In March 2009, TIME magazine listed âthe new Calvinismâ as one of ten ideas âchanging the world right now.â1 It was, in many ways, the most significant indicator of the success of the resurgence of Reformed theology that began with the first publications of the Banner of Truth in the late 1950s and has continued more recently among the very different demographic of the âyoung, restless and Reformed.â2 Fifty years ago, the Banner of Truth began republishing older classics in a marketplace in which Reformed theology seemed deeply unfashionable. But a number of books produced by the Trust encouraged readers to believe that the system of theology to which they had been attracted would one day be extraordinarily revived in popular appeal.3 The readers of the Trustâs first publication, Thomas Watsonâs Body of Divinity (reprinted 1958), could hardly have expected that the movement they were in many respects beginning would five decades later feature on the front cover of TIME magazine. It hasâbut many traditionally minded Reformed Protestants are now wondering whether the ânew Calvinismâ attracting this unprecedented media interest is in fact the revival of the true religion they had been encouraged to expect. Their difficulty is that âCalvinismâ has evolved as it has gone mainstream, and, as even its advocates admit, the ânew Calvinismâ is quite different from the old. D. G. Hart has recognized that âCalvinismâs original leadersâ could not have âpredicted or planned the outcome of their initial efforts to reform Europeâs churches.â4 For, as R. Scott Clark has noticed, âsignificant segments within the Reformed communion ⌠define âReformedâ in ways our forefathers would not understand.â5
The resurgence of Reformed theology, and the revolution it has precipitated within the leadership of the movement, has sparked a series of religious turf wars. A number of theologians have moved to defend more traditional articulations of orthodoxy, denying that the ânew Calvinistsâ have the right to be identified as âReformed.â The fact that the terms âReformedâ and âCalvinistâ are historically loaded is part of the challenge of this debate.6 Some of those reacting have gone further, identifying themselves as the âtrulyâ or âconfessionally Reformed,â and attempting to police the boundaries of the âReformed movementâ to exclude from its ranks many of the most able and articulate defenders of Calvinistic soteriology, including John Piper, Mark Dever, and other members of such organizations as the Gospel Coalition. Their argument is simpleâanyone who denies any element within the Reformed confessions cannot be regarded as âReformedââand it is directed most obviously against those Calvinists who are charismatics or who argue against the baptism of infants. So, these polemicists continue, the term âReformed Baptistâ is an oxymoron, however closely a baptistic believer may adhere to Calvinâs soteriological scheme or to an early modern theological symbol in which that soteriology might be embedded, such as the second London Baptist confession of faith (1677/1689). Noting that the âCalvinismâ label denotes much more than soteriology, self-identified confessional conservatives have responded to the broader appropriation of âReformedâ identity with criticism and concern.
Part of the difficulty, of course, is that identity boundaries cannot effectively be policed. These charismatic or baptistic âCalvinistsâ are not the only Christians to insist that they share the âReformedâ identity with those who think it more properly their own. Even such âmixedâ communions as the Christian Reformed Church, the Reformed Church in America, the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, the Church of Scotland, and the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) claim to be Reformed. For example, a search of the term âReformedâ on the PCUSA website yields 1780 results (though some of these results use the term to refer to the process of change rather than to the theology of the Protestant Reformation).7 While their theological terminology is common, there is little doctrinal agreement between liberal or Barthian denominations and their broadly conservative âothersââwhether the movement of the âyoung, restless and reformed,â or those historic or confessionally prescriptive Reformed and Presbyterian denominations, whose members critique the âyoungâ and ârestless.â Thus the descriptor âReformedâ has been drawn into a struggle related to broader concerns about religious identity politics in the contemporary United States. And yet the paradox of so much of this discussion is that many of those who are most vocal in denying the title of âReformedâ to the âyoung,â the ârestless,â the âliberal,â and the âBarthianâ are operating with a definition of âReformedâ that is itself both a-historical and geographically specific, and that may, consequently, beg the question of what âconfessionalâ actually means. The âtruly Reformedâ require their âothersâ to measure themselves against the body of creeds produced during and immediately after the Reformation. But, as we will argue in this chapter, these standards may provide an unstable foundation for a contemporary âReformedâ identity, for these texts were first published as competing statements of faith, and some of them have been so radically revised as to now exist in multiple and contradictory versions, the most advanced of which move their modern subscribers into theological territories that their original subscribers would have regarded as âAnabaptist.â The ânew Calvinism,â as its advocates admit, is quite different from the oldâjust as the old Calvinism differed from the much older Calvinism it also once replaced, and by which, for similar reasons, it might also have been rejected.
I
It is our contention that the recent attempt to recover âthe Reformed confessionâ as part of the broader articulation and defense of âCalvinismâ has been both necessary and problematic. The difficulty relates in part to trends in historiography, in which older models of confessionalization, which focused on German territories and were most famously expounded by Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling, have given way to geographically broader and more troubled reconstructions of early modern religious change within âanti-papal Latin Christianityâ that pay closer attention to the phenomenon of religious radicalism.8 Part of the difficulty, as Alec Ryrie has recently noted, is that Lutherans and the Reformed adopted very different attitudes to the confessions of faith that they published. While âLutheranism in the age of orthodoxy was ⌠precisely ⌠a Confession, with its principal spiritual parameters defined at Augsburg in 1530 and its legal parameters at the same city in 1555,â there âwas never a single Reformed confession of faith,â and attempts to create a âsingle, harmonisedâ confession always failed.9 This did not âprevent the Reformed family from recognising one another as brethren,â partly because âtheir confessions were understood to be limited, provisional documents, subject to revision and improvement,â with similar, though not identical, emphases.10 Calvinism, Ryrie has concluded, âshould be seen not as a unified âconfessionâ in any strict sense, but as an ecumenical movement for Protestant unity,â which was âbroad, discursive and dangerously soft-edged,â with a tendency to âleak into radicalismâ in territories where Reformed ideas did not enjoy strong state support.11 For, as Willem van Asselt has similarly argued, âthere was not one, but several trajectoriesâ within early modern Reformed thought, âa whole series of Reformed theologies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.â12 And so, he continues, the âReformed tradition is to be examined on its own terms, and to be considered against the backdrop of its own historical and theological context,â13 for if we fail to remember the âvariety and breadth of the later Reformed tradition,â we may not âdo justice to historical phenomena.â14 Our definition of âCalvinismâ should not reduce a complex and variegated phenomenon to a âkind of uniform and even ideological movement ⌠to legitimize the present position of the historian or theologian.â15 For, as John Leith famously put it, the Reformed churches were âprolific in the production of creedsââhe refers to around 60 such examplesâand these creeds âexhibit a variety that is the nemesis of all those who would write the theology of the Reformed confessions.â16
In this chapter, we argue that the recent attempt to ârecover the Reformed confessionâ and its broader ecclesial significance has not paid sufficient attention to this historical reality, nor to its contemporary implications. One of the most common assumptions in the literature discussing the question of nomenclature is that âReformed,â when it appears in the title of a congregation, denomination, or institution, has a stable meaning, which refers to an allegiance to that part of the Protestant tradition that traces its intellectual and spiritual origins to the theology of John Calvin, or, often more accurately, to a combination of his theology, anthropology, and soteriology with the ecclesiological experiments of John Knox and the advanced covenant theology and sometimes (but, controversially, not always) the experiential emphasis of seventeenth-century English and Dutch puritans. But this is not always the case: the âReformedâ descriptor does not always precisely refer to this body of knowledge. The United Societies of Scottish Covenanters that formed the Reformed Presbytery in 1743, for example, adopted the label âReformedâ not to indicate that their ministers were Calvinisticâthis hardly being distinctive in the Scotland of the mid-eighteenth centuryâbut to indicate that they were âre-formingâ in the sense of re-establishing a national church for Scotland on the basis of a renewed commitment to the Solemn League and Covenant and other denominationally particular documents.17 This instance is a useful reminder that the âReformedâ tradition does allow for the use of this descriptor to indicate something other than a commitment to a specific set of early modern confessional texts.
Neither can âReformedâ be effectively defined in relation to the creeds and confessions of faith produced during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.18 First, despite the widespread use of the definite article, as Ryrie has noted, there is no single âReformed confession.â19 It is true that any intertextual comparison of various Reformed confessions, such as that edited by Peter Hall in the mid-nineteenth century, will demonstrate a vast amount of agreement.20 There can be surprising omissions: the Scots Confession (1560), for example, does not refer to the doctrine of justification by faith alone. Agreement does exist on such loci as Holy Scripture, the Trinity, predestination, creation ex nihilo, original sin, atonement, justification, sanctification, the sacraments, and the civil magistrate. Yet, in early modernity, these similarities were not expressed in a single statement of faith: there were, and still are, many Reformed confessions, and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries these confessions to some extent competed with each other. When the divines in the Jerusalem Chamber abandoned their attempt to improve the 39 Articles, they did not simply adopt one of the better Continental alternatives, or even the Irish Articles (1615) that had provided the doctrinal basis for an earlier and more proximate Reformed church. Instead, the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647) which they published in some sense competed with the Three Forms of Unity (1619), encoding di...