Peripatetic Pastor

Tag: Confessions

  • TRADITION

    “Tradition!” Tevye, the milkman sings at the beginning of Fiddler on the Roof. It’s a great beginning, as Tevye walks us through his village and points out how things are done and why. Well, not why. Tevye mostly doesn’t know why they do things the way they do. It’s just what they have always done.  Despite the song,…

  • TOWARD A HERMENEUTIC OF THE CONFESSIONS I

    I don’t remember much if any discussion in seminary about how to interpret the confessions. I don’t think this was because I was not paying enough attention—although, I may not have been. While it was often said that we—the Christian Reformed Church (CRC)—were a confessional church, not much was said about what this meant in…

  • CONFESSIONALISM: WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A CONFESSIONAL CHURCH. THESES ON DENOMINATIONALISM 8

    Soooo, we—we Christian Reformed (CRC) types, that is—seem to be having a discussion about confessionalism: what it means to be a confessional church. As is often the case with conversations like this in churches of whatever kind, we are backing into it. The CRC Synod 2022 declared its interpretation of Question and Answer 108 (Q&A…

  • HOLD THOSE GRAVAMINA: WHY FILING A GRAVAMEN MIGHT NOT BE THE RIGHT MOVE FOR THOSE WHO DISAGREE WITH SYNOD 2022

    If Synod 2022 of the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) has done anything at all, it has popularized an obscure Latin-based word, “gravamen.” The word is used in the law to mean the weighty part of a complaint, from gravis, “heavy.” But that’s not how it is used in the CRC church order. In the CRC universe,…

  • WHAT TRUE ORTHODOXY LOOKS LIKE: THESES ON DENOMINATIONAL LIFE 6

    One of my correspondents recently put an interesting question to me: “Are there any truths that you would include in a summary of Christian (or perhaps, Biblical) Orthodoxy? If so, what would they be and how would you arrive at them?” There may well have been a barb in the question, something like, “Clay, do…