This is not just a lament for the evident slide of the CRC toward the American mainline (liberalism) but to note how that happened. The CRC didn’t become liberal overnight. Most of the CRC still probably isn’t classically liberal as much as it is broadly evangelical, which is the bridge between confessionalism and liberalism. Conservatives, even staunch conservatives such as R. B. Kuiper in the 1920s, warned of the dangers of “confessionalism” and thought they could steer a conservative course between liberalism and confessionalism. By the 1950s, however, Kuiper essentially admitted (without saying so) that move had failed.

Recently I’ve been stressing to my students the importance of believing their senses. Maybe it’s because each autumn I re-read the Apostolic Fathers (and other patristic writers) and walk the students through the threats posed by Basilides, Valentinus, and Marcion (pre-Gnostic, Gnostic, and Dualist) and perhaps it’s also because it seems that people seem to be having a hard time believing what they are seeing around them—how often do you find yourself asking, “Is this really happening?”—and responding accordingly. For whatever reason I am impressed anew recently with the need for Christians to believe their senses and to understand that God made the world to be known and he made us to know it. This much is evident from Romans chapters 1 and 2. In Romans 1:20, Paul says, “For [God’s] invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” That phrase “clearly perceived” (νοουμενα καθοραται) signals something about how Paul thought that we know things. He assumed the general reliability of our senses. Our older Reformed writers picked up on this and built on it. In our age, however, for a variety of reasons—some of the good, some of them not good—we have come increasingly not to trust our senses. I suspect that the rise of electronic technology is also making us less confident about our sense experience and cutting us off from the world that is and sequestering us in artificial e-worlds.

Historically, when we have refused to believe our eyes, however, things have not gone well. There were rumors and more than rumors about what the Germans and others were doing with the Jews and other groups. Many didn’t want to hear or didn’t want to believe what was happening. Even today there are those who deny what really did happen. Don’t bother posting wacky comments on the HB denying the Holocaust. I’ll delete them and ban you from commenting. Those who study public safety will tell you that people frequently refuse to believe that something bad is happening even though they can see and hear it. People have to be taught not to deny what they are hearing and seeing, for their own safety and that of others.

Denial of what is happening right before us happens in religious and ecclesiastical contexts too. When I first started writing about what we then called ‘The Shepherdite Movement” (later the self-described Federal Vision movement), that we are justified with God by faith and works (as Norman Shepherd said in the mid-70s), people were disbelieving. This skepticism about what was happening right in front people is part of why it took seven years for WTS/Philadelphia to deal with “The Shepherd Case.” The same thing was true when the self-described Federal Vision (really the Shepherd Vision Movement) picked up on his covenant theology (in by grace, stay in by cooperation with grace) and elaborated on it (baptismal union with Christ etc). People were disbelieving. “Reformed folk can’t possibly be saying such things!” But they were. It took time for us all to believe our senses, that yes, what we were seeing in print and hearing in sermons really was what it seemed: a flat contradiction of the Scriptures as understood by the Reformed churches.

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