Continental Reformed Protestantism

And, and so they know that, but they don't know what happened from the end of Acts to modern times.

Now, some of your, you know, academic people, and especially in the Reformed camp, will know the Reformation till now.

And they know Martin Luther and John Calvin and, and Zwingli and all those guys.

Not so much the English Reformation, but the Continental Reformation.

But the second reason is this.

you know, the circle in which I travel would be the Reformed camp, and I thought we already understood Roman Catholicism, and even if you don't know the particular details, I was under the assumption, and maybe foolishly, I know there are camps in which people say that they are Reformed Catholic, so maybe it was a foolish presumption on my part, but...

I thought as Reform folks and as Protestants, we understood that Roman Catholicism was incompatible with what the Bible actually has to say.

And so when all of a sudden you see various kinds of alliances forming, whether they be in the church, parachurch ministries, or even for political purposes, Where it's like, hey, no, we Protestants can partner with Roman Catholics in this way or in this particular vein, such as politics.

When you go back and you read the original Westminster Confession of Faith, many American Presbyterians don't actually understand that they are reading an edited version.

I actually once met a pastor's son who grew up in the PCA church who didn't even know that the original Westminster Confession of Faith said this.

But the original Westminster Confession of Faith says in chapter 25, verse 4, "...there is no other head of the church but the Lord Jesus Christ, nor can the Pope of Rome in any sense be head thereof." But is that Antichrist, that man of sin and son of perdition that exalts himself in the church against Christ and all that is called God? And likewise, the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith says in chapter 26, section 4, The Lord Jesus Christ is the head of the church, in whom, by the appointment of the Father, all power for the calling, institution, order, or government of the church is invested in a supreme and sovereign manner." Neither can the Pope of Rome in any sense be head thereof, but is that Antichrist, the man of sin and son of perdition, that exalts himself in the church against Christ and all that is called God, whom the Lord shall destroy with the brightness of his coming." That is the historic Reformed understanding of the Pope, that he is an Antichrist.

And I need to point out here that Reformed Baptists and Presbyterians, they're agreed on almost everything.

That's the group I'm talking about.

So, some of the major incongruities between evangelical and Reformed theology, the one that has always struck me as the most poignant is nothing is more central to evangelical thought practice and spirituality than the conversion narrative, right? The being born again by inviting Jesus into your heart, praying the sinner's prayer, that kind of model of Christian initiation.

And that is not classical Reformed theology at all.

Classical Reformed theology maintains a modified doctrine of baptismal regeneration.

Modified.

And here's the modification.

You know, the Catholic view, the Lutheran view, the Anglican view, the Orthodox view is that the order of baptism really does regenerate the soul and brings a person to new life in Christ.

Calvin, who really kind of shaped Reformed theology on this issue, didn't deny that that takes place, but he inserted a qualifier, and his qualifier was, in the elect.

There's Calvin, and then there are the Calvinists, and the Calvinists got Calvin wrong.

The argument was that later Reformed scholasticism took Calvin's warm, Christ-centered, biblically alive theology and turned it into something cold, speculative, and rationalistic.

That thesis shaped much of 20th-century theology, and then Richard Muller came along and spent decades in the primary sources and found that the picture was substantially wrong.

Dr. Venema's own scholarship sits right at this intersection, and I can't think of a better conversation to close this series with.

They im- imported, uh, Aristotelian categories from medieval scholasticism, and the result was something called Calvinism that had actually departed from Calvin in pretty fundamental ways.

If that's right, the implications are enormous.

It means the Reformed confessions are already a step removed from Calvin, that the scholastic tradition is suspect, and that authentic Reformed theology requires going back behind the confessions to Calvin himself, and maybe even using Calvin against his own confessional heirs.

And so you can see why that was an attractive argument to many people.