Suchergebnisse

It is a privilege to respond to Paul Fries's paper, especially since he has given the subject much attention and is well qualified to address it. In the introduction, he says that he will offer some footnotes to a paper yet to be written. I saw in what he gav~ us much more. The paper is faithful to the Reformed tradition of office, ordination, and mimstry. It is also faithful to John Calvin's heavy emphasis on order, particularly order in the church. I once reread Calvin seeking his contribution to the faith of the church. After a whole year, I concluded that it is order and the Holy Spirit. Calvin's temperament, schooling under the Neo-stoic teachers, association with Martin Bucer, Scripture, and the times in which he lived made order one of his major emphases. The Holy Spirit gave order to creation at its inception; civil government was ordained so that sin may be curbed and that there may be order in the state; salvation is the restoration of order; and, since the church is the body of Christ and the creation of the Holy Spirit, it is unthinkable that disorder be allowed in it. Calvin writes, "There is nothing in which order should be more diligently observed than in establishing church government; for nowhere is there greater peril if anything is done irregularly" (Inst. IV.iii. I 0). He believed that Scripture gives us instructions about church government. Dr. Fries shares Calvin's thinking.

To identify the kind of a world in which one lives is a matter of serious consequence whether that be the world of pre-Christian Rome, of Aquinas and the age of faith, of Puritan New England, of the Enlightenment, of Victorian England, or of today. For one's understanding of his world enables him to address himself to it, in one way or another; and for the Christian this means the possibility of comparing it with God's intention for the world and ministering to it in his name. Ours is not the world that our fathers of a generation or two ago conceived it to be. The rise of totalitarianisms in a Europe once baptized; the rise of crime and the abandonment of Christian morality; the cri sis in belief in God and the dimini shing strength and influence of organized religion—these are but a few, though potent, evidences of that fact. We no longer take certain mores for granted. We do not go to war to make the world safe for democracy; we hope that we can retain it for ourselves! With disillusionment,pessimism, and even cynicism evident in all sectors of society it is little wonder that ours is being called a post-Christian era—in Europe, and also here.

If a question were asked concerning the single greatest achievement of that tradition known as Dutch Calvinism, a viable answer would be its theology. The theological faculties, the theological interest, and acumen of the Dutch Reformed Church have been its chief adornment during long periods of its history, and that was never more true than during the seventeenth century, the main period of our study. lts schools, amply supported by local governments so that substantial libraries could be funded and the ablest scholars attracted, soon became the most famous in Europe and drew students from as far away as Hungary where during a century and a half over 3,000 young men set out on the 1,000 mile trek to the low countries in order to study theology and then return to their homes. But not only ministers and theological students pursued this "highest science," as it was often called, but laymen, particularly the thousands of elders in local churches, read and discussed theological literature so that there were actually times when and places where the words "Dutch" and "theology" seemed synonymous.

It is with certain trepidation that I broach the present subject, for the doctrine of the state has had a long and distinguished history. The consequence of that history is that positions have been held tenaciously by most people who have given it attention, especially our own compatriots. To challenge the doctrine, worked out laboriously by left-wing Puritanism in the seventeenth century and taken over by the founding fathers of this country and written into its fundamental documents, is no light matter. Yet if in the Reformed tradition we believe in examining our positions, constantly striving to bring them into harmony with the will of God expressed in Scripture, it is well that we do the same with the topic before us. This becomes especially desirable when one considers the origins of that doctrine and the crisis before us today. Let us look at each of these briefly.

After a return from Europe a decade ago, Professor Paul Tillich wrote about the great change in theological climate in that country which occurred a generation ago. "All groups," he said, "whether Lutheran, Reformed or Barthian, consider the last 200 years of Protestant theology essentially erroneous." A little later he wrote about Harnack and Troeltsch, two of the liberal giants, and said, "They died (in 1923 and 1926) in an atmosphere strange to that in which they had lived for the most part of their lives. And it seems that in Europe neo-Protestantism died with them." The past era to which Professor Tillich refers is, of course, that long reign of rationalistic thought which played such an important role in Protestant theology from the end of the 17th century to this century. A book which traces the beginning of that movement in England bears the significant title, From Puritanism to the Age of Reason. It is a study of changes in religious thought within the Church of England from 1660 to 1700. It tells of the eclipse of Calvinism, and of the influence of the Cambridge Platonists and the Latitudinarians; of the impact of the new science and the religious significance of John Locke. Then it traces the rise of Deism and ends with the triumph of the rationalist school of thought. Other works tell us the same story of this important period in history, which carried popular thought "from Puritanism to the age of reason." The revolution in thinking that took place then, "though silent and unnoticed, was the greatest revolution in human history, far outweighing in importance any of the political revolution whose thunder has reverberated through the world."