Neo-Calvinism
- Thread starter jwithnell
- Start date
RamistThomist
Puritanboard Assessor
Kuyper. The other might be called New Lights or New Divinity or New School.
darrellmaurina
Puritan Board Junior
@RamistThomist is right. "Neo-Calvinism" has nothing to do with Lyman Beecher or the New School movement in either Presbyterianism or Congregationalism.
What does need qualification is that there are people who use the term "Neo-Calvinism" to identify with some parts of Abraham Kuyper's theological system but not others.
I'm among them.
If we identify "Neo-Calvinism" as its American form, i.e., the Stone Lectures at Princeton leading to Francis Schaeffer and D. James Kennedy and other forms of emphasis on a "cultural mandate," then I'm all in.
Start talking about presumptive regeneration? I'm out. REALLY REALLY REALLY out. There are REASONS why major elements of the conservative Dutch Reformed world in the late 1800s refused to join with Kuyper and presumptive regeneration was close to the top of that list. However, Kuyper had a legitimate point when he blasted his conservative opponents of his day as "world flight pietists." He wasn't wrong when criticizing a tendency to ignore culture and separate into irrelevance. There are people right here on the Puritan Board who know that firsthand, and in their Dutch Reformed circles would be regarded as "loose" or "light" because they spend time fellowshipping with people like you and me with "too loose" views of what it means to be Reformed. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think you wear black dresses to church that are not just below your knee but all the way to your ankles, and I don't think you wear a headcovering. Those two "problems" would mark you as "insufficiently Reformed" in some of the Dutch Reformed denominations and movements that exist today and were the leading opponents of Kuyper during his life.
I also have concerns about the way Kuyper's doctrine of common grace came to be used by some of his successors to baptize bad things in secular thought. I'm not Protestant Reformed, and men like Prof. Engelsma who knew me personally were well aware that while I was sympathetic to their concerns I wasn't "one of them," but it's hard to disagree that Hoeksema saw very real problems in how the generation that followed Kuyper took some of his ideas and ran with them into directions that were problematic.
That's not new or unusual to have a major theological leader whose system of thought led in more than one direction. You mentioned Jonathan Edwards. Today, places like the Puritan Board affirm Edwards' emphasis on personal conversion as the premier example of a Calvinist who emphasized not just head knowledge, though he was a scholar at the highest level, and combined it with an emphasis on personal heartfelt conversion. So far, so good. But his successors went into problematic places. We'd say similar things about Augustine -- his ecclesiology, while he was right in fighting Donatism, led directly to the problems of medieval Roman Catholicism placing too much authority in the institutional church led by bishops, and increasingly downplaying Augustinian soteriology in favor of Augustinian (or at least what was believed to be Augustinian) ecclesiology.
So we need to be a bit careful when we hear someone identifying himself as "neo-Calvinist." He probably means he's Kuyperian. Fine. What part of Kuyper?
The answer isn't the same for all people.
Last edited:
RamistThomist
Puritanboard Assessor
For a while I almost considered myself a Schilderite because of this.
You bring up a good point here. While many of us in conservative pietist Reformed churches consider ourselves anti-Kuyperian in many respects--specifically on the issues of presumption and some of the excesses of the common grace system--in other ways, Kuyper's model has been assumed (vis. Church-State relations). While Article 36 is still confessed in its original in the NRC, HRC, & FRC, there is certainly a Kuyperian 'spin' put on its understanding amongst many that I have interacted with.
As for hats and long dresses, the former is an explicit command given in 1 Cor. 11 and it is sad for those of us who hold the conviction see it disappearing without any arguments to the contrary. Black suits and dresses, while perhaps proper and modest expressions that help minimize distraction, are not explicitly commanded in the Word of God.
darrellmaurina
Puritan Board Junior
We're on the same page about the Kuyperian church-and-state model becoming the default all across the Reformed world, even in circles that were explicitly and strongly opposed to Kuyper in his era, at least ecclesiastically. Look up the "Night of Kersten" and what happened when the political party associated with the Gereformeerde Gemeenten was used by Dutch liberals to "divide and conquer" the conservatives in the Netherlands over relationships with Roman Catholicism. That debate simply would not happen in today's American political system where most of us, following Francis Schaeffer and D. James Kennedy, believe the Roman Catholics are essential allies in the pro-life movement. But it was the CGKN, GG, and (some of) the Gereformeerde Bond, along with GKN people who didn't fully agree with the consequences of Kuyper's sphere sovereignty, who broke with Kuyper on certain aspects of church-state relations.
These are not issues that are well understood in the American Reformed world because, unlike Schaeffer, most of us in America don't understand the Dutch predecessors to what has become the default conservative Christian position on civil government. We read Schaeffer, not the people Schaeffer learned from. You and your fellow members in the Free Reformed, Heritage Reformed, and Netherlands Reformed circles do understand those issues, or at least have a better understanding of them, because you are closer to the sources.
On your second point, you may actually be surprised on my views.
For whatever it's worth, I'm not at all opposed to head coverings for women. Perhaps unlike you -- I don't want to assume your beliefs, though I do know what is commonly held in the FRC/NRC/HRC world -- I believe the exegesis of the key passage on a covering for women's heads can at least arguably be understood to say women should not have shaved heads and/or should have long hair. I think this is an issue that can be argued exegetically and while my own personal position is in favor of headcoverings for women, that is such a tiny minority position today that I would rather just encourage people who have come to that position than try to push it on people who are new to the Reformed faith. I view the issue as being comparable to the Geneva Bible's commentary notes on long hair for men being cultural, not a mandate -- the Geneva commentators were wrong, and Cromwell should have cut his hair, and Edwards either should have worn no wig or a short wig. But if long hair is going to keep me from agreeing that Cromwell and Edwards did great things, along with the large majority of the Puritans who also had long hair, I need to find bigger things to argue about.
Still, on women's headcoverings, I also know that even as late as the mid-1800s, one of the key New School Presbyterian churches pastored by a key advocate of what we would today call a "downgrade" of Reformed doctrine, in other words, not at all a conservative or a traditional church, had an internal controversy over what to do with a woman who said her bonnet caused her to have headaches. We don't know the details but there's no reason to believe it was an excuse to ditch the headcovering and she likely had some sort of medical condition that the doctors of the era didn't have a way to treat. After extended discussion, the church leadership decided to allow her to attend worship without her headcovering, provided she sat in the back where she would not be seen and her lack of a headcovering would not a distraction.
In other words, headcoverings, just a little more than a century and a half ago, were considered not just standard but almost required even in the most progressive of American Presbyterian churches!
Maybe we need to do a better job of looking to our own history before we say headcoverings were culturally conditioned. The problem is that if we do that, we'll find that long hair for men was defended by many of the same people we cite who said headcoverings for women were not a cultural practice but a Scriptural mandate.
"What's good for the goose is good for the gander" might apply here -- if we're going to insist on headcoverings for women, we need to insist on short hair for men, and that gets quite uncomfortable when we look at pictures of Puritans from the 1600s and 1700s.
Sort of like the modern argument that confessionally Reformed men need to have beards.
I'd rather spend my time focusing on sovereign grace, not head hair or facial hair.
Feminism, certainly has done a number on us all, and I am certainly not exempting myself from the 'us.'
darrellmaurina
Puritan Board Junior
I won't disagree.
But I'll go back to the point that there is biblical warrant for telling Cromwell to cut his hair in 1646, just as there is for telling a Reformed woman in 2026 to have a headcovering. Actually more warrant. We can at least argue that long hair for women fulfils the biblical requirement for a woman's covering. Not saying I agree with that exegesis, but the case can be made. By contrast, the notes in the Geneva Bible were simply wrong to say that banning long hair for men was a culturally conditioned issue, and no exegetical argument can defend that.
BTW, since you are Free Reformed, it may interest you that I bought a hat for my wife when we were visiting Dr. Beeke's church back in the 1990s when she was going to be introduced as the translator of one of his books into Korean. Also, Dr. Beeke, and from your denomination, Rev. Vander Meyden. were at our wedding. It was decades ago, but I think one of their wives wore a headcovering and the other did not. Of course, a wedding wasn't a worship service so the issues are different.
I used to live on the same block within walking distance of the Grand Rapids FRC and sometimes attended it when I was at Calvin College. I've attended the Crescent Street NRC/HRC congregation numerous times as well. I'm definitely aware of and sympathetic to the practice of headcoverings and am not speaking as someone who has never seen it normalized.
But I think we have to face reality and recognize that, unless we are in the Middle East or certain parts of India, virtually nobody coming to our churches has even considered the issue. I have had an Indian woman visiting a church I was serving long ago who always put on something that sort of looked like a scarf or a shawl to pray, even in Bible studies. She was pleased to hear it when I told her that yes, Reformed people used to wear head coverings. I encouraged her to keep doing it even though no other women in the church did, and I said, "You need to do what you are convicted Scripture says you should do." The church was mostly Asian, nobody ever talked about headcoverings before she started attending, and I think the response was, "Okay, it's Darrell doing his Dutch stuff from Michigan. Let the woman from India do what she thinks she needs to do, and let's try to remember that DTM spent so much time around the Dutch that he started to act like them."
That's how discussions of headcoverings worked out in real life. At least in my experience.
Christodulus
Puritan Board Freshman
It is a tragedy that anyone in the Reformed world should say such a thing. We have discussed this before and I know the nuance you put on this, but I would clarify that the state apparatus is an essential tool in the pro-life movement, which is not at all the same thing as saying Romanists are “essential allies”. To conflate the fact that the votes and policies of men and women which happen to be Romanists are useful in abolishing abortion with the idea that Romanists as Romanists are our *essential allies* in anything whatsoever, let alone our war with sin and death, is to (most ironically in light of Kuyper’s criticisms of traditional Reformed political theology) absolutely confuse the civil and the religious. Though it is completely necessary that the murder of preborn children should be prohibited with the sword, yet the only true solution to the problem and the only thing which ever could bring the end to it or any other sin in this world is the gospel of Jesus Christ, which cannot be found among them. While one preaches the word of life to those destitute women as they go in and out of the abortion mill, their “essential” Romanist “allies” can be found on their knees, rosaries in hand, chanting prayers to an idol they call Mary seeking it to perform some sorcery to magically save the world in their place, or if they do preach a gospel it is a different one, which is not another, by which no man could be saved. Romanists are either no help at all, or often are instead an impediment to the Christian work.
darrellmaurina
Puritan Board Junior
You and I have discussed this before. This was the core of the fight between Abraham Kuyper and his Reformed political opponents in the 1800s and early 1900s.
I understand your position. It is the position my parents grew up with, though from the other side, when liberals were writing books like "American Freedom and Catholic Power," arguing in the 1940s and 1950s from a liberal perspective that Roman Catholicism is incompatible with American political values. I have relatives from that generation who feared -- and had good reason for fear -- that the 1960 presidential election could lead to a mass outbreak of physical attacks on Catholic churches and schools.
Francis Schaeffer and D. James Kennedy are largely responsible for creating the modern Christian conservative consensus on this matter that Catholics are essential allies in politics, and that the liberal project of "divide and conquer," pitting Catholics against evangelicals, would destroy what is left of Christian values in America.
You have every right to disagree. But when you disagree, it's probably important to understand that you are taking a position that is not only at variance with most of modern American conservative Christianity, but also the majority position of the part of the Dutch Reformed world from which the URCNA comes.
Abraham Kuyper got the Three Forms of Unity amended for a reason.
The term Neo-Calvinism is used to trace a line of theological development in the early US republic era. It is used by academics like Henry F. May and others in mainline academia.
While they may not use the term by name, George Marsden, Mark Noll, and Nathan Hatch trace this early history and its effect on evangelicalism.
I've become interested in this era because modern reformed churches have absorbed elements of this teaching with little self consciousness. (An example of a work that appears blind to this influence is Reformed and Evangelical across Four Centuries: The Presbyterian Story in America by Feldmeth et al which shrugs off the OPC as inconsequential, and accepts the New Light dominance as a given and altogether proper outcome.)
New School covers some of the same ground as Neo-Calvinism, but does not overlap entirely as it often focuses upon revival where as Neo-Calvinism began to undercut the idea of the federal headship of Adam until it had its practical outworking in the Semi-Pelagianism of Charles Finney.
Since starting this thread I have discovered that John Murray may have directly addressed this history in The Imputation of Adam's Sin which I have on order.
While they may not use the term by name, George Marsden, Mark Noll, and Nathan Hatch trace this early history and its effect on evangelicalism.
I've become interested in this era because modern reformed churches have absorbed elements of this teaching with little self consciousness. (An example of a work that appears blind to this influence is Reformed and Evangelical across Four Centuries: The Presbyterian Story in America by Feldmeth et al which shrugs off the OPC as inconsequential, and accepts the New Light dominance as a given and altogether proper outcome.)
New School covers some of the same ground as Neo-Calvinism, but does not overlap entirely as it often focuses upon revival where as Neo-Calvinism began to undercut the idea of the federal headship of Adam until it had its practical outworking in the Semi-Pelagianism of Charles Finney.
Since starting this thread I have discovered that John Murray may have directly addressed this history in The Imputation of Adam's Sin which I have on order.
RamistThomist
Puritanboard Assessor
They're using the term differently than it is commonly used. 99% of the time today, it means Kuyper and his heirs.
Here is a piece worth reading: https://www.westminsterconfession.o...f-grace/historic-calvinism-and-neo-calvinism/
That's precisely why I asked about the use of the term here on the board. I was wondering if others might have looked in-depth at this piece of American church history. I'm hoping John Murray's book on Imputation may give me the clarity I am seeking.
Thank you -- I look forward to reading this.
I have read a fair amount of Abraham Kuyper's work over the years. I am wondering if some of the early 1750s to 1830s theology I am tracing may have had influence upon his thoughts on common grace; but that is a leap I am no where close to being able to make at this point.
darrellmaurina
Puritan Board Junior
That's actually a great question, and the problem in answering it is going to be that the First Great Awakening made it to Europe in the form of the Reveil, but the Second Great Awakening didn't come in the same form, and when it arrived, it largely happened outside both the established churches and the "Free Churches" that had seceded from or been expelled from the established churches. It was regarded as a "foreign influence" outside legitimate Reformed church life, not as a "New School" approach to being Presbyterian and Reformed.
Here is an article on the Reveil that may help:
The Geneva ‘Réveil’: An Almost Unknown Evangelical Awakening
How a forgotten revival challenges our assumptions about the spread of Christianity.
There are direct historical and personal links between Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, and between Edwards and other English church leaders. That much is widely known. It's less widely known that the Erskine brothers, after Edwards' removal from the pulpit of Northhampton Congregational Church, asked Edwards if he would be willing to come to Scotland and join the predecessor denomination of what later became the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church. (Edwards declined, politely, but if he had accepted, it is likely the subsequent history of the Associate Presbytery would have been radically different.)
What is still less well known is that there were continuing connections between not only British and American streams of Reformed spiritual renewal, but also European streams.
Kuyper was deeply influenced by, but in some ways significantly different from, the movement that came to be known as the Reveil.
The biggest differences have to do with the role of personal conversion. Kuyper reacted very strongly against the hyper-Puritanism of many of the people who had seceded from the state church in the 1834 Afscheiding and various related movements that eventually led to the creation of the Christelijke Gerefomeerde Kerk in Nederland (Christian Reformed Church in the Netherlands) and the Gereformeerde Gemeenten (the Dutch "mother church" of the Netherlands Reformed Congregations, the denomination in which Joel Beeke was originally ordained and later deposed him). When the vast majority of the CGKN merged with Kuyper's Doleantie to form the GKN, those tensions remained but Kuyper, by force of personality and his role in politics and public life, largely won the day.
I believe that influence was most definitely a mix of problematic and promising elements.
Some of Kuyper, I love. Especially his views on Christian politics and applying faith to culture.
His view of spheres of authority was, I believe, a correct application of Scripture and correct exegesis of the developing ways in which a family patriarchy (Abraham, etc.) branched off into separate roles for priests and heads of household in the Mosaic era through the Judges, and finally the civil magistrate developed with separate roles from the priesthood, including severe rebukes to King Saul for presuming to offer sacrifices. The correct division is not "church and state," but rather "family, church, and state," with the family being the most basic of the three.
There are different standards for all three. There are men who have no business in any pulpit or consistory/session room, or teaching anything in the institutional church, who not only may teach but are COMMANDED to teach their families at home. Likewise, the standards for civil magistrates are NOT those for church office or even church membership. That is the core insight that allowed Kuyper to work with Roman Catholics in the Netherlands, breaking the unholy alliance that Dutch liberals had formed with dissenting Catholics to attack conservative Protestants. That has long-standing effects not just in Dutch politics but American politics and is a key part of Schaeffer, Kennedy, and the Reformed roots of the modern conservative Christian movement in America.
That is what people USUALLY mean by "neo-Calvinism" today.
I do understand that Kuyper was NOT "dead orthodox." His personal conversion narrative gives every evidence of having been both real and dramatic. I also understand that Kuyper was reacting against things that were very real problems in the conservative pietistic Reformed world of his day.
But I can't get over presumptive regeneration. That's a no-go with me. Full stop.
I've seen the damage for decades among the Dutch Reformed with prioritizing covenant over conversion. Kuyper is responsible for that and there is no way to get over that part of his legacy. He had reasons for doing what he did, but it was a pendulum swing too far the wrong way.
Last edited:
darrellmaurina
Puritan Board Junior
In reference to my last post with the link to the Reveil, note this sentence from the article: "Few English-speaking evangelicals are aware that shortly after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, there began at Geneva an evangelical awakening that leavened French-speaking Protestantism in Switzerland and France before spilling across borders into the Rhine region of today’s Germany, the then-combined Belgium and the Netherlands, and the Piedmont region of what would become Italy."
The last sentence there refers to the Waldensians in the Piedmont.
There are reasons why even today, two hundred years later, there are connections between Dutch Reformed people and Italian Waldensians, and why the Senate Majority Leader of the Italian Senate, himself a talented musician in addition to being the most prominent evangelical Protestant in Italy, is producing a modern Italian version of the Genevan Psalter and following the model of the Gereformeerde Bond of working within rather than seceding from his synod. Senator Malan has a thousand things to do in his role in politics that are far more important than helping me, but he took the time to proofread our sign for our little church in Hazelgreen in the Missouri Ozarks to make sure we didn't have any stupid mistakes.
Kuyper was doing the equivalent sorts of things, even as Prime Minister of the Netherlands, helping tiny little churches with things that nobody could realistically have expected a very important politician to do. It made a difference, and it was a significant part of his success in both the ecclesiastical and political worlds.
As that article link points out, the Anglosphere is important, but there are a lot of Reformed people in Europe who became confessionally Reformed in the 1800s entirely apart from the role of the Americans or British.
Kuyper comes far more from that part of the Reformed tradition than from the Anglo-American part of it.
Christodulus
Puritan Board Freshman
The author is very strongly focused and critical of presumptive regeneration. In fact, I think it would be fair to say he blasts Kuyper for it. But I find this criticism (albeit a common one) a strange one (and not only because it refers to “so-called covenant children” as though he believes there is no such thing): “If so-called covenant children are to be regarded as regenerate, then there is no need to tell them, ‘Ye must be born again.’” I do not mean to defend Kuyper’s view (which I do not feel confident I understand), but this does not seem to follow from any kind of “presumptive regeneration”. This perhaps comes from an erroneous understanding of law and gospel (something which certainly is historic Reformed understanding that is sadly under-appreciated in modern Reformed circles). It commonly seems to be assumed, and in some extreme cases (e.g. Doug Wilson) explicitly stated, that the first use of the law excludes Christians; that the law does not have the function of exposing sin and leading to Christ except for pagans. As though true Christians did not sin, and did not need Jesus.
On the contrary, not only is it necessary for regenerate covenant children to be converted, it is necessary for regenerate professing adults to be converted, and that frequently. Not that they ever are deconverted or forfeit their justification, but they do grieve the Holy Spirit and their own conscience, they do hinder and harm their own sense of peace, they disrupt their own assurance, and they join Peter in saying “I do not know Him” with their hands if not their lips. Our hearts ought to be broken by our own failure of God’s law, and it ought to impress upon us our perpetual need for a Savior. You never outlive your need for the gospel. This continual need for law and gospel is aptly described in Heidelberg Catechism 115: “Q. Since no one in this life can keep the Ten Commandments perfectly, why does God want them preached so pointedly? A. First, so that all our life long we may more and more come to know our sinful nature and thus more eagerly seek the forgiveness of sins and righteousness in Christ.”
darrellmaurina
Puritan Board Junior
Scott, you raise valid questions.
Kuyper's version of presumptive regeneration has been mischaracterized and misunderstood. It also has been misused and abused.
You are in the URCNA. I assume most of the members of your church are Dutch. I actually think I preached there in the very early days when your church had left the CRC but I haven't been there since the 1990s. You see the good part of the covenant, in which fathers are taught to catechize their children and make sure they all know the facts of the faith. So far so good, and a lot better than what happens in a lot of American churches, including some churches in NAPARC denominations, where the large majority of people may well be evangelical but have not been catechized and do not know their confessions or much beyond the Five Points, and sometimes not even that.
Kuyper emphasized that. GREAT! That is what he meant by covenantal faithfulness.
J. Gresham Machen, who had met Kuyper and appreciated him, regularly spoke about how impressed he was that conservative Christian Reformed families had evening services with Heidelberg Catechism preaching. Machen believed catechism preaching for the whole congregation, and midweek catechesis for the church's children, were the keys to why Dutch conservatives remained Reformed while Presbyterian conservatives were often attracted to dispensationalism and various other non-Reformed movements within evangelicalism. He saw the problems of the later Bible Presbyterian split coming long before the PC(USA) secession.
The problem is that historical faith is NOT saving faith. It is entirely possible to have the whole catechism memorized, and even think one believes it, and go straight to hell.
Kuyper understood that. He knew he was not personally converted when he began his pulpit ministry. A lot of people who attack Kuyper forget that key fact of his life. He wasn't saying ALL covenant children are converted, but that we should PRESUME they are converted until they show clear evidence to the contrary. That's still wrong, but a different type of error than the much worse forms of presumptuousness and downplaying of the need for conversion that some advocate who claim to follow Kuyper. You probably won't see that in your URC today -- obviously the people in your church made a deliberate decision to leave the CRC and those who didn't want to be in the URC are somewhere else -- but go look at the CRC of three or four decades ago and it was all over the place.
Kuyper was reacting against a type of pietism that Jonathan Edwards himself warned against, namely, making certain sorts of Christian experience the test of whether a person was converted, or not. If you haven't seen the problems of the NRC, up close and personal -- and you probably won't in Beecher, Illinois -- it's hard to appreciate just how bad the problems were against which Kuyper reacted.
Making conversion dependent upon an intensely subjective experience is dangerous.
Kuyper's reaction against that was a pendulum swing from hyper-pietism to hyper-covenantalism.
Both are bad.
Last edited:
darrellmaurina
Puritan Board Junior
Totally unrelated, but I found your elder photo on your consistory in a black suit and tie.
It's here for those who want to go look: https://redeemerfrc.org/our-leadership/
Elder Mason Chase looks like the youngest man on the consistory (yes, looks can be deceiving) but in his black suit, white shirt, and black tie, he looks like photos of me in my 20s -- DECADES ago -- except that he doesn't wear glasses.
First: Compliments to you for understanding the importance of looking the part. A young person in office NEEDS to dress in ways that make clear that he actually does have authority and isn't "just a kid." I think you can understand why the elderly ladies of the Congregational church I was serving back in the early 1990s told me I needed to wear a Geneva gown so I didn't look like a teenage kid in the pulpit. Cultures differ, and I'm not totally insistent on coats and ties, but ripped blue jeans and T-shirts don't cut it in most conservative and confessional Reformed churches because they indicate a low view of office and ordination, and often a low view of worship. In the evangelical world, they come from the "Jesus people" movement of the 1960s which had major problems.
Second: Be glad for your youthful appearance, Mason -- there will be a day when you either wish you still looked young, or are amused when people think you are much younger than you are. My wife and I got called "forever thirty" by some elderly ladies in church a few weeks ago, which we think is funny because we are older than they are, and my wife is retired. (I could retire, but have no intention of ever retiring unless I am physically incapable of working.) Korean women expect to be misjudged for being much younger than they are, but it's a standard joke with people who know me well that my wife's prettiness and youthfulness must have rubbed off on me because she certainly didn't marry me for my looks.
This is meant as an encouragement. Trust me -- I know what it's like, in the secular world, to have to make people do what I tell them when I'm young enough to be their grandson. Being young can be a problem in conservative circles, and "dressing the part" can help.
As a member of the NRC I find this an interesting point. It is also a caricature of what is taught in the NRC. Evidences of being born again, also known as fruits of regeneration, are what we find in the beatitudes. This is also taught in the NRC. An intensely subjective experience is something that can be experienced but it is not by everyone who is born again. Scottish Puritan Thomas Boston outlines the experiential process of a sinner being "cut off" from the natural stock (the covenant of works under the first Adam) and ingrafted into the true vine (Jesus Christ). Again the degree of intensity can vary from person to person. What is taught is probably most clearly explained in the Canons of Dordt to which the NRC adheres to: The elect in due time, though in various degrees and in different measures, attain the assurance of this their eternal and unchangeable election, not by inquisitively prying into the secret and deep things of God, but by observing in themselves with a spiritual joy and holy pleasure, the infallible fruits of election pointed out in the Word of God - such as a true faith in Christ, filial fear, a godly sorrow for sin, a hungering and thirsting after righteousness, etc.
darrellmaurina
Puritan Board Junior
Thank you for your post. What you wrote appears -- at least upon first glance and initial reading, without seeking to unpack details -- to be standard experiential Calvinism with which most if not all people on the Puritan Board would agree.
I think we can agree that just as not all of the GKN/CRC could be blamed for Kuyper's teaching on presumptive regeneration, not all of the NRC/Gereformeerde Gemeenten can be blamed for what Kuyper was reacting against. There were real problems in the "black stocking churches" of the 1800s. Kuyper was not wrong to identify those problems. I believe he was very wrong by responding to those problems with an overreaction.
I knew people in both the Covell Avenue NRC and the Crescent Street NRC before Dr. Beeke's deposition and before the resulting denominational split, and I knew former members of both churches who had left for other denominations outside the NRC/HRC/FRC group, and I do not think it is unfair to say that, as with any denomination, some were better than others at representing their ecclesiastical tradition than others.
I've seen some really bad things personally in NRC circles -- what some former NRC members have described as "not piety, but pietism gone to seed" -- but I have seen far worse problems in the CRC. All churches have problems because all people are sinners. Given the choice it's obvious which problems I would pick. I'd far rather err in the particulars of depending upon God and His grace than the errors of presuming upon the covenant.
May God bless your profession and grant you continued reliance on His sovereign power to save.
Similar threads
- Locked
