronts the myth of nationalism taking hold? Will we hold our politicians accountable to a just immigration policy? Could we create a positive theology that addresses AI for the global church?

It's time to take our tradition off the shelf and put it to use. It’s no good to anyone collecting dust.

1. For example, see John W. De Gruchy, Liberating Reformed Theology: A South African Contribution to an Ecumenical Debate, 1-46; Fred W. Graham, The Constructive Revolutionary; André Biéler, The Social Humanism of Calvin.

2. André Biéler, Calvin's Economic and Social Thought, 438

3. André Biéler, The Social Humanism of Calvin, 64-65

4. André Biéler, Calvin's Economic and Social Thought, 456

5. Ibid.

6. Abraham Kuyper, “Conservatism and Orthodoxy: False and True Preservation (1870),” in Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader, 80.

7. Kuyper, Conservatism and Orthodoxy, 73-74.

8. Abraham Kuyper, Common Grace (Volume 2): God’s Gifts for a Fallen World, 107.

9. Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism: Six Lectures from the Stone Foundation Lectures Delivered at Princeton University, Lecture Six.

10. Herman Bavinck, “Herman Bavinck’s Modernisme En Orthodoxie: A Translation,” trans. Bruce R. Pass, Bavinck Review 7 (2016): 79, https://bavinckinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/TBR7_Pass.pdf.

11. Herman Bavinck, “The Future of Calvinism,” The Presbyterian and Reformed Review 5, no. 17 (1894): 23.

12. De Gruchy, Liberating Reformed Theology, 16.