In confessional Reformed churches, leaders who feel compelled to improve upon alleged defects of the Confessions—which is the kind way of putting a positive spin on the activity of criticizing the Confessions—are required by a Form of Subscription to submit their views to their consistory, and perhaps to the broadest assembly, the synod, for review and adjudication. Before promoting their views.
All our living, writing, and preaching occurs in a context. We belong to a history, a history of thought, of interpretation, of doctrine—and of ethics.
Within Reformed and Presbyterian church communions, that history is both transmitted and protected by means of Confessions, documents summarizing the Bible’s teaching, documents designed to promote unity and guard truth. Reformed churches generally adhere to the Three Forms of Unity, while Presbyterians churches generally hold to the Westminster Standards. These Confessions are not infallible, nor are they equivalent to the Bible, but they are authoritative and binding, because they fully agree with Scripture.
From time to time, these Confessions come under public attack, not only from thinkers outside the church, but more commonly from thinkers—usually theologians—inside the church. The pattern of these insider attacks often follows the form of: let’s get back to the Bible, laying aside our categories and terminology crafted for systematic theology and ethics. Usually the invitation is extended to “just open your Bible” and read it “for what it says.” Rarely, however, do Reformed and Presbyterian leaders invite folks to read only their New Testament. Extending that limited invitation will understandably raise questions among those whose life oxygen is their whole Bible—both Old and New Testaments.
And when the invitation to read only the New Testament is introduced with cautions about theological categories and terminology, and is accompanied and defended with rather fundamental and far-reaching criticisms of Reformed and Presbyterian confessions and catechisms, then our questions become grave concerns.
Protocols for challenging the Confessions
In confessional Reformed churches, leaders who feel compelled to improve upon alleged defects of the Confessions—which is the kind way of putting a positive spin on the activity of criticizing the Confessions—are required by a Form of Subscription to submit their views to their consistory, and perhaps to the broadest assembly, the synod, for review and adjudication. Before promoting their views.
Here is the relevant portion of the Form of Subscription:
“We, the undersigned, Ministers of the Gospel, Elders and Deacons . . . do hereby, sincerely and in good conscience before the Lord, declare by this our subscription that we heartily believe and are persuaded that all the articles and points of doctrine contained in the Belgic Confession and Heidelberg Catechism of the Reformed Churches, together with the explanation of some points of the aforesaid doctrine made by the National Synod of Dordrecht, 1618-’19, do fully agree with the Word of God.
We promise therefore diligently to teach and faithfully to defend the aforesaid doctrine, without either directly or indirectly contradicting the same by our public preaching, teaching, or writing. . . .
. . . And if hereafter any difficulties or different sentiments respecting the aforesaid doctrines should arise in our minds, we promise that we will neither publicly nor privately propose or defend the same, either by preaching, teaching, or writing, until we have first revealed such sentiments to the Consistory, Classis, or Synod, that the same may there be examined, being ready always cheerfully to submit to the judgment of the Consistory, Classis, or Synod, under the penalty, in case of refusal, of being by that very fact suspended from our office.” (Available here.)
A republication of the Irons case?
The question of our title is just that: a question, not an accusation. As such, it invites a response—preferably not one that denigrates the character or standing of the question’s author, but one that serves the unity, both ecumenical and local, of Reformed and Presbyterian churches.
Readers will notice that with this question, we are not entering into the substance of the issue regarding the continuing validity of the Decalogue for Christian living, but merely seeking to clarify the status and parameters of the discussion. What may be a discussion of doctrine or ethics, in terms of biblical interpretation, needs first to be a discussion of the rules of engagement. That is why we printed the protocol that obtains among confessional Reformed churches.
The basis for our question is what appears to us to be an unmistakeable identity between the arguments advocated in the late-1990s by then-OPC pastor Rev. Lee Irons, and now by URCNA licentiate Mr. Matthew Tuininga. Dr. Irons (now a ruling elder in the PCA) was charged and convicted within the Presbytery of Southern California for violating the teaching of Scripture and the Westminster Standards with respect to his views denying the continuing validity of the Decalogue for Christian living.
Again, whether you the reader agree or disagree with Mr. Tuininga concerning the continuing validity of the Decalogue for Christian living, placing this discussion within a wider historical and ecclesiastical context can help all of us learn from the OPC experience.
You can find the following quotes, with their full context, online. This information is public, and publicly available.
Lee Irons:
“The Presbytery of Southern California of The Orthodox Presbyterian Church charges you, the Rev. C. Lee Irons, with violating your ordination vows by teaching, contrary to the Scriptures and the Westminster Standards, that the Decalogue is no longer binding on believers as the standard of holy living.
The specifications (minus supporting evidence) were:
1.That you have, on numerous occasions,publicly called into question the teaching of the Westminster Standards regarding the moral law.
2. That you have denied that the Decalogue, as a summary of the moral law, continues to have binding authority over the Christian.” (General Assembly Minutes OPC 2003-2004, 368).
Here are several quotes from sermons, consisting of statements entered into evidence by Rev. Irons for his own defense (available here).
“This indirect view of the law’s authority for the new covenant Christian, flows logically from their view that the Mosaic covenant is a subservient covenant of works. For if the Decalogue is part of the Mosaic covenant, indeed standing at the very heart of that covenant, and if the Mosaic covenant is a subservient covenant of works, then we have been delivered from the covenant of works in Christ. Since it is part of the Mosaic covenant of works, the Decalogue cannot be the form of the moral law that binds the believer in Christ.”
“But the biggest weakness of the Reformed approach is that it doesn’t seem to fit with what you read in the New Testament. Nowhere in the New Testament – in the teaching of Jesus or of the apostles – do they make this threefold division of the Law. Instead, the New Testament seems to view the Law as a unit. The Law is always referred to as “the Law.” And then, the New Testament writers, following the lead of Jesus himself which we’ll look at in a minute, take that Law as a unit and say that it must be interpreted redemptive historically in light of its fulfillment in Christ” (from Irons’ sermon, “The Law is Abolished”).
“I argued that the classical Reformed approach to the Law is in need of improvement. I did so with great fear and trepidation, knowing that I am calling [into] question, I suppose, some of the traditional teachings of Reformed theology and even the Westminster Confession. I do so, though, not in a spirit of saying that the Westminster Confession or that traditional Reformed theology is flat-out wrong, but rather in the spirit of suggesting that it can be improved and built upon” (from Irons’ sermon, “The Law: A Redemptive Historical Approach, Part II”).
Matthew Tuininga:
These quotes appear in essays posted here, here, and here. Readers are urged to study them in their original context, in order to understand these statements properly.
“Unfortunately, the catechisms of the Reformation sometimes obscure this point [that Christians are called to follow Jesus, not the law] because of their emphasis on the Ten Commandments as the primary teaching tool for righteous living according to God’s moral law. But the New Testament comes at the matter from a slightly different direction. Sit down and read your New Testament cover to cover and you will notice a consistent redirecting of Christians from the law to the one who fulfilled and satisfied it, not just with reference to justification and the forgiveness of sins, but with reference to sanctification and good works. To put it simply, the typical approach of Christian scripture when describing the Christian life is not to call believers to obey the law, but to urge them to “put on the new man,” to conform to the image of Christ by following him.”
“It is the failure to emphasize this following of Jesus as the form and model of the Christian life, I worry, that is the greatest weakness of standard Reformed ethics. Look at a typical syllabus for a Reformed Christian ethics course, or a typical Reformed catechism, and the emphasis will fall almost entirely on the Ten Commandments.”
“The issue is whether or not believers remain bound to the law as a covenant. The Ten Commandments are in play not because most (though not all!) of what they include happens to be part of the moral law, but because in scripture the Ten Commandments serve as short hand, or as representative, of the Mosaic Covenant as a whole. The Ten Commandments are the “words of the covenant” that has been made obsolete (Exodus 34:28; Hebrews 8).”
“But if I am right about the emphasis of the New Testament, then we are wrong to identify the Ten Commandments as the primary or best expression of the moral law, let alone as the framework for the obedient Christian life. In contrast, we should (following the cue of Heidelberg Catechism Lord’s Day 33, as one pastor pointed out to me) identify the best expression of the moral law as Christ himself. The framework for the Christian life is therefore putting on the new man Jesus an conforming to his image (See especially Ephesians 4:17-32 and Colossians 3:1-17, both of which set the framework for those letters’ household codes).”
LD 33: Good works . . . according to the law of God = Decalogue
But far from compelling a choice between following Jesus or obeying the Decalogue, as Mr. Tuininga would have it, the Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day 33, teaches that the believer’s good works are, among other important features (namely, arising from true faith, done to God’s glory), only those that conform to God’s law—which law the Catechism immediately identifies in Lord’s Day 34 as the Decalogue and proceeds to explain in Lord’s Days 34-44. To see the serious inadequacy of the pastoral advice offered regarding this matter, we must consider the entire Lord’s Day 33:
Question 88. Of how many parts doth the true conversion of man consist?
Answer. Of two parts; of the mortification of the old, and the quickening of the new man.
Question 89. What is the mortification of the old man?
Answer. It is a sincere sorrow of heart, that we have provoked God by our sins; and more and more to hate and flee from them.
Question 90. What is the quickening of the new man?
Answer. It is a sincere joy of heart in God, through Christ, and with love and delight to live according to the will of God in all good works.
Question 91. But what are good works?
Answer. Only those which proceed from a true faith, are performed according to the law of God, and to his glory; and not such as are founded on our imaginations, or the institutions of men.
The Heidelberg Catechism teaches very clearly that the Decalogue continues to be the standard for Christian living “according to the will of God in all good works.”
All of us are, or should be, in favor of following the cue of Lord’s Day 33, as it is written. But what is written in Lord’s Days 33-44—namely, that the law = Decalogue is the standard for the believer’s good works, a.k.a., the believer’s Christian living—Mr. Tuininga considers to be a defect of the Heidelberg Catechism, and because it follows the Catechism’s line, the defect also of the entire history of Reformed ethics.
All of us are, or should be, in favor of correcting defective Confessions, but only in terms of protocols that are mutually binding among the churches.
So here, then, are questions designed for further discussion, questions whose answer deserves the attention of every conscientious Reformed and Presbyterian church leader.
1. In what specific and clear way(s) do these views of the Decalogue, as being no longer authoritative for Christian living, differ from one another?
2. If these views of the Decalogue are identical, then what should be the standing, among church communions joined together as NAPARC, of the 2003 OPC GA judicial decision upholding the verdict against the views of Rev. Irons, a verdict issued by the Presbytery of Southern California?
3. If these two views of the Decalogue are not identical, then how can a person both subscribe to the Heidelberg Catechism as fully agreeing with the Word of God, and insist that Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Days 33-44, does not agree with the New Testament, which allegedly teaches believers to follow Jesus, not the law?
For the record . . .
We vigorously endorse the call for people to study their Bibles as they seek to follow Jesus Christ as his disciples in today’s world. Such study is impossible, however, apart from interpretative and theological categories of understanding; none of us does, or can, approach Scripture as a confessional, theological tabula rasa. Consequently, we prefer and recommend those categories embraced and employed by confessional Reformed and Presbyterian churches.
We vigorously applaud any appeal for understanding, teaching, and obeying the Decalogue Christocentrically. This Christocentric approach to the Decalogue, while subordinating the Decalogue to Jesus Christ, refuses to separate the Decalogue from Jesus Christ.
We vigorously subscribe to both the Three Forms of Unity and the Westminster Standards because, in their teaching and system of doctrine, they do fully agree with the Word of God.
Dr. Nelson D. Kloosterman is a Teaching Elder in the Presbyterian Church in America and is Director of Worldview Resources International is an ordained Teaching Elder in the Presbyterian Church in America, and is Assistant Pastor of the Lincoln Square PCA in Chicago, Ill. He is also an adjunct faculty member at Mid-America Reformed Seminary in Dyer, Ind. This article appeared on the Worldview Resources International site and is used with permission.
[Editor’s note: One or more original URLs (links) referenced in this article are no longer valid; those links have been removed.]