Restoring the Church's Glory to Reformed Theology

Greystone Conversations

What difference might it make to Reformed systematic theology if we were to recover and deploy the fundamental importance of the Trinity, the incarnation, the ascension, and especially the Church, rather than expend all our energy only on the (certainly indispensable) doctrines of justification by faith alone, epistemology and revelation, theological method, the cross, and the atonement?

In the 19th century, Presbyterian minister and professor Stuart Robinson wrote a book entitled The Church of God as an Essential Element of the Gospel. Not only would such a title certainly fair poorly in terms of sales today, but its very thesis would draw accusations--maybe even charges--of clericalism, traditionalism, and any number of others epithets expressive of the often irrational and even violent distaste amongst western Christians for the Church as organization rather than only organism--the Church as a defined body, with authoritative rituals and patterns of life, practices, and officers, apart from which the notion of an individual Christian life and faith is traditionally meaningless.
Some will no doubt fear that such a book title and theology, making the Church an essential of the gospel, is a slippery slope towards Rome. But this is really only an indication of how very far we have fallen in our day from the biblical and traditional Christian teaching regarding not only the Church but the nature of saving faith and of the Christian life. The truth is that the ordinary necessity to salvation of our relationship to the real-life flesh and blood worshipping assembly--the organization we call the Church--exists in a friction-full relationship with our modern default mode of almost rabid individualism. And so we are unable often to appreciate the teaching of the Westminster Standards about the preaching and the sacraments of the Church as means of saving grace rather than only nice and helpful edifying addenda to the central thing of the Christian's individual cognitive disembodied faith in Jesus. Reformed theology has a rich tradition of clarity on this matter, and Robinson's book is only one of many expressions of the biblical commitment to the Church as the "ark of safety."

Another work in this vein is the work of Dr. Robert Letham, who's recently published Systematic Theology explicitly teaches, and attempts to recover, the traditional Reformed understanding of the Church as essential to the gospel. How might today's church recover such a view of the gospel? And what difference might that make to Reformed systematic theology?

Today's Greystone Conversation episode is a discussion on these very questions between Dr. Mark A. Garcia and Dr. Robert Letham. The Rev. Dr. Robert Letham is a Fellow at Greystone in Theology and History. Dr. Letham is an eminent theologian and historian, and an example of Greystone's commitment to careful patristic scholarship and confessional Reformed catholicity. He will be teaching a Greystone course module this winter on the doctrine of the Trinity and its outworking in history. Register today!