Until this article, I was not aware of John’s departure. I read him weekly growing up, and I loved his passion, amazing writing skills and love for the ways of the kingdom. I’m sad for the CRC. I breathe relief for John.

Nearly twenty years ago I finished my course work at Calvin Seminary. Eleven years ago I helped start a little non-CRC house church.

Today I still embrace Calvin College. A reformed world-view is an amazing perspective on life. I won’t give all of it up. Yet. Dordt is outdated and still adhered too. The Heidelberg still damns our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters. Our right wing politics support pre-birthed life, but we fail to see our bipolar attitude toward the marginalized whether it be the poor, immigrant without a green card or the homosexual couple wanting to live a committed life together. In other words, the second commandment often is disregarded for Puritan values.

I am also saddened the CRC is losing such an amazing voice. His choice was not his own however. Here is why: First, Calvin Seminary still has predominately systematic theologians teaching in its faculty. Even though they know better, skin is not lost nor tenure potentially not granted for the sake of these issues. There simply isn’t institutional will to risk what could be lost for the sake of saving something greater. As I read the comments, even Scott Hoezee won’t call the denomination out for bad theological positions. The will to do so largely does not exist.

Secondly, for those of us who love Catholics and embrace gay monogamous partnerships, there is no space for us if we are to be honest with our theology being our guiding force in life.

Thirdly, for those of us called to be evangelists, the rules are often strict. The theological maze i of rules become obstacles to living the reflections of the life of Jesus to a hurting and broken world. (Case in point: the new Calvin College president, although Presbyterian, is expected to join the CRC. For God’s sake. Really? For the sake of the Missio Dei, the mission of God, does it really matter?)

Ironically, it doesn’t matter. Yet, to the gatekeepers it does matter. No major voice will have the courage to say otherwise.

Finally, as someone having spent conception through Christian day school through Calvin College, Calvin Seminary, seven years of serving as a youth pastor, and being grateful for my first 34 years of being mentored by amazing CRC people, the past eleven years have challenged me to vistas of the kingdom I would not have seen from most of the CRC’s best peaks.

My connections, encounters and friendships during this decade of time have surpassed my greatest dreams. In the midst of these voices, the cries I hear to pursue justice and mercy as I learned growing up in the CRC have exponentially multiplied.

Today my kingdom theology is in the veins of Leslie Newbigin, NT Wright, George Hunsberger and Craig VanGelder. Most days I am not concerned about bad theology because I am not told that it still matters.

The ways of Jesus and the kingdom of God allow space for justice and mercy, goodness and kindness, thoughtful friendships with heretics and sinners in ways that I never imagined eleven years ago.

For some people the desire to stay and see institutional change may be a tremendous calling. For others of us such as Suk and me, life’s calling is elsewhere.

I can not speak nor write for John. For me, life is too short to spend time saving institutions. These too will pass. I have many friends who know the biblical text, believe Jesus was great, but they want nothing to do with a Saviour. Their views are the result of institutional failures in many cases.

As for me, I’m called to live the kingdom that is here now but not yet fully known. When human institutions get in the way of kingdom stuff, I have a serious problem. Today I find people in West Michigan more willing to converse about the kingdom when they know I am committed to the ways of Jesus but have no institutional ties. While this may be a sad commentary on the institutional church, including the CRC, it is also our current reality.

Will there be a theological call to reform following Suk’s departure? We can hope so, but the theologians are always good at creating spin. We shall hope for a groundswell that becomes a Tsunami, but let’s not hold our breath. Life is too short to hope for change we can not create apart from a groundswell of desire and passion.

Grace & Peace,
Randy

You can say that there is no such thing as ‘divinizing’ the confessions, and I hope you’re right — but when people get über-defensive when there is any talk of change it is hard for me to see otherwise. Yet when I hear of changes that have been made, as you noted, or of someone referring to the confessions as ‘living documents not set in stone’, it gives me hope that perhaps I am wrong in my perceptions.

I really appreciate the link you provided – there’s some really helpful stuff there in terms of history and current approaches and relationships to confessional documents. I also appreciate what Lee Hardy notes: “To suppress all critical discussion of the creeds [confessions] at the institutional level would be to adopt means that work against the end of having true belief on matters religious.”

Amen to that.

Perhaps there is wider latitude than I’ve assumed, as the process of “ecclesiastical freedom” seems to connote. Yet there is tension between that practice and what the FoS (at least for Calvin faculty) actually says, as is noted in the article.

As far as splitting over ‘failure to see them as important’, I guess I don’t see how that is different than abusing their authority or using them as weapons. It would seem that in such a case there is a split because some feel the confessions must continue to function at a certain level of ‘binding authority’, and others would prefer to see them ‘guides’. If people feel their only recourse is to leave, then perhaps an abuse (or misappropriation) of authority is the case at some level. It goes both ways.

The use of the confessions highlighted on p.15 notes that the CRC approach is one in which: “Subscribers are not bound to think that the confessions are the best possible articulation of specific themes for every time and place, and are bound to develop ever more faithful ways of speaking and practicing the faith, revising the confessions when necessary.”

I hope that is indeed the case. Though I do have to admit the idea of subscription that is ‘appropriating’ (or essential tenet subscription) rather than ‘binding’ makes even more sense to me, because I think that creates space for people like John Suk. To me, that is a better place to be.

Given what I read there, perhaps my perception of the situation is narrower than the reality (not a real surprise). Thanks again.

I’m wondering where this idea of our confessional tradition being so biblically myopic originated…

From de Bres to Ursinus to Gomarus – yes they used strong language about the story of scripture and its interpretation because their context necessitated it. We’ve footnoted a few things over the years that have been tempered by changes in the western church (Vatican II softened the council of Trent, Anabaptists don’t subvert social order like they used to – wiki my possible ancestor Melchior Hoffman). But overall, their hermeneutics have remained fairly nuanced over the last few centuries (one great example might be BC art. 32)

Yes, there have been plenty of ‘heresy’ trials in the Dutch Reformed Churches since 1619 along the lines of confessional orthodoxy, but I fail to historically see any of these churches espousing the kind of rigid, fundamentalist ‘divinizing’ of the confessions that you seem to fear.
Scott Hoezee pointed out that accusing the confessions of being used as weapons fails both the historic and contemporary litmus test. All too often, those who’ve held to the HC, BC and C’s of D have split over the failure to see them as important, not because their authority was abused. In the CRC, the names Janssen, Dekker and Boer come to mind, but they were never ‘run out on a rail’ because they didn’t have things perfectly in line.

You say you’re “inviting people into the center.” A recent report from Calvin College on the history of the use of the confessions shows that the view in the center is actually the one which you might say is far right (http://www.calvin.edu/admin/provost/documents/statement.pdf – see p. 15). To somehow imply a less strict or more lenient approach to the confessions is more “Christological” or biblical is a little unfair in my opinion.

You’ve got some good things going here. I am not sure I was trying to say that narrative theology produces better fruit in terms of one’s discipleship and life of faith – though that could be the case. I was implying rather that narrative theology allows the text to speak without trying to answer dogmatically things which many of the biblical writers were not necessarily concerned with. To that extent, the more we hear the story of the life of God with his people, the more we are invited to live into it, so in that sense it would enrich the life of faith. But as you note, much more is needed: reflection, worship, etc.

As for proof-texting, yes, we all ‘take’ verses and read them and they speak powerfully to us. It should be that way. It’s impractical to imagine that we could spend time reading whole books every time we open the Bible, and then spend time doing serious exegesis and hermeneutics to boot. Small pieces of the text can and should inform our faith life, but hopefully as part of a broader whole of studying the text on one’s own and in community, which itself belongs to a broader tradition. But do we want such an approach to determine the bounds within which we must operate?

It seems that we have become fundamentalist in our adamance that we remain subservient to these documents. In a healthy relationship –one in which they are part of the ‘cloud of witnesses’ rather than immovable objects– they would encourage and speak into our lives, without maintaining a choke hold on them.

Underneath, I hear an argument of sorts being advanced, that the latter produces better spiritual fruit, that it is perhaps generates a better spiritual connection. I want to respect that, although I find that discipleship — the process of conviction-action-reflection/worship seems a better path to spiritual fruit than hermeneutics (this is likely a left-over from my childhood Methodism).

So we come then to the matter of “proof-texts.” This strikes me as being particularly cultural, speaking more to present cultural dis-stances than of a process. The Forms of Confession are theological documents, not the result of biblical exegesis. Rhetorically, I would suppose that behind most of the points we could find pre-existing commonplaces of texts; this is not the invention of proof-texting. Rather I see two things going on: first an adornment: what we say theologically is adorned biblically, the citations not only providing a formal connection but in themselves asserting a Reformed conviction about life in the Word. We put on the texts not merely as manipulation (though some do this), but as a way of confessing, even promising that we ground our life in God’s Word.

Secondly, in a more political mode, the use of proof-text, of drenching our thoughts in Scripture is a way of asserting something close to the priesthood of all believers; it is a protest, a counter to priestcraft with its reservation of truth for the “educated” or the elite. In Reformed circles, the proof text then is a way of socially keeping the domine honest. It’s a dialogic approach.

Finally, there is the matter of our stance. Proof-texting, the drenching of life with the Word — this is what “those other folk” do, the ones at the third-tier Baptist schools. We reserve the Bible for the big stuff, but not the daily parts of our lives; proof-texting (and our discomfort with it) is a class boundary. And yet. I don’t know how I can be aflame with God (to borrow from the Desert Fathers) without it.

Or as the song goes, humming to myself on my tasks:
Sweeter are thy words to me
Than all other goods can be;
Safe I walk, thy truth my light,
hating falsehood, loving right.

Spirit and truth – our faith needs both! it seems we (crc) have been heavy on the truth, while charismatics have been heavy on the Spirit, and I believe God is working on bringing these 2 streams together so He can move powerfully on behalf of His Kingdom in this world… Neither side can say we are better than the other, neither side can say we have it more right, because we are both missing some key parts in some ways, and God intended for us to work together, in unity as the Bride of Christ. We need to learn some “stuff” from them, and we have some “stuff” that we can help teach them…

I was curious about the classis, because it was unofficially reported that Moses made a pretty bold statement there about the Holy Spirit, and when I heard what he said, it confirmed a lot!! It was very encouraging to hear that a key leader was willing make that bold of a statement publicly. sorry to hear about the 20″ snow storm so late in the spring…

I have no idea what it means to say theology trumps stories. There would be no meaningful theology were it not for the biblical stories, so I’m not sure what you mean by that.

Reading Genesis literally tends to ‘miss out’ on what is actually being said. It also forces people into awkward positions like having to believe in talking snakes and that the whole predicament of the planet is based on a piece of fruit. The literalism crushes the theological beauty that is encapsulated in a story that is telling us true things about us and our world. Not to mention the issues with current science that a literal reading puts one at odds with.