Lecture 1A: Preface

Four Motivations

1. Loyalty

Let me begin by telling you why we study the history of the RCA, and propose to you what I consider to be the proper motivations for doing so. Let me mention four motivations:
Loyalty to the Lord Jesus, Understanding, Wisdom, and Love. First, Loyalty to the Lord Jesus. We study the history of the church because of our loyalty to the Lord whose church it is. To get at this, we’ll look at the Apostles Creed, our summary of the gospel.

If you think of the Apostles Creed as a story, it is a single story in three parts, the story of what the One God does in terms of the Three Persons. The three parts are what the Father does, and then what happened to the Son and what the Son does, and then what the Spirit does. The Apostles Creed is not a list of ideas but a short report of actions, the actions of God.

As you know from Reformed theology, there is an interaction of the Son and the Spirit in our lives today. What happened to the Son and what the Son does are both applied to us by the Spirit. That’s what the Spirit does, the Spirit applies what happened to the Son and what the Son is right now doing. After all, they are both Persons of the One God.

Right now the Son is reigning at the right hand of the Father. We call this, of course, the Kingdom of Christ, which is the temporal form of the Reign of God.. (As you know, until the Second Coming, the Father has put all things in the power of the Son.) The great expression of this in the New Testament is Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, which is the epistle of the Ascension, and the implications of the Ascension, and how the Ascended Messiah is now King of the World, and how he works in the world through the church.

To put it another way, according to the Creed, what the Lord Jesus is doing right now is reigning as Christ at the right hand of the Father. And what the Holy Spirit is doing right now is, first, applying the benefits of Our Lord’s incarnation, suffering, death, and resurrection, and second, acting as Our Lord’s agent in governing the world.

Furthermore, there is a specific way in which the Holy Spirit does both of these things, and the last part of the Creed is a short report of the actions of the Holy Spirit in the world today.

So if we ask, What is the Holy Spirit doing in the world today? the Creed tells us that:
The Holy Spirit is doing the Holy Catholic Church.
The Holy Spirit is doing the communion of saints.
The Holy Spirit is doing the forgiveness of sins.
The Holy Spirit is doing the resurrection of the body.
The Holy Spirit is doing the life everlasting.

We might also say it this way, that the Lord Jesus is doing all these things through the power of the Holy Spirit. And we might well add, the Lord Jesus is doing these things through the Spirit for the Father and to the Father, so that God might be all in all.

Contemporary Christians in North America, especially, suffer from too much individualism. We think of the work of the Holy Spirit in narrow personal terms. But the first work of the Spirit is the Holy Catholic Church.

What does all this have to do with the motivation for studying the history of the Reformed Church in America? Stay with me. Let’s take one step closer to our own history, to the Heidelberg Catechism, and what it says about the Holy Catholic Church, in Question 54:

Q: What do you believe concerning the Holy Catholic Church?

A: I believe that the Son of God, by his Spirit and Word, out of the entire human race, from the beginning of the world unto its end, gathers, protects, and preserves for himself a community for chosen eternal life, and united in true faith. And of this community I am and always will be a living member.

Do you believe this? You need to believe it, not just because it’s the best definition of the church I know. You need to believe it because soon you will be teaching it, as you will promise to do in your various Declarations before classis and at your ordination and installation. You need to believe if it you want to be happy in the RCA, for this is the foundation of the RCA’s doctrine of the church, and the "source code" of its church order and its liturgy, not to mention its approach to both missions and ecumenism.

In this wonderful answer, 440 years old but still so fresh and contemporary, the church is defined as a community (not a hierarchy or even as an organization). The church is defined as a work of the Lord Jesus (not as our work), which he does by means of his Word and Spirit. The church is defined as existing from Genesis (not just Pentecost).

The church is the community of life and faith which the Lord Jesus gathers, protects, and preserves by means of his Word and Spirit. The whole story of the Bible is the history of the Lord Jesus gathering, protecting, and preserving this community.

And in this answer, you are defined as a living member of this community. You are part of the larger story. You are one of those persons whom the Lord Jesus has gathered in, and is protecting, and will preserve. You are part of a community which extends across the whole human race, and which crosses the centuries from Genesis till when Our Lord returns.

What is more, you are seeking ordination in the Reformed Church, which means that you believe that God has called you to leadership in this community. Not just any leadership, but the leadership that comes out of serving the Word. Your ministry of the Word is one of the important means by which the Lord Jesus gathers, protects, and preserves this community.

The reason that you study church history is so that you can trace the gathering, protecting, and preserving work of the Lord Jesus across the centuries, up to and including yourself. You study the Holy Catholic Church out of loyalty to its Lord, the Lord who has chosen it (for life) and united it (in faith). As a servant of the Lord Jesus you honor the choices of your Lord, and you seek to be united to his community across the centuries. Not only in your heart, your will, and your emotions, but also in your mind. God has given you the capacity for knowledge in support of your calling, and therefore you seek this knowledge as a way of honoring your Lord.

2. Understanding, Wisdom, and Love

Now lets look at the other motivations, which are understanding, wisdom, and love. First, we study our denomination’s history it for understanding. Where did we come from? What happened to us to bring us to what we are today? Why are we the way we are, and why have we become the way we are? We study history to understand ourselves, but we also study it to understand the past itself, in its own terms, if only to honor the grace of God within the lives and projects of those who have served God before us.

Second, we study it for wisdom. We study history to get perspective on ourselves and our own situation. We do not want to suffer from pride, from what C. S. Lewis called "chronological snobbery." When we look at what our forebears did in the past, we learn from their failures no less than their successes. And we resist the temptation to judge them by our own standards, but rather examine in the light of what they did and what they stood for.

Third, we study it for love. (It is my deep conviction that we underplay love as a general motivation for ministry). We study our history because we love learning. As Ministers of the Word, we are responsible to be lovers of learning. We study our history out of love for our forebears in the church. No matter whether we agree or disagree with our forebears, we owe them love.

If I love my spouse, I want to know whatever I can about her, the way she does things, her habits and peculiarities, her convictions and opinions. And I want to know whatever I can about her parents, and her grandparents, and the landscapes of the towns in which they lived.
RCA ministers need to love the RCA the way it is right now. That’s not necessarily a matter of agreement. But if you don’t love the RCA the way it is right now, your disagreements will be of the flesh.

Too often Christians love people and institutions only in terms of what we want them to become. We tend to love non-believers because we intend to make them believers. We love them not at they are but as we want them to be. Especially under the burdens of the latest ideas of "leadership," we tend to love our visions for our congregations more than we love our congregations as they are. We tend to love the kind of members our ministries will attract more than the members as they are right now. Your first responsibility is to love the first group of members you will serve, right from the start of your first call. Because Christ does.

You need to love the RCA and its history, warts and all, for better or worse. You need to love the way it did things, in sickness and in health. You need to love the way it tried to obey the Lord Jesus, for richer or poorer. Its buildings, its traditions, the way it worshiped, its attempts at foreign missions and new church development. Even if you feel that the Word of God requires further reformation of all these things, you need to love them first before you can serve them.

God has commanded us to honor our fathers and mothers. This honor is an important form of love. The analogy for pastors is to honor our predecessors in the church. We may well want to do things differently then they did, but we still must honor them. We want to spend some time with them, and enjoy our fellowship with them. This is not optional but necessary, because, as our Lord said, this commandment has a promise, that if we honor them, we will live long in the land which the Lord has given us.

Let me sum up so far. In these four motivations, we recognize the work of the Holy Spirit in the church. We say in the Apostles Creed that we believe in the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Catholic Church. We mean by this that the Church is the central means of the Spirit in bringing the power of Gospel to the world (Ephesians 3:10). We honor the work of the Spirit in the church by studying its history. We honor the faithfulness of God to the Reformed Church in America by studying its history. We honor the gathering, protecting, and preserving work of the Lord Jesus by studying in the history of the community of Jesus in which we are living members.

Method

Let me now say a few words about my general approach. What I want to emphasize in this course is the peculiar set of problems that have defined us throughout our history.

Let me elaborate. One way of understanding any particular culture is as a set of solutions to the particular problems that it faces. For example, the culture of the Inuit is a set of solutions to the problems of living in the Arctic. The culture of the Bedouin is a set of solutions to the problems of living in the Sahara. In both cases, their solutions, while effective, do not make their problems go away.

Many of the problems we face in the world stay with us, they do not go away, no matter how effective we are at solving them. The problems are just part of the environment, or they’re built in to life, and our solutions are the strategies we’ve developed for managing those problems, and even to thrive in those problems.

The Reformed Church in America may be understood as a particular culture within the larger Holy Catholic Church. I think it’s true that the culture of the RCA is less distinctive and all-inclusive than it used to be. The culture of the RCA used to include not only its churches but also its homes and the dinner tables of its families.

Indeed, I believe that in the past, the most effective enculturation of RCA members was not done by the church but by fathers and mothers in the way they raised the kids, how they read the Bible at home, how they prayed at meals, how they behaved on Sundays, how they spent their money, what they did and didn’t do for entertainment, where they went to college, etc.

That is far less so today, for a whole host of reasons. Most RCA homes are indistinguishable from non-RCA homes. The culture of the RCA is now limited to the institutional church itself. As often as not, it’s limited to the government of the church. In so many congregations, the RCA Liturgy is rarely used, and their worship is pretty much the same as any other evangelical or mainline church. The same is true for the doctrinal life of the congregations. Few laypersons are familiar with the Heidelberg Catechism, though in earlier generations many laypeople knew it well and loved it.

This is not just a condition of the RCA. It’s true for most historic denominations. The change is even more drastic in the Christian Reformed Church. It’s the general condition of pragmatic, market-oriented North America. The pace of cultural change and innovation keeps accelerating, and so does the mixing of our sub-cultures. This is not all bad. But it has its costs, in people feeling rootless and disconnected, and in leaders often being out of control, because they are able to escape the claims historical accountability.

For all of this, at some level, the RCA, as a denominational entity, still has a particular culture of its own. This culture is most apparent in the way that classes and synods operate, and less obviously, but more importantly, in the way that consistories operate. This particular culture has been developed, in great part, as a long series of solutions for managing certain problems.

As you will see, these problems include the following:
What kind of Calvinists should we be: how strict, how loose, how Lutheran, how Puritan?
How American should we let ourselves be?
What kind of education should we demand of our pastors?
What should be our relationship to other denominations?
Does it honor God to keep our denominational independence?
How shall we fit within a generally Arminian and Pelagian environment?
How do we deal with our relative smallness among the denominations?
What are the proper motives for Foreign Missions?
What are effective strategies for Domestic Missions and Church Extension?

These problems are with us today. These problems have always been with us. The sum total of the ways that we have tried to solve and manage these problems is our denominational culture, and our relative integrity in this process is what has developed our denominational character.

To illustrate, let me take one besetting problem in some detail. The RCA has a besetting problem that the Presbyterians never had, and this has had a profound affect on our development. That is the besetting problem of language change—of switching from Dutch to English. All the original RCA congregations had to go through this change, which was always a very costly one, while almost no Presbyterian congregations had to go through this change, since almost all the Presbyterians immigrants were already speaking English.

This has had profound secondary effects. In the RCA, every second generation had to make a choice between their parents and their neighbors, between their roots and America (or Canada). This also meant that to survive in North America, they had to separate themselves from much of the richness of their tradition. While the Presbyterians could keep on singing their Psalms just as they did done in Scotland, we in the RCA had to give up our Psalms, especially since they were so hard to translate. (In 450 years there has never been a good English translation of the Genevan Psalter.)

Thus, the RCA has lost its own native musical tradition. While all around the globe the Reformed Church is known best for Psalm-singing, in the RCA most members haven’t ever heard of it. And we have spent the last two hundred years borrowing music from other denominations and traditions, and we don’t agree on what we like. Thus, the culture of the RCA has been conditioned by a lack of unity and some frustration over music.

Another effect has been that our preachers and theologians are cut off from our deepest native sources in doctrine and theology, because those sources are written in Dutch and German. Most of our seminary professors have been trained by Presbyterians. (Western Seminary in Holland, Michigan is a case in point.) One can hardly blame them. But it’s affected the RCA.

Another example, as we will see more fully in later sessions, is the problem of an educated ministry. How educated? And by whom? As teachers of scripture or as leaders of organizations? As pastors of the flock or as prophets to the nation? The RCA has been debating this for some three hundred years, and this debate has been very formative of the RCA.

What we will emphasize in this course is not research. We will expect a decent knowledge of important facts and movements and personalities, but we will emphasize understanding the continuing issues that have defined us and distinguished us, for better or for worse.

Your First Two Books

Your first assignment is two books. Let me offer a few words about Howard Hageman’s Lily Among the Thorns, which I do hope you enjoy. This little book was written more than fifty years ago, and it’s worth reading as something of a classic for the RCA. It is beautifully written, and it was meant as a popular book. Excellent scholarship lies beneath it, and its historical facts are solid and dependable. It’s the best short introduction to the history and character of the RCA.

A word about its author, not least because the author is an outsized figure in our recent history. Dr. Hageman was a convert to the RCA, and I knew him well. Hageman grew up Methodist, in New England. He was a brilliant young man, who went to Harvard, where he was second in his graduating class, and at his commencement he gave the Salutatorian address, in Latin!

He sang in the Harvard Glee Club, and while singing Bach’s St. Matthew Passion he had something of a conversion experience. (Talk about it the power of the Word!) So he started going to church and he started reading Karl Barth.

He knew his Latin and Greek, and even before he graduated he began doing graduate-level work. He began assisting the great scholar Werner Jaeger in new editions of the Church Fathers, and he continued this as a Harvard Fellow after he graduated. But Professor Jaeger told him that before he could go any further, he needed to learn some theology.

Hageman had some ancestors who were Reformed, so he chose to go to New Brunswick Seminary to study with Dr. Beardslee. While there he kept doing his Harvard work on the side. At this point, he was not a member of any RCA church!

During seminary Hageman did the ordinary field work in local RCA congregations. And in doing this, he began to feel the call to serve the Lord Jesus as a minister of the gospel. At his graduation from seminary, he declined the offers to do graduate study at Harvard and also at Princeton, and he accepted the call of the North Reformed Church of Newark, an urban church, downtown, in a city in decline.

Hageman served that congregation for three decades, the decades of riots and despair, and was active in the life of the city. He also worked hard for the RCA. He was president of General Synod. He wrote Sunday School curriculum. He wrote a weekly column for the Church Herald. He was the anchor of the whole long project to revise the RCA Liturgy. He made Bible studies for the US Army, and he preached to the troops in Europe. He was a famous preacher, and he preached at the special services of every congregation that invited him, it didn’t matter how small or great. All this while he continued to do first-class scholarship, and gave the Stone Lectures at Princeton, which resulted in the book which quickly became the classic study of Reformed worship, Pulpit and Table.

The little book you are reading for this course was written by a true minister of the Word, that is, a Pastor and Teacher. It is written with a teacher’s knowledge and a pastor’s heart.

The other book you are using is very different. By Grace Alone is more like a family picture album. Its history is less objective, and not always balanced. It has some small mistakes in it. It suggests the preferences and predilections of its compilers. It’s more about the surfaces and less about the depths.

Like a family album, it looks at the past in our terms instead of the past’s own terms, and it sometimes reports what we want to see in our ancestors instead of how they saw themselves. For example, to call John Calvin a "Feminist" is the kind of thing you’d say at a family reunion, and not in public, where you’d have a hard time defending it!

But for all of that, the book is wonderful and indispensable. There is not better source for seeing our own story. You can share this book with your congregations, when your people come to you, as they will, with the desire to know our roots. Where did we come from? Who are we?