What does it mean to be Reformed? For several reasons—reasons I will lay out in a subsequent post—it’s an odd question. But if you hang around in the ecclesiastical circles which I frequent, you will hear it asked. Often.

I recently received a promotional magazine from Calvin Seminary, a school I once attended.  featuring that question: What does it mean to be Reformed? (The magazine, once Calvin Forum is now called forum; what’s with the lower case?)  The seminary celebrates its 150^th anniversary in 2025-26. It plans to issue a collection of faculty essays to address the question. Ronald J. Feenstra, Professor of Systematic Theology at Calvin, promises that the essays will be “accessible, warm, and engaging” (forum, winter 2024, 29). forum offers a preview of how the seminary might handle the question.

As it happens a few days after I received forum I attended a classis meeting. (A classis is a regional church judicatory in the Reformed system.) The talk there was also about what it means to be Reformed. The meeting featured several examinations of potential preachers and pastors—all of them men. In these examinations, the candidates for various church offices and statuses were always asked somewhere in the interview about what it means to be Reformed. The answers were various—some forthright, some halting, some as if the person being examined had never thought much about it—but clearly the question was on everyone’s mind.

As Karin Maag explains in her introductory piece in forum, it’s an identity question—a question of belonging. It’s about family. Asking what it means to be Reformed is asking why one belongs to this particular ecclesiastical family rather than to another. It’s the how we roll question. What makes us who we are and why?

The question does not permit a single easy answer. The discussions in forum range across a variety of topics: Reformed is this. Or that. Or perhaps this other thing. Still, as Maag says, there are “commonalities” in the answers given by various faculty members. She lists: “the primacy of Scripture, the importance of the confessions, the vital role of covenant, the Trinity, the community, the willingness to learn from others and engage with complexity, the reality of sin, the even more powerful reality of Christ’s victory over sin and death, and the call to service.”

This list is not of a piece. Some of the items are claimed by everyone who claims to be Christian: scripture, for example, and Trinity, community, the reality of sin, the victory of Christ, and the call to service. Reformed identity in these cases seems less in the list itself and more in the way these items are construed in Reformed circles.

Some others have more the stamp of the Reformed movement: the confessions, of course, because Maag has in mind the Reformed confessions, and covenant, which is not confined to Reformed theology but plays an outsized role in it.

The remaining item on her list, “the willingness to learn from others and engage with complexity,” points to one of the dangers of such a list: the tendency to think more highly of one’s own family than perhaps one’s family deserves. Do Reformed people really show more of a “willingness to learn from others and engage with complexity?”

Sometimes, perhaps, and in some places, but recently in my experience the reverse has been true. Reformed thought in my denomination has hardened into a set of formulas: say this, and you are Reformed; say anything else, and you are not. Judging from the way the question of what it means to be Reformed is asked and answered in my recent experience, the tradition appears tired: canned answers rather than lively and helpful theological thinking.

Usually, the answers to the question amount to watered down Louis Berkhof. For more than a generation the go-to source for right theology in my denomination has been Louis Berkhof’s Systematic Theology (originally published in 1941), a compendium of Reformed orthodoxy. Berkhof presents theology as a series of wrong and right answers (in that order). The wrong answers are those of everyone else; the right answers are Reformed. 

It’s a theology with little sense of history. The right answers are biblically-based propositions, or so Berkhof claims. Berkhof takes no account of the way the Bible is immersed in the thought world of the time. If the Bible declares the world was created in seven twenty-four hour days, it was. There’s no sense of how saying that means something different in the twentieth century CE than it did in, say, the sixth century BCE. There’s no sense that anything has been discovered since the closing of the canon. There is no sense of progress in theology. It is what it has always been—except in those times when the church went off the rails.

Recently, there have been those trying to revive the Berkhof style of orthodoxy. It appeals to a certain sort of young person—particularly young men (on this see, recently, Meghan O’Gieblyn’s God, Human, Animal, Machine, 2021:196-202, 228-241 for her account of how the Berkhof style of orthodoxy dominated her time at Moody Bible Instititute, of all places). The appeal is partly that this theology is highly technical. It has the same attraction that drives devotees of highly symbolic universes like Lord of the Rings. I once heard a person devoted to this kind of Calvinism ask a pastoral candidate at a classis meeting how many “imputations” there were in Reformed theology. One more, it turns out, than the candidate could recall. You can get good at this sort of thing.

But it quickly becomes an intellectual game, devoid of real content. It comes to stand in the way of theological thinking. It’s a game designed to assert the superiority of those who know it over those who don’t. But what those who know know is the game, not the Bible, not God, not human life, not sin, not salvation, not how we should live. 

The unwritten rule at too many of our ecclesiastical meetings is that all theological thinking ended with Louis Berkhof and his Systematic Theology. Along with this goes the claim that what Berkhof taught is just what the Bible says. Neither are true. Which brings us back to the question: What does it mean to be Reformed?

In answering that question, I would like to dally on three things which, if my posts are not to get overly long, as they frequently are, will require three more blog posts. The first will be about the question itself. I mentioned above that what it means to be Reformed is an odd question. One of the ways it has been answered recently in my circles is to suggest that being Reformed is a theological accent. What are we asking when we ask what it means to be Reformed?

The second post following this one will take up the idea that there is a Reformed way to read scripture. In forum, several of the professors interviewed claim that there is a Reformed hermeneutic, a way that Reformed people read scripture different from the way others read scripture. Is there such a hermeneutic, and does it still work?

In the third and last in this series, I will look at the idea of covenant which is sometimes cited—in forum, for example—as a distinctively Reformed idea and at the heart of what it means to be Reformed. What’s covenant?

As I roll out these posts, for those of you who consider themselves Reformed (and perhaps those who don’t) I invite you form your own answers to the what does it mean to be Reformed question. And if you will, send me your answers. Perhaps we can begin a conversation and in doing so take a step or two beyond Berkhof.

Clay