All serious Christian believers have an obligation to support those who are fighting for the truth in their own communions. We ought to take our cue from St. John Henry Newman, an Anglican who became Catholic, and who still engaged with other Christians—not only about doctrinal differences, but also about areas of agreement.
The tiny Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRC), begun in 1857 by Dutch Calvinist immigrants in west Michigan, has had an outsized influence on American Christianity and education. It was scholars from this denomination that led the translation of the popular New International Version of the Bible. Members of the denomination started Eerdmans and Zondervan, some of the most influential Christian publishing companies in the U.S. It was a group of philosophers, most famously Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff, from its flagship institution of higher education, Calvin College (now University), who began the Society of Christian Philosophers, an organization that helped Christians achieve a greater respect in modern academic philosophy and the university. One-time Calvin history professor George Marsden remains one of the leading scholars of the development of modern Evangelicalism as well as a proponent of the idea of distinctively Christian scholarship.
The denomination certainly had a big influence on me. My parents, who came from what could be called, not unfairly, fundamentalist and Baptist traditions, joined this denomination when I was four years old when they became members of the South Bend (Indiana) CRC. So though I have vague memories of attending a non-denominational (largely Baptist in theology and polity) church before this, my childhood through my college years were spent in this denomination.
Why did my parents, whose families had lived and intermarried in America long enough to think of themselves as American without any hyphens, join this ethnically monolithic denomination where bumper stickers reading “You’re not much if you’re not Dutch” prevailed? When studying at Moody Bible Institute in the 1950s, my father had encountered the CRC when he rented a room from a Dutchman in Cicero, Illinois. Though my father was shocked by his landlord’s cigars, his landlord was shocked by my father’s relaxed attitude to Sabbath observance—Dad went to restaurants on Sunday. Nevertheless, the Dutch landlord made a largely positive impression on my father. My parents had both confessed their sins and asked Jesus to come into their hearts (or gotten “saved” as Evangelicals say) as children. Now in adulthood, they began to look for churches in which Sunday services said something about post-saved life rather than spending every service trying to get people saved. As a friend says, Baptists have a tendency never to go beyond St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. Indeed, those in the premillennial dispensationalist camp actually say that only St. Paul’s epistles to the Romans through Philemon are meant for Christians. In contrast, my parents liked the fact that when they visited the South Bend CRC, the sermons preached by the Rev. Roger Kramer covered books of the Bible seldom touched on beyond Sunday School in their previous churches and delved into matters of theology that went beyond the question of how we were to be saved. Indeed, the CRC took theology seriously and had a more holistic vision of how in the Scriptures—all of them—Christ spoke to the Christian.
My parents also had grown tired of the entertainment-style worship that had begun to permeate 1970s Evangelicalism. While jokes could be made about Calvinists as “the frozen chosen,” my parents were attracted to the CRC’s dignified if somewhat staid worship that had a place for a reading of the Ten Commandments on Sunday morning, a musical repertoire that went beyond the ancient tunes of Moody and Sankey (delightful as some of them are), and a recitation of the Apostles’ Creed at the Sunday evening service.
That Sunday evening service was itself an attraction. In Baptist circles, it was said that while everybody but backsliders came to the Sunday morning service and those who wanted to run the business meeting came on Wednesday nights, only those who loved the Lord or loved the preacher came on Sunday night. The CRC’s then-mandate that every congregation have a Sunday evening service and the healthy attendance at it were attractive. I actually preferred the Sunday evening service myself. That liminal time of dusk has always seemed to me an ideal time for reflection and prayer to a transcendent and immanent God.
Attractive too was the fact that Sunday school was a pretty serious affair. Youth were schooled in the Heidelberg Catechism, a sixteenth-century teaching tool that contains a wonderful summary of the faith. Even twenty-five years after becoming a Catholic I still look at it periodically. A very serious Catholic theologian friend who spent some time in the CRC tells me that apart from the notorious Q. and A. 80, which treats the “abomination of the Mass,” he reads it as spiritual literature.
What probably smoothed over the fact that we ourselves were not ethnically Dutch was the fact that the South Bend CRC had a great many other non-Dutch Evangelicals and other Christians who had discovered this tradition and loved it. The aforementioned philosopher Alvin Plantinga had moved from Calvin to the University of Notre Dame by the time we joined the congregation and, due to his and other Dutch-American scholars’ influence, there were a great many other Protestant academics teaching at Our Lady’s University who came to the church. The historian of American Christianity Nathan Hatch, now president of Wake Forest University, was a member. One of his sons was a year younger than I, and Professor Hatch gave me my first academic book when I mentioned having heard about The Democratization of American Christianity.
Indeed, I gloried in the proximity to these academics. My ideas of a career as a professor were shaped in large part by reading about the Inklings and my own time at South Bend CRC. I don’t know how much I understood, but when Alvin Plantinga substituted for an adult Sunday School class and talked about Anselm’s ontological argument for God’s existence, I thought it thrilling. The denomination’s overall theological seriousness and my congregation’s particular version of it helped inoculate me against any teenage atheist claims that Christians were not intellectually serious.
In this very situation there were tensions, however, that would eventually lead to my parents leaving the denomination. My mother, a very intelligent woman who had studied Latin at her public high school in Ohio, was nevertheless not as well-read in theology and history as my father and sometimes felt a tone of condescension in conversations. Both of my parents held to six-day creationism as well and thought the acceptance of an evolutionary account of the earth and particularly human origins was a betrayal of Scripture. And both believed that the push in the denomination for ordination of women as presbyters went against the scriptural prescriptions for how the church should be organized.
My high school years were filled with arguments about both topics. While I understood the difficulties that came from accepting an evolutionary account of human origins, I had read and found persuasive C. S. Lewis’s own understanding of how this could be compatible with the biblical creation narratives. And the suggestion that the apparent ancient age of the earth was a test of our faith in biblical revelation struck me as unpersuasive.
With regard to women’s ordination, I was perhaps less persuaded of the rightness of the so-called liberal side of the argument. While I agreed that the structure of the church was not stated in its specificity in the New Testament and that subsequently there was no Scriptural slam dunk in quite the way opponents of women’s ordination wanted there to be, three elements of the argument worried me. First, New Testament passages seeming to rule out said ordination were often opposed on the basis that the Apostles and perhaps Jesus himself were limited by their cultural context. Such an argument seemed to be a real attack on Scripture as the words of God in the words of men and even on the Word of God Made Flesh himself. The implication was that Christ and the words of Scripture didn’t just speak in human language but that they could be just plain wrong not only on obiter dicta but on moral teachings.
Second, the frequent citation of Galatians 3:15 about there being in Christ “neither male nor female” was often accompanied by the suggestion that there were no real differences between, and thus nothing particularly significant about, our being male or female. Indeed, a popular phrase I heard quite often in those days was that the call to ministry didn’t have anything to do with “plumbing.”
One CRC minister predicted in the pages of the denominational magazine that this approach to sex taken by the advocates of women’s ordination would itself lead to the acceptance of homosexuality and who knew what else, given the rather gnostic assumptions about the body being bandied about. A seminary professor replied to him that such a suggestion was “illogical” and “unlovely.” I thought the minister’s prediction of a logical slope or progression had much to say for it; and if accurate, the unloveliness would not be the fault of the one pointing out the slope but of those telling us not to worry about the slide.
Third, the suggestion frequently made that the question of women’s ordination was not really theological but “only” a matter of church order implied that said church order was almost entirely a matter of human arrangement and had little to do with theological truth. Some advocates of women’s ordination would say things such as, “Let’s major on the majors and minor on the minors,” telling those who objected that they were obsessed with something unimportant. Some used John Calvin’s term adiaphora, meaning “matters of indifference,” to describe the admission of women to ministerial orders. I could understand the claim of a Reformed communion to be re-forming the church according to a deeper understanding of God’s will, but there was the troubling suggestion that this kind of reformation was less putting something back into its original form and more shuffling parts of a body of Christ that had no real form to begin with. Additionally, the claims about what were “major” and what were “minor” points led me to start asking questions about the nature of Scripture, tradition, and authority. Everyone, it seemed, was relying on understandings of Scripture that were certainly rooted in Scripture itself but also in assumptions about the nature and scope of scriptural revelation—assumptions that were not themselves fully derived from Scripture alone.
Though I attended their PCA congregation when at home, I did not change my own church membership. Those questions about Scripture, tradition, and authority were already making me question whether I was Reformed at all. By the time I graduated in 1996 I had come to believe the Reformed tradition was indeed a tradition, a passing down of a way of understanding divine revelation in Christ and the Bible. But was its nature divine or finally human? And where was the authority to make final decisions about important doctrinal questions? Was there any?
A few months after that graduation I had decided that, though the Reformed tradition was still a vigorous and beautiful theological tradition, it had certain defects with regard to a number of different issues. And what was beautiful and true within it could fit into the Catholic tradition quite handily. I also decided that the Catholic Church claimed with reason the capacity to make final decisions on doctrine, though the process of doing so was itself filled with the same kind of tensions. I used to say, perhaps with a bit of triumphalism, that the Catholic Church had to deal with all the questions roiling the CRC and Protestantism generally, but that they were dealt with on a higher plane. The triumphalist element came out when I would say that the various Protestant groups were like the minor leagues while the Catholic Church was the major leagues twenty-five years ago. That this might have been a jerk-y thing to say didn’t mean that I didn’t believe what was behind it. Thus, twenty-five years ago I entered the Catholic Church.
***
If you are reading this thus far and worry that this essay is going to become an exercise in Catholic apologetics directed at the Reformed or broader Protestant traditions, please put your worries aside. This essay is not a Catholic conversion story.[i] My reflections on my past here have been, I suppose, in the vein of St. John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, subtitled “A History of his Religious Opinions.” They are not directly arguments for the Catholic Church but instead recollections about my past brought to mind because of events in the CRC itself along with some lessons that are perhaps useful for all Christians attempting to hew to traditional orthodoxy.
The first lesson is that the claims made by religious progressives about their own knowledge of where the bright lines are and the bright new future to be found once Christians give in to their demands for change are never to be taken seriously. After the CRC’s first fateful decision about women’s ministry, the number of members started dropping. From a high of about 316,000 members at the time of the decision to allow women to preach and exercise pastoral authority thirty years ago, the numbers have plummeted to a little over 204,000 members, a drop of over one third.[ii] Many of the conservatives such as my parents formed new congregations, which affiliated with different denominations old and new, or simply switched churches. Many entire congregations disaffiliated from the CRC. Given the loss of many of these conservatives, those in the denomination proved the minister who was accused of illogic and unloveliness in the denominational magazine largely correct. I have never seen anything from his accuser apologizing, and I suspect that accusing gentleman has gone on to approve of all the things he denied. From women’s ordination those liberals have passed on to promotion of a reconsideration of the teaching that homosexual behavior is morally wrong. Now many of them fully embrace it and all the other letters in the always growing collection starting with LGBT. Many also openly embrace not only legalized abortion but think it morally good. (I was embarrassed to find out a number of years ago what I had not realized as a teenager: most of those who promoted women’s ordination at my congregation in South Bend in the ’80s and ’90s were also sotto voce teaching their own children and telling others that being “pro-choice” was compatible with orthodox Christianity.) Nowhere is this more true than at my alma mater, Calvin. Even thirty years ago there were professors about whom it was whispered that they didn’t accept the denominational teachings on sexuality and abortion. Now many are open about their positions.
If progressive Christianity leads to ecclesial death is the first lesson, the second is that its parasitical nature means there are limits if enough people keep fighting for the host’s body. It long seemed to me that the CRC’s passage to simply another mainline denomination was complete: it had smashed on the iceberg of the sentimental contemporary prime moral directive to “Do What Thou Wouldst, Caringly.”[iii] But a curious thing has happened that perhaps should not be completely surprising. This summer at the CRC’s annual denominational meeting, known as Synod, the delegates voted overwhelmingly to reaffirm the 1973 report on sexuality that itself reaffirmed much of traditional Christian morality, including the immorality of homosexual acts. Not only did the delegates reaffirm it; they raised it to the level of “confessional status”—that is, it is a necessary belief for those in the CRC to hold. In Catholic terms, it went from doctrine to dogma. How could this have happened? After all, today, it seems the ratchet only ever turns one way.
Well, I think there is an explanation. Many of those who passed from women’s ordination to the celebration of “Pride” and “choice” gradually left, as I did, the denomination that formed them in order to be more consistent with what they believed or did not believe. The cratering numbers for the denomination represented not just those who believed the denomination had strayed from traditional Christian orthodoxy but those who thought it had not done so nearly enough.
That latter category certainly included many of those who participated in those old denominational fights; a long-time editor of the denominational magazine loudly left his position—and soon the CRC itself—while I am told that one well-known philosopher is now officially an Episcopalian. The category included especially their children who quite often ceased to believe in orthodox Christianity at all, with no wonder given that they had been raised to believe their denomination was sexist and homophobic—and these days, given much of what comes out of the denomination’s offices, systemically racist—in its teaching.
I am personally more sympathetic intellectually with the unbelieving children than the religiously hip parents who raised them. What we often call liberal or progressive Christianity of the modern sort is sterile and parasitic. It has no power or even impetus to make converts out of non-believers in more than a few cases; it can only serve as a kind of off-ramp from more traditional religion that appeals to those who want to say they are still on the narrow way but have departed from the one that got them where they are. While many of the progressives like to make a big show out of their left-wing political and economic views, it is pretty clear that a Jesus who has nothing to say at all about the bedroom—or even what a man or woman is—really has nothing to say about boardrooms or tax policy or anything else. Religious progressives have exchanged what they considered unbelievable for what most people consider incomprehensible.
This leads to a third general conclusion about how to deal with wayward institutions. The tendency in many Christian groups is to tolerate doctrinal and moral waywardness in hopes of gentle persuasion and a lot of splitting-the-differences allowing everybody to get past the disputes. This is itself a mistake, because a false moderation becomes an extreme problem both for the institution and for the Christian group sponsoring it. It allows those who dissent to seize the institutions more fully and makes the group’s claims to truth seem implausible both to traditional and liberal Christians.
That has been the case at my alma mater. Because much of the progressivism in the CRC has been centered on Calvin University, that has been where decline has been most evident. Though a number of Calvin University faculty are clinging to something in the neighborhood of the ever-less-commanding heights of the ivory tower, the school itself is now teetering. Friends close to the university tell me that the university’s lurch to the left has resulted in many traditional CRC and other Evangelical-but-sympathetic parents refusing to send their children to this flagship, a trend that has resulted in declining enrollments for some time. Indeed, when I was at the school in the early-and-mid-90s, the undergraduate enrollments were around 4000 students. This past year, according to one source, the number was around 2800 (though university material says, without specification of undergraduate and graduate numbers, 3300). And now that the denomination has reaffirmed elements of orthodox Christian sexuality, I am told a group of progressive parents of this fall’s freshman (an offensive term in today’s world) have indicated their children will not attend after all. In first stiffing traditional CRC students in the rational bet that the CRC would finally “get with the times,” Calvin University has now fallen between the conservative and liberal stools.
Can the university pick itself up? I’m not so sure. At a certain point in an institution’s life, the continuous hiring of people at all levels of authority who disagree with the beliefs of the institution’s ecclesial owners means that there is no real institutional will to change. A few of the high-flying faculty will no doubt hie themselves off to some other more liberal institutions. But given the decline in undergraduate enrollments across the country even before the 2026 demographic cliff is reached, the closing of colleges and universities already happening, and the elimination of liberal arts requirements at those that remain, the prospects for most faculty are bleak. Many of those who don’t believe what the CRC believes will no doubt keep on doing what they do and daring the university to fire them. This will continue to put the university in an untenable position with both traditional and liberal-leaning parents. Calvin will have to choose eventually what they are going to be. And if they don’t want to be the CRC’s institution, the denomination needs to cut them off because they will continue to be a symbol that the CRC doesn’t actually believe what it says it believes. Far better to put the money and resources into the CRC’s other two, more conservative colleges, Trinity in Chicago and Dordt in Sioux Center, Iowa. They are growing even as Calvin shrinks.
The fourth and final lesson is one that I bring to this story rather than strictly draw out of it. It is that all serious Christian believers—Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox—ought to be supporting each other in these areas in which we all have a stake. Without giving up on the positions that divide us about the nature of Christian truth, we have an obligation to support those who are fighting for the truth in their own communions. The CRC has had, as I began by noting, an outsized role in American Christian life. Its disputes about the nature of sexual morality and revelation are ones in which we are all engaged today. Serious Christians, even those who have left such denominations out of conscience, ought to pray for and encourage those within. We ought to take our cue from St. John Henry Newman, an Anglican who became Catholic, and who still engaged with other Christians—not only about doctrinal differences, but also about areas of agreement.
Newman corresponded over a number of years with the (Calvinist) Free Church of Scotland scholar David Brown. His approach to this group in an 1878 letter was noteworthy for its generous spirit and its recognition of the importance of other believers even if they were not Catholic: “I have always looked at the Free Kirk of Scotland with admiration. I consider the movement to come from God, and to be a portion of that religious revival with which He has been, and is, visiting Western Christendom, in connexion with that contemporaneous burst of infidelity which comes from the Enemy of Truth—and I think that whatever success the Free Kirk has in its substance comes from the Truth.” Newman went on in this letter to profess his “great respect for the persons and the aims, as far as I know them, of the leaders of the Free Church of Scotland.” He declared, “I shall rejoice to hear that you have succeeded in your efforts against the liberalism of the day.” As a fellow Christian, I am glad to say the same of the CRC.
The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics as we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.
Notes:
[i] If you would like to read a version of that story., see “Twenty-five Years: Logos and My Catholic Life,” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 25:3 (Summer 2022): 5-20.
[ii] Those interested in the numbers can see them neatly laid out by the CRC itself in the document here.
[iii] I borrow this phrase from the late Fr. Paul Mankowski, who used it in his essay “Academic Religion: Playground of the Vandals.” See “The Wit and Wisdom of the Odd Man Out,” a review of Jesuit at Large: Essays and Reviews by Fr. Paul Mankowski, S.J., edited and introduced by George Weigel, The Imaginative Conservative, October 14, 2021.
The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics as we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.
The featured image is the ecumenism symbol from a plaque in St. Anne’s Church, Augsburg. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Leave A Comment