To Be Orthodox and Modern
Painting a CRC Future: Part 11
The current and ongoing neglect of our Christian Reformed tradition has led our denomination down a path of increasing impotence.
The dissolution of the “old ways” described in the previous articles is saddening, not because we long for some nostalgic “better” days of yore, but because those old ways were 1. Biblically faithful and 2. practical and effective.
The old ways worked.
These weren’t mere secular attempts to use developments in the science of human psychology, but these were the products of both Biblical wisdom and generational wisdom. The “survival of the fittest” in regards to healthy church membership.
It’s ironic yet shouldn’t be surprising that the “church growth movement” heralded by the baby boomer generation has produced cheap, disposable churches and unsustainable growth.
Turns out that, when it comes to religion, human beings want substance and expectations. They don’t want lower expectations, they want something that is worth giving up their time, money, energy for! Humans want their lives to matter and to give themselves fully to something worthy (or better: so much more worthy!) of their life’s value.
And this is as true today as it was in 1984 or 1884.
In fact today, the juxtaposition between the wheat of Time-Transcendent Christianity and the chaff of seeker-sensitive churches, or online churches, or God-is-love churches is stark!
We have before us, as a denomination, two paths.
We can continue to die the death of the weak and superficial Mainline Protestant Church in Babylon or…
We can hold our swords in one hand and our trowels in the other and repair the walls of Christian Reformed orthodoxy and publicly recommit our people to the Covenant.
The CRC has now twice made “Vision”, (2020 & 2025) plans about leading the denomination forward. But I’m confident that you won’t be able to remember what they say.
If there is a new vision for the CRC’s future, may it be a new marriage of the Old with the New.
The Pre-CRC Dutch Reformed secessionist preacher and teacher Herman Bavinck championed the continual uplifting of being both “orthodox” and “modern”. Orthodox in that we have no justification for ever drifting from the Biblical truths that faithful ministers and theologians have put forth in our creeds and confessions. We believe these confessions because they are Biblical.
Yet we must always be applying these ancient truths to our current realities. And so, by “modern”, we do not refer to the literary and philosophical definition of “modern” or “post-modern” or anything like that. We simply mean that we must put in the hard work of standing firm on our Biblical beliefs even as we meet the demands of our present age head on.
If we clung to our orthodox teachings without ever expanding upon them or applying them to our current lives, we would be orthodox but not modern.
If we allowed our current cultural context to nullify and reshape our confessional convictions then we would be modern but not orthodox.
One cannot be “Reformed” and reject Reformed orthodoxy. To do so would be, by definition, something else. Something which would need its own name and its own confession.
In my initial outline for this series, I had thought about including some of my own suggestions for other major practices and visions that the CRC should embrace, but I decided to keep this series focused on Bouma’s book and dive into possible additions in future series.
For the next series, I would like to suggest another possible tool from the past that is devastatingly underutilized today:
Family Worship
This wasn’t listed in the structural factors singled out by Dr. Bouma, but it too is wisdom from the past that glorifies God and builds up his church from the ground up.