Our responsibility is not to produce great success in our strength. Our responsibility is to be faithful and thereby to be instruments that God may use just as He will. Our great concern should not be our success or our will, but it should be God’s will and God’s success. And as Calvinists, our confidence will be that God will accomplish His purpose. 

The calling of Ligonier Ministries is to renew the churches through a growing knowledge of biblical Christianity, which is to say a knowledge of historic Calvinism. Ligonier is continuing the teaching ministry of R.C. Sproul, one of the best minds and one of the most balanced, faithful, and effective Reformed teachers of the last half-century. He inherited and continued a marvelous tradition: the militant stance for the fundamentals of the faith of J. Gresham Machen; the scholarship and Reformed orthodoxy of old Princeton Seminary; the evangelizing, Reformed revivalism of the First Great Awakening; the confessional and experiential Calvinism of the Westminster Confession of Faith; the teaching of John Calvin and the Reformation; and the legacy of Augustine and true catholicity. What a heritage is ours. How much we have inherited from those who have gone before. What a responsibility for us to preserve and advance what we have received.

We recognize that the great accomplishments of Christians in the past are now challenged in unique ways. After more than 1,500 years of Christianity’s providing the dominant worldview in the West, we now find ourselves living in a post-Christian world. Certainly in terms of Calvinism, our numbers, our influence, and our fervor seem much diminished. I was reminded of this in an essay by John Updike. Thinking about those beautiful Congregational churches on village greens in New England, he wrote: “Joy and aspiration have shaped these churches, but a certain melancholy may fill them. Puritanism faded into Unitarianism and thence to stoic agnosticism; these gallant old shells hold more memories than promises.”¹ Has our movement come to hold more memories than promises? That is the great issue, it seems to me, before us today. My passion and my concern are that we be committed to the notion that Calvinism holds more promises than memories, as rich and glorious as those memories are.

The title of this essay, “The Whole Counsel of God,” comes from Acts 20:27, from the words of the Apostle Paul as he encouraged the Ephesian elders in their future service of the Lord. He said to them in part:

You yourselves know how I lived among you the whole time from the first day that I set foot in Asia, serving the Lord with all humility and with tears and with trials that happened to me through the plots of the Jews; how I did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable, and teaching you in public and from house to house, testifying both to Jews and to Greeks of repentance toward God and of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. And now, behold, I am going to Jerusalem, constrained by the Spirit, not knowing what will happen to me there, except that the Holy Spirit testifies to me in every city that imprisonment and afflictions await me. But I do not account my life of any value nor as precious to myself, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God. And now, behold, I know that none of you among whom I have gone about proclaiming the kingdom will see my face again. Therefore I testify to you this day that I am innocent of the blood of all, for I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God. Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood. I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them. Therefore be alert, remembering that for three years I did not cease night or day to admonish every one with tears. And now I commend you to God and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified. (Acts 20:18–32)

Paul called on the Ephesian elders to preserve and build on the Christian truth that he had brought to them. He had given them “the whole counsel of God” and called on them to live courageously on the basis of that truth. Today we need a courageous Calvinism for the unique time in which we live. What is the character of that courageous Calvinism that we need? What is the truth of God that we must embrace, live, and teach?

Comprehensive Calvinism

The first element of courageous Calvinism that we need is a comprehensive Calvinism. You notice how Paul talked about the “whole counsel of God” (v. 27), that he did not hold back from them “anything that was profitable” (v. 20). Paul spoke very much in the spirit of our Lord Jesus Christ, who sent out His disciples in the Great Commission to go and teach “all that I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:20). Scripture and our Calvinistic heritage are clear that we are committed to all that the Lord has revealed in His Word. We seek no shrunken religion. We seek no minimalist doctrine. We seek the fullness of what the Lord has revealed to us. We stand with Jeremiah as the Lord spoke to him: “Thus says the LORD: Stand in the court of the LORD’s house, and speak to all the cities of Judah that come to worship in the house of the LORD all the words that I command you to speak to them; do not hold back a word” (Jer. 26:2). The task that is committed to us is to speak the whole counsel of God, all that God has revealed. Ligonier exists to help Christians study that Word in its totality and grow in that Word.

Our growth is founded on and rooted in our commitment to the Word and its inerrant authority. We embrace the Word in the spirit of John Calvin, who said, “A soul, therefore when deprived of the Word of God, is given up unarmed to the devil for destruction.”² Our conviction is that the Word must be our sword and our defense. The Word in its complete truthfulness is what we need and that to which we are committed.

Calvin, commenting on Jeremiah 42:5–6, said:

If we desire to prove our fidelity to God, the only way of acting is, to regard his Word as binding, whether it be agreeable or otherwise, and never to murmur, as the ungodly do; for when God would have a yoke laid on them, they complain that his doctrine is too hard and burdensome. Away, then, with all those things which can render God’s Word unacceptable to us, if we desire to give sure proof of our fidelity.³

We accept the Word of God in its fullness. We are committed to it, both where it is pleasing to us and where it pinches us. Because of our sins and our ignorance, we must have the Word of God to correct us. And that means that we stand committed to a full biblical theology. J. Gresham Machen expressed this forcefully, reminding us that the “Christian life is the fruit of Christian doctrine, not its root, and Christian experience must be tested by the Bible, not the Bible by Christian experience.”⁴ We are committed to this notion that the Word judges us; we do not judge the Word. The Word directs us; we do not direct the Word.

R.C. Sproul continued and deepened this commitment with his leadership in defending the doctrine of the inerrancy of the Bible during his ministry. Inerrancy became a touchstone of true biblical fidelity, helping to reveal those who tried to use traditional terms for biblical authority and reliability but used those terms in equivocal ways.

Because of our commitment to the Word, we are committed to the notion of the importance of theology. We are committed to the idea that theology is a reflection on the Word and an effort on the part of human beings to summarize that Word. We are convinced that theology is a useful, necessary discipline for appropriating the Scriptures for us. Evelyn Waugh, the British novelist, gave one of the best definitions of theology I know after his journey to Ethiopia for the coronation of the emperor Haile Selassie. After observing the extreme mystery of the rituals of the Ethiopian Coptic Church, he rejoiced in a theology that makes clear what God’s ways are. He wrote, “I saw theology as the science of the simplification by which nebulous and elusive ideas are formalized and made intelligible and exact.”⁵ The “science of simplification”—how seldom theology has been seen that way, but how true that is. Theology should make clear God’s will and God’s way as He has expressed them in His Word. And we here at Ligonier are committed to the full theology of the confessions to which we have subscribed, as they summarize biblical teaching for us.

Now, some have said that stressing the importance of theology makes Christianity too intellectualized. Some fear this means that only theologians have a role in the church. Perhaps in the tradition of our Reformed churches, there has been some danger of that. But it is not inherent in our tradition. We are not saying that theology is all there is to Christianity. But we are saying that theology must shape life. There must be life, but it must be shaped and directed by the Word of God.

Indeed, our Reformed heritage says that we do have more than theology. We also have piety; we have worship; we have loving service to the Lord. All these elements of Calvinism also flow out of the teachings of Scripture. We can see that clearly, for example, in the work of the Westminster Assembly. We need to remember that the Westminster Assembly not only gave us a confession of faith as a summary of doctrine, but it also gave us catechisms to teach the faith. It gave us a directory of worship to guide our meeting with God. It gave us a form of government to help in the organization of the church. And it gave us a Psalter to voice our praise to God. As we seek a comprehensive Calvinism, we must be sure that we have not shrunk it just to theology—however full our theology might be. We must be renewed in the fullness of a Reformed life flowing out of a Reformed theology. Our lives must follow a pattern of Bible study and prayer, of Word and sacrament, of self-denial and active love, and of Sabbath and of Psalm. We have seen a great decline in Reformed piety, in Reformed life, and I would suggest that decline is tied intimately to our loss of Sabbath and of Psalm. Too many of us have lost a day of rest, worship, study, and reflection and have lost the Psalms that put steel in our souls. We need to recapture that fullness of Calvinistic experience as well as Calvinistic theology.

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