The Rev. Dr. David Coffin is pastor of New Hope Presbyterian church, a 20-year-old congregation that meets in Fairfax City’s Fire Station No. 3. Coffin, a student of early American theologians Jonathan Edwards and Robert Dabney, is said to be one of the most learned men of his denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America.

Coffin will speak in Washington at Christ Reformed Church’s “Christianity and Politics” lecture series later this month alongside other well-known Reformed intellectuals. Coffin sat down with The Washington Examiner to talk about his lecture, “The Spirituality of the Church,” and his own faith in God.

Do you consider yourself to be of a specific faith?
I’m certainly a Christian. The problem is that’s a pretty generic term these days. I would say that I’m a Catholic Christian in that I hold to the fundamentals of the faith as set forth in the historic creeds of the church. I’m a Protestant Christian in that I believe the Reformation was a return of the church to its original scriptural foundations. I’m a Reformed Christian, meaning that the way of salvation understood in historic Reformed or Calvinistic Christianity seems to me most faithful to the Scriptures.

What is the “spirituality of the church”?
In a way it’s a corollary to the idea of religious liberty, the idea of the separation of church and state. It’s the doctrine that the church shouldn’t intrude into the government, that the church has a limited calling, given to it by Christ that it doesn’t have the freedom to expand upon. It’s a doctrine that’s fallen on hard times now. But the idea of it goes back as far as the Westminster Confession of Faith, which says synods are not to interfere into the affairs of the commonwealth but are to devote themselves to the life of the church. People nowadays think whatever Christians are called to do the church is called to do and vice versa. But this is a mistake. The believer is called to engage in politics, but the church is not, as such. So for example, the church can scripturally say abortion is the taking of an innocent life.

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