Although I’ll be focusing on the Reformed Faith in this entry I am doing so only becasue I’m more familiar with it then most other Christian traditions. I presume that many of the situations that I speak about here can be seen in other traditions as well. I know it will apply to Baptists, of which there is a baptists denomination for every minor belief, and likely to a lesser extent in many of the more traditional traditions.
Last week a link was posted on this blog by another to an address by Steve Schilissel about what he viewed, in 1988, as wrong with the Christian Reformed Church (CRC). To be very, very, brief in his eyes the denomination has become to liberal and left behind it’s roots. To quote from his conclusion:
Our confessions should form the basis of who is allowed to stay in and who must go out. Scripture is unchanging in its character precisely because its author is unchanging. Here we must stand. But I am afraid that the Christian Reformed Church has contracted Ecclesiastical Aids. We seem not to have the will to fight those microbes that are invading the body. Be they ever so insidious, calculating, dishonest, arrogant or destructive, above all, we want comfort. We do not want the truth; we want to be polite. We are polite-ing ourselves to death. Along with a loss of the will to fight, many have lost the will to live. Where, my brothers and sisters, is your heroic Dutch blood, and why is it not boiling?
This is a common complaint in the Reformed Tradition. In and of itself I do not have much issue with it. If you have a confession that tells you what it means to be within that tradition you should work on keeping yourself inside of that tradition or remove yourself from it. Redefining a tradition every generation or so really does away with the need for traditions at all.
I do however have a problem with the way, and spirit, that the need to keep a tradition together is often applied. Not every belief that a tradition holds to is part of that tradition’s foundation. It seems that more and more there is no diversity allowed within a tradition. The area roped off for those who actually have the right traditional beliefs becomes smaller and smaller each year. This only serves to create a fracturing of denominations, and then each denomination claims to hold to the true historic tradition while the other ones have gone astray.
The Christian Reformed Church that Schlissel speaks about has had this happen to it even before he was ever a member of it. The Canadian and American Reformed Church (CanRC) split from the CRC long ago over theological differences, and it is still occurring with the more recent creation of the United Reformed Church.
When any break occurs in a Dutch Reformed Denomination (that is any denomination that follows the Three Forms of Unity(3FU)) you pretty much are saying that the denomination your breaking from is outside of the tradition becasue the 3FU requires complete adherence to it to be a member in their churches. If you don’t hold to the 3FU, your not Dutch Reformed.
This is slightly different from the Presbyterian Reformed Tradition whose confession, that is Westminster, does not require each church member to be in complete agreement with it. Yet although you would think that this would allow more room within their denominations for a range of beliefs, that has been far from the case. John Frame has an excellent essay entitled Machen’s Warrior Children where he looks at a number of controversies that have divided Presbyterian denomination. I think the most important thing that Frame says, and it applies to both the Dutch and Presbyterian traditions, as well as those in most Christian traditions, is in the recommendations that follow his essay:
“Reformed people need to do much more thinking about what constitutes a test of orthodoxy…The assumption seems to be that any difference of opinion amounts to a test of fellowship, that any truth I possess gives me the right to disrupt the peace of the church until everybody comes to agree with me. But surely there are some disagreements that are not tests of orthodoxy, some differences that should be tolerated within the church”
How are we to present our faith to the world if we spend most of our time arguing among our own traditions not to mention the Christian faith as a whole? I want to have a broad church. I still am all for having different traditions within the Christian faith becasue we will not be able to agree on everything, but those traditions should not be as quick to close their doors as they have been in the past. We all need to pick our battles more carefully and be a lot more charitable with those who disagree with us.
I totally agree with the main point of your post.
I wonder if the age of denominational splits is winding down. There’s alot more independent churches than in previous times and it seems to me anyways that denominations don’t split so much as individual people and churches drop out.
There is no problem with someone claiming that another person does not believe EXACTLY as they believe. I can define my “denomination” as having my exact beliefs, and in all likelihood nobody else will ever be a member of “my denomination”. In fact, in a few years, I likely wouldn’t be a member. Segmentation by name is meaningless, and there is no problem with it. What matters most is how we TREAT members of other segments, particularly those who do not violate any “central” beliefs. I consider anyone who believes in the basic Gospel and treats the Bible as the inspired word of God to be family. I might think they are wrong in their eschatology or cosmology, but they are still family. Classifying myself as believing differently than my brother is acceptable. Spurning my brother because he isn’t “Atanamis denomination certified” is stupid.
I think your generation (as opposed to mine, and I remind you that I’m an old lady) does a better job in not splitting hairs and in accepting a certain amount of variation before starting a new church. Maybe that is because there is a clearer divide nowadays as to who is a Christian and who isn’t. By that I mean it is now more culturally acceptable to be non-religious or non-Christian-in-name than it used to be, so maybe those who actually hold to the name of Christ stick together better. The trick comes in knowing where to draw the line–what “little” things can we disagree on and what basic core beliefs are worth fighting about/separating.