Please bear with me a bit in this review of Scott Clark’s contribution to Tabletalk. So many different issues converge here that it will be necessary to spend a little bit of time deconfusing them.
Clark’s article concerns what to do with the pilgrims from evangelicalism that may be making their way into confessional Reformed churches. “Upon arrival, the visitor is likely to find new language and culture, that is, a new theology, piety, and practice.” Clark grants that the traffic is not exactly heavy — there are about sixty million evangelicals in North America, and less than a million members in confessional Reformed communions. But there is traffic, and Clark discusses what to do about it. Jumping to the end of the article, Clark, to his credit, urges that these faithful Reformed believers decline to surrender their heritage, and that they “gently, gradually, welcome” these pilgrims to the confessional tradition. Thus far, this is all to the good.
But there is a glitch. Knowing the particular kind of confessional tradition that passes muster with Clark, certain comments he makes in the course of this article throws this reviewer into a state of consternation.
“There remain, however, churches that not only trace their roots to the Reformation but who also continue to believe the same faith confessed by Calvin and his successors.”
This will fly when you are dealing with a refugee from pabulum churches, and who doesn’t know the history or theology of the Reformation. A Klinean kingdom approach is something that someone can hold and still go to Heaven, obviously, but it most emphatically is not “the same faith confessed by Calvin and his successors.” It is the same faith with bits and pieces of it, sure.
I’ll bet that if you got Scott Clark and William Perkins in a battle of the bands face off, and asked each of them to play that old fifties standard, Ordo Salutis, it would recognizably be the same song. But there are a whole bunch of other issues, issues that show up in virtually all the Reformed confessions, and which take up the lion’s share of the Reformers’ biographies, that, if you apply the acids of R2K theology to them, they just come apart in your hands.
“Now the confessional churches are isolated from both the old liberal mainline and the revivalist traditions.”
This is because they are isolated from pretty much everybody, and this unfortunately includes isolation from the cultural potency of Reformed theology and piety. And that potency, incidentally, is one of the most obvious things about it. The Reformed theology I have read and studied and loved built a great civilization. The Reformed theology of the truncated brethren, consistently applied, would have trouble building a taco stand.
“If you found yourself in an intentionally historic, confessional Reformed congregation, you may have even done a little time traveling to the seventeenth or even the sixteenth century.”
Look. If you actually did some time travel to Geneva, or Heidelberg, or London, or Wittenberg, or Strasbourg, you would have to be given guided tours that kept you out of 9/10 of those cities, and out of 100% of the theological discussions. You would be given a guided tour of every sixteenth century Potemkin village there was.
“It may take time for Americans raised on religious fast food to learn to enjoy a new diet, language and culture. If we try to become what the pilgrim has left behind, what use are we to the pilgrim? (Matt. 5:13)”
Clark describes evangelicals abandoning the fast food of revivalism, and it is an apt metaphor. But it is possible to abandon breakfast, lunch and dinner at the golden arches without insisting that the only restaurant in the world with confessional food is a sushi bar in Escondido.
And it is here that Clark has gotten the picture exactly backwards. As an evangelical, and the son of an evangelical, allow me to give my testimony. I was part of the exodus from pop evangelicalism (not historic evangelicalism). I was sick of the cultural irrelevance and impotence of “believe in Jesus, go to Heaven when you die.” I was sick of a pietism that couldn’t find its way out of the prayer closet. I wanted to stop confessing that Jesus was Lord of an invisible seventeenth dimension somewhere. Why not here? Why not now? It was a long story, but the trail to historic evangelicalism, God-honoring worship, and a culturally potent and world transforming faith led me straight to the Reformed faith — the same faith that John Calvin and his successors confessed. Calvin preached to milkmaids and Calvin wrote letters to princes. Calvin drafted catechisms, and he drafted ordinances for the city council. Calvin thought that the idea of a civil society without enforcement of the first table of the law was “preposterous.” Calvin was a loyal son of Christendom, as am I.
Clark says that if the confessionally Reformed make the mistake of trying “to become what the pilgrim has left behind, what use are we to the pilgrim?” This is actually an outstanding question.
Scott, let me answer it for you. What you argue for — principled cultural irrelevance for Jesus — is exactly what I left behind, and I left it behind because historic Reformed believers taught me better. You have, at this point, abandoned the historic Reformed faith, and you have joined yourself to the anabaptists and revivalists. I can describe it for you well — I grew up in that, and I know exactly what it is like.
In your confessional church, would you vote to ordain John Knox? Would you vote to ordain Martin Bucer? Would you vote to ordain John Calvin? Would you vote to ordain Abraham Kuyper? Would you vote to ordain Jonathan Edwards? Looking over that list, I would be five for five. What would you do? Treat them as pilgrims who needed to be taught some of the nuances of the true confessional tradition?