Traditions must sometimes be saved from those who claim them. In this series of posts, I’ve been asking the question, “What does it mean to be Reformed?” There are those who give ready answers to that question. Their answers might include the early 20th century acronym TULIP. Or penal substitutionary atonement. Or declaring that same sex marriage is immoral. None of these is inherently Reformed, but in the hands of these claimants to the Reformed tradition, they become a hammer to smash down those who think differently.

One only has to peruse the upcoming docket for the synod of the Christian Reformed Church to see the hammer raised for action. In overtures (official requests for action) already filed for the June meeting, some deferred from 2023, we find such titles as “Withhold Denominational Funding from Calvin University until Faculty and Staff Adhere to CRCNA Covenantal Standards” (Classis Heartland), “Amend Rules for Synodical Procedure to Suspend Delegates Whose Classes Have Not Adequately Implemented Discipline” (Classis Minnkota), “Shepherd Congregations into Another Denomination” (Council of the Moline, Michigan, CRC), “Declare as Heresy the Belief that Scripture Sanctions Homosexual Marriage” (Council of Immanuel CRC, Burbank, Illinois), and “Declare that Heidelberg Catechism Q&A 108 Addresses a Salvation Issue” (it addresses “unchastity”). These all, and many others, are requests for the synod to bring the hammer down hard on those who dissent from the synodical decisions of 2022 and 2023 that declared that same marriage is wrong and that it is wrong confessionally to support same-sex marriage. Anyone who says anything to the contrary, said these synods and say these overtures, is in violation of the Covenant for Officebearers and subject to discipline.

But perhaps this punitive spirit itself is a violation of what it means to be Reformed. If being Reformed means anything beyond a laundry list of right wing causes, shouldn’t we in the spirit of the tradition step back from the current fray and see the tradition anew? The Reformed tradition, after all, just is a tradition of reform. Rethinking the faith in the light of scripture and the gospel is the Reformed thing to do.

And not only this, but the Reformed tradition requires us to be always rethinking the faith in the light of the best thinking, not only by people in churches but by people who are not in churches. For the early church the not-in-churches thinking was that of the Greeks—Plato, Aristotle, and others. For the reformers of the 16th century, it was not only the rediscovery of the Greeks (preserved by Muslims) but of the great thinkers of Jewish tradition. In our time, it includes a vast cultural conversation that has broadened to include not just Western Europeans but the people who proceeded Europeans in these lands and others. Ours is or should be a capacious tradition, a tradition that, as the confessions have it, embraces science as well as theology.

It was in the spirit of this that in the post just previous to this one I chose to write about a particular way that Reformed people construe the faith. In Reformed theology, questions of salvation are bracketed off as God’s business—the first and the most important implication of the doctrine of election. Once one gets beyond the 17th century metaphysics, election becomes a way of saying that “getting saved” is a distortion of the gospel. Our task is not “getting saved” but glorifying God. As the Westminster Shorter Catechism has it, the central purpose of human life is “to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” Retrieve this Reformed perspective from the contemporary evangelical soup, and you have gone far in grasping what being Reformed is all about.

For the remainder of this post, I’ll make a second attempt at retrieving a central idea in the Reformed tradition, this time, the centrality of scripture. Asked, “What does it mean to be Reformed?” one of the answers you are likely to get is a high view of scripture. I have on my desk a pamphlet published by the Christian Reformed Church with the title, “What Does It Mean to Be Reformed.” Open it, and one finds, under a subtitle, “What we believe: The doctrinalist emphasis,” the claim that “Reformed Christians have a high view of Scripture.” Or take the five solas, often considered a summary of Reformed teaching, and there as the first sola one finds sola scriptura, “only by the Bible.” If being Reformed stands for anything, one would suppose, a high view of scripture is paramount.

But this claim is misleading. It’s misleading in two directions. One is that what’s claimed as a Reformed reading of scripture is not particular to Reformed theology. I’ll have less to say about that in this post. The second is that the way the Bible is handled in much of what passes for the Reformed tradition does not, despite declarations to the contrary, seem to honor the Bible at all. In fact, it seems profoundly distrustful of the Bible. Or, perhaps better, it seems stuck, more aspirational than actual. If we are to retrieve the importance of scripture for the tradition we will have to get it unstuck.

What are we talking about here? The first thing to remember about the Reformed approach to scripture is that it was built on a base of a new secular humanism coming out of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Among the ways that this new humanism influenced the Reformation was the rise of the Bible as text. To see the Bible as text is to take it out of the air, as it were, where seemed to have no history, no grounding in the actual process of producing books. It’s to the see the Bible as having a complex textual history, written not only in Hebrew and Greek (and a little Aramaic) but in specific and ordinary forms of those languages, which languages themselves have histories. It’s to read the Bible as one would read any other ancient document with eyes for the meanings of words, for how words are used, for the kind of texts that the documents are. It’s to ask questions about what gave rise to these texts—the history behind them. It’s to see all these things and more.

This new approach to the Bible gave rise to what often is called (mostly in seminaries) “grammatical-historical exegesis.” This approach is expressed as the idea that every text has a specific meaning—the meaning originally intended for it by its author—and that ascertaining this correct reading, using the tools of philology and history, is the business of interpretation. Taking this approach, one assumes that Paul meant this specific thing by words like “justify” and “salvation” and “death” and “sin” rather than that (what one’s opponent thinks they mean). This is the interpretative technique I learned in seminary.

It’s naïve at best. And even if one could do what it suggets doing, it doesn’t give us scripture as scripture. For scripture to be scripture, it must have a claim on our lives. One must not only be able to say, Paul meant that, but what Paul meant is what we should think and do. It must present to us a way of life. It must tell us a story about God and about creation and about us—human beings—that compels us to action. For that, one needs some notion of what in the Bible is crucial and what is not. Most Christian interpreters hold, for example, that what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13 about love is important in a way that the Leviticus command not to mix two kinds of cloth is not. And not just important but mandatory. In addition to the text, one needs an interpretative frame: this matters; this doesn’t matter as much or at all.

The church has always known this about the Bible. Irenaeus, the 2nd century divine who established this approach, called it the “rule of faith.” The “rule of faith” is a story about God and Jesus and sin and humanity that shapes one’s reading of the Bible. It tells us what to pay attention to, and what can safely be ignored. Pay attention to what Jesus says about love, for example; don’t pay the same kind of attention to the apparent command of God in Joshua to kill animals and babies.

In Reformed circles—at least the ones I hang around in—the story that shapes the interpretation of the Bible is often framed as “creation, fall, redemption, and consummation.” Take the most recent issue of Calvin Seminary’s forum magazine, for example. Under the rubric of “What does it mean to be Reformed?” it quotes Calvin Seminary professors. Several of them, curiously, using exactly the same phrase, say that being Reformed means reading scripture with “the paradigm of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation.” The fact that they mention this “paradigm” in exactly the same language would seem to indicate that this is something they teach. In the Irenaean sense, it constitutes a shorthand “rule of faith,” an overlay that one puts on Bible to decide what matters and what doesn’t matter as much.

To this point in my explanation, there’s nothing wrong with reading the Bible in this way. The Bible does make much of these themes: creation, sin, redemption, and new creation (which I prefer to “consummation”). Thinking of God as creator, judge, redeemer and, again for a second time, creator are ways to engage the materials of the Bible. But they are not the only way. Problems begin to arise when a narrative like the creation-fall-redemption-consummation narrative begins to calcify into a rigid scheme that itself has canonical force. This happens when it is said that this scheme not only a useful of reading the Bible but it’s the only way—that this way of reading the Bible is itself biblical. It’s not. It’s an interpretation, and in many respects, not a very good interpretation.

This way of approaching the Bible—let’s call it CFRC for “creation-fall-redemption-consummation—distorts the way the Bible approaches these things. Take one example, the way CFRC privileges creation. Often for those who use the CFRC approach, creation and consummation match. The end circles back to the beginning. It’s this idea that is at the heart of the approach taken to human sexuality by the Christian Reformed human sexuality study committee. They argued that heterosexuality is built into creation. Never mind that nature seems to have developed an extensive repertoire of sexual arrangements; this is what God had in mind. And because it is built into creation at the beginning, they argued, heterosexuality must be the norm. What was at the beginning will be the same in the end. Rules about same sex relationships in the Bible are not cultural, subject to change, but forever.

But suppose you privileged the other end of the sequence: consummation. And suppose instead of using the word “consummation” which has few biblical resonances you used “new creation.” And suppose that new creation means what it says: this creation will be new, different. It will include not only what was there at the beginning but what has been created along the way, all of human cultural development, for example. Suppose that God calls us from where human life began to something greater, something we can at this point only imagine. In that case, contemporary perspectives on human sexuality may be not deviations from the straight path but genuinely new insights on the way to this new creation. The idea of consent in human sexual relationships, to take one example, may be a better way to understand what’s at stake in sexual relationships. And the idea of consenting relationships (an idea the Bible does not consider) may lead to the recognition that what matters first of all is not the biology of the relationship but whether the relationship is loving—with, to circle back, love defined in the way of the Bible.

You see where this is going. Or can go. The problem with CFRC interpretation is not that it’s always wrong but that the tradition seems to have gotten stuck, and when the interpretative traditions get stuck, the Bible—the Bible with all its complexities—gets lost. Instead of the Bible itself, we get an interpretation of the Bible. It’s as if the Bible were a wrapper around a set of golden truths. Once you have gotten to the truths, you can throw the wrapper away.

This is also true in regard to the confessions. Actually, doubly true. It’s true for the confessions themselves. The interpretation of the Reformed confessions has gotten stuck in a kind of timelessness. It’s as if they—the Reformed confessions—have no place in history. They are forever the same. Which, of course, is not only not true, but destroys the power of the confessions. But then these same confessions are said to be exactly what the Bible says. In this way, not lose not only the confessions, but the Bible itself.

If the confessions say just what the Bible says, then we don’t really need the Bible anymore. It’s this I had in mind when I said that some “Reformed” people seem suspicious of the Bible. They are concerned that the Bible, allowed the full range of interpretations one can bring to the Bible, will end up undermining what they want to hold on to. Like penal substitutionary atonement, for example. Or adamant opposition to same-sex marriage. Or the notion that the Eden story in Genesis 2-3 should be read as the story of The Fall. They seem afraid that Bible might turn out to be a whole lot more interesting than they are willing to allow it to be.

In Percival Everett’s Pulitzer-listed novel, James, the James of the title, based on the Jim of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, finds a cache of books. The books include copies of works by Voltaire, Rousseau, and Locke. And a Bible. The Bible he leaves behind. It belongs, so he believes, to the oppressors, to those who have enslaved him. The Bible is the hammer with which white people have fashioned his shackles.

The Bible can be so used. As a hammer. But here, I believe, Everett is wrong. People like James did read the Bible, and what they found was not the message their masters wanted them to find. They found freedom and hope. Their oppressors wanted them to read the biblical dictates about slavery; what they found was the exodus, the story of runaway slaves.

There is more to say about this, about how to read the Bible conversationally, but that will have to wait for another time. For now it’s enough to say that the Bible is a far richer, deeper, more amusing and instructive book than many of those who claim it may realize. And when it’s read by those who care to read it, it still speaks.

Clay