Always Reforming—and Avoiding Two Extremes About That

Some modern theologians who lay a claim to being children of the Protestant Reformation misapplied the maxim semper reformanda. Robert Godfrey has pointed out that the language first appeared in a devotional book written by Jodocus van Lodenstein in 1674. In spite of the fact that it was probably not meant to be an endorsement of larger doctrine or practical programs, for many this has served as a call to endless innovation. Followers of Karl Barth have been chief offenders in this, and “Reformissional” church planters in the Emergent era from over a decade ago more crassly picked up the slogan.

In all of these ways and more, the maxim has been taken out of its context (whether English or Latin). What it actually said was this: ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda secundum verbi Dei—that is, “the church is Reformed and always being reformed according to the Word of God”). Very often there is theology in grammar, and so it is here. The church that is reformed was conceived as passive in this ideal; and I mean that literally. The church was conceived by the Word. As one theologian has said it, the church is a “creature of the word,” so that we should not be surprised that the same Word that gives birth to the church also nourishes and informs her development. There is to be change, so long as the norms of eternity remain the pattern. 

 Godfrey further asks the question, 

 “So what did van Lodenstein mean by his famous phrase reformed and always reforming? Probably something like this: since we now have a church reformed in the externals of doctrine, worship, and government, let us always be working to ensure that our hearts and lives are being reformed by the Word and Spirit of God. Whatever other meanings may be made of this phrase, this original meaning is well worth pondering and preserving.”1

 So does this mean that all future reformation is of a personal, or spiritual, kind of renovation? In other words, now that the reformation has left its mark on time and space, is it only left for us to apply that Word inwardly? This cannot be! Even in the Sermon on the Mount, our Lord was not doing away with the preservation of life external by his exposure of hatred in the heart, nor the flourishing of marriages by his exposure of lust in the heart. What then of continual reformation? Must the continual heart work not issue forth into a transformation of all of life?  

Semper Reformanda is Neither Innovation Nor Stagnation

Having addressed the natural misapplication of cultural accommodation under the guise of reformation, we should not fail to notice that the pendulum swings the other way as well, and in fact is purposefully held at a reactionary extreme. We can so dig in our heels against the spirit of the age that we become all fortress and no advance. When this happens, it becomes a toy fortress and all of its motions like a historic war re-enactment society.

Surely it is not the spirit of the Reformation to merely escape Roman shores, to sail in between the isles of the Anabaptists and Remonstrants, only to come out living in a memory at our rear guard. What lies beyond? What new pirates will we meet on the seas and who all can join our fleet? Is the ship in need of repair, or can it run even better than before? And where are we going anyway? 

These are among the questions that we cannot ask at this more conservative extreme. Here we avoid postmodern “reformation” only by turning ourselves into a museum relic. J. I. Packer once said about our proper (and improper) admiration for the Puritans that, 

“We can parrot their language and ape their manners, and imagine that thereby we place ourselves in the true Puritan tradition. But the Puritans would impress on us that that is precisely what we fail to do if we act so. They sought to apply the eternal truths of Scripture to the particular circumstances of their own day—moral, social, political, ecclesiastical, and so forth.”2

I think we can all see that in matters like wearing whigs and settling for only wooden pews. A more difficult self-assessment awaits to the degree that our historical knowledge lacks the sense of what was transient even in the past. Many have made this criticism of Reformed views of worship. For instance, someone will object, “Aren’t all these hymns sung to the tune of classical composers simply the form of late medieval to early modern European culture?” This is a risky example. My own sympathies are with exactly that form of music. Part of my view is informed by realities that I do not think can be simply reduced to that time and place. Nevertheless the challenge must be faced. We may have an ideal of what is old to us, but what was not as enduring back then. Even if it is not true of elements of worship, it is still true of other things, that our tunnel-vision’s first glance at history is mistaken for the permanent order of Christ.   

The upshot is that if the Word of God is the active agent in truly spiritual reformation, then neither the past nor the present can compete for that same role. We may be challenged by the present and rooted in the past to a great extent; but neither can be the “DNA” that informs the desired traits of the body in that next stage of development. 

Credal Imperatives and Masculine Resistance to Corporate Apostasy

All of this raises an objection about the advantage of the past over the present. Granting that the Word stands over both tradition and our own moment of reason, surely we would not be so nearsighted as to treat them as equals, right? That is true. But we must be just as realistic about the pride of our place in that tradition. It is not as though the only form of pride is that of the individual madman spinning his own novelties. It has been said that, “Tradition is the living faith of the dead, and traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.” My purpose is not to make the Confession and the reformer out to be equals. It is only to unleash the armor and arsenals of history from their museum casing, in which they should never have been shackled. And besides, I think we can all agree with the common sense insight that not all traditions are equal. Cannibals have their own traditions.

Now one form of traditionalist pride is that collective bargain with silence in the face of evil. This bargain with the devil is as clear as day. We all save face in exchange for a “place at the table.” Who are we to say that we alone are right about every jot and tittle, right? In fact, such sentiment bills itself as the opposite of pride. Such is the only acceptable definition of humility. As the evil advances (and it always does—Why do you think it’s here, for a brief tour of the place?), “save face” morphs into save life and limb, or at least paycheck. In the downgrade, the good old boys can keep pointing to the Confession they are all standing on. All affirm it. What’s the problem?

It is simply this. While it takes a council of the venerable dead for any wisdom worth bringing to life, on the other hand, it takes new blood to defend old realms. Such new blood has to be pumping and moving and willing to risk all for the sake of Christ’s kingdom advancing in the real world. It must, as the hymn says, Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also. The body they may kill. God’s truth abideth still.

But does it abide where compromise is papered over? Where the clear witness of even those confessional standards (its sections on the moral law) positively outlaw every square inch of what we call Progressivism, and yet our leaders have created a flock too uninformed in all things ethical to understand why? None of this is in any sense Christianity. And it takes only a modicum of reason and backbone to say so. True reformers would say more than this.

Just take a lesson from Machen—since we are all keen on consulting the saints of old. What were the founding of Westminster Seminary and the OPC but examples of righteous separation from a ship hell-bent on going under? Princeton and its Presbyterians were the grey beards in the 1920s. Machen was on his own as “Professor of Bigotry,” as he was affectionately labeled. There is that statement that we are told is falsely attributed to Luther, and yet truer words were hardly ever spoken. But they are convicting words to those who would only play Reformation, which may explain the fixation on pointing out the false attribution whenever they are quoted. So it was “pseudo-Luther” who said,

“If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at the moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved. And to be steady on all the battle fields besides is merely flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.”

The young men that are leaving the “New Calvinist” churches they grew up in are not leaving because they were too Reformed, but because its leaders were exposed as “reforming” only by accommodating to culture or else posturing for the dead. Just as there is a clear difference between tradition and traditionalism, so there is one to be observed between prudence and cowardice.

In our own day, both Southern Baptists and Presbyterians hope to wrestle command of a massive ship away from those who have always had a dark inertia on their side. There is a kind of Reformed traditionalism that would have had Machen wait indefinitely for presbytery to give it another whirl next year, and the next, and the next, ad infinitum, until Chesterton’s “democracy of the dead” becomes the death of the church. Of course such a comatose appeal to the past would be a cheat; for the heroes we all say we admire in history were never waiting around for presbytery to give them permission to be men. They were too busy always reforming.

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1. Robert Godfrey, What Does Semper Reformanda Mean?

2. J. I. Packer, A Quest for Godliness (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1990), 233.