Honest question to the pastors of Abide: Are people outside of new CRC still God’s chosen? Can they experience Salvation if they aren’t in the CRC (and if they aren’t signing the required documents)?
It sounds like a ridiculous question (and anyone who reads it should think so). And yet your musings in the recent months have made me wonder.
Yes, because sex is inherently evil, we need the guidance of scripture and the confessions in order to make good out of what is evil. Sex is so evil, in fact, that our very salvation depends on us following scriptural and confessional guidance on human sexuality.
I completely agree. If there is any failing in it is because “The CRC cannot sustain herself on family legacy, it must make the critical shift into a church that defines herself by what she believes and not by family connections.” Amen! The votes in the last three Synods were a shock to the one fourth of our denomination that sees being part of the CRC Dutch family was more important than holding up our commitment to our creeds and confessions. These last three Synods show we are beginning to become more than just a paid of Dutch Wooden Shoes.
I was at both Synod 2022 & 2024 and I gave a floor speech on how my background led me to support a limited time on holding a gravamen.
“I am in support of this overture. And here is why.
I did not grow up in the CRC. Instead, I fell in love with the CRC doctrines and teachings from afar. The writing of Berkhof, Berkouwer, Bavink were my mentors into that Reform faith. But, most importantly, I fell in love with its church order. I envied it. Why? Because the independent church movement in which I was a minister in for over ten years had no church order, no way of accountability for its leadership. They didn’t hold to any creeds or confessions other than what the person in the pulpit taught on any given Sunday. And, as a direct consequence, what our churches believed would change literally from Sunday to Sunday. Pastors were considered to be prophets and their teaching was rooted in personal revelations rather than in the clear teaching of the Holy Scriptures. Pastors were considered raised up by God, not men, and therefore it was thought that God alone hires them and God alone could fire them.
I say all of this because I love our confessions and I especially love our Church Order. I love them because I saw, first hand, what the alternative was in church organizations that didn’t have them. As one example, I love how the Heidelberg Catechism defines the Keys of the Kingdom of God for the church as two things. The first is “The preaching of the holy gospel and the second is Christian discipline toward repentance. Both of them open the kingdom of heaven to believers and close it to unbelievers.” This is what our catechism teaches us.
So as far as Graveman goes, it is part of our church discipline. And remember, Church discipline is another way of describing the word discipleship. To be a disciple of Christ means we under the discipline of Christ. It is what defines us as Christians. A case in point, Our Church order warns about this in Article 5, “However, no one is free to decide for oneself or for the church what is and what is not a doctrine confessed in the standards. In the event that such a question should arise, the decision of the assemblies of the church shall be sought and acquiesced in.” in other words we acquiesce to the discipline of our joint confessional beliefs. It is our confessional beliefs that tie us together as a church. This is why I joined the CRC.
Why do I believe this overture is so important? Because the alternative is spiritual chaos that leads to an every man for himself type of theology. It is a church run by personalities, of personal opinion and personal revelation rather than by the unifying confessional commitment to the word of the God. And brethren, I want you to know I lived in that world for twenty years and I have seen the unchecked authoritarian impulses of it and its cost upon the spiritual lives of the people who belong to those churches. More often than not, those churches become personality cults.
Clearly that is not us, we are confessional church. We are united around our creedal and confessional faith not around personalities, or personal opinion or personal revelation. Without a gravamen that , as our the discipleship and discipline of our unified confessional faith that is exactly what happens.
Why were the doctrines and confessions as they were not considered to be enough then? Why did one part of the denomination feel the need to add their own clarification and then declare that that was in fact also confessional? With the process in place, what else can be declared newly confessional in upcoming years? Seems like a church doing the same thing as your personal-opinion example.
Because one part of the denomination was attempting to gaslight the rest of us, and pretend God's Word no longer applied to this matter, and that they were free to believe and teach whatever they wished, and still consider themselves CRC! That was what spawned the necessity of further clarification of what it means to be CRC.
Gaslighting! So, they were intentionally attempting to inflict psychological abuse on the denomination? Or were they expressing a straightforward difference of opinion on how to interpret some specific verse of the Bible that so clearly to you states that all homosexual relationships are unchaste no matter what but maybe does not do the same for others when they try their best to consider other contextual and historical layers?
You calling it gaslighting tells me a lot, though. Thanks for that.
Now that Abide got their victory, what happens? Are they the dog that caught the car? Will they just churn out a warmed-over article every few days indefinitely continuing to say “we’re right, we swear, we did the right thing, here’s more justification!”?
I saw an article this evening about a Nazarene theologian getting excommunicated for his affirming views. Maybe that gives me an idea for Abide’s next series of blog posts: Public notice with names and congregations of all those who filed a gravamen and haven’t been properly re-CRC’d yet. Names can the be nailed to the church door every Sunday morning with ushers checking the list as people file in during the prelude.
I would qualify this with two observations, one sociological, one biblical.
Sociologically, all institutions (and certainly churches) develop their own culture over time, Baptists don't look like Methodists, Presbyterians do not look like Christian Reformed. There are differences about how one approaches issues, about how one relates, about what cultural goods get prominence in the community. For instance, among the Christian Reformed education carries a high value; our schools are part of who we are. And so forth. the culture of our church not only establishes community with other, but helps us navigate in the larger world.
And theologically, we speak of the covenant as moving from one generation to the next. This is not only about propagation (though that), but also about memory. Churches are places where faithfulness is both remembered and passed forward; even now, we are doing this, even among the so-called "birthright" church.
Whether we start from the stance of confession or of birthright (and so culture and memory), the proof of both is not a what so much as a who, not a what we do but in who's image we become.
Who is the most CRCer? Silly to draw comparisons to eminent Alvin Plantinga. Desperate sounding.
Why not hammer the confessions into gold and dance around them to show us the CRCer you really are?
Sing it with me now . . .
🎵and they’ll know we are Christians by our specific-and-binding-interpretations-of-our-confessions, and they’ll know we are Christians by our . . . 🎶
Honest question to the pastors of Abide: Are people outside of new CRC still God’s chosen? Can they experience Salvation if they aren’t in the CRC (and if they aren’t signing the required documents)?
It sounds like a ridiculous question (and anyone who reads it should think so). And yet your musings in the recent months have made me wonder.
What we have to figure out is, how to convince everyone that sex is inherently evil, and that it has only one good outcome: procreation.
That is the goal of the Abide Project.
Yeah, the big sermon of our Convention last night, in a session open to the public, was on the goodness of sex, so no, you are 100% wrong!
Sex has to be beautiful, biblical and confessional. What's so wrong with it it needs these things?
What's so wrong? Our sins and sinful nature is what Scripture would point to as being wrong with us/the world/sex.
Yes, because sex is inherently evil, we need the guidance of scripture and the confessions in order to make good out of what is evil. Sex is so evil, in fact, that our very salvation depends on us following scriptural and confessional guidance on human sexuality.
I completely agree. If there is any failing in it is because “The CRC cannot sustain herself on family legacy, it must make the critical shift into a church that defines herself by what she believes and not by family connections.” Amen! The votes in the last three Synods were a shock to the one fourth of our denomination that sees being part of the CRC Dutch family was more important than holding up our commitment to our creeds and confessions. These last three Synods show we are beginning to become more than just a paid of Dutch Wooden Shoes.
I was at both Synod 2022 & 2024 and I gave a floor speech on how my background led me to support a limited time on holding a gravamen.
“I am in support of this overture. And here is why.
I did not grow up in the CRC. Instead, I fell in love with the CRC doctrines and teachings from afar. The writing of Berkhof, Berkouwer, Bavink were my mentors into that Reform faith. But, most importantly, I fell in love with its church order. I envied it. Why? Because the independent church movement in which I was a minister in for over ten years had no church order, no way of accountability for its leadership. They didn’t hold to any creeds or confessions other than what the person in the pulpit taught on any given Sunday. And, as a direct consequence, what our churches believed would change literally from Sunday to Sunday. Pastors were considered to be prophets and their teaching was rooted in personal revelations rather than in the clear teaching of the Holy Scriptures. Pastors were considered raised up by God, not men, and therefore it was thought that God alone hires them and God alone could fire them.
I say all of this because I love our confessions and I especially love our Church Order. I love them because I saw, first hand, what the alternative was in church organizations that didn’t have them. As one example, I love how the Heidelberg Catechism defines the Keys of the Kingdom of God for the church as two things. The first is “The preaching of the holy gospel and the second is Christian discipline toward repentance. Both of them open the kingdom of heaven to believers and close it to unbelievers.” This is what our catechism teaches us.
So as far as Graveman goes, it is part of our church discipline. And remember, Church discipline is another way of describing the word discipleship. To be a disciple of Christ means we under the discipline of Christ. It is what defines us as Christians. A case in point, Our Church order warns about this in Article 5, “However, no one is free to decide for oneself or for the church what is and what is not a doctrine confessed in the standards. In the event that such a question should arise, the decision of the assemblies of the church shall be sought and acquiesced in.” in other words we acquiesce to the discipline of our joint confessional beliefs. It is our confessional beliefs that tie us together as a church. This is why I joined the CRC.
Why do I believe this overture is so important? Because the alternative is spiritual chaos that leads to an every man for himself type of theology. It is a church run by personalities, of personal opinion and personal revelation rather than by the unifying confessional commitment to the word of the God. And brethren, I want you to know I lived in that world for twenty years and I have seen the unchecked authoritarian impulses of it and its cost upon the spiritual lives of the people who belong to those churches. More often than not, those churches become personality cults.
Clearly that is not us, we are confessional church. We are united around our creedal and confessional faith not around personalities, or personal opinion or personal revelation. Without a gravamen that , as our the discipleship and discipline of our unified confessional faith that is exactly what happens.
This is why I support this overture.”
Why were the doctrines and confessions as they were not considered to be enough then? Why did one part of the denomination feel the need to add their own clarification and then declare that that was in fact also confessional? With the process in place, what else can be declared newly confessional in upcoming years? Seems like a church doing the same thing as your personal-opinion example.
Because one part of the denomination was attempting to gaslight the rest of us, and pretend God's Word no longer applied to this matter, and that they were free to believe and teach whatever they wished, and still consider themselves CRC! That was what spawned the necessity of further clarification of what it means to be CRC.
Gaslighting! So, they were intentionally attempting to inflict psychological abuse on the denomination? Or were they expressing a straightforward difference of opinion on how to interpret some specific verse of the Bible that so clearly to you states that all homosexual relationships are unchaste no matter what but maybe does not do the same for others when they try their best to consider other contextual and historical layers?
You calling it gaslighting tells me a lot, though. Thanks for that.
Now that Abide got their victory, what happens? Are they the dog that caught the car? Will they just churn out a warmed-over article every few days indefinitely continuing to say “we’re right, we swear, we did the right thing, here’s more justification!”?
I saw an article this evening about a Nazarene theologian getting excommunicated for his affirming views. Maybe that gives me an idea for Abide’s next series of blog posts: Public notice with names and congregations of all those who filed a gravamen and haven’t been properly re-CRC’d yet. Names can the be nailed to the church door every Sunday morning with ushers checking the list as people file in during the prelude.
I would qualify this with two observations, one sociological, one biblical.
Sociologically, all institutions (and certainly churches) develop their own culture over time, Baptists don't look like Methodists, Presbyterians do not look like Christian Reformed. There are differences about how one approaches issues, about how one relates, about what cultural goods get prominence in the community. For instance, among the Christian Reformed education carries a high value; our schools are part of who we are. And so forth. the culture of our church not only establishes community with other, but helps us navigate in the larger world.
And theologically, we speak of the covenant as moving from one generation to the next. This is not only about propagation (though that), but also about memory. Churches are places where faithfulness is both remembered and passed forward; even now, we are doing this, even among the so-called "birthright" church.
Whether we start from the stance of confession or of birthright (and so culture and memory), the proof of both is not a what so much as a who, not a what we do but in who's image we become.