by Andrew Kuyvenhoven

Every old man rides a hobby horse or two. I ride my strong conviction that God requires the Reformed church to express its faith in a contemporary confession or the church will lose its Reformed character.

In the 1960s and ‘70s we debated the need and the possibility of a new confession, as did many churches in several countries. In 1971 I defended an overture of Classis Chatham on the floor of synod, asking synod to declare it "necessary and desirable to re-express the faith of the church in a new confession." This new creed would "replace the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Canons of Dort as a statement of the truth and as our standard of unity."

Predictably, synod did not go for that. Synods of the Christian Reformed Church defend our confessions; they will not alter them. The confessions are old and venerable. When they were recent efforts, they could be changed and amended. In 1565 a synod in Antwerp decided that the new "Belgic Confession" should be read at the opening session so that the delegates could "declare unity" but also "see whether there is something to change or amend." At every Christian Reformed synod, however, the president asks the delegates to "rise and express their agreement" with the Three Forms of Unity. It would be out of order to change or to amend.

Only once in 440 years have we deleted a few lines in one of our confessions. Article 36 of the Belgic Confession used to say that God wants the government to promote the kingdom of Jesus Christ and to destroy idolatry and false worship. In 1910 we admitted that we should change this, but it took us until 1958 to complete the change. Many speakers and writers have used this small and overdue correction as an example that the church is willing to change its confessions. But it is not.

Although Classis Chatham failed to convince Synod 1971 to say that we needed a restatement of the faith of the church, the eventual result of that debate was the composition and acceptance (12 years later) of a Contemporary Testimony, Our World Belongs to God. This modern confession has an undefined authority in the church, though many congregations love it and use it regularly.

During the ’60s and ’70s, when we debated the need for a new confession, most church leaders kept saying that there was nothing wrong with the old confessions but that people were too lazy to study them. So we made new translations of two of the old confessions.

In addition to those translations, we had a committee of 12 musicians and poets rework the 150 psalms in the Psalter Hymnal. That committee worked 10 years and gave us 150 revised psalms and 590 selected hymns. The Psalter Hymnal became a hefty book of 1,100 pages. (When many stanzas must be sung, even the strong need two hands to hold this whopper.)

The book, which includes the new translations of the old confessions, holds all we need for faith and worship. Now it appears to me that the gray Psalter Hymnal of 1987 concludes the period in which the church’s synod tells the church’s members what’s good for them. It was our last combined effort to be classically Reformed. Now that time is past, I fear.

Last winter my wife and I attended a lively and growing Christian Reformed congregation for 10 weeks. Nobody cracked the book. All we needed was the overhead.

Losing Relevance
Today the differences between Protestant congregations have diminished. A leader in Latin American missions says that Protestant churches in countries south of the United States border are virtually indistinguishable. During my years of ministry, the whole phenomenon of "denominationalism"—including belonging to a "Reformed" kind of Christianity—has gone from absolutism to relativism, from fanaticism to indifference. (Of course, there are exceptions. Some groups build their fences even higher.)

When serious Christian parents move to another town and seek a place for spiritual growth, they attend a number of churches. Finally they join a particular church not because it has the "right" confession but because the preacher is good and the kids like it there.

This is the mentality of the masses of Christian people. And for decades our confessions have not functioned in the church as personal confessions are supposed to do. Except for selective parts of the Heidelberg Catechism, the church today does not seem able to embrace these documents and make them our own. So we should now stop saying that people are too lazy to read. The fault is with the confessions themselves.

It makes no sense, either, to edit the confessions. Updating any historical document is risky and unaesthetic. Patching the confessions would be even less satisfying. The only change we made in more than four centuries (Art. 36) still doesn’t cut it because it does not say what we believe about the relationship of church and state. And to put the "detestable Anabaptists" in a footnote (see p. 857 of the gray Psalter) is no solution.

Our ancestors spoke before their God, in their world, to their opponents and to all people. Their faith is our faith; their God is our God. But their words are not our words, and our world is totally different from theirs. Their opponents were the pope as the head of the "false church"; the Anabaptists, because they were "not content with only one baptism" and they didn’t respect authority; and the Arminians, to whom the Synod of Dort addressed 59 articles and 34 statements of rejection.

Today our biggest opponent is secularism, which was unknown to our ancestors. We love Roman Catholics and Baptists, although we have a few things to discuss with them. We are harassed by Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, but Islam is an even bigger threat. And we need some clarity with respect to Judaism. Yet we have no confessional word for all of these and no guidance for our members.

We cannot take these documents to our neighbor and use them as our basis for unity in the Lord. And the confessions are insufficient to tell us what our task is in the present world. That’s why boards within the church write mission statements. They share this practice with the bank, the hardware store, and local congregations. But where is the communal, confessional mission statement that embraces the church of the living God?

The danger is very real that our three Reformed confessions are merely tools for elders, deacons, and preachers, for professors and evangelists, to hold each other in check. These people pledge to teach and to defend them. But fewer and fewer church officials know the confessions. And, as I said, that’s not their fault. It’s the fault of teachers and theologians, all of us who have become custodians of documents rather than confessors of a living faith.

A Contemporary, Ecumenical Creed
It’s my conviction that all who care for the Reformed confessions should restate the Reformed faith today or watch it evaporate in the church. That includes our fellow Calvinists, the Presbyterians. The Westminster Confession is even harder to teach than the Belgic Confession, and the Heidelberg Catechism may be closer to God’s Word and human hearts today than the Westminster Catechism.

In the present crisis of confessional churches, all of us look for viable ways to be church in the 21st century. Many of us have been successful in imitating the style of churches that know "no creed but Jesus" and no other Christian mark than a "personal Savior and Lord."

Indeed, we have much in common with all who love Jesus and celebrate him with a thousand tongues. But we still want to be a church that is part of a worldwide confessional community, don’t we?

We need a confession that says in intelligible, Reformed language what the one holy and catholic (universal) church believes and does in the present world. This confession would be our contemporary response to God’s abiding Word.

A new formulation of the Reformed faith might also be the answer to our ecumenical efforts that are now on a dead-end street. Today we have ecumenical contact with those churches that share an old tradition with us, while they and we grade each other’ s ethics and polity to determine the level of intimacy in our relationship. But if the worldwide Reformed community could find its unity in a creed that clearly states what we must proclaim and do in the present world, we might get somewhere.

God has not abandoned the church of the Reformation. May he give us the vision and power to confess the Reformed faith in our words for our times.