Is Reformed Theology “Isolationist?”

Source: Recovering the Reformed Confession (P&R Publishing)

 By Dr. R. Scott Clark - Posted at The Heidelblog:

One of the many criticisms John Frame makes of Recovering the Reformed Confession is that it advocates a closed, isolationist, elitist view of the Reformed faith in order to exclude others unnecessarily and wrongly.1 Jerry Owen, a commentator on Frame’s review, asks, “What does Reformed theology look like when it becomes a club with secret code words and handshakes?”2 In the words of Richard Nixon, “Let me say this about that.” There is nothing “secret” about the Reformed faith. Indeed, repeatedly the book defines the Reformed confession, narrowly considered, as a public ecclesiastical document. The Westminster Confession (WCF), the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism (HC), the Canons of Dort, and the Westminster catechisms are not private, esoteric documents. They were intended to be read and, in the case of the Heidelberg and Westminster Shorter catechisms, they were intended to be memorized. These are teaching documents. They were and remain the very opposite of “private.” We want people to know what we understand Scripture to teach. So this criticism seems to me to be very difficult to understand.

I also use the word confession in the broader sense of those who created the tradition within which those public, ecclesiastical documents were framed. Here I am accused of privileging some theologians over others. This is a harder criticism to answer because it is partly true, if somewhat misleading. I claim that those theologians who taught (and continue to teach) substantially what the Reformed churches confess are Reformed and that those who denied (or deny) substantially what the churches confess are not Reformed. To give a historical example, I would argue that the confessional doctrine of justification is of the essence of the Reformed faith. That this is true seems incontrovertible. If we remove or substantially change WCF 11 or HC 60 we have cut out the heart of those documents. For this reason, J. H. Alsted said that the doctrine of justification is “the article of the standing or falling of the church.”3 That this is so has seemed self-evident to Reformed people for hundreds of years. To take an historical example, Richard Baxter denied the substance of the Reformed doctrine of justification and John Owen affirmed it (against Baxter). There may be ways in which Baxter was “Reformed” (e.g., sociologically or on other theological issues), but on this issue he was not Reformed, and given the centrality of the doctrine of justification to the Reformed confession, Owen may be rightly privileged over Baxter. The same is true today. The Reformed confession has not substantially changed since the classical period. Those who adhere to it are Reformed and those who do not are not.4

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