Among the Reformed confessions, however, particularly within what have been called “The Three Forms of Unity,” (The Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Canons of Dort), we can find carefully reasoned articulations of biblical truth pastorally aimed at the heart in ways that still speak to the masses. 

If you’re a Protestant Christian, imagine that someone you don’t know asks you to explain in one sentence (no run-ons!) why your church doesn’t pray to Mary or the saints. How would you respond? As you think it over, let’s think about the historical, theological, and present-day significance of what just happened, and what an opportunity you’ve been given.

This person has invited you to engage in polemics, the advancing of biblical doctrine against unbiblical distortions of it. And although you’d be doing it here informally, the effort to persuade someone of our Lord’s teaching is always a serious undertaking. In our radically post-Christian culture, and amidst so many revelations of abuse in the church, it’s also an extremely sensitive one. Today, the way eternal truth is presented is especially consequential, and we in Reformed circles need to be especially careful.

There can be a tendency among confessional, Reformed, orthodox Protestants to be attracted to the spirited, occasionally aggressive, sometimes personally insulting words the original Reformers launched against their Roman Catholic counterparts. But when we view the Reformers’ explosive rhetoric as justification for us to “go and do likewise” in our teaching, preaching, and online posting – whatever the topic and whomever the target – we tend to ignore the crucial differences between their circumstances and ours. Theirs was a literally life and death struggle to proclaim the gospel; those whom they opposed in writing represented an organization that condemned them to hell in official church declarations and commissioned the torture and assassination of their ministers. We should blush at imitating the Reformers’ heated polemics if we haven’t passed through such flames ourselves. And it’s not just the temperature of their historically conditioned language that should give us pause.

In our present-day efforts at theological persuasion, we should hesitate to use antiquated language and technical terminology that does not translate to our times. However much we rightly admire the linguistic styles and structures of Reformed writings from centuries past, the effort to rhetorically recreate conditions long gone actually runs afoul of the principles and practice of Reformed confessionalism. Repristination is not Reformed.

The Reformed confessions were written to carry old truth into contemporary times. They spoke with relatable language to situations the church was presently enduring.

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