Dutch Reformed vs. Evangelical, I: “Salvation”

Hi Ron:

You asked whether I could try to explain “how the Christian Reformed Church and the Reformed Church in America can be considered evangelical while pointing out the distinctions between them and what the media broadly classifies as evangelical.”

As it happens, I’ve been thinking about this question for about fifty years, ever since I started working on my doctoral dissertation. In fact, the issue might have been a key reason that I chose the dissertation topic that I did. If the subject has become a bit old and tired in my head, it’s vital nonetheless, especially in light of what’s happened to — better: what’s become apparent about? — evangelicalism in recent years. So, once more into the breach, dear friend.

Like Caesar’s Gaul and the Heidelberg Catechism, my answer divides into three parts. I’ll treat the first today—differing concepts of salvation and their consequences. Next time I’ll turn to (2) differing concepts of time and history and (3) how many Dutch Reformed in the U.S. have come to swim happily in the evangelical pool.

Defining Evangelical

Some of the answer to your question depends on when you draw the comparison. Evangelicalism has evolved over the years as have the Dutch Reformed churches in North America. It also depends on which definition of “evangelical” you use, a matter that has been beaten to death and beyond.

Until recently the reigning definition among scholars is known as the Bebbington quadrilateral after the historian who coined it, David Bebbington of the University of Sterling in the UK. All evangelicals around the world, he posits, hold high the Bible as the key source of spiritual truth, the cross—that is, Christ’s atonement — as the central point in Christian theology, personal conversion as the key point in the believer’s life, and evangelistic activism — “witnessing” — as the central calling of that life. (“Witnessing” understood to include deeds as well as words, the walk as well as the talk.)

The CRC and RCA fit easily into this mold. After all, the three divisions of the Heidelberg Catechism as we learned it — “sin, salvation, service” — look close enough to Bebbington’s points 2-4, and as you suffered through advanced catechism with me under the tutelage of Louis Berkhof’s Manual of Reformed Doctrine, we got a full enough dose of bibliolatry to suffice on point 1 as well.

But the quadrilateral’s intent to cover evangelicalism in all times and places misses a lot of variations, the points that really distinguish the movement in a specific setting and the impulses that drive (as opposed to categories that can cover) its practice here and now. This is particularly true for what the media understand as evangelicalism in the United States, i.e., white American evangelicalism. Here, it seems to me, the concern of the Catechism’s second section—“salvation”—dominates the stage. For whom or what is salvation and how does it occur?

Who’s Saved, and How?

For American evangelicalism, I am saved, ideally in a nameable, datable “born again” experience. Born again, after all, was the label that the media slapped on evangelicals when they popped back up into public view in the 1970s. Those who claimed that experience back in our youth, you’ll remember, would typically express it as having “accepted Jesus Christ as my own personal savior.” (The phrase, when slurred together in a rush, makes up one of antidisestablishmentarianism’s chief rivals for the longest word in the English language.) Bluntly put, if you haven’t born again, you’re not a real Christian. It’s the central point in your life (Bebbington 2 & 3 above), the moment to which you should periodically return for a spiritual check-up.

You’re also to talk about it at the drop of a hat, a practice known as “sharing” (also “just sharing”) your “personal testimony.”

This is decidedly not the world you and I grew up in. We’re earnest enough Christians, trying to live a righteous life, still working on our salvation with fear and trembling. What makes the model I just described such a foreign country? For me it’s that CRC kids were reared on Heidelberg Q/A 1, taught that “we belong” to our faithful savior Jesus Christ, not that we choose him or implicitly own him. My father, one of your teachers, said that Calvinists start with God, Evangelicals start with man. The latter might retort that the Dutch Reformed recite such inherited formulas without taking them to heart. Doubtless, some do. So on the downside, choose your poison: formalism or narcissism?

Communal vs. Individual

Dutch Reformed folks have also traditionally had a strong communal sense. “Us,” not “me.” Yes, it is the Holy Spirit that works regeneration in the heart, but she does so typically through the nurturing ministrations of the church. Thus the church makes believers rather than believers making up the church by individual free choice. This can create the syndrome of the smug and unexamined heart, but it also opens a blessed alternative to the “harmful emotional and spiritual yo-yo” that Kathryn Vilela caught so poignantly in this space last week when recounting her struggle with evangelicalism’s prescribed path to salvation.

Kathryn’s account bears re-reading for its capture of how evangelical habits and formulas can feel on the ground. It is also a remarkably close duplicate to accounts left by three eminent daughters of 19^th-century American evangelicalism — Harriet Beecher Stowe, Phoebe Palmer, and Ellen Harmon White — regarding their painful struggle for the assurance of faith. They found their way to three very different refuges — Anglican sacramentalism, Wesleyan holiness, and Seventh-Day Adventism, respectively — but refuges these were. In its own way Dutch Reformed spirituality fits in the same class.

Revival vs. Covenant

One more point on the how of salvation before we get back to who or what are saved. Dutch Reformed folks have understood salvation under the arc of the covenant; Evangelicalism works by revivals. On the upside, this moves beyond the tribalism to which covenant notions can be turned; on the downside, it can devolve into marketing hustle. The business reference here is intentional — evangelicalism’s God works wholesale, not retail, much less in spiritual boutiques like the RCA and CRC. God who has worked a mighty change in me is poised to make a mighty change in many, in so many that the church will be awakened from its slumber and a flood of salvation unleashed all around the world.

Hence the evangelical hall of fame: on the home front, the Wesley brothers, George Whitefield, Charles Finney, Dwight Moody, St. Billy Graham; on “the foreign field,” as we called it back in the day, heroic missionaries from Adoniram and Ann Judson to the Auca martyrs. Hence also the evangelical knack for readily adopting new communications media, from the circuit rider to radio to TV, and the hot new venue, from Billy Sunday’s vaudeville hall to Billy Graham’s breakout at Yankee Stadium. Hence also their eager adoption of praise and worship music from its arena-rock model to its intent to move the emotions, now.

This is certainly not the pattern of three hymns, 30-minute sermon, “long prayer,” and two peppermints on which we were raised. Dutch Reformed folks have traditionally been more than a little suspicious of the manipulations, cult of personality, flash and faddishness that come on the revival trail. Revivals leave shallow roots, they observe, unstable faith, a hunger for the next high and the concomitant plague of low valleys. They lack dignity. To which evangelicals can aptly reply — at least they get people out of their seats! They press home the essential questions of faith. They melt the frozen chosen. Again, friend, take your pick.

John 3:16

Back then, finally, to who or what are “saved.” Abraham Kuyper was particularly strong here. His exact contemporary, Dwight Moody, famously said that the world is a sinking ocean liner and the church a lifeboat to rescue as many victims as it could. Kuyper profoundly disagreed: “the world now, as in the beginning, is the theater for the mighty works of God, and humanity remains a creation of His hand, which, apart from salvation, completes under this present dispensation here on earth a mighty process, and in its historical development is to glorify the name of Almighty God.” (Lectures on Calvinism, 162)

Put more broadly, God is not just saving individuals from hellfire but is in the business of redeeming the whole world, the entire cosmos, from the blight of the fall. The “saved” at the end of time will populate the new earth, but in the meantime they are to witness to that coming kingdom in every domain of human life, here and now. We are means, not the end; agents, not the goal.

There’s risk of terrible pride here, but also a mandate for great humility, for purpose, for praise and joy. I think that’s what we remember from our CRC childhoods. We’ll see next time what’s become of it.