Part VI – A Time To Confess
This is a new series from Rev. Cedric Parsels covering the history of gravamina in the Christian Reformed Church.
In this series of articles, I have sought to lay out a more accurate history of the Christian Reformed Church’s (CRC) approach to gravamina. Contrary to Prof. Smith’s claims, the CRC’s official policy from 1857 to 1976 was that our officebearers had to subscribe unconditionally to the doctrines contained in our confessions. And Synod 1976’s invention of ‘confessional-difficulty gravamina’ did nothing to change that policy. If so, however, then where did the idea come from that councils can allow officebearers to take exception to our confessions?
The answer to this question is relatively simple: some churches and institutions have found the CRC’s policy toward subscription too costly to put into practice. For example, suppose you serve a smaller church and there is a person whom your council believes would make a great elder or deacon, but there is only one problem: the person in question cannot sign the Covenant for Officebearers (CFO). Maybe they disagree with our doctrines of infant baptism, election, or limited atonement. What do you do?
Or consider the minister who signed the Covenant for Officebearers ten years ago in good faith, but now disagrees with the confessions. After reading Barth, perhaps they no longer believe that the Bible is the infallible Word of God (cf., Belgic, Arts. 3-7). After reading Wolterstorff, perhaps they no longer believe in God’s eternality (cf., Belgic, Art. 1). After reading a synodical report, perhaps they no longer believe that Christ’s spiritual order for His church requires a congregation to have elders and deacons (cf., Belgic, Art. 30). They grew up in the CRC. It has played an important role in their ‘Dutch’ self-identity. All their credentialling has prepared them for ministry in the CRC. All their work experience has been in the CRC. They enjoy their CRC community. Their kids go to the local Christian school. Their family lives in the parsonage. They come to you and your council to explain that they no longer agree with the confessions on these points. What do you do?
These and similar scenarios have played out in the CRC for decades. And because some councils didn’t want to have to leave people off their list of potential elders and deacons and because they did not want to instruct their minister to submit a confessional-revision gravamen, they pursued illicit solutions.
Perhaps the oldest solution has been for councils and officebearers to turned a blind eye when their colleagues voice disagreement with the confessions. Writing in December 1976, Harry Boer wrote in The Reformed Journal that “among the more or less theologically conscious elements” of the CRC, “a common acceptance of a certain unmeasured, undefined slice of the creeds” had become “let us say, ‘negotiable’…” (p.23). According to Boer, when working among members of this “self-conscious theological community,” a minister could openly reject certain doctrines without any fear of reprisal. Other doctrines they could reject (e.g., reprobation), but they were to keep more or less quiet about it so as not to upset the unenlightened. And some doctrines they could not openly deny at all, because they were considered too central to the community’s faith. Boer believed that this whole situation was dishonest and unworthy of a church of Christ, but it was, he argued, the unofficial arrangement that the CRC’s leadership (right, left, and center) had more or less agreed to tolerate.
Uncomfortable with turning a blind eye, however, some churches in the 1980s and 1990s chose a more radical solution. They believed that the best way forward was simply to not require officebearers to subscribe to the confessions at all. In an overture to Synod 2004, Classis B.C. South-East admitted that many of its churches “no longer used the [Form of Subscription], because many individuals had difficulty signing it” (Agenda for Synod 2008, p.245; Agenda for Synod 2004, p. 435). Synod 2004 mildly rebuked these churches, but it also agreed to send out a questionnaire “to inquire of each congregation as to the methods by which the churches comply with the provisions of Article 5” (Acts of Synod 2004, p.633). The results of that study led to our current Covenant for Officebearers.
It is in this broader context of churches trying to evade the CRC’s official policy of unconditional subscription that some churches most likely started misusing confessional-difficulty gravamina. Prof. Smith in her Summary says that, when the Church of the Savior in South Bend, IN asked Dr. Alvin Plantinga whether he would serve as an elder, Dr. Plantinga submitted a confessional-difficulty gravamen in which he expressed his disagreement with the Synod of Dordt’s teaching on election and reprobation. Prof. Smith says that she cannot exactly pinpoint when this took place. But, since Dr. Plantinga was at Notre Dame from 1983 until 2010, we can definitively say that it was at some point in that time period.
We don’t know exactly how it came about that someone at Church of the Savior thought to use a confessional-difficulty gravamen in this way. Was it the council’s own invention? Or did the council reach out in some way to Henry De Moor (Professor of Church Order at Calvin Theological Seminary from 1986-2010)? We don’t know. What we do know, however, is that what the Church of the Savior did was illicit.
I mention Prof. De Moor in this last connection, because I think Prof. De Moor has probably done more than anyone else to mainstream this third approach to confessional evasion. As far as I have found, Prof. De Moor’s 2010 Church Order Commentary is the first source to suggest that a confessional-difficulty gravamen permits councils to grant officebearers an exemption from having to confess all the doctrine contained in our confessions (De Moor, Church Order Commentary, 2nd Ed., p. 422). He appears to make his case completely dependent on the phrase in our church order that says a council must render a “judgment” on an officebearers confessional-difficulty gravamen (C.O, Supplement, Art.5, B-1). According to Prof. De Moor, this judgement is about whether the council can “tolerate” the officebearer’s disagreement. But as I have argued before, the accuracy of this interpretation is highly improbable. There is nothing in our history to suggest that Synod 1976 intended to allow exceptions by way of confessional-difficulty gravamina and CRC commentators, from Harry Boer to Bob Godfrey, were still saying in the late 1980’s that the CRC required unconditioned subscription. The inaccurate nature of Prof. De Moor’s interpretation is also suggested by the fact that churches farther afield from West Michigan during the 1990’s, such as those in Classis B.C. South-East, decided to take a radically different approach to confessional evasion by foregoing confessional subscription altogether. It seems unlikely that those churches would have adopted such a radical measure, if it had been common knowledge that confessional-difficulty gravamina could be used as Prof. De Moor suggests.
To conclude this series, our current controversy over gravamina represents the clash of two visions for the CRC. On the one hand, there are those who want the CRC to remain committed to our original purpose, namely, of raising a confessional Christian and Reformed banner over the North American religious landscape. And we want this because we actually believe what we say when we sign the Covenant for Officebearers, namely, that these doctrines “fully agree with the Word of God.” Some of us may be open to Synod creating a way for officebearers to take some exceptions to our confessions, but it cannot be on the model offered by Prof. Smith and the denominational offices. That approach seems to us to be both immoral and toxic to confessionalism. On the other hand, there are those who seem to want the CRC to become nothing more than a smaller version of the Presbyterian Church (USA); a denomination in which virtually anyone – regardless of their commitment to confessional Reformed doctrine – can serve in ordained ministry.
Accordingly, there is more at stake at Synod 2023 than whether our denomination continues to require officebearers to confess the Bible’s teaching on unchastity. Synod 2023’s response to overtures asking for a clarification of the gravamen process (such as the one coming from Classis Grandville) will determine which of the two visions mentioned above will direct the CRC in the future. The question our synodical delegates must answer is: are we to be a confessionally Reformed denomination or not?