Over the
last 17 years or so, I’ve been referring to myself as being “charismatic Reformed” –
rooted in the theological tradition of John Calvin and charismatic in my
experiences.
Lately, many people are asking me what “charismatic Reformed”
stands for. What does “Reformed” mean for me, and how is my theology
“charismatic”?
I’ll try to
put some thoughts down in this blog. This is my no means a theological paper,
or a church vision document – merely some thoughts that might be helpful. Of
course, not everyone who considers themselves to be charismatic Reformed
necessarily agrees with all things I’ll be suggesting – this is just me.
1. It’s all about the Gospel of grace in Christ
In the words
of Tim Keller: “We are more sinful and
flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we
are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.”
That’s not
merely “imputed righteousness”, it’s passionate love and grace from our Maker,
the triune God! God created us to share in the eternal love between Father and
Son and Spirit and to glorify and be glorified, and to find our deepest joy and
fulfilment in God. When we chose self-centeredness instead, disobedient to our
divine calling, God in his great mercy did not abandon us to our sin, but
remained faithful despite our unfaithfulness. He took the burden of our sin and
all the consequences of it – the corruption of all creation – on himself, so we
may be restored in our divine calling: sharing in the love of the triune God
and enjoy Him forever. In other words, because
of the great love God has for us, we are adopted
by the Father as his children and heirs of God’s Kingdom of glory, in the Son, and through the Spirit of sonship (Romans 8:17; Galatians 4:7;
Revelation 21:7).
Grace
changes everything! When we realize that we are adopted as God’s children not
because of who we are (and how good we live), but because of who God is, we are
freed from condemnation and self-condemnation and freed to be changed from the inside out. Nothing we do or fail to do can make Him love
us more or less – we are loved and accepted in Jesus Christ. The Reformation
has coined the terms sola gratia, sola fide and solus Christus and soli Deo gloria
to capture this gospel of sheer grace.
Grace
enables us to be honest about our sins and flaws, not pretending to be holier
than we are. It frees us from moralism, from judging and excluding each other
when we fail to live up to God’s standard. We all are in need of God’s grace.
We all stumble and fall, and we all need to grow in Christ-likeness – not by
moral law (merely affecting outward behaviour), but from the inside out: through union with Christ in the Spirit.
This is why the Reformation has greatly valued the holy sacrament of the Lord’s Supper: our communion with Christ
through the Spirit. The Reformed liturgical documents teach us that Lord’s
table is not restricted to those who succeed in living holy, on the contrary:
it is for the very reason that we constantly fall short, that we desperately
need to be comforted, strengthened and
nourished through communion with Christ.
Within
contemporary Reformed theology, both the recent retrieval of the notion of
“being in Christ”, and the renewed trinitarian and pneumatological perspectives,
would seem to call for an even greater prominence of the holy sacrament of
communion in our corporate worship. I’d say, in a charismatic Reformed church Communion should be celebrated not casually but truly sacramentally, yet frequently and in an inclusive
manner: welcoming all who seek to follow Jesus Christ as their Lord and
Saviour, however messy their lives.
2. God’s plan of salvation comprises all of creation
God’s plan of salvation is not to redeem
people from the earth (eternal souls
to go to heaven), but it entails the redemption of the earth and the entire creation. It’s all about earth,
about the cosmic universe, about mountains and oceans and rivers, about birds
and livestock and wild animals, about communities and society, politics and
economics. The Kingdom of God, that we are heirs of, is over all creation. God does
not abandon his creation, but He brings it to completion and into his glory. God’s plan of salvation moves from creation
to new creation. We were not created to go to heaven, but for life on earth
– earth is our eternal destination, and earth is to be God’s dwelling place
when heaven comes down on earth and God will be “all in all”. Over against
gnostic and spiritualized tendencies within Christianity (also within
Evangelicalism and specifically Pentecostalism), this has been a strong
insistence of Reformed theology: God’s
salvation means wholeness for the entire creation, and earthly life matters –
including ecology, culture, politics, economics.
Over against
Anabaptist, traditional Pentecostal and some orthodox-Reformed tendencies to
downplay the importance of Christian involvement with culture, politics and
ecology, this Kingdom-perspective calls for social, political, cultural, and ecological engagement (the church
seeking the good for their city and society, expressing environmental
awareness, etc).
The notion
that creation is to be God’s dwelling
place, opens a deeper understanding of the significance of the indwelling
of the Spirit of God in us.
3. We are God’s covenant people
God’s
covenant with Noah and “every living creature on earth – birds, livestock, and
all the wild animals” (Genesis 9: 8-17), is followed by God’s covenant with
Abraham: “All the people on earth will be blessed through you” (Genesis 12, 22),
and Isaac and Jacob. God works his plan
of salvation through his chosen people: not elected out of the world, but set apart for
the sake of the world. Again, it is all about sheer grace: It is not
about people choosing for God, but God choosing for his people: Israel. God
takes the initiative for this covenant, and He warrants it himself. His people
merely have to respond to his grace, and act upon it in reliance on God.
The
Reformation emphasises the continuity of the Old and the New Testament: God
enfolds his single plan of salvation from creation to new creation. With the
new covenant in Christ, Israel is not replaced with the Church, but the people
of God is expanded to all who follow Jesus Christ as the Messiah of Israel,
including gentiles (“all the people of the earth”) (Hebrews 9: 15; Galatians
3:29). All who follow the Messiah, are
God’s covenant people.
A
charismatic Reformed church will hold this covenant notion dear, highlighting
the primacy of grace, the faithfulness of God from creation to new
creation, the communality of faith
(it’s about a people, over against individualistic tendencies in some strands
of contemporary Evangelicalism), and the calling
that comes with being the people of God: purposed for the blessing of the
world.
4. We are baptised into God’s covenant people…
When we are baptized – infant baptism and
faith baptism alike – we are baptized into God’s covenant people. Our
initiation into the people of God is God’s act of grace: it is his initiative,
and He warrants it, out of sheer grace and love – being taken up in the death
of the Son, we are transferred from death to the Kingdom of life. It is not
about our choice for God, but God’s choice for us. That’s grace in Christ.
Since we are
baptized into God’s people, it is by definition a communal event (not something
merely between the individual and God): becoming a child of the Father and heir
to the Kingdom - in the Son through the Spirit of sonship - simultaneously
involves being initiated into God’s family, his church.
Just as with the old covenant, children are
fully part of the covenant and its promises, not based upon their personal
choice for God but on God’s choice for them, and rooted in the communal faith
of the people of God (first of all their parents, but then also the entire
local church community). Any church should see many faith baptisms, as new
believers are touched by God’s grace and initiated into God’s people (this is
what we see in the New Testament: accounts of new believers being baptized). But
I’d say that the believer’s children should
be baptized at birth, as this seems to be the most consistent expression of the
notion that baptism is about God’s covenant with his people, and a sacrament of
grace.
Considering the gravity and radicality of this event - being saved and receiving new life through being taken up in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ - the recommendable way to baptize would be by immersion, both in the case of faith baptism and infant baptism.
5. … and the power of his Spirit is released in us
When a child is old enough to take
responsibility over her or his own life, she/he is called to respond to God’s
covenant grace, embracing what is received at baptism and taking the
responsibility to seek to live as a disciple of Jesus Christ and thus as a
witness to the coming Kingdom of God in both word and deed. This is what is
at stake at the public profession of faith, in the midst of the people of God
and public to the world around us. Responding to Jesus’ call to follow Him and
be his disciple is a big deal! Reformed churches are seriously neglecting their
theological richness when the public profession of faith has become something
of an automatism or a jaded ritual. Heaven rejoices when a person responds to
God’s grace and surrenders her or his life to Jesus to be his disciple, and so
should the church!
A public
profession of faith is a great opportunity to celebrate God’s grace received
through a godly upbringing in the midst of God’s family. Such a worship service
could very well begin with a ritual of “remembrance of baptism”, showing a
picture of the infant’s baptism, inviting parents (if present) to the front and
thanking God for their faith and his grace through their upbringing. Then
followed by a personal testimony by the child of her/his response to Jesus’
call to surrender her/his life and be his disciple, and the answering of
creedal questions.
It is only
in the power of the Spirit that we can live as disciples of Jesus Christ and
witnesses to the Kingdom of God. Therefore, an important element of the public profession of faith should be the
laying on of hands by the pastor/elders and prayer for the power of the Spirit. Anointing with oil would be a powerful way to express that believers share in the anointing of Christ, receiving the same Spirit that empowered Jesus Christ for his public ministry (see the Heidelberg Catechism; also section 8 of this blog). I would not refer to this as a “baptism with the Spirit” (as traditional
Pentecostal theology would assert), since we have received the Spirit of
sonship with our water baptism already. The Spirit was poured out into us, and
dwells within us. But the power of the indwelling Spirit may be “released” in
us, made actual and functional, empowering us for witness to the Kingdom of God.
According to the New Testament accounts,
this is an experienced reality, releasing the gifts of the Spirit in our lives
(including healing, prophecy, discernment, tongues, serving, teaching,
leadership, miracles, and so on; Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12). This may be
experienced at the moment of laying on of hands, or throughout the disciple’s
life.
The apostle
Paul urges us to be filled with the Spirit (throughout our lives, again and
again) – apparently this is something that requires our activity. He commands us
to strive for the spiritual gifts for
the upbuilding of the church and eagerly desire them – “be eager to prophesy”
(receiving and sharing a revelation in the church) “and do not forbid speaking
in tongues” (1 Corinthians 14). Timothy he urges to “fan into flame the gift of
God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands” (2 Timothy 1:6).
6. We are God’s Kingdom-people, the beginning of New Creation
This is the Gospel: The Kingdom of God,
that restores creation in the love of God, has begun in Jesus Christ. The
entire history of salvation is about God ushering in his Kingdom over all
creation, and the decisive moment is when the Son of God is resurrected from
the dead as the firstborn of the New Creation. In the words of N.T. Wright:
The Bible tells the story of how God became King. The followers of the Messiah are
God’s Kingdom people: To be God’s covenant people is to be his Kingdom people.
Here the
doctrine of church moves to the centre. The church is not merely a “gathering
of believers” (I think the Reformers may sometimes have been too meagre in
their appreciation of church here, in response to the Roman Catholic Church of
their days; and certainly Evangelical Congregationalists have been notoriously
poor on ecclesiology, as have been Pentecostals). Amazing as it is, the church
is God’s new beginning – his eschatological new people. At Pentecost, the
Spirit was poured out on the followers of Jesus Christ, igniting the church.
The Bible refers to the outpoured Spirit as the “down payment” (arrabōn) of the
future inheritance (the Kingdom of glory, as God dwells on the new earth), and
as the “firstfruit” (aparchē) of the new creation. Subsequently, the Spirit-filled church is referred to as the “firstfruit” of the new
creation. In all its weakness and deficiency, the church is the beginning of
God’s future creation.
The vocation of the church then, is to
truly live as God’s new people – no longer living according the world’s ideas
and values, but under the new order of the Kingdom of God. That is, loving God
and one another, seeking God’s shalom
for the world, by living from “the powers of the future age”. In doing so, the
church is both a sign and a tool of the coming of that Kingdom – proclaiming
the Kingdom in the power of the Spirit and demonstrating it.
When Jesus began
his public ministry proclaiming the Kingdom of God, he read from the scroll of
Isaiah (Luke 4). And when his disciples noticed his intimacy with the Father
and asked Him to teach them how to pray, He taught them what we came to call
“the Lord’s Prayer”. Both passages reveal how Jesus understood the messianic
Kingdom: reconciliation to God, healing of the sick, freedom for the captives,
food for the hungry, justice for the oppressed – in other words, the
restoration to wholeness of all creation in the Kingdom of God.
What does this entail for a local charismatic
Reformed church? First of all, that the congregation will be characterized by
being a place of Spirit-filled and Spirit-led worship – not just in its
Sunday worship services but in all its aspects of being. The church community
first of all is a temple: a place of God’s holy presence - here God’s
eschatological indwelling of creation takes its beginning. What we do in our gatherings – Word, sacraments, testimonies, sharing a
revelation, singing, praying – is aimed at helping one another to become aware
of God’s presence, entering into it and being regenerated by his Spirit, thus
glorifying God.
Practically,
this would translate in (among other things):
- times of praise and worship aimed at God’s presence in our midst, following not merely a “set list of songs” or “program” but the prompting of the Spirit, expecting the Spirit to move and minister in our midst
- cultivating a culture of church in which we share testimonies of what God is doing in our lives, share prophetic words for the strengthening of the church, glorify God for what He is doing, and seek to be filled with the Spirit so we can serve one another
- a practice of prayer in which we pray with one another in the power of the Spirit, bringing each other in the presence of God and expect Him to minister his grace (“prayer ministry”)
Secondly (and flowing from the above), such a church would be leading people to Christ, our King, and have ministries
of reconciliation, ministries of healing and deliverance, ministries of mercy, and
be engaged with social justice and environmental care, expressing the
shalom that comes with the Kingdom of God.
7. The church lives in the “in-between times”
As essential it is to understand that the
Kingdom of God has come in Christ, it is to understand that is still is in the
process of coming: it has been “inaugurated” in Christ and the outpouring of
the Spirit on the church, but not “realized” - it has to be consummated still,
at Christ’s return.
- Over against theologies that postpone any “materialization” of God’s salvation to the eschatological future (future eschatology), a charismatic Reformed theology will argue that the Kingdom has been inaugurated already, and we often may see glimpses of God’s future glory as we proclaim this – in terms of healing, restoration, wholeness.
- Over against triumphalist theologies that assert that “heaven” has “come on earth” already, and Christians should “name and claim” their future blessings in the present life – such as healing and prosperity, “declaring” a sick person healthy, or “declaring victory over financial problems” –, charismatic Reformed theology will argue that the church is living in the “in-between times”, awaiting the future consummation still: we still live in a reality that is scarred and burdened by sin and its consequences for all creation.
The church
thus lives in the mysterious tension of the coming Kingdom, living from the
powers of the future age while the powers of the present age continue around
us. This understanding of the “inaugurated
Kingdom” makes us continually open to signs and wonders and overwhelming
interventions of God, in a moment-by-moment expectancy, while never “claiming”
it and not being unnerved when future wholeness fails to happen yet.
Instead of
pretending to “possess” the power of the Spirit (and for instance have the
“ability” to heal people – as in some Pentecostal and charismatic strands), Reformed charismatics will emphasize the
“inaugurated” reality of the Kingdom, the sovereignty of God, and thus the need for a moment-to-moment dependency
on the Spirit of Christ. Yes, believers have “authority” and “power” in
Christ, but this is always a derived
authority and power: we receive it insofar as we move in Christ, in obedience
to Him, and following the Father in what He is doing in any given situation
(compare Jesus’ own dependency on the Father, as he said: “The Son can only do
what he sees the Father doing”).
This
awareness of our continuous dependency finds expression in, for instance,
- The introductory words at the very beginning of a Reformed Sunday worship gathering: “Our help is in the name of the LORD, who made heaven and earth” (votum)
- Inviting the Holy Spirit to move in the midst of the congregation, opening the eyes of our hearts to God’s presence and ministering God’s grace to us. It is not about the program that we have prepared, but about what God wants to do in our midst.
- The practice of prayer ministry, that concentrates on the presence of God and inviting Him to minister.
- The words of sending & blessing at the end of a Reformed Sunday worship gathering: As we are sent into the world as witnesses of the Kingdom of God, we confess that we are fully dependent on the Spirit of God, and seek to be blessed by God’s presence in us.
8. We hold to the priesthood of all believers and Presbyterian governance
One of the
great principles of the Reformation was the “priesthood of all believers”. All believers are priests before God
through our great high priest Jesus Christ. As believers, we all have direct
access to God through Christ, without the need for mediation by clergy or
saints. One aspect of this communal priesthood is that all believers are called to proclaim and minister God’s blessing and
shalom to people. The Heidelberg Catechism actually teaches us that all
believers “share in the anointing of Christ” and thus share in his threefold office of prophet, priest and
king, through the outpouring of the Spirit.
In a
charismatic Reformed church, it’s not just the pastor or the elders who do the
ministering and blessing, but all church
members are to be encouraged and equipped to minister God’s grace to others.
To each one is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good, says
Paul (1 Corinthians 12-14), to all have been given spiritual gifts and
ministries, and when believers come together, each one contributes.
Simultaneously,
a charismatic Reformed church will hold to a “presbyterian” governance of
church: the leadership of the church is
with elders (presbyters) – who are to be elected from the midst of the
congregation - and a pastor. This is not so much a “managing leadership”
but a spiritual leadership, "devoted to prayers and the ministry of the Word" –
they are to be “full of the Spirit and wisdom” as they are spiritually
responsible for the church (compare Acts 6: 1-7).
In addition to this spiritual leadership,
I’d suggest a charismatic Reformed church knows a variety of appointed
ministries (diakonia), including
evangelists, pastoral workers, deacons (ministries of mercy), worship leaders,
and teachers (reflecting both the contextual needs of the local church and the
charismata present in the congregation).
Flowing from
both the doctrine of the priesthood of all saints and the overall including working of the Spirit – breaking down
barriers of culture, gender, race and societal position – I’d say all offices and ministries are open for
mature and gifted Christians, men and women alike.
9. Ecclesia reformata semper reformanda secundum Verbum Dei
The spirit
and the purpose of the Reformation may be best captured by the Latin principle Ecclesia reformata semper reformanda
secundum Verbum Dei (“The reformed
church must always be reformed according to the Word of God”). This is not a
principle that glorifies change in itself, though it urges the church to be
continuously open for change. It refers to a norm, the Word of God. As
theologian Stefan Paas has put it: Reformation is not a matter of ever-new
formations; it is a matter of constant re-formation
– or reconstruction. We could call
this the ‘restorative principle’ of the Reformation. The highest authority is always with the Word of God, the Bible. Church
should always be open to be corrected by deepened insight in the Word of God.
Practically,
this means for instance that “tradition” or “culture” cannot be a decisive
argument when it comes to changes in church or in theological convictions. In a
charismatic context, it also means that any prophetic word or spiritual
direction is subject to the authority of the Scriptures and discernment through the elders’ ministry of the Word.
This high regard for the authority of the
Word of God also induces an emphasis on the importance of both Bible study and
theological scholarship (over against certain tendencies in some
Pentecostal and charismatic strands to distrust and dismiss theology). When it
comes to academic theological study, this should not be an activity that is
separated from church: theology should flow from worship, be rooted in the
faith community, and be aimed at serving the faith community – it is fides quaerens intellectum, “faith
seeking understanding”, guided by the
Spirit of God.
Baptized in one Spirit
At the end
of this long blog on what it means to be “charismatic Reformed”, I can’t help but
to make the remark that one of the characteristics, ironically, would be that when
meeting charismatic Christians of other “flavours” – Anglican, Pentecostal,
Roman Catholic, or otherwise -, the denominator of a denomination is far less
relevant than the shared experiences of Christ: we are all baptized in one
Spirit, and members of one body.
Nonetheless,
these are some aspects of the theology of the Reformation that I value greatly
and that shape my understanding of church. A church that is always renewed
according to the Word of God, and that has the Word of God, the sacraments of baptism and communion,
and the charismata of the Spirit at
the centre of its corporate life, witnessing to the coming Kingdom of God.
Amersfoort,
July 6, 2015 (some additions, July 7)
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