When I began this post, the third in a series on what it means to be Reformed, I had in mind writing about a way of interpreting the scriptures sometimes called “the Reformed hermeneutic.” It is frequently said that Reformed people read the Bible differently from other Christians groups. I wanted to explore whether that’s true, and if true, how it’s true. I will do that, but in the next post. And I am anxious to get to it: how we read the Bible is at the heart of my concern for the contemporary church.
But allow me for this essay to return to the previous post in which I proposed that Reformed theology could be taken as a sort of theological dialect (as opposed to an “accent,” as is sometimes claimed). Reformed theology sounds different—at least, it should sound different—than the standard evangelical dialect one finds spoken in many, perhaps most, American churches. I’ll not return to what I said in that post—you can read ithere—but I would like to cite a specific way that Reformed theology tends to sound different. Where evangelicals typically speak of salvation, “getting saved,” Reformed theology tends to speak of glorifying God. These two ways of speaking lead in quite different directions.
Evangelical Grammar
Start with the grammar of evangelicalism. American churches broadly speak Evangelical. And not just churches but people in the churches, Christians of all sorts. Regardless of the name on the church sign, the theology spoken inside the building is more likely than not to have been shaped by evangelical concerns. And the principal evangelical concern is salvation. Escape. Escape from the wrath of God. Escape from punishment. Escape from hell.
For evangelical theology, the key question is what happens when you die. Will you in the next life experience eternal bliss or eternal agony? To be saved is to be assured of the first rather than the second. One gains such assurance by affirming, well, evangelical theology itself. In this way the evangelical grammar is self-reinforcing.
On this, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that one of the reasons this theology is so prevalent is that it feeds churches. If you believe making an evangelical confession is the difference between going to heaven or going to hell, then the duty of all Christians and all churches should be to get people to make evangelical confessions. This is not quite the same thing as getting them to go to church, but often it comes to the same thing. The job of the church is to get people to go to church.
There is something peculiar about all this. Not only that this seems a rather narrow view of salvation, but that the New Testament almost never talks in this way. The New Testament doesn’t seem to speak Evangelical. It doesn’t formulate its message in terms of four spiritual laws. It rarely mentions hell. In the letters of Paul, for example, at the very heart of the New Testament, hell doesn’t arise at all. If staying out of hell and getting into heaven is the whole point of the gospel, shouldn’t Paul and the rest of the New Testament spend a little more time on such matters?
And this way of construing the faith has structural consequences. The evangelical grammar leads mostly out—out of this life and into the next. Righteousness is no longer, as it clearly was in the Old Testament and in the preaching of Jesus, a way of life, a way of doing right by God and by people (and, we might add, right by the earth and all that inhabits it). Instead, righteousness in much evangelical theology is a legal concept distinguishing between people who are slated to receive eternal punishment and those who are slated to receive eternal life.
As I said, this has consequences. If the focus of your theology is the next life, it’s hard to give much importance to matters of this life: to good government, for example, or to human expression in the arts, or to the teachings of Jesus about how to live a righteous life. Instead of a life well-lived before God and our fellow humans, evangelical theology prefers dramatic last-minute rescues. What’s an ordinary Christian life lived in worship and obedience to Christ compared to the story of a rogue rescued at the last minute from a life of evil?
I should add a caution here. I’m talking about the way this theological grammar works, not about individual Christians or churches. Many people who speak Evangelical as their primary theological language live as exemplary disciples of Jesus. They “get” the faith in spite of their theology. I’m arguing about what the theology does, not what people do. The evangelical “getting saved” way of talking tends to distort the faith and mislead those who use it. But people are often better than their theologies. Or worse than their theologies. Good theology does not automatically make good people; bad theology does not automatically make bad disciples.
Getting Our Grammar Right
That said, it remains important to get the grammar right, and it’s here that the Reformed way of speaking can be helpful in a world that speaks Evangelical. The question once again is what’s at the center of this way of speaking. If for the evangelical way of speaking, it’s “getting saved”—with some very specific ideas about what it means to “get saved”—for the Reformed way of speaking, it’s glorifying God.
I tumbled to this anew after reading the latest issue offorum, Calvin Theological Seminary’s promotional magazine. The issue, as I noted in previous posts, is given over the question I’m asking here: what does it mean to be Reformed? In the manner of such promotional magazines, the discussion is breezy. It’s designed to be a teaser for a book slated to come out next year with faculty essays on what it means to be Reformed, the seminary’s way of saying to its constituency: yes, we are thinking hard about these things.
But included in the issue is an excerpt from a longer interview with the esteemed Christian philosopher Young Ahn Kang. Something Kang said caught my attention. Asked about what it means to be Reformed, Young cited an obscure 19thcentury German theologian Mathias Schneckenburger. Schneckenburger contrasts theologies that center the question, “How can I be saved? with the Reformed theologies that center the question, “How can I glorify God? (focus, Winter 2024, 21). This constitutes an entirely different faith grammar. Theologies that focus on glorifying God sound different from theologies that focus on getting saved.
And this can be quite confusing to people who wander into Reformed churches that actually speak Reformed. More than once I have been asked why I didn’t do more to preach people into salvation. I recall one man with exasperation in his voice telling me that I was failing in my duty. I was neglecting the most important thing that a preacher can do: rescue people from hell.
In the Reformed theological grammar rescuing people is not what we do; it’s what God does. Because the doctrine of election has gotten so convoluted and so mixed up with early modern metaphysics, we often fail to grasp the radical thought that lies behind the doctrine: getting saved is God’s business, not mine. Not even for myself. My business is to glorify and enjoy God. God’s business is saving the human race. The faithfulness is entirely on God’s side. Which means I don’t have to worry about it, not only because it’s God’s business but because God is love. And wise Reformed theologians have always suspected that if love chooses, then love chooses not just me but everyone.
Evangelical grammar is inherently Arminian. It lays the burden on me. I have to “get saved.” This is true even when the people who speak this language claim to be Calvinists, as they sometimes do. They make salvation the issue, and thus they make salvation depend not just on the faithfulness of God in Christ but on me. Or you.
But what if the question is not am I saved but how can I glorify God? This is not a new thought. The Westminster Shorter Catechism begins here: Q: “What if the chief end of man? A: “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” And what does it mean to “glorify” and “enjoy?” Try Irenaeus, writing in the 2ndcentury, “The glory of God is a human fully alive.”
Compared to the grammar of getting saved, there is breadth to this view of human life and depth to it. We could paraphrase Westminster by asking, “What does it mean to be human?” The answer is to live fully what we are created to be: all the glory and enjoyment of human life. Irenaeus’s “being fully alive.” It’s an embrace of human culture, of human possibility, amid the sadness of our failure to be what we are created to be.
It’s this perspective that I first learned at Calvin College, that one sees in Calvin, that one finds articulated by Abraham Kuyper, that stirs one still. And it’s this grammar that seems to have gotten lost. The church doesn’t sound this way anymore, not even Reformed churches. And that’s sad. So count this as a plea for my denomination and churches like it to begin sounding once again like Reformed churches.
For that, we need a robust and expansive view of scripture. But that’s for the next post.
Until then,
Clay
