A few weeks ago (it’s been a busy season for me), I started a short series of posts posing the question: what does it mean to be Reformed? This question is much mooted these days. I noted, for example, that the Calvin Theological Seminary promotional magazine, forum (yes, that’s how they write it), gave over its Winter 2024 issue to that question, announcing that for its 150^th anniversary next year, the seminary would produce a volume of collected essays on what it means to be Reformed. But the question is not only being asked in academic settings. The denomination of which I am a part, along with Calvin Seminary, is engaged in a debate, an often bruising and divisive debate, about what it means to be Reformed.

Sometimes the debate turns nasty. In selecting its delegates for the 2022 synod, several candidates in a classis I recently attended said that they wanted to go to synod to “finish the job.” “Finishing the job” is not subtle code for coming down hard on the likes of Neland Avenue Church in Grand Rapids, a congregation that ordained a deacon in a same-sex marriage, and Classis Grand Rapids East, the judicatory that includes and has supported Neland Avenue. Those proposing to finish the job want ecclesiastical blood. Lately, a few of these folks seem to want my ecclesiastical blood.

All of this has to do with what it means to be Reformed. Think for a moment about the name of the movement of which I and perhaps you are a part: Reformed. Is being Reformed static? Or is there still some verbal force left in the word. Does “Reformed” still mean, as Reformed people once claimed, semper reformanda est, “to be always reforming”? Or does it mean, as some seem to suggest, that theological truth has been once and for all settled and that we—those of us lucky enough to be Reformed—are those who possess it. 

The questions could go on, but this is enough of an introduction. In this post and at least two more, I will attempt to give some provisional answers to these sorts of questions, attempting to frame and partially answer the question: what does it mean to be Reformed? I begin with the idea of what has been called “the Reformed accent.”

The Reformed Accent

So, what does it mean to be Reformed? Go to www.crcna.org, the denominational website of the Christian Reformed Church, and under a tab for “Our Faith,” you will find along with Reformed confessions, some ecumenical creeds, synodically-approved positions statements, and a few other things, something called “The Reformed Accent.” 

Open the tab, and you will find a discussion about what it means to be Reformed. Noting that different Christian communions construe the faith in different ways, the writers propose an analogy: “Imagine a room full of English speakers from different corners of the world— Georgia, Australia, Britain, South Africa, Scotland, and Toronto. Each speaks the same language, but their accents make them sound very different! Sometimes we [the CRC] refer to our particular [theological] emphases as speaking with a Reformed accent.” 

This is an altogether curious way to explain doctrinal difference, especially for the Christian Reformed Church. Accents, by definition, are not essential. A skilled actor can recite the same speech in a variety of accents without changing the words at all. Perhaps, the writers in this case are only being polite, understating the differences between various strands of Christianity so as not to put anyone off. Accents, after all, can be charming. Don’t be put off by our accent (a Dutch accent, perhaps), they seem to be saying; we are all speaking the same language. But charming though accents may be, the notion that being Reformed is just a matter of having a different accent than, say, someone from a Pentecostal background or someone from the Orthodox tradition seems altogether too breezy an explanation. 

Perhaps the writers use “accent” when what they really mean is “dialect.” Something like this was proposed years ago by the Yale theologian George Lindbeck in his influential book, The Nature of Doctrine (Westminster John Knox, 1984). Lindbeck proposed that the Christian faith, like other religions, has an underlying grammar. Well, not just a grammar, but a vocabulary and a grammar. The vocabulary is taken mostly from the Bible: biblical stories and concepts. How these biblical stories and reflections relate to each other is the grammar of the faith. 

And grammars have rules—not the sort of rules imposed by grammar teachers (or teachers of theology) but rules internalized by the speakers of the language. A native speaker of a language knows the difference between a well-formed sentence and one that is not well-formed. So, too, suggested Lindbeck, someone fluent in the faith knows the difference between a well-formed belief statement and a belief statement that is not well-formed. This is true not only for those who are theologically trained but for ordinary Christians—those who have lived long and deeply with the Christian faith. They have a sense of what is proper to the faith and what is not proper.

The first theologian to suggest something like this was Irenaeus of Lyon in the 2^nd century CE. Irenaeus was up against gnostic Christianity. In his Against the Heresies, he proposed something he called “the rule of faith” (sometimes, “the rule of truth”). Matthew T. Bell in his Ruled Reading and Biblical Criticism (Eisenbrauns, 2019) calls this “a sensibility, a world-view or cultivated aesthetic” (42). What the gnostics taught didn’t fit with this sensibility. For those trained in the apostolic faith, it didn’t pass the smell test.

What this idea of a “rule of faith” suggests is that there is an underlying grammar for the faith, a proper way of “speaking” the faith. We learn the language—the grammar of the faith—not so much by studying theology, although that may help, but by being part of a worshiping community. In worship, sharing the scriptures, participation in the sacraments, and the work of the church generally, we learn from others what the faith sounds like and looks like.

I recall a passage in Resident Aliens, a long-ago book by Will Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas, in which a local congregation was engaged in one of those mission statement exercises that never seem to go as well as church consultants suggest they might. Finally, someone in the group said, what we really want is more Joes. Joe—I may have the name wrong here—was someone in the congregation who was widely held by others to be an example of what a Christian should be. Instead of an abstract statement about the mission of the church, the speaker suggested that a much more efficient way to describe what the church is about to point to someone like Joe and say, there, that’s what we are after.

This is something like what Irenaeus had in mind for the rule of faith. The rule of faith is not easily stated, just as the underlying grammar of a language is not easily stated. It’s better, as linguists know, to ask people who actually speak it what sounds right and what sounds wrong. This is close to what the early church meant by “canon.” Canon—the word means “rule”—is not simply a list of books that belong in the Bible but a relationship to the truth. It’s a kind of belonging. It’s knowing how to speak the faith.

What’s more, like a natural language, the grammar of the faith is and must be flexible. There are always new things to address. The grammar must be flexible enough to guide Christians not only in the 1^st century or in Irenaeus’s 2^nd century, but in the 21^st century. It must enable Christians to speak the faith in an age of cell phones and social media and global warming and much, much more. 

And this language, this way of what I’m calling “speaking the faith,” is never reducible to a grammar book. This is true, of course, for the way we speak English. Grammar books may be helpful or, often, not helpful. But they are always a step or perhaps many steps behind the language. Many older grammar books were based not on English at all but on Latin. They try to force the language into a rigid set of rules. It never works. Good language, good speaking and good writing, requires a sense of the language, a sense gotten best not by reading the rules but by reading good writing and listening to those who speak well.

The same is true of our faith. Often those who want most to enforce rules on the faith, and on the faithful, are those who seem in their own lives not to have learned the faith very well at all. They speak hatred and judgment, when those who have learned how to speak the faith from the scriptures and from other Christians know that that the grammar of the faith is a grammar of love and acceptance. As Jesus noted in his own ministry, often those who are considered outside the faith are those who speak it best.

To those of you who remember the opening question, what does it mean to be Reformed? I may seem to have gotten far afield with all this talk about the grammar of the faith. But not so, I think. If being Reformed is a dialect of Christianity, a way of speaking the faith that has its own dialectical differences from other ways of speaking the faith, then it’s important that we turn not just to rule books—Reformed theologies of an earlier age—but to those who speak Reformed well.

The CRC—my denomination—has had a long line of people who have given eloquent statement to the Reformed faith, both in what they said and in what they did. And how they said it and how they did it. It’s not just what you say, it’s how you say it that makes for a proper statement of what it means to be Reformed.

In this age in which denominations and traditions seem to fading away into a generic Christianity, a way of speaking the faith that one finds in the biggest churches, is it still worth our while to learn to speak Reformed? And what would that sound like in an age as challenging as our own?

I, for one, think it is still worth learning this way of speaking the faith. There has been in the traditions with which I grew up, a capaciousness to the Reformed dialect. There has been a sense that how we speak can be understood not only in church but in the broad culture of which we are a part. When I think about this way of speaking, the person who comes to my mind is Marilynne Robinson whose essays and novels speak truth to the cultured despisers of the faith. There are many others.

So perhaps Reformed is not an accent but something more robust: a dialect, a dialect that I hope to have spoken in this blog, even if not all my statements have been well-formed. I hope to keep on speaking it. In this series, I’ll turn next to what I consider central to the grammar of the faith, the scriptures and how to read them. If Reformed people fail to speak scripture, then they fail entirely.

Until next time,

Clay