![]() ![]() The external word of the Scriptures has not changed or been added to since Patmos. ![]() Here on Reformation Day, as we remember the impulse of “always being reformed,” we clarify anew what we do not seek to reform: the substance of true doctrine.įor two millennia, Christ’s final word that is Scripture has been complete, objective, and fixed. Yet even in context, and with such disclaimers, the maxim unnerves some Reformed bents and inclinations. ![]() Without fresh effort and energies, and drinking ourselves from the headwaters of Scripture, the church’s life and doctrine will soon decline and erode. Rather, it’s a reminder of our personal and ecclesial entropy, our gradual decline into the disorder of sin, our tendency to wander from Scripture’s doctrines and ethics. Semper reformanda, then, as a corollary of sola Scriptura, is not a call to revise for the sake of revising, or to assimilate with contemporary patterns of unbelief. As DeYoung, Godfrey, and others rightly stress, it’s not that the church is “being reformed” by the winds of the times but “according to Scripture,” by the ancient rule of God’s written word. Kevin DeYoung emphasizes the need to consider the context: “It is important to see the entirety of van Lodenstein’s phrase: ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda secundum verbi Dei (‘the church is Reformed and always being reformed according to the Word of God’).” Observe here the twin assertions - the church is both (1) “Reformed” as well as (2) “being reformed” - with two passive verbs, ending with the standard of that action: the word of God. His concerns were pietistic and devotional, and as Robert Godfrey writes, these “concerns were very similar to those of the English Puritans.” He juxtaposed “Reformed” and “reforming” not to plead for formal doctrinal improvements but for the reforming of the human hearts of professedly Reformed readers. The oldest record of something like the phrase is in a 1674 devotional book by Dutch Reformed pastor Jodocus van Lodenstein (1620–1677). Others in the Reformed camp think differently - and these varying instincts have often clashed over what might be the most controversial of Reformed theology’s handful of Latin maxims: semper reformanda, “always reforming.” Origin and Context The project was complete the last four centuries have brought plenty risk of erosion but no real exercises in improvement. With the advent of Westminster, they say, the church’s doctrine, worship, and government were, at last, reformed. Some adherents to Westminster today will tell you that the task of reformation was great but finite - and by 1648 it was essentially done. It is remarkable to rehearse the enduring Reformed formulations that emerged in that ninety-year period, beginning a generation after the Reformation (from the 1560s to 1640s): It’s just a little more than 1% of the Bible’s length, and it is, by and large, a very good synthesis of Scripture’s teaching. What wonderful, helpful, instructive summaries faithful creeds and confessions can be! The full text of Westminster can be read, at a reasonable pace, in about an hour. The usefulness of such creeds is bound up with their brevity - whether it’s the longer 12,000 words of Westminster or the tight 200 of Nicea. ![]() Hopefully, you would answer “no,” but in responding to a question put that way, you might intuit both the profit and peril of our creeds and confessions. Might your time be better spent in seventy readings of Westminster than one long journey through the whole terrain of Scripture with its genealogies, cultic regulations, esoteric aphorisms, and minor prophets? What good might it do you for a lifetime if you worked diligently through those learned 12,000 words some five or six dozen times?Ĭast in such terms, normal Bible reading can begin to seem inefficient. Almost four centuries ago, 120 of the best English-speaking pastors and theologians in the world labored for three years to hammer out the key theological and ethical teachings of Scripture. In the time it takes to read the Bible cover to cover, you could read the Westminster Confession almost seventy times. ![]()
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