Understanding the Core of Reformed Theology

Now, the idea of systematic thinking goes way back in church history, but even in the period of the enlightenment with the advent of the modern scientific method the philosophers of those days discovered or advocated a method or science that they called the analytical method of study which in abbreviated terms and in popular language was called the task of seeking to find the logic of the facts, that is the scientists would explore the details of the physical universe and point their telescopes into the heavens and gather as much particular data as they possibly could, and after they got this data they tried to make sense out of it. [00:01:32]

Now, historically the task of systematic theology is something like that. It is not to come to the Bible with preconceived system but rather to come to the Bible, listen to the word of God in all of its particulars, in all of its details, and then try to discern how all of these individual truths fit together, because the assumption of systematic theology is this: that the Bible is coherent, that though God reveals many things to us that all of His truth is unified in His own person and in His own character. [00:02:39]

And at first glance it may seem that we're just running around chasing rabbits down extraneous rabbit trails, but then I remind them; I said these questions that you're asking are questions that we should be asking because they flow out of the doctrine that we're studying, because every doctrine of Christian theology touches in some way every other doctrine of the faith. That is the whole of the Christian faith is intimately and intricately related in all of its pieces. [00:03:49]

In fact one of the things that never ceases to amaze me is the way the Bible speaks about so many things over so many years and myriads of details and yet the symmetry of Scripture is there. It fits together in such a coherent way. Well when we say that Reformed theology is systematic that's what we're saying at the outset that we are trying not to impose a system upon the Scripture but to find the system of doctrine that is in the Scriptures themselves to see how all of the parts fit together. [00:04:33]

All Christians have a basically orthodox creedal affirmation about the character of God, but what I think happens frequently in other theologies is that when the attention is diverted to another doctrine there's a tendency to forget your affirmation about the character of God. And the doctrine of God is just one of many doctrines in the faith rather than the controlling doctrine of the faith. [00:08:00]

In Reformed theology we constantly test our doctrine by going back to our fundamental understanding of the character of God. And I really think that's the central unique factor of Reformed theology; it is that it is relentlessly committed to maintain the purity of the doctrine of God through every other element of our theology. [00:10:01]

Now what do I mean by that when I say that Reformed theology is catholic? Usually we think of the Reformation as being a protest against Catholicism, but remember that the theology that emerged and came to the front of the stage in the 16th Century was not something that was invented for the first time in the 16th Century. It was a reformation not a revolution. It was an attempt in the 16th Century to recover the historic Christian apostolic faith. [00:10:40]

At the time of the Reformation virtually every church that arose out of it continued to embrace the catholic truths of the Christian faith, that is the truths that are embraced and confessed by Christians of all stripes, of all denominations, and of all traditions. That is here the word catholic does not refer to the Roman Catholic church or to the Russian Catholic church or to some particular group, but rather the term is used in its original sense meaning universal--the whole church. [00:11:23]

Now, all who are evangelical in the historic sense are also catholic. Not all who are catholic are evangelical, but all who are evangelical share the common doctrine of the church universal with everybody else. Now not everybody who is evangelical is Presbyterian or Lutheran or Methodist or any of these other distinctives, so that not everyone who is evangelical is reformed. But everyone who is reformed in the historic sense of the term also is evangelical. [00:15:12]

They believed that with the doctrine of justification by faith alone they were recovering the evangel or the Gospel of the New Testament. And since the heart of the controversy of the 16th Century focused on the doctrine of justification, the whole debate centered on the question what is the Gospel? So Protestants called themselves evangelicals, meaning by that label that they were embracing Luther's definition of the doctrine of justification--justification by faith. [00:16:31]

The other doctrine that was common to historic evangelicalism was the doctrine of the authority of Scripture, or what is called Sola Scriptura, which we'll take up later on. And so historians have said that the material issue or cause of the Reformation was the doctrine of justification, the formal cause was the doctrine of the authority of Scripture. [00:17:52]

We have to be careful not to think that this, and this alone, is the Reformed faith, because the Reformed faith, though it has its own distinctives, contains within itself unifying doctrines with other Christians--with all evangelicals and with those who hold the catholic truths of historic Christianity. [00:21:06]