Our Identity

At the heart of the church’s identity is its confession of the love shown by the holy and eternal God in redeeming his fallen people from their sins.

To adore and praise God for his love and majesty will be his people’s vocation in paradise forever, and this destiny orients them in their present pilgrimage.

Their greatest joy is that God has brought them into an intimacy with himself, as sons of the Father, the bride of the Lamb, and objects of the Holy Spirit’s comforting.

Their salvation springs from God’s predestinating design. It is secured through the atonement made by Christ for his people. It is applied in a mystical union with Christ. All the praise is reserved for the originating, procuring and efficacious love of God.

This salvation is publicly offered to the world through the commission which the Redeemer has given to his church to preach the gospel to every creature. All are invited to embrace the Lord’s free salvation, by resting on the great Substitute who has borne our sins in his body on the cross. All who come to him will have an irrevocable reconciliation with God, and will be transformed into a holy likeness to their Savior.

The love of God supplied the required satisfaction of divine justice. God’s eternal and beloved Son was not spared, but was made by God to be a curse for us. Only in this way could divine love redeem us from the impending curse due to us for sin, restore to us the access to God that Adam forfeited, and carry us on to a closeness to God that surpasses anything Adam knew in his unfallen condition.

Sinners are justified before God not by anything they do, but through the double action of Christ, who suffered the deep penalty of the broken law, and fulfilled the law’s entire precept. The Lord has credited to his people the righteousness of Christ’s obedient life, so that his people are acquitted on the ground of their Substitute’s record. Our faith is the empty hand of a beggar, to lay hold on the fullness which heaven’s initiative pours down on the weak and needy.

With the passage of years, it becomes evident that all things on this earthly scene are mutable. Even the church changes with the society around it. This is not altogether to be decried. Like each successive child born into a family, another generation has its own face and personality.

The church faces an arduous undertaking, with two mandates. On the one hand, the church is to be the pillar and ground of the truth, by its stable adherence to Scripture. At the same time, it must learn how to engage the new order emerging in its day, so that the church is always bringing the apostolic faith to bear on the conscience of its time. The first mandate requires tenacity, and the second adaptability.

Faced with this mission, some lose conviction concerning aspects of the doctrine and religious practice which the church had long understood to be taught by the Word of God.

For those who remain persuaded that the church’s classic confessions of faith are faithful to Scripture, there must be discernment as to what should be let go from the past life of the church. Believers five hundred years ago could not have imagined the society we have today. Many social and technological developments have an effect for good on the lives of the Lord’s people. But what ministers and elders, in being admitted to office, have vowed to conserve are those aspects of the church’s historic identity which are doctrinal or which constitute specifically religious practice.

To have a classical Reformed persuasion means that one adheres to the same doctrine and religious practice as that of the Reformation, such as was embodied in the Reformed confessions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the belief that these are in accord with the Word of God. In these areas our church seeks to preserve or restore historic doctrine and practice.

A true Christian knows what it means to cry out to God for mercy, in concern lest he be condemned. He has more than a theoretical knowledge. He trembles when he views his guiltiness, and is driven to seek a covering in the blood of Christ. He abhors himself and grieves because he perceives the wickedness of his heart. He has come to know experientially that what Scripture says about such things is true.

This is what the older Reformed writers called experimental religion. A term was used which today is more commonly associated with the natural sciences, where a method of probing and investigation leads to an understanding of reality. In religion it means that we not only read and confess what Scripture teaches about salvation, but also are enabled by the Holy Spirit in our own experience to prove, feel the power, and enter into the truth of those things.

In this connection, a member of the Westminster Assembly referred to the knowledge of foreign countries acquired from maps. But map knowledge cannot compare with actually visiting the country, climbing its mountains, swimming in its rivers, and walking the streets of its towns. There are those who have seen godliness in the map only, hearing about it from the Bible, but have never had experience of the thing itself. At one time the young Saul of Tarsus had great confidence that all was well with him, but eventually that gave way to an awareness that his religious performances were deficient in the sight of God, and that he was still under wrath.

It is needful that preaching expound not only what Christ did outside of us to accomplish our redemption, but also what he does by the Holy Spirit in our hearts to apply that redemption. Such preaching includes the delineation of those biblical marks by which our lives give evidence that we have been renewed through union with Christ. This serves both to undeceive those who indulge a misguided hope, and also to promote that well-grounded assurance of salvation which will strongly confirm and embolden those who love God.

At the Reformation, entire nations were publicly committed to the truth of the Christian faith. But reformers such as Calvin understood that despite the near universal acknowledgment of biblical doctrine, multitudes in their midst had neither experienced the new birth, nor found personal contrition for sin and fled to the Savior for deliverance. It is not enough that children be raised in the church or be educated in a biblical world view. The reformers proclaimed to their congregations how to come to Christ, fenced the Lord’s table against any who were in scandalous sin, and warned professing Christians of the peril of eternal judgment if they are not in saving union with Christ.

It is characteristic of modern secular society that the primacy of religion over all other things has been displaced. Any role conceded to religion is bottled up in the spheres of individual belief, family life and places of worship. Even the churches have acquiesced in this outlook, concluding that the only word Scripture has for the civil order in our day is a call to respect moral values in social relationships.

The Reformation had a notably different concept. It held that the main goal in life is the pursuit of religion, worship, and the inner life of communion with God. Moreover, the reformers believed that not only the individual standing alone, but also individuals together in their corporate identity as a society, have an obligation to acknowledge the one true God. Each institution in society is to carry out its role in subservience to the primacy of religion as that which is of ultimate significance. Therefore civil government and public policy are to espouse the true religion and aim at promoting it.

This view of religion’s place in society was surrendered in the face of eighteenth-century Enlightenment scepticism that there can be certainty in matters of religion, as well as a misguided plea that the individual’s right of private judgment as recognized by classical Reformed writers would be incompatible with a society’s endorsement of the true religion, and concerns that an establishment of religion would be abused or the spirituality of the church compromised. Two centuries ago, populations that were personally attached to biblical religion called for civil constitutions which would make no acknowledgment of the true religion. It was inevitable that moral and spiritual waywardness would transpire when societies accepted a public policy that did not take its compass from the true religion, or give religion the primacy in man’s calling.

Today the church’s indictment of the civil order should go beyond a call to repent with regard to discrete areas of moral decline in social relationships. These are but symptoms. There is need to confront the root sin in the vision of modern secular society, which is its denial that man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.

In a further nod to secularism, some theologians have suggested that man’s primary task is the development of culture. Though this is said to be a redemption of the culture and to be done for the service of God, nevertheless the premise borrowed from secularism is that man is to give himself fundamentally to social and cultural endeavor in this present world, rather than finding the goal of his life beyond creation, in the pursuit of religion, worship and the inner life of communion with God. The classical Reformed persuasion articulated by Augustine and Calvin is that the Christian is a pilgrim on his way to a heavenly city, that the social structures of the earthly city do not represent the coming of God’s kingdom, and that the vision of a society should be to direct man to what is transcendent.

The form of worship acceptable to God has been commanded by him in the Scriptures. Without his prior word of institution for an action offered to him in worship, what we bring is offered in vain. From the beginning of the world, there have been certain solemn actions which he invests with the significance of worship, and conformity to such appointments has always been an eminent test of submission to God. So important was this matter in the estimation of Calvin, that he declared the two principal parts of the Christian religion to be the worship of God by the mode he sanctions in his Word, and the necessity of seeking righteousness outside of ourselves in Christ alone.

As forms of worship for the church of the New Testament, God has appointed prayer, reading of the Scriptures, preaching the Word, singing of Psalms, baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and the Lord’s Day. In our time there is widespread fear that the few and simple ordinances given in Scripture will be insufficient to bring about the advance of the gospel. But the Lord Jesus directed his servants that they were rather to teach the nations to comply with his commands, and that what will effectually secure the prosperity of their labors is his presence with them as the exalted and reigning Messiah to whom has been given all power in heaven and in earth.

There is a further dimension to the purity and simplicity of New Testament worship, because the forms of worship that prefigured the coming priesthood of Christ have passed away. Both in Old Testament and New, worship centers on a priest. The scene for the service of the Levitical priests was an earthly sanctuary, where there was a simulation of realities in heaven. But once Christ made atonement for sin, he went into heaven itself, as our forerunner entering within the veil of the true sanctuary above. There we ourselves are brought, to enter the holiest of all by the blood of Jesus. The worship of the church in the New Testament is centered on the priestly intercession of Christ which gives us access to God, our hearts being directed in faith toward the heavenly sanctuary as the seat and nub of our worship, just as the Old Testament people of God prayed with their faces to Jerusalem where a descendent of Aaron approached the mercy seat.

Worship in the earthly tabernacle was a pictorial spectacle of the anticipated appearance of Christ in the true sanctuary. With his debut there as our priest, worshippers no longer relate to God through forms which gave a shadowy representation of the real thing. A glory and a beauty had been appointed for the garments worn by the Levitical priests, and for much else pertaining to that tabernacle which was the setting for their ministry. Such outward display, as in the incense, or in the musical instrumentation that was synchronized with the offering of sacrifice, was symbolic of the greater glory of a priest yet to come, whose ministry would have an efficacy theirs never knew. The Levitical priesthood had inadequacy written all over it, and its forms of worship were a reminder of sins not taken away, and that the way into the holiest of all had not yet been made manifest.

The end of prefigurement in the forms of worship leaves a marked simplicity in the forms of New Testament worship. But this is not a diminution of glory, unless glory is measured by outward symbols rather than by the efficacy of Messiah’s priesthood. The glory of our worship is the glory of our priest in his power actually to purge the conscience of sin, to constitute the ungodly righteous, and to open the way to God. Though the glory of our worship is not visible to the eye, the freedom of access to the presence within the veil surpasses anything known in the Old Testament forms of worship. Now we have the reality of our priest entering the heavens to give us access to God, rather than a shadowy portrayal of it on earth.

As the reformer Oecolampadius once put it, the Old Testament ceremonies were like the lighting of candles which serve a purpose in the hours before dawn, but it is a strange lack of appreciation for the daylight when we continue to burn candles after the sun has ascended to its noonday height.

The Sabbath goes back to the creation of the world, when it was ordained by God for all the ages, as a basic structure of human life, along with marriage and labor.

To remember the Sabbath means to uphold its distinctiveness from other days of the week. This is a precept of the enduring moral law, set down in the ten commandments. When those ten words were first given, observance of the Sabbath was grounded in a recognition of what God had done in bringing the world into existence. When the ten commandments were reissued in Deuteronomy, a further reason was given for Sabbath observance, for now the people were exhorted to consider that God had redeemed them from bondage. These two considerations were summed up in the ninety-second Psalm, designated as intended for the Sabbath, when worshippers were called to reflect on mighty works of all kinds done by God. The Sabbath is a day to worship God for what he has done.

The greatest of the acts of God in redemption are the death and resurrection of his Son. The Lord’s Supper and the Lord’s Day are the commemorative institutions which place those two acts in the center of God’s worship. With the inauguration of the New Testament, the Sabbath was moved from the seventh day, where it had been placed at the culmination of the creation week. Now it takes its position on the first day of the week, signaling the beginning of the new creation brought in by the resurrection of Christ.

Christ noted that the temple labor of the priests on the Sabbath day was blameless labor, because what is required in the observance of the Sabbath is not a cessation of all activity, but rather an activity distinct from the ordinary business of the other days of the week. While the other six days are left to us for our employment and recreation, the Sabbath is a whole day set apart for the worship of God.

The New Testament also speaks of pilgrims in this world awaiting a Sabbath-keeping in the world to come. Our present Sabbath observance is a pledge that there is a future rest from the preoccupations of this world. Our life now should not be an uninterrupted routine. God has appointed that it be punctuated every seven days with a pause which serves to remind us that this life will eventually give way to an eternal Sabbath of worshipping God in the beatific vision of his glory and love.

At the Reformation, Calvin called for a return to the ancient church’s practice of using only the words of the biblical text for singing in worship. He endorsed Augustine’s judgment that the song texts spoken by God through the prophets are those which are appropriately offered back to him in worship. “Now what Saint Augustine says is true, that no one is able to sing things worthy of God unless he has received them from Him. Wherefore, when we have looked thoroughly everywhere and searched high and low, we shall find no better songs nor more appropriate to the purpose than the Psalms of David which the Holy Spirit made and spoke through him. And furthermore, when we sing them, we are certain that God puts the words in our mouths, as if He Himself were singing in us to exalt His glory.”

This advocacy for the church’s use of the Book of Psalms as its manual of praise may be stated in two parts.

First, in both the Old and New Testaments the text of song for the worship of God is regarded as having been given by the Holy Spirit through inspired prophecy. The words of song for worship were as much the oracles of God as were ethical codes and prophetic visions. Thus Scripture defines divine inspiration as normative for the texts to be used in this part of worship.

Second, the Lord’s placement of the Book of Psalms in the biblical canon amounts to his requirement that its texts which are overtly designated for singing in worship should be employed for their announced purpose. Neither are we at liberty to venture beyond the Bible’s prescriptions for religious observance. In other words, the canon of Scripture is sufficient for the religious functions which it claims for itself. The principle of sola Scriptura has consequences for the question of an appropriate text for singing in worship. In those parts of worship for which the canon claims to supply a text, the sufficiency and divine authority of the canon entail a restriction to that text.

In more recent times, John Murray has once more called the churches back to a recognition that the only text which the Bible recognizes for song offered to God in worship is that which comes by prophetic revelation. “1) There is no warrant in Scripture for the use of uninspired human compositions in the singing of God’s praise in public worship. 2) There is explicit authority for the use of inspired songs. 3) The songs of divine worship must therefore be limited to the songs of Scripture, for they alone are inspired. 4) The Book of Psalms does provide us with the kind of compositions for which we have the authority of Scripture. 5) We are therefore certain of divine sanction and approval in the singing of the Psalms.”

The sacraments are to be administered in conjunction with the preaching of the Word of God, because the symbolism of the sacraments must be explained by the Word. Accordingly, the sacraments are administered only by the minister of the Word.

There should be an enunciation of the gospel message on every such occasion. In advance of the Lord’s Supper, there is also to be admonition based on the biblical directive to examine ourselves lest we eat and drink unworthily. We are to make preparation for receiving the sacrament, by considering our need for the grace of Christ and whether we have a true repentance from sin. In connection with these reflections, the observance of a fast is a recognition of the lowliness of spirit which befits us when entering into such nearness to God. Preaching at the time of the Supper ought most especially to direct attention to Christ’s atoning sacrifice. Another theme at this time is the giving of thanks to God, because of his abounding grace and love in the gospel.

To assist communicants and those who look on, it is appropriate that at the time of the Lord’s Supper there be a season of several days of preaching, during which consideration is given to the benefits symbolized in the Supper and to a fruitful use of the Supper. Careful preparation for partaking is accompanied by earnest expectation that Christ will be present in the midst of his people.

It is most seemly, and closest to the appointment of Christ, that communicants come up to and sit at a covered table to receive the bread and wine as at the hospitality of a meal, in enjoyment of bonds with Christ and with one another as the bread and the cup are passed around the table, and in anticipation of the marriage supper of the Lamb at the resurrection. Eating at a man’s table is a sign of friendship with him.

Inasmuch as the purpose of Christ’s death is to deliver us from our sins, no one should approach the Lord’s table who is indifferent to repentance and to the pursuit of holy living. As at the Reformation, a caution is duly sounded at the administration of the Supper, forbidding any to partake who are living in contempt of God’s law. In this way, the table is verbally fenced off against profanation. Words of encouragement and invitation are also spoken, for opening the table to those who are broken in themselves and see no relief but in Christ.

The minister offers words of support to those who are painfully conscious of their sin and unworthiness, and stirs up the people to meditate affectionately on the sufferings and death of their Savior as they assemble to commemorate his act of love. The minister then takes up into his hands the bread and the cup. The elements are set apart, by the word of institution, and by thanksgiving and prayer, to be sacred symbols for the duration of the sacramental action. The bread is broken in signification of the breaking of Christ’s body for us. The bread and wine are given to the communicants and shared among them. The disciples are dismissed with an exhortation to press forward in the grace they have received.

Christ in the Scriptures has instituted a government for his church. There are to be governing assemblies composed of ministers of the word and ruling elders, with all ministers of the word and ruling elders being of equal authority for rule in the church, and with assemblies at the local level that are in subordination to higher assemblies in which the local assemblies are represented.

One of the mandated functions of this government is to perpetuate the form of sound words, committing to faithful men the task of teaching the same doctrine to others after them.

To accomplish this, it is appropriate for the church to adopt a digest of biblical doctrine, for testing the soundness of candidates for church office. Only those men are admitted to office who can declare by solemn vows that they believe the whole doctrine of the church’s confessional statement to be the truths of God, that they acknowledge it as a confession of their faith, and that they will assert, maintain and defend that doctrine. Inasmuch as the vows are administered for the purpose of ensuring that the church’s principles will be maintained, it is not morally conscionable that rulers who were admitted to office on such terms should afterwards overturn the church’s commitment to the principles referenced in their vows.

A significant aspect of the classical Reformed confessions is the range of issues left undefined. This latitude makes it possible for numbers of men to take the vows of subscription required of church officers, despite a diversity of opinion on many points of biblical interpretation. This measured approach to concurrence about doctrine, leaving room for each minister to teach his own interpretation of Scripture on points not addressed by the church’s confession, is to be accompanied by a concentration of the pulpit ministry on the primary truths of Scripture. The effect on the church of dwelling much in the main things of Scripture is a biblically proportioned spirituality.

A second function of the church’s government is to supply shepherding care or spiritual oversight for the Lord’s people, watching for their souls as those who must give an account. The discharge of this responsibility warrants the preparation of agreed rules and forms of procedure, which should go no further than reiterating and implementing principles laid down in the Word of God for a just and equitable administration in the church.

In acting on such premises, a church establishes a constitution. A select body of principles is assigned an elevated status, securing the church’s posture on a number of points of doctrine and practice. The constitution, some of whose elements are often referred to as subordinate standards, is situated in a middle position between, on the one hand, the supreme authority of the Word of God, the truths of which the constitution professes to represent and guard, and, on the other hand, the inferior status of the church’s ongoing decisions, which, if they are to be competent, must be in accord with the constitution. The historic identity of a church is found not in the preferences of transient majorities, but in its constitution, where the church has made the fundamental confession of its faith.

In seeking to project the testimony of Jesus to generations yet to come, our church is endowed with a precious heritage from which we start. Institutionally, we have an extended history of stable adherence to the classical Reformed tradition, both in constitutional commitment to principle and also in actual observance. The consequence is a shared consensus, an institutional memory, and customary forms of procedure, which make for conservation of the tradition. Notably, there is a stated acknowledgment that it is incompetent for the church officers to set aside the doctrine and worship exhibited in the church’s constitution and concerning which they have taken vows.

We continue the stance in doctrine and worship espoused by the Church of Scotland at the sixteenth-century Reformation. At that church’s Disruption in 1843, the Free Church of Scotland carried on the spiritual identity and succession of the Reformation in Scotland.

If the tradition is to survive, there is the never-ending work of thoroughly training the successors, with prayer that they would acquire experimental acquaintance with the truths which captured the hearts of their parents. Though the tradition has a past record of stability, every new generation of hearts and minds must be won over, like the necessity of planting young trees to create a fresh forest where an older one has been harvested.

The challenge for parents is to labor during their lifetime for the establishment of congregations across the nation, so that when they are gone they will have left behind them places in which their descendents and others may worship according to the Word of God and in which they may benefit from a faithful administration of the laws of Christ. If parents only go so far as to teach their children the classical Reformed tradition, and leave them few church structures in which that tradition is conserved and practiced, it will be much more difficult for the next generation to retain the tradition. When Christ appoints the church as the pillar and ground of the truth, he identifies it as his instrument for publicly maintaining the form of sound words in the earth, and for preserving the tradition he delivered to the apostles. The work of erecting such churches should not be postponed for another generation.

Many neighborhoods in the urban areas of America are greatly altered from their complexion fifty years ago. Former residents revisiting those streets feel themselves to be strangers in the place. The same transformation comes over churches when a subsequent generation let slip the persuasions on which the church was founded. The question for the oncoming generation is whether it will lay hold for itself on classical Reformed theology and practice, and come to cherish these things as dearly as did those who preceded them.