Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

James D. Bratt is professor of history at Calvin College andcoeditor of Perspectives: A Journal of ReformedThought. His other books include DutchCalvinism in Modern America and AntirevivalisminAntebellum America.

Ronald A. Wells is professor emeritus of history at Calvin College, was an editor of both Fides et Historia and The Reformed Journal, and now directs the Symposium on Faith and the Liberal Arts at Maryville College in Tennessee. Among hi

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The Best of THE REFORMED JOURNAL

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

Publisher's Note.............................xiiiAcknowledgments..............................xviiiIntroduction.................................1PART I 1951-1962.............................11PART II 1963-1977............................67PART III 1978-1990...........................195

Chapter One

The Cathedral

Harry R. Boer July 1953

We who stand in the spiritual tradition of John Calvin think of him as a reformer and a theologian, as a writer of the Institutes and of the Commentaries. Only infrequently do we think of him as a preacher, and hardly at all as one who addressed the world of his day from the pulpit of a massive cathedral. That Calvin during the space of thirty years preached his eloquent sermons in the impressive setting of marble and stone structured in Gothic beauty is worthy of note.... His timeless witness was spoken in the symbolic setting of enduring stone hewn into the form of a heaven-pointing cross. When Calvin preached in St. Peter's it was already rich with three hundred fifty years of history. He who ascended the pulpit and they who worshipped in the pew were already then conscious of the weight of a tradition and of a cloud of witnesses who had gone on before....

Dutch American Calvinists have quite left this tradition. We build houses of worship to last some generations and expect that then our great-grandchildren will erect new ones. But we will not be in those new buildings. Our spirits will be absent, lost in the ruins of the old. And because we will not be there, those who lived before us will not be there. Our posterity will stand alone, much as we now so largely stand alone. They will be conscious of a physical relationship to those who gave them birth but somehow strangely distant from their spirit and ideals, just as we now stand strangely distant from the spirit and ideals that lie at the fountainhead of our tradition.

Have we not become quite poor? Theology is the queen of the sciences in the Reformed tradition, but we have not produced a new thought, have not found a new vision in half a century. But there has been endless casuistry about the movies and divorce. Apparently isolated from all that went before or came after stands concern with the large problem of Common Grace in 1924. Why was no more heard about it for twenty-five years and more? Was it really theological and religious concern that lifted the problem to prominence a quarter-century ago?

I think that all this is the way it is because we have not the inner strength to build cathedrals. Like the rest of America, we have the money to build them, but not the inner strength. We have money to build a million-dollar science building. We have more millions for a commons building and dormitories and other such soulless structures. But there is on Calvin College's campus no cathedral, no small effort at one in the form of a solid, spacious, worship-inviting chapel. This the often emptily boastful descendants of the preacher of St. Peter's in Geneva do not have at the center of their denominational life.

Now I do not mean to say that we cannot build a cathedral-like chapel on our school grounds. Of course we can ... for we are a determined people when we get going. But it would not, I fear, be a cathedral. A cathedral, to me, represents a profound human appreciation for history in its religious significance and development. It says that God is the Lord of History. Therefore it cuts the never-aging rock out of the eternal hills and fashions it into an enduring structure, a testimony to man's witnessing, consecrated, royal service to the God of time, past and present and future. That is a cathedral. That is a true cathedral. In such a cathedral one never stands alone. One stands in the consciousness of communion with and indebtedness to the past, and of a stewardship to discharge in the present and transmit to the future. It is this sense of history, the sense that builds cathedrals of stone or stately mansions of the soul, that we have lost in the Christian Reformed Communion....

Can we again become [a cathedral-building people]? Assuredly we can. Did not Israel become a temple-building people after the long captivity? So we can again become a cathedral-building community. But first we will have to unlearn and leave our idolatries as Israel had to unlearn and leave its idolatries. The chilling and killing touch of a dead traditionalism, satisfaction with what great men said in living context to their day many years ago, living on them but not extending them, the substitution of legalism for the safeguards of the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free—these, all these, must go, and unfettered men must be free to preach the unfettered Word to a world that needs unfettering from a bondage that only free men can effect. This only people who live in the tradition of Calvin can do, people who live in the cathedral tradition.

The significance of Calvin is not so much that he said new things, but that he spoke old truths in a new way in living context with his day. He absorbed into himself all that was best in the long history out of which he had come and he knew how to use it in making the Scriptures speak their message for his generation. The Bible is timeless, theologies are its exposition in the concrete situation in which the Church finds itself. We must get away from the notion that has so long dominated our thinking that theology or dogmatics is simply a compendium of propositions. It must serve the Church in its existing need. Christ saves us not alone from the world but also in the world as sin expresses itself in any given era of the world's history. Kuyper spoke against the easy-going Christ-denying Modernism of his time. Calvin took issue with the traditionalism of Rome and with its denial of the liberty that Christ has given us. Against these evils he made the Bible speak. He passionately demanded the right to say what the Bible says and for more than thirty years he wrote its meaning in his study and preached its message in the cathedral, sending throughout Europe a wave of energy-unleashing life that has permanently affected Western civilization.

I knew it from reading the Institutes and now after visiting the cathedral I know more than ever that Calvin could not possibly have spent his days on the movie question; in defending the proposition that card-playing is sin but that the Church must not do anything about it because everybody is doing it; in holding that an illegally divorced person can never, never be a member of the Christian Church so long as the partner is living and then, after forty years, undertake to see if there is scriptural ground for such a position. We are called to more serious and responsible theological stewardship. Our preoccupation with trivialities and with improperly formulated problems has cost us the riches of our tradition and given nothing in its place....

Can the Reformed tradition among us still be preserved, guarded and extended — above all extended — for only so can a tradition be preserved? Clearly the days of the Prophets are gone and we are fallen upon the evil days of Scribes and Lawyers with their precept upon precept, line upon line, here a little, there a little. Let us stand in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, that we may...